“At Modesti’s.”
“Well, don’t get any more. Here, I’d better ring for more.”
“Never mind, I have more in the refrigerator.”
When she brought the new bottle in, he was sitting there, clever and alive and fresh. “You look wonderful,” she said.
“Feel fine. You’re beautiful. I think I love you more tonight than ever.”
She waited for him to fall sidewise and stare the stare of the dead. “Here we go,” he said, opening the second bottle.
When the second bottle was empty, an hour had passed. He was telling witty little stories and holding her hand and kissing her gently now and again. At last he turned to her and said, “You seem quiet tonight, Martha? Anything wrong?”
“No,” she said.
She had seen the news item last week, the item that had finally set her worrying and planning, that had explained her loneliness in his presence. About the Marionettes. Marionettes, Incorporated. Not that they really existed, surely not. But there was a rumor. Police were investigating.
Life-size marionettes, mechanical, stringless, secretive, duplicates of real people. One might buy them for ten thousand dollars on some distant black market. One could be measured for a replica of one’s self. If one grew weary of social functions, one could send the replica out to wine, to dine, to shake hands, to trade gossip with Mrs. Rinehart on your left, Mr. Simmons on your right, Miss Glenner across the table.
Think of the political tirades one might miss! Think of the bad shows one need never see. Think of the dull people one could snub without actually snubbing. And, last of all, think of the jeweled loved ones you could ignore, yet not ignore. What would a good slogan be? She Need Never Know? Don’t Tell Your Best Friends? It Walks, It Talks, It Sneezes, It Says “Mama”?
When she thought of this she became almost hysterical. Of course it had not been proven that such things as Marionettes existed. Just a sly rumor, with enough to it to make a sensitive person crawl with horror.
“Abstracted again,” he said, interrupting her quietness. “There you go, wandering off. What’s in that pretty head of yours?”
She looked at him. It was foolish; at any moment he might convulse and die. Then she would be sorry for her jealousy.
Without thinking, she said, “Your mouth; it tastes funny.”
“Dear me,” he said. “I shall have to see to that, eh?”
“It’s tasted funny for some time.”
For the first time he seemed concerned. “Has it? I’m sorry. I’ll see my doctor.”
“It’s not that important.” She felt her heart beating quickly and she was cold. It was his mouth. After all, no matter how perfect chemists were, could they analyze and reproduce the exact taste? Hardly. Taste was individual. Taste was one thing to her, something else to another. There was where they had fallen down. She would not put up with it another minute. She walked over to the other couch, reached down and drew out the gun.
“What’s that?” he said, looking at it. “Oh my God,” he laughed. “A gun. How dramatic.”
“I’ve caught on to you,” she said.
“Is there anything to catch on to?” he wanted to know, calmly, his mouth straight, his eyes twinkling.
“You’ve been lying to me. You haven’t been here in eight weeks or more,” she said.
“Is that true? Where have I been then?”
“With Alice Summers, I wouldn’t doubt. I’ll bet you’re with her right now.”
“Is that possible?” he asked.
“I don’t know Alice Summers, I’ve never met her, but I think I’ll call her apartment right now.”
“Do that,” he said, looking straight at her.
“I will,” she said, moving to the phone. Her hand shook so that she could hardly dial information. While waiting for the number to come through she watched Leonard and he watched her with the eye of a psychiatrist witnessing a not-unusual phenomenon.
“You are badly off,” he said. “My dear Martha—”
“Sit down!”
“My dear Martha,” he moved back in the couch, chuckling softly. “What have you been reading?”
“About the Marionettes is all.”
“That poppycock? Good God, Martha, I’m ashamed of you. It’s not true. I looked into it!”
“What!”
“Of course!” he cried, in delight. “I have so many social obligations, and then my first wife came back from India as you know and demanded my time and I thought how fine it would be if I had a replica of myself made, as bait you might say, to turn my wife off my trail, to keep her busy, how nice, eh? But it was all false. Just me. I thought I needed a change.
So I went on to Alice and tired of her. And went on to Helen Kingsley, you remember her, don’t you? And tired of her. And on to Ann Montgomery. And that didn’t last. Oh, Martha, there are at least six duplicates of me, mechanical hypocrites, ticking away tonight, in all parts of the town, keeping six people happy. And do you know what I am doing, the real I?
“I’m home in bed early for the first time in thirty years, reading my little book of Montaigne’s essays and enjoying it and drinking a hot glass of chocolate milk and turning out the lights at ten o’clock. I’ve been asleep for an hour now, and I shall sleep the sleep of the innocent until morning and arise refreshed and free.”
“Stop!” she shrieked.
“I’ve got to tell you,” he said. “You’ve cut several of my ligaments with your bullets. I can’t get up. The doctors, if they came, would find me out anyway, I’m not that perfect. Perfect enough, but not that good. Oh, Martha, I didn’t want to hurt you. Believe me. I wanted only your happiness. That’s why I was so careful with my planned withdrawal. I spent fifteen thousand dollars for this replica, perfect in every detail. There are variables. The saliva for one. A regrettable error. It set you off. But you must know that I loved you.”
She would fall at any moment, writhing into insanity, she thought. He had to be stopped from talking.
“And when I saw how the others loved me,” he whispered to the ceiling, eyes wide, “I had to provide replicas for them, poor dears. They love me so. You won’t tell them, will you, Martha? Promise me you won’t give the show away. I’m a very tired old man, and I want only peace, a book, some milk and a lot of sleep. You won’t call them up and give it away?”
“All this year, this whole year, I’ve been alone, alone every night,” she said, the coldness filling her. “Talking to a mechanical horror! In love with nothingness! Alone all that time, when I could have been out with someone real!”
“I can still love you, Martha.”
“Oh God!” she cried, and seized up the hammer.
“Don’t, Martha!”
She smashed his head in and beat at his chest and his thrashing arms and wild legs. She beat at the soft head until steel shone through, and sudden explosions of wire and brass coggery showered about the room with metal tinkles.
“I love you,” said the man’s mouth. She struck it with the hammer and the tongue fell out. The glass eyes rolled on the carpet. She pounded at the thing until it was strewn like the remains of a child’s electric train on the floor. She laughed while she was doing it.
In the kitchen she found several cardboard boxes. She loaded the cogs and wires and metal into these and sealed the tops. Ten minutes later she had summoned the houseboy from below.
“Deliver these packages to Mr. Leonard Hill, 17 Elm Drive,” she said, and tipped the boy. “Right now, tonight. Wake him up, tell him it’s a surprise package from Martha.”
“A surprise package from Martha,” said the boy.
After the door closed, she sat on the couch with the gun in her hand, turning it over and over, listening. The last thing she heard in her life was the sound of the packages being carried down the hall, the metal jingling softly, cog against cog, wire against wire, fading.
The Dragon
The night blew in the short grass on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years since a single bird had flown by in the great blind shell of sky. Long ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.
Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other’s faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.
“Don’t, idiot; you’ll give us away!”
“No matter,” said this second man. “The dragon can smell us miles off anyway. God’s breath, it’s cold. I wish I was back at the castle.”
“It’s death, not sleep we’re after. . . .”
“Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!”
“Quiet, fool! He eats men traveling alone from our town to the next!”
“Let them be eaten and let us get home!”
“Wait now; listen!”
The two men froze.
They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses’ nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.
“Ah.” The second man sighed. “What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it’s night. And then, and then, oh, sweet mortality, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn
