Ray Bradbury - Quicker Than the Eye

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QUICKER

THAN

THE EYE

Ray Bradbury

AVON BOOKS NEW YORK

Books by Ray Bradbury

Dandelion Wine

Dark Carnival

Death Is a Lonely Business

Fahrenheit 451

The Golden Apples of the Sun

A Graveyard for Lunatics

Green Shadows, White Whale

The Halloween Tree

I Sing the Body Electric!

The illustrated Man

Journey to Far Metaphor Kaleidoscope

Long After Midnight

The Martian Chronicles

The Machineries of Joy

A Medicine for Melancholy

The October Country

One Timeless Spring

R Is for Rocket

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

S Is for Space

The Toynbee Convector

When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

Yestermorrow

Zen in the Art of Writing

QUICKER THAN THE EYE is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in hook form. This is a collection of

fiction. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

Page 262 is an extension of this copyright page.

AVON BOOKS

A division of

The Hearst Corporation

1350 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10019

Author photograph by Torn Victor

Interior design by Kellan Peck

Published by arrangement with the author

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-20481

ISBN: 0-380-97380-4

Law. For information address Don Congdon Associates, Inc., 156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 625, New York. New York 10010.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

Bradbury, Ray, 1920

Quicker than the eye~ Ray Bradbuty.-lst ed.

p. cm.

I. Title.

P53503.R167Q53 1996 96-20481

8l3'.54-dc20 CIP

First Avon Books Hardcover Printing: December 1996

AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA. HECHO EN U.S.A.

Printed in the U.S.A.

FIRST EDITION

QM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Avon Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund raising or educational use. Special

books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs.

For details write or telephone the office of the Director of Special Markets, Avon Books, Dept. FP, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New

York, New York l~9, 1-800-238-0658.

To Donn Albright,

my Golden Retriever,

with love

CONTENTS

UNTERDERSEABOAT DOKTOR

ZAHAROFF/RICHTER MARK V

REMEMBER SASCHA?

THE ELECTROCUTION

ANOTHER FINE MESS

HOPSCOTCH

THE FINNEGAN

THAT WOMAN ON THE LAWN

THE VERY GENTLE MURDERS

QUICKER THAN THE EYE

DORIAN IN EXCELSUS

NO NEWS, OR WHAT KILLED THE DOG?

THE WITCH DOOR

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

AT THE END OF THE NINTH YEAR

BUG

ONCE MORE, LEGATO

EXCHANGE

FREE DIRT

LAST RITES

THE OTHER HIGHWAY

MAKE HASTE TO LIVE:

AN AFTERWORD

QUICKER THAN THE EYE

Unterderseaboat Doktor

The incredible event occurred during my third visit to Gustav Von Seyfertitz, my

foreign psychoanalyst.

I should have guessed at the strange explosion before it came.

After all, my alienist, truly alien, had the coincidental name, Von Seyfertitz, of

the tall, lean, aquiline, menacing, and therefore beautiful actor who played the

high priest in the 1935 film She.

In She, the wondrous villain waved his skeleton fingers, hurled insults,

summoned sulfured flames, destroyed slaves, and knocked the world into

earthquakes.

After that, "At Liberty," he could be seen riding the Hollywood Boulevard

trolley cars as calm as a mummy, as quiet as an unwired telephone pole.

Where was I? Ah, yes!

It was my third visit to my psychiatrist. He had called that day and cried,

"Douglas, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch, it's time for beddy-bye!

Beddy-bye was, of course, his couch of pain and humiliation where I lay

writhing in agonies of assumed Jewish guilt and Northern Baptist stress as he from

time to time muttered, "A fruitcake remark!" or "Dumb!" or "If you ever do that

again, I'll kill you!"

As you can see, Gustav Von Seyfertitz was a most unusual mine specialist.

Mine? Yes. Our problems are land mines in our heads. Step on them! Shock-troop

therapy, he once called it, searching for words. "Blitzkrieg?" I offered.

"Ja!" He grinned his shark grin. "That's it!"

Again, this was my third visit to his strange, metallic-looking room with a most

odd series of locks on a roundish door. Suddenly, as I was maundering and

treading dark waters, I heard his spine stiffen behind me. He gasped a great death

rattle, sucked air, and blew it out in a yell that curled and bleached my hair:

"Dive! Dive!"

I dove.

Thinking that the room might be struck by a titanic iceberg, I fell, to scuttle

beneath the lion-claw-footed couch.

"Dive!" cried the old man.

"Dive?" I whispered, and looked up.

To see a submarine periscope, all polished brass, slide up to vanish in the

ceiling.

Gustav Von Seyfertitz stood pretending not to notice me, the sweat-oiled

leather couch, or the vanished brass machine. Very calmly, in the fashion of

Conrad Veidt in Casablanca, or Erich Von

like Jack Nicklaus hits a ball? Bamm. A hand grenade!

That was the sound my Germanic friend's boots

made as he knocked them together in a salute Crrrack!

