Until two nights ago. We sat in her convertible beneath a swollen moon, high on a dark cliff overlooking the sea, and I forced the issue at last. “Delia,” I said. “Tell me the truth, I have to know. Is there another man?”
She looked at me and I saw she was about to deny everything yet again, but this time she couldn’t do it. She bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Ronald.” she said, her voice so low I could barely hear the words. “There is.”
“Who?”
She raised her head, gazing at me with eyes in which guilt and pity and love and shame were all commingled, and she said, “It’s Mr. Miller.”
I recoiled. “What?”
“I met him at the country club,” she said. “I can’t help it, Ronald. I wish to God I’d never met the man, he has some sort of hold over me, some hypnotic power. That first night, he took me to a motel, and—”
Then she told me, told me everything, every action and every demand, in the most revolting detail. And though I squirmed and struggled, though I strained and yearned, I could not wake up, I could not end the Dream. Delia told me everything she had done with Mr. Miller, her helplessness to deny him even though it was me she loved and him for whom she felt only detestation, her constant trysts with him night after night, direct from my arms to his. She told me of their planned meeting later that very night in the motel where it had all begun, and she told me of her bitter self-knowledge that even now, after I knew everything, she would still meet him.
Then at last her toneless voice was finished and we were in silence once again, beneath the moon, high on the cliff. Then I awoke.
That was two nights ago. Yesterday I arose the same as ever — what else could I do? — and I went to the store as usual, and I behaved normally in every way. What else could I do? But I noticed again Mr. Miller’s muted attitude toward me, and now I understood it was the result of his guilty knowledge. Of course Delia had told him about me, she’d described all that to me during her confession, relating how Mr. Miller had laughed and been scornful to hear that “Ronald the sap” had never been to bed with her. “Doesn’t know what he’s missing, does he?” she quoted him as saying, with a laugh.
At lunchtime I drove past the motel she’d named, and a squalid place it was, peeling stucco painted a garish blue. Not far beyond it was a gunsmith’s; on the spur of the moment I stopped, I talked to the salesman about “plinking” and “varmints,” and I bought a snub-nosed Iver Johnson Trailsman revolver. The salesman inserted the .32 bullets into the chambers, and I put the box containing the gun into the glove compartment of my car. Last evening I carried the gun unobserved into the house and hid it in my room, in a dresser drawer, beneath my sweaters.
And last night, as usual, I dreamed. But in the Dream I was not with Delia. In the Dream I was alone, in my bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed with the gun in my hand, listening to the small noises of my mother and sister as they prepared for sleep, waiting for the house to be quiet. In last night’s Dream I had the gun and I planned to use it. In last night’s Dream I had not left my car in the drive as usual but a street away, parked at the curb. In last night’s Dream I was waiting only for my mother and sister to be safely asleep, when I intended to creep silently from the house, hurry down the pavement to my car, drive to that motel, and enter room 7 — it’s always room 7, Delia told me. always the same room — where it was my intention to shoot Mr. Miller dead. In last night’s Dream I heard my mother and sister moving about, at first in the kitchen and then in the bathroom and then in their bedrooms. In last night’s Dream the house slowly, gradually, finally became quiet, and I got to my feet, putting the gun in my pocket, preparing to leave the room. And at that point the Dream stopped.
I have been very confused today. I have wanted to talk to Mr. Miller, but I’ve been afraid to. I have been unsure what to do next, or in which life to do it. If I kill Mr. Miller in the Dream tonight, will he still lie in the store tomorrow, with his guilt and his scorn? If I kill Mr. Miller in the Dream tonight, and if he is still in the store tomorrow, will I go mad? If I fail to kill Mr. Miller, somewhere, somehow, how can I go on living with myself?
When I came home from work this evening, I didn’t park the car in the drive as usual, but left it at the curb, a street away from here. My mind was in turmoil all evening, bur I behaved normally, and after the eleven o’clock news I came up here to my bedroom.
But I was afraid to sleep, afraid to Dream. I took the gun from the drawer, and I have been sitting here, listening to the small sounds of my mother and my sister as they prepare for bed.
Can things ever lie again as they were between Delia and me? Can the memory of what has happened ever be expunged? I turn the gun and look into its black barrel and I ask myself all these questions. “Perchance to Dream.” If I arranged it that I would never awake again, would I go on Dreaming? But would the Dream become worse instead of better?
Is it possible — as some faint doubting corner of my mind suggests — even remotely possible, that Delia is not what she seems, that she was never true, that she is a succuba who has come to destroy me through my Dream?
The house is silent. The hour is late. If I stay awake, if I creep from the house and drive to the motel, what will I find in room 7?
And whom shall I kill?
1982
Interstellar Pigeon
The natives didn’t name their planet casino for nothing — the crew members of galactic spaceship hopeful were losing their shirts.
From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. Tint he spread over his own planet, then across the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.
Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (111,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth.
Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than 1000 colonies, all in Sector F.U.B.A.R.3. For half a millennium, those colonies, young and struggling when last heard from, had had no contact with the rest of Humanity.
The Galactic Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Standforth commanding, was at once dispatched to re-establish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the bosom of Mankind.
Why me?
Watching Captain Gregory Standforth sit at his desk and — stuff yet another bird — this one a blue-beaked yellow-backed Latter Sneezer from Degeb IV— Why me? wondered Ensign Kybee Benson, not for the first time. What flaw is there in me that I don’t suspect? Why did they choose ME?
There was no question why the Galactic Council had chosen Captain Standforth to lead this one-way trip into obscurity. Just look at him now: a tall, skinny, mild-eyed fellow with his nose and fingers jammed up that dead bird’s ass, tamping the excelsior in real tight. “Got to get it in real tight,” the captain said, “or the wings’ll sag.” Why me? thought Ensign Benson. I’m no misfit.
Captain Standforth was, and would be the first to admit it. Were it not for the seven generations of glorious Standforth’s preceding him in the Galactic Patrol, he never would have joined up, nor would they have taken him. Taxidermy was the only thing he really cared about, which was why strange stuffed birds from all over the known Universe pervaded the Hopeful like an eighth plague. Everywhere you looked, plastic eyes looked back, surrounded by feathers.