Read Ebook: Pipe Dream by Leiber Fritz

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Ebook has 50 lines and 6077 words, and 1 pages

, placed it on the ledge of his easel and went off to bed ... and to a series of disturbingly erotic dreams.

Next day he got up late and, after breakfasting on black coffee, gloomed around the studio for a while, picking things up and putting them down. He glanced frequently at the stepladder, but resisted the temptation to climb up and have another look next door. Sighing, he thumbtacked a sheet of paper to a drawing board and half-heartedly began blocking in a female figure. It was insipid and lifeless. Stabbing irritably at the heavy curve of the figure's hip, he broke his charcoal. "Damn!" he said, glaring around the room. Abandoning all pretense, he threw the charcoal on the floor and climbed the stepladder. He pressed his nose against the glass.

In daylight, the adjoining roof looked bare and grimy. There was a big transparent pipe running between the water tank and the shack, braced in two places by improvised-looking wooden scaffolding. Listening intently, Simon thought he could hear a motor going in the shack. The water looked sallow green. It reminded Simon of those futuristic algae farms where the stuff is supposed to be pumped through transparent pipes to expose it to sunlight. There seemed to be a transparent top on the water tank too--it was too high for Simon to see, but there was a gleam around the edge. Staring at the pipe again, Simon got the impression there were little things traveling in the water, but he couldn't make them out.

Climbing down in some excitement, Simon got the twist of cellophane from the ledge of the easel and stared at its contents. Wild thoughts were tumbling through his head as he got back up on the stepladder. Sunlight flashed on the greenish water pipe between the tank and the shack, but after the first glance he had no eyes for it. Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich had her face tragically pressed to the window of the shack. She was wearing the black dress with high neck and puffed shoulders. At that moment she looked straight at him. She lifted her hands and seemed to speak imploringly. Then she slowly sank from sight as if, it horridly occurred to Simon, into quicksand.

Simon sprang from his chair, heart beating wildly, and ran down the stairs to the street. Two or three passersby paused to study him as he alternately pounded the flaking green door of the Russians' house and leaned on the button. Also watching was the shirt-sleeved driver of a moving van, emblazoned "Stulnikov-Gurevich Enterprises," which almost filled the street in front of the house.

The door opened narrowly. A man with a square black beard frowned out of it. He topped Simon by almost a head.

"Yes?" Ivan the Bomber asked, in a deep, exasperated voice.

"I must see the lady of the house immediately," Simon cried. "Your sister, I believe. She's in danger." He surged forward.

The butt of the Bomber's right palm took him firmly in the chest and he staggered back. The Bomber said coldly, "My sister is--ha!--taking a bath."

Simon cried, "In that case she's drowning!" and surged forward again, but the Bomber's hand stopped him short. "I'll call the police!" Simon shouted, flailing his limbs. The hand at his chest suddenly stopped pushing and began to pull. Gripped by the front of his shirt, Simon felt himself being drawn rapidly inside. "Let go! Help, a kidnapping!" he shouted to the inquisitive faces outside, before the door banged shut.

"No police!" rumbled the Bomber, assisting Simon upstairs.

"Now look here," Simon protested futilely. In the two-story-high living room to his right, the pipes of an organ gleamed golden from the shadows. At the second landing, a disheveled figure met them, glasses twinkling--Vasily the Vodka Breather. He spoke querulously in Russian to Ivan, who replied shortly, then Vasily turned and the three of them crowded up the narrow third flight to the pent-shack. This housed a small noisy machine, perhaps an aerator of some sort, for bubbles were streaming into the transparent pipe where it was connected to the machine; and under the pipe, sitting with an idiot smile on a chair of red plush and gilt, was a pale black-mustached man. An empty clear-glass bottle with a red and gold label lay on the floor at his feet. The opposite side of the room was hidden by a heavy plastic shower curtain. Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich was not in view.

Ivan said something explosive, picking up the bottle and staring at it. "Vodka!" he went on. "I have told you not to mix the pipe and the vodka! Now see what you have done!"

"To me it seemed hospitable," said Vasily with an apologetic gesture. "Besides, only one bottle--"

Ducking under the pipe where it crossed the pent-shack, Ivan picked up the pale man and dumped him crosswise in the chair, with his patent-leather shoes sticking up on one side and his plump hands crossed over his chest. "Let him sleep. First we must take down all the apparatus, before the capitalistic police arrive. Now: what to do with this one?" He looked at Simon, and clenched one large and hairy fist.

