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Title: Pipe Dream
Author: Fritz Leiber
Release Date: November 10, 2019 [EBook #60664]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PIPE DREAM ***
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PIPE DREAM
BY FRITZ LEIBER
_Simon Grue found a two-inch mermaid in
his bathtub. It had arms, hips, a finny
tail, and (here the real trouble began)
a face that reminded him irresistibly
of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich...._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It wasn't until the mermaid turned up in his bathtub that Simon Grue
seriously began to wonder what the Russians were doing on the roof next
door.
The old house next door together with its spacious tarpapered roof,
which held a sort of pent-shack, a cylindrical old water tank, and
several chicken-wire enclosures, had always been a focus of curiosity
in this region of Greenwich Village, especially to whoever happened
to be renting Simon's studio, the north window-cum-skylight of which
looked down upon it--if you were exceptionally tall or if, like Simon,
you stood halfway up a stepladder and peered.
During the 1920's, old-timers told Simon, the house had been owned by
a bootlegger, who had installed a costly pipe organ and used the water
tank to store hooch. Later there had been a colony of shaven-headed
Buddhist monks, who had strolled about the roof in their orange and
yellow robes, meditating and eating raw vegetables. There had followed
a _commedia dell' arte_ theatrical group, a fencing salon, a school of
the organ (the bootlegger's organ was always one of the prime renting
points of the house), an Arabian restaurant, several art schools and
silvercraft shops of course, and an Existentialist coffee house.
The last occupants had been two bony-cheeked Swedish blondes who
sunbathed interminably and had built the chicken-wire enclosures to
cage a large number of sinister smoke-colored dogs--Simon decided they
were breeding werewolves, and one of his most successful abstractions,
"Gray Hunger", had been painted to the inspiration of an eldritch
howling. The dogs and their owners had departed abruptly one night in
a closed van, without any of the dogs ever having been offered for
sale or either of the girls having responded with anything more than a
raised eyebrow to Simon's brave greetings of "Skoal!"
The Russians had taken possession about six months ago--four brothers
apparently, and one sister, who never stirred from the house but could
occasionally be seen peering dreamily from a window. A white card with
a boldly-inked "Stulnikov-Gurevich" had been thumbtacked to the peeling
green-painted front door. Lafcadio Smits, the interior decorator, told
Simon that the newcomers were clearly White Russians; he could tell it
by their bushy beards. Lester Phlegius maintained that they were Red
Russians passing as White, and talked alarmingly of spying, sabotage
and suitcase bombs.
Simon, who had the advantages of living on the spot and having
been introduced to one of the brothers--Vasily--at a neighboring
art gallery, came to believe that they were both Red and White and
something more--solid, complete Slavs in any case, Double Dostoevsky
Russians if one may be permitted the expression. They ordered vodka,
caviar, and soda crackers by the case. They argued interminably (loudly
in Russian, softly in English), they went on mysterious silent errands,
they gloomed about on the roof, they made melancholy music with their
deep harmonious voices and several large guitars. Once Simon though
they even had the bootlegger's organ going, but there had been a bad
storm at the time and he hadn't been sure.
They were not quite as tight-lipped as the Swedish girls. Gradually a
curt front-sidewalk acquaintance developed and Simon came to know their
names. There was Vasily, of course, who wore thick glasses, the most
scholarly-looking of the lot and certainly the most bibulous--Simon
came to think of Vasily as the Vodka Breather. Occasionally he could be
glimpsed holding Erlenmayer flasks, trays of culture dishes, and other
pieces of biological equipment, or absentmindedly wiping off a glass
slide with his beard.
Then there was Ivan, the dourest of the four, though none of them save
Vasily seemed very amiable. Simon's private names for Ivan were the
Nihilist and the Bomber, since he sometimes lugged about with him a
heavy globular leather case. With it and his beard--a square black
one--he had more than once created a mild sensation in the narrow
streets of the Village.
Next there was Mikhail, who wore a large crucifix on a silver chain
around his neck and looked like a more spiritual Rasputin. However,
Simon thought of him less as the Religious than as the Whistler--for
his inveterate habit of whistling into his straggly beard a strange
tune that obeyed no common harmonic laws. Somehow Mikhail seemed to
carry a chilly breeze around with him, a perpetual cold draught, so
that Simon had to check himself in order not to clutch together his
coat collar whenever he heard the approach of the eerie piping.
Finally there was Lev, beardless, shorter by several inches, and
certainly the most elusive of the brothers. He always moved at a
scurry, frequently dipping his head, so that it was some time before
Simon assured himself that he had the Stulnikov-Gurevich face. He
did, unmistakably. Lev seemed to be away on trips a good deal. On his
returns he was frequently accompanied by furtive but important-looking
men--a different one on each occasion. There would be much bustle at
such times--among other things, the shades would be drawn. Then in a
few hours Lev would be off again, and his man-about-town companion too.
And of course there was the indoors-keeping sister. Several times Simon
had heard one of the brothers calling "Grushenka", so he assumed that
was her name. She had the Stulnikov-Gurevich face too, though on her,
almost incredibly, it was strangely attractive. She never ventured on
the roof but she often sat in the pent-shack. As far as Simon could
make out, she always wore some dark Victorian costume--at least it
had a high neck, long sleeves, and puffed shoulders. Pale-faced in
the greenish gloom, she would stare for hours out of the pent-shack's
single window, though never in Simon's direction. Occasionally she
would part and close her lips, but not exactly as if she were speaking,
at least aloud--he thought of calling her the Bubble Blower. The effect
was as odd as Mikhail's whistling but not as unpleasant. In fact, Simon
found himself studying Grushenka for ridiculously long periods of time.
His mild obsession began to irk him and one day he decided henceforth
to stay away altogether from his north window and the stepladder. As a
result he saw little of the alterations the Russians began to make on
the roof at this point, though he did notice that they lugged up among
other things a length of large-diameter transparent plastic piping.
* * * * *
So much for the Russians, now for the mermaid. Late one night Simon
started to fill his bathtub with cold water to soak his brushes
and rags--he was working with a kind of calcimine at the time,
experimenting with portable murals painted on large plaster-faced
wooden panels. Heavily laden, he got back to the bathroom just in time
to shut off the water--and to see a tiny fish of some sort splashing
around in it.
He was not unduly surprised. Fish up to four or five inches in length
were not unheard-of apparitions in the cold-water supply of the area,
and this specimen looked as if it displaced no more than a teaspoon of
water.
He made a lucky grab and the next moment he was holding in his firmly
clenched right hand the bottom half of a slim wriggling creature hardly
two inches long--and now Simon was surprised indeed.
To begin with, it was not greenish white nor any common fish color,
but palely-pinkish, flesh-colored in fact. And it didn't seem so much
a fish as a tadpole--at least its visible half had a slightly oversize
head shaped like a bullet that has mushroomed a little, and two tiny
writhing arms or appendages of some sort--and it felt as if it had
rather large hips for a fish or even a tadpole. Equip a two-months
human embryo with a finny tail, give it in addition a precocious
feminine sexiness, and you'd get something of the same effect.
But all that was nothing. The trouble was that it had a face--a tiny
face, of course, and rather goggly-ghostly like a planarian's, but a
face nevertheless, a human-looking face, and also (here was the real
trouble) a face that bore a grotesque but striking resemblance to that
of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich.
Simon's fingers tightened convulsively. Simultaneously the slippery
creature gave a desperate wriggle. It shot into the air in a high curve
and fell into the scant inch of space between the bathtub and the wall.
The next half hour was hectic in a groveling sort of way. Retrieving
anything from behind Simon's ancient claw-footed bathtub was a most
difficult feat. There was barely space to get an arm under it and at
one point the warping of the floor boards prevented even that. Besides,
there was the host of dust-shrouded objects it had previously been too
much trouble to tease out--an accumulation of decades. At first Simon
tried to guide himself by the faint flopping noises along the hidden
base of the wall, but these soon ceased.
Being on your knees and your chest with an ear against the floor and
an arm strainingly outstretched is probably not the best position to
assume while weird trains of thought go hooting through your head, but
sometimes it has to happen that way. First came a remembered piece
of neighborhood lore that supported the possibility of a connection
between the house next door and the tiny pink aquatic creature now
suffering minute agonies behind the bathtub. No one knew what ancient
and probably larceny-minded amateur plumber was responsible, but the
old-timers assured Simon there was a link between the water supply of
the Russians' house with its aerial cistern and that of the building
containing Simon's studio and several smaller apartments; at any
rate they maintained that there had been a time during the period
when the bootlegger was storing hooch in the water tank that several
neighborhood cold-water taps were dispensing a weak but nonetheless
authoritative mixture of bourbon and branch water.
So, thought Simon as he groped and strained, if the Russians were
somehow responsible for this weird fishlet, there was no insuperable
difficulty in understanding how it might have gotten here.
