The Ultimate Egoist Read Online Free PDF Page B

Crawley. I didn’t move for a few minutes, and I heard Crawley talking. And I heard someone else answering.
    Crawley was saying something about money. “We got to get money, Bub. This is a hell of a jam. We thought we didn’t need it. We could get anything we wanted without it. See what happened? Just because I’m no beauty winner a cop asks us questions. They stick us in here. Now we’ve got to break it. Oh, we can do it; but if we get some money it don’t have to happen again. You can figure something, can’t you, Bub?”
    And then came the answering voice. It was the grating one that had been laughing before. That wasn’t Crawley’s voice! That belonged to somebody else. Aw, that was foolish. Two men to a cell. One man to a bunk. But here were two men talking, and I wasn’t saying anything. I suddenly had a feeling my brains were bubbling like an egg frying in too much grease.
    The voice shrilled, “Oh, sure. Money’s no trouble to get. Not the way we work, Crawley. He, he!” They laughed together. My blood felt so cold I was afraid to move in case my veins broke. The voice went on. “About this break; you know just what we’re going to do?”
    “Yeah,” said Crawley. “Gee, Bub, I’d sure be wuthless without you. Man, what a brain, what a brain!”
    The voice said, “You don’t have to do without me! Heh! Just you try and get rid of me!”
    I took a deep, quiet breath and slowly raised up and hung my head over the edge of the bunk so I could see. I couldn’t be scared any more. I couldn’t be shocked any more. After seeing that, I was through. A guy lives all his life for a certain moment. Like that little old doc that delivered the quints. He never did anything like it before. He never did again. From then on he was through. Like adetective in a book solving a crime. It all leads up to one thing—who done it? When the dick finds that out, he’s through. The book’s finished. Like me; I was finished when I saw Crawley’s brother. That was the high point.
    Yeah, it was his brother. Crawley was twins. Like them Siamese twins, but one was big and the other was small. Like a baby. There was only the top part of him, and he was growing out of Crawley’s chest. But that oversize chest was just built for the little one to hide in. It folded around the little one. It was hinged like I said before, something like a clamshell. My God!
    I said it was like a baby. I meant just small like that. It wasn’t baby stuff, aside from that. The head was shaggy, tight-curled. The face was long and lean with smooth, heavy eyebrows. The skin was very dark, and there was little crooked fangs on each side of the mouth, two up, two down. The ears were just a little pointed. That thing had sense of its own, and it was bad clear through. I mean really bad. That thing was all Crawley’s crime-brains. Crawley was just a smart mule to that thing. He carried it around with him and he did what it wanted him to do. Crawley obeyed that brother of his—and so did
everybody else!
I did. My tobacco money; cleaning the cell; seeing that Crawley got fed—that was all the little twin’s doing, all of it. It wasn’t my fault. Nobody
ever
pushed me around like that before!
    Then it saw me. It had thrown its hideous little head back to laugh, and it flung up a withered arm and piped, “You! Go to sleep!
Now!
” So—I did.
    I don’t know how it happened. If I’d slept all that time the bulls would have taken me to the ward. But so help me, from that time until two o’clock I don’t know what happened. The Crawley twins kept me fogged, I guess. But I must have gotten dressed and washed; I must have eaten, and I’ll guarantee that the Crawleys didn’t wash no messkits. Anyhow, the next thing I remember is the bolt shooting back on the cell door. Crawley came up behind me as I stood there looking at it, and I felt his eyes on my back. Four eyes. He said:
    “Go on. What are you waiting for?”
    I said: “You’ve done