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Title: Or Darwin, if you prefer
Author: Mel Hunter
Release date: July 31, 2024 [eBook #74161]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1954
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OR DARWIN, IF YOU PREFER ***
Or Darwin, If You Prefer
By Mel Hunter
Mr. Harbinger could not quite
believe in the Mouth. But poor
Mr. Harbinger--or Darwin, if you
prefer--are gone to other times.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Fantastic Universe September 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_Mr. Hunter's superb art work has appeared on a baker's dozen
science fiction magazine covers during the past year, but
incredible as it may seem with this story we introduce him to the
reading public for the first time as a science fiction writer.
We say incredible, because this is not a beginner's story. It is
sparkling, sophisticated, erudite--the work of a craftsman._
Mr. Harbinger was tired of his job. In fact he was so tired of it he
put down his pencil in the middle of a series of chemical notations.
All noted, he realized with sudden clarity, in a disgustingly neat and
orderly fashion.
"Mr. Cushman, sir," he said quietly to the small, prissy man at the
desk near the wall, "why don't you take these titrations and jam them
straight up the middle of you know where?"
And with that previously inconceivable remark Mr. Harbinger put on his
hat, removed his spotless, starched smock and passed through the doors
of the Cushman Chemical Co., Inc. for the last time and decidedly the
most satisfactory time.
Upon arriving home to his ridiculously--he suddenly noted with even
greater clarity than before--orderly, proper, drab room, Mr. Harbinger
sighed. He removed his hat, pocketed his glasses, and sank in bleak
defeat into the sole, uncomfortable easy chair which graced his room.
There was another of those momentarily crystal-clear glimpses.
"I've trated my last ti," he said aloud with the depths of the Styx in
his colorless voice.
Closing his mind as best he could to this very disconcerting habit that
had acquired him, Mr. Harbinger continued to sit there, looking at the
dingy wall he had examined minutely now, every evening, for the past
thirteen years.
_I would appreciate it if that wall would just go away_, he thought,
knowing that it wouldn't, and that he was probably condemned to stare
at it, or one worse than it, every evening for the rest of his life.
It was while he was contemplating a particularly uninteresting spot
in the fading design of the wallpaper which was intended to decorate
his room that he noticed it wasn't a spot at all, but an _eye_. Of all
things!
Reacting in exactly the same manner as he would when confronted with a
line in a newspaper ad which defied his watery vision, he plucked his
pince-nez from a vest pocket and placed them in their accustomed notch
upon the bridge of his nose.
"Go away," he said to it, when he had assured himself that it was most
decidedly an _eye_.
"Why?" returned a _mouth_, suddenly materializing out of the design
below both _eyes_, the second of which had resolved itself in time to
wink at him in a most disconcerting manner, almost rudely, one might
say.
"Because," Mr. Harbinger faltered, at a loss as to how best to converse
with a disembodied _mouth_ and a pair of floating _eyes_ which could
not even remain on a line with each other, but kept drifting about over
a small area of the wall, bumping together now and again.
"In a moment you'll commit a non-sequitur like 'Oh yeah?' and I will
scream," the _mouth_ promised.
Mr. Harbinger, after a moment's pause in which he frantically tried to
swallow those very words, somehow risen to his lips for the first time
in his life, grasped at a straw.
"Would a drink help make you go away?" he quavered. He was now
beginning to feel that his mind was running down, and since he had
never had a drink in his life, he possessed the abstainer's conception
of alcohol as an instantaneous neural bombshell.
"A drink for which one of us?" was the reply, and it sent him off in a
whole new wilderness of speculation.
"Which one of the three of you needs one?" he gulped, completely
bemused.
"Three of who?" the _mouth_ asked, in some consternation. Almost, Mr.
Harbinger thought, in a trace of fright quickly concealed. "Oh, you
mean those two _eyes_," it said laughing in obvious relief. "I'm sorry
if their moving about that way upsets you, but I seem to have a bit
of trouble with my control." The tone became somewhat rueful. "The
mechanisms are not in very good condition these days."
"Listen," exclaimed Mr. Harbinger, "If I am going to have
hallucinations, I want, no, I insist that they be of an ordinary garden
variety, not cluttered with such feeble self-excuses as machinery being
at fault." He was quite wrought up, and to be so shook him visibly, for
he was accustomed to a most unruffled, detached manner of thought.
"The fault lies not with machinery, or, as I might like to tell
myself, with this modern technical age running away too fast for us
poor day-by-day mortals to keep up with it!" Mr. Harbinger took a deep
breath, said, "That's not it at all. It's just that I have always had a
romantic streak in me that is dying of malnutrition. I'm choked by the
tedium, the huge, calibrated double-titrated BOREDOM of it all!"
