“Thing” was all I could call it, and it had a million tentacles.
It was growing in Da Campo’s garden, and it kept staring at me.
“How’s your garden, John,” said Da Campo behind me, and I spun, afraid he’d see my face was chalk–white and terrified.
“Oh — pretty, pretty good. I was just looking for Jamie’s baseball. It rolled in here.” I tried to laugh gaily, but it got stuck on my pylorus. “Afraid the lad’s getting too strong an arm for his old man. Can’t keep up these days.”
I pretended to be looking for the ball, trying not to catch DaCampo’s eyes. They were steel–gray and disturbing. He pointed to the hardball in my hand, “That it?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, yeah! I was just going back to the boy. Well, take it easy. I’ll — uh — I’ll see you — uh — at the Civic Center, won’t I?”
“You suspect, don’t you, John?”
“Suspect? Uh — suspect? Suspect what?”
I didn’t wait to let him clarify the comment. I’m afraid I left hurriedly. I crushed some of his rhododendrons.
When I got back to my own front yard I did something I’ve never had occasion to do before. I mopped my brow with my handkerchief. The good monogrammed hankie from my lapel pocket, not the all–purpose one in my hip pocket; the one I use on my glasses. That shows you how unnerved I was.
The hankie came away wet.
“Hey, Dad!”
I jumped four feet, but by the time I came down I realized it was my son, Jamie, not Clark Da Campo coming after me. “Here, Jamie, go on over to the schoolyard and shag a few with the other kids. I have to do some work in the house.”
I tossed him the ball and went up the front steps. Charlotte was running one of those hideous claw–like attachments over the drapes, and the vacuum cleaner was howling at itself. I had a vague urge to run out of the house and go into the woods somewhere to hide — where there weren’t any drapes, or vacuum cleaners, or staring tentacled plants.
“I’m going into the den. I don’t want to be disturbed for about two hours, Char — ” She didn’t turn.
I stepped over and kicked the switch on the floor unit. The howling died off and she smiled at me over her shoulder, “Now you’re a saboteur?”
I couldn’t help chuckling, even worried as I was; Charlotte’s like that. “Look, Poison, I’ve got some deep thought to slosh around in for a while. Make sure the kid and the bill collectors don’t get to me, will you.”
She nodded, and added as an afterthought, “Still have to go into the city today?”
“Umm. ’Fraid so. There’s something burning in the Gillings Mills account and they dumped the whole brief on my desk.”
She made a face that said, “Another Saturday shot,” and shrugged.
I gave her a rush–kiss and went into the den, closing and locking the big double doors behind me.
Symmetry and order are tools for me, so I decided to put down on paper my assets and liabilities in this matter. Or, more accurately, just what I was sure of, and what I wasn’t.
In the asset column went things like:
Name: John Weiler. I work for a trade association. In this case the trade association is made up of paper manufacturers. I’m a commuter — a man in the gray flannel suit, if you would. A family man. One wife, Charlotte; one son, Jamie; one vacuum cleaner, noisy.
I own my own home, I have a car and enough money to go up to Grossingers once each summer mainly on the prodding of Charlotte, who feels I should broaden myself more. We keep up with the Joneses, without too much trouble.
I do my job well, I’m a climbing executive type, and I’m well- adjustedly happy. I’m a steady sort of fellow and I keep my nose out of other people’s business, primarily because I have enough annoying, average, commonplace small problems of my own. I vote regularly, not just talk about it, and I gab a lot with my fellow suburbanites about our gardens — sort of a universal hobby in the sticks.
Forty–seven minutes into town on the train five days a week (and sometimes Saturday, which was happening all too frequently lately) and Lexington Avenue greets me. My health and the family’s is good, except for an occasional twinge in my stomach, so most of the agony in the world stays away from me. I don’t get worried easily, because I stay out of other people’s closets.
But this time I was worried worse than just badly.
I drew a line and started writing in the liabilities column:
Item: Clark Da Campo has a million–tentacled staring plant in his garden that is definitely not of normal botanical origin.
Item: There has never been a wisp of smoke from the Da Campo chimney, even during the coldest days of the winter.
Item: Though they have been living here for six months, the Da Campos have never made a social call, attended a local function, shown up at a public place.
Item: Charlotte has told me she has never seen Mrs. Da Campo buy any groceries or return any empty bottles or hang out any wash.
Item: There are no lights in the Da Campo household after six o’clock every night, and full–length drapes are drawn at the same time.
Item: I am scared witless.
Then I looked at the sheet. There was a great deal more on the asset side than the other, but somehow, after all the value I’d placed on the entries in that first column, those in the second had suddenly become more impressive, overpowering, alarming. And they were so nebulous, so inconclusive, I didn’t know what it was about them that scared me.
But it looked like I was in Da Campo’s closets whether I wanted to be or not.
Three hours later the house had assumed the dead sogginess of a quiet Saturday afternoon, three pages of notepaper were covered with obscure but vaguely ominous doodles, and I was no nearer an answer that made sense than when I’d gone into the den.
I sighed and threw down my pencil.
My back was stiff from sitting at the desk, and I got up to find the pain multiplied along every inch of my spinal cord. I slid the asset–liability evaluation under my blotter and cleaned the cigarette ashes off the desk where I’d missed the ashtray.
Then I dumped the ashtray in the waste basket. It was Saturday and Charlotte frowned on dirty ashtrays left about, even in my private territory.
When I came out the place was still as a tomb, and I imagined Charlotte had gone into the downtown section of our hamlet to gawk at the exclusive shops and their exclusive contents.
I went into the kitchen and looked through the window. The car was gone, bearing out my suspicions. My eyes turned themselves heavenward and my mind reeled out bank balances without prompting.
“Want to talk now, John?”
I could have sworn my legs were made of ice and they were melting me down to the kitchen linoleum. I turned around and — that’s right — Da Campo was in the doorway to the dining room.
“What do you want?” I bluffed, stepping forward threateningly.
“I came over to borrow a cup of sugar and talk a little, John,” said Da Campo, smiling.
The utter incongruity of it! Borrowing a cup of sugar! It was too funny to equate with weird plants and odd goings–on in the house across the street. It took the edge off my belligerence quite effectively.
“S–sure, I suppose I can find the wife’s sugar.” Then it occurred to me: “How do you know my name?”
“How do you know mine?”
“Why I — I asked the neighbors. Like to know who’s living across the street, that’s all.”
“Well, that’s how I know yours, John. I asked my neighbors.”
“Which ones? The Schwachters? Heffman? Brown?”
He waved his hand absently, “Oh . . . just the neighbors, that’s all. How about that sugar?”
I opened one of the cabinets and took out the sugar bowl. DaCampo didn’t have a cup, so I took one down — one of the old blue set — and filled it for him.
“Thanks,” he said. “Feel like that talk now?”
Somehow, I wasn’t frightened of him, as I was by that sheet of items. It was easy to feel friendly toward the big, gray–eyed, gray–haired man in the sport shirt and slacks. Just another typical suburban neighbor.
“Sure, come on into the living room,” I answered, moving past him.
When Da Campo had found a reasonably comfortable position in one of Charlotte’s doubly–damned modern chairs, I tried to make small conversation. “I’ve never noticed a TV antenna on your house. Don’t tell me an inside one works over there. No one this far out seems to be able to make one of those gadgets bring in anything decently.”
“We don’t have television.”
“Oh,” I said.
The silence hauled itself around the room several times, and I tried again. “Uh — how come we never see you at the new Civic Center? Got some sweet bowling alleys down there and the little theatre group is pretty decent. Like to see — ”
“Look, John, I thought I might come over and try to explain about myself, about us — Ellie and me.” He seemed so intent, so earnest, I leaned forward.
“What do you mean? You don’t have to — ”
“No, no, I mean it,” he cut me off. “I know everyone in the neighborhood has been wondering about us. Why we don’t go out much, why we don’t invite you over, everything like that.” He held up his hands in fumbling motions, as though he were looking for the words. Then he let his hands fall, as though he knew he would never find the words.
“No, I don’t think anyone has — ”
He stopped me again with a shake of the head. His eyes were very deep and very sad and I didn’t quite know what to say. I suddenly realized how far out of touch with real people I’d gotten in my years of commuting. There’s something cold and impersonal about a nine–to–five job and a ride home with total strangers. Even total strangers that live in the same town. I just looked at Da Campo.
“It’s simple, really,” he said, rubbing his hands together, looking down at them as though they had just grown from the ends of his arms.
“I got mixed up with some pretty strange people a few years ago, and well, I went to jail for a while. When I came out I couldn’t get a job and we had to move. By then Ellie had drawn into a shell and . . . well, it just hasn’t been easy.”
I didn’t know why he was telling me all this and I found myself embarrassed. I looked around for something to break the tension, and then pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I held them out to him and he looked up from his hands for a second, shaking his head. He went back to staring at them as I lit a cigarette. I was hoping he wouldn’t go on, but he did.
