Star Science Fiction 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  We therefore knew what we were dealing with. What we didn’t know was what the Russians were doing with it, how they had gotten it and why they were so upset about it.

  Finally it all went to the White House for a conference. The conference, to which my boss Mr. Spatz went along as a sort of rapporteur and monitor to safeguard the interests of the Director of the Budget and of the American taxpayer, was a rather brief affair.

  All roads led to Nelson Angerhelm. Nelson Angerhelm was already guarded by about half of the F.B.I, and a large part of the local military district forces. Every room in his house had been wired. The microphones were sensitive enough to hear his heart beat. The safety precautions we were taking on that man would have justified the program we have for taking care of Fort Knox.

  Angerhelm knew that some awful funny things had been happening but he didn’t know what and he didn’t know who was concerned with it.

  Months later he was able to tell somebody that he thought his brother had probably done some forgery or counterfeiting and that the neighborhood was being thoroughly combed. He didn’t realize his safeguarding was the biggest American national treasure since the discovery of the atomic bomb.

  The President himself gave the word. He reviewed the evidence. The Secretary of State said that he didn’t think that Khrushchev would have brought up the question of a joke if Khrushchev himself had not missed out on the facts.

  We had even tried Russians on it, of course—Russians on our side. And they didn’t get any more off the record than the rest of the people. Everybody heard the same blessed thing, “Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota.”

  But that didn’t get anybody anywhere.

  The only thing left was to try it on the man himself.

  When it came to picking inconspicuous people to go along, the Intelligence committee were pretty thin-skinned about letting outsiders into their show. On the other hand they did not have domestic jurisdiction, particularly not when the President had turned it over to J. Edgar Hoover and said, “Ed, you handle this. I don’t like the looks of it.”

  Somebody over in the Pentagon, presumably deviled on by Air Intelligence, got the bright idea that if the Army and the rest of the Intelligence committee couldn’t fit into the show the best they could do would be to get their revenge on liaison by letting liaison itself go. This meant Mr. Spatz.

  Mr. Spatz has been on the job for many, many years by always avoiding anything interesting or dramatic, always watching for everything that mattered—which was the budget and the authorization for next year—and by ditching controversial personalities long before anyone else had any idea that they were controversial.

  Therefore, he didn’t go. If this Angerhelm fiasco was going to turn out to be a mess he wanted to be out of it.

  It was me who got the assignment.

  I was made a sort of honorary member of the F.B.I, and they even let me carry the tape in the end. They must have had about six other copies of the tape so the honor wasn’t as marked as it looked. We were simply supposed to go along as people who knew something about the brother.

  * * * *

  It was a dry, reddish Sunday afternoon, looking a little bit as though the sunset were coming.

  We drove up to this very nice frame house. It had double windows all the way around and looked as tight as the proverbial rug for a bug to be snug in in cold winter. This wasn’t winter and the old gentleman obviously couldn’t pay for air conditioning. But the house still looked snug.

  There was no waste, no show. It just looked like a thoroughly livable house.

  The F.B.I, man was big-hearted and let me ring the doorbell. There was no answer so I rang the doorbell some more. Again, nobody answered the bell.

  We decided to wait outside and wandered around the yard. We looked at the car in the yard; it seemed in running order.

  We rang the doorbell again, then walked around the house and looked into the kitchen window. We checked his car to see if the radiator felt warm. We looked at our watches. We wondered if he were hiding and peeking out at us. Once more we rang the doorbell.

  Just then, the old boy came down the front walk.

  We introduced ourselves and the preliminaries were the usual sort of thing. I found my heart beating violently. If something had stumped both the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, something salvaged possibly out of space itself, something which thousands of men had heard and none could identify, something so mysterious that the name of Nelson Angerhelm rang over and over again like a pitiable cry beyond all limits of understanding, what could this be?

  We didn’t know.

  The old man stood there. He was erect, sunburned, red-cheeked, red-nosed, red-eared. Healthy as he could be, Swedish to the bone.

  All we had to do was to tell him that we were concerned with his brother, Tice Angerhelm, and he listened to us. We had no trouble, no trouble at all.

  As he listened his eyes got wide and he said, “I know there has been a lot of snooping around here and you people had a lot of trouble and I thought somebody was going to come and talk to me about it but I didn’t think it would be this soon.”

  The F. B. I. man muttered something polite and vague, so Angerhelm went on, “I suppose you gentlemen are from the F.B.I. I don’t think my brother was cheating. He wasn’t that dishonest.”

  Another pause, and he continued. “But there is always a kind of a funny sleek mind—he looked like the kind of man who would play a joke.”

  Angerhelm’s eyes lit up. “If he played a joke, gentlemen, he might even have committed a crime, I don’t know. All I do is raise chickens and try to have my life.”

