Stories complete, p.1
Stories Complete, page 1
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Stories Complete
Jack Lewis
(custom book cover)
Jerry eBooks
Bibliography
The Miraculous Lens
Who’s Cribbing
Purple Forever
No Place for Housekeeping
Riddle of the Rim
Spaceborn
Jekyll-Hyde Planet
The Students
Calling All Aliens
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels
Blood Money (1960)
Chapbooks
Jekyll-Hyde Planet (2019)
Purple Forever (2020)
Short Fiction
The Miraculous Lens, Vortex Science Fiction #2, 1953
Who’s Cribbing?, Startling Stories, January 1953
Purple Forever, Planet Stories, November 1953
No Place for Housekeeping, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fall, October 1954
Riddle of the Rim, Spaceway, April 1955
Spaceborn, Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, October 1955
Jekyll-Hyde Planet, If, February 1956
The Students, Fantastic Universe, April 1957
Calling All Aliens, Fantastic Universe, March 1958
The Miraculous Lens
MY name is James O’Conell, but the kids at school all call me Jimmie. Pop calls me Jimmie too. But sometimes when Mom gets a little mad at me she calls me James. Like the time I got into the fist fight with Tommy Pearson and broke my glasses.
She was real mad that time—especially after I told her that I didn’t like the old glasses anyhow and was glad they were broke.
When Pop got home from work that night, I sat in the living room, real quiet like, and pretended I was reading a comic book. But all the while, I could hear Mom in the kitchen telling him what happened.
While she talked to him, Pop kept moving around, and I knew he was hanging up his hat and coat. Then pretty soon he came into the living 100m and told me to put down the comic book.
“Your Mother tells me you got into trouble at school today,” he said. “Broke your glasses too. Can you give me any reason why I shouldn’t put the strap to you?”
I didn’t say anything—just looked down at the floor and acted like I was sorry. I thought maybe if I acted sorry enough about what happened, he wouldn’t put the strap to me.
“Well, what have you got to say for yourself?” he said.
“Gee, Pop,” I told him, “I’m sorry about the glasses. I didn’t mean to break them, but now that they’re broke, maybe the kids at school won’t make fun of me anymore.”
Pop scratched his nose a little, like lie always does when he’s trying to figure something out. “Why would they make fun of you?” he asked me. “Lots of people wear glasses.”
“None of the kids in my class do,” I said. “That’s what started the fight this afternoon. Tommy Pearson and a couple of other guys kept calling me Barney Google and Banjo Eyes, till all of a sudden we were all swinging at each other.
After I told him that, Pop scratched his nose some more. Then pretty soon he walked out in the kitchen. At first I thought he was going inside after the strap. But after a while, I could hear him and Mom talking in the kitchen. They talked real low. That’s how I knew they were talking about me. But I didn’t mind because by that time I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get a spanking after all.
After school the next day Mom took me down to the optician. Mom went inside with him first and after a while they called me in and the man asked me to sit down. Mr. Pfister asked me a lot of questions about how old I was and what class I was in at school. Then he made me look through a big funny looking pair of black glasses and read a chart on the wall. He said he was going to make me a pair of glasses that weren’t really glasses at all, cause no one would be able to tell whether I was wearing them or not.
A couple of days later when we went back there again, Mr. Pfister brought out a little box and inside were the things he’d made for me. He said they were called contact lenses.
They didn’t feel very good when he
put them on, but after he let me look in a mirror and I saw that you couldn’t tell I was wearing them, I knew they were going to be OK.
It must have been just about lunch time when we got back outside cause there were an awful lot of people on the street. Everyone seemed to be walking in different directions and bumping into each other. I didn’t think much about it right then, but after we got home and I went to turn on the television, a funny thing happened.
Mom was sitting across from me on the sofa. I asked her what time Howdy-Doody came on, but she didn’t answer me. She was looking right at me, so I thought she hadn’t heard and asked her again.
Then I heard Mom say: “He won’t be on for almost an hour.” Only it wasn’t Mom talking, but another lady who looked just like her. And she was standing in the doorway.
Well, I just looked back and forth, from the lady who stood in the doorway and looked and talked like my Mom, to the lady who sat on the sofa and didn’t talk at all. Then the Mom who talked, walked over and sat down next to the Mom that didn’t.
“Who is that sitting next to you?” I asked the Mom who talked.
She turned around, real scared like and looked right at the other lady. Then she looked back at me. “James,” she said, “I don’t want you to startle me that way. It isn’t funny to scare people.”
“But there IS someone there,” I told her. “She looks just like you, and she’s sitting beside you.”
Mom, (the one who talked) wrinkled up the corners of her mouth. Then as if she just thought of something, jumped up and walked over to where I sat. “James,” she said, “I do believe you’re seeing double. Take those lenses out of your eyes this instant!”
I took them off. And then I noticed that the lady on the sofa was gone.