He sat down limply, breathless, for this was a major oration for Mr.
Harbinger to deliver all at once.
"Hell," said the _mouth_. "Me too."
"What?" Mr. Harbinger faltered, becoming somewhat surer by the instant
that such a remark was out of character for a deranged hallucination.
It seemed to him, though he admittedly was ceasing to be a reliable
judge of such matters, that the particular hallucination in question
should be taking more the part of the strangling Don Juan in him, the
drowning Errol Flynn, the departing Da Vinci.
"I said, 'Me too,'" the _mouth_ declared again, pausing then to retract
a wandering left _eye_, which had developed a fondness for a repetition
of the pattern a foot or two down the wall.
"Where I come from there is nothing but boredom, too," it went on. "All
day, every day, I run test checks on various gadgets, finding flaws,
and lacking the materials to put them in proper order, even if I had
the knowledge, and even if anybody cared whether I did or not."
* * * * *
It pursed itself, as if remembering the pall of it all, and continued.
"I had hoped to find a Time when people were lively; when there was zip
and a dash to just getting up in the morning; when somebody would care
what you did every day. Oh, not that they don't care if I should miss
a day," it quickly qualified. "They care very much about _that_. Laws,
you know, but just that and no more.
"Why, if I never succeeded in repairing a single machine my whole life
long, no one would say a word. I only try out of boredom, and even
that gets dull after a few years."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," Mr. Harbinger said, sitting back in
his chair when he realized that it was silly to hang on the words of an
hallucination from the depths of one's own mind. "Really!" he thought,
"One should already know every word it said." But then he puzzled again
over the content of the _mouth's_ words.
"It's very simple," the _mouth_ went on. "Should we really get
a machine in absolutely perfect working order, it is immediately
carted away to a warehouse and stored, all snug in an indestructible
cocoon ... so it will never wear out again, you know." It sighed.
"Really doesn't pay to get interested, or try to be a perfectionist,
any more."
Mr. Harbinger felt an unaccountable twinge of sympathy at the truly
apathetic tone of the _mouth_, which appeared to droop a bit at the
corners, as though it could never again think of a thing to smile at.
The _eyes_ drooped too, if such a thing can be conceived, though he
had an extraordinary disinclination to look at them, being continually
unnerved by the way they insisted on drifting about.
"Cup of tea?" he asked nervously, offering this small irrelevancy as a
means of changing a subject which so clearly depressed his parturated
companion ... nor did the subtle development of his concept of the
apparition on the wall escape his notice.
He now seemed to be of two minds over the whole thing. Either he
was succumbing to the reality of his hallucination--and his sketchy
remembrance of college Psych told him that meant he was either very
sane or very insane; he couldn't recollect which--either that or he was
having the scientific, or para-scientific, adventure of the age.
"Why, I'd love one!" answered the _mouth_, the corners undrooping
noticeably. "I had no idea you Twentieth Centuryites were so civilized
as all that.... Tea. Imagine!"
Mr. Harbinger fairly popped out of the chair, unstrung again at the
reference, clearly made in deprecation, to his own century. However,
he covered over admirably the mental abyss which yawned at his feet by
clattering about among the few pieces of chipped china in his cupboard
as though his sanity depended on the amount of distracting noise he
could wring from the simple act of setting out a tea service for two.
And indeed, for the moment, it did.
He accepted gratefully, to put it mildly, the few moments respite
accorded him by the small, secure hum-drum of preparing the hot water,
of fussing over just the minutely exact amount of tea leaves to be
spooned into each cup.
Once again, as he invariably did each time he prepared the beverage,
he silently congratulated himself on his one small talent ... but the
dilute pleasure to be derived from such a trivia evaporated the instant
he considered what would again confront him when he turned from the
tiny Pullman kitchenette.
He grew faint at the thought of being forced once more to brave the
wandering improbable _eyes_, and the completely unthinkable _mouth_.
A worse thought crossed his reeling mind as he started for the other
side of the room, trying to walk the tea over with his eyes closed,
but giving that up as impossible when he remembered the perilously
threadbare condition of his rug.
"Will I have to"--pause--"help you drink it?" The cups clattered
betrayingly in each hand, no matter how mightily he strove to control
his nerves.
"Heavens no," laughed the _mouth_. One _eye_ crinkled in apparent
amusement, the other continued to contemplate what Mr. Harbinger
referred to as "the W.C."
A _hand_ shot out of the wall and tapped Mr. Harbinger on the shoulder
from the side of his weakest eye.
