Дональд Уэстлейк - Humans

“You just do it,” the bag lady said. “You’ll see I’m right. You’ve got plenty of time at work, you can do it there, easy as pie. And off you go, it’s a whole new world, a whole new experience.”

“I don’t win contests, I’ve never won anything in my—”

“I’ll bet you could win this one,” the bag lady said. “Change your life, it would.” Finishing her tomato juice in one final noisy gulp, she struggled off the stool and gave Susan her sunniest smile, saying, “It’s just perfect, a pretty girl like you.” She pushed the sheet from the magazine closer to Susan. “See if I’m not right.”

“But... why do you want to give this to me ?”

The bag lady smiled and nodded. She patted Susan on the shoulder, her touch surprisingly light and comforting. “Just think of me as your guardian angel,” she said, and went off, swaying from side to side like a tugboat in a heavy sea.

“Weird,” Susan said to the waitress, who had come immediately to remove the empty tomato juice glass. She wished she could call her Marie, but knew she couldn’t.

“Mm,” said the waitress, and touched the page torn from the magazine. “This hers?”

“No, no,” Susan told her, not sure why. “It’s mine.”

The waitress shrugged and went away. Susan, lifting her coffee cup, studied the rules of the contest.

It didn’t look that hard, really.

Well. I have to be more careful, I see, in choosing who to become when I walk upon the Earth. What a sad sack of guts I was in that café! My feet truly did hurt; in fact, I was aches and itches all over. It was only knowing I’d be out of that carcass soon that made it possible to go on. Their lives may be brief, humans, but they can certainly seem long.

I selected that option because I wanted to appear as the person Susan Carrigan would think of as least threatening; so no man was possible, of course. The traditional golden-haired white-gowned barefoot youth would lack conviction, somehow, in that neighborhood. A child would not have threatened, but equally would not have been persuasive about the contest in the magazine. A young and attractive woman — without all those twinges and pangs — would have been held at a wary distance, as in some way a competitor. So I chose my category from among the types available in Susan Carrigan’s environment, with pains and stings intact.

We angels make the form we want, you know, from the atoms of our own free-flowing selves; we do not, except under the most dire circumstances, commandeer the body of a living creature. Thus, from my own protoplasm, I have been a shepherd keeping watch over my flock by night; I have been a centurion bidding one to go and another to stay; I have been a leaping hart glimpsed briefly through the pines and followed to salvation. Once I was a butterfly, and became so lost in its infinitesimally tiny brain that I nearly forgot my own true self, and almost remained in there, a butterfly for the rest of its short life. (Now, there’s brevity!) Would I have died, then, when the butterfly did? I have no idea, and the question is of some moment to me, now that everything has changed.

Because, you know, He does not come after us. Like spies in novels of intrigue, once we are on the mission we are on our own. And the greatest danger we face — ifs the greatest danger humans face, too, but they don’t realize it — is our own free will.

Here is a paradox that surpasseth all understanding. God is omnipotent, among His qualities. And yet, angels and men have free will, can choose their own destinies, can opt to disobey even His desires. (As Lucifer did, notoriously.) Thus it is that God has always nudged men, has engaged in confidence tricks and little scams, has played at times with a stacked deck, has thrown up illusions and toyed with mirrors, all to get humankind to want to do what God has in mind. And now that what he has in mind to do is end this world, the same methods come into play. I have been sent, therefore, to arrange things, to set the stage, to coach the unwitting actors in their parts.

To end this world. For men to do it themselves, to release that final fire, envelop the globe in such a volume of ravening searching flame as to leave nothing with life in it anywhere on the cinder that remains; not a weed, not a bug, not a drop of water in which impurities could form and flow and start it all again. Nothing left but a lifeless ball, tumbling around and around the sun. And man to do it himself, of his own free will. And a little help from me.

The explosion was a small one, confined to one room in the laboratory wing, with very little damage, all in all: two metal tables bent out of shape, a couple of hopelessly charred wooden chairs, some minor flasks and cruets destroyed, three windows to replace, walls and ceiling to repaint, that’s about all. Minor, really, very minor.

But that wasn’t the point, dammit. Carson damn well knew what the point was, because he damn well knew what Philpott was up to in there, and the point was, Philpott might have blown up the whole damn university. Including its president, himself, Hodding Cabell Carson IV, who would not appreciate being snuffed out of existence at the peak of his career by some tenured maniac who, not content to be famously an explorer at the very outermost frontiers of scientific knowledge, actually has to go on and on doing experiments! And blowing things up along the way.

Carson let off steam over lunch in his private dining room with his provost, Wilcox Breckenridge Harrison: “The man could have blown us all up! So far, he’s merely done for some two-hundred-year-old foliage, but is that a portent or not?” And he waved his chilled salad fork at the large windows beside them, through which the older and more stately parts of Grayling University could be seen, heavily overgrown with ivy. A prestigious private university, Grayling, tucked away here in the rolling hills of upstate New York, with a prestigious president and the most prestigious of modern physicists on the faculty, Dr. Marlon Philpott, who was a menace to everything civilization holds dear.

Harrison said, “What is it that blew up, anyway?”

“God knows.” Carson chomped on a lot of iceberg lettuce covered with bottled diet Italian creamy salad dressing. “The worst of it is, if you ask Philpott what in Christ’s holy name he’s doing over there, he’ll tell you, at length, and not one word in ten makes the slightest bit of sense. I take it, though, it was not his famous strange matter that blew, but something more mundane.”

“Strange matter?” Harrison grinned, tentatively. “You’re putting me on.”

“No, by God, I’m not.” Carson wiped his lips on linen, dropped the napkin back on his lap, sipped a bit of the San Gimignano, and said, “It all makes sense, in its way, if only he weren’t so intent on proceeding with it. The fact is, he’s right, we do need new energy sources. The oil’s running out, we have thirty or forty years of it left. The public, given increasing familiarity with nuclear power, has grown less accepting of it, rather than more. Solar power is a joke. So is wind, so is water, so is coal. What’s needed is something brand-new, and our friend and nemesis, Dr. Marlon Philpott, is hot on the trail of one of the possibilities.”

“Strange matter,” suggested Harrison.

“Don’t ask me what it is. I asked him once, and all he did was say quark-quark-quark. You know these scientists.”

“I’m afraid I do.”

“In any event,” Carson said, “that, believe it or not, is the scientific term for this theoretical substance our Dr. White Rabbit is in pursuit of. Strange matter. If he can isolate it, it could apparently provide us with energy beyond our wildest dreams.”