The Body Snatchers Read online

  “Thanks,” Becky said. “I feel good when I’m with you, Miles. I’m not at ease with most people these days. But it’s different with you. I suppose it’s because we’ve been divorced.” She laughed and added, “In Santa Mira it does make a difference.”

  Well, of course that was it, and now I realized it. Driving along through the summer evening, the top down, turning onto Main Street, I understood why I’d rather be with Becky these days than anyone else I knew, including old friends. I had a girl in the only way I wanted a girl just now, on an even, steady keel. Of course I was aware that Becky was attractive, and I’d wondered how it would be to kiss her. But, mostly, meeting Becky was like coming home from a world of strangers.

  WE GOT the last parking space in the block, and at the box office I bought two loge tickets. The girl in the booth said, “Just check in with Ed, Doctor,” meaning she’d relay any call that came in for me, if I’d remind the usher to remember where he put us.

  We were lucky; we saw half the picture. Sometimes I think I’ve seen half of more movies than anyone else alive, and my mind is cluttered with vague, never-to-be-answered wonderings about how certain movies turned out and how others began. This evening was no different. The usher was flashing his light, beckoning to me, and I muttered to Becky; then we pushed our way out.

  “Someone downstairs, Doctor,” the boy said.

  As we came down the carpeted stairs. Jack Belicec came across the lobby toward us, smiling apologetically. “Sorry, Miles,” he said, glancing at Becky to include her in the apology. “Hate to spoil your movie.”

  “That’s okay. What’s the trouble?”

  He didn’t answer, but walked over to hold the outer doors open for us, and I knew he didn’t want to talk in the lobby, so we walked on out to the sidewalk, and he followed. But outside he still wouldn’t get to the point. “No one’s sick. Miles; it isn’t that. But I’d certainly like you to come out to the house.”

  I like Jack. He’s a writer, and a good one, I think. But I was a little annoyed: this kind of intrusion happened so often. All day people will wait around, thinking about calling the doctor, but deciding not to, deciding to wait, hoping it won’t be necessary. But then it gets dark, and there’s something about night that makes them decide that maybe they’d better have the doctor in after all.

  “Well, Jack,” I said, “if it’s not an emergency, if it’s anything that can wait till morning, then why not do that?” I nodded toward Becky. “It’s not just my evening, but—you two know each other, by the way?”

  Becky smiled, and nodded. Jack glanced from me to Becky and said, “Look, bring Becky along, if she’d like to come. Might be a good idea, might help my wife.” He smiled wryly. “I don’t say Becky’s going to like what she’ll see, but it’ll be a lot more interesting than any movie, I promise that.”

  I glanced at Becky, she nodded, and since Jack is no fool, I didn’t ask any more questions. “All right,” I said, “let’s go in my car. I’ll drive you back to pick up yours when we’re through.”

  We sat three in the front seat, and on the way out—Jack lives in the country just outside town—he didn’t offer any more information, and I assumed he had a reason. Jack’s a thin-faced intense sort of man, with prematurely white hair. He’s about forty years old, an intelligent man of good sense and judgment. I respect him; he knows how to make a decision. And so I waited now, till he was ready to talk.

  We passed the city-limits sign, and Jack pointed ahead. “Turn left on the dirt road, if you remember, Miles. It’s the green house on the hill.”

  I nodded, and turned, shifting into second for the climb.

  He said, “Stop a minute, will you, Miles? I want to ask you something.”

  I PULLED to the edge of the road, set the hand brake, and turned to him, leaving the motor running.

  He took a deep breath, and said, “Miles, there are certain things a doctor has to report when he runs into them, aren’t there?”

  It was as much a statement as a question, and I just nodded.

  “A contagious disease, for example,” he went on, as though thinking out loud, “or a bullet wound, or a body. Well, Miles”—he turned to stare out the window on his side—“do you always have to report them? Is there ever a case, I mean, when a doctor might feel justified in overlooking the rules?”

  I shrugged. “Depends,” I said. I didn’t know how to answer him.

