Sideshow: Tales of the Galactic Midway, Vol. 1 Page 8

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  Chapter 8

  The Cyclops—I think I'd better start calling him Four-Eyes, like everyone else does—was very sick the next morning.

  Mr. Ahasuerus shook me awake just before dawn, apologized for disturbing me, and led me over to where Four-Eyes was sitting. I didn't have to be an alien physiologist to know he was in a bad way. He was trembling violently, his pupil was completely dilated, his tongue was coated, sweat was pouring down his body, and he felt hot to the touch.

  “How long has he been like this?” I asked.

  “About two hours,” said Mr. Ahasuerus. “I hadn't wanted to bother you, but it's too serious to leave him unattended.”

  “What's the matter with him?”

  “I think his system finally rebelled against the food he's been eating,” replied Mr. Ahasuerus. “When I told you that we could tolerate a certain amount of your native food, I should have pointed out that our entire stay on your planet was to be no more than fourteen days.”

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Only eleven,” he replied, “but it obviously affects some of us more rapidly than others.”

  I took another look at Four-Eyes.

  “I'd better get Thaddeus,” I said, and headed off to his trailer.

  He was lying exactly as I had left him, sprawled on a small couch with his arms and legs dangling over the sides, and covered with a faded purple blanket. I woke him up and told him that he'd better get over to the dormitory tent right away.

  I've seen him spend an hour crawling out of bed when he's got a hangover, and I've seen him stay asleep with Monk's lion roaring right outside the window—but mention that the carnival's got a problem and he's up and alert in ten seconds. Since he was already dressed, all he did was splash some cold water on his face and, without even bothering to put on a jacket, he ran across the snow-covered Midway to the aliens’ tent without saying a word. I guess he must have thought Mr. Ahasuerus was leading a revolt or something like that, because he looked surprised to see the total lack of commotion when he arrived.

  “What's up?” he asked me.

  “Four-Eyes,” I said. “He's very sick.”

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “The Cyclops. You named him last night.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right.” He walked over to Four-Eyes, then turned to Mr. Ahasuerus.

  “Just how bad is he?” he demanded.

  “I don't know,” answered Mr. Ahasuerus.

  “Why the hell not?” snapped Thaddeus. “You're the goddamned tour guide, aren't you?”

  “I am not a doctor,” said Mr. Ahasuerus. “And he needs one.”

  “Well, we don't happen to have any doctors who specialize in one-eyed men from Mars,” said Thaddeus. He picked up Four-Eyes’ hand in his own and took his pulse. “What's the normal rate for this guy?”

  “I have no idea,” replied the blue man.

  “Is there anything about him that you do know?” asked Thaddeus contemptuously.

  “I think the food has made him sick.”

  “I notice that it didn't make anyone else sick,” said Thaddeus, “or do you all intend to start foaming at the mouth and collapsing?”

  “We are all different,” said Mr. Ahasuerus. “This is an alien environment. It affects us in different ways.”

  Thaddeus dropped Four-Eyes’ hand and frowned. “Find out from him what he needs and we'll try to supply it.”

  “He needs freedom,” hissed Albert the Alligator.

  “You can't eat freedom,” said Thaddeus coldly. He turned to Mr. Ahasuerus. “Find out what it is: potassium, iodine, whipped cream, whatever.”

  “What if he can't reply?” asked Mr. Ahasuerus.

  “Then you'll have to figure out who's guiltier—you or me,” said Thaddeus.

  He turned and started to leave the tent. I shuffled after him and caught up with him at the doorway. “Thaddeus, I think he's dying,” I said.

  “Horseshit,” said Thaddeus. “He's got a bellyache.”