When Pop got home that night and Mom told him what happened, he was fit to be tied. He raved for a long while about people not making things the way they used to, and then he asked me to put on the lenses again.
When I got them set in place, he had me read from a comic book, and asked me if I could see him all right. I told him I could, and that seemed to make him feel better, cause he called out to Mom in the kitchen that there wasn’t anything wrong with the glasses as far as he could see. It struck me kind of funny that he should call out to the kitchen, when Mom was sitting right at the table, but I didn’t say anything about it seeing how mad he’d just been.
Then I saw the door open and another man who looked just like Pop walked into the room and sat down at the table across from Mom.
Well, it was all pretty hard for me to understand, especially after someone else came into the room; a boy about ten years old who looked enough like me to be my twin brother; only I didn’t have any twin brother.
Pop saw me staring at all the people in the room and asked me what was wrong. I pointed to the table. “Pop,” I said, “how can we be over there at the table and here at the same time?”
Pop’s mouth dropped a little bit and he scratched his nose as he looked over toward the table where we sat. For a minute I thought he was going to get mad. But he didn’t. “Son,” he said, “tell me, just what do you see over there?”
I told him about the three people sitting at the table eating supper, and that if we didn’t hurry up and eat too, there wasn’t going to be anything left. Then Mom—the other Mom—came into the room and she and Pop began talking real excited like. Mom said she thought they should call in Doctor Williams, but Pop said he was going to get to the bottom of this himself.
“Jimmy,” he said, “you know good and well there isn’t anyone else in the room but us. Why do you persist in making up such a big story?”
“But there is,” I told him, pointing at the table.
“There’s no one there Son!”
All the time this was going on, the three people at the table kept right on eating and passing stuff just like nothing was happening.
Finally Pop said: “Jimmie, I’m going to prove to you that there’s no one there. I want you to walk over to the table and touch the man who you say is sitting in that chair.”
I didn’t want to do it, but the Pop who talked, looked madder than the one who was sitting at the table, so I walked over and put my hand on his shoulder. Leastwise, I tried to put my hand on his shoulder. But instead, my arm went right through him and I found myself holding on to the back of the chair. It didn’t seem to bother him any though, cause even with my arm sticking in him, he wiped off his mouth with a napkin and picked up the evening newspaper off the edge of the table.
“Well?” said the Pop who was standing by the fireplace.
“My arm goes right through him,” I told him. “He’s reading a newspaper now.”
Mom looked at Pop. “Fred,” she said, “don’t you think we should call in the doctor?”
Pop didn’t answer her. Just walked over to where I was standing with my arm sticking out from between the man’s shoulder blades. “So he’s reading a newspaper now,” he said getting all red in the face. “And tell me: What does it say in the paper?” He was shaking me by the shoulder’s now like he thought I was making the whole thing up.
“What does it say?” he yelled.
I looked at the paper, and read the headline out loud: “39 DIE IN PLANE CRASH.”
Pop didn’t say anything when I told him that. Just looked over at Mom who was standing there twisting a dish towel and looking kind of scared.
He made me take the lenses off then.
During supper, Mom and Pop didn’t say hardly a word, but every once in a while, Pd catch them looking at me. Then they’d look at each other as if they had some kind of secret between them.
There was no school the next day, on account of it being Saturday. Right after lunch Mom took me down to see Mr. Pfister again. She told him all about the glasses he’d made for me, and all the while she talked, he kept looking over at me kind of funny like. Then he told Mom to wait outside and took me into the dark room.
“Jimmie,” he said to me, “what ever made you tell your mother and father a story like that. Don’t you know that little boys who lie never get to be president?”
I told him I wasn’t lying, but he just smiled a little bit and asked me to put on the lenses.
“Now what do you see?” he asked me. I looked around the room, but everything seemed just the same as it was before. I told him this and he shook his head a little and made a funny noise with his mouth.
When we went outside, Mr. Pfister told Mom that it appeared that her son was suffering from an over active imagination.
Mom glared at me and told Air. Pfister that she’d take care of me as soon as we got home. Then we left. Mom seemed awful mad, and I knew as soon as we got to the house I was going to get it good. To make it worse, as soon as she opened the door, I saw that Pop was already home.
“Fred—” Mom started to say.
But Pop just held up his hand like he was busting with some kind of news. “Janet,” he said, pushing a newspaper toward Mom, “look here!”
I started to walk out of the room, but Pop called me back. “Son,” he Said, “is this the headline you saw last night?”
“Sure Pop,” I told him, “Why?”
Pop scratched his nose. “Because, this crash only happened this morning.”
He turned to Mom. “Janet,” he said, “there’s something going on here that’s mighty strange.”
All day Sunday, Pop had me taking the lenses on and off, and telling him what I saw.
Right after supper, Pop jumped up as if he’d just thought of something and took the lenses out of the box. Mom and I watched while he tried to put them on himself. Only they didn’t fit, and when Mom told him how silly he looked, he gave them back to me and told me to put them on again.
