"I'll make the trouble." He seized her bare arm. "Come along."
"Darling, don't!" She hung back, squirming. "You're hurting me!"
He made her shut up, and dragged her out of the house. She wanted to go back for a robe, but he threw her into the car and climbed over her to the wheel. He waited for her to try to get out, so that he could slap her down, but she only whimpered for a Kleenex and sat there sniffling.
Old balloon-belly had ruined everything.
He tried angrily to clash the gears, as he started off, as if that would damage the outsiders, but the Hydramatic transmission wouldn't clash, and anyhow the saucer ship was probably somewhere out beyond the moon by now.
"There's Gabriel," Carmen sobbed. "There, crossing the street, going to work. Don't hurt him, please!"
He gunned the car and veered across the pavement to run him down, but Carmen screamed and twisted at the wheel. Gabriel managed to scramble out of the way. He stopped on the sidewalk, hatless and breathless but grinning stupidly.
"Sorry, mister. Guess I wasn't looking—" Then Gabriel saw who he was. "Why, Casey! We've been expecting you back. Seems you're the lucky one, after all." Gabriel had started toward the car, but he stopped when he saw the gun. His voice went shrill as a child's. "What are you doing?"
"Just gut-shooting another dirty greaser, that's all."
"Darling!" Carmen snatched at the gun. "Don't—" He slapped her down.
"Don't strike her!" Gabriel stood gripping the door of the car with both hands. He looked sick. His twitching face was bright with sweat, and he was gasping hoarsely for his breath. He was staring at the gun, his wide eyes dull with horror.
"Stop me!"
He smashed the flat of the gun into Carmen's face, and grinned at the way Gabriel flinched when she screamed.
This was more the way he wanted everything to be. "Just try and stop me!"
"I—I won't fight you," Gabriel croaked faintly. "After all, we're not animals. We're civilized humans. I know Carmen loves you. I'm stepping out of the way. But you can't make me fight—"
The gun stopped Gabriel.
Queerly, though, he didn't fall. He just stood there like some kind of rundown machine, with his stiffened hands clutching the side of the car.
"Die, damn you!"
Casey James shot again; he kept on shooting till the gun was empty. The bullets hammered into the body, but somehow it wouldn't fall. He leaned to look at the wounds, at the broken metal beneath the simulated flesh of the face and the hot yellow hydraulic fluid running out of the belly, and recoiled from what he saw, shaking his head, shuddering like any trapped and frightened beast.
"That—thing!"
With a wild burst of animal ferocity, he hurled the gun into what was left of its plastic face. It toppled stiffly backward then, and something jangled faintly inside when it struck the pavement.
"It—it ain't human!"
"But it was an excellent replica." The other thing, the one he had thought was Carmen, gathered itself up from the bottom of the car, speaking gently to him with what now seemed queerly like the voice of old barrel-belly. "We had taken a great deal of trouble to make you the happiest one of your breed." It looked at him sadly with, Carmen's limpid dark eyes. "If you had only kept your word."
"Don't—" He cowered back from it, shivering. "Don't k-k-kill me!"
"We never kill," it murmured. "You need never be afraid of that."
While he sat trembling, it climbed out of the car and picked up the ruined thing that had looked like Gabe and carried it easily away toward the Oasis garage.
Now he knew that this place was only a copy of Las Verdades, somewhere not on Earth. When he looked up at the blue crystal sky, he knew that it was only some kind of screen. He felt the millions of strange eyes beyond it, watching him like some queer monster in a cage.
He tried to run away.
He gunned the Cadillac back across the acequia bridge and drove wildly back the way he had come in, on the Alburquerque highway. A dozen miles out, an imitation construction crewman tried to flag him down, pointing at a sign that said the road was closed for repairs. He whipped around the barriers and drove the pitching car on across the imitation desert until he crashed into the bars.
JEROME BIXBY
It's a Good Life
If editors know more than writers about what is good and bad (admittedly an arguable point), Jerry Bixby should know very much more than almost any other writer at all. Other writers have been tempted to do a stint of editing; Bixby was so lost to self-control that he found himself, one time and another, editing at least half a dozen magazines, including some of the very best. He has also a good many new, fine TV scripts to his credit. Oh, and he illustrates. And he plays a fine piano. And But read on; and you'll learn all that anyone ever needs to learn about the fine creative talents of Jerome Bixby, in—
Aunt Amy was out on the front porch, rocking back and forth in the high-backed chair and fanning herself, when Bill Soames rode his bicycle up the road and stopped in front of the house.
Perspiring under the afternoon “sun,” Bill lifted the box of groceries out of the big basket over the front wheel of the bike and came up the front walk.
Little Anthony was sitting on the lawn, playing with a rat. He had caught the rat down in the basement—he had made it think that it smelled cheese, the most rich-smelling and crumbly-delicious cheese a rat had ever thought it smelled, and it had come out of its hole, and now Anthony had hold of it with his mind and was making it do tricks.
When the rat saw Bill Soames coming, it tried to run, but Anthony thought at it, and it turned a flip-flop on the grass and lay trembling, its eyes gleaming in small black terror.
Bill Soames hurried past Anthony and reached the front steps, mumbling. He always mumbled when he came to the Fremont house, or passed by it, or even thought of it. Everybody did. They thought about silly things, things that didn’t mean very much, like two-and-two-is-four-and-twice-is-eight and so on; they tried to jumble up their thoughts and keep them skipping back and forth, so Anthony couldn’t read their minds. The mumbling helped. Because if Anthony got anything strong out of your thoughts, he might take a notion to do something about it—like curing your wife’s sick headaches or your kid’s mumps, or getting your old milk cow back on schedule, or fixing the privy. And while Anthony mightn’t actually mean any harm, he couldn’t be expected to have much notion of what was the right thing to do in such cases.
That was if he liked you. He might try to help you, in his way. And that could be pretty horrible.
If he didn’t like you—well, that could be worse.
Bill Soames set the box of groceries on the porch railing and stopped his mumbling long enough to say, “Everythin’ you wanted, Miss Amy.”
“Oh, fine, William,” Amy Fremont said lightly. “My, ain’t it terrible hot today?”
Bill Soames almost cringed. His eyes pleaded with her. He shook his head violently no, and then interrupted his mumbling again, though obviously he didn’t want to. “Oh, don’t say that, Miss Amy. It’s fine, just fine. A real good day!”
Amy Fremont got up from the rocking chair and came across the porch. She was a tall woman, thin, a smiling vacancy in her eyes. About a year ago Anthony had got mad at her, because she’d told him he shouldn’t have turned the cat into a cat rug, and although he had always obeyed her more than anyone else, which was hardly at all, this time he’d snapped at her. With his mind. And that had been the end of Amy Fremont’s bright eyes, and the end of Amy Fremont as everyone had known her. And that was when word got around in Peaksville (population forty-six) that even the members of Anthony’s own family weren’t safe. After that, everyone was twice as careful.