Mackenzie sits up straight and crosses her arms. She looks past him towards the glowing red exit sign and the door leading back out onto Sunset Boulevard, into daylight and the shimmering, dusty wilds of La La Land. “I don’t suppose why is really any of my business,” she says.
“I’m wrung out, that’s all. It ain’t no more complicated than that. I’ve been at this business now for thirty-seven years, since way back before you—or Ellison—were even born. And I’m simply too tired to keep pace anymore. I’m not that damn Energizer bunny rabbit beating on its drum. Surely there’s a limit to how many times a mortal man can fairly be expected to come face-to-face with cosmic annihilation, and this thing with Jehosheba Talog and all her little green fishmen, it’s the last apocalypse I’ve got in me.”
Neil Young gives way to Linda Ronstadt and “Blue Bayou,” and neither Mackenzie nor the Signalman says anything else for two or three long minutes. He smokes his cigarette and she stares at the exit sign.
“Okay,” she says finally. “Are you going to tell her?”
“You mean Ellison?”
“Yeah,” says Mackenzie.
“You think there’s some particular reason she needs to know?”
Mackenzie shrugs again and and rubs her temples. She’s getting a headache. She hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since before the horror show in Gove City, and whenever she can’t sleep she gets headaches. “Never mind,” she says. “It’s none of my business. But can I ask you a question?”
“You certainly can,” he tells her, stubbing out his cigarette on the underside of the table and dropping the butt on the floor. “Shoot.”
“Even if Nicodemo can still do what you want her to do, and even if she does it and everything goes off this time without a hitch, we’re working on the assumption that killing the Talog woman will stop what she’s started. We’re assuming that the way it’s going to work, yeah?”
“Yeah,” the Signalman replies, “we are proceeding on that assumption, and no, there aren’t any guarantees, just like usual.”
“Is there at least a contingency plan?”
“Maybe. Possibly. We can always fucking hope. But nobody’s told me, one way or the other. Still, since you asked, I’m sorta thinking Ellison is the contingency plan.”
“Oh,” says Mackenzie. She takes a bottle of store-brand aspirin from a pants pocket and stares at it.
“You getting another migraine?” the Signalman asks her. “Maybe it and my bum tooth could get together and compare notes.” He lights another cigarette.
“Listen, I’ll be back in a minute or two,” she says, then slides out of the cherry-red Naugahyde booth.
“But you’re okay? Besides the noggin, I mean?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m fine. I just need to piss, that’s all.”
The Signalman nods, and she leaves him alone with his toothache and the defiant mighty middle finger of Johnny Cash, with his bourbon and dread and a nigh unto bottomless well of uncertainty about exactly what he’s going to say to Ellison Nicodemo come Wednesday morning. Worse still, and worse by a long shot, about what he’ll do if she puts up a fight.
13.: Bee of the Bird of the Moth
(Undated)
Sure, it all comes down to who you’re gonna believe. But can’t both things be true. This ain’t no wave-particle duality sorta situation. Meaning no disrespect to X and butterflies and hurricanes, but this ain’t no sun shining down at midnight so that walrus Buddha and carpenter Christ might go about their bloody business without the inconvenience of an electric torch. So either you take this literal or you don’t and tell yourself it’s all just some sort of crytographical malarkey, and sure, if that gets you through the night, if that gets you hard and wet, sweetheart, you go on ahead and be my guest. No skin off my dick.
But, really, it all comes down to who you’re gonna believe.
Now, between you and me and the Staten Island Ferry, we’re gonna cut the crap and talk about Tindalos, as I am given to understand the matter. Straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. The horse being this guy I knew who knew a guy who knew this hippie chick who knew this bull dyke physicist used to be in tight with a certain American nonprofit global policy think tank which shall here remain nameless. The way that particular horse laid it out, you gotta look at what showed up in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales magazine as some kinda temporally retroactive disinformation. Yeah, I just made that up, that phrase, but it works about well as anything. The horse (and we’ll call him Harry; Harry the Horse, just like in that Beatles song and Guys and Dolls and what the hell ever else), he said it was none other than the fabled Madam Immacolata what done the deed, planted the story under the name of this Frank Belknap Long fella, since she slips the surly bonds so well and all. But I don’t know whether that’s true or just more flaps and seals, given she ain’t never exactly been a player for Albany. Given her allegiances lie elsewhere. But who cares, right? Either way, all that fancy pulp window dressing doesn’t show up until thirteen years before the Chicago Pile-1 goes critical and Enrico Fermi gets his wish and any number of those assembled to behold that blessed event are left with a nasty recurring impression that much, much more than the first self-sustaining, controlled nuclear chain reaction was achieved there beneath the bleachers of Stagg Field. Say that ten times fast, how about it. Well, anyway, there’s Chianti from Dixie Cups all round and Arthur Compton phones up Jim Conant with the news how the Italian navigator has landed in the New World, and Conant, he wants to know how were the natives, and Dr. Compton replies very fucking friendly indeed.
