Backteria and Other Improbable Tales by Richard Matheson Page B

needlepoints into your side. Pupils like worlds swimming in chaos, your eyes whip around, searching. There has to be
an answer
. Fury rises.
There has to be AN ANSWER
!
    “There
has
to be!” you scream.
    And, sired by malfunction, rage is born. (Right on schedule)
    Hell-fire-eyed, you rush into a pottery shop.
    “HEL-
LO
!” you challenge. No reply. Your lips compress.
    “I said HEL-
LO
!” you ultimatum.
    No reply.
    Pulsing with distemper, you grab a firkin mug and let fly. Strike one! A hand-wrought chafing dish explodes into china shrapnel. The floor is sprinkled with its splinters. Angry satisfaction fires your insides.
    “
Well?
” you ask. Nothing.
    Your hand shoots out and grabs a miniature patella.
Whiz-z-z-z
!—it goes. Ca
-rash
! Strike two! A hail of gold-fringed porringer fragments sprays the floor and wall. “I SAID HELLO!” you shout. Not mad exactly; more infuriated than deranged. Arm extended, spar-like, you pound along the counter, sweeping trenchers, salvers, goblets, bowls and cylixs into one great Dresden bomb.
    Which goes off with a glorious, ceramic detonation, pelting kaleidoscopic teeth just everywhere.
Strike three
! You are fulfilled.
    “There!” you yell.
    Whirling, profanations dancing on your tongue, you rush from the shop, laughing. (a laugh not wholly wholesome)
    “HEY!” you cry. “HEY-EY!” You shuck out curses at the peopleless stretch of Main Street. You jump into a running car and drive along the sidewalk for a block, making a right turn into the window of a furniture store.
    “Look
out
!” You bound into the ruins and begin to topple chairs and sling sofa cushions at the chandeliers. “I said Hel-
LO
!” You kick in coffee table tops. You pick up porcelain lamps and pitch them at the walls. “HEL-L-
O
!”
    And so on—hoary thing.
    When next seen, hours later, you have run amuck, an abstract lamp shade for a hat, an ermine wrap around your camel’s hair clad shoulders. You have burst into a supermarket with an axe and chopped pies and breads and cookies into floatsam. You have sent thirty cars running toward the neighboring town. You have thrown fistfuls of hundred dollar bills off roofs. You have set fire to the fire department, then driven its ladder truck on Main Street, knocking over hydrants and lampposts, leaving it, finally, red and running, in the lobby of the
Gaiety Theatre
.
    And now you sit, wearied with rage’s labor, sprawled on a contour chair you’ve dragged into the street; watching your town go up in smoke. Thinking: Who cares, gawdammit, anyway,
who cares?

Counterfeit Bills
    Mr. William O. Cook decided that afternoon—it was raining and he was coming home from work on the bus—that it would be pleasant to be two people. He was 41 ½, 5’ 7”, semi-bald, oval-bellied and bored. Schedule depressed him; routine gave him a pain where he lived. If, he visioned, one only had a spare self, one could assign all the duller activities of life—i.e. clerkship, husbandry, parenthood, etc.—to the double, retaining for ones own time, more pleasurable doings such as bleacher viewing, saloon haunting, corner ogling and covert visits to Madame Gogarty’s pleasure pavilion across the tracks; except, of course, that, with a double, the visits wouldn’t have to be covert.
    Accordingly, Mr. Cook spent four years, six months, two days, $5,228.20, six thousand yards of wiring, three hundred and two radio tubes, a generator, reams of paper, dizzying mentation and the good will of his wife in assembling his duplication machine. This he completed one Sunday afternoon in autumn and, shortly after pot roast dinner with Maude and the five children, made a double of himself.
    “Good evening,” he said, extending his hand to the blinking copy. His double shook hands with him and, shortly after, at Mr. Cook’s request, went upstairs to watch television until bedtime while Mr. Cook climbed out the window over the coal bin, went to the nearest bar, had five fast,