  Perhaps it was the wrong kind of Intelligence procedure but I broke in ahead of the F.B.I, and said, “Are you a happy man, Mr. Angerhelm? Do you live a life that you think is really satisfying?”

  The old boy gave me a keen look. It was obvious that he thought there was something wrong and he didn’t have very much confidence in my judgment.

  And yet underneath the sharpness of his look he shot me a glance of sympathy and I am sure that he suspected I had been under a strain. His eyes widened a little. His shoulders went back, and he looked a little prouder.

  He looked like the kind of man who might remember that he had Swedish admirals for ancestors, and that long before the Angerhelm name ran out and ran dry there in this flat country west of Minneapolis there had been something great in it and that perhaps sparks of the great name still flew, somewhere in the universe.

  I don’t know. He got the importance of it, I suppose, because he looked me very sharply and very clearly in the eye.

  “No, young man, my life hasn’t been much of a life and I haven’t liked it. And I hope nobody has to live a life like mine. But that is enough of that. I don’t suppose you’re guessing and I suppose you’ve got something pretty bad to show me.”

  The other fellow then took over.

  “Yes, but it doesn’t involve any embarrassment for you, Mr. Angerhelm. And even Colonel Angerhelm, your brother, wouldn’t mind if he were living.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” said the old man. “My brother minded almost everything. As a matter of fact, my brother once said to me, ‘Listen, Nels, I’d come back from Hell itself rather than let somebody put something over on me.’ That’s what he said. I think he meant it. There was a funny pride to him and if you’ve got anything here on my brother, you’d better just show it to me.”

  With that, we got over the small talk and we did what we were told to do. We got out the tape and put it on the portable machine, the hi-fi one which we brought along with us.

  We played it for the old man.

  I had heard it so often that I think I could almost have reproduced it with my vocal cords. The clickety-click, and the buzz, buzz. There wasn’t any whee, whee, but there was some more clickety-click and there was some buzz, buzz, and long periods of dull silence, the kind of contrived silence which a recording machine makes when it is playi
ng but nothing is coming through on it.

  The old gentleman listened to it and it seemed to have no effect on him, no effect at all.

  No effect at all? That wasn’t true.

  There was an effect. When we got through the first time, he said very simply, very directly, almost coldly, “Play it again. Play it again for me. There may be something there.”

  We played it again.

  After that second playing he started to talk.

  “It is the funniest thing, I hear my own name and address there and I don’t know where I hear it, but I swear to God, gentlemen, that’s my brother’s voice. It is my brother’s voice I hear there somewhere in those clicks and noises. And yet all I can hear is Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota. But I hear that, gentlemen, and it is not only plain, it is my brother’s voice and I don’t know where I heard it. I don’t know how it came through.”

  We played it for him a third time.

  When the tape was halfway through, he threw up his hands and said, “Turn it off. Turn it off. I can’t stand it. Turn it off.”

  We turned it off.

  He sat there in the chair breathing hard. After a while in a very funny cracked tone of voice he said, “I’ve got some whisky. It’s back there on the shelf by the sink. Get me a shot of it, will you, gentlemen?”

  The F.B.I, man and I looked at each other. He didn’t want to get mixed up in accidental poisoning so he sent me. I went back. It was good enough whisky, one of the regular brands. I poured the old boy a two-ounce slug and took the glass back. I sipped a tiny bit of it myself. It seemed like a silly thing to do on duty but I couldn’t risk any poison getting to him. After all my years in Army counter-intelligence I wanted to stay in the Civil Service and I didn’t want to take any chances on losing my good job with Mr. Spatz.

  He drank the whisky and he said, “Can you record on this thing at the same time that you play?”

  We said we couldn’t. We hadn’t thought of that.

  “I think I may be able to tell you what it is saying. But I don’t know how many times I can tell you, gentlemen. I am a sick man. I’m not feeling good. I never have felt very good. My brother had the life. I didn’t have the life. I never had much of a life and never did anything and never went anywhere. My brother had everything. My brother got the women, he got the girl—he got the only girl I ever wanted, and then he didn’t marry her. He got the life and he went away and then he died. He played jokes and he never let anybody get ahead of him. And, gentlemen, my brother’s dead. Can you understand that? My brother’s dead.”

  We said we knew his brother was dead. We didn’t tell him that he had been exhumed and that the coffin had been opened and the bones had been X-rayed. We didn’t tell him that the bones had been weighed, fresh identification had been remade from what was left of the fingers, and they were in pretty good shape.

  We didn’t tell him that the serial number had been checked and that all the circumstances leading to the death had been checked and that everybody connected with it had been interviewed.

  We didn’t tell him that. We just told him we knew that his brother was dead. He knew that too.

  “You know my brother is dead and then this funny thing has his voice in it. All it’s got is his voice . . .”

