The First Science Fiction MEGAPACK®. Fredric Brown
a gadget I couldn’t make head or tail of—one which ordinarily I’d have passed by without a second look. It was beautifully made of brass and polished steel, and its fitted mahogany box clearly went back to the last decade of the nineteenth century. Cased with it were eight or ten brass wheels, the rim of each serrated with geometrical neatness and with its individual pattern. It had a central axis to which these might have been affixed, a plunger like a date-stamp’s, a spirit level, and two calibrated dials the purpose of which I couldn’t even guess at. The man who had it thought it might have been a check-writing device, but he couldn’t tell me how it possibly could have worked.
I bought the thing for less than twenty dollars, and that night I phoned Hoogstraten and was pleased to find him back from his journeyings. I described it to him, and instantly his voice came alive with interest. No, he couldn’t possibly come up to Saybrook, not then, but would I bring it to New York?
I hesitated, for it seemed like quite an expedition for what I assumed would be a pretty petty deal, and at once he answered my unspoken question. “You needn’t worry about the money part, Mr. Dennison—it is Dennison, isn’t it? I am accustomed to paying well for anything that meets my criteria—at least in three figures—unless, of course, the seller has already set a lower price. In this case, even if I do not buy it, I’ll make the trip worth your while.”
So I agreed to bring it to him on the Sunday, and he gave me an address near Sutton Place—his card had carried only his phone number. The cab dropped me off at two in the afternoon in front of a several-story, obviously very expensively converted brownstone, with a martial doorman mounting guard at the entrance. I waited humbly while he made his phone call, and saw that there was only a single flat on each floor.
“Mr. Hoogstraten is waiting for you,” he told me finally, giving my shoes and sports coat a supercilious farewell appraisal. “Take the elevator to the third floor.”
The elevator was smooth and swift and new, and I was whisked to my destination in an instant. There a man-servant was waiting for me—I won’t say a butler. He was short and muscular and massive, with a pale square face and huge hands. I judged him to be some sort of general factotum—chauffeur perhaps? Guard? He looked more like a hit-man. But he was polite enough, bowing me through the hall and opening the door for me.
I don’t know exactly what I had expected, but it was not the Museum of Modern Art decor that greeted me, spare and stark and rectilinear, self-consciously manipulating mass and light and shadow in grays and blacks, startling whites, intrusive yellows, solid reds, some of the furniture echoing it, some tortured, twisted, with a thin scattering of anomalous ornaments. Of the objects he collected, there was no sign.
My face, I know, must have mirrored my astonishment, but he did not notice. He had eyes only for the package I was carrying, and I saw how hard his small black pupils were in their Wedgwood settings. He did not ask me to sit down. Dressed like something from a Vanity Fair men’s fashions ad, he seized it without a word, opened it. His lips now drawn back from his almost too even teeth, he plucked the gadget from its box, hastily put the box down on a table, seated himself. For several minutes, he examined it, testing this, trying that, while I stood there uncomfortably.
Finally, “What do you suppose it is?” he asked.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” I answered. “The man I bought it from thought it might have been intended as some sort of check protector.”
He said that was nonsense, and went back to his examination for several more long, silent minutes.
Then he looked up at me. He smiled, and again I felt wrapped in coldness. “It is satisfactory,” he told me. “Yes, it is completely satisfactory. I shall derive pleasure from it.” He nodded. “Indeed yes. Will five hundred be adequate?”
“You are very generous,” I said, accepting the five hundred-dollar bills.
And at that point, a door opened and a woman entered. The effect was unbelievable. She paused, regarding us—and suddenly, as far as I was concerned, no one else was in the room. Her presence dominated it. She was tall, her hair coal black, as were her eyes. Her cheekbones were high. But the physical details were nothing compared with the totality. Suddenly I knew why men had imagined goddesses, and sacrificed to them, why there had been tilting in the lists and knightly quests, why late Victorian artists like Burne-Jones had so idealized the beauty of womankind. And simultaneously there was another surge, one I still felt when I remember her, that very natural one that sets your loins afire.
She turned toward us, and against all reason I was quite sure that she did not walk, but flowed, floated. Nor was she gowned for any such effect. She was dressed simply, in a tailored suit with white lace at the throat, and almost no jewelry; a brooch, a wedding ring.
Hoogstraten looked up, frowning slightly. “You’re going out?” he asked.
“Yes, dear,” she answered—and at the word irrational jealousy flamed in me. “Only for a—how do you say it?—for an hour or two perhaps? You do not need me here?”
She had the strangest accent I’ve ever heard, one I was quite unable to identify. All I can say is that somehow, to my ear, it sounded archaic. He didn’t even answer, his attention once more on the thing I’d sold him.
“Good-bye,” she said, smiled very slightly at me, and left.
I had to interrupt him. “Mrs. Hoogstraten?” I asked.
“Yes, yes,” he replied, a hint of irritation in his voice. “Pretty, isn’t she?” She’s magnificent! I thought. But I had sense enough not to say it. It took him a moment more to remember I was there, but with a sigh he put the object down again. “Thank you, Dennison,” he said. “You will call me if you find anything else, won’t you? Yes, yes. Now Varig will show you out.”
He must have pressed a button, because immediately the servant was at the door. Hoogstraten did not say good-bye.
That night I dreamed of her, a dream which Tennyson might have written for me, or one of the Cavalier poets, and I had a hard time explaining my abstraction to the sweet girl I was going with. She was in my mind, and would not leave, and I began to hope I’d never find another object for her husband, no matter how profitable the find might be.
As it turned out, during the next several months I found three things that seemed to have been made especially for him, and on each occasion he demanded that I bring them to him in New York. I justified it by telling myself that, after all, I was a dealer and could not forego such easy money, but I know now that it was far more the hope of seeing her even for a moment, of hearing her speak a few casual words. I dreamed of her time and again, and tormented myself with the thought of her embraced in her husband’s coldness.
My second visit went much like the first, except that she was in the room when I arrived, again attired very simply in—but what she wore is of no moment. She stood up when I walked into her presence, and though again Hoogstraten did not introduce us, she thanked me for the machine—was it not a machine?—I had sold Andreas, which had pleased him. He was a genius. His mind, it demanded problems.… It was very nice of…
I stood there tongue-tied, trapped by the magic radiating from her. Hoogstraten was already opening what I had brought him—a clock but not a clock. A thing with complicated clockwork in a case which could have been made by some exotic Faberge, which told something, but not time—at least not any time that might make sense to us. After a moment, his voice still soft, he told her to leave the room, and without demur, as I stood there grinning at her foolishly, she left. For that I hated him, and almost for spite I asked him seven thousand for the thing. He paid me seventy-five hundred, again in cash, and sent me on my way.
Two months passed before I went again, two months during which I still dreamed of her, still thought of her, wondered at whatever power she had over me, at what her life might have been before she married Hoogstraten and, indeed, why she had married him.
This time, again, she was in the room when I arrived, and again she spoke to me, nothing memorable, comments about the season possibly, or how very good I was to find another treasure