But that was the least of Simon's preoccupations. He scrabbled wildly
and unsuccessfully for several minutes, and then realizing he would
never get anywhere in this unsystematic manner, he began to remove the
accumulated debris piece by piece: dark cracked ends of soap, washrags
dried out in tortured attitudes, innumerable dark-dyed cigarette
stumps, several pocket magazines with bleached wrinkled pages, empty
and near-empty medicine bottles and pill vials, rusty hairpins, bobby
pins, safety pins, crumpled toothpaste tubes (and a couple for oil
paint), a gray toothbrush, a fifty-cent piece and several pennies, the
mummy of a mouse, a letter from Picasso, and last of all, from the dark
corner behind the bathtub's inside claw, the limp pitiful thing he was
seeking.
It was even tinier than he'd thought. He carefully washed the dust and
flug off it, but it was clearly dead and its resemblance to Grushenka
Stulnikov-Gurevich had become problematical--indeed, Simon decided that
someone seeing it now for the first time would think it a freak minnow
or monstrous tadpole and nothing more, though mutation or disease had
obviously been at work. The illusion of a miniature mermaid still
existed in the tapering tail and armlike appendages, but it was faint.
He tried to remember what he knew about salamanders--almost nothing,
it turned out. He thought of embryos, but his mind veered away from the
subject.
He wandered back into the studio carrying the thing in his hand. He
climbed the stepladder by the north window and studied the house
next door. What windows he could see were dark. He got a very vague
impression that the roof had changed. After he had strained his
eyes for some time he fancied he could see a faint path of greenish
luminescence streaming between the pent-shack and the water-tank, but
it was very faint indeed and might only be his vision swimming.
He climbed down the stepladder and stood for a moment weighing the tiny
dead thing in his hand. It occurred to him that one of his friends at
the university could dig up a zoologist to pass on his find.
But Simon's curiosity was more artistic than scientific. In the end he
twisted a bit of cellophane around the thing, placed it on the ledge
of his easel and went off to bed ... and to a series of disturbingly
erotic dreams.
* * * * *
Next day he got up late and, after breakfasting on black coffee,
gloomed around the studio for a while, picking things up and putting
them down. He glanced frequently at the stepladder, but resisted the
temptation to climb up and have another look next door. Sighing, he
thumbtacked a sheet of paper to a drawing board and half-heartedly
began blocking in a female figure. It was insipid and lifeless.
Stabbing irritably at the heavy curve of the figure's hip, he broke
his charcoal. "Damn!" he said, glaring around the room. Abandoning
all pretense, he threw the charcoal on the floor and climbed the
stepladder. He pressed his nose against the glass.
In daylight, the adjoining roof looked bare and grimy. There was a big
transparent pipe running between the water tank and the shack, braced
in two places by improvised-looking wooden scaffolding. Listening
intently, Simon thought he could hear a motor going in the shack. The
water looked sallow green. It reminded Simon of those futuristic algae
farms where the stuff is supposed to be pumped through transparent
pipes to expose it to sunlight. There seemed to be a transparent top
on the water tank too--it was too high for Simon to see, but there
was a gleam around the edge. Staring at the pipe again, Simon got the
impression there were little things traveling in the water, but he
couldn't make them out.
Climbing down in some excitement, Simon got the twist of cellophane
from the ledge of the easel and stared at its contents. Wild thoughts
were tumbling through his head as he got back up on the stepladder.
Sunlight flashed on the greenish water pipe between the tank and the
shack, but after the first glance he had no eyes for it. Grushenka
Stulnikov-Gurevich had her face tragically pressed to the window of
the shack. She was wearing the black dress with high neck and puffed
shoulders. At that moment she looked straight at him. She lifted her
hands and seemed to speak imploringly. Then she slowly sank from sight
as if, it horridly occurred to Simon, into quicksand.
Simon sprang from his chair, heart beating wildly, and ran down the
stairs to the street. Two or three passersby paused to study him as he
alternately pounded the flaking green door of the Russians' house and
leaned on the button. Also watching was the shirt-sleeved driver of a
moving van, emblazoned "Stulnikov-Gurevich Enterprises," which almost
filled the street in front of the house.
The door opened narrowly. A man with a square black beard frowned out
of it. He topped Simon by almost a head.
"Yes?" Ivan the Bomber asked, in a deep, exasperated voice.
"I must see the lady of the house immediately," Simon cried. "Your
sister, I believe. She's in danger." He surged forward.