“Reason I’m telling you this is that you must have thought me pretty odd this afternoon. The only thing I have is my garden, and Ellie, and we don’t like living as alone as we do, but it’s better this way. That’s the way we have to do it. At least for a while.”
For a second I got the impression he had skimmed the top of my mind and picked off my wonderment at his telling me the story. Then I shook off the feeling and said, “That’s understandable. If I ever did wonder about you and Mrs. Da Campo, well, it’s something I won’t do any more. And feel free to drop over any time you get the urge.”
He looked thankful, as though I’d offered him the Northern Hemisphere, and stood up.
“Thanks a lot, John. I was hoping you’d understand.”
We shook hands, I asked him if he wanted to call up the Missus and come over for dinner, but he said no thanks and we’d certainly get together again soon.
He left, and I wasn’t surprised to see the cup of sugar sitting on an end table where he’d set it down.
Nice guy, I thought to myself.
Then I thought of that staring plant, which he hadn’t explained at all, and some of the worry returned.
I shrugged it off. After three weeks I forgot it entirely. But Da Campo and I never got together as he’d suggested.
At least not at the Civic Center.
Da Campo kept going to the City on the 7:40 and coming back on the 5:35 every day. But somehow, we never sat together, and never spoke to one another. I made tentative gestures once or twice, but he indicated disinterest, so I stopped.
Ellie Da Campo would always be waiting at the station, parked a few cars down from Charlotte in her station wagon, and Clark Da Campo would pop into it and they’d be off before most of the rest of us were off the train.
I stopped wondering about the absence of light or life or smoke or anything else around the Da Campo household, figuring the guy knew what he was doing. I also took pains to caution Jamie to stay strictly off–limits, with or without baseball.
I also stopped wondering because I had enough headaches from the office to take full–time precedence on my brain–strain.
Then one morning, something changed my careful hands–off policies.
They had to change. My fingers were pushed into the pie forcibly.
I was worried sick over the Gillings business.
The Gillings Mills were trying to branch over into territory held by another of our Association’s members, trying to buy timber land out from under the other. It looked like a drastic shake–up was in the near offing.
The whole miserable mess had been heaped on me, and I’d not only been losing my Saturdays — and a few Sundays to boot — but my hair was, so help me God, whitening, and the oculist said all the paperwork had played hell with my eyes. I was sick to tears of the thing, but it was me all the way, and if I didn’t play it right, mergers might not merge, commitments might not be committed, and John Weiler might find himself on the outside.
Mornings on the train were a headache and a nightmare. Faces blurred into one runny gray smear, and the clickety–clack didn’t carry me back. It made my head throb and my bones ache and it made me hate the universe. Not just the world — the universe! All of it.
I unzipped my briefcase and opened it on my lap. The balding $125,000–a–year man sharing the seat harrumphed once and gathered the folds of his Harris tweed about his paunch. He went back to the Times with a nasty side glance at me.
I mentally stuck my tongue out and bent to the paperwork.
I was halfway through an important field agent’s report that might — just barely might — provide the loophole I was seeking to stop the gobbling by the Gillings Mills, and I walked out of the station with my briefcase under my arm, my nose in the report, with a sort of mechanical stride.
About halfway down the subway ramp I realized I didn’t know where the bloody Hell I was. Hurrying men and women surrounded me, streaming like salmon heading to spawn. I was somewhere under Grand Central’s teeming passageway labyrinth, heading for an exit that would bring me out into the street somewhere near my building.
But where the devil was this?
I’d never seen any of the signs on the tiled walls before. They were all in gibberish, but they seemed to be the usual type thing: women, big bold letters in some foreign language, packaged goods, bright colors.
I lost interest in them and tried to figure out where I was.
I’d gone up through the Station and then down again into the subway. Then there’d been a long period of walking while reading that damned report, and thinking my practiced feet knew where they were going.
It dawned on me that for the last few years I’d been letting myself go where my feet led me each morning. Yeah, but my feet were following the subconscious orders of my head that said follow the rest of the commuters.
This morning I’d just followed the wrong batch.
A string of yellow lights spaced far apart in the ceiling, between the regular lights, indicated the way to a line of some sort. I followed the lights for a while until I looked down at my watch, for perhaps the hundredth time that morning, and realized it was past nine. I was late for the office.
Today of all days!
I started to get panicky and stopped a gray–suited man hurrying past with a sheaf of papers under his arm.