  “On what?”

  “On the doctor, I suppose. And the particular case. What’s up, Jack?”

  “I can’t tell you yet; I’ve got to know the answer to this first.” Staring out his window, he thought for a moment, then turned to look at me. “Maybe you can answer this. Can you imagine a case, any kind of case—a bullet wound, for example—where the rules or the law or whatever it was, required you to report it, and where you’d get into real trouble if you didn’t report it and were found out—maybe even lose your license? Can you imagine any set circumstances where you might gamble your reputation, ethics and license, and not turn in a report, just the same?”

  I shrugged again. “I don’t know, Jack. I guess so. I guess I could dream up some sort of situation where I’d forget the rules, if it were important enough and I felt I ought to.” I was suddenly irritated at all the mystery. “I don’t know, Jack. What are you getting at? This is all too vague, and I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m promising anything. If you’ve got something up at your house that I ought to report, I’ll probably report it. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Jack smiled. “All right. That’s good enough. I think maybe you’ll decide not to report this one.” He nodded toward his house. “Let’s go on up.”

  I pulled out into the road again, and the headlights caught a figure, maybe a hundred yards ahead, walking toward us. I saw it was Theodora, Jack’s wife.

  I pulled toward her in low gear, then stopped beside her. She said, “Hello. Miles,” then spoke to Jack, looking into the car through my open window. “I couldn’t stay up there alone, Jack. I just couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

  He nodded. “I should have brought you along. It was stupid of me not to.” Opening the car door, I leaned forward to let Theodora into the back seat; then Jack introduced her to Becky, and we drove on up to the house . . .

  Jack’s house sits by itself on the side of a hill, and the garage is a part of the basement. The garage was empty, the door open, and Jack motioned for me to drive right in. We got out of the car; Jack snapped on a light, closed the garage door, and then opened a door leading into the basement proper, motioning for us to go on in.

  We stepped into an ordinary basement and then Jack walked past us across the room to another door. He stopped, turning toward us, his hand on the doorknob. He had a pretty good secondhand billiard table in there, I knew; he’d told me he used it a lot, just knocking the balls around by himself, doing a lot of his writing in his head. Now he looked at Becky, glancing at his wife too. “Get hold of yourself,” he said. Then he walked in, pulled the chain on the overhead light, and we followed after him.

  The light over a billiard table is designed to light up the table surface brilliantly. It hangs low so it won’t shine in your eyes as you play, and it leaves the ceiling in darkness. I wasn’t looking at Becky, but I heard her gasp. Lying on the table top under the brilliant light of the 150-watt bulb, and covered with the rubberized sheet Jack kept on the billiard table, was what was unmistakably a body. I turned to look at Jack. He said, “Go on; pull it off.”

  I was irritated; this worried me and scared me, and there was too damn’ much mystery to suit me. It occurred to me that the writer in Jack was laying on the dramatics a little too heavily. I grabbed the rubber sheet, yanked it off and tossed it to one side. Lying on the green felt, on its back, was the naked body of a man. It was maybe five feet ten inches tall—it isn’t too easy to judge height, looking down on a body that way. The skin was very pale in the brilliant shadowless light; the body looked unreal and theatrical, as t
hough it were lying in a spotlight. And yet it was intensely, overly real. The body was slender, weighing maybe 140 pounds, but well nourished and well muscled. I couldn’t judge the age, except that he wasn’t old. The blank eyes were open, staring directly up into the overhead light, in a way that made your own eyes smart. There was no wound visible, and no other obvious cause of death. I walked over beside Becky, slipped my arm under hers, and turned to Jack. “Well?”

  He shook his head, refusing to comment. “Keep looking. Examine it. Notice anything strange?”

  I turned back to the body on the table. I was getting more and more irritated. I didn’t like this; there was something strange about this dead man on the table, but I couldn’t tell what, and that made me angrier. “Come on, Jack,” I said. “I don’t see anything but a dead man. Let’s cut out the mystery. What’s it all about?”