Crossing the roof, Simon made a sudden effort and wrenched himself free. They caught him again at the edge of the roof, where he had run with nothing clearly in mind, but with his mouth open to yell. Suspended in the grip of the two Russians, with Ivan's meaty palm over his mouth, Simon had a momentary glimpse of the street below. A third bearded figure, Mikhail the Religious, was staring up at them from the sunny sidewalk. The melancholy face, the deep-socketed tormented eyes, and the narrow beard tangled with the dangling crucifix combined to give the effect of a Tolstoy novel's dust-jacket. As they hauled Simon away, he had the impression that a chilly breeze had sprung up and the street had darkened. In his ears was Mikhail's distant, oddly discordant whistling.

Grunting, the two brothers set Simon down on the kitchen chair and slid him across the roof until something hard but resilient touched the top of his head. It was the plastic pipe, through which, peering upward, he could see myriads of tiny polliwog-shapes flitting back and forth.

"Do us a kindness not to make noise," said Ivan, removing his palm. "My brother Vasily will now explain." He went away.

"Ah?" said Simon tentatively.

"Not at all," Simon assured him.

"Good," Vasily said with simple satisfaction and gulped at his bottle. "Meanwhile my brother Mikhail was a religious brother at a monastery near Mount Athos, my Nihilist brother Ivan was in central Europe, while my third brother Lev, who is of commercial talents, had preceded us to the New World, where we always felt it would some day be our destiny to join one another.

"With the aid of brother Ivan, I and my sister Grushenka escaped from Russia. We picked up Mikhail from his monastery and proceeded here, where Lev had become a capitalist business magnate.

"My brothers, Ivan especially, were interested in my research. He had a theory that we could eventually produce hosts of men in this way, whole armies and political parties, all Nihilist and all of them Stulnikov-Gureviches. I assured him that this was impossible, that I could not play Cadmus, for free-swimming forms are one thing, we have the way to feed them in the aqueous medium; but to make fully developed mammals placental nourishment is necessary--that I cannot provide. Yet to please him I begin with the egg of my sister, that was as good a beginning as any and perhaps it intrigued my vanity. Ivan dreamed his dreams of a Nihilist Stulnikov-Gurevich humanity--it was harmless, as I told myself."

Simon stared at him glassy-eyed. Something rather peculiar was beginning to happen inside his head--about an inch under the point where the cool water-filled plastic pipe pressed down on his scalp. Little ghostly images were darting--delightfully wispy little girl-things, smiling down at him impudently, then flirting away with a quick motion of their mermaid tails.

The sky had been growing steadily darker and now there came the growl of thunder. Against the purple-gray clouds Simon could barely make out the semi-transparent shapes of the polliwogs in the pipe over his head; but the images inside his mind were growing clearer by the minute.

"Ah, we have a storm," Vasily observed as the thunder growled again. "That reminds me of Mikhail, who is much influenced by our Finnish grandmother. He had the belief as a child that he could call up the winds by whistling for them--he even learned special wind musics from her. Later he became a Christian religious--there are great struggles in him. Mikhail objected to my researches when he heard I used the egg of my sister. He said we will produce millions of souls who are not baptized. I asked him how about the water they are in, he replied this is not the same thing, these little swimmers will wriggle in hell eternally. This worried him greatly. We tried to tell him I had not used the egg of my sister, only the egg of a fish.

"But he did not believe this, because my sister changed greatly at the time. She no longer spoke. She put on my mother's bathing costume and retired to the bathtub all day long. I accepted this--at least in the water she is not violent. Mikhail said, "See, her soul is now split into many unredeemed sub-souls, one each for the little swimmers. There is a sympathy between them--a hypnotic vibration. So long as you keep them near her, in that tank on the roof, this will be. If they were gone from there, far from there, the sub-souls would reunite and Grushenka's soul would be one again." He begged me to stop my research, to dump it in the sea, to scatter it away, but Lev and Ivan demand I keep on. Yet Mikhail warned me that works of evil end in the whirlwind. I am torn and undecided." He gulped at his vodka.

Thunder growled louder. Simon was thinking, dreamily, that if the soul of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich were split into thousands of sub-souls, vibrating hynotically in the nearby water tank, with at least one of them escaping as far as his bathtub, then it was no wonder if Grushenka had a strange attraction for him.

"But that is not yet the worst," Vasily continued. "The hypnotic vibrations of the free-swimming ones in their multitude turn out to have a stimulating effect on any male who is near. Their sub-minds induce dreams of the piquant sort. Lev says that to make money for the work we must sell these dreams to rich men. I protest, but to no avail."