At this completely unexpected assault, poor Mr. Harbinger gave a
despairing little gasp, and would have dropped both cups smash on the
floor had not a second _hand_ materialized instantly, and snatched them
both, more or less expertly, in mid-air, spilling hardly a drop or two.
"My!" Mr. Harbinger mumbled weakly, sinking like a wilting leaf into
his patently uneasy easy chair. "I'm afraid the complications of this
thing, be it lunacy or be it occult or whatever, are getting completely
beyond me."
He sat there trembling and impotent, unable to do much of anything
beyond refusing to observe the two bizarrely supported cups of steaming
tea.
At last the _mouth_ said in some reproach, "If you will be good enough
to take one of these off my hands.... Oh, I say ... off my hands!...
I'd very much like to have a bit of the other."
The left _hand_ seemed to extend itself toward Mr. Harbinger a bit,
and though he could not help but cower down in his chair, unhinged as
he was by all this, he at last realized that it would be only common
courtesy to do what the _mouth_ had asked.
So realizing, he forced, literally forced, his trembling hand to take
the cup from the proferring impossibility, and retract slowly enough to
avoid catapulting the chattering china across the room. As it was there
was a good deal of splashing before he managed to get it safe on the
small table by the side of the chair.
The _mouth_ made a creditable job of the tea-sipping, considering the
handicaps it was forced to operate under; the wandering _eyes_ and all.
And at length, after performing a most peculiar contortion in obvious
reluctance to further prostrate its host by asking for a napkin, it
voiced a thought which caught Mr. Harbinger's attention in spite of his
badly shattered composure.
"Doesn't it seem," it said musingly, almost to itself, "as though there
ought to be some way we, that is to say you and I as we exist in our
own Time, could right the wrongs of our respective situations."
It wasn't a question--more of a spoken dream thought, with all the
drifting oddness of inflection that those occasionally voiced wisps of
desire usually possess.
The very familiarity of that unmistakable kind of shading, its very
humanness convinced, in a second, Mr. Harbinger of the reality of the
thing which was occurring in his room, as all the fantastic things
which had gone before had failed to do more than terrify him beyond
enduring. He became, in that instant, a believer.
Accordingly he said the, to him, proper thing.
"I don't believe we've met."
They talked, thereafter, for hours ... long into the night; undisturbed
by the passage of time, not distracted, at least not very badly
distracted, by the recurrent pangs of the unsated supper appetite;
exchanging small bits of unhappiness in their separate lots, and each
sympathizing heartily and hopelessly with the misfortunes of the other
like two long-lost souls--as indeed they were.
The upshot of it was that they resolved to meet again in the same
manner when the conditions of their separate lives permitted, and to
this end they set a series of future dates, calculated to find the
disembodied man--whose name turned out to be Jones--at liberty to
manipulate the forbidden Time mechanism of his age at an hour when his
workshop was deserted, and when Harbinger might be expected to be at
home after the day's job hunting--a prospect from which he shrank--or a
day's work, if he should be fortunate enough to ever get another job.
A possibility he doubted, due to the precipitate, not to say frank, or
even to say vulgar, now that he thought of it, manner in which he had
informed his previous employer of his decision to resign.
But, meet they did, from time to time, and they had many good laughs
over the pun in that one. When it came to puns, Jones was pretty adept
and it was a puzzle to Mr. Harbinger how the language had changed so
little in a hundred and fifty years.
Jones cleared that up by explaining that the status quo in everything
from contraceptives to slang had been rigidly maintained and enforced
for nearly all that time, beginning with the great Scholars' Debate in
the U.N. in 1971.
Eventually, a night came when Jones greeted Mr. Harbinger with
startling news. "I don't know whether it had occurred to you," he said
slowly, "but I could arrange, I think, for you to get a job up here in
good old Two Thousand and Ninety Four if you wanted me to."
Jones said it slowly, for he had found that such novel ideas were apt
to throw Mr. Harbinger into an attack of jingling nerves by virtue of
their very novelty; a commodity he found a very hot thing to handle.
"My word!" Mr. Harbinger said, at length. "What on Earth would I do up
there? And how about identification, and all that?"
Now that he had somewhat assimilated the idea, details passed rapidly
through his head, spinning as it was now with the mystery of the even
suggested possibility of him ... HIM, Henry Harbinger, _taking a jaunt
in Time_. Oh, the ideas, the details came, but, for a few moments he
was too carried away with the ROMANCE of it all to grasp at them, to do
more than allow the 'gasping Juan,' the 'sinking Flynn,' the 'distant
Da Vinci' to reverse themselves for an instant and show small signs of
inner life.
