Over the River and Through the Woods Read online

  Soon he would have to change into other clothes, hide the gun and the clothes that he was wearing. The staff would ask no questions, most likely, but it was best to let nothing arouse suspicion in their minds.

  He felt his nerves quieting and he allowed himself to glance about the room, take in the books and furnishings, the soft and easy…and earned…comfort of a man solidly and unshakably established in the world.

  He smiled softly.

  “It will be nice,” he said.

  It had been easy. Now that it was over, it seemed ridiculously easy. Easy because he had never seen the man who had walked up to the door. It was easy to kill a man you have never seen.

  With each passing hour he would slip deeper and deeper into the personality that was his by right of heritage. There would be no one to question, after a time not even himself, that he was Henderson James.

  The phone rang again and he got up to answer it.

  A pleasant voice told him, “This is Allen, over at the duplication lab. We’ve been waiting for a report from you.”

  “Well,” said James, “I…”

  “I just called,” interrupted Allen, “to tell you not to worry. It slipped my mind before.”

  “I see,” said James, though he didn’t.

  “We did this one a little differently,” Allen explained. “An experiment that we thought we’d try out. Slow poison in his bloodstream. Just another precaution. Probably not necessary, but we like to be positive. In case he fails to show up, you needn’t worry any.”

  “I am sure he will show up.”

  Allen chuckled. “Twenty-four hours. Like a time bomb. No antidote for it even if he found out somehow.”

  “It was good of you to let me know,” said James.

  “Glad to,” said Allen. “Good night, Mr. James.”

  Dusty Zebra

  If you’re human, you can’t keep a thing around the house. You’re always losing things and never finding them and you go charging through the place, yelling, cross-examining, blaming.

  That’s the way it is in all families.

  Just one warning—don’t try to figure out where all those things have gone or who might have taken them. If you have any notion of investigating, forget it. You’ll be happier!

  I’ll tell you how it was with me.

  I’d bought the sheet of stamps on my way home from the office so I could mail out the checks for the monthly bills. But I’d just sat down to write the checks when Marge and Lewis Shaw dropped over. I don’t care much for Lewis and he barely tolerates me. But Marge and Helen are good friends, and they got to talking, and the Shaws stayed all evening.

  Lewis told me about the work he was doing at his research laboratory out at the edge of town. I tried to switch him off to something else, but he kept right on. I suppose he’s so interested in his work that he figures everyone else must be. But I don’t know a thing about electronics and I can’t tell a microgauge from a microscope.

  It was a fairly dismal evening and the worst of it was that I couldn’t say so. Helen would have jumped all over me for being antisocial.

  So, the next evening after dinner, I went into the den to write the checks and, of course, the stamps were gone.

  I had left the sheet on top of the desk and now the desk was bare except for one of the Bildo-Blocks that young Bill had outgrown several years before, but which still turn up every now and then in the most unlikely places.

  I looked around the room. Just in case they might have blown off the desk, I got down on my hands and knees and searched under everything. There was no sign of the stamps.

  I went into the living room, where Helen was curled up in a chair, watching television.

  “I haven’t seen them, Joe,” she said. “They must be where you left them.”

  It was exactly the kind of answer I should have expected.

  “Bill might know,” I said.

  “He’s scarcely been in the house all day. When he does show up, you’ve got to speak to him.”

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “It’s this trading business. He traded off that new belt we got him for a pair of spurs.”

  “I can’t see anything wrong in that. When I was a kid…”

  “It’s not just the belt,” she said. “He’s traded everything. And the worst of it is that he always seems to get the best of it.”

  “The kid’s smart.”

  “If you take that attitude, Joe…”

  “It’s not my attitude,” I said. “It’s the attitude of the whole business world. When Bill grows up…”

  “When he grows up, he’ll be in prison. Why, the way he trades, you’d swear he was training to be a con man!”

  “All right, I’ll talk to him.”

  I went back into the den because the atmosphere wasn’t exactly as friendly as it might have been and, anyhow, I had to send out those checks, stamps or no stamps.

  I got the pile of bills and the checkbook and the fountain pen out of the drawer. I reached out and picked up the Bildo-Block to put it to one side, so I’d have a good, clear space to work on. But the moment I picked it up, I knew that this thing was no Bildo-Block.

  It was the right size and weight and was black and felt like plastic, except that it was slicker than any plastic I had ever felt. It felt as if it had oil on it, only it didn’t.

  I set it down in front of me and pulled the desk lamp closer. But there wasn’t much to see. It still looked like one of the Bildo-Blocks.

  Turning it around, I tried to make out what it was. On the second turn, I saw the faint oblong depression along one side of it—a very shallow depression, almost like a scratch.

  I looked at it a little closer and could see that the depression was machined and that within it was a faint red line. I could have sworn the red line flickered just a little. I held it there, studying it, and could detect no further flicker. Either the red had faded or I had been seeing things to start with, for after a few seconds I couldn’t be sure there was any line at all.

