“I read you, buddy,” I answered, slowing to a halt at the barrier’s massive red-and-white-striped pole where it cut the road in half. “Sorry I’m early; I guess it’s nerves; must have put my foot down a little. Anyway, what’s a couple minutes between friends, eh?”
“Between you and me? Nothing!” Smiler’s voice came back—and with a chuckle in it! I thought: God, that’s courage for you! “But Big ‘C’ likes accuracy, dead reckoning,” he continued. “And come to think of it, so do I! Hell, you wouldn’t try to find me a reentry window a couple of minutes ahead of time, would you? No you wouldn’t.” And then, more quietly: “And remember, Peter, a man can get burned just as easily in here….” But this time there was no chuckle.
“What now?” I sat still, staring straight ahead, aware that the—tunnel?—was closing overhead, that the light was going as Big “C” enclosed me.
“Out,” he answered at once, “so he can take a good look at the car. You know he’s not much for trusting people, Peter.”
I froze, and remained sitting there as rigid as…as the great steel barrier pole right there in front of me. Get out? Big “C” wanted me to get out? But the car was my womb and I wasn’t programmed to be born yet, not until I got to Smiler. And—
“Out!” Smiler’s voice crackled on the air. “He says you’re not moving and it bothers him. So get out now—or would you rather sit tight and have him come in there with you? How do you think you’d like that, Peter: having Big “C” groping around in there with you?”
I unfroze, opened the car door. But where was I supposed to—?
“The checkpoint shack,” Smiler told me, as if reading my mind. “There’s nothing of him in there.”
Thank God for that!
I left the car door open—to appease Big “C”? To facilitate his search? To make up for earlier inadequacies? Don’t ask me—and hurried in the deepening gloom to the wooden, chalet-style building at the side of the road. It had been built there maybe four years ago when Big “C” wasn’t so big, but no one had used it in a long time and the door was stuck; I could get the bottom of the door to give a little by leaning my thigh against it, but the top was jammed tight. And somehow I didn’t like to make too much noise.
Standing there with the doorknob clenched tight in my hand, I steeled myself, glanced up at the ceiling being formed of Big “C”’s substance—the moth-eaten holes being bridged by doughy flaps, then sealed as the mass thickened up, shutting out the light—and I thought of myself as becoming a tiny shriveled kernel in his gigantic, leprous walnut. Christ…what a mercy I never suffered from claustrophobia! But then I also thought: to hell with the noise, and put my shoulder to the door to burst it right in.
I left the door vibrating in its frame behind me and went unsteadily, breathlessly, to the big windows. There was a desk there, chairs, a few well-thumbed paperbacks, a Daily Occurrence Book, telephone and scribble pad: everything a quarter-inch thick in dust. But I blew the dust off one of the chairs and sat (which wasn’t a bad idea, my legs were shaking so bad), for now that I’d started in on this thing I knew there’d be no stopping it, and what was going on out there was all part of it. Smiler’s knowledge of cars hadn’t been much to mention; I had to hope that Big “C” was equally ignorant.
And so I sat there trembling by the big windows, looking out at the road and the barrier and the car, and I suppose the idea was that I was going to watch Big “C”’s inspection. I did actually watch the start of it—the tendrils of frothy slop elongating themselves downwards from above and inwards from both sides, closing on the car, entering it; a pseudopod of slime hardening into rubber, pulling loose the weather strip from the boot cover and flattening itself to squeeze inside; another member like a long, flat tapeworm sliding through the gap between the hood and the radiator grille…but that was as much as I could take and I turned my face away.
It’s not so much how Big “C” looks but what he is that does it. It’s knowing, and yet not really knowing, what he is….
So I sweated it there and waited for it to get done, and hoped and prayed that Big “C” would get done and not find anything. And while I waited my mind went back again to that time six years earlier.
The months went by and Smiler weakened a little. He got to spending a lot of his time at Lakeport, which was fine by the space medics at the Lake because they could go and see him any time they wanted and carry on examining and testing him. And at the time I thought they’d actually found something they could do for him, because after a while he really did seem to be improving again. Meanwhile I had my own life to live; I hadn’t seen as much of him as I might like; I’d been busy on the Saturn’s Moons Project.
When I did get to see him almost a year had gone by and he should have been dead. But he wasn’t anything like dead and the boys from Med. were excited about something—had been for months—and Smiler had asked to see me. I was briefed and they told me not to excite him a lot, just treat him like…normal? Now how the hell else would I treat him? I wondered.
It was summer and we met at Clewiston on the Lake, a beach where the sun sparkled on the water and leisure craft came and went, many of them towing their golden, waving water-skiers. Smiler arrived from Lakeport in an ambulance and the boys in white walked him slowly down to the table under a sun umbrella where I was waiting for him. And I saw how big he was under his robe.
I ordered a Coke for myself, and—”Four vodkas and a small tomato juice,” Smiler told me! “An Anemic Mary—in one big glass.”
“Do you have a problem, buddy?” the words escaped me before I could check them.
“Are you kidding?” he said, frowning. But then he saw me ogling his huge drink and grinned. “Eh? The booze? Jesus, no! It’s like rocket fuel to me—keeps me aloft and propels me around and around—but doesn’t make me dizzy!” And then he was serious again. “A pity, really, ’cos there are times when I’d like to get blasted out of my mind.”
“What?” I stared hard at him, wondered what was going on in his head. “Smiler, I—”
“Peter,” he cut me short, “I’m not going to die—not just yet, anyway.”
For a moment I couldn’t take it in, couldn’t believe it. I was that delighted. I knew my bottom jaw must have fallen open, so closed it again. “They’ve come up with something?” I finally blurted it out. “Smiler, you’ve done it—you’ve beaten the Big ‘C’!”
But he wasn’t laughing or even smiling, just sitting there looking at me.
He had been all dark and lean and muscular, Smiler, but was now pale and puffy. Puffy cheeks, puffy bags under his eyes, pale and puffy double chins. And bald (all that shining, jet-black hair gone) and minus his eyebrows: the effect of one treatment or another. His natural teeth were gone, too: calcium deficiency brought on by low grav during too many missions in the space stations, probably aggravated by his complaint. In fact his eyes were really the only things I’d know him by: film-star blue eyes, which had somehow retained their old twinkle.
Though right now, as I’ve said, he wasn’t laughing or even smiling but just sitting there staring at me.
“Big ‘C,’ “ he finally answered me. “Beaten the Big ‘C’….”
And eventually the smile fell from my face, too. “But…isn’t that what you meant?”
“Listen,” he said, suddenly shifting to a higher gear, “I’m short of time. They’re checking me over every couple of hours now, because they’re expecting it to break loose…well, soon. And so they’ll not be too long coming for me, wanting to take me back into that good old ‘controlled environment,’ you know? So now I want to tell you about it—the way I see it, anyway.”