The _mouth_ at length interrupted, though with courtesy, this reverie
which showed signs of going on and on. "Oh, the details are simple
enough," it said. "I've already taken the liberty of producing several
dozen sets of fool-proof identity files which I can bribe a Civil
Servant to slip into the Master Record Section. You would be listed as
a research chemist, and given unlimited funds to experiment to your
heart's content, and with no control exercised over the work you choose
to do."
"Unbelievable," Mr. Harbinger whispered, all the while wanting
desperately to believe such a miraculous thing could somehow come to
pass.
The _mouth_ smiled. The _eyes_ crinkled. Then the _mouth_ said, "Hmmm,
pick a name. Smith, Ackerman, Evans, Daugherty ... all good solid names
to fit your appearance."
Mr. Harbinger rose to the delicately extended bait at last. "I imagine,
with a little chicanery, I could arrange for you to get into something
here too, if you would want to."
He rose from his chair, fired and appalled at once by the notion of
bringing a Civil Servant, or some such Romantic dastardy. Pacing the
floor, he huffed and puffed to himself in contemplation of intrigue,
looking for all the world like a small boy planning a daring raid on a
neighbor's pear tree.
"Social Security ..." he mumbled. "Voter's registration ... Income Tax
records ... hmmm."
As he paced, the _eyes_ wandered alarmingly over the surface of the
wall, but he didn't notice, having long since become more or less
accustomed to that small absurdity.
At last he stopped dead, in possession of the solution, and
relieved--though he would never admit it, least of all to himself--to
see a way around the bribery and such things, Romantic though they
doubtless were.
"You can take mine, if you don't mind the name, and all. My record is
clean--never been arrested, except once for jay-walking ten years or so
ago."
He paused to consider the ramifications of this infinitesimal
aberration, but at length decided, with much humming and vacillation,
that there was no chance of his fingerprints having been taken for
that; and remembering that his state did not require them on a driver's
license, either.
Finally they agreed to try it. There was a slight bit of trepidation
on Jones's part, for he explained to Mr. Harbinger that it would be
necessary to draw mightily on the power supply of the area surrounding
his workshop. But that the exchange would be effected instantly by
the Time Mechanism, as he always called it, and that, by the time
anyone arrived at the workshop from Master Power to investigate,
Mr. Harbinger--or Darwin, as he would be in his new Life and Time,
he having taken great pleasure in the illustrious history of that
appellation, and insisted on it--would be long gone in the streets and
away, safe in his new identity.
They shook hands on it, and a queer gesture it must have been....
At last the appointed day arrived. Then the appointed hour, and at
long last, the appointed minute and second. Jones had assured Mr.
Harbinger--or Darwin, if you prefer--that he had taken extraordinary
pains to make sure the Time Mechanism would be in perfect working
order. But unfortunately the devil-may-care attitude of the technicians
over at Master Power, was beyond his ability to rectify; indeed, had
not occurred to him at all.
As a regrettable consequence, at the instant he threw the switch, at
the precise second the Time Mechanism seemed to swell itself for the
momentous event it was about to initiate, a cat-napping n'er-do-well of
a technician over at Master Power, a recognized incompetent among his
fellows and a braggart to boot, shifted his up-propped feet from one
instrument bank to another more comfortable.
And in doing so, tripped a switch with a careless toe; robbed the great
Time Mechanism of the last ounce of energy necessary for the task it
was attempting, and so stranded poor Mr. Harbinger--or Darwin, if you
prefer--and poor Mr. Jones in the constantly shifting anomalies and
vicissitudes of Variable Time....
Perhaps you have seen them occasionally for an instant: an eye peering
at you in pitiable entreaty from under a leaf of a tree as you pass. Of
course, when you look closely, they--or whichever of them it was; poor
Mr. Harbinger, or Darwin, if you prefer, or perhaps it was poor Mr.
Jones--are gone on to other Times, and other crannies to peer out of
for a moment.
Perhaps you have heard a _voice_ call out to you on some unlikely
occasion, or in some improbable place. I remember once hearing a
_voice_ distinctly cry out, "You there...."
* * * * *
But when I turned about I could catch only a fleeting glimpse of a
_mouth_ and one _eye_ as they vanished from the side of a near-by
church steeple, thirty feet or so in the air.
I suppose it was only the merest chance that I happened to glance
directly at that spot as I turned, or else I should never have known
who it was who called.
As it is I still wonder whether it was poor Mr. Jones, or poor Mr.
Harbinger--or Darwin, if you prefer.
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