The butt of the Bomber's right palm took him firmly in the chest and he
staggered back. The Bomber said coldly, "My sister is--ha!--taking a
bath."
Simon cried, "In that case she's drowning!" and surged forward again,
but the Bomber's hand stopped him short. "I'll call the police!" Simon
shouted, flailing his limbs. The hand at his chest suddenly stopped
pushing and began to pull. Gripped by the front of his shirt, Simon
felt himself being drawn rapidly inside. "Let go! Help, a kidnapping!"
he shouted to the inquisitive faces outside, before the door banged
shut.
"No police!" rumbled the Bomber, assisting Simon upstairs.
"Now look here," Simon protested futilely. In the two-story-high
living room to his right, the pipes of an organ gleamed golden from
the shadows. At the second landing, a disheveled figure met them,
glasses twinkling--Vasily the Vodka Breather. He spoke querulously in
Russian to Ivan, who replied shortly, then Vasily turned and the three
of them crowded up the narrow third flight to the pent-shack. This
housed a small noisy machine, perhaps an aerator of some sort, for
bubbles were streaming into the transparent pipe where it was connected
to the machine; and under the pipe, sitting with an idiot smile on a
chair of red plush and gilt, was a pale black-mustached man. An empty
clear-glass bottle with a red and gold label lay on the floor at his
feet. The opposite side of the room was hidden by a heavy plastic
shower curtain. Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich was not in view.
Ivan said something explosive, picking up the bottle and staring at
it. "Vodka!" he went on. "I have told you not to mix the pipe and the
vodka! Now see what you have done!"
"To me it seemed hospitable," said Vasily with an apologetic gesture.
"Besides, only one bottle--"
Ducking under the pipe where it crossed the pent-shack, Ivan picked
up the pale man and dumped him crosswise in the chair, with his
patent-leather shoes sticking up on one side and his plump hands
crossed over his chest. "Let him sleep. First we must take down all
the apparatus, before the capitalistic police arrive. Now: what to do
with this one?" He looked at Simon, and clenched one large and hairy
fist.
"_Nyet-nyet-nyet_," said the Vodka Breather, and went to whisper in
Ivan's ear. They both stared at Simon, who felt uncomfortable and began
to back toward the door; but Ivan ducked agilely under the pipe and
grasped him by the arm, pulling him effortlessly toward the roof exit.
"Just come this way if you please, Mr. Gru-_ay_," said Vasily, hurrying
after. As they left the shack, he picked up a kitchen chair.
Crossing the roof, Simon made a sudden effort and wrenched himself
free. They caught him again at the edge of the roof, where he had
run with nothing clearly in mind, but with his mouth open to yell.
Suspended in the grip of the two Russians, with Ivan's meaty palm over
his mouth, Simon had a momentary glimpse of the street below. A third
bearded figure, Mikhail the Religious, was staring up at them from
the sunny sidewalk. The melancholy face, the deep-socketed tormented
eyes, and the narrow beard tangled with the dangling crucifix combined
to give the effect of a Tolstoy novel's dust-jacket. As they hauled
Simon away, he had the impression that a chilly breeze had sprung up
and the street had darkened. In his ears was Mikhail's distant, oddly
discordant whistling.
Grunting, the two brothers set Simon down on the kitchen chair and slid
him across the roof until something hard but resilient touched the top
of his head. It was the plastic pipe, through which, peering upward, he
could see myriads of tiny polliwog-shapes flitting back and forth.
"Do us a kindness not to make noise," said Ivan, removing his palm. "My
brother Vasily will now explain." He went away.
* * * * *
Curiosity as much as shock kept Simon in his chair. Vasily, bobbing
his head and smiling, sat down tailor-fashion on the roof in front
of him. "First I must tell you, Mr. Gru-_ay_, that I am specialist
in biological sciences. Here you see results of my most successful
experiment." He withdrew a round clear-glass bottle from his pocket and
unscrewed the top.
"Ah?" said Simon tentatively.
"Indeed yes. In my researches, Mr. Gru-_ay_, I discovered a chemical
which will inhibit growth at any level of embryonic development,
producing a viable organism at that point. The basic effect of
this chemical is always toward survival at whatever level of
development--one cell, a blastula, a worm, a fish, a four-legger.
This research, which Lysenko scoffed at when I told him of it, I had
no trouble in keeping secret, though at the time I was working as the
unhappy collaborator of the godless soviets. But perhaps I am being too
technical?"
"Not at all," Simon assured him.
"Good," Vasily said with simple satisfaction and gulped at his bottle.
