Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Sacheverell whimpered. “I don’t know , George. I don’t know. ”

The man scowled, then grinned slyly. “That’s what you say. I’m not so sure. You think I don’t know that if They found out, They’d take you away from me? Sure. A million bucks…how come I’m being followed, if They don’t know? First a guy with a beard, then a kid in a red snow-suit. I seen them together. Listen, you frigging little jocko, you better think , I’m telling you — you better think hard!” He poked again with his stiff and dirty finger. And again. “I always knew, see, I always knew that there was a million bucks waiting for me somewhere, if I only kept my eyes open. What the hell is a guy like me doing unloading crates in the fruit market, when I got plans for a million? And then—” His voice sank and his eyes narrowed. “—this Professor Whitman come along and put up at the Eagle Hotel. I caught his act in the sticks once, I been around. First I thought he was practicing ventriloquism, then I found out about you — you was the other voice in his room! And that’s when I—”

Abruptly he stopped. The outside door opened with a rusty squeal and footfalls sounded in the hall. Someone knocked. Someone tried the knob. Someone said, “Sacheverell? Sacheverell?” and George clamped his hairy, filthy hand over the captive’s mouth. Sacheverell jerked and twitched and rolled his eyes. The voice made a disappointed noise, the footfalls moved uncertainly, started to retreat. And then Sacheverell kicked out at George’s crotch. The man grunted, cursed, lost his grip—

“Help!” Sacheverell cried. “ Help! Help! Save me! ”

Fists beat on the door, the glass in the back window crashed and fell to the floor, a wizened old-man’s face peered through the opening, withdrew. George ran to the door, then turned to chase Sacheverell, who fled, shrieking hysterically. A tiny figure in a red snow-suit squeezed through the bars of the back window and ran to pull the bolt on the door. Someone in boots and a plaid jacket and a woolen watch-cap burst in, melting snow glittering on a big black beard.

“Save me!” Sacheverell screamed, dashing from side to side. “He attacked Professor Whitman and knocked him down and he didn’t get up again —”

George stooped, picking up the chair, but the red snow-suit got between his legs and he stumbled. The chair was jerked from his hands, he came up with his fists clenched and the bearded person struck down with the chair. It caught him across the bridge of the nose with a crunching noise, he fell, turned over, stayed down. Silence.

Sacheverell hiccupped. Then he said, “Why are you wearing men’s clothing, Princess Zaga?”

“A bearded man attracts quite enough attention, thank you,” the Princess said, disengaging the chain. “No need to advertise… Let’s get out of here.” She picked him up and the three of them went out into the black, deserted street, boarded-shut windows staring blindly. The snow fell thickly, drifting into the ravaged hall and into the room where George’s blood, in a small pool, had already begun to freeze.

“There’s our car, Sacheverell,” said the man in the red snow-suit, thrusting a cigar into his child-size, jaded old face. “What a time—”

“I assume you are still with the carnival, General Pinkey?”

“No, kiddy. The new owners wouldn’t reckernize the union, so we quit and retired on Social Security in Sarasota. You’ll like it there. Not that the unions are much better, mind you: Bismarkian devices to dissuade the working classes from industrial government on a truly Marxian, Socialist-Labor basis. We got a television set, kiddy.”

“And look who’s waiting for you—” Princess Zaga opened the station wagon and handed Sacheverell inside. There, in the back seat, was the hugest, the vastest, the fattest woman in the world.

“Princess Opal!” Sacheverell cried, leaping into her arms — and was buried in the wide expanse of her bosom and bathed in her warm Gothick tears. She called him her Precious and her Little Boy and her very own Peter Pan.

“It was Madame Opal who planned this all,” Princess Zaga remarked, starting the car and driving off. General Pinkey lit his cigar and opened a copy of The Weekly People .

“Yes, I did, yes, I did,” Mme. Opal murmured, kissing and hugging Sacheverell. “Oh, how neglected you are! Oh, how thin! We’ll have a tea-party, just like we used to, the very best doll dishes; we’ll see you eat nice and we’ll wash you and comb you and put ribbons around your neck.”

Sacheverell began to weep. “Oh, it was awful with George,” he said.

“Never mind, never mind, he didn’t know any better,” Mme. Opal said, soothingly.

“The hell he didn’t!” snapped Princess Zaga.

“Predatory capitalism,” General Pinkey began.

“Never mind, never mind, forget about it, darling, it was only a bad dream …”

Sacheverell dried his tears on Mme. Opal’s enormous spangled-velvet bosom. “George was very mean to me,” he said. “He treated me very mean. But worst of all, you know, Madame Opal, he lied to me — he lied to me all the time, and I almost believed him — that was the most horrible part of all: I almost believed that I was a monkey.”

Science fiction often paints a hopeful history of colonists and castaways on far planets. They not only survive, they thrive in their isolation; they keep all their skills, they remember how to operate the sawmill, how to program the computer, how to maintain liberty and justice for all. And when the Federation finds them after five hundred years, they talk just the way the Feds talk.

Avram didn’t share the rationalist’s faith that reason, once established, will prevail. I doubt he believed that reason had ever been established anywhere for more than about five minutes. In the incredibly fertile darkness of his imagination, rational behavior is the gleam of a flashlight for a moment in a midnight thunderstorm in a tropical forest.

The Blakeneys could well be a Heinlein survivalist scenario five centuries later, the offspring of a couple of masterful polygamist studs, the children of Reason.

This profoundly disturbing story comes on as light as a meringue. Avram’s ear for weird ways of talking was wonderful, and his Blakeneys are very funny, mumbling on and going “Rower, rower.” It’s hard not to start talking like them, funnyfunny, a hey. But Avram’s ear was also for the precise meanings of words; he wrote with a very rare accuracy of usage. Late in the story we realize that the Blakeneys have no plural for the word house. “Houses?”—“No such word, hey.” And the whole story lies in that reply.

The funnyfunniest thing about them, to me, is that they don’t have cows. They have freemartins. I suspect Avram of throwing this in to see if anybody knew what a freemartin is, and if so, if they’d wonder how the Blakeney cattle reproduce. A hey.

FOUR PEOPLE COMING DOWN the Forest Road, a hey,” Old Big Mary said.

Young Red Tom understood her at once. “Not ours.”

Things grew very quiet in the long kitchenroom. Old Whitey Bill shifted in his chairseat. “Those have’s to be Runaway Little Bob’s and that Thin Jinnie’s,” he said. “Help me up, some.”

“No,” Old Big Mary said. “They’re not.”

“Has to be.” Old Whitey Bill shuffled up, leaning on his canestick. “Has to be. Whose elses could they be. Always said, me, she ran after him.”