“Say, can you tell me where the exit onto 42nd and Lex — ”
“Derlagos–km’ma–sne’ephor–july, esperind,” he drawled out of the corner of his mouth and stalked past.
I was standing there stupidly till the next couple people cast dirty looks at me for being in the way.
Foreigner, I thought, and grabbed a girl who was walking with typical hurried secretarial steps. “Say, I’m trying to get out of here. Where’s the 42nd and Lexington exit?”
She looked at me, amazedly, for a moment, shook my hand loose from her coat–sleeve, and pattered off, looking once over her shoulder. That look was a clear, “Are you nuts, Mac?”
I was getting really worried. I had no idea where the blazes I was, or where I was heading, or how to get out. I hadn’t seen an exit in some time. And still the people continued to stream purposefully by me.
Subways had always scared me, but this was the capper.
Then I recognized the arrows on the wall. They were marked with the same kind of hyphenated, apostrophied anagrams on the billboards, but at least I got the message!
THIS WAY TO SOMEWHERE!
I followed the crowd.
By the time I got to the train, I was in the middle of a swarm of people, all madly pushing to get into the cars. “Hey, hold it! I don’t want to — ! Wait a minute!”
I was carried forward, pressed like a rose in a scrapbook, borne protesting through the doors of the car, and squashed up against the opposite door.
If you live in New York you will know this is not an impossibility. If you don’t, take my word for it.
The doors slid shut with a pneumatic sigh and the train shot forward. Without a jar. That was when I began to sweat full–time.
I had wondered, sure, but in the middle of downtown Manhattan you just don’t expect anything weird or out–of–place unless there’s a press agent behind it. But this was no publicity stunt. Something was wrong. Way off–base wrong, and I was caught in the midst of it.
I wasn’t scared, really, because I didn’t know what there was to be afraid of, and there was too much familiarity about it all to hit me fully.
I had been in a million subway crushes just like this one. Had my glasses knocked off and trampled, had my suit wrinkled, had the shine taken off my shoes, too often to think there was anything untoward here.
But the signs had been in a foreign language. No one I’d been able to accost would talk to me in anything but gibberish, and most of them looked at me as though my skin was green. The train was definitely not an ordinary train. It had started without a jerking rasp. If you know New York subways, you know what I mean.
That was unusual. That was fantastic!
I bit my lower lip, elbowed my way into a relatively clear space in the car, and for the second time in my life dragged out my square–folded lapel hankie to mop my face.
Then I saw Da Campo.
He was sitting in one of the plush seats, reading a newspaper. The headline read:
SELFGEMMEN–BARNSNEBBLE J’J’KEL–WOLO–BAGEDTAR!
I blinked. I blinked again. It was Da Campo all right, but that newspaper! What the hell was it?
I made my way over to him, and tapped him on the shoulder, “Say, Da Campo, how the deuce do I — ”
“Good Tilburr all mighty!” he squawked, his eyes bugging, the newspaper falling to the floor. “How the — dwid olu — did you follow — Weiler!” He went off in a burst of that strange gibberish, gasped, and finally got out, “What are you doing here, for God’s sake, man?”
“Look, Da Campo, I got lost in the subway. Took a wrong turn or something. All I want is out of here. Where’s this train’s next stop?”
“Drexwill, you damned fool!”
“Is that anywhere near Westchester?”
“It’s so far away your best telescopes don’t even know it exists!” He was getting red in the face.
“What?”
“The planet Drexwill, you idiot! What the hell are you doing here?”
I felt suddenly choked, hemmed in, like a fist was tightening around the outside of my head, squeezing it.
“Look, Da Campo, this isn’t funny. I’ve got an appointment this morning, and the office is waiting for me to — ”
“Understand this, Weiler!” he snapped, pointing a finger that seemed to fill the universe for me. “You’ll never make that appointment!”
“But why? I can get off at the next sta — ”
“You’ll never make another appointment back there.” His eyes flicked back toward the rear of the car and I found my own drawn in that direction. The fear was crawling around in me like a live thing.
He seemed to be grinding inside. His face was screwed up in an expression of distaste, disbelief and pity. “Why? Why? Why didn’t you leave well enough alone? Why couldn’t you believe what I told you and not follow me?” His hands made futile gestures, and I saw the people near us suddenly come alive with the same expressions as our conversation reached them.
I was into something horrible, and I didn’t know precisely what!
“Auditor! Auditor! Is there an Auditor in the car?” yelled Da Campo, twisting around in his seat.
