Damon Knight - Orbit 17

After much effort, Clyde was located at Judy ’n Bette’s Bar & Grille. When Chief Peck and his assistants arrived, Judy ’n Bette’s was filled with about a hundred fifty homosexuals engaged in various kinds of illegal acts, carrying on the best they could since all were depressed by several hours of looking like Snooky Lanson, Russell Arms and George Fenneman. Upon seeing the law officers, the hundred fifty homosexuals went into a capering frenzy that Sam had to silence by firing a couple of shots into the ceiling, which immediately began to leak glitter.

“Jesus 'n Mary,” said Clyde the Clown from a booth in the comer where he was performing one of the more illegal acts. “If it isn’t John Wayne herself."

“Clyde,” said Sam, slipping into the booth and looking away as best he could as Clyde arranged himself. “Clyde, buddy, I need your help. Des Moines needs your help.”

“Des Moines,” said Clyde, “can go butt a stump. ”

“Clyde,” said Sam, “I see that your great and good friend here”—Sam nodded toward Clyde’s companion, who had no particular interest in arranging himself—“looks a great deal like Red Buttons and I’m willing to bet that until this afternoon he looked like, well, your great and good friend. Are you really pleased with that, Clyde, that your great and good friend should all of a sudden look like Red Buttons? Wouldn’t you like to help him look like your G&G friend again?”

“Not if it means cooperating with you, Mr. Pig,” said Clyde.

“All right, Clyde. I am willing to make it worth your while. Clyde, for just a few minutes of your time, to save Des Moines, I am willing to drop the last twenty-five indecent exposure charges against you.”

Clyde brightened. “More, more,” he cried, clapping his hands.

“I am willing to pull all my vice squad men out of the bars.”

"Couldn’t like it better,” said Clyde. “Rave on, teen queen.”

“And Clyde,” said Sam. “I will also pull the vice squad out of the bus station.”

“Free at last!” screamed Clyde. “Honey, you’ll never in your life find me closer to saying yes. Just the tiniest shove and I’ll fall right into your arms.”

“Clyde. Look at this.” On the freaky film clerk’s suggestion, Sam had brought a book with him. It had meant handcuffing Des Moines’ only rare-book dealer to a waterpipe and it gave Sam terrible guilt; but this was an emergency.

Clyde looked at the book. His eyes started to bulge. “Oh God,” he said.

“It’s an original nineteen fifty-two edition of Heinlein’s Space Cadet. ”

“Oh Jesus,” said Clyde.

“The Scribner’s edition,” said Sam.

“With illustrations by Clifford N. Geary?” Clyde whispered.

“Yes,” said Sam. “And Clyde.”

“Yes . . .”

“It’s autographed, Clyde.”

“Oh God. Oh Jesus. Can I touch it?”

“Clyde. You can have it.”

Clyde slid right off the banquette, under the table with the beer spills and crumpled copies of After Dark. “What do you want me to do?” said Clyde weakly from down there, “and who do you want me to do it to?”

Clyde was as pleased as punch when Sam told him in the cop car on its way to Any Street USA what his assignment was.

“Couldn’t love it more!” Clyde said. “If you’d have told me first, I’d have done it just for getting the vice out of bars.”

Sam ground his teeth. Expediency, he told himself.

Sam had brought along a makeup kit and a mirror and the dust jacket from Between Planets with R.A.H.’s picture on it for Clyde to work from.

“He can write like an angel in heaven,” said Clyde confidentially, “but he looks like Mr. Fishcake of 1954. That mustache! It looks like a Dr. West toothbrush that died.”

Mr. and Mrs. Brown, smiling apologetically and suddenly looking like Sherman Adams and Oveta Culp Hobby, were waiting on the front porch.

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Heinlein,” said Mr. Brown. “I offer you water.”

“Never thirst,” said Clyde the Clown.

“What?” said Sam.

Timmy was waiting for them at the top of the stairs.

“Hokey smoke,” said Timmy, his eyes bugging. “Robert A. Heinlein himself.”

“I grok, water brother,” said Clyde.

“And you can cut out that shit, Bob, for a start,” said Timmy. “That’s the worst book you ever wrote. What I want to know is” —he pulled Clyde into his room and shut the door behind them —“is why at the end of Citizen of the Galaxy, the kid . .

The vigil, which Sam observed on the Browns’ front yard, lasted several hours. Sam knew things were going well when the pterodactyl returned Thayer. He didn’t know it was Thayer at first, since she no longer looked like Mala Powers.

“Well,” said Thayer. "That’s a relief.” She was no longer wearing the poodle skirt but an attractive pants-suit outfit. Sam realized that her name probably wasn’t Thayer. He was having trouble remembering precisely what she—Thayer/what’s-her-name —was doing here, or what was going on in general. The continuity was beginning to break up. He got the distinct feeling that within a couple of hours no one in Des Moines would exactly remember any of this—which, all things considered, was just as well, since it was sort of embarrassing to begin with.

Very soon his squad car had stopped being a ’55 De Soto, and the National Guard commander looked like any other National Guard commander and not Gerald Mohr. When Clyde the Clown emerged from the Brown house, Sam had to strain to remember what it was he went in for.

“A precious child,” said Clyde. “But weird city. Before he left I had to autograph all twelve of his copies of The Door into Summer and promise to write nothing but juveniles for the next three years.”

“He’s gone?” said Sam.

“I suggest,” said Clyde as he pulled off Robert A. Heinlein’s mustache and got into a squad car, “that you call the police chief of Montgomery, Alabama, and make sure he can get his hands on Theodore Sturgeon on very short notice.”

But Sam was running into the house and up the stairs to Timmy’s room. Everything was gone, even the wallpaper: the Crosley Shelvador, the stacks of Collier’s, the Edmund Scientific plasmawarp (or whatever) machine, the pictures of Ted Kluszewski, Mr. and Mrs. Brown, the apologetic smiles, the works.

Everything but the Sylvania Halo-lite TV. Sam stood there, just beginning to forget what he was doing there, and saw that the program on was the ’58 or ’57 World Series, Yankees vs. Milwaukee, and Mickey Mantle was at bat.

“Hit one out, Mick,” said Sam softly to the screen. Sam had collected forty-three different Mickey Mantle bubble-gum cards when he was a kid. But the picture went black, and Sam was standing in this room in a frame house, wondering what happened to all the wallpaper, and thinking about getting some dinner.

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

URSENURSENURSENURSEN

. . . will do my best my love can do no more nor less gross metal that I am signal left accelerate lane shift beneath my treads the tar in the cracked asphalt wavers and jumps as does your cardiogram trying my damnedest, my damsel, my only, my passenger, my patient linkaging hepatic tourniquet screw with diastole feedback loop welcome aboard, Yvette none, blood group A—, this is your ambulance speaking to you, while I keep you in one piece for the emergency team at Municipal Hospital