They passed darkened buildings. She saw the neon sign atop the Herald offices ahead. If no one knew she’d killed them, no one would awaken. No one would live again. The world would end after all.
She opened the door and jumped from the moving car. Stumbling, she ran toward the Herald offices.
She stumbled into the building and began seeking through its bright corridors. Stopping to stare at each office door, she finally found the one labeled "Editorial. Mr. Gray." She pushed into the office.
The little man behind the desk wore horn-rim glasses and smoked a pipe that was a copy of Lester’s. He smiled paternally. "Yes, dear?"
"I killed them! They’re all dead!"
Realizing excitement did nothing to make her words more believable, she forced herself to be calm.
Editor Gray wore his gray hair combed straight back, Lester-like. He stood, putting one hand into his trouser pocket, as Lester always did.
"Who did you kill?" he asked quietly. "Calm down, dear. Tell me who you killed."
"Lester and all the rest. You have to print it. I shot them—they’re dead. Print it in your paper."
He crossed the room to his Wall. Bass and Kippie were rolling pie dough together, one on either end of the rolling pin.
"I’m afraid you’re imagining these things, my dear." He sucked his pipe, looking lovingly at Kippie. "I could love that child, but of course Alice would be jealous."
She backed away from him into the arms of the tweedy man, who had come into the office.
"I’m sorry to bother you, sir," he said. "This poor woman is suffering from delusions. I was driving her home when she escaped me."
"That’s all right," Editor Gray said mildly. "Perhaps she needs professional help. Have you considered that, my dear?"
But Amanda was staring at Bass. She stared at his penetrating eyes, his broad shoulders, at the curl of hair combed low over his forehead. The curl was swirled left, not right.
The tweedy man took her arm, guided her from the building and nudged her into the car.
Do they curl a dead actor’s hair differently, she wondered. She had killed them. Why weren’t they dead?
*
When they reached her house, it was completely dark. Either Dell and Kippie had gone to bed or the Wall had been replaced and was playing.
"I’m sorry I had to bring you away so abruptly," the tweedy man said. "We can’t afford to have the press print unfavorable reports about the force, you understand." He fingered his pipe. "Now, Mrs. Davis, get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow you’ll realize it was all a bad dream. You wouldn’t kill the stars."
Woodenly she walked up the front walk. Hearing Bass’s mellow voice from the Wall room, she knew Kippie and Dell were up.
She entered the room. Kippie sat curled on the Wall seat.
Amanda stared at the handsome face on the Wall. Bass McDowall, Wall idol. Why wasn’t he dead?
His curl was still curled wrong. She looked more closely at his face as he leaned toward Kippie, gasping, "Sweetie-bug."
There was a small scar beneath his left eye. The tiniest, most insignificant scar, but it had never been there before.
"Poor Bass, he looks so tired," the Kippie on the Wall seat said. "See how his face looks thinner when he’s tired? I wonder if she notices it."
Dell said, "After all, Bass has worked hard today, Kippie."
Bass’s face was indeed thinner. Thinner face, small scar that hadn’t been there before, curl that curled wrong—what did it mean?
Suddenly she realized the image on the Wall wasn’t Bass. She corrected herself. He was a different Bass. He wasn’t the one she had shot, but his almost identical double.
She stared at her daughter, who looked more like Kippie each time she assumed another of her characteristics or poses. There were hundreds of young people wanting to be Bass or Kippie, hundreds of young men combing their hair the way Bass did, smiling as he did, learning to use their eyes as he did. And if the time should come when a new Bass was needed, there he was, hundreds of him.
She frowned. Undoubtedly they had several doubles waiting conveniently nearby to perform if something should happen to one of the stars.
*
She felt a choking in her throat. It would be as impossible to kill all the Basses and Kippies as it would be to break every Wall in the world. There was no way to get rid of them, no way to make people listen to what was happening. No way to prevent humanity from watching itself to extinction.
As they grew older, she guessed, the actors would grow older too. Gradually Bass would be thirty, then thirty-five, and Lester and the others would age too. But no one would notice; everyone would be aging at the same rate.
But some day someone would notice. Some day all the Lesters would die, and there would be no more Lester to smile at Alice and look thoughtful. And people would look around and see that her daughter, Kathryn, was the youngest person in the world.
But by then even Kathryn would be past the child-bearing age.
Stunned, she sat down beside Dell. He squeezed her hand. She looked up at the Wall, into Bass’s penetrating dark eyes. His eyes were so deep, she thought. His hands were strong, and his face was intelligent. How could she ever have hated him?
"Where’ve you been, baby?" Dell asked.
She shook her head irritably. "Be quiet," she said. "Can’t you see he’s going to kiss her?"
Perhaps she should change her name to Alice. Then they’d have Kippie, Alice and Lester. All they needed was a Bass, and they would be almost like a real family.
It would be so easy to forget this way, looking deep into Bass’s dark eyes.
The Big Engine
by Fritz Leiber
Have you found out about the Big Engine? It’s all around us, you know—can’t you hear it even now?
There are all sorts of screwy theories (the Professor said) of what makes the wheels of the world go round. There’s a boy in Chicago who thinks we’re all of us just the thoughts of a green cat; when the green cat dies we’ll all puff to nothing like smoke. There’s a man in the west who thinks all women are witches and run the world by conjure magic. There’s a man in the east who believes all rich people belong to a secret society that’s a lot tighter and tougher than the Mafia and that has a monopoly of power-secrets and pleasure-secrets other people don’t dream exist.
Me, I think the wheels of the world just go. I decided that forty years ago and I’ve never since seen or heard or read anything to make me change my mind.
I was a stoker on a lake boat then (the Professor continued, delicately sipping smoke from his long thin cigarette). I was as stupid as they make them, but I liked to think. Whenever I’d get a chance I’d go to one of the big libraries and make them get me all sorts of books. That was how guys started calling me the Professor. I’d get books on philosophy, metaphysics, science, even religion. I’d read them and try to figure out the world. What was it all about, anyway? Why was I here? What was the point in the whole business of getting born and working and dying? What was the use of it? Why’d it have to go on and on?
And why’d it have to be so complicated?
Why all the building and tearing down? Why’d there have to be cities, with crowded streets and horse cars and cable cars and electric cars and big open-work steel boxes built to the sky to be hung with stone and wood—my closest friend got killed falling off one of those steel boxkites. Shouldn’t there be some simpler way of doing it all? Why did things have to be so mixed up that a man like