  Again he shook his head. “Miles, take it easy. Please. I don’t want to tell you my impression of what’s wrong; I don’t want to influence you. If it’s there to see, I want you to find it yourself, first. And if it isn’t, if I’m imagining it, I want to know that too. Bear with me, Miles,” he said gently. “Take a good look at that thing.”

  WALKING slowly around the table, I studied the corpse, stopping to look down at it from various angles. Jack, Becky and Theodora stepped out of my way as I moved. “All right,” I said presently, and reluctantly, apologizing to Jack with the tone of my voice. “There is something funny about it. You’re not imagining anything. Or if you are, so am I.” For maybe half a minute longer I stood staring down at what lay on the table.

  “Well, first of all,” I said finally, “you don’t often see a body like this, dead or alive. In a way, it reminds me of a few tubercular patients I’ve seen, those who’ve been in sanitariums nearly all their lives.” I looked around at them all. “You can’t live an ordinary life without picking up a few scars, a few nicks here and there. But these sanitarium patients never had a chance to get any; their bodies were unused. And that’s how this one looked. But it’s not tubercular. It’s a well-built healthy body; those are good muscles. But it never played football or hockey, never fell on a cement walk, never broke a bone. It looks—unused. That what you mean?”

  Jack nodded. “Yes. What else?”

  “The face,” I said, answering Jack. I stood looking down at that face, waxy-white, absolutely still and motionless, the china-clear eyes staring. “It’s not immature, exactly.” I wasn’t sure how to say this. “Those are good bones; it’s an adult face. But it looks”—I hunted for the word, and couldn’t find it—“vague. It looks—”

  Jack said, “Did you ever see them make medals?”

  “Medals?”

  “Yes, fine medals. Medallions.”

  “No.”

  SETTLING into his explanation, Jack said, “Well, for a really fine job, in hard metal, they make two impressions.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, or why. “First they take a die and make impression number one, giving the blank metal its first rough shape. Then they stamp it with die number two, and it’s the second die that gives it the details, the fine lines and delicate modeling you see in a really good medallion. They have to do it that way because that second die, the one with the details, couldn’t force its way into smooth metal. You have to give it that first rough shape with the number one.” He stopped, looking from me to Becky, to see if we were following him.

  “So?” I said, a little impatiently. “Well, usually a medallion shows a face. And when you look at it after die number one, Miles, the face isn’t finished. It’s there, all right, but the details that give it character aren’t.” He stared at me. “Miles, that’s what this face looks like. It’s like a blank face, waiting for the final finished face to be stamped onto it!”

  He was right. It really wasn’t a face, not yet. There was no life to it; it wasn’t marked by experience—that’s the only way I can explain it. “Who is he?” I said.

  “I don’t know.” Jack walked to the doorway and pointed to the staircase leading upstairs. “There’s a little closet under the stairway; it’s walled in with plywood to make storage space. It’s half full of old junk and we hardly ever open it. I found him in there about an hour ago; I was hunting for a reference book I needed, and thought it might be in there. He was lying on top of the cartons, just the way you see him now. It scared me stiff at first. Then I pulled him out. I thought he might still be alive; I couldn’t tell. Miles, how soon does rigor mortis set in?”

  “Oh, eight to ten hours.”

  “Feel him,” Jack said.

  I picked up an arm from the table, by the wrist; it was loose and flexible. It didn’t even feel clammy, or particularly cold.

  “There’s no rigor mortis, Jack said. “Right?”

  “That’s right,” I said, “but rigor mortis isn’t invariable. There are certain conditions—” I stopped talking; I didn’t know what to make of this. I picked up the rubber sheet and tossed it over the body again, half covering it. “All right,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs and talk this over.”

  Up in the living room, Theodora sat down in a big easy chair, Becky and I were on the davenport, and Jack was sitting by the window.

  Jack said, “We called you, Miles, because you’re a doctor, but also because you’re a guy who can face facts. Even when the facts aren’t what they ought to be. You got anything more to say about this body downstairs?”

