Andre Norton - The Science Fiction anthology

The Agents’ guns rattled.

Love, Benjamin said, the greatest of these is love. Or did someone else say that? Someone, somewhere, perhaps in another time, in some misty, forgotten chip of time long gone, in another frame of reference perhaps....

Mrs. Jamieson could not remember, before she died.

The pockets of Mr. Humphrey Fownes were being picked outrageously.

It was a splendid day. The temperature was a crisp 59 degrees, the humidity a mildly dessicated 47%. The sun was a flaming orange ball in a cloudless blue sky.

His pockets were picked eleven times.

It should have been difficult. Under the circumstances it was a masterpiece of pocket picking. What made it possible was Humphrey Fownes’ abstraction; he was an uncommonly preoccupied individual. He was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses, one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions. But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to begin with for a person living in a domed city. He was thinking so deeply about it that it never occurred to him that entirely too many people were bumping into him. He was thinking about Optimum Dome Conditions (a crisp 59 degrees, a mildly dessicated 47%) when a bogus postman, who pretended to be reading a postal card, jostled him. In the confusion of spilled letters and apologies from both sides, the postman rifled Fownes’s handkerchief and inside jacket pockets.

He was still thinking about temperature and humidity when a pretty girl happened along with something in her eye. They collided. She got his right and left jacket pockets. It was much too much for coincidence. The sidewalk was wide enough to allow four people to pass at one time. He should surely have become suspicious when two men engaged in a heated argument came along. In the ensuing contretemps they emptied his rear pants pockets, got his wristwatch and restored the contents of the handkerchief pocket. It all went off very smoothly, like a game of put and take—the sole difference being that Humphrey Fownes had no idea he was playing.

There was an occasional tinkle of falling glass.

It fell on the streets and houses, making small geysers of shiny mist, hitting with a gentle musical sound, like the ephemeral droppings of a celesta. It was precipitation peculiar to a dome: feather-light fragments showering harmlessly on the city from time to time. Dome weevils, their metal arms reaching out with molten glass, roamed the huge casserole, ceaselessly patching and repairing.

Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still intrigued by a temperature that was always 59 degrees, by a humidity that was always 47%, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting his fingerprints off the postman’s bag, and which photographed, X-rayed and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and handedness behind.

By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an orange patrol car parked down the street.

Lanfierre had undoubtedly been affected by his job.

Sitting behind the wheel of the orange car, he watched Humphrey Fownes approach with a distinct feeling of admiration, although it was an odd, objective kind of admiration, clinical in nature. It was similar to that of a pathologist observing for the first time a new and particularly virulent strain of pneumococcus under his microscope.

Lanfierre’s job was to ferret out aberration. It couldn’t be tolerated within the confines of a dome. Conformity had become more than a social force; it was a physical necessity. And, after years of working at it, Lanfierre had become an admirer of eccentricity. He came to see that genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own small efforts, rarer.

Fownes was a masterpiece of queerness. He was utterly inexplicable. Lanfierre was almost proud of Humphrey Fownes.

“Sometimes his house shakes ,” Lanfierre said.

“House shakes,” Lieutenant MacBride wrote in his notebook. Then he stopped and frowned. He reread what he’d just written.

“You heard right. The house shakes ,” Lanfierre said, savoring it.

MacBride looked at the Fownes house through the magnifying glass of the windshield. “Like from ... side to side ?” he asked in a somewhat patronizing tone of voice.

“And up and down.”

MacBride returned the notebook to the breast pocket of his orange uniform. “Go on,” he said, amused. “It sounds interesting.” He tossed the dossier carelessly on the back seat.

Lanfierre sat stiffly behind the wheel, affronted. The cynical MacBride couldn’t really appreciate fine aberrations. In some ways MacBride was a barbarian. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. It was only with the greatest reluctance that he finally mentioned Fownes to MacBride. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. They spoke in an incessant chatter of cliches, and their actions were unbelievably trite.

Then a fine robust freak came along and the others—the echoes—refused to believe it. The lieutenant was probably on the point of suggesting a vacation.

“Why don’t you take a vacation?” Lieutenant MacBride suggested.

“It’s like this, MacBride. Do you know what a wind is? A breeze? A zephyr?”

“I’ve heard some.”

“They say there are mountain-tops where winds blow all the time. Strong winds, MacBride. Winds like you and I can’t imagine. And if there was a house sitting on such a mountain and if winds did blow, it would shake exactly the way that one does. Sometimes I get the feeling the whole place is going to slide off its foundation and go sailing down the avenue.”

Lieutenant MacBride pursed his lips.

“I’ll tell you something else,” Lanfierre went on. “The windows all close at the same time. You’ll be watching and all of a sudden every single window in the place will drop to its sill.” Lanfierre leaned back in the seat, his eyes still on the house. “Sometimes I think there’s a whole crowd of people in there waiting for a signal—as if they all had something important to say but had to close the windows first so no one could hear. Why else close the windows in a domed city? And then as soon as the place is buttoned up they all explode into conversation—and that’s why the house shakes.”

MacBride whistled.

“No, I don’t need a vacation.”

A falling piece of glass dissolved into a puff of gossamer against the windshield. Lanfierre started and bumped his knee on the steering wheel.

“No, you don’t need a rest,” MacBride said. “You’re starting to see flying houses, hear loud babbling voices. You’ve got winds in your brain, Lanfierre, breezes of fatigue, zephyrs of irrationality—”

At that moment, all at once, every last window in the house slammed shut.

The street was deserted and quiet, not a movement, not a sound. MacBride and Lanfierre both leaned forward, as if waiting for the ghostly babble of voices to commence.

The house began to shake.