To Marry Medusa Read online

  “Space Patrol! Space Patrol,” yelled Rocky, pointing at the approaching blue uniform. “Four o’clock high!”

  “Esss-cape velocity!” one of them barked; and with their antenna-fingers clamped to their heads and a chorus of shrill beep-beeps they snaked through the crowd and were gone.

  “Bastits. Lousy bastits. I’ll killum, the lousy bastits,” Gurlick wept.

  “Ah right. Ah right! Break it up. Move it along. Ah right,” said the policeman. The crowd broke it up immediately ahead of him and moved along sufficiently to close the gap behind, craning in gapmouthed anticipation of another laugh ... laughter makes folks feel good.

  The policeman found Gurlick on all fours and jerked him to his feet, a good deal more roughly than Rocky had done. “Ah right, you, what’s the matter with you?”

  The indignant lady pushed through and said something about hoodlums. “Oh,” said the policeman, “hoodlum, are ye?”

  “Lousy bastits,” Gurlick sobbed.

  The policeman quelled the indignant lady in midprotest with a bland, “Ah right, don’t get excited, lady; I’ll handle this. What you got to say about it?” he demanded of Gurlick.

  Gurlick, half suspended from the policeman’s hard hand, whimpered and put his hands to his head. Suddenly nothing around him, no sound, no face, pressed upon him more than that insistence inside. “I don’t care there is lotsa people, don’t make me ast now!”

  “What’d you say!” demanded the policeman truculently.

  “A’right! A’right!” Gurlick cried to the Medusa, and to the policeman. “All I want is, tell me how we c’n get together again.”

  “What?”

  “All of us,” said Gurlick. “Everybody in the world.”

  “He’s talking about world peace,” said the indignant woman. There was laughter. Someone explained to someone else that the bum was afraid of the Communists. Someone else heard that and explained to the man behind him that Gurlick was a Communist. The policeman heard part of that and shook Gurlick. “Don’t you go shootin’ your mouth off around here no more, or it’s the cooler for you. Get me?”

  Gurlick sniveled and mumbled, “Yessir. Yessir,” and sidled, scuttled, cringed away.

  “Ah right. Move it along. Show’s over. Ah right, there ...”

  When he could, Gurlick ran. He was out of breath before he began to run, so his wind lasted him only to the edge of the park, where he reeled against the railing and clung there to whimper his breath back again. He stood with his hands over his face, his fingers trying to press back at that thing inside him, his mouth open and noisy with self-pity and anoxia. A hand fell on his shoulder and he jumped wildly.

  “It’s all right,” said the indignant woman. “I just wanted to let you know, everybody in the whole world isn’t cruel and mean and—and—mean and cruel.”

  Gurlick looked at her, working his mouth. She was in her fifties, round-shouldered, bespectacled, and most earnest. She said, “You go right on thinking about world peace. Talking about it too.”

  He was not yet capable of speaking. He gulped air, it was like sobbing.

  “You poor man.” She fumbled in an edge-flaked patent leather pocketbook and found a quarter. She held it and sighed as if it were an heirloom, and handed it to him. He took it unnoticing and put it away. He did not thank her. He asked, “Do you know?” He pressed his temples in that newly developed compulsive gesture. “I got to find out, see? I got to.”

  “Find out what?”

  “How people can get put back together again?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear.” She mulled it over. “I’m afraid I don’t know just what you mean.”

  “Y’see?” he informed his inner tormentor, agonized. “Ain’t nobody knows—nobody!”

  “Please explain it a little,” the woman begged. “Maybe there’s some one who can help you, if I can’t.” Gurlick said hopelessly, “It’s about people’s brains, see what I mean, how to make all the brains go together again.”

  “Oh, you poor man ...” She looked at him pityingly clearly certain that his brains indeed needed putting together again, and Well, at least he realizes it, which is a sight more than most of us do. “I know!” she cried. “Dr. Langley’s the man for you. I clean for him once a week, and believe me, if you want to know somebody who knows about the brain, he’s the one. He has a machine that draws wiggly lines and he can read them and tell what you’re thinking.”

