Free The Collection by Fredric Brown Page A

in the water? Or in the next town? Surely
not farther than the next town. The hunch was that strong. That tremblingly
strong. Like the verge of madness, and suddenly he knew that he would go
mad if he did not find it soon. Maybe he was a little mad already.
    Staring over moonlit water. And suddenly something disrupted
its surface, flashed silently white in the moonlight and was gone again. Dooley
stared at the spot. A fish? There had been no sound, no splash. A hand? The
hand of a mermaid swum upstream from the North Sea beckoning him? Come in, the
water ' s fine. (But it wouldn ' t be; it was cold.) Some
super-natural water sprite? A displaced Rhine Maiden in the Weser?
    But was it really a sign? Dooley, shivering now at the
thought of what he was thinking, stood at the Weser's edge and imagined how it
would be . . . wading out slowly from the bank, letting his emotions create
the tune for the clarinet, tilting his head back as the water became deeper so
that the instrument would stick out of the water after he, Dooley, was under
it, the bell of the clarinet last to submerge. And the sound, whatever sound
there was, being made by the bubbling water closing over them. Over him first
and then the clarinet. He recalled the cliched allegation, which he had
previously viewed with iconoclastic contempt but now felt almost ready to
accept, that a drowning person was treated to a swift viewing of his entire
life as it flashed before his eyes in a grand finale to living. What a mad
montage that would be! What an inspiration for the final gurglings of the
clarinet. What a frantic blending of the whole of his wild, sweetly sad,
tortured existence, just as his straining lungs expelled their final gasp into
a final note and inhaled the cold, dark water. A shudder of breathless
anticipation coursed through Dooley Hanks's body as his fingers trembled with
the catch on the battered clarinet case.
    But no, he told himself. Who would hear? Who would
know? It was important that someone hear. Otherwise his quest, his discovery,
his entire life would be in vain. Immortality cannot be derived from one ' s
solitary knowledge of one ' s greatness. And what good was The Sound
if it brought him death and not immortality?
    A blind alley. Another blind alley. Perhaps the next town.
Yes, the next town. His hunch was coming back now. How had he been so foolish
as to think of drowning? To find The Sound, he'd kill if he had to—but not
himself. That would make the whole gig meaningless.
    Feeling as one who had had a narrow escape, he turned and
walked away from the river, back to the road that paralleled it, and
started walking toward the lights of the next town. Although Dooley Hanks had
no Indian blood that he knew of, he walked like an Indian, one foot directly in
front of the other, as though on a tightrope. And silently, or as nearly
silently as was possible in hiking boots, the ball of his foot coming down
first to cushion each step before his heel touched the roadway. And he walked
rapidly because it was still early evening and he'd have plenty of time, after
checking in at a hotel and getting rid of his haversack, to explore the town
awhile before they rolled up the sidewalks. A fog was starting to roll in now.
    The narrowness of his escape from the suicidal impulse on
the Weser ' s bank still worried him. He ' d had it before,
but never quite so strongly. The last time had been in New York, on top of the
Empire State Building, over a hundred stories above the street. It had been a
bright, clear day, and the magic of the view had enthralled him. And suddenly
he had been seized by the same mad exultation, certain that a flash of
inspiration had ended his quest, placed the goal at his fingertips. All he need
do was take his clarinet from the case, assemble it. The magic view would be
revealed in the first clear notes of the instrument and the heads of the other
sightseers would turn in wonder. Then the contrasting gasp as he leaped into
space, and