“I’m coming in, Smiler,” I told him.
And somehow I made myself. In front of the main building there’d been lawn cropped close as a crewcut. Now it was just soil crumbling to sand. I walked across it and into the building, just looking straight ahead and nowhere else. Inside…the corridors were clear at least. Big “C” had cleared them for me. But through each door as I passed them I could see him bulking, pile upon pile of him like…like heaped intestines. His brains? God, I hoped so!
Finally, when I was beginning to believe I couldn’t go any further on two feet and would have to crawl—and when I was fighting with myself not to throw up—I found Smiler in his “office”: just a large room with a desk which he sat behind, and a couple of chairs, telephones, radios. And also containing Big “C,” of course. Which is the part I’ve always been reluctant to talk about, but now have to tell just the way it was.
Big “C” was plugged into him, into Smiler. It was grotesque. Smiler sat propped up in his huge chair, and he was like a spider at the center of his web. Except the web wasn’t of silk but of flesh, and it was attached to him. The back of his head was welded to a huge fan-shape of tentacles spreading outwards like some vast ornamental headdress, or like the sprawl of an octopus’s arms; and these cancerous extensions or extrusions were themselves attached to a shuddering bulk that lay behind Smiler’s chair and grew up the walls and out of the windows. The lower part of his body was lost behind the desk, lost in bulging grey sacks and folds and yellow pipes and purplish gelatinous masses of…Christ, of whatever the filthy stuff was! Only his upper body, his arms and hands, face and shoulders were free of the stuff. He was it. It was him—physically, anyway.
No one could have looked at him and felt anything except disgust, or perhaps pity if they’d known him like I had. And if they hadn’t, dread and loathing and…yes, horror. Friendship didn’t come into it; I knew that I wasn’t smiling; I knew that my face must reflect everything I felt.
He nodded the merest twitch of a nod and husked: “Sit down, Peter, before you fall down! Hey, and you think I look bad, right?” Humor! Unbelievable! But his voice was a desiccated whisper, and his grey hands on the desk shook like spindly skating insects resting up after a morning’s hard skimming over a stagnant pond.
I sat down on a dusty chair opposite him, perching myself there, feeling all tight inside from not wanting to breathe the atmosphere, and hypersensitive outside from trying not to touch anything. He noticed and said: “You don’t want to contaminate yourself, right? But isn’t it a bit late for that, Peter?”
From which I could tell that he knew—he did know—and a tingle started in my feet that quickly surged through my entire being. Could he see it in me? Sense it in me? Feel some sort of weird kinship with what was under my skin, burgeoning in me? Or was it worse than that? And right there and then I began to have this feeling that things weren’t going according to plan.
“Smiler,” I managed to get started at the second attempt, “it’s…good to see you again, pal. And I….” And I stopped and just sat there gasping.
“Yes?” he prompted me in a moment. “And you—?”
“Nerves!’ I gasped, forcing a sickly smile, and forced in my turn to take my first deep breath. “Lots of nerves. It was always the same. It’s why I had to stay behind when you and the others went into space.” And I took out my cigarettes, and also took out the lighter from my pocket. I opened the pack and shook out several cigarettes, which fell on the floor, then managed to trap one between my knees and transfer it shakily to my mouth. And I flipped back the top on my lighter.
Smiler’s eyes—the only genuinely mobile parts he had left—went straight to the lighter and he said: “You brought it in, right?” But should he be saying things like that? Out loud, I mean? Couldn’t Big “C” hear him or sense his mood? And it dawned on me just how little we knew about them, about Big “C” and Smiler—as he was now….
Then…Smiler smiled. Except it wasn’t his smile!
Goodbye, everything, I said to myself, pressing the button and holding my thumb down on it. Then releasing it and pressing it again, and again. And finally letting the fucking thing fall from my nerveless fingers when, after two or three more tries, still nothing had happened. Or rather, “nothing” hadn’t happened.
“Peter, old buddy, let me tell you how it is.” Smiler got through to me at last, as the cigarette fell from my trembling lips. “I mean, I suspect you now know how it is, but I’ll tell you anyway. See, Big ‘C’ changes things. Just about anything he wants to change. He was nothing at first, or not very much—just a natural law of change, mutation, entropy if you like. An ‘emanation.’ Or on the other hand I suppose you could say he was everything—like Nature itself. Whichever, when I went up there to Luna II he got into me and changed my cancer into himself, since when he’s become one hell of a lot. We can talk about that in a minute, but first I want to explain about your bomb. Big ‘C’ changed it. He changed the chemical elements of the explosive charges, and to be doubly sure sucked all the fizz out of the fissionable stuff. It was a firework and he dumped it in a bucket of water. So now you can relax. It didn’t go off and it isn’t going to.”
“You…are him!” I knew it instinctively. Now, when it was too late. “But when? And why?”
“When did I stop being Smiler? Not long after that time you met him at the beach. And why the subterfuge? Because you human beings are a jumpy lot. With Smiler to keep you calm, let you think you had an intermediary, it was less likely you’d do something silly. And why should I care that you’d do something silly? Because there’s a lot of life, knowledge, sustenance in this Earth and I didn’t want you killing it off trying to kill me! But now you can’t kill me, because the bigger I’ve got the easier it has become to change things. Missiles? Go ahead and try it. They’ll be dead before they hit me. Why, if I got the idea you were going to try firing a couple, I could even kill them on the ground!
“You see, Peter, I’ve grown too big, too clever, too devious to be afraid any more—of anything. Which is why I have no more secrets, and why there’ll be no more subterfuge. Subterfuge? Not a bit of it. Why, I’m even broadcasting all of this—just so the whole world will know what’s going on! I mean, I want them to know, so no one will make any more silly mistakes. Now, I believe you came in here to talk about boundaries—some limits you want to see on my expansion?”
Somehow, I shook my head. “That’s not why I’m here, Smiler,” I told him, not yet ready to accept that there was nothing of Smiler left in there. “Why I’m here is finished now.”
“Not quite,” he said, but very quietly. “We can get to the boundaries later, but there is something else. Think about it. I mean, why should I want to see you, if there’s nothing else and if I can make any further decisions without outside help?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“See, Smiler has lasted a long time. Him and the frogmen that came to kill me, and a couple of farmers who didn’t get out fast enough when they saw me coming, oh, and a few others. And I’ve been instructed by them. Like I said: I’ve learned how to be devious. And I’ve learned anger, too, though there’s no longer any need for that. No need for any human emotions. But the last time you came to see Smiler—and when you would have plotted with him to kill me—that angered me.”
“And so you gave me my cancer.”