Edgar Pangborn - A Mirror for Observers

Para means a man lying in the gutter, his gray hair moving curiously in a brown stream from a leaky hydrant. He has a four-day beard and his clothes are frayed, with buttons sprung open on innocent meaningless nakedness. He is elderly. He isn’t drunk. His stiffly upright shoes are cracked, with holes in the bottom, and he isn’t drunk: the wagon will come when it can.

Para means a rat running out of an empty restaurant. There weren’t supposed to be any rats left in New York. This one stops in front of me, not frightened, not aware of me, just dying. No resistance when my foot pushes him into the street.

The busses weren’t running on Lexington Upper Level. As I went back down the stairway I noticed eight or ten crows flying northwest. Odd — you never see crows over the city. Northwest toward Central Park. I think the Robbie-road was functioning, but I didn’t see a taxi anywhere. I went on down to the subway level, and there the robot change-maker was in operation. I passed through a turnstile to a deserted platform and waited a dreary while. One other man came through, saw me, and walked to the other end of the platform to wait.

The train came in at low speed. I noticed two men in the motor-man’s cab, another outside — in case one should collapse? The car I entered had only two other passengers in it, a thin woman whose lips moved silently, a frozen-faced Negro studying his shoe tips. They sat at opposite ends of the car; something in the way they both glanced at me suggested that I ought to sit in the middle or go to the next car. I sat in the middle…. Only a few pedestrians were on Lexington Upper Level when I climbed back to it at 125th Street. They hurried as if on desperate secret missions, giving each other wide clearance. I saw no one stirring when I looked through the big windows of the Organic Unity Party office. A policeman stopped me at the entrance. “Staff?”

“No. Place closed?”

He spoke with the harassed patience of a man forced to repeat the same thing to the point of nausea: “No public gatherings allowed. Only the office staff goes in.”

“Do you happen to know Mr. Keller by sight?”

He looked me up and down coldly. My Santa Claus appearance may have restrained things he would have liked to say. “I don’t know any of ’em, mister. I just work here. On the sidewalk. Only staff goes in.”

“Okay, I don’t want in. But — uh — it’s just the rule about public gatherings, isn’t it? What I mean, there isn’t anything to the rumor that’s going around about these Organic Unity people?”

He was large and quiet and Irish and most unhappy. “Now what rumor would that be?”

Drozma, I shall never know if what I did was right. It was an action deriving more from emotion than from reason. It had the human thread of vengeance in it: I have been away from Northern City too long. I said: “Talk I overheard in the subway. Other places too — everyone’s whispering it. I’ve got nothing to do with this damn Party, but I’m slightly acquainted with Keller, man who works here, thought I’d like to ask him about it, about that rumor.”

He was monumentally patient. “What rumor?”

“Hell, you must’ve heard it.” I tried to look more than ever distressed and stupid and ancient. “About that fella Walker who jumped off Max’s roof garden, week ago Friday, I think it was.” He stiffened with alertness, and some woman, half seen, was passing on the sidewalk as I spoke. I can’t be certain that her steps paused for a listening second. I think they did. “The rumor was that Walker had a test tube with some kind of bugs in it, virus or something, and chucked it over before he jumped.”

It went home, I know. A moment of dark intentness, perhaps horror, before he rumbled: “I wouldn’t be repeating stuff like that.”

“Why, I won’t. But other people are. On the subway was where I just now heard it, one guy yakking at another.” I shrugged and moved away. “Well, hell, Keller wouldn’t tell me the truth anyway.” I walked on slowly, terrified that he might call me back for questioning. He didn’t. My impersonation of a half-witless antique must have been convincing. With the tail of my eye I saw him step inside the building — to a telephone, I imagine. I don’t know, Drozma. Maybe it was the old bum in the gutter. Or that little golden spaniel. It was not what an Observer should have done, yet under the same pressures I would very likely do it again.

I walked on, west, on 125th Street.

I cannot see the thing as a whole, Drozma. Not yet and maybe never. I know (with my mind only) that, because of the blind madness of a few and the almost unknowing acquiescence of the many, human beings have once again stumbled into calamity with no assurance of survival. I know (in theory) that a wiser society might be able to detect and isolate such creatures as Joseph Max before they have done their work. Yet who can shape the realities of any such society in his mind, or tell how to arrive at it? With the study of human nature in its half-sickly infancy, we come back (in theory at least) to the unwillingness of men to look at themselves: but that is too simple. Even self-knowledge, if it should ever be achieved by more than a handful in each generation, is simply a means to some end that neither man nor Martian is wise enough to guess. I know these things with some clarity, but at this moment I can truly see only certain disconnected pictures from today’s bleak journey.

Para means a little Negro girl, about the age Sharon was when I first knew her, walking directly into me on 125th Street, wide-eyed and tearless. She said mechanically: “I’m sorry, mister. I didn’t see you. My pop’s dead.” I kept her from stumbling; maybe she knew it, but she moved on, stiff-legged, while I fought back the need to follow and tell her — well, what? What? I couldn’t make him live.

I climbed from 125th Street to the Esplanade. Not many blocks north of here, a small tube of glass…

The express elevators in the Green Tower Colony were not running. There was a bank of self-service elevators, and there has been no power failure — yet. I used one of those, and stood for a time outside Keller’s door, not thinking much. It was like waiting for some signal which of course never came. I noticed that the card with Abraham’s name was still above the bell; I took it out and dropped it in my pocket, a touch of cold metal reminding me, quite casually, that I was still carrying Miriam’s automatic. Then it was also a casual thing to punch the bell. One and perhaps both of my grenades would have to be used. Both, if Keller and Nicholas were both here, or if I should be wounded and unable to escape.

Nicholas opened the door.

I reminded myself further that I had not used scent-destroyer for several days. It hadn’t seemed to matter. And although as soon as Abraham decided to go over to Brooklyn I knew where I would go, it still hadn’t mattered. Nicholas opened the door. He recognized Will Meisel and stood back with a human stare of resentment, dislike, anger, sternness — all quite irrelevant, as he understood himself when I had shut the door behind me and my Martian scent reached him. He said with sober quiet: “I should have known.”

“Is your son here, who goes by the name of William Keller?” I spoke in English; it has become almost more natural than my native tongue.

He waddled away to close the door on the back rooms, and held his voice to a neutral dead level: “My son is in Oregon, or maybe Idaho, with a new face. You’d only waste your time trying to find him — I couldn’t myself, probably.” It had a flat sound of truth; I think it was truth. If it was, then I must leave Keller to be dealt with by other Observers in the course of the years. Such a being cannot hide himself long, and we have always had patience on our side.