  I figured it must have been something Bill had picked up or traded for. The kid is more than half pack-rat, but there’s nothing wrong with that, nor with the trading, either, for all that Helen says. It’s just the first signs of good business sense.

  I put the block over to one side of the desk and went on with the checks. The next day, during lunch hour, I bought some more stamps so I could mail them. And off and on, all day, I wondered what could have happened to that sheet of stamps.

  I didn’t think at all about the block that had the oily feel. Possibly I would have forgotten it entirely, except that when I got home, the fountain pen was missing.

  I went into the den to get the pen and there the pen was, lying on top of the desk where I’d left it the night before. Not that I remembered leaving it there. But when I saw it there, I remembered having forgotten to put it back into the drawer.

  I picked it up. It wasn’t any pen. It felt like a cylinder of cork, but much too heavy to be any kind of cork. Except that it was heavier and smaller, it felt something—somehow—like a fly rod.

  Thinking of how a fly rod felt, I gave my hand a twitch, the way you do to cast a line, and suddenly it seemed to be, in fact, a fly rod. It apparently had been telescoped and now it came untelescoped and lengthened out into what might have been a rod. But the funny thing about it was that it went out only about four feet and then disappeared into thin air.

  Instinctively, I brought it up and back to free the tip from wherever it might be. I felt the slack take up against a sudden weight and I knew I had something on the other end of it. Just like a fish feels, only it wasn’t fighting.

  Then, as quickly as it happened, it unhappened. I felt the tension snap off and the weight at the other end was gone and the rod had telescoped again and I held in my hand the thing that looked like a fountain pen.

  I laid it down carefully on the desk, being very certain to make no more casting motions, and it wasn’t until then that I saw my
hand was shaking.

  I sat down, goggling at the thing that looked like the missing fountain pen and the other thing that looked like a Bildo-Block.

  And it was then, while I was looking at the two of them, that I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the little white dot in the center of the desk.

  It was on the exact spot where the bogus pen had lain and more than likely, I imagined, the exact spot where I’d found the Bildo-Block the night before. It was about a quarter of an inch in diameter and it looked like ivory.

  I put out my thumb and rubbed it vigorously, but the dot would not rub off. I closed my eyes so the dot would have a chance to go away, and then opened them again, real quick, to surprise it if it hadn’t. It still was there.

  I bent over the desk to examine it. I could see it was inlaid in the wood, and an excellent job of inlaying, too. I couldn’t find even the faintest line of division between the wood and the dot.

  It hadn’t been there before; I was sure of that. If it had been, I would have noticed it. What’s more, Helen would have noticed it, for she’s hell on dirt and forever after things with a dusting cloth. And to cinch the fact that it had not been there before, no one I ever heard of sold desks with single inlaid ivory dots.

  And no one sold a thing that looked like a fountain pen but could become a fly rod, the business end of which disappeared and hooked a thing you couldn’t even see—and which, the next time, might bring in whatever it had caught instead of losing it.

  Helen called to me from the living room. “Joe.”

  “Yeah. What is it?”

  “Did you talk to Bill?”

  “Bill? About what?”

  “About the trading.”

  “No. I guess I forgot.”

  “Well, you’ll have to. He’s at it again. He traded Jimmy out of that new bicycle. Gave him a lot of junk. I made him give back the bicycle.”

  “I’ll have a talk with him,” I promised again.

  But I’m afraid I wasn’t paying as close attention to the ethics of the situation as I should have been.

  You couldn’t keep a thing around the house. You were always losing this or that. You knew just where you’d put it and you were sure it was there and then, when you went to look for it, it had disappeared.

  It was happening everywhere—things being lost and never turning up.

  But other things weren’t left in their places—at least not that you heard about.

  Although maybe there had been times when things had been left that a man might pick up and examine and not know what they were and puzzle over, then toss in a corner somewhere and forget.

  Maybe, I thought, the junkyards of the world were loaded with outlandish blocks and crazy fishing rods.

  I got up and went into the living room, where Helen had turned on the television set.

  She must have seen that something had me upset, because she asked, “What’s the matter now?”

  “I can’t find the fountain pen.”

  She laughed at me. “Honestly, Joe, you’re the limit. You’re always losing things.”

  That night, I lay awake after Helen went to sleep and all I could think about was the dot upon the desk. A dot, perhaps, that said, Put it right here, pardner, and we will make a swap.

  And, thinking of it, I wondered what would happen if someone moved the desk.

  I lay there for a long time, trying not to worry, trying to tell myself it didn’t matter, that I was insane to think what I was thinking.

  But I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  So I finally got up and sneaked out of the bedroom and, feeling like a thief in my own house, headed for the den.

  I closed the door, turned on the desk lamp and took a quick look to see if the dot was still there.

  It was.

  I opened the desk drawer and hunted for a pencil and couldn’t find one, but I finally found one of Bill’s crayons. I got down on my knees and carefully marked the floor around the desk legs, so that, if the desk were moved, I could put it back again.