  Gurlick’s vague visualization of such a device flashed out to the stars, where it had an electrifying effect. “Where’s it at?”

  “The machine? Right there in his office. He’ll tell you all about it; he’s such a dear kind man. He told me all about it, though I’m afraid I didn’t quite—”

  “Where’s it at?” Gurlick barked.

  “Why, in his office. Oh, you mean, where. Well, it’s 13 Deak Street, on the second floor; look, you can almost see it from here. Right there where the house with the—”

  Without another word Gurlick put down his chin and hunched his shoulders and scuttled off.

  “Oh, dear,” murmured the woman, worriedly. “I do hope he doesn’t bother Dr. Langley too much. But then, he wouldn’t; he does believe in peace.” She turned away from her good deed and started home.

  Gurlick did not bother Dr. Langley for long, and he did indeed bring him peace.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mbala slipped through the night, terrified. The night was for sleep, for drowsing in the kraal with one of one’s wives snoring on the floor and the goats shifting and munching by the door. Let the jungle mutter and squeak then, shriek and clatter and be still, rustle and rush and roar; it was proper that it should do all these things. It was full of devils, as everyone knew, and that was proper too. They never came into the kraal, and Mbala never went into the dark. Not until now.

  I am walking upside down, he thought. The devils had done that. The top of him had forgotten how to see, and his eyes stretched round and protuberant against the blackness. But his feet knew the trail, every root and rock of it. He sidled, because somehow his feet saw better that way, and his assegai, poised against—what?—was more on the ready.

  His assegai, blooded, honorable, bladed now for half its length ... he remembered the day he had become a man and had stood stonily to receive it, bleeding from the ceremony, sick from the potions which had been poured into him and which, though they bloated his stomach, did nothing to kill the fire-ants of hunger that crawled biting inside him. He had not slept for two nights and a day, he had not eaten for nearly a week, and yet he could remember none of these feelings save as detached facts, like parts of a story told of someone else. The single thing that came to him fine and clear was his pride when they pressed his assegai into his hand and called him man. His slender little assegai, with its tiny pointed tip, its long unmarked shaft. He thought of it now with the same faint leap of glory it always brought him, but there was a sadness mixed with it now, and an undertone of primal horror; for although the weapon which slanted by his neck now was heavy steel, beautiful with carvings, it was useless ... useless ... and he was less of a man than that young warrior with his smooth tipped stick, he was less of a man than a boy was. In the man’s world the assegai was never useless. It might be used well or ill, that was all. But this was the devil’s world, and the assegai had no place or purpose here save to comfort his practiced hand and the tight-strung cords of his ready shoulder and back. It became small comfort, and by the moment smaller, as he realized its uselessness. His very manhood became a foolishness like that of old Nugubwa, whose forearm was severed in a raid, who for once did not die but mended, and who carried the lost limb about with him until there was nothing left of it but a twisted bundle like white sticks.

  A demon uttered a chattering shriek by his very ear and scampered up into the darkness; the fright was like a blaze of white light in his face, so that for long seconds the night was full of floating flashes inside his eyeballs. In the daytime such a sound and scamper mean
t only the flight of a monkey; but here in the dark it meant that a demon had taken the guise of a monkey. And it broke him.

  Mbala was frozen in the spot, in the pose of his fright, down on one knee, body arched back and to the side, head up, assegai drawn back and ready to throw at the source of his terror. And then—

  He slumped, wagged his head foolishly, and climbed to his feet like an old old man, both hands on the staff of the spear and its butt in the ground. He began to trudge forward, balanced no longer on the springs of his toes, no longer sidewise and alert, but walking flat-footed and dragging his assegai behind him like a child with a stick. His eyes had ceased to serve him so he closed them. His feet knew the way. Beside him something screamed and died, and he shuffled past as if he had heard nothing. He dimly realized that he was in some way past fear. It was not any kind of courage. It was instead a stupidity marching with him like a ring of men, a guard and a barrier against everything. In reality it was a guard against nothing, and a gnat or a centipede would penetrate it quite as readily as a lion. But through such a cordon of stupidity, Mbala could not know that, and so he found a dim content. He walked on to his yam patch.