"Gustav Mannerheim Auschlitz Von Seyfertitz Baron Woldstein, at your

service!" He lowered his voice. "Unterderseaboat-"

I thought he might say "Doktor." But:

"Unterderseaboat Captain!"

I scrambled off the floor.

Another crrrack and-The periscope slid calmly down out of the

ceiling, the most beautiful Freudian cigar I had ever seen.

"No!" I gasped.

"Have I ever lied to you?" "Many times!"

"But' '-he shrugged-' 'little white ones.” He stepped to the periscope, slapped

two

handles in place, slammed one eye shut, and crammed the other angrily against the

view piece, turning the periscope in a slow roundabout of the room, the couch, and

me.

"Fire one," he ordered.

I almost heard the torpedo leave its tube. "Fire two!" he said.

And a second soundless and invisible bomb

motored on its way to infinity. Struck midships, I sank to the couch.

"You, you!" I said mindlessly. "It!" I pointed

at the brass machine. "This!" I touched couch. "Why?"

"Sit down," said Von Seyfertitz.

"I am." "Lie down."

"I'd rather not," I said uneasily.

Von Seyfertitz turned the periscope so its topmost eye, raked at an angle, glared

at me. It had an uncanny resemblance, in its glassy coldness, his own fierce hawk's

gaze.

His voice, from behind the periscope, echoed. "So you want to know, eh, how

Gustav Von Seyfertitz, Baron Woldstein, suffered to leave the cold ocean depths,

depart his dear North Sea ship, flee his destroyed and beaten fatherland, to become

the Unterderseaboat Doktor-"

"Now that you mention-"

"I never mention! I declare. And my declarations are sea-battle commands."

"So I noticed . .

"Shut up. Sit back-"

"Not just now . . ." I said uneasily.

His heels knocked as he let his right hand spider to his top coat pocket and slip

forth yet a forth eye with which to fasten me: a bright, thin monocle which he

screwed into his stare as if decupping a boiled egg. I winced. For now the monocle

was part of his glare and regarded me with cold fire.

"Why the monocle?" I said.

"Idiot! It is to cover my good eye so that neither there eye can see and my

intuition is free to work!”

"Oh," I said.

And he began his monologue. And as he talked I realized his need had been

pent up, capped, years, so he talked on and on, forgetting me.

And it was during this monologue that a strange thing occurred. I rose slowly to

my feet as Herr Doktor Von Seyfertitz circled, his long, slim cigar printing smoke

cumuli on the air, which read like white Rorschach blots.

With each implantation of his foot, a word ca out, and then another, in a sort of

plodding grammar. Sometimes he stopped and stood poised with one leg raised

and one word stopped in his mouth to be turned on his tongue and examined. Then

the shoe went down, the noun slid forth and the verb and object in good time.

Until at last, circling, I found myself in a chair stunned, for I saw:

Herr Doktor Von Seyfertitz stretched on his couch, his long spider fingers laced

on his chest.

"It has been no easy thing to come forth on land," he sibilated. "Some days I

was the jellyfish, frozen. Others, the shore-strewn octopi, at least with tentacles, or

the crayfish sucked back into my skull. But I have built my spine, year on year,

and now I walk among the land men and survive."

He paused to take a trembling breath, then continued:

"I moved in stages from the depths to a houseboat, to a wharf bungalow, to a

shore-tent and then

back to a canal in a city and at last to New York

an island surrounded by water, eh? But where,

where, in all this, I wondered, would a submarine commander find his place, his

work, his mad love and activity?

"It was one afternoon in a building with the world's longest elevator that it

struck me like a hand grenade in the ganglion. Going down, down, down, other

people crushed around me, and the numbers descending and the floors whizzing

by the glass windows, rushing by flicker-flash, flicker-flash, conscious,

subconscious, id, ego-id, life, death, lust, kill, lust, dark, light, plummeting, falling,

ninety, eighty, fifty, lower depths, high exhilaration, id, ego, id, until this shout

blazed from my raw throat in a great all-accepting, panic-manic shriek:

"'Dive! Dive!'

"I remember," I said.

'Dive!' I screamed so loudly that my fellow passengers, in shock, peed merrily.

Among stunned faces, I stepped out of the lift to find one-sixteenth of an inch of

pee on the floor. 'Have a nice day!' I said, jubilant with self-discovery, then ran to

self-employment, to hang a shingle and next my periscope, carried from the

mutilated, divested, castrated unterderseaboat all these years. Too stupid to see in

it my psychological future and my final downfall, my beautiful artifact, the brass

genitalia of psychotic research, the Von Seyfertitz Mark Nine Periscope!"

"That's quite a story," I said.

"Damn right," snorted the alienist, eyes shut.

"And more than half of it true. Did you listen? What have you learned?"

"That more submarine captains should become psychiatrists."

"So? I have often wondered: did Nemo really die when his submarine was

destroyed? Or did he run off to become my great-grandfather and were his

psychological bacteria passed along until I came into the world, thinking to

command the ghostlike mechanisms that haunt the under tides, to wind up with the

fifty-minute vaudeville routine in this sad, psychotic city?"

I got up and touched the fabulous brass symbol that hung like a scientific

stalactite in mid-ceiling.