"Meanwhile my brother Mikhail was a religious brother at a monastery
near Mount Athos, my Nihilist brother Ivan was in central Europe,
while my third brother Lev, who is of commercial talents, had preceded
us to the New World, where we always felt it would some day be our
destiny to join one another.
"With the aid of brother Ivan, I and my sister Grushenka escaped from
Russia. We picked up Mikhail from his monastery and proceeded here,
where Lev had become a capitalist business magnate.
"My brothers, Ivan especially, were interested in my research. He
had a theory that we could eventually produce hosts of men in this
way, whole armies and political parties, all Nihilist and all of them
Stulnikov-Gureviches. I assured him that this was impossible, that I
could not play Cadmus, for free-swimming forms are one thing, we have
the way to feed them in the aqueous medium; but to make fully developed
mammals placental nourishment is necessary--that I cannot provide. Yet
to please him I begin with (pardon me!) the egg of my sister, that was
as good a beginning as any and perhaps it intrigued my vanity. Ivan
dreamed his dreams of a Nihilist Stulnikov-Gurevich humanity--it was
harmless, as I told myself."
Simon stared at him glassy-eyed. Something rather peculiar was
beginning to happen inside his head--about an inch under the point
where the cool water-filled plastic pipe pressed down on his scalp.
Little ghostly images were darting--delightfully wispy little
girl-things, smiling down at him impudently, then flirting away with a
quick motion of their mermaid tails.
The sky had been growing steadily darker and now there came the growl
of thunder. Against the purple-gray clouds Simon could barely make out
the semi-transparent shapes of the polliwogs in the pipe over his head;
but the images inside his mind were growing clearer by the minute.
"Ah, we have a storm," Vasily observed as the thunder growled again.
"That reminds me of Mikhail, who is much influenced by our Finnish
grandmother. He had the belief as a child that he could call up the
winds by whistling for them--he even learned special wind musics from
her. Later he became a Christian religious--there are great struggles
in him. Mikhail objected to my researches when he heard I used the
egg of my sister. He said we will produce millions of souls who are
not baptized. I asked him how about the water they are in, he replied
this is not the same thing, these little swimmers will wriggle in hell
eternally. This worried him greatly. We tried to tell him I had not
used the egg of my sister, only the egg of a fish.
"But he did not believe this, because my sister changed greatly at
the time. She no longer spoke. She put on my mother's bathing costume
(we are a family people) and retired to the bathtub all day long. I
accepted this--at least in the water she is not violent. Mikhail said,
"See, her soul is now split into many unredeemed sub-souls, one each
for the little swimmers. There is a sympathy between them--a hypnotic
vibration. So long as you keep them near her, in that tank on the
roof, this will be. If they were gone from there, far from there, the
sub-souls would reunite and Grushenka's soul would be one again." He
begged me to stop my research, to dump it in the sea, to scatter it
away, but Lev and Ivan demand I keep on. Yet Mikhail warned me that
works of evil end in the whirlwind. I am torn and undecided." He gulped
at his vodka.
Thunder growled louder. Simon was thinking, dreamily, that if the soul
of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich were split into thousands of sub-souls,
vibrating hynotically in the nearby water tank, with at least one of
them escaping as far as his bathtub, then it was no wonder if Grushenka
had a strange attraction for him.
"But that is not yet the worst," Vasily continued. "The hypnotic
vibrations of the free-swimming ones in their multitude turn out to
have a stimulating effect on any male who is near. Their sub-minds
induce dreams of the piquant sort. Lev says that to make money for the
work we must sell these dreams to rich men. I protest, but to no avail."
"Lev is maddened for money. Now besides selling the dreams I find he
plans to sell the creatures themselves, sell them one by one, but keep
enough to sell the dreams too. It is a madness."
The darkness had become that of night. The thunder continued to growl
and now it seemed to Simon that it had music in it. Visions swam
through his mind to its rhythm--hordes of swimming pygmy souls,
of unborn water babies, migrations of miniature mermaids. The pipe
hanging between water tank and pent-shack became in his imagination
a giant umbilicus or a canal for a monstrous multiple birth. Sitting
beneath it, helpless to move, he focused his attention with increasing
pleasure on the active, supple, ever more human girl-bodies that swam
across his mind. Now more mermaid than tadpole, with bright smiling
lips and eyes, long Lorelei-hair trailing behind them, they darted and
hovered caressingly. In their wide-cheeked oval faces, he discovered
without shock, there was a transcendent resemblance to the features of
Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich--a younger, milk-skinned maiden of the
steppes, with challenging eyes and fingers that brushed against him
with delightful shocks....
