“What kind of tree?”
“Any tree. I think it was an ordinary elm.”
“The Slippery Elm has a pleasant aroma in season. The others, to me, have none.”
“No. It was not. Every tree has a strong smell in her world. This was an ordinary elm tree, and it had a violent musky obscene smell that delighted her. It was so strong that it staggered. And to her the grass itself is like clumps of snakes, and the world itself is flesh. Every bush is to her a leering satyr, and she cannot help but brush into them. The rocks are spidery monsters and she loves them. She sees every cloud as a mass of twisting bodies and she is crazy to be in the middle of them. She hugged a lamp post and her heart beat like it would fight its way out of her body.
“She can smell rain at a great distance and in a foul manner, and she wants to be in the middle of it. She worships every engine as a fire monster, and she hears sounds that I thought nobody could ever hear. Do you know what worms sound like inside the earth? They’re devilish, and she would writhe and eat dirt with them. She can rest her hand on a guard rail, and it is an obscene act when she does it. There is a filthiness in every color and sound and shape and smell and feel.”
“And yet, Charles, she is but a slightly more than average attractive girl, given to musing, and with a love of the world and a closeness to it that most of us have lost. She has a keen awareness of reality and of the grotesqueness that is its main mark. You yourself do not have this deeply; and when you encounter it in its full strength, it shocks you.”
“You mean that is normal?”
“There is no normal. There are only differences. When you moved into our several worlds they did not shock you to the same extent, for most of the corners are worn off our worlds. But to move into a pristine universe is more of a difference than you were prepared for.”
“I cannot believe that that is all it is.”
Charles Cogsworth would not answer the letters of Valery Mok, nor would he see her. Yet her letters were amusing and kind, and carried a trace of worry for him.
“I wonder what I smell like to her?” he asked himself. “Am I like an elm tree, or a worm in the ground? What color am I to her? Is my voice obscene? She says she misses the sound of my voice. It should be possible to undo this. Am I also to her like a column of snakes or a congeries of spiders?”
For he wasn’t well yet from what he had seen.
But he did go back to work, and nibbled at the edges of mystery with his fantastic device. He even looked into the worlds of other women. It was as Smirnov had said: they were more sensuous than men but none of them to the shocking degree of Valery.
He saw with the eyes of other men. And of animals: the soft pleasure of the fox devouring a ground squirrel, the bloody anger of a lamb furious after milk, the crude arrogance of the horse, the intelligent tolerance of the mule, the voraciousness of the cow, the miserliness of the squirrel, the sullen passion of the catfish. Nothing was quite as might have been expected.
He learned the jealousy and hatred that beautiful women hold against the ugly, the untarnished evil of small children, the diabolic possession of adolescents. He even, by accident, saw the world through the fleshless eyes of a poltergeist, and through the eyes of creatures that he could not identify at all. He found nobility in places that almost balanced the pervading baseness.
But mostly he loved to see the world through the eyes of his friend Gregory Smirnov, for there is a grandeur on everything when seen through a giant’s eyes.
And one day he saw Valery Mok through the eyes of Smirnov when they met accidentally. Something of his old feeling came back to him, and something that even surpassed his former regard. She was here magnificent, as was everything in that world. And there had to be a common ground between that wonderful world with her in it and the hideous world seen through her own eyes.
“I am wrong somewhere,” said Cogsworth. “It is because I do not understand enough. I will go and see her.”
But instead she came to see him.
She burst in on him furiously one day.
“You are a stick. You are a stick with no blood in it. You are a pig made out of sticks. You live with dead people Charles. You make everything dead. You are abominable.”
“I a pig, Valery? Possibly. But I never saw a pig made out of sticks.”
“Then see yourself. That is what you are.”
“Tell me what this is about.”
“It is about you. You are a pig made out of sticks, Charles. Gregory Smirnov let me use your machine. I saw the world the way you see it. I saw it with a dead man’s eyes. You don’t even know that the grass is alive. You think it’s only grass.”
“I also saw the world with your eyes, Valery.”
“Oh, is that what’s been bothering you? Well, I hope it livened you up a little. It’s a livelier world than yours.”
“More pungent, at least.”
“Lord, I should hope so. I don’t think you even have a nose. I don’t think you have any eyes. You can look at a hill and your heart doesn’t even skip a beat. You don’t even tingle when you walk over a field.”
“You see grass like clumps of snakes.”
“That’s better than not even seeing it alive.”
“You see rocks like big spiders.”
“That’s better than just seeing them like rocks. I love snakes and spiders. You can watch a bird fly by and not even hear the stuff gurgling in its stomach. How can you be so dead? And I always liked you so much. But I didn’t know you were dead like that.”
“How can one love snakes and spiders?”
“How can one not love anything? It’s even hard not to love you, even if you don’t have any blood in you. By the way, what gave you the idea that blood was that dumb color? Don’t you even know that blood is red?”
“I see it red.”
“You don’t see it red. You just call it red. That sill color isn’t red. What I call red is red.”
And he knew that she was right.
And after all, how can one not love anything? Especially when it becomes beautiful when angry, and when it is so much alive that it tends to shock by its intense awareness those who are partly dead.
Now Charles Cogsworth was a scientific man, and he believed that there are no insoluble problems. He solved this one too; for he had found that Valery was a low-flying bird, and he began to understand what was gurgling inside her.
And he solved it happily.
*
He is working on a Correlator for his Scanner now. When this is perfected, it will be safe to give the device to the public. You will be able to get the combination in about three years at approximately the price of a medium-sized new car. And if you will wait another year, you may be able to get one of the used ones reasonably.
The Correlator is designed to minimize and condition the initial view of the world seen through other eyes, to soften the shock of understanding others.
Misunderstandings can be agreeable. But there is something shattering about sudden perfect understanding.
All the People
Tin Tony Trotz had only one job—to watch out for something a little odd—in a universe that was insane!
Anthony Trotz went first to the politician, Mike Delado. “How many people do you know, Mr. Delado?”