  We agreed. We said that we didn’t know how his voice got in there and we didn’t even know that there was a voice.

  We didn’t tell him that we had heard that voice ourselves a thousand times and yet never knew where we heard it.

  We didn’t tell him that we’d played it at the SAC base and that every man there had heard the name, Nelson Angerhelm, had heard something saying that and yet couldn’t tell where.

  We didn’t tell him that the entire apparatus of Soviet intelligence had been sweating over this for an unstated period of time and that our people had the unpleasant feeling that this came out of a Sputnik somewhere out in the sky.

  We didn’t tell him all that but we knew it. We knew that if he heard his brother’s voice and if he wanted to record, it was something very serious.

  “Can you get me something to dictate on?” the old man said.

  “I can take notes,” the F.B.I, man replied.

  The old man shook his head. “That isn’t enough,” he said. “I think you probably want to get the whole thing if you ever get it and I begin to get pieces of it.”

  “Pieces of what?” said the F.B.I, man.

  “Pieces of the stuff behind all that noise. It’s my brother’s voice talking. He’s saying, things—I don’t like what he is saying. It frightens me and it just makes everything bad and dirty. I’m not sure I can take it and I am not going to take it twice. I think I’ll go to church instead.”

  We looked at each other. “Can you wait ten minutes? I think I can get a recording machine by then.”

  The old man nodded his head. The F.B.I, man went out to the car and cranked up the radio. A great big aerial shot up out of the car which otherwise was a very inconspicuous Chevrolet sedan. He got his office. A recording machine with a police escort was sent out from downtown Minneapolis toward Hopkins. I don’t know what time it took ambulances to make it but the fellow at the other end said, “You better allow me twenty to twenty-two minutes.”

  We waited. The old man wouldn’t talk to us and he didn’t want us to play the tape. He sat there sipping the whisky.

  “This might kill me and I want to have my friends around. My pastor’s name is Jensen and if anything happens to me you get a hold of him there but I don’t think anything will happen to me. Just get a hold of him. I may die, gentlemen, I can’t take too much of this. It is the most shocking thing that ever happened to any man and I’m not going to see you or anybody else get in on it. You understand that it could kill me, gentlemen.”

  We pretended that we knew what he was talking about, although neither one of us had the faintest idea, beyond the suspicion that the old man might have a heart condition and might actually collapse.

  The office had estimated twenty-two minutes. It took eighteen minutes for the F.B.I, assistant to come in. He brought in one of these new, tight, clean little jobs, the kind of thing that I’d love to take home. You can pack it almost anywhere. And it comes out with concert quality.

  The old man brightened when he saw that we meant business.

  “Give me a set of headphones and just let me talk and pick it up. I’ll try to reproduce it. It won’t be my brother’s voice. It will be my voice you’re hearing. Do you follow me?”

  We turned on the tape.

  He dictated, with the headset on his head.

  That’s when the message started. And that’s the thing I started with in the very beginning.

  * * * *

  Funny funny funny. It’s sort of funny funny funny to think without a brain—it is really something like a trick but not a trick to think without a brain. Talking is even harder but it can be done.

  Nels, this is Tice. I’m dead.

  Nels, I don’t know whether I’m in Heaven or Hell, but I think it’s Hell, Nels. And I am going to play the biggest joke that anybody’s ever played. And it’s funny, I am an American Army officer and I am a dead one, and it doesn’t matter. Nels, don’t you see what it is? It doesn’t matter if you’re dead whether you’re American or Russian or an officer or not. And even laughter doesn’t matter.

  But there’s enough left of me, Nels, enough of the old me so that perhaps for one last time I’ll have a laugh with you and the others.

  I haven’t got a body to laugh with, Nels, and I haven’t got a mouth to laugh with and I haven’t got cheeks to smile with and there really isn’t any me. Tice Angerhelm is something different now, Nels. I’m dead.

  I knew I was dead when I felt so different. It was more comfortable being dead, more relaxed. There wasn’t anything tight.

  That’s the trouble, Nels, there isn’t anything tight. There isn’t anything around you. You can’t feel the world, you can’t see the world and yet you
know all about it. You know all about everything.

  It’s awfully lonely, Nels. There are some corners that aren’t lonely, some funny little corners in which you feel friendship and feel things creeping up.

  Nels, it’s like kittens or the faces of children or the smell of the wind on a nice day. It’s any time that you turn away from yourself and you don’t think about yourself.

  It’s the times when you don’t want something and you do want something.

  It’s what you’re not resenting, what you’re not hating, what you’re not fearing and what you’re not jeering. That’s it, Nels, that’s the good part inside of death. And I suppose some people could call it Heaven. And I guess you get Heaven if you just get into the habit of having Heaven every day in your ordinary life. That’s what it is. Heaven is right there, Nels, in your ordinary life, every day, day by day, right around you.