  “But—”

  “Look,” he said, “if our food could kill him instantly, he'd be dead by now. If it kills him slowly, then he's committed suicide and there's nothing we can do to stop it. And if he was suicidal, he'd have tried to kill himself before now, so what he's got is a pain in the gut. It's probably like eating rich food: one meal is okay, three are okay, and twenty in a row will have you wishing you were dead. Find out what he needs and give it to him—and for Christ's sake, don't let him go back to eating Queenie's food once he's recovered.”

  “I hope you're right,” I said.

  “I am,” he replied confidently. “And you tell that son of a bitch that I want him back to work tomorrow night at the latest.”

  It turned out that Four-Eyes needed enormous supplements of iron and sodium. Once Mr. Ahasuerus relayed that information to me I had Gloria buy a batch of each, and within a few hours he was showing a noticeable improvement.

  Everything went along smoothly for two more days. Then we experienced the first blizzard of the season. The winds whipped across the landscape at fifty miles an hour, snow piled up everywhere, and we had to shut down just before twilight.

  Sometime during the night one of the power lines was knocked down. The county repairmen had it fixed in a couple of hours, but by then Rainbow was pale blue again.

  “What the hell did you let him come along for?” Thaddeus demanded of Mr. Ahasuerus after examining the Man of Many Colors. “If he's got any survival traits I sure as hell haven't seen them.”

  “He would have been all right under normal circumstances,” said Mr. Ahasuerus softly.

  Thaddeus glared at him. “It could have snowed a week ago,” he said.

  “But it didn't,” replied Mr. Ahasuerus.

  Thaddeus turned to me. “Go over to the girls’ trailers and see if any of them have an electric blanket. If not, get a couple of hot-water bottles.”

  “Thank you,” mumbled Rainbow.

  “I don't need any thanks for protecting my investment,” snapped Thaddeus.

  He looked around the tent. “Rainbow stays here. Everyone else works. We start at noon.”

  He walked out without another word.

  I managed to borrow an electric blanket from Gloria, and when I returned I plugged it in and showed Rainbow how to use the controls. It was about ten-thirty, and I decided to have some breakfast before the show began.

  “I don't understand him,” said Scratch, walking over and sitting next to me while I ate some of Queenie's scrambled eggs and bacon.

  I fought the urge to edge away from him. During the past week I had made an effort to get to know most of the aliens, but Scratch scared me. Not the way Mr. Ahasuerus had at first, but in a deeper, more mystical way. He was probably a very decent person, and someone had told me that he was a mathematician and poet on his home world, but with his reddish color and the two huge horns growing out of his forehead he seemed diabolical in appearance. Thaddeus had dressed him in red satin, with a black cape, and he looked as if he belonged on the throne of Hell.

  “You mean Thaddeus?” I asked, leaning back just a little.

  “Yes,” said Scratch. “You are a decent man, and you do not hate him, so doubtless he has certain admirable qualities.”

  I would have been hard-pressed to tell him what they were, so I simply stared at him and waited for him to speak again.

  “Yet I find him a mass of contradictions,” continued the satanic alien. “He treats our illnesses, yet he won't set us free. He lets his mate perform what in your society are acts of degradation, but he allows her to convince him that the Three-Breasted Woman should not have to undergo such an experience. He treats us like animals, yet yesterday he threatened a customer with physical violence for making a remark far less insulting than those he himself makes all the time. Why?”

  I shrugged. “I don't know. Life isn't as simple as I once thought it was. And, just for the
record, Alma isn't his mate.”

  “But I understood him to say...”

  “He doesn't always tell the truth,” I said.

  “Will he ever release us?” asked Scratch.

  “I don't know,” I told him truthfully.

  “Sooner or later we will start dying,” he said without emotion. “The food, the air, the temperature, the gravity, even the stress, will do us in. He will cause the death of twelve intelligent entities. Doesn't this trouble him?”

  I didn't know how to answer him, so I didn't say anything.

  “No, I suppose it doesn't,” he continued. He uttered what I took to be an oath. “I ache for my mate and my children. I have my work to return to. What am I to do?”