"May I look?"

"I wouldn't if I were you." He only half heard me, lying in the midst of his

depression as in a dark cloud.

"It's only a periscope-"

"But a good cigar is a smoke."

I remembered Sigmund Freud's quote about cigars, laughed, and touched the

periscope again.

"Don't!" he said.

"Well, you don't actually use this for anything, do you? It's just a remembrance

of your past, from your last sub, yes?"

"You think that?" He sighed. "Look!"

I hesitated, then pasted one eye to the viewer, shut the other, and cried:

"Oh, Jesus!"

"I warned you!" said Von Seyfertitz.

For they were there.

Enough nightmares to paper a thousand cinema screens. Enough phantoms to

haunt ten thousand castle walls. Enough panics to shake forty cities into ruin.

My God, I thought, he could sell the film rights to this worldwide!

The first psychological kaleidoscope in history.

And in the instant another thought came: how much of that stuff in there is me?

Or Von Seyfertitz? Or both? Are these strange shapes my maundering daymares,

sneezed out in the past weeks? When I talked, eyes shut, did my mouth spray

invisible founts of small beasts which, caught in the periscope chambers, grew

outsize? Like the microscopic photos of those germs that hide in eyebrows and

pores, magnified a million times to become elephants on Scientific American

covers? Are these images from other lost souls trapped on that couch and caught

in the submarine device, or leftovers from my eyelashes and psyche?

"It's worth millions!" I cried. "Do you know what this is!?"

"Collected spiders, Gila monsters, trips to the Moon without gossamer wings,

iguanas, toads out of bad sisters' mouths, diamonds out of good fairies ears,

crippled shadow dancers from Bali, cut-string puppets from Geppetto's attic, little-

boy statues that pee white wine, sexual trapeze performers' alley-oop, obscene

finger-pantomimes, evil clown faces, gargoyles that talk when it rains and whisper

when the wind rises, basement bins

full of poisoned honey, dragonflies that sew every fourteen-year-old's orifices to

keep them neat until they rip the sutures, aged eighteen. Towers with mad witches,

garrets with mummies for lumber-"

He ran out of steam.

"You get the general drift."

"Nuts," I said. "You're bored. I could get you a five-million-dollar deal with

Amalgamated Fruit-cakes Inc. And the Sigmund F. Dreamboats, split three ways!"

"You don't understand," said Von Seyfertitz. "I am keeping myself busy, busy,

so I won't remember all the people I torpedoed, sank, drowned mid-Atlantic in

1944. I am not in the Amalgamated Fruitcake Cinema business. I only wish to

keep myself occupied by paring fingernails, cleaning earwax, and erasing inkblots

from odd bean-bags like you. If I stop, I will fly apart. That periscope contains all

and everything I have seen and known in the past forty years of observing pecans,

cashews, and almonds. By staring at them I lose my own terrible life lost in the

tides. If you won my periscope in some shoddy fly-by-night Hollywood strip

poker, I would sink three times in my waterbed, never to be seen again. Have I

shown you my waterbed? Three times as large as any pool. I do eighty laps asleep

each night. Some-times forty when I catnap noons. To answer your million fold

offer, no."

And suddenly he shivered all over. His hands clutched at his heart.

"My God!" he shouted.

Too late, he was realizing he had let me step into his mind and life. Now he was

on his feet between me and the periscope, staring at it and me, as if we were both

terrors.

"You saw nothing in that! Nothing at all!”

"I did!"

"You lie! How could you be such a liar? Do you know what would happen if

this got out, if you ran around making accusations-?

"My God," he raved on, "If the world knew, if someone said' '-His words

gummed shut in his mouth as if he were tasting the truth of what he said, as if he

saw me for the first time and I was a gun fired full in his face. "I would be...

laughed out of the city. Such a goddamn ridiculous . . . hey, wait a minute. You!"

It was as if he had slipped a devil mask over his face. His eyes grew wide. His

mouth gaped.

I examined his face and saw murder. I sidled toward the door.

"You wouldn't say anything to anyone?” he said.

“No”

"How come you suddenly know everything about me?"

"You told me!"

"Yes," he admitted, dazed, looking around for a weapon. "Wait."

"if you don't mind," I said, "I'd rather not.” And I was out the door and down

the hall, my knees jumping to knock my jaw.

"Come back!" cried Von Seyfertitz, behind me. "I must kill you!"

"I was afraid of that!"

I reached the elevator first and by a miracle it flung wide its doors when I

banged the Down button. I jumped in.

"Say good-bye!" cried Von Seyfertitz, raising his fist as if it held a bomb.

"Good-bye!" I said. The doors slammed.

I did not see Von Seyfertitz again for a year.

Meanwhile, I dined out often, not without guilt, telling friends, and strangers on

street corners, of my collision with a submarine commander become phrenologist

(he who feels your skull to count the beans).

So with my giving one shake of the ripe fruit tree, nuts fell. Overnight they

brimmed the Baron's lap to flood his bank account. His Grand Slam will be

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Ray Bradbury - Quicker Than the Eye

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