"Lev is maddened for money. Now besides selling the dreams I find he plans to sell the creatures themselves, sell them one by one, but keep enough to sell the dreams too. It is a madness."

The darkness had become that of night. The thunder continued to growl and now it seemed to Simon that it had music in it. Visions swam through his mind to its rhythm--hordes of swimming pygmy souls, of unborn water babies, migrations of miniature mermaids. The pipe hanging between water tank and pent-shack became in his imagination a giant umbilicus or a canal for a monstrous multiple birth. Sitting beneath it, helpless to move, he focused his attention with increasing pleasure on the active, supple, ever more human girl-bodies that swam across his mind. Now more mermaid than tadpole, with bright smiling lips and eyes, long Lorelei-hair trailing behind them, they darted and hovered caressingly. In their wide-cheeked oval faces, he discovered without shock, there was a transcendent resemblance to the features of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich--a younger, milk-skinned maiden of the steppes, with challenging eyes and fingers that brushed against him with delightful shocks....

"So it is for me the great problem," Vasily's distant voice continued. "I see in my work only the pure research, the play of the mind. Lev sees money, Ivan sees dragon teeth--fodder for his political cannon--Mikhail sees unshriven souls, Grushenka sees--who knows?--madness. It is indeed one great problem."

Thunder came again, crashingly this time. The door of the pent-shack opened. Framed in it stood Ivan the Bomber. "Vasily!" he roared. "Do you know what that idiot is doing now?"

As the thunder and his voice trailed off together, Simon became aware at last of the identity of the other sound, which had been growing in volume all the time.

Simultaneously Vasily struggled to his feet.

Wind was shaking the heavy pipe over Simon's head, tossing him back and forth in the chair. Looking with an effort toward the west, Simon saw the reason: a spinning black pencil of wind that was writing its way toward them in wreckage across the intervening roofs.

The chair fell under him. Stumbling across the roof, he tugged futilely at the door to the pent-shack, then threw himself flat, clawing at the tarpaper.

There was a mounting roar. The top of the water tank went spinning off like a flying saucer. Momentarily, as if it were a giant syringe, the whirlwind dipped into the tank. Simon felt himself sliding across the roof, felt his legs lifting. He fetched up against the roof's low wall and at that moment the wind let go of him and his legs touched tarpaper again.

Gaining his feet numbly, Simon staggered into the leaning pent-shack. The pale man was nowhere to be seen, the plush chair empty. The curtain at the other side of the room had fallen with its rods, revealing a bathtub more antique than Simon's. In the tub, under the window, sat Grushenka. The lightning flares showed her with her chin level with the water, her eyes placidly staring, her mouth opening and closing.

Simon found himself putting his arms around the black-clad figure. With a straining effort he lifted her out of the tub, water sloshing all over his legs, and half carried, half slid with her down the stairs.

He fetched up panting and disheveled at the top landing, his attention riveted by the lightning-illuminated scene in the two-story-high living room below. At the far end of it a dark-robed figure crouched at the console of the mighty organ, like a giant bat at the base of the portico of a black and gold temple. In the center of the room Ivan was in the act of heaving above his head his globular leather case.

Mikhail darted a look over his shoulder and sprang to one side. The projectile crashed against the organ. Mikhail picked himself up, tearing something from his neck. Ivan lunged forward with a roar. Mikhail crashed a fist against his jaw. The Bomber went down and didn't come up. Mikhail unwrapped his crucifix from his fingers and resumed playing.

With a wild cry Simon heaved himself to his feet, stumbled over Grushenka's sodden garments, and pitched headlong down the stairs.

The young gentleman listened to his story without changing expression, thanked him warmly, and shooed him out.

The Stulnikov-Gureviches disappeared for good, though not quite without a trace. Simon found this item in the next evening's paper, the first of many he accumulated yearningly in a scrapbook during the following months:

MERMAID RAIN A HOAX, SCIENTIST DECLARES

The professor added, "I would like to know where they got them, however. There is clear evidence of mutation, due perhaps to fallout."

Dr. Stulnikov directed his party in a brief but intensive search for overlooked specimens. His charming silent sister, Grushenka Stulnikov, wearing a quaint Latvian swimming costume, explored the shallows of the Delaware.

After collecting as many specimens as possible, the professor and his assistants continued their trip in their unusual camping car. Dr. Stulnikov intends to found a biological research center "in the calm and tolerant atmosphere of the West Coast," he declared.

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