Fredric Brown - The Best of Fredric Brown

"Of course. Uh—will you ask him to do me a favor? "

"Probably. What is it?"

"Lend him your flask and ask him to bring it filled. You 've no idea how much more nearly pleasant it makes these interviews. "

The intercom on Mortimer Mearson 's desk buzzed and he pressed the button on it that would bring his secretary 's voice in. "Dr. Galbraith to see you, sir." Mearson told her to send him in at once.

"Hi, Doc, "Mearson said. "Take a load off your feet and tell all."

Galbraith took the load off his feet and lighted a cigarette before he spoke. "Puzzling for a while," he said. "I didn 't get the answer till I went into medical history with him. While playing polo at age twenty-two he had a fall and got a whop on the head with a mallet that caused a bad concussion and subsequent amnesia. Complete at first, but gradually his memory came back completely up to early adolescence. Pretty spotty between then and the time of the injury. "

"Good God, the indoctrination period. "

"Exactly. Oh, he has flashes—like the dream he told you about. He could be rehabilitated—but I 'm afraid it 's too late, now. If only we 'd caught him before he committed an overt murder—But we can 't possibly risk putting his story on record now, even as an insanity defense. So. "

"So," Mearson said. "I 'll make the call now. And then go see him again. Hate to, but it 's got to be done. "

He pushed a button on the intercom. "Dorothy, get me Mr. Hodge at the Midland Realty Company. When you get him, put the call on my private line. "

Galbraith left while he was waiting and a moment later one of his phones rang and he picked it up. "Hodge? "he said, "Mearson here. Your phone secure? . . . Good. Code eighty-four. Remove the card of Lorenz Kane—L-o-r-e-n-z K-a-n-e from the reality file at once . . . Yes, it 's necessary and an emergency. I 'll submit a report tomorrow. "

He took a pistol from a desk drawer and a taxi to the courthouse. He arranged an audience with his client and as soon as Kane came through the door—there was no use waiting—he shot him dead. He waited the minute it always took for the body to vanish, and then went upstairs to the chambers of Judge Amanda Hayes to make a final check.

"Hi, Your Honoress, "he said. "Somebody recently was telling me about a man named Lorenz Kane, and I don 't remember who it was. Was it you? "

"Never heard the name, Morty. If wasn 't me. "

"You mean `It wasn 't I. 'Must 've been someone else. Thanks, Your Judgeship. Be seeing you. "

THE KING my liege lord is a discouraged man. We understand and do not blame him, for the war has been long and bitter and there are so pathetically few of us left, yet we wish that it were not so. We sympathize with him for having lost his Queen, and we too all loved her—but since the Queen of the Blacks died with her, her loss does not mean the loss of the war. Yet our King, he who should be a tower of strength, smiles weakly and his words of attempted encouragement to us ring false in our ears because we hear in his voice the undertones of fear and defeat. Yet we love him and we die for him, one by one.

One by one we die in his defense, here upon this blooded bitter field, churned muddy by the horses of the Knights—while they lived; they are dead now, both ours and the Black ones—and will there be an end, a victory?

We can only have faith, and never become cynics and heretics, like my poor fellow Bishop Tibault. "We fight and die; we know not why, "he once whispered to me, earlier in the war at a time when we stood side by side defending our King while the battle raged in a far corner of the field.

But that was only the beginning of his heresy. He had stopped believing in a God and had come to believe in gods, gods who play a game with us and care nothing for us as persons. Worse, he believed that our moves are not our own, that we are but puppets fighting in a useless war. Still worse—and how absurd!—that White is not necessarily good and Black is not necessarily evil, that on the cosmic scale it does not matter who wins the war!

Of course it was only to me, and only in whispers, that he said these things. He knew his duties as a bishop. He fought bravely. And died bravely, that very day, impaled upon the lance of a Black Knight. I prayed for him: God, rest his soul and grant him peace; he meant not what he said.

Without faith we are nothing. How could Tibault have been so wrong? White must win. Victory is the only thing that can save us. Without victory our companions who have died, those who here upon this embattled field have given their lives that we may live, shall have died in vain. Et tu, Tibault.

And you were wrong, so wrong. There is a God, and so great a God that He will forgive your heresy, because there was no evil in you, Tibault, except as doubt—no, doubt is error but it is not evil.

Without faith we are noth--

But something is happening! Our Rook, he who was on the Queen's side of the field in the Beginning, swoops toward the evil Black King, our enemy. The villainous one is under attack—and cannot escape. We have won! We have won!

A voice in the sky says calmly, "Checkmate. "

We have won! The war, this bitter stricken field, was not in vain. Tibault, you were wrong, you were--

But what is happening now? The very Earth tilts; one side of the battlefield rises and we are sliding—White and Black alike into--

—into a monstrous box and I see that it is a mass coffin in which already lie dead--

IT IS NOT FAIR; WE WON! GOD, WAS TIBAULT RIGHT? IT IS NOT JUST; WE WON!

The King, my liege lord, is sliding too across the squares—

IT IS NOT JUST; IT IS NOT RIGHT; IT IS NOT ...

His NAME was Dooley Hanks and he was One of Us, by which I mean that he was partly a paranoiac, partly a schizophrenic, and mostly a nut with a strong idee fixe, an obsession. His obsession was that someday he'd find The Sound that he 'd been looking for all his life, or at least all of his life since twenty years ago, in his teens, when he had acquired a clarinet and learned how to play it. Truth to tell, he was only an average musician, but the clarinet was his rod and staff, and it was the broomstick that enabled him to travel over the face of Earth, on all the continents, seeking The Sound. Playing a gig here and a gig there, and then, when he was ahead by a few dollars or pounds or drachmas or rubles he 'd take a walking tour until his money started to run out, then start for the nearest city big enough to let him find another gig.

He didn 't know what The Sound would sound like, but he knew that he 'd know it when he heard it. Three times he 'd thought he'd found it. Once, in Australia, the first time he 'd heard a bull-roarer. Once, in Calcutta, in the sound of a musette played by a fakir to charm a cobra. And once, west of Nairobi, in the blending of a hyena 's laughter with the voice of a lion. But the bull-roarer, on second hearing, was just a noise; the musette, when he 'd bought it from the fakir for twenty rupees and had taken it home, had turned out to be only a crude and raucous type of reed instrument with little range and not even a chromatic scale; the jungle sounds had resolved themselves finally into simple lion roars and hyena laughs, not at all The Sound.

Actually Dooley Hanks had a great and rare talent that could have meant much more to him than his clarinet, a gift of tongues. He knew dozens of languages and spoke them all fluently, idiomatically and without accent. A few weeks in any country was enough for him to pick up the language and speak it like a native. But he had never tried to cash in on this talent, and never would. Mediocre player though he was, the clarinet was his love.