I was a little surprised when I looked out of them and saw Pop sitting in the living room reading the newspaper—all day long there bad only been one of him. I told him about it and that seemed to get him all excited. The next thing I know Pop had grabbed me by the arm and scooted me behind the big arm chair where he was sitting.
“What does the paper say, Son?” he asked me. “Read the headline!”
I told him that I couldn’t see the headline on account of the paper being opened to the inside.
“What DO you see?” he said.
“It’s opened to the sport’s page,” I told him. “The Dodgers lost again.”
Pop snapped his fingers and peeked around the alcove to where Mom was busy doing the dishes. He bent down close to my ear. “What else do you see, Jimmie?”
I looked down past the picture of Bobby Thomson in the middle of the page. “There’s not much else here,” I told him. “Except for that box at the bottom of the page.”
“Box?”
“Yeah Pop,” I told him, “It’s on this page every night. It says Belmont Park Charts.”
Pop licked his lips a little and peeked in at Mom again. “Son,” he whispered, “read me what it says.”
POP got home from work early the next day. He was smiling all over and when Mom asked him what happened, he said he’d just put over a big business deal, and he guessed she’d be able to buy that new electric range after all. Then he asked me how I’d like to have a bicycle.
He seemed real fidgety that night. First he’d sit down a while, and then he’d get up and walk around the floor and look at his watch. Once while he didn’t think I was looking, I saw him go into the bedroom and start to count a big roll of bills. But then when Mom came in, he put them away.
Right after the newsboy threw the evening paper on the porch, he asked me to put on the lenses again. And when I did, there was the Pop that I could only see through my left eye, sitting on the sofa reading the paper. When I told my real Pop about it, he jumped up from the arm chair and made me read from the paper just like I’d done the night before. Only this time he got a pencil and paper and wrote it all down.
Well, that went on for most of the week. Each night, Pop would make me put on the lenses and read to him from the bottom of the sport’s page while he wrote it down.
Then on Friday, he brought me home the bicycle he’d promised. I know it was Friday, cause that was the night him and Mom had the fight. I guess I was the one that started it in a way, cause when Mom asked me that afternoon what Pop was making me read every night, I got yesterdays newspaper and showed her the box at the bottom of the page. That’s how I found out that all the funny names I had to spell out for Pop were really the names of horses.
I didn’t know why Mom should be so mad about that, but I guess mothers are kind of funny that way, cause when Pop came home that night they had a big row.
Mom called him a lot of names which didn’t seem to bother him very much, until she told him that she’d hid the lenses. Then Pop got all red in the face and told her that it was very important that he have them back right away. Otherwise, he said, he would miss out on his timing.
I didn’t know what he meant by that, but it must have been pretty important, because after a lot more hollering back and forth, Mom went back of the bookcase and got out the box. She threw it on the table.
“Take your old lenses!” she yelled, “evidently they’re more important to you than your wife or son!”
Pop didn’t argue with her then anymore. Just called me into the living room and had me read to him from the paper again.
He looked kind of sad when he came home the next day. At first I thought he was still mad about the row he’d had with Mom. But after a while I found out it was because he hadn’t done so good at the track that day. Mom told him that it just went to show that you can’t make a living without working, but he said that wasn’t it at all.
He said that he’d had the winner of every race, only they didn’t pay anything. He said it had been the first time since the racetrack had been there that all the winners had only paid two dollars and ten cents.
As, usual after supper Pop called me into the living room. “Bring the lenses along, Son,” he said to me. “Maybe things will be better tomorrow.”
I brought them in and put them on. Only that night Pop wasn’t in the room at all. At first I thought the glasses weren’t working anymore. Then I looked in the dining room and there was Mom sitting at the table with the paper spread out in front of her. When I told Pop about it, he seemed a little worried. But then he said: “Never mind,” and fold me to go inside and read him the results from there.
“I can’t, Pop,” I told him. “It’s not open to the sport page.”
I told him that maybe if we waited a little while, Mom would open it to the sport page, but he said that it wasn’t likely on account of Mom never read anything except Gasoline Alley and the society page. He walked up and down the floor a while and scratched his nose. Then all of a sudden he smiled.
“I’ll be darned!” he said. “In all the excitement, I plumb forgot that tomorrow is Sunday. There isn’t any racing tomorrow.”
And then all of a sudden I saw it—right on the front page were two pictures. One of them was of the fellow who makes the eye glasses. And the other was of me!
When I told Pop, I thought for a minute lie was going to faint. “Are you sure, Son?” he said. Read me the headline! Quick, what does the headline say?”
It was no trouble to read the headline, on account of it was in big black letters that took up half the page. I read it to him: “OPTICIAN DISCOVERS LENS THAT VIEWS THE FUTURE!”
I could feel Pop’s hand on my shoulder. It was shaking. “Read some more, Jimmie,” he said.
