boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

204 Anthony Boucher
“But this I swear to: If this article sells and de Camp’s Prophetic Limerick is
there in print for future McCanns to study, by 2342 it will have been fulfilled as
surely as any quatrain Mike ever wrote, or I lose all trust in the perverted ingenuity
of the human race.”
A.D. 1943:
By the time the magazine reached Sergeant Harold Marks, there was not much left
in it to interest him. The Varga girls and the Hurrell photographs had gone to decorate
the walls of long-abandoned outposts, and most of the cartoons had vanished, too.
Little remained but text and ads, and Sergeant Marks was not profoundly concerned
with what the well-dressed man in America was wearing last Christmas.
Until he had almost finished looking through it, he would have been more than
willing to swap the magazine for a cigarette or even for a drag on one, but at the
end he hit the de Camp article.
The Sergeant’s sister Madeleine was psychic. At least, that was her persistent claim,
and up until she joined the WAACs nobody had been able to persuade her otherwise.
Sergeant Marks had no later news from his sister than the discomforting word that
she had received her commission and now outranked him, but he was willing to bet
that she still spent as much time as she could spare telling her unfortunate non-coms
about the wonders of Nostradamus.
It was good to see somebody tear into the prophecy racket and rip it apart. This
de Camp seemed a right guy, and his lucid attack did Sergeant Marks’ heart good.
Especially the prophetic limerick. The sergeant was something of an authority
on limericks. He had yet to find a man in the service whose collection topped
his. But the pelagic young spark from the East tickled him even more than the
unlikely offspring of the old man of Bombay or the peculiar practices of the clergy
of Birmingham.
Sergeant Marks carefully tore the limerick out of the magazine and slipped it in
his pocket. He’d copy it out in a V-letter to Madeleine when they managed to get
in touch again.
He thumbed back over the magazine, hoping that he might have overlooked
some piece of cheesecake that had escaped previous vandals. Then, without warning,
all hell broke loose from the jungle and Sergeant Marks forgot cheesecake and
prophecy alike.
Civilian Harold Marks used to scoff at stories of heroes who captured machine-gun
nests single-handed. That was before he joined the Marines and learned that practical
heroism is not a mythical matter.
He still didn’t know how it was done. He knew only, and that with a half-aware
negligence, that he had done it. He was in the jungle, master of a green-painted
machine gun, and he was alone save for a pile of unmoving things with green uniforms
and yellow faces.
There were more of them coming. A green gun looks funny in your hands, but
it works fine.
There were no more coming.
Toting the green killer, Sergeant Marks returned to the ambushed outpost. His