  Then, pretending I had no particular purpose for doing it, I laid the crayon precisely on the dot.

  In the morning, I sneaked a look into the den and the crayon was still there. I went to work a little easier in my mind, for by then I’d managed to convince myself that it was all imagination.

  But that evening, after dinner, I went back into the den and the crayon was gone.

  In its place was a triangular contraption with what appeared to be lenses set in each angle, and with a framework of some sort of metal, holding in place what apparently was a suction cup in the center of the triangle.

  While I was looking at it, Helen came to the door.

  “Marge and I are going to see a movie,” she said. “Why don’t you go over and have a beer with Lewis?”

  “With that stuffed shirt?”

  “What’s the matter with Lewis?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” I didn’t feel up to a family row right then.

  “What’s that you’ve got?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Just something I found.”

  “Well, don’t you start bringing home all sorts of junk, the way Bill does. One of you is enough to clutter up the house.”

  I sat there, looking at the triangle, and the only thing I could figure out was that it might be a pair of glasses. The suction cup in the center might hold it on the wearer’s face and, while that might seem a funny way to wear a pair of glasses, it made sense when you thought about it. But if that were true, it meant that the wearer had three eyes, set in a triangle in his face.

  I sat around for quite a while after Helen left, doing a lot of thinking. And what I was thinking was that even if I didn’t care too much about Lewis, he was the only man I knew who might be able to help me out.

  So I put the bogus fountain pen and the three-eyed glasses in the drawer and put the counterfeit Bildo-Block in my pocket and went across the street.

  Lewis had a bunch of blueprints spread out on the kitchen table, and he started to explain them to me. I did the best I could to act as if I understood them. Actually, I didn’t know head nor tail of it.

  Finally, I was able to get a word in edgewise and I pulled the block out of my pocket and put it on the table.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  I expected him to say right off it was just a child’s block. But he didn’t. There must have been something about it to tip him off that it wasn’t just a simple block. That comes, of course, of having a technical education.

  Lewis picked the block up and turned it around in his fingers. “What’s it made of?” he asked me, sounding excited.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what it is or what it’s made of or anything about it. I just found it.”

  “This is something I’ve never seen before.” Then he spotted the depression in one side of it and I could see I had him hooked. “Let me take it down to the shop. We’ll see what we can learn.”

  I knew what he was after, of course. If the block was something new, he wanted a chance to go over it—but that didn’t bother me any. I had a hunch he wouldn’t find out too much about it.

  We had a couple more beers and I went home. I hunted up an old pair of spectacles and put them on the desk right over the dot.

  I was listening to the news when Helen came in. She said she was glad I’d spent the evening with Lewis, that I should try to get to know him better and that, once I got to know him better, I might like him. She said, since she and Marge were such good friends, it was a shame Lewis and I didn’t hit it off.

  “Maybe we will,” I said and let it go at that.

  The next afternoon, Lewis called me at the office.

  “Where’d you get that thing?” he asked.

  “Found it,” I said.

  “Have any idea what it is?”

  “Nope,” I told him cheerfully. “That’s why I gave it to you.”

  “It’s powered in some way and it’s meant to measure something. That dep
ression in the side must be a gauge. Color seems to be used as an indicator. At any rate, the color line in the depression keeps changing all the time. Not much, but enough so you can say there’s some change.”

  “Next thing is to find out what it’s measuring.”

  “Joe, do you know where you can get another of them?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “It’s this way,” he said. “We’d like to get into this one, to see what makes it tick, but we can’t find any way to open it. We could break into it, probably, but we’re afraid to do that. We might damage it. Or it might explode. If we had another…”

  He had to let it go at that.

  I went home that evening grinning to myself, thinking about Lewis. The guy was fit to be tied. He wouldn’t sleep until he found out what the thing was, now that he’d started on it. It probably would keep him out of my hair for a week or so.

  I went into the den. The glasses still were on the desk. I stood there for a moment, looking at them, wondering what was wrong. Then I saw that the lenses had a pinkish shade.

  I picked them up, noticing that the lenses had been replaced by the kind in the triangular pair I had found there the night before.

  Just then, Helen came into the room and I could tell, even before she spoke, that she had been waiting for me.

  “Joe Adams,” she demanded, “what have you been up to?”

  “Not a thing,” I told her.

  “Marge says you got Lewis all upset.”

  “It doesn’t take a lot to upset him.”

  “There’s something going on,” she insisted, “and I want to know what it is.”

  I knew I was licked. “I’ve been trading.”

  “Trading! After all I’ve said about Bill!”

  “But this is different.”

  “Trading is trading,” she said flatly.

  Bill came in the front door, but he must have heard his mother say “trading,” for he ducked out again. I yelled for him to come back.

  “I want both of you to sit down and listen to me,” I said. “You can ask questions and offer suggestions and give me hell after I’m through.”

  So we sat down, all three of us, and had a family powwow.