“Da Campo, what are you doing? Help me, get me off this train, I don’t know where I’m going, and I have to be at the office!” I was getting hysterical, and Da Campo kept looking from me to the back of the car, screaming for an Auditor, whatever that was.
“I can’t help you, Weiler, I’m just like you. I’m just another commuter like you, only I go a little further to work every day.”
The whole thing started to come to me then, and the idea, the very concept, dried my throat out, made my brain ache.
“Auditor! Auditor!” Da Campo kept yelling.
A man across the aisle leaned over and said something in that hyphenated gibberish, and Da Campo’s lips became a thin line. He looked as though he wanted to slap his forehead in frustration.
“There isn’t one on the train. This is the early morning local.” He made fists, rubbed the thumbs over the tightened fingers.
A sign began flashing on and off, on and off, in yellow letters, over the door of the car, and everyone lowered his newspaper with a bored and resigned expression.
The sign blinked HUL–HUBBER on and off.
“Translation,” said Da Campo briefly, and then the car turned inside out.
Everything went black and formless and limp in the car and for a split split–second my intestines were sloshing around in the crown of my hat and my shoe soles were stuck to my upper lip. Then the lights came back on, everyone lifted his paper, the sign went dead, and I felt as though I wanted to vomit.
“Good Lord above, what was that?” I gasped, holding onto the back of Da Campo’s seat.
“Translation,” he said simply, and went back to his paper.
I suddenly became furious. Here I was lost in a subway, going — if I was to believe what I had been told — somewhere called Drexwill. I was late for the office, and this thing had overtones that were only now beginning to shade in with any sort of logic. A mad sort of logic, but logic nonetheless.
And the only person I knew here was reading his newspaper as though my presence was a commonplace thing.
“Da Campo!” I screamed, knocking the weird newspaper out of his hands. Heads turned in annoyance. “Do something! Get me off this goddamed thing!”
I grabbed his coat lapel, but he slapped my hand away.
“Look, Weiler, you got yourself into this, you’ll just have to wait till we hit the Depot and we can fish out an Auditor to help you.
“I’m just a lousy businessman; I can’t handle anything as snarled as this. This is government business, and it’s your headache, not mine. I have to be at work . . . ”
I wasn’t listening. It all shaded in properly. I saw the picture. I didn’t know where I was going, or what it was like there, but I knew why Da Campo was on this train, and what he’d been doing in my town.
I wanted to cry out because it was so simple.
I wanted to cry because it was so simply terrifying.
The train slowed, braked, and came to a hissing halt, without lurching. The doors opened and the many commuters who had been crowded into the car began to stream out. The entire trip couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes.
Then I thought of that “translation” and I wasn’t so sure of my time estimate.
“Come on,” said Da Campo, “I’ll get you to an Auditor.” He glanced down at his wrist, frowning at the dial of a weirdly–numeraled watch. He whistled through his teeth for a moment, as the crowd pushed out. Then he shoved me after them resignedly. “Let’s hurry,” he said, “I haven’t much time.”
He herded me before him, and told me to wait a moment while he took care of something. He stepped to the end of a line of men and women about to enter a small booth, one of about twenty such booths. A dilating opening in the booth admitted one person at a time.
In a few moments the line had diminished, as men went in one side wearing suits like my own gray flannel, and emerged from the other clad in odd, short jackets and skin–tight pants. The women came out in the equivalent, only tailored for the female form. They didn’t look bad at all.
Da Campo went in and quickly came out. He stepped to my side, dressed like the others, and began pushing me again.
“Had to change for work,” he commented shortly. “Come on.”
I followed him, confused. My stomach was getting more and more uneasy. I had a feeling that the twinge I’d occasionally felt in my stomach was going to develop into an ulcer.
We stepped onto an escalator–like stairway that carried us up through a series of floors where I saw more people — dressed like Da Campo — scurrying back and forth. “Who are they?” I asked.
Da Campo looked at me with pity and annoyance and said, “Commuters.”
“Earth is a suburb, isn’t it?” I asked.
He nodded, not looking at me.
I knew what it was all about, then. A fool would be the only one unable to see the picture after all the pieces had been laid out so clearly. It was really quite simple:
Earth was being infiltrated. But there wasn’t any sinister invasion or displacement afoot. That was ridiculous. The only reason these aliens were on Earth was to live.
When I thought the word “alien” I looked at Da Campo. He appeared to be the same as anyone of Earth. These “aliens” were obviously exactly like us, physically. Physically.
Why were the aliens on Earth to live? Again, simple.
