Fred Saberhagen - Specimens

SPECIMENS

By

Fred Saberhagen

Before the car had gone a hundred feet, the glass was ripped out of

the right front window. Then something like a steel cable with a bright

metal ball at the end snaked in front of her. With the amazing dexterity

of an elephant's trunk, it snatched the ignition key from its socket, then

took hold of the steering wheel and effortlessly overcame Nancy's own

grip with a hard twist to the right. Wheels screeched as the car jolted

up onto the grassy shoulder of the road. Nancy threw her door open to

jump, the centrifugal force of the turn adding momentum to her

movement. She felt a steel-hard arm tear at her clothing as she fell free.

The grass came up to hit her, and momentum whipped her through

an easy somersault. She came upright to see the car jouncing into a

small tree… Some shape that was not human was moving in the

driver's seat…

Other Ace Science Fiction titles by Fred Saberhagen:

THE HOLMES DRACULA FILE

THE DRACULA TAPE

AN OLD FRIEND OF THE FAMILY

THORN

BERSERKER

BERSERKER MAN

BERSERKER'S PLANET

BROTHER ASSASSIN

LOVE CONQUERS ALL

THE MASK OF THE SUN

THE VEILS OF AZLAROC

EMPIRE OF THE EAST

A SPADEFUL OF SPACETIME (Fred Saberhagen, editor)

SPECIMENS

FRED SABERHAGEN

ace books

A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

A GROSSET & DUNLAP COMPANY

51 Madison Avenue New York, New York 10010

SPECIMENS

An ACE Book

Ace printing, March 1981

First Published Simultaneously in Canada

Manufactured in the United States of America

ONE

Looking from the high narrow windows in the southeastern

bedroom, Dan Post could see a vague crescent of daytime moon. Far

below it, on the horizon and some twenty-five miles from where he

stood, the tallest building in the world was plainly visible along with

two slightly lesser gods of Chicago's Loop. The eaves on the old

suburban house were narrow, and even the high-latitude sun of

summer could strike in under them to get at the glass in the old

windows. The glass, mottled with wavy distortions, might be as old as

the house itself. Dan thought he could see how the panes had begun to

purple, like desert glass, from decade upon decade of the sun hurling

its fire at them across ninety million miles of space.

He leaned back a little from the window and shifted his weight

meditatively on the wide, solid planks of the old floor, which squeaked

just very slightly as he did so. Dan was rather heavy but solid, a

muscular man in his mid-thirties. A slightly concave nose gave him a

somewhat boyish look. His hair was darkly unruly above a pale, tan-

resistant face. Today he was dressed in doubleknit slacks and sport

shirt for looking at old houses in mid-June; he had to admit, though,

that the upper floor of this vacant, air-conditionerless place wasn't as

unmercifully hot as he had expected. There was an attic above, which

helped, and the windows had been left slightly open. The place must

catch every breeze: it was on the top of a fairly steep hill.

"So," he asked, "this house is supposed to be a hundred and forty

years old?"

"That's right." Ventris, the real estate agent, was standing relaxed in

the bedroom doorway. It was a big bedroom by modern standards, and

the house had three more like it on its second floor, not one of them

smaller than twelve feet by thirteen. A room or so away Nancy and the

kids were discussing something in low voices.

"They say,'' Ventris continued, "that it used to be a way station on

the Underground Railroad. You know, before the Civil War, when

slaves were being smuggled north to Canada."

"Well, I suppose that's possible." Dan's interest was no more than

polite. The house did not strike him as likely to be historically

interesting, or even extremely old. The walls and woodwork in this

bedroom had been painted light green not long ago, determinedly made

new-looking by interior latex put on somewhat carelessly with a roller,

leaving a few spatters on the worn but solid floor. Anyway, the

railroad Dan was concerned about, the commuters' kind, ran through

Wheatfield Park about half a mile to the north of here, and according

to Ventris the station was just over a mile away. Dan supposed that if

he got up early every day and walked, it would help him keep in shape.

Of course he could ride into the city with Nancy, who would be

driving in anyway, as long as she kept her job…they would have to see

how that worked out.

"Of course," Ventris added, "people tend to say that about any house

this old, at least in this part of the country." While leading Dan and

Nancy through two other houses earlier in the day, Ventris had shown

himself to be very much the low-pressure type of salesman. Sandy-

haired and paunchy, he seemed on the way to aging gracefully in the

real estate business. He didn't look old enough to have got into it after

retirement from something else.

