“Not that much, people don’t. Nobody would enjoy a roller-coaster ride if he saw cars crashing all around him and people get ting killed. You’ll have to tone it down a lot. An awful lot.”
“But you liked it?”
“On the whole, yes. It’s a unique idea. But you’ll have to tone it down about 75 cercent.”
Freeman grimaced. “It can be done. But I’ll have to have a definite commitment from you before I undertake such extensive changes.”
“Um.”
“There are other places I could sell it, you know,” Freeman said pugnaciously. “Jenkins of Amalgamated might be interested. Or Silberstein.”
“Jenkins lit out with about six thousand of Amalgamated’s dollars a couple of months ago. Nobody’s seen him since. And they found Silberstein wandering on the streets last week in a sort of fit. Didn’t you know? He’s in a mental home. You won’t be selling either of them much of anything.”
Freeman sighed, but made no attempt to dispute these distressing facts. “I’ll have to have a definite commitment from you before I make that many major changes,” he repeated stubbornly.
“Well…” Fright and whiskey may have made Dickson-Hawes a little less cautious than usual. “We could pay you fifty a week for a couple of months while you worked on it, as advance against royalties. If we didn’t like the final results, you wouldn’t have to give back the advance.”
“It’s robbery. Apprentice mechanics earn more than that. Make it sixty-five.”
“I hate haggling. Tell you what. We’ll make it sixty.”
Freeman shrugged tiredly. “Let’s get it down in black and white. I’ll just draw up a brief statement of the terms and you can sign it.”
“Well, okay.”
Freeman stooped and began to rummage in a desk drawer. Once he halted and seemed to listen. He opened another drawer. “Thought I had some paper… Yeah, here it is.” He turned on the desk light and began to write.
Dickson-Hawes leaned back in his chair and sipped at Freeman’s whiskey. He crossed his legs and recrossed them. He was humming “Lili Marlene” loudly and off pitch. His head rested against the wall.
Freeman’s pen moved across the paper. “That’s about it,” he said at last. He was smiling. “Yeah. I—”
There was a splintering crash, the sound of lath and plaster breaking. Freeman looked up from the unsigned agreement to see the last of his entrepreneurs—the last, the indubitable last—being borne off in the long black arms of Voom.
It was the first time they had gone through the partitions in search of a victim, but the partitions were thin and the unsuccessful chase on the highway had excited them more than Freeman had realized. There has to be a first time for any entity, even for Voom.
Ten full minutes passed. Dickson-Hawes’s shrieks died away. The third episode had ended just as disastrously as the earlier two. There wasn’t another entrepreneur in the entire U.S.A. from whom Freeman could hope to realize a cent for the contents of his horror house. He was sunk, finished, washed up.
Freeman remained sitting at his desk, motionless. All his resentment at the bad luck life had saddled him with—loyalty oaths, big deals that fell through, chiselers like Dickson-Hawes, types that yelled when the Voom were after them—had coalesced into an immobilizing rage.
At last he drew a quavering sigh. He went over to the bookcase, took out a book, looked up something. He took out a second book, a third.
He nodded. A gleam of blind, intoxicated vindictiveness had come into his eyes. Just a few minor circuit changes, that was all. He knew the other, more powerful entities were there. It was only a question of changing his signaling devices to get in touch with them.
Freeman put the book back on the shelf. He hesitated. Then he started toward the door. He’d get busy on the circuit changes right away. And while he was making them, he’d be running over plans for the horror house he was going to use the new entities to help him build.
It would be dangerous. So what? Expensive… he’d get the money somewhere. But he’d fix them. He’d build a horror house for the beasts that would make them sorry they’d ever existed—A Horrer Howce for the Voom.
THE WINES OF EARTH
Joe da Valora grew wine in the Napa Valley. The growing of premium wine is never especially profitable in California, and Joe could have made considerably more money if he had raised soybeans or planted his acreage in prunes. The paperwork involved in his occupation was a nightmare to him; he filled out tax and license forms for state and federal governments until he had moments of feeling his soul was made out in triplicate, and he worked hard in the fields too. His son used to ask him why he didn’t go into something easier. Sometimes he wondered himself.
But lovers of the vine, like all lovers, are stubborn and unreasonable men. And as with other lovers, their unreasonableness has its compensations. Joe da Valora got a good deal of satisfaction from the knowledge that he made some of the best Zinfandel in California (the Pinot Noir, his first love, he had had to abandon as not coming to its full excellence in his particular part of the Napa Valley). He vintaged the best of his wine carefully, slaved over the vinification to bring out the wine’s full freshness and fruitiness, and had once sold an entire year’s product to one of the “big business” wineries, rather than bottling it himself, because he thought it had a faint but objectionable “hot” taste.
Joe da Valora lived alone, His wife was dead, and his son had married a girl who didn’t like the country. Often they came to see him on Sundays, and they bought him expensive gifts at Christmas time. Still, his evenings were apt to be long. If he sometimes drank a little too much of his own product, so that he went to bed with the edges of things a bit blurred, it did him no harm. Dry red table wine is a wholesome beverage, and he was never any the worse for it in the morning. On the nights when things needed blurring, he was careful not to touch the vintaged Zinfandel. It was too good a wine to waste on things that had to be blurred.
Early in December, when the vintage was over and the new wine was quietly doing the last of its fermentation in the storage containers, he awoke to the steady drumming of rain on his roof. Well. He’d get caught up on his bookkeeping. He hoped the rain wouldn’t be too hard. Eight of his acres were on a hillside, and after every rain he had to do some reterracing.
About eleven, when he was adding up a long column of figures, he felt a sort of soundless jarring in the air. He couldn’t tell whether it was real or whether he had imagined it. Probably the latter. His hearing wasn’t any too good these days. He shook his head to clear it, and poured himself a glass of the unvintaged Zinfandel.
After lunch the rain stopped and the sky grew bright. He finished his noon-time glass of wine and started out for a breath of air. As he left the house he realized that he was just a little, little tipsy. Well, that wasn’t such a bad way for a vintner to be. He’d go up to the hillside acres and see how they did.
There had been very little soil washing, he saw, inspecting the hillside. The reterracing would be at a minimum. In fact, most of the soil removal he was doing himself, on the soles of his boots. He straightened up, feeling pleased.
Ahead of him on the slope four young people were standing, two men and two girls.
Da Valora felt a twinge of annoyance and alarm. What were they doing he re? A vineyard out of leaf isn’t attractive, and the hillside was well back from the road. He’d never had any trouble with vandals, only with deer. If these people tramped around on the wet earth, they’d break the terracing down.
As he got within speaking distance of them, one of the girls stepped forward. She had hair of an extraordinary copper-gold, and vivid, intensely turquoise eyes. (The other girl had black hair, and the two men were dark blonds.) Something about the group puzzled da Valora, and then he located it. They were all dressed exactly alike.
“Hello,” the girl said.
“Hello,” da Valora answered. Now that he was near to them, his anxiety about the vines had left him. It was