"So it is for me the great problem," Vasily's distant voice
continued. "I see in my work only the pure research, the play of
the mind. Lev sees money, Ivan sees dragon teeth--fodder for his
political cannon--Mikhail sees unshriven souls, Grushenka sees--who
knows?--madness. It is indeed one great problem."
* * * * *
Thunder came again, crashingly this time. The door of the pent-shack
opened. Framed in it stood Ivan the Bomber. "Vasily!" he roared. "Do
you know what that idiot is doing now?"
As the thunder and his voice trailed off together, Simon became aware
at last of the identity of the other sound, which had been growing in
volume all the time.
Simultaneously Vasily struggled to his feet.
"The organ!" he cried. "Mikhail is _playing_ the Whirlwind Music! We
must stop him!" Pausing only for a last pull at the bottle, he charged
into the pent-shack, following Ivan.
Wind was shaking the heavy pipe over Simon's head, tossing him back and
forth in the chair. Looking with an effort toward the west, Simon saw
the reason: a spinning black pencil of wind that was writing its way
toward them in wreckage across the intervening roofs.
The chair fell under him. Stumbling across the roof, he tugged futilely
at the door to the pent-shack, then threw himself flat, clawing at the
tarpaper.
There was a mounting roar. The top of the water tank went spinning off
like a flying saucer. Momentarily, as if it were a giant syringe, the
whirlwind dipped into the tank. Simon felt himself sliding across the
roof, felt his legs lifting. He fetched up against the roof's low wall
and at that moment the wind let go of him and his legs touched tarpaper
again.
Gaining his feet numbly, Simon staggered into the leaning pent-shack.
The pale man was nowhere to be seen, the plush chair empty. The curtain
at the other side of the room had fallen with its rods, revealing a
bathtub more antique than Simon's. In the tub, under the window, sat
Grushenka. The lightning flares showed her with her chin level with
the water, her eyes placidly staring, her mouth opening and closing.
Simon found himself putting his arms around the black-clad figure. With
a straining effort he lifted her out of the tub, water sloshing all
over his legs, and half carried, half slid with her down the stairs.
He fetched up panting and disheveled at the top landing, his attention
riveted by the lightning-illuminated scene in the two-story-high living
room below. At the far end of it a dark-robed figure crouched at the
console of the mighty organ, like a giant bat at the base of the
portico of a black and gold temple. In the center of the room Ivan was
in the act of heaving above his head his globular leather case.
Mikhail darted a look over his shoulder and sprang to one side. The
projectile crashed against the organ. Mikhail picked himself up,
tearing something from his neck. Ivan lunged forward with a roar.
Mikhail crashed a fist against his jaw. The Bomber went down and didn't
come up. Mikhail unwrapped his crucifix from his fingers and resumed
playing.
With a wild cry Simon heaved himself to his feet, stumbled over
Grushenka's sodden garments, and pitched headlong down the stairs.
When he came to, the house was empty and the Stulnikov moving van
was gone. At the front door he was met by a poker-faced young man
who identified himself as a member of the FBI. Simon showed him the
globular case Ivan had thrown at the organ. It proved to contain a
bowling ball.
The young gentleman listened to his story without changing expression,
thanked him warmly, and shooed him out.
The Stulnikov-Gureviches disappeared for good, though not quite without
a trace. Simon found this item in the next evening's paper, the first
of many he accumulated yearningly in a scrapbook during the following
months:
MERMAID RAIN A HOAX, SCIENTIST DECLARES
_Milford, Pa._--The "mermaid rain" reported here has been
declared a fraud by an eminent European biologist. Vasily
Stulnikov-Gurevich, formerly Professor of Genetics at Pire
University, Latvia, passing through here on a cross-country trip,
declared the miniature "mermaids" were "albino tadpoles, probably
scattered about as a hoax by schoolboys."
The professor added, "I would like to know where they got them,
however. There is clear evidence of mutation, due perhaps to fallout."
Dr. Stulnikov directed his party in a brief but intensive search for
overlooked specimens. His charming silent sister, Grushenka Stulnikov,
wearing a quaint Latvian swimming costume, explored the shallows of the
Delaware.
After collecting as many specimens as possible, the professor and his
assistants continued their trip in their unusual camping car. Dr.
Stulnikov intends to found a biological research center "in the calm
and tolerant atmosphere of the West Coast," he declared.
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