"What was that about the Underground Railroad?" Nancy, wearing

slacks and a summery blouse, now came with Dan's two children to

join him in the southeast bedroom. The two kids were somewhat silent

and thoughtful today, as if this business of looking at houses brought

home to them forcefully the fact that their good pal Nancy was soon

going to assume the office of motherhood over them. Millie was eleven

and Sam was nine, and both of them had their father's sturdy frame and

wild dark hair. But often, as now, when they were quiet and

thoughtful, he could see their mother in their eyes. Cancer, a year and a

half ago. The wounds of the survivor healed, the children changed and

grew. Life went on, and the gonads like all the other organs kept

working away, and now here he was, picking out another home in

which to settle a new bride.

"My girl, the history nut." Dan put an arm around Nancy and

squeezed her shoulders. "Mr. Ventris was just saying that this might

have been a station, or whatever they called their stopping places. But

never mind that; how would you like to live here?"

"There's certainly lots of room." Nancy brushed back her straight

black hair. "But oh, it's such a hodgepodge." She was a rather tall girl,

who towered over her little Japanese-born mother in Chicago, and was

almost of a height with her American father and her husband-to-be.

She was in her early twenties, years younger than Dan. "The

downstairs looks like some decorator's sample case."

Today Nancy was evidently not going to be distracted by historical

discoveries, but others might. Millie took her father's hand and looked

around, and pondered aloud: "I wonder where they hid the slaves."

"Maybe the basement or the attic." This reminded Dan of another

point he meant to check, and he walked out into the spacious upstairs

hall and stood looking up at a closed trapdoor in the ceiling. "Is there a

chair around somewhere?" he asked Ventris. "I'd like to take a look at

the attic now if possible."

"I think there is. Let me check." Ventris moved away to rummage in

a closet, and Dan rejoined Nancy and the kids in the southeast

bedroom, where they were enjoying the view from the window.

"This is neat, being up on a hill," young Sammy commented.

"Not bad,'' Dan agreed. From up here one could see a lot of treetops,

and several of their prospective neighbors' roofs. From this place, in

mid-June, it seemed a hot, green land in which they dwelt. Of the great

metropolis that sprawled around them not much was visible except for

part of the highway that ran past a block to the east, the shopping

center on the highway's other side, and the three towers looming over

the horizon to mark the location of the central city.

This house would be wind-blasted in the winter (one reason Dan

wanted to go up into the attic was to check the insulation) but the

summer breezes were certainly pleasant, and the occupant would never

have to worry about a flood, even in the wettest spring. The hill that

the house stood on was perhaps the highest place in the generally flat

terrain for a mile or more around.

The settler who had built this place had doubtless a wide choice of

sites—and like many others of his time he had chosen high. At the time

from which the house supposedly dated, well before the Civil War, the

surrounding land must have been largely virgin prairie. Chicago, then

far beyond and below the horizon to the east, would have been a small

collection of frame buildings, a booming but otherwise unremarkable

town, perhaps not yet incorporated as a city. From this window one

neighboring farmhouse may have been visible, on the next mile-distant

hill, and maybe not. Dan wondered if there had been a road. And

Indians… in what year had the Black Hawk War been fought? He

would ask Nancy sometime.

Now of course pavement was everywhere beneath the green

suburban canopy of trees, and automobiles had managed to proliferate

rapidly enough to keep the ever-extending acres of concrete and

asphalt crowded. Not many sidewalks around here, in the better

suburban neighborhoods' best tradition. Main Street, a principal

thoroughfare of Wheatfield Park and also a numbered state highway,

ran north and south one block to the east of the old house Nancy and

Dan were looking at. The house itself faced south, its irregular half-

acre lot fronting on Benham Road, which cut west from Main to lose

itself a few blocks farther west in residential meanders and cul de sacs.

As Ventris had already pointed out, Benham at no time of day

sustained a very heavy flow of traffic, and the kids would not be

running out of their yard directly into a busy highway. They were still

young enough for that to be important.

Across Benham, the land sloped downhill into the large back yards

of the next street's houses. To the east on Benham, the nearest house

was a contemporary four-bedroom-sized brick ranch; Dan was looking

down now upon its elegant tile roof. On the next lot to the west stood a

green-vinyl-sided Georgian, with a wide immaculate lawn and a well-

manicured flower garden in the back; the back yard of the house

beyond that was graced by a large in-ground swimming pool. The

house on the hilltop had the look of a poor relation amid its much

newer neighbors.

Not that it was a ruin, or seemed abandoned. It had been vacant,

according to Ventris, for only a few weeks. "Rundown" was not

exactly the right word, either; the white stucco that now covered the

outside walls seemed reasonably solid, and there were no other

obvious signs of deterioration. The plumbing, as Dan had already

satisfied himself, was in working condition, and the wiring was

modern enough. Standing now on the folding chair that Ventris had

finally unearthed from the back of a closet, and thrusting his head up

through an obviously little-used trapdoor into the dimness of the attic,

Dan saw nothing horrifying. It was hot, of course, though louvered

vents in opposite gables allowed air circulation as well as admitting a

little light. But there was no sign of leaks in the roof. The ancient

wooden beams and joists looked hand-hewn, and the nearest of them

felt as solid as a young oak when Dan jabbed at it with the smallest and

sharpest blade of his little pocketknife. The attic was largely unfloored,

but there was at least some kind of insulation between the joists.

