Альфред Бестер - Star of Stars [Anthology]

Martha: or bring home any guests.

Phil: She'd be sick, infallibly. She called me at the office and she called me at board meetings

Martha: and woe, if you didn't get home on time. Phil: She made my life utterly impossible.

Martha: Why didn't you get rid of her?

Phil: I did. Divorce, you know, has an ugly ring in the ear of a missionary's son

Martha: and I think you just wanted it like that. Some people just have to have hell at home. You know, Will....

Phil: Did you run Will like that?

Martha: I don't know. I guess I was worried about him be-cause he took to drinking so heavily.

Phil: You canceled his dinner engagements?

Martha: Because I didn't want people to see him so drunk.

Phil: There's always some because

Martha: because he put both hands into the salad bowl at the Marchesa Marchesani's

Phil: if he didn't do worse than that

Martha: and he would argue. Did he argue, with Dermott, when they both were drunk? He was quite un­bearable.

Phil: What did they argue about?

Martha: Politics, lots of it. Imperialism. Socialism, and all the rest.

Phil: Well. I know where Dermott stands on all those things

Martha: and you can imagine what happened when Will said the Indians were inferior.

Phil: Did he say that?

Martha: And the children there get blind because they are too lazy to drive the flies off their eyes. He said they just sit there and let the flies eat their eyes.

Phil: Maybe it's true. 1 heard it too.

Martha: You know, he lived with them, street urchins, for years, after he got lost during the earthquake —a girl named Maharata picked him up and mothered him as best she could—and he said, if he didn't turn out to be a mess like them it was because he had the stuff it takes to be a man.

Phil: it's the same stuff I am made of. I can assure you.

Martha: It hasn't got anything to do with the "social order" he said. And the British officers in India did a wonderful job

Phil: they tried to bring the natives up to their stand­ards: didn't he say that?

Martha: Why, they even left their personal silver to the Indian Officers Mess, when they quit, just to show them

Phil: that was undoubtedly generous on their part.

Martha: But the Labour Government was terrible

Phil: that wasn't exactly what Dermott thought.

Martha: But Will, he turned literally green when you as much as mentioned one of them. Which, after all, is rather strange because he knew nothing about politics in the first place.

Phil: What did he think was wrong?

Martha: The way they betrayed the Empire, he said, was terrible and they killed initiative at home and produced soft characters, whereas, what you need to get along is to be tough, he said

Phil: come to think about it, that's just the way I used to feel

Martha: you've got to be tough

Phil: it was because I was so tough that I became president of the Morris Trust Co. at thirty years of age

Martha: you thought the real way to start a business was to sell apples from an apple cart

Phil: I even tried to write a book about these things, you know, how tough and self-made you've got to be

Martha: and that the New Deal was terrible

Phil: and that the government should keep off my affairs and yours

Martha: and stuff like that.

Phil: It was to be called: Keep Going West, Young Man, but I guess it was so badly written no one wanted to publish it, thank goodness.

Martha: Why did you change your mind about these things?

Phil: it's all stuff and nonsense: I and I and I. Did you ever hear about a fellow named Plato?

Martha: Vaguely.

Phil: My favored author at the Great Books class.

Martha: Your mind is wandering, Phil.

Phil: At the beginning, he said, there were neither men nor women

Martha: but some kind of funny beings

Phil: male and female at once.

Martha: I guess they must have had four arms

Phil: and four legs and so on

Martha: I wonder whether they were happy that way

Phil: until, one day, a certain rude deity split them asunder

Martha: severing boy and girl

Phil: and they have been looking for one another ever since.

Martha: What are you driving at, Phil?

Phil: It's the story of Will and me.

Martha: Split asunder, one day, by a certain rude deity?

Phil: A quirk of fate.

Martha: You should have been one, are one. Don't die any more, please don't die again.

Phil: One case of 86 works out like that: Twins. One out of every 862, makes triplets; one of every 863, quadruplets. The dickens knows why. But that's the way it is

Martha: and it had to be you

Phil: or else it might have been one of 87

Martha: the law upset

Phil: a false interval, a dissonant chord: it hurts my ear to think of it

Martha: it could not happen

Phil: the name of the new Platonic God is Statistics.

Martha: You are mad, Phil,

Phil: and all that he-man stuff just to hide the half-man, you know

Martha: and you were lonely and little and scared under­neath.

It had gotten dark in the room.

"Martha, dear, Doctor Rosselli says the trial has been set for a month from now. He is very confident it will go all right. He says he can drop the plea for temporary insanity—your nervous breakdown came after the fact—and base your case on self-defense. Accidental killing in self-defense. He says the only trouble is that there are no witnesses, and the fact that you were doped, but he hopes to get around that. But now you should tell me everything. The whole story. That may be very, very helpful. Are you strong enough to tell me everything?"

"I'll try. But it's a long story. I'll try to piece it to­gether. Well, Will was getting worse all the time. He drank terribly. For a certain time, he grew a beard, and he was wearing dark glasses. The light hurt his eyes, he said. What are you fumbling with in your pocket. Now look there, for God's sake, dark glasses! You too! He looked terribly sick. I wanted to take him to a doctor, but he said he knew I wanted to murder him. He said that all the time. He whispered it into my ear at night. He devel­oped the strangest notions."

"What notions?"

"For awhile he always thought that he ... stank. That was before he grew the beard. Later he didn't care any more. At that time, he would constantly change his underwear, order that it be boiled, sniff at his shirts and jackets and pillow cases. He would constantly get new mouth waters and tooth pastes. When there was some bad smell somewhere—for instance, at the post office—he would say with a very loud voice, the puzzo, what a stink! And everybody would look at him—which is just what he wanted—for he wanted them all to know that it wasn't he. At the restaurant he would order the waiter to open the windows—I smell the smell of sour feet, he would an­nounce—and when the lady at the next table protested against the draught, he said, Lady, if I were in your shoes --and I mean what 1 say, he added—1 would not pro-test against a little fresh air. But some people don't seem to notice when they ... because the smell goes away: it doesn't go up into your own nose. He had often noticed that, he said. It was quite embarrassing."