  With Mbala’s people, the yam patch was a good deal more than a kitchen garden. It was his treasure, his honor. His women worked it; and when it yielded well and the bellies of his kin were full, a man could pile his surplus by his door and sit and contemplate it, and accept the company of the less fortunate who would come to chat, and speak of anything but yams while the yearning spittle ran down their chins; until at last he deigned to give them one or two and send them away praising him; or perhaps he would give them nothing, and at length they would leave, and he could sense the bitter curses hiding in the somber folds of their impassive faces, knowing they could sense the laughter in his own.

  Tribal law protecting a man’s yam patch was specific and horrifying in its penalties, and the tabus were mighty. It was believed that if a man cleared a patch and cultivated it and passed it on to his son, the father’s spirit remained to watch and guard the patch. But if a man broke some tabu, even unknowingly, a devil would drive away the guardian spirit and take its place. That was the time when the patch wouldn’t yield, when the worms and maggots attacked, when the elephant broke down the thorn trees ... and when the grown yams began to disappear during the night. Obviously no one but a demon could steal yams at night.

  And so it was that misfortune, grown tall, would mount the shoulders of misfortune. A man who lost yams at night was to be avoided until he had cleansed himself and propitiated the offended being. So when Mbala began to lose yams at night, he consulted the witch doctor, who at considerable cost—three links of a brass chain and two goats—killed a bird and a kid and did many mumbling things with stinking smokes and bitter potions and spittings to the several winds, and packed up his armamentarium and hunkered down to meditate and at last inform Mbala that no demon was offended, except possibly the shade of his father, who must be furious in his impotence to guard the yams from, not a devil, but a man. And this man must be exorcised not by devil’s weapons but by man’s. At news of this, Mbala took a great ribbing from Nuyu, his uncle’s second son. Nuyu had traveled far to the east and had sat in the compound of an Arab trader, and had seen many wonders and had come back with a lot less respect than a man should have for the old ways. And Nuyu said among howls of laughter that a man was a fool to pay a doctor for the doctor’s opinion that the doctor could not help him; he said that he, Nuyu, could have told him the same thing for a third the price, and any unspoiled child would have said it for nothing. Others did not—dared not—laugh aloud like Nuyu, but Mbala knew well what went on behind their feces.

  Well, if a man stole his yams at night, he must hunt the man at night. He foiled completely to round up a party, for though they all believed the doctor’s diagnosis, still night marches and dealings with demon’s work—even men doing demon’s work—were not trifles. It was decided after much talk that this exorcism would bring great honors to anyone so brave as to undertake it, so everyone in the prospective hunting party graciously withdrew and generously left the acquisition of such honors to the injured party, Mbala. Mbala was thereby pressured not only into going, but also into thanking gravely each and every one of his warrior friends and kinsmen for the opportunity. This he did with some difficulty, girded himself for battle, and was escorted to the jungle margin at evening by all the warriors in the kraal, while his wives stood apart and wept. The first three nights he spent huddled in terror in the tallest solid crotch he could find in the nearest tree out of sight of the kraal, returning each day to sit and glower so fiercely that no one dared ask him anything. He let them think he had gone each night to the patch. Or hoped they thought that. On the fourth morning he climbed down and turned away from the tree to be greeted by the smiling face of his cousin Nuyu, who waved his assegai and walked off laughing. And so at last Mbala had to undertake his quest in earnest. And this was the night during which the demons scared him at last into the numbness of impenetrable stupidity.

  He reached his patch in the blackest part of the night, and slipped through the thorns with the practiced irregular steps of a modern dancer. Well into the thickest part of the bush which surrounded his yams—a bush his people called makuyu and others astralagus vetch—he hunkered down, rested his hands on his upright spear and his chin on his forearms. So he was here—splendid. Bad luck, thievery, shame and stupidity had brought him to this pinnacle, and now what? Man or devil, if the thief came now he would not see him.

  He dozed, hoping for some lightening of the leaden sky, for a suspicious sound, for anything that would give him a suggestion of what to do next. He hoped the demons could not see him crouched there in the vetch, though he knew perfectly well they could. He was stripped of his faith and his courage; he was helpless and he did not care. His helplessness commanded this new trick of stupidity. He hid in it, vulnerable to anything but happily unable to see out. He slept.

  His fingers slipped on the shaft of the assegia. He jolted awake, peered numbly around, yawned and let the weapon down to he across his feet. He hooked his wide chin over his bony updrawn knees and slept again.

  CHAPTER 9

  “You Doctor Langley?”

  The doctor said, “Good God.”

  Dear kind man he might be to his cleaning lady, but to Gurlick he was just another clean man full of knowledges and affairs which Gurlick wouldn’t understand, plus the usual foreseeable anger, disgust and intolerance Gurlick stimulated wherever he went. In short, just another one of the bastits to hate. Gurlick said, “You know about brains?”

  The doctor said, “Who sent you here?”

  “You know what to do to put people’s brains together again?”

  “What? Who are you? What do you want anyway?”

  “Look,” said Gurlick, “I got to find this out, see. You know how to do it, or not?”

  “I’m afraid,” said the doctor icily, “that I can’t answer a question I don’t understand.”

  “So ya don’t know anything about brains.”

  The doctor sat tall behind a wide desk. His face was smooth and narrow, and in repose fell naturally into an expression of arrogance. No better example in all the world could have been found of the epitome of everything Gurlick hated in his fellow-man.

  The doctor was archetype, coda, essence; and in his presence Gurlick was so unreasonably angry as almost to forget how to cringe.

  “I didn’t say that,” said Langley. He looked at Gurlick steadily for a moment, openly selecting a course of action: Throw him out? Humor him? Or study him? He observed the glaring eyes, the trembling mouth, the posture of fear-driven aggressiveness. He said, “Let’s get something straight. I’m not a psychiatrist.” Aware that this creature didn’t know a psychiatrist from a CPA, he explained, “I mean, I don’t treat people who have problems. I’m a physiologist, specializing on the brain. I’m just interested in how brains do what they do. If the brain was a motor, you might sa
y I am the man who writes the manual that the mechanic studies before he goes to work. That’s all I am, so before you waste your own time and mine, get that straight. If you want me to recommend somebody who can help you with whatev—”

  “You tell me,” Gurlick barked, “you just tell me that one thing and that’s all you got to do.”

  “What one thing?”

  Exasperated, adding his impatience with all his previous failures to his intense dislike of this new enemy, Gurlick growled, “I tole ya.” When this got no response, and when he understood from the doctor’s expression that it would get no response, he blew angrily from his nostrils and explained, “Once everybody in the world had just the one brain, see what I mean. Now they’s all took apart. All you got to tell me is how to stick ‘em together again.”

  “You seem to be pretty sure that everybody—how’s that again?—had the same brain once.”

  Gurlick listened to something inside him. Then, “Had to be like that,” he said.

  “Why did it have to be?”

  Gurlick waved a vague hand. “All this. Buildin’s. Cars, cloe’s, tools, ‘lectric, all like that. This don’t git done without the people all think with like one head.”

  “It did get done that way, though. People can work together without—thinking together. That is what you mean, isn’t it—all thinking at once, like a hive of bees?”

  “Bees, yeah.”

  “It didn’t happen that way with people, believe me. What made you think it did?”

  “Well, it did, thass all,” said Gurlick positively.

  A startled computation was made among the stars, and, given the axiom which had proved unalterably and invariably true heretofore, namely, that a species did not reach this high a level of technology without the hive-mind to organize it, there was only one way to account for the doctor’s incredible statement—providing he did not lie—and Gurlick, informed of this conclusion, did his best to phrase it. “I guess what happened was, everybody broke all apart, they on their own now, they just don’t remember no more. I don’t remember it, you don’t remember it, that one time you and me and everybody was part of one great big brain.”