  “I'm surprised you haven't tried to escape,” I remarked as casually as I could.

  “To what purpose?” he said. “Oh, we have the ability to leave here, even if Flint tried to stop us. But where would we go? What would we do? We could never find our shuttlecraft, and before long our presence would be made manifest to your race.”

  “Would that be so terrible?” I asked.

  “I personally cannot see why it would, but I am told that those few worlds that have been made aware of us have changed radically and unnaturally because of that knowledge. Our most sacred pledge before embarking upon this endeavor was to maintain secrecy at all costs.”

  Suddenly he didn't seem quite so satanic.

  “You're caught between the devil and the deep blue sea,” I said.

  He didn't understand that, of course, so I had to explain just what the devil was. He was quite amused.

  “We have three devils in our religion,” he said with a smile. “One of them looks exactly like Monk, and another could be a cousin of Alma's.”

  “Then I hope you understand why I'm a little nervous in your presence,” I said.

  “You must not have been watching me very closely when Monk loaded us into his cages,” said Scratch. “I was trembling so much from fright that I thought I would faint.”

  “Three devils,” I said. “That's a lot of bogeymen to be afraid of.”

  “And none of them looks like Flint,” he said, staring at the doorway. Then he added in a faraway voice: “Isn't that curious?”

  He sat in silence for another moment or two, then wandered off. I checked on Rainbow, who seemed to be in serious discomfort, but there was nothing I could do for him, so finally I went back to the makeshift kitchen and asked Queenie for a cup of coffee.

  “Ah, the henchman returns,” she said contemptuously.

  “I'm not his henchman, Queenie,” I said.

  “You like ‘lackey’ better?” she asked.

  “I prefer Tojo,” I said. “It's my name.”

  “Did he give it to you?”

  “What if he did?”

  “He's pretty good at making up names,” said Queenie. “He tells a girl who doesn't know any better that he loves her, and then he names her Honeysuckle Rose and makes her go out on a stage and do God knows what with a bunch of sick, retarded hicks!”

  “I don't know what you want me to say.”

  “I want you to say that he's a vicious bastard who ought to have his balls cut off!” she snapped. “Just once, I want you to stand up to him!”

  “You still work for him,” I noted softly.

  “Only because Alma's still here,” she said. “He's got her mind so messed up that she doesn't know whether she's coming or going. I'll tell you this, though: he's never going to lay a finger on my Alma again, or I'll kill him!”

  “Is she your Alma now?” I asked.

  “She is.”

  “And has she agreed?”

  “She hasn't disagreed.” She jutted her chin out. “You got any objections?”

  “Not if she's happy,” I said.

  “I'll make her happier than he would, that's for sure,” said Queenie.

  “Is she going to keep working in the show?”

  “She doesn't care who does what to her,” said Queenie, and for a minute I thought she was going to cry. Then her face hardened again. “That's what Thaddeus has done to her. Once she cares again, she'll quit.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “I know you do,” she replied gently. “I'm sorry, Tojo. Sometimes I can't help getting you mixed up with him. God, do you know what it's like lying in bed with her and seeing her looking out the window at his trailer with tears rolling down her face?”

  “I know what her face looks like with tears on it,” I said.

  “It's not the same thing.”

  “No, I guess not,” I answered softly. I thanked her for my coffee and spent the next hour sitting next to Rainbow, looking for a change in his color. There wasn't any, but he did seem a little more comfortable. Then, at noon, I escorted the other aliens to the sideshow tent.

  Thaddeus showed up ten minutes late and looking very agitated. His patter was off, and he almost got into a fight with a customer. Finally, just before three o'clock, he told Swede, who was selling tickets, to close up the box office, and after he rushed the last batch of customers through he had me take the aliens back to the dormitory tent.

  He entered a minute later, practically snorting fire from his nostrils, and told the guards to wait outside. Then he lined the aliens up and stood in front of them, an ominous smile on his face.