Why does a man who works in New York City go out to Westchester after 5:00 every day? Answer: the city is too crowded. He goes to the suburbs to live quietly.
“Is — uh — Drexwill crowded, Da Campo? I mean, are there a lot of people here?”
He nodded again and muttered something about serious over population and why didn’t the stupid Faenalists use their heads and bring things under control and wasn’t that what he was paying his Allotments for.
The escalator was coming to another floor, and Da Campo made movements toward the exit side. He stepped off, and I followed. He gave me a quick glance to make sure I was following, and strode briskly away.
All around us people were coming and going with quiet purpose.
“Da Campo — ” I began, trying to get his attention. His nonchalance and attitude of trying to brush me off were beginning to terrify me more than all the really strange things going on around me.
“Stop calling me that, you fool! My name is Helgorth Labbula, and if you refer to me again with that idiotic name I’ll leave you here and let you fend for yourself. I’m only taking my time to get you to an Auditor because they might construe it as my fault that you wandered into the Suburb Depot.” He glared at me, and I bit my lip.
We kept walking and I wondered what an Auditor was, and where we were going to find one.
I found out quickly enough. Da Cam — er, Helgorth Labbula spotted a tall, hard–looking man in a deep blue version of the universal short jacket and tight pants, and hailed him.
The Auditor walked over and Da Campo talked to him in soft tones for a moment. I watched as the man’s eyes got wider and wider, as Da Campo’s talk progressed.
“Hey!” I yelled. They both looked up, annoyed.
“I hate to say anything,” I said, “but if I’m right, you’re talking about me, and I don’t like this cold–shoulder routine, not one little bit.” I was sick of all this rigamarole, and me stuck somewhere a million miles or more away from my office, and everyone acting as though I’d done it on purpose and I was a nuisance.
“Now talk in English so I can understand, will you?”
The Auditor turned cool gray eyes on me. Stiffly, as though he were unaccustomed to speaking the language, he said, “You have stumbled into something by chance, and though it is not your fault, dispensation must be arranged. Will you please come with me.”
He stated it, didn’t ask it, and I had no choice.
We took a few steps, and the Auditor turned to stare back at Da Campo who was watching us balefully. “You, too,” the man in the blue tunic said.
“But I have to be at — ”
“You will be needed for a statement. I’m sorry, but it’s official.”
“What am I paying my Allotments for, if you Auditors can’t handle a little thing like this?” He was getting angry, but the Auditor shrugged his shoulders, and Da Campo trudged along behind us.
We came up off one of the escalators, into the light of triple suns. Three of them. Burning all at once. Triple shadows. That was when I realized how far away, more than a mere million miles, and how strange, and how lost I was.
“How — how far from Earth are we?” I asked.
The Auditor answered absently, “About 60,000 light–years.”
I gawked, stopped dead in my tracks. “But you toss it off so lightly, as though it were around the block! And you don’t live that differently from us! I don’t understand!”
“Understand? What’s to understand?” snapped Da Campo with annoyance. “It was a fluke that discovered Translation, and allowed us to live off Drexwill. But it didn’t change our culture much. Why shouldn’t we take it for granted? We’ve lived with it all our lives, and there’s nothing odd or marvelous about it.”
“In fact,” he added, glaring at the Auditor, “it’s a blasted bother sometimes!”
His tossing it off in that manner only made it worse for me.
I thought of the distance between me and my office, realizing I hadn’t the faintest idea how far away it was, but knowing it was further than anything I could ever imagine. I tried putting it into mundane terms by remembering that the nearest star to Earth was only four light–years away and then trying something like:
If all the chewing–gum wrappers in the world were laid end to end, they’d stretch from Earth to —
But it only made things worse.
I was lost.
“I want to go home,” I said, and realized I sounded like a little boy. But I couldn’t help it.
The Auditor and Da Campo turned to look at me at the same time. I wished I had been unable to read what was in their eyes.
But I could. I wished I hadn’t been able to, really.
They hurried me down a street, if street it was, and I supposed that was what it was, and into a bubble–like car with a blue insignia, that sat by the curb. It ran on a monorail, and in a few seconds we had left the Depot behind.
We sped through the city, and oddly, I didn’t marvel at the fantastic architecture and evidences of great science, though there were enough of both. From the screaming ships that split the morning sky to the cone–within–helix buildings rising on all sides.
I didn’t look, because it was so restful for the first time in my life not to have to worry about offices, and commuting, and bills, and Charlotte’s ashtray fetish, or any of the other goddam bothers I had been heir to since I was able to go out and earn a living. No treadmill. No responsibility.