  I sat there for a moment or so, fiddling with a button on my coat, then made up my mind to say it. “Yes,” I said, “I have. This doesn’t make sense, it makes no sense at all, but if I were to perform an autopsy on that body, you know what I think I’d find?” I glanced around the room—at Jack, Theodora, then Becky—and no one answered; they just sat there waiting. “I think I’d find no cause of death at all. I think I’d find every organ in as perfect condition as the body is externally. Everything in working order, ready to go.” I let them think about that for a moment, then went on; I felt utterly foolish saying it, and utterly certain I was right. “And that isn’t all. I don’t believe for a single moment that that body downstairs ever died. There is no cause of death, because it never died. And it never died because it’s never been alive.” I shrugged, and sat back on the davenport. “There you are. That screwy enough for you?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, slowly and emphatically nodding his head. “That’s exactly screwy enough for me. It’s exactly what I think, and so does Theodora. And what’s important is, I didn’t tell her anything about my impressions. I let her look at that thing and form her own opinion, just as I did with you.”

  “You tell anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “I don’t know.” Jack looked at me, a little smile on his face. “You want to call them?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t.”

  Jack nodded in agreement, and then said slowly, “I have a feeling that this is a time to do something more than call the police. What exactly could the police do? This isn’t just a body, and we know it. It’s”—he shrugged, his face somber—“it’s something terrible. Something—I don’t know what.” He looked up, glancing around at us all. “I only know, and somehow I’m certain of this, that we mustn’t make a mistake here. That there is some one step—the wise step, the single correct step, the one and only step to take—and if we fail to take it, if we guess wrong, something terrible is going to happen.”

  I said, “What should we do?”

  FOR a moment, Jack turned away to stare out the window. Then he looked back at us, and smiled a little. “I have a terrible urge to call the President at the White House, or the head of the Army, the FBI, the Marines or something.” He shook his head in wry amusement at himself, and then the smile faded. “Miles, what I mean is, I want somebody—exactly the right person, whoever he is—to realize from the very start how important this is. And I want him, or them,
to do whatever should be done, without a mistake. But the trouble is, whoever I got in touch with—if he’d even listen to me or believe me—might be exactly the wrong person, somebody who’d make the worst move possible, whatever that might be. But I do know this isn’t something for the local police. This is—” He shrugged, realizing he was repeating himself, and stopped.

  “I know,” I said. “I have the same feeling, the feeling that the world better hope we handle this right.” In medicine sometimes, on a puzzling case, an answer or a clue will pop up out of nowhere—the subconscious mind at work, I suppose. I said, “Jack, how tall are you?”

  “Five ten.”

  “How tall would you say the body downstairs is?”

  He looked at me for a moment, then said, “Five ten.”

  “And what do you weigh?”

  “One forty.”

  “And what would you say—”

  “One forty.”

  I nodded. “You got an ink pad in the house? The kind you use for rubber stamps?”

  “Yes,” Theodora said and got up. She crossed the room to a desk. “There’s one in here somewhere.” She found and brought out an ink pad. and then opened another drawer and got out a sheet of stationery.

  I went over to the desk, and so did Becky. I inked the ends of all five fingers of Jack’s right hand, then pressed the fingers, carefully rolling each one, on the sheet of paper, getting a full set of clean sharp prints. Then I picked up the stamp pad and paper. “You girls want to come?” I nodded at the basement door.

  Becky said. “No, but I’m going to.” and Theodora nodded.

  DOWNSTAIRS, Jack turned on the light over the billiard table. It swung a little, giving the impression that the body was moving. I picked up the right wrist, concentrating on that, not looking at the face. I inked the ends of all five fingers, then I laid the sheet of paper containing Jack’s fingerprints on the wide table ledge, beside the body’s right arm. I brought the hand up, laid it on the paper and, rolling each finger, I took an impression of them all, directly opposite Jack’s prints; then I lifted the hand from the paper.