“Where I worked when the bomb fell,” Stuart said, “at Modern TV Sales & Service, we had a lot of girly calendars downstairs in the repair department. They were all incinerated, naturally.” At least so he had always assumed. “Suppose a person were poking around in the ruins somewhere and he came onto an entire warehouse full of girly calendars. Can you imagine that?” His mind raced. “How much could he get? Millions! He could trade them for real estate; he could acquire a whole county!”
“Right,” Hardy said, nodding.
“I mean, he’d be rich forever. They make a few in the Orient, in Tokyo, but they’re no good.”
“I’ve seen them,” Hardy agreed. “They’re crude. The knowledge of how to do it has declined, passed into oblivion; it’s an art that has died out. Maybe forever.”
“Don’t you think it’s partly because there aren’t the girls any more who look like that?” Stuart said. “Everybody’s scrawny now and have no teeth; the girls most of them now have burn-scars from radiation and with no teeth what kind of a girly calendar does that make?”
Shrewdly, Hardy said, “I think the girls exist. I don’t know where, maybe in Sweden or Norway, maybe in out-of-the-way places like the Solomon Islands. I’m convinced of it from what people coming in by ship say. Not in the U.S. or Europe or Russia or China, any of the places that were hit—I agree with you there.”
“Could we find them?” Stuart said. “And go into the business?”
After considering for a little while Hardy said, “There’s no film. There’re no chemicals to process it. Most good cameras have been destroyed or have disappeared. There’s no way you could get your calendars printed in quantity. If you did print them—”
“But if someone could find a girl with no burns and good teeth, the way they had before the war—”
“I’ll tell you,” Hardy said, “what would be a good business. I’ve thought about it many times.” He faced Stuart meditatively. “Sewing machine needles. You could name your own price; you could have anything.”
Gesturing, Stuart got up and paced about the shop. “Listen, I’ve got my eye on the big time; I don’t want to mess around with selling any more—I’m fed up with it. I sold aluminum pots and pans and encyclopedias and TV sets and now these vermin traps. They’re good traps and people want them, but I just feel there must be something else for me. I don’t mean to insult you, but I want to grow. I have to; you either grow or you go stale, you die on the vine. The war set me back years, it set us all back. I’m just where I was ten years ago, and that’s not good enough.”
Scratching his nose, Hardy murmured, “What did you have in mind?”
“Maybe I could find a mutant potato that would feed everybody in the world.”
“Just one potato?”
“I mean a type of potato. Maybe I could become a plant breeder, like Luther Burbank. There must be millions of freak plants growing around out in the country, like there’s all these freak animals and funny people here in the city.”
Hardy said, “Maybe you could locate an intelligent bean.”
“I’m not joking about this,” Stuart said quietly.
They faced each other, neither speaking.
“It’s a service to humanity,” Hardy said at last, “to make homeostatic vermin traps that destroy mutated cats and dogs and rats and squirrels. I think you’re acting infantile. Maybe your horse being eaten while you were over in South San Francisco—”
Entering the room, Ella Hardy said, “Dinner is ready, and I’d like to serve it while it’s hot. It’s baked cod-head and rice and it took me three hours standing in line down at Eastshore Freeway to get the cod-head.”
The two men rose to their feet. “You’ll eat with us?” Hardy asked Stuart. At the thought of the baked fish head, Stuart’s mouth watered. He could not say no and he nodded, following after Mrs. Hardy to the kitchen.
Hoppy Harrington, the handyman phocomelus of West Marin, did an imitation of Walt Dangerfield when the transmission from the satellite failed; he kept the citizens of West Marin amused. As everyone knew, Dangerfield was sick and he often faded out, now. Tonight, in the middle of his imitation, Hoppy glanced up to see the Kellers, with their little girl, enter the Forresters’ Hall and take seats in the rear. About time, he said to himself, glad of a greater audience. But then he felt nervous, because the little girl was scrutinizing him. There was something in the way she looked; he ceased suddenly and the hall was silent.
“Go ahead, Hoppy,” Cas Stone called.
“Do that one about Kool-Ade,” Mrs. Tallman called. “Sing that, the little tune the Kool-Ade twins sing; you know.”
“ ‘Kool-Ade, Kool-Ade, can’t wait,’ ” Hoppy sang, but once more he stopped. “I guess that’s enough for tonight,” he said.
The room became silent once again.
“My brother,” the little Keller girl spoke up, “he says that Mr. Dangerfield is somewhere in this place.”
Hoppy laughed. “That’s right,” he said excitedly.
“Has he done the reading?” Edie Keller asked. “Or was he too sick tonight to do it?”
“Oh yeah, the reading’s in progress,” Earl Colvig said, “but we’re not listening; we’re tired of sick old Walt—we’re listening to Hoppy and watching what he does. He did funny things tonight, didn’t you, Hoppy?”
“Show the little girl how you moved that coin from a distance,” June Raub said. “I think she’d enjoy that.”
“Yes, do that again,” the pharmacist called from his seat. “That was good; we’d all like to see that again, I’m sure.” In his eagerness to watch he rose to his feet, forgetting that people were behind him.
“My brother,” Edie said quietly, “wants to hear the reading. That’s what he came for.”
“Be still,” Bonny, her mother, said to her.
Brother, Hoppy thought. She doesn’t have any brother. He laughed out loud at that, and several people in the audience smiled. “Your brother?”he said, wheeling his phocomobile toward the child. “I can do the reading; I can be Philip and Mildred and everybody in the book; I can be Dangerfield. Sometimes I actually am. I was tonight, and that’s why your brother thinks Dangerfield’s in the room. What it is, it’s me.” He looked around at the people. “Isn’t that right, folks? Isn’t it actually me?”
“That’s right, Hoppy,” Orion Shroud agreed. Everyone nodded.
“You have no brother, Edie,” Hoppy said to the little girl. “Why do you say your brother wants to hear the reading when you have no brother?” He laughed and laughed. “Can I see him? Talk to him? Let me hear him talk and—I’ll do an imitation of him.”
“That’ll be quite an imitation,” Cas Stone chuckled.
“Like to hear that,” Earl Colvig said.
“I’ll do it,” Hoppy said, “as soon as he says something to me.” He sat in the center of his ‘mobile, waiting. “I’m waiting,” he said.
“That’s enough,” Bonny Keller said. “Leave my child alone.” Her cheeks were red with anger.
“Lean down,” Edie said to Hoppy. “Toward me. And he’ll speak to you.” Her face, like her mother’s, was grim.
Hoppy leaned toward her, cocking his head on one side, mockingly.
A voice, speaking from inside him, as if it were part of the interior world, said, “How did you fix that record changer? How did you really do that?”
Hoppy screamed.
Everyone was staring at him, white-faced; they were on their feet, now, all of them rigid.
“I heard Jim Fergesson,” Hoppy said. “A man I worked for, once. A man who’s dead.”
The girl regarded him calmly. “Do you want to hear my brother say more? Say some more words to him, Bill; he wants you to say more.”