It was good to lie back in the padded seat and just close my eyes. Even though I knew I was in deep trouble.
We drove for a while, and then something occurred to me.
“Why don’t we just Translate where we’re going?”
The Auditor was looking out the window abstractedly, but he said, “Too short a jump. It only works in light–year minimums.”
“Oh,” I said, and sank back again.
It was all so logical.
Something else popped into my mind. The sheet of liabilities under my desk blotter.
“Uh — Da Campo,” I began, and shrank back at the scathing look he turned on me.
“The name is Helgorth Labbula, I told you!”
The Auditor smiled out the window.
“Want to tell me a few things?” I asked, timidly.
Da Campo sighed once, deeply, “Go ahead. You can’t be any more trouble to me than you have already. I’m twenty kil–boros late already.”
“What was that in your garden?”
“A plant, what do you think?”
“But — ”
He seemed about to explode with irritation. “Look, Weiler, you grow those runty little chrysanthemums and roses, don’t you? Well, why shouldn’t I be entitled to grow a native plant in my garden? Just because I’m living out there in the sticks doesn’t mean I have to act and live like a barbarian.”
The Auditor looked over, “Yes, but you were warned several times about growing native plants in Suburb Territory when you signed the real estate release, weren’t you, Helgorth?”
Da Campo turned red.
“Well, that’s — what I mean is — a man has to have some —” He stuttered into silence and looked at me with wrath.
“How come we never saw any smoke from your house?”
“We don’t use imbecilic fuels like coal or gas or oil.”
I didn’t understand, but he cleared it up with the answer to my next question. I said, “Why don’t you ever go out, or show lights at night, and why do you pull those drapes?”
“Because the inside of our house isn’t like yours. We have a Drexwillian bungalow in there. A bit cramped for space we are,” he said, casting a nasty look at the Auditor, “but with regulations what they are, we can’t expect much better. We have our own independent heating system, food supply, lighting system and everything else. We pull the drapes so you won’t see when we turn on all the units at once. We have to inconvenience ourselves, I’ll tell you.
“But at least it’s better than living in this madhouse,” he finished, waving a hand at the bustling city.
“I rather like it,” I said.
The Auditor glanced over at me again, and for the second time I read his eyes. The message hadn’t changed. I was still in trouble.
“We’re almost there,” he said.
The car slowed and came to an easy stop before a huge white building, and we got out.
Da Campo held back and spoke to the Auditor again in tones that indicated he wanted to leave.
“It will only take a short time. We need your statement,” the Auditor told him, motioning him out of the car.
We walked up the wide, resilient steps.
After a wearying progression through the stages of red tape, statements, personnel, and official procedure which reminded me strongly of Earth, we came to an office that seemed to be the end of the road.
Da Campo was uneasy and kept damning me with his eyes when he wasn’t looking at his watch.
We were ushered in, and the Auditor saluted the pale–faced man behind the desk. “The Head Auditor,” said the blue–uniformed man, and left us. I noticed that the official had gray eyes, like Da Campo and the Auditor. Was that a dominant on Drexwill?
“Sit down, won’t you?” he said, amiably enough.
Da Campo blurted, “I really must be going. I’m quite late for my work and if you don’t mind I’d like to — ”
“Sit, Helgorth, I have something to say to you, too.”
I was grateful they were speaking English.
The Head Auditor crossed long arms and glared at Da Campo across the desk.
“You know you’re partially to fault here.”
Da Campo was indignant. “Why — why — what do you mean? I gave him a perfectly logical story, but he had to go and stumble into the Suburb Depot. That wasn’t my — ”
“Quiet! We leave you commuters pretty much alone. It’s your lives and we try not to meddle. But there are certain regulations we have to keep enforced or the entire system will break down.
“You knew you weren’t to grow any native plants out there. We warned you enough times so that it should have made an impression. Then to boot, you became a recluse out there. We ask you to make certain advances to your neighbors, strictly for purposes of keeping things on a level. But you wouldn’t even go shopping!”
Da Campo started to protest, but the Head Auditor snapped his fingers sharply, causing the man to fall silent. “We checked your supply requisitions through Food Central, and we were going to drop you a memo on it, but we didn’t get to it in time.”
The pale–faced man tapped his fingers on the desk, “Now if we have any more trouble out of you, Helgorth, we’re going to yank your Suburb Ticket and get you and your wife back into one of the Community Towers. Is that clear?”
Da Campo, suitably cowed, merely nodded.