He would check it out more thoroughly, later, if they really got

serious about the place. "Looks dry, at least," he said, getting down off

the chair and brushing the dust of decades from his hands. He looked

at Nancy, trying to gauge what she was really feeling about the place,

and saw his own thoughtful uncertainty mirrored in her face; they

could take another turn around, but essentially they had seen it all now,

from top to bottom.

Ventris was being unobtrusive in the background, and the children

were rapping on a bedroom wall in quest of hollow places that might

have been used as hidey-holes for escaping slaves. "I would say the

owners have tried to keep it up," Dan offered, probing for his woman's

opinion.

Nancy shook her head and frowned. "I would say they've tried too

hard."

That was it, Dan thought. The owners down through the years, or at

least some of the most recent of them, had seemingly worked on the

place too much, and too often at cross purposes. It was no longer

apparent to the casual eye that the house, or a large part of it at least,

might date from well before the Civil War. It had been added to, sided,

remodeled, stuccoed, re-sided, re-remodeled, re-stuccoed, modernized

and remodernized until even its original outlines had disappeared and it

was hard to tell where the original walls stood, or of what they had

been made.

Someone with more imagination and energy than talent, doubtless

the present owner or an ambitious do-it-yourselfer in his family, had

recently completed the latest assault. This had been sustained mainly

by the kitchen and the downstairs bath. Besides the refrigerator and

regular stove, which were to stay, an off-brand oven had been built

into the kitchen wall at shoulder height, surrounded by panels of

unconvincing brick and stone whose corners were already starting to

peel back from the wall. What appeared to be a new window in the

downstairs bath would not close quite all the way, and the fancy new

medicine cabinet wiggled like a loose tooth in its socket when you slid

the mirrored door open, and dribbled a little plaster dust from around

its edges. Also downstairs, in the living room, a real fireplace had at

some time had its flue bricked up and been made to look artificial. And

then there was the way the one-car frame garage clung to the side of

the house, almost like a lean-to glued on with filets of siding and

stucco. No door led directly from house to garage, though there were

four (count'em four) doors leading from the ground floor to outside.

Every kind of wall covering ever devised by the mind of man seemed

to be findable somewhere on the interior walls in at least one of the

multiplicity of rooms. All in all, as Nancy had protested, a real

hodgepodge.

And yet—and yet. On the plus side, there was all that room, the four

bedrooms for a family perhaps to be enlarged, since Nancy had said

she wanted a baby of her own. There was the basic structural

soundness, the fireplace to resurrect when time and money permitted,

the tall old windows with their ancient glass. And who knew what

buried glories of original woodwork, floors, and paneling were waiting

to be uncovered? Besides the house itself there was the external space

that came with it, a vast irregular plot of lawn or rather yard, that

showed permanent-looking worn spots in the form of a children's

impromptu softball diamond, and was otherwise mostly luxuriant

crabgrass somewhat in need of mowing. No well-kept garden like the

neighbors', but plenty of room for kids to play and things to grow.

One might plant vegetables here, or keep a dog, or both.

They looked into each bedroom once more, then went downstairs

and walked through all the ground floor rooms again. When they

finally stood outside, with Ventris locking the place up, Nancy stood

frowning up at the old place in a way that had nothing to do with the

bright sun in her eyes. "It's a hodgepodge," she repeated.

"It sure is," Dan agreed. But then, instead of herding the children

right back to Ventris' car, the two of them continued gazing at the

place, as they might have looked at some objectionable relative with

whom they had been stuck by fate and who therefore had to be gotten

on with at almost any cost. The children meanwhile were making

themselves right at home in the yard, arguing about where the exact

highest point of the hilltop was. They were both wrong, it was right

under the house. Sometimes Dan wondered if they were really as

bright as their teachers had sometimes indicated.

"They're only asking sixty-two five," Dan said to himself,

meditating aloud. And then he kicked himself mentally for that only,

which Ventris could not have failed to hear.

"I would say it's no great bargain," Nancy commented, giving her

fiancée a sharp look. "Children, I think that's supposed to be some kind

of flowerbed near the porch, please stay out of it." She was easing into

the Mother role somewhat ahead of time, with Dan's full approval.

