“But it isn’t!” Helena said. “Oh, darling, I’m here! This is real! I don’t care if you fire me or not. I’ve loved you forever, and you mustn’t let that mass murderer get you down. I actually think he isn’t insane at all, but has just figured out a way to seem insane so he won’t have to pay for his crime.”
“You think so?” Cedric said, interested. “It’s a possibility. But he would have to be as good a psychiatrist as I am— You see? Delusions of grandeur.”
“Sure,” Helena said, laughing thinly. “Napoleon was obviously insane because he thought he was Napoleon.”
“Perhaps,” Cedric said. “But you must admit that if you are real, my taking this yellow pill isn’t going to change that, but only confirm the fact.”
“And make it impossible for you to do your work for a week,” Helena said.
“A small price to pay for sanity,” Cedric said. “No, I’m going to take it.”
“You aren’t!” Helena said, reaching for it.
Cedric picked it up an instant before she could get it. As she tried to get it away from him, he evaded her and put it in his mouth. A loud gulp showed he had swallowed it.
He sat back and looked up at Helena curiously.
“Tell me, Helena,” he said gently. “Did you know all the time that you were only a creature of my imagination? The reason I want to know is—”
He closed his eyes and clutched his head in his hands.
“God!” he groaned “I feel like I’m dying! I didn’t feel like this the other time I took one.” Suddenly his mind steadied, and his thoughts cleared. He opened his eyes.
On the chart table in front of him the bottle of yellow pills lay on its side, pills scattered all over the table. On the other side of the control room lay Jerry Bocek, his back propped against one of the four gear lockers, sound asleep, with so many ropes wrapped around him that it would probably be impossible for him to stand up.
Against the far wall were three other gear lockers, two of them with their paint badly scorched, the third with its door half melted off.
And in various positions about the control room were the half-charred bodies of five blue-scaled Venusian lizards.
A dull ache rose in Gar’s chest. Helena Fitzroy was gone. Gone, when she had just confessed she loved him.
Unbidden, a memory came into Gar’s mind. Dr. Cedric Elton was the psychiatrist who had examined him when he got his pilot’s license for third-class freighters—
“God!” Gar groaned again. And suddenly he was sick. He made a dash for the washroom, and after a while he felt better.
When he straightened up from the wash basin he looked at his reflection in the mirror for a long time, clinging to his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. He must have been out of his head for two or three days.
The first time. Awful! Somehow, he had never quite believed in space madness.
Suddenly he remembered Jerry. Poor Jerry!
Gar lurched from the washroom back into the control room. Jerry was awake. He looked up at Gar, forcing a smile to his lips. “Hello, Dr. Elton,” Jerry said.
Gar stopped as though shot.
“It’s happened, Dr. Elton, just as you said it would,” Jerry said, his smile widening.
“Forget that,” Gar growled. “I took a yellow pill I’m back to normal again.”
Jerry’s smile vanished abruptly. “I know what I did now,” he said. “It’s terrible. I killed six people. But I’m sane now. I’m willing to take what’s coming to me.”
“Forget that!” Gar snarled. “You don’t have to humor me now. Just a minute and I’ll untie you.”
“Thanks, Doctor,” Jerry said. “It will sure be a relief to get out of this strait jacket.”
Gar knelt beside Jerry and untied the knots in the ropes and unwound them from around Jerry’s chest and legs.
“You’ll be all right in a minute,” Gar said, massaging Jerry’s limp arms. The physical and nervous strain of sitting there immobilized had been rugged.
Slowly he worked circulation back into Jerry, then helped him to his feet.
“You don’t need to worry, Dr. Elton,” Jerry said. “I don’t know why I killed those people, but I know I would never do such a thing again. I must have been insane.”
“Can you stand now?” Gar said, letting go of Jerry.
Jerry took a few steps back and forth, unsteadily at first, then with better co-ordination. His resemblance to a robot decreased with exercise.
Gar was beginning to feel sick again. He fought it.
“You OK now, Jerry boy?” he asked worriedly.
“I’m fine now, Dr. Elton,” Jerry said. “And thanks for everything you’ve done for me.”
Abruptly Jerry turned and went over to the air-lock door and opened it.
“Good-by now, Dr. Elton,” he said.
“Wait!” Gar screamed, leaping toward Jerry.
But Jerry had stepped into the air lock and closed the door. Gar tried to open it, but already Jerry had turned on the pump that would evacuate the air from the lock.
Screaming Jerry’s name senselessly in horror, Gar watched through the small square of thick glass in the door as Jerry’s chest quickly expanded, then collapsed as a mixture of phlegm and blood dribbled from his nostrils and lips, and his eyes enlarged and glazed over, then one of them ripped open and collapsed, its fluid draining down his cheek.
He watched as Jerry glanced toward the side of the air lock and smiled, then spun the wheel that opened the air lock to the vacuum of space, and stepped out.
And when Gar finally stopped screaming and sank to the deck, sobbing, his knuckles were broken and bloody from pounding on bare metal.
RIVER OF RICHES
by Gerald Kersh
For some reason, s-f has enjoyed a rather more reputable name in Great Britain than it has here—or at least a good many more “literary” British authors have written it. {Kipling, Wells, Dunsany, Doyle, Chesterton, Priestley, Collier, Coppard, to name a few.)
In this country, fantasy, beginning with Hawthorne, has a long record of respectability; but even the best science fiction (with the notable exception of a few offbeat efforts by “major” writers, such as Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon”) could be found ordinarily only in pulp magazines.
All this, of course, was B.B.—Before the Bomb. Then when s-f did achieve a measure of popular approval here, one of the first science-fiction stories printed in a top national magazine was by a British author. (Not the first. Heinlein beat Kersh to The Saturday Evening Post by about two months, early in 1947.)
Though Mr. Kersh lives in this country now, and is one of the more colorful lights in the New York literary firmament, much of his work retains the flavor of the traditionally English adventure story. This one is a tale told in a barroom, by that classic adventurer, the “younger son of a younger son.”
About the man called Pilgrim there was a certain air of something gone stale. “Seedy” is the word for it, as applied to a human being. It was difficult to regard him except as a careful housewife regards a pot of homemade jam upon the surface of which she observes a patch of mildew. Sweet but questionable, she says to herself, but it is a pity to waste it. Give it to the poor. So, as it seemed to me, it was with Pilgrim.
He was curiously appealing to me in what looked like a losing fight against Skid Row, and maintained a haughty reserve when the bartender, detaining him as he abstractedly started to stroll out of MacAroon’s Grill, said, “Dad-die be a dollar-ten, doc.”
Pilgrim slapped himself on the forehead, and beat himself about the pockets, and cried, “My wallet! I left it at home.”