I thought of the fantastic system they had devised. All Earth turned into a suburban development. Lord! It was fantastic, yet so simple and so obvious when I thought about it, my opinion of these people went up more and more. This explained all sorts of things I’d wondered about: hermits, bus lines that went nowhere, people disappearing.
“All right, you can go,” I heard the Head Auditor say.
Da Campo got up to leave, and I turned to watch him, “So long, Da Campo, see you at home tonight,” I said.
He looked at me strangely. The message hadn’t altered. “So long, Weiler. I hope so,” he said, and was gone.
I half–knew what he meant.
They weren’t going to let me go back. That would be foolish. I knew too much. Strangely, I felt no fear.
“You see our predicament, don’t you?” asked the Head Auditor, and I swung back to look at him. I must have looked at him in amazement, because he added, “I couldn’t help knowing what you were thinking.”
I nodded, reaching for a way to say what I wanted to say.
“We can’t let you go back.”
“Fine,” I smiled a bit too eagerly. “Let me stay. I’d like to stay here. You can’t imagine how fascinated I am by your planet.”
And it was then, right in that instant, that I recognized the truth in what I’d said.
I hated Earth.
I hated the nine–to–five drudgery of the closed office and the boring men and women with whom I did business.
I despised my wife, who wanted More. And Better. And More Expensive. I realized how I’d been fooled by her flippant and sometimes affectionate attitude. I was a faceless thing to her. A goddam man in a gray flannel suit.
I despised the trains and the vacuum cleaners and the routine. I despised the lousy treadmill!
I loathed, detested, despised, abhorred, abominated and in all hated the miserable system. I didn’t want to go back.
“I don’t want to go back! I want to stay. Let me stay here!”
The Head Auditor was shaking his auditing head.
“Why not?” I asked, confused.
“Look, we’re overpopulated now! Why do you think we use the Suburbs out there? There isn’t room here for anyone like you. We have enough non–working bums on our hands without you. Just because you stumbled into one of our Depots, don’t assume we owe you anything. Because we don’t.
“No, I’m afraid we’ll have to — er — dispense with you, Mr. Weiler. We’re not unpleasant people, but there is a point where we must stand and say, ‘No more!’ I’m sorry.” He started to push a button.
I went white. I could feel myself going white. Oh no, I thought! I’ve got to talk!
So I talked. I talked him away from that button, because I suppose he had a wife and children and didn’t really like killing people. And I talked him away from the killing angle entirely. And I talked and talked and talked till my throat was dry and he threw up his hand and said . . .
“All right, all right, stop! A trial, then. If you can find work here, if you can fit in, if you can match up, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay. But don’t ever expect to go back!”
Expect to go back? Not on your life!
Then he shooed me out of the office, and I set about making a place for myself in this world I’d never made.
Well, I’ve done pretty decently. I’m happy, I have my own apartment, and I have a good job. They’ve said I can stay.
I didn’t realize it, all those years, how much I hated the rush, rush, rush, the getting to the office and poring over those lousy briefs, the quiet nagging of Charlotte about things like the ashtrays, the constant bill collectors, the keeping up with the Joneses.
I didn’t realize how badly I wanted out.
Well, now I’m out, and I’m happy. No more of that stuff for me.
Thanks for listening. Thought I’d get it straight, as long as you needed the story to open my charge account. I’m here and I like it, and I’m out of the suburbanite climbing–executive rush–rush class. At last I’m off that infernal treadmill.
Thanks again for listening. Well, I’ve got to go.
Got to get to work, you know.
Current crazes fascinate me. Though I couldn’t operate one to save my life, the hula hoop was an entrancing little path to dislocation of the spine and ultimate madness, and I watched with not too much lasciviousness as the pre–adult vixens of my acquaintance shimmied and swirled in the use of same. The telephone–booth–stuffing trend seemed to me abortive, and I was not at all surprised when it faded in lieu of the “limbo” acrobatics at voodoo calypso parties. Mah–jongg, Scrabble, ouija boards, Lotto, TV quiz shows, pennies in kids’ loafers, bongo boards, snake dances, panty raids, rumble seats, trampoline classes, croquet, Empire–line dresses, day–glo shirts, stuffed tigers in car back windows, Billy Graham and Fabian (no relation) — all of them awed and bemused me, as I watched the world swallow them whole, digest them and infuse them into the daily scene. Trends knock me out, frankly: Whether it be painting by the numbers or making your own full–scale skeleton of a tyrannosaurus, I think the most imaginative, and auctorially–useful fad of recent years has been the one aptly called