Short Fiction

a grateful rest now that the awful semblance of life had quitted their slack, butchered limbs. And the blue fire that had burst forth in the midst of the old battle, to linger ghostwise for years; the horned image that Jager had broken; the seeming powers of the Long Lost Friend, as an amulet and a storehouse of charms⁠—these were items in the strange fabric. He would remember them forever, without rationalizing them.

He drank coffee, into which someone, probably Enid, had dropped sugar while he mused. Rationalization, he decided, was not enough, had never been enough. To judge a large and dark mystery by what vestigial portions touched one, was to err like the blind men in the old doggerel who, groping at an elephant here and there, called it in turn a snake, a spear, a tree, a fan, a wall. Better not to brood or ponder upon what had happened. Try to be thankful, and forget.

“I shall build my church under Fearful Rock,” Jager was saying, “and it shall be called Fearful Rock no more, but Welcome Rock.”

Lanark looked up. Enid had come and seated herself beside him. He studied her profile. Suddenly he could read her thoughts, as plainly as though they were written upon her cheek.

She was thinking that grass would grow anew in her front yard, and that she would marry Kane Lanark as soon as he asked her.

Bratton’s Idea

Old Bratton, janitor at the studios of Station XCV in Hollywood, was as gaunt as Karloff, as saturnine as Rathbone, as enigmatic as Lugosi. He was unique among Californians in professing absolutely no motion picture ambitions. Once, it is true, a director had stopped him on the street and offered to test him for a featured role, but old Bratton had refused with loud indignation when he heard that the role would be that of a mad scientist. Old Bratton was touchy about mad scientists, because he was one.

For a time he had been a studio electrician, competent though touchy; but then it developed that he had lied about his age⁠—he was really eighty years old, and he had been fooling with electricity ever since Edison put apparatus of various sorts within the reach of everyone. Studio rules imposed pretty strict age limits on the various jobs, and so he was demoted to a janitorship.

He accepted, grumbling, because he needed money for the pursuit he had dreamed of when a boy and maintained from his youth onward. In his little two-room apartment he had gathered a great jumble of equipment⁠—coils, transformers, cathodes, lenses, terminals⁠—some of it bought new, some salvaged from studio junk, and a great deal curiously made and not to be duplicated elsewhere save in the eccentric mind of its maker. For old Bratton, with the aid of electricity, thought to create life.

“Electricity is life,” he would murmur, quoting Dr. C. W. Roback, who had been venerable when old Bratton was young. And again: “All these idiots think that ‘Frankenstein’ is a romance and ‘R.U.R.’ a flight of fancy. But all robot stories are full of truth. I’ll show them.”

But he hadn’t shown them yet, and he was eighty-two. His mechanical arrangements were wonderful and crammed with power. They could make dead frogs kick, dead birds flutter. They could make the metal figures he constructed, whether large or small, stir and seem about to wake. But only while the current animated them.

“The fault isn’t with the machine,” he would say again, speaking aloud but taking care none overheard. “It’s perfect⁠—I’ve seen to that. No, it’s in the figures. They’re too clumsy and creaky. All the parts are good, but the connections are wrong, somehow. Wish I knew anatomy better. And a dead body, even a fresh one, has begun dissolution. I must try and get⁠—”

Haranguing himself thus one evening after the broadcast, he pushed his mop down a corridor to the open door of a little rehearsal hall, then stopped and drew into a shadowy corner, for he had almost blundered upon Ben Gascon in the act of proposing marriage.

Ben Gascon, it will be remembered, was at the time one of radio’s highest paid performers, and well worthy of his hire for the fun he made. Earlier in life he had been a competent vaudeville artist. When, through no fault of his, vaudeville died, Gascon went into sound pictures and radio.

He was a ventriloquist, adroit and seasoned by years of performance, and a man of intelligence and showmanship as well. Coming to the stage from medical school, he had constructed with his own skilful hands the small figure of wood, metal, rubber and cloth that had become known to myriads as Tom-Tom. Tom-Tom the impish, the witty, the leering cynic, the gusty little clown, the ironical jokester, who sat on the knee of Ben Gascon and, by a seeming misdirection of voice, roused the world to laughter by his sneers and sallies. Tom-Tom was so droll, so dynamic, so uproariously wicked in thought and deed, that listeners were prone to forget the seemingly quiet, grave, Ben Gascon who held him and fed him solemn lines on which to explode firecracker jokes⁠—Ben Gascon, who really did the thinking and the talking that Tom-Tom the dummy might be a headliner in the entertainment world.

Not really a new thing⁠—the combination of comedian and stooge may or may not have begun with Aristophanes in ancient Greece⁠—but Ben Gascon was offering both qualities in his own person, and in surpassing excellence. Press agents and commentators wrote fascinating conjectures about his dual personality. In any case, Tom-Tom was the making of him. It was frequently said that Gascon would be as lost without Tom-Tom as Tom-Tom without Gascon.

But tonight Ben Gascon and Tom-Tom were putting on a show for an audience of one.

Shannon Cole was the prima donna and co-star of the program. She was tall, almost as tall as Gascon, and her skin was delectably creamy, and her dark hair wound