  “I just got a phone call from Vermont,” he said, looking from one alien to the next. “They released Romany early this morning.” He paused for a few seconds, then continued. “He told them he was coming to Maine to look for us.”

  None of the aliens made any comment, or even moved.

  “So I got to thinking about it,” said Thaddeus. “How the hell could he know to look for us in Maine, when all logic says we'd be moving south, and when even I myself didn't know we were going to Maine until after he'd been arrested? I didn't tell the cops we were going to Maine, and I'm sure none of you told them. So how did he know?”

  Silence.

  “He knew,” said Thaddeus triumphantly, “because one of you goddamned freaks is a telepath! You told him where we are and you're guiding him every step of the way!”

  He folded his arms across his chest and glared at them.

  “All right,” he said. “Who is it?”

  Nobody moved.

  “Someone is in for a lot of trouble,” he said. “What happens to him is going to happen whether it happens to everyone else or not.”

  “We have been kidnapped and mistreated,” said Mr. Ahasuerus at last. “You have deprived us of our physical and spiritual needs. What possible threat can you make at this point?”

  “You're still alive,” said Thaddeus grimly. “That is not necessarily a permanent condition.”

  “You won't kill us,” said Mr. Ahasuerus with a wry smile. “What would become of your profit?”

  “You think about whether I'll make appreciably less profit with six freaks than twelve, and let me know when you come up with an answer,” said Thaddeus.

  “And you think about how you will display us if, for example, we were to go on a hunger strike,” said Mr. Ahasuerus.

  “Semantics,” said Thaddeus.

  “I don't understand.”

  “Whether you go on a hunger strike or I put you on a starvation diet, the result is going to be the same: you ain't gonna have one hell of a lot to eat.”

  “What must be, must be,” said the blue man.

  “You think about it real carefully,” said Thaddeus. “Just how long do you think the rainbow man can go without food in his current condition? How long can the Cyclops make it without his pills? I want to know today!”

  He turned to me. “You come with me!” he snapped. Then he walked out of the tent and headed over to his trailer. I couldn't see that any purpose would be served by defying him, so I paused for just a few seconds and fell into step behind him.

  I expected to see him start ranting and raving and throwing things against the walls, but instead he sat on his couch, a s
elf-satisfied smile on his face.

  “I guess that put the fear of God into ‘em!” he chuckled, lighting up a cigarette.

  “Didn't you mean it?” I asked.

  “Of course not! Who the hell is going to shell out money to see a bunch of dying aliens?”

  “Then why did you say it?”

  “You got to show ‘em who's boss, Tojo,” he said. “Besides, I didn't want them to think I was so goddamned dumb that I didn't know what was going on.”

  “But when they find out you're not going to do anything—”

  “My God, you're as dumb as they are!” he said irritably. “Do you really think I'd grandstand like that if I couldn't follow it up?”

  “I don't understand what you mean,” I said.

  “I told them I wanted the name of the telepath,” he said with a grin. “They're going to give it to me.”

  “They'll never tell you,” I said.

  “I already know,” he said with a laugh. “It's gotta be the Pincushion.”

  “Bullseye?” I said. “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because he's the only one who doesn't talk. How the hell else can he communicate?”

  “Then why didn't you accuse him?”

  “Divide and conquer,” Thaddeus replied. “I'm going to grill each one privately. When I'm done I'll announce that one of them told me.”

  “But why?”

  “Everyone's got a pent-up supply of rage and suspicion,” he said. “Why the hell should it all be directed at an honest businessman like me who's just doing his job? A little dissension, a little distrust, a little skepticism about their comrades-in-arms ought to make everything go a little smoother. Who the hell is going to plan a revolution when they've got an informer in the ranks?”

  Deep down inside of me I probably knew it all the time, but it was at that instant that I realized beyond any shadow of a doubt that Mr. Ahasuerus and the others had more than met their match.

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