"Well, I suppose there are two schools of thought about that," said

Ventris, standing patiently beside them now. "The house itself is not

the prettiest or the most convenient, but those things can always be

changed. The land itself, in this area…"

Allowing himself to be tugged along by the soft sell, Dan knew a

growing feeling of rightness about the place. The taxes were

reasonable, at least in terms of suburban taxes in general, good schools

were supposedly nearby; (that was another thing to be checked out

more closely), and he had a theory that it was better to own the

cheapest house on the block, any block, rather than the best. Let your

neighbors' property pull the value of your own property up, not down.

And after a couple of days of house-looking he had seen enough to

realize that he was not going to be able to afford, for example, that

four-bedroom brick ranch next door.

"Do you think the owners might come down a little bit?" Nancy was

asking the agent. "If we should decide to buy this place, it would take

quite a bit of money to fix it over to what we want." Dan had earlier

suffered occasional pangs of private fear that an offwhite wife with

eyes adorned by a trace of epicanthic folds might be made to feel

unwelcome in suburbia, where folk of Oriental descent seemed almost

as rare as blacks or poverty. So far no problems, though, not even a

funny look, at least as far as Dan had been able to observe. And,

judging by Nancy's demeanor, the idea that there might be racial

problems for her had never entered her head.

Ventris compressed his lips and answered her cautiously. "I'm not

sure. I rather suspect they might be open to an offer, though the price is

already low for this area. Did I mention before that the family has been

having personal problems?"

"No, you didn't," said Nancy. "Nervous breakdowns, I suppose,

from the look of that remodeling in the kitchen."

"Something like that. The man of the house suffered some kind of

breakdown, and then he did away with himself."

"Oh, I'm sorry." She really was. "I was trying to be funny, in my

own stupid way. I didn't have any idea."

"Come on, kids, let's get in the car," Dan called. To Ventris he said:

"We're going to have to think about this place."

"Maybe the joint is haunted," Dan commented a minute later,

without really knowing why, looking back at the vacant and intriguing

house one more time before he got into the car and closed the door.

Ventris just shook his head and gave a little laugh. "That's one thing

I haven't heard anybody say." TWO

By the time he pulled the rented van off Benham Road Dan had

gotten pretty well used to driving it. He backed up into his yard—his

yard!—with some dexterity, minimizing the carrying distance between

truck and house.

Nancy's Volkswagen was in the small garage, whose doors she had

managed to prop open with some bricks. Nancy herself, in jeans and

with a kerchief tied round her head, was standing in the shade-mottled

yard, talking with a stoutish lady in gardening clothes.

Nancy's brother Larry, chunky in his junior college sweatshirt,

called out to her from the van to get to work; then Larry and Dan's

friend Howie, who had been following in Dan's Plymouth, got the rear

door of the van open and immediately began to struggle to get some of

Dan's furniture unloaded. Nancy's father Ben, who had kept Dan and

Larry entertained with Navy stories all the way out from the city, got

out of the right seat beside Dan and went to pitch right in.

Millie and Sam, who had ridden out with Nancy earlier, now came

running from the backyard to get under the movers' feet and be yelled

at, and Dan, as soon as he had the chance, went to check in with

Nancy. Her companion proved to be Mrs. Follett, their next-door

neighbor to the west, of the vinylsided Georgian with all the flowers.

Mrs. Follett had at first glance a plump look that Dan considered

natural for a suburban matron at the end of middle age, but then you

noticed her hands, which were shamelessly hardened by outdoor work,

and a certain weathered toughness in her face that made her smile

somehow much more attractive.

He would have to forgive poor Nancy here for not doing any other

work, Mrs. Follett said, because getting to know the neighbors was a

big part of the job of moving in. "Yes, and I've also introduced myself

to Millie and Sam already. They're going to have a fine big yard to

play in here, and Patrick and I won't mind a bit if they chase a ball or

something over into our grass from time to time. I think fences are

rather ugly. Don't set up your baseball diamond on my side of the line,

is all I asked them." The unfenced property line was certainly plain

enough, with rude crabgrass and dandelions on one side, prim civilized

lawn in a meek carpet on the other. "And do try to stay out of the

flowers!" This last was sent in a slightly raised voice toward the

children, who were just coming out of the house again in a race to see

who could carry some prize in from the van. They glanced over as if

they might have heard the warning with at least half an ear. "The poor

Stanton children. I bawled them out sometimes and now I'm sorry for

it. Little did I know what trouble they were having in their family… I

suppose you've heard something of that."

Dan and Nancy exchanged glances. Nancy said: "We only saw Mrs.

Stanton once, and very briefly. In the lawyer's office, when we were

closing on the house."

"Well, he put an end to his own life." Mrs. Follett looked hard

toward the old house for a moment, but then away again. "After a brief

period of mental disturbance. But let's not dwell on the unhappiness of

the past. You're getting a fine piece of property. You can be very

happy with it—now look at those clouds. I hope it doesn't start to rain

before you can get your furniture inside."

Fred Saberhagen - Specimens

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