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Title: The Night of the Long Knives
Author: Fritz Reuter Leiber
Illustrator: Virgil Finlay
Release Date: April 9, 2008 [EBook #25024]
Language: English
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COMPLETE
BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL
THE NIGHT
OF THE
LONG KNIVES
By FRITZ LEIBER
ILLUSTRATED by FINLAY
CHAPTER 1
_Any man who saw you, or even heard your footsteps must be ambushed,
stalked and killed, whether needed for food or not. Otherwise, so
long as his strength held out, he would be on your trail._
--The Twenty-Fifth Hour,
_by Herbert Best_
I was one hundred miles from Nowhere--and I mean that literally--when I
spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd been keeping an extra
lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over
from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.
[Illustration: They were two desperate scavengers in a no-man's land of
radiation and death.]
I'd been following a line of high-voltage towers all canted over at the
same gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast from the Last War. I judged
the girl was going in the same general direction and was being edged
over toward my course by a drift of dust that even at my distance showed
dangerous metallic gleams and dark humps that might be dead men or
cattle.
She looked slim, dark topped, and on guard. Small like me and like me
wearing a scarf loosely around the lower half of her face in the style
of the old buckaroos.
We didn't wave or turn our heads or give the slightest indication we'd
seen each other as our paths slowly converged. But we were intensely,
minutely watchful--I knew I was and she had better be.
Overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always. I don't remember what a
high sky looks like. Three years ago I think I saw Venus. Or it may have
been Sirius or Jupiter.
The hot smoky light was turning from the amber of midday to the bloody
bronze of evening.
The line of towers I was following showed the faintest spread in the
direction of their canting--they must have been only a few miles from
blast center. As I passed each one I could see where the metal on the
blast side had been eroded--vaporized by the original blast, mostly
smoothly, but with welts and pustules where the metal had merely melted
and run. I supposed the lines the towers carried had all been vaporized
too, but with the haze I couldn't be sure, though I did see three dark
blobs up there that might be vultures perching.
From the drift around the foot of the nearest tower a human skull peered
whitely. That is rather unusual. Years later now you still see more dead
bodies with the meat on them than skeletons. Intense radiation has
killed their bacteria and preserved them indefinitely from decay, just
like the packaged meat in the last advertisements. In fact such bodies
are one of the signs of a really hot drift--you avoid them. The vultures
pass up such poisonously hot carrion too--they've learned their lesson.
Ahead some big gas tanks began to loom up, like deformed battleships and
flat-tops in a smoke screen, their prows being the juncture of the
natural curve of the off-blast side with the massive concavity of the
on-blast side.
None of the three other buggers and me had had too clear an idea of
where Nowhere had been--hence, in part, the name--but I knew in a
general way that I was somewhere in the Deathlands between Porter County
and Ouachita Parish, probably much nearer the former.
* * * * *
It's a real mixed-up America we've got these days, you know, with just
the faintest trickle of a sense of identity left, like a guy in the
paddedest cell in the most locked up ward in the whole loony bin. If a
time traveler from mid Twentieth Century hopped forward to it across the
few intervening years and looked at a map of it, if anybody has a map of
it, he'd think that the map had run--that it had got some sort of
disease that had swollen a few tiny parts beyond all bounds, paper
tumors, while most of the other parts, the parts he remembered carrying
names in such big print and showing such bold colors, had shrunk to
nothingness.
To the east he'd see Atlantic Highlands and Savannah Fortress. To the
west, Walla Walla Territory, Pacific Palisades, and Los Alamos--and
there he'd see an actual change in the coastline, I'm told, where three
of the biggest stockpiles of fusionables let go and opened Death Valley
to the sea--so that Los Alamos is closer to being a port. Centrally he'd
find Porter County and Manteno Asylum surprisingly close together near
the Great Lakes, which are tilted and spilled out a bit toward the
southwest with the big quake. South-centrally: Ouachita Parish inching
up the Mississippi from old Louisiana under the cruel urging of the
Fisher Sheriffs.
Those he'd find and a few, a very few other places, including a couple I
suppose I haven't heard of. Practically all of them would surprise
him--no one can predict what scraps of a blasted nation are going to
hang onto a shred of organization and ruthlessly maintain it and very
slowly and very jealously extend it.
But biggest of all, occupying practically all the map, reducing all
those swollen localities I've mentioned back to tiny blobs, bounding
most of America and thrusting its jetty pseudopods everywhere, he'd see
the great inkblot of the Deathlands. I don't know how else than by an
area of solid, absolutely unrelieved black you'd represent the
Deathlands with its multicolored radioactive dusts and its skimpy
freightage of lonely Deathlanders, each bound on his murderous, utterly
pointless, but utterly absorbing business--an area where names like
Nowhere, It, Anywhere, and the Place are the most natural thing in the
world when a few of us decide to try to pad down together for a few
nervous months or weeks.
