Fredric Brown - The Fredric Brown Megapack

The one-syllable word wouldn’t come. He went mad, instead.

He beat upon the now—dark door with his bloody hands, with his knees, his face, with himself, although already he had forgotten why, had forgotten what he wanted to crush.

He was raving mad—dementia praecox, not paranoia—when they released his body by putting it into a strait jacket, released it from frenzy to quietude.

He was quietly mad—paranoia, not dementia praecox—when they released him as sane eleven months later.

Paranoia, you see, is a peculiar affliction; it has no physical symptoms, it is merely the presence of a fixed delusion. A series of metrazol shocks had cleared up the dementia praecox and left only the fixed delusion that he was George Vine, a reporter.

The asylum authorities thought he was, too, so the delusion was not recognized as such and they released him and gave him a certificate to prove he was sane.

He married Clare; he still works at the Blade— for a man named Candler. He still plays chess with his cousin, Charlie Doerr. He still sees—for periodic checkups—both Dr. Irving and Dr. Randolph.

Which of them smiles inwardly? What good would it do you to know? Yes it was, is, one of those four.

It doesn’t matter. Don’t you understand? Nothing matters!

He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and he was fifty thousand light-years from home.

A strange blue sun gave light and the gravity, twice what he was used to, made every movement difficult.

But in tens of thousands of years this part of war hadn’t changed. The flyboys were fine with their sleek spaceships and their fancy weapons. When the chips are down, though, it was still the foot soldier, the infantry, that had to take the ground and hold it, foot by bloody foot. Like this damned planet of a star he’d never heard of until they’d landed him there. And now it was sacred ground because the aliens were there too. The aliens, the only other intelligent race in the Galaxy…cruel, hideous and repulsive monsters.

Contact had been made with them near the center of the Galaxy, after the slow, difficult colonization of a dozen thousand planets; and it had been war at sight; they’d shot without even trying to negotiate, or to make peace.

Now, planet by bitter planet, it was being fought out.

He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and the day was raw with a high wind that hurt his eyes. But the aliens were trying to infiltrate and every sentry post was vital.

He stayed alert, gun ready. Fifty thousand light-years from home, fighting on a strange world and wondering if he’d ever live to see home again.

And then he saw one of them crawling toward him. He drew a bead and fired. The alien made that strange horrible sound they all make, then lay still.

He shuddered at the sound and sight of the alien lying there. One ought to be able to get used to them after a while, but he’d never been able to. Such repulsive creatures they were, with only two arms and two legs, ghastly white skins and no scales.

It was rather funny for a while, the business about Ronson’s Linotype. But it began to get a bit too sticky for comfort well before the end. And despite the fact that Ronson came out ahead on the deal, I’d have never sent him the little guy with the pimple, if I’d guessed what was going to happen. Fabulous profits or not, poor Ronson got too many gray hairs out of it.

“You’re Mr. Walter Merold?” asked the little guy with the pimple. He’d called at the desk of the hotel where I live, and I’d told them to send him on up.

I admitted my identity, and he said, “Glad to know you, Mr. Merold. I’m—” and he gave me his name, but I can’t remember now what it was. I’m usually good at remembering names.

I told him I was delighted to meet him and what did he want, and he started to tell me. I interrupted him before he got very far, though.

“Somebody gave you a wrong steer,” I told him. “Yes, I’ve been a printing technician, but I’m retired. Anyway, do you know that the cost of getting special Linotype mats cut would be awfully high? If it’s only one page you want printed with those special characters, you’d do a lot better to have somebody hand-letter it for you and then get a photographic reproduction in zinc.”

“But that wouldn’t do, Mr. Merold. Not at all. You see, the thing is a secret. Those I represent— But skip that. Anyway, I daren’t let anyone see it, as they would have to, to make a zinc.”

Just another nut, I thought, and looked at him closely.

He didn’t look nutty. He was rather ordinary-looking on the whole, although he had a foreign—rather an Asiatic—look about him, somehow, despite the fact that he was blond and fair-skinned. And he had a pimple on his forehead, in dead center just above the bridge of the nose. You’ve seen ones like it on statues of Buddha, and Orientals call it the pimple of wisdom and it’s something special.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Well,” I pointed out, “you can’t have the matrices cut for Linotype work without letting somebody see the characters you want on them, can you? And whoever runs the machine will also see—”

“Oh, but I’ll do that myself,” said the little guy with the pimple. (Ronson and I later called him the L.G.W.T.P., which stands for “little guy with the pimple,” because Ronson couldn’t remember his name, either, but I’m getting ahead of my story.) “Certainly the cutter will see them, but he’ll see them as individual characters, and that won’t matter. Then the actual setting of the type on the Linotype I can do myself. Someone can show me how to run one enough for me to set up one page—just a score of lines, really. And it doesn’t have to be printed here. Just the type is all I’ll want. I don’t care what it costs me.”

“O.K.,” I said. “I’ll send you to the proper man at Merganthaler, the Linotype people. They’ll cut your mats. Then, if you want privacy and access to a Linotype, go see George Ronson. He runs a little county biweekly right here in town. For a fair price, he’ll turn his shop over to you for long enough for you to set your type.”

And that was that. Two weeks later, George Ronson and I went fishing on a Tuesday morning while the L.G.W.T.P. used George’s Linotype to assemble the weird-looking mats he’d just received by air express from Mergenthaler. George had, the afternoon before, showed the little guy how to run the Linotype.

We caught a dozen fish apiece, and I remember that Ronson chuckled and said that made thirteen fish for him because the L.G.W.T.P. was paying him fifty bucks cash money just for one morning’s use of his shop.

And everything was in order when we got back except that George had to pick brass out of the hellbox because the L.G.W.T.P. had smashed his new brass matrices when he’d finished with them, and hadn’t known that one shouldn’t throw brass in with the type metal that gets melted over again.

The next time I saw George was after his Saturday edition was off the press. I immediately took him to task.

“Listen,” I said, “that stuff about misspelling words and using bum grammar on purpose isn’t funny anymore. Not even in a country newspaper. Were you by any chance trying to make your newsletters from the surrounding towns sound authentic by following copy out the window, or what?”

Ronson looked at me kind of funny and said, “Well—yes.”

“Yes, what?” I wanted to know. “You mean you were deliberately trying to be funny, or following copy out the—”

He said, “Come on around and I’ll show you.”

“Show me what?”

“What I’m going to show you,” he said, not very lucidly. “You can still set type, can’t you?”