Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

He was almost back in the city when he tuned in a news broadcast As he listened, he sat in stunned silence. Brant had roused himself enough before he died to talk to the man who found him in his apartment. Brant had named his killer as Philon Miller. Miller felt as if he had turned to ice.

Then his mind thawed out with a rush of reassuring words. After all, why should he be worrying? He had John’s word in court as a perfect alibi. Yes, everything would be all right. Everything had to be all right.

In the late evening Philon arrived at his house with a consuming sense of great relief, as if the very act of entering his home would protect him from anything. There was a sense of safety in the mere familiarity of the environment.

On the mail table he found a note from Ursula saying she had gone for the weekend. Philon shrugged indifferently. He was glad to have her out of the way anyhow. But John—there was the best ten thousand dollars he had ever spent. A sound investment, about to pay its first real dividend.

“John!” His voice echoed in the house with a disturbing hollow sound. He wet his dry lips and shouted again, “John—where are you?”

Only his echoing voice answered him. In growing fright he pounded up the escalator and rushed into John’s room. It was empty. On a desk he found a message in John’s neat hand—

Phil and Ursula,

For a long time I have been very unhappy living with you. I’m grateful for the food and shelter and education you’ve provided. But you have never given me the love and warmth that I seem to crave. The funny part of it is that I never understood my craving and what it meant until I saw how love and affection bound the MacDonald kids and their folks.

This afternoon Jimmie and Jean came over to say good-by because they said their father told them they didn’t belong here—that he was taking his family back where they belonged, atomic bomb threat and all—whatever he meant by that. After they left I got to thinking how much I’d like to go with them. So I’m leaving. Somehow I’m going to talk them into taking me with them wherever they are going. So this will have to be good-by.

Philon lifted his eyes from the note and his glance strayed to the window. Dreading to look he took two slow steps and peered down the street. The sight of the empty lot on the corner paralyzed him in his tracks.

John gone! The MacDonald house gone! Gone was his perfect alibi! In Washington a dying man’s words had spelled out his own death sentence.

A step at the door roused him from his horror-stricken trance. He looked up to see a detective and a policeman regarding him with cold calculation.

“What’s the matter, Miller?” asked the detective. “We’ve punched your announcer button half a dozen times. You deaf? You better come along to Headquarters to answer some questions about your movements today.”

Every man wants to see a Garden of Eden. John Barth agreed with his whole heart—he knew that he’d rather see than be one!

Take a fellow, reasonably young, personable enough, health perfect. Suppose he has all the money he can reasonably, or even unreasonably, use. He is successful in a number of different fields of work in which he is interested. Certainly he has security. Women? Well, maybe not any woman in the world he might want. But still, a very nice, choice selection of a number of the very finest physical specimens. The finest—and no acute case of puritanism to inhibit his enjoyment.

Take all that. Then add to it the positive assurance of continuing youth and vigor, with a solid life expectancy of from 175 to 200 more years. Impossible? Well—just suppose it were all true of someone. A man like that, a man with all those things going for him, you’d figure he would be the happiest man in the world.

Wouldn’t you?

Sure. A man with all that would have to be the happiest—unless he was crazy. Right? But me, Johnny Barth, I had it.

I had all of it, just like that. I sure wasn’t the happiest man in the world though. And I know I wasn’t crazy either. The thing about me was, I wasn’t a man. Not exactly.

I was a colony.

Really. A colony. A settlement. A new but flourishing culture, you might say. Oh, I had the look of a man, and the mind and the nerves and the feel of a man too. All the normal parts and equipment. But all of it existed—and was beautifully kept up, I’ll say that—primarily as a locale, not a man.

I was, as I said before, a colony.

Sometimes I used to wonder how New England really felt about the Pilgrims. If you think that sounds silly—perhaps one of these days you won’t.

The beginning was some ten years back, on a hunting trip the autumn after I got out of college. That was just before I started working, as far off the bottom as I could talk myself, which was the personnel office in my Uncle John’s dry cleaning chain in the city.

That wasn’t too bad. But I was number four man in the office, so it could have been better, too. Uncle John was a bachelor, which meant he had no daughter I could marry. Anyway, she would have been my cousin. But next best, I figured, was to be on good personal terms with the old bull.

This wasn’t too hard. Apart from expecting rising young executives to rise and start work no later than 8:30 a.m., Uncle John was more or less all right. Humor him? Well, every fall he liked to go hunting. So when he asked me to go hunting with him up in the Great Sentries, I knew I was getting along pretty well. I went hunting.

The trip was nothing very much. We camped up in the hills. We drank a reasonably good bourbon. We hunted—if that’s the word for it. Me, I’d done my hitch in the Army. I know what a gun is—and respect it. Uncle John provided our hunting excitement by turning out to be one of the trigger-happy types. His score was two cows, a goat, a couple of other hunters, one possible deer—and unnumbered shrubs and bushes shot at. Luckily he was such a lousy shot that the safest things in the mountains were his targets.

Well, no matter. I tried to stay in the second safest place, which was directly behind him. So it was a nice enough trip with no casualties, right up to the last night.

We were all set to pack out in the morning when it happened. Maybe you read about the thing at the time. It got a light-hearted play in the papers, the way those things do. “A one in a billion accident,” they called it.

We were lounging by the campfire after supper and a few good snorts. Uncle John was entertaining himself with a review of some of his nearer, more thrilling misses. I, to tell the truth, was sort of dozing off.

Then, all of a sudden, there was a bright flash of blue-green light and a loud sort of a “zoop-zing” sound. And a sharp, stinging sensation in my thighs.

I hollered. I jumped to my feet. I looked down, and my pants were peppered with about a dozen little holes like buckshot. I didn’t have to drop my pants to know my legs were too. I could feel it. And blood started to ooze.

I figured, of course, that Uncle John had finally shot me and I at once looked on the bright side. I would be a cinch for a fast promotion to vice president. But Uncle John swore he hadn’t been near a gun. So we guessed some other hunter must have done it, seen what he had done and then prudently ducked. At least no one stepped forward.

It was a moonlight night. With Uncle John helping me we made it the two and a half miles back down the trail to Poxville, where we’d left our car and stuff. We routed out the only doctor in the area, old Doc Grandy.

He grumbled, “Hell, boy, a few little hunks o’ buckshot like that and you make such a holler. I see a dozen twice’s bad as this ever’ season. Ought to make you wait till office hours. Well—hike yourself up on the table there. I’ll flip ’em out for you.”