As I say, I was somewhere in the Deathlands near Manteno Asylum.
* * * * *
The girl and me were getting closer now, well within pistol or dart
range though beyond any but the most expert or lucky knife throw. She
wore boots and a weathered long-sleeved shirt and jeans. The black
topping was hair, piled high in an elaborate coiffure that was held in
place by twisted shavings of bright metal. A fine bug-trap, I told
myself.
In her left hand, which was closest to me, she carried a dart gun,
pointed away from me, across her body. It was the kind of potent tiny
crossbow you can't easily tell whether the spring is loaded. Back around
on her left hip a small leather satchel was strapped to her belt. Also
on the same side were two sheathed knives, one of which was an
oddity--it had no handle, just the bare tang. For nothing but throwing,
I guessed.
I let my own left hand drift a little closer to my Banker's Special in
its open holster--Ray Baker's great psychological weapon, though (who
knows?) the two .38 cartridges it contained might actually fire. The one
I'd put to the test at Nowhere had, and very lucky for me.
She seemed to be hiding her right arm from me. Then I spotted the weapon
it held, one you don't often see, a stevedore's hook. She _was_ hiding
her right hand, all right, she had the long sleeve pulled down over it
so just the hook stuck out. I asked myself if the hand were perhaps
covered with radiation scars or sores or otherwise disfigured. We
Deathlanders have our vanities. I'm sensitive about my baldness.
Then she let her right arm swing more freely and I saw how short it was.
She had no right hand. The hook was attached to the wrist stump.
I judged she was about ten years younger than me. I'm pushing forty, I
think, though some people have judged I'm younger. No way of my knowing
for sure. In this life you forget trifles like chronology.
Anyway, the age difference meant she would have quicker reflexes. I'd
have to keep that in mind.
* * * * *
The greenishly glinting dust drift that I'd judged she was avoiding
swung closer ahead. The girl's left elbow gave a little kick to the
satchel on her hip and there was a sudden burst of irregular ticks that
almost made me start. I steadied myself and concentrated on thinking
whether I should attach any special significance to her carrying a
Geiger counter. Naturally it wasn't the sort of thinking that interfered
in any way with my watchfulness--you quickly lose the habit of that kind
of thinking in the Deathlands or you lose something else.
It could mean she was some sort of greenhorn. Most of us old-timers can
visually judge the heat of a dust drift or crater or rayed area more
reliably than any instrument. Some buggers claim they just feel it,
though I've never known any of the latter too eager to navigate in
unfamiliar country at night--which you'd think they'd be willing to do
if they could feel heat blind.
But she didn't look one bit like a tenderfoot--like for instance some
citizeness newly banished from Manteno. Or like some Porter burgher's
unfaithful wife or troublesome girlfriend whom he'd personally carted
out beyond the ridges of cleaned-out hot dust that help guard such
places, and then abandoned in revenge or from boredom--and they call
themselves civilized, those cultural queers!
No, she looked like she _belonged_ in the Deathlands. But then why the
counter?
Her eyes might be bad, real bad. I didn't think so. She raised her boot
an extra inch to step over a little jagged fragment of concrete. No.
Maybe she was just a born double-checker, using science to back up
knowledge based on experience as rich as my own or richer. I've met the
super-careful type before. They mostly get along pretty well, but they
tend to be a shade too slow in the clutches.
Maybe she was _testing_ the counter, planning to use it some other way
or trade it for something.
Maybe she made a practice of traveling by night! Then the counter made
good sense. But then why use it by day? Why reveal it to me in any case?
Was she trying to convince me that she was a greenhorn? Or had she hoped
that the sudden noise would throw me off guard? But who would go to the
trouble of carrying a Geiger counter for such devious purposes? And
wouldn't she have waited until we got closer before trying the noise
gambit?
Think-shmink--it gets you nowhere!
She kicked off the counter with another bump of her elbow and started to
edge in toward me faster. I turned the thinking all off and gave my
whole mind to watchfulness.
Soon we were barely more than eight feet apart, almost within lunging
range without even the preliminary one-two step, and still we hadn't
spoken or looked straight at each other, though being that close we'd
had to cant our heads around a bit to keep each other in peripheral
vision. Our eyes would be on each other steadily for five or six
seconds, then dart forward an instant to check for rocks and holes in
the trail we were following in parallel. A cultural queer from one of
the "civilized" places would have found it funny, I suppose, if he'd
been able to watch us perform in an arena or from behind armor glass for
his exclusive pleasure.
* * * * *
The girl had eyebrows as black as her hair, which in its piled-up and
metal-knotted savagery called to mind African queens despite her typical
pale complexion--very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From the
inside corner of her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran up
between her eyebrows and across her forehead at a rakish angle until it
disappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper left corner of her
forehead.
I'd been smelling her, of course, for some time.
I could even tell the color of her eyes now. They were blue. It's a
color you never see. Almost no dusts have a bluish cast, there are few
blue objects except certain dark steels, the sky never gets very far
away from the orange range, though it is green from time to time, and
water reflects the sky.
Yes, she had blue eyes, blue eyes and that jaunty scar, blue eyes and
that jaunty scar and a dart gun and a steel hook for a right hand, and
we were walking side by side, eight feet apart, not an inch closer,
still not looking straight at each other, still not saying a word, and I
realized that the initial period of unadulterated watchfulness was over,
that I'd had adequate opportunity to inspect this girl and size her up,
and that night was coming on fast, and that here I was, once again, back
with _the problem of the two urges_.
I could try either to kill her or go to bed with her.
* * * * *
I know that at this point the cultural queers (and certainly our
imaginary time traveler from mid Twentieth Century) would make a great
noise about not understanding and not believing in the genuineness of
the simple urge to murder that governs the lives of us Deathlanders.
Like detective-story pundits, they would say that a man or woman murders
for gain, or concealment of crime, or from thwarted sexual desire or
outraged sexual possessiveness--and maybe they would list a few other
"rational" motives--but not, they would say, just for the simple sake of
murder, for the sure release and relief it gives, for the sake of wiping
out one recognizable bit more (the closest bit we can, since those of us
with the courage or lazy rationality to wipe out ourselves have long
since done so)--wiping out one recognizable bit more of the whole
miserable, unutterably disgusting human mess. Unless, they would say, a
person is completely insane, which is actually how all outsiders view us
Deathlanders. They can think of us in no other way.
I guess cultural queers and time travelers simply _don't_ understand,
though to be so blind it seems to me that they have to overlook much of
the history of the Last War and of the subsequent years, especially the
mushrooming of crackpot cults with a murder tinge: the werewolf gangs,
the Berserkers and Amuckers, the revival of Shiva worship and the Black
Mass, the machine wreckers, the kill-the-killers movements, the new
witchcraft, the Unholy Creepers, the Unconsciousers, the radioactive
blue gods and rocket devils of the Atomites, and a dozen other groupings
clearly prefiguring Deathlander psychology. Those cults had all been as
unpredictable as Thuggee or the Dancing Madness of the Middle Ages or
the Children's Crusade, yet they had happened just the same.
But cultural queers are good at overlooking things. They have to be, I
suppose. They think they're humanity growing again. Yes, despite their
laughable warpedness and hysterical crippledness, they actually
believe--each howlingly different community of them--that they're the
new Adams and Eves. They're all excited about themselves and whether or
not they wear fig leaves. They don't carry with them, twenty-four hours
a day, like us Deathlanders do, the burden of all that was forever lost.
* * * * *
Since I've gone this far I'll go a bit further and make the paradoxical
admission that even us Deathlanders don't really understand our urge to
murder. Oh, we have our rationalizations of it, just like everyone has
of his ruling passion--we call ourselves junkmen, scavengers, gangrene
surgeons; we sometimes believe we're doing the person we kill the
ultimate kindness, yes and get slobbery tearful about it afterwards; we
sometimes tell ourselves we've finally found and are rubbing out the one
man or woman who was responsible for everything; we talk, mostly to
ourselves, about the aesthetics of homicide; we occasionally admit, but
only each to himself alone, that we're just plain nuts.
But we don't really understand our urge to murder, we only _feel_ it.
At the hateful sight of another human being, we feel it begins to grow
in us until it becomes an overpowering impulse that jerks us, like a
puppet is jerked by its strings, into the act itself or its attempted
commission.
Like I was feeling it grow in me now as we did this parallel deathmarch
through the reddening haze, me and this girl and our problem. This girl
with the blue eyes and the jaunty scar.
The problem of the _two_ urges, I said. The other urge, the sexual, is
one that I know all cultural queers (and certainly our time traveler)
would claim to know all about. Maybe they do. But I wonder if they
understand how intense it can be with us Deathlanders when it's the only
release (except maybe liquor and drugs, which we seldom can get and even
more rarely dare use)--the only complete release, even though a brief
one, from the overpowering loneliness and from the tyranny of the urge
to kill.
To embrace, to possess, to glut lust on, yes even briefly to love,
briefly to shelter in--that was good, that was a relief and release to
be treasured.
But it couldn't last. You could draw it out, prop it up perhaps for a
few days, for a month even (though sometimes not for a single
night)--you might even start to talk to each other a little, after a
while--but it could never last. The glands always tire, if nothing else.
Murder was the only _final_ solution, the only _permanent_ release.
Only us Deathlanders know how good it feels. But then after the kill the
loneliness would come back, redoubled, and after a while I'd meet
another hateful human ...
_Our_ problem of the two urges. As I watched this girl slogging along
parallel to me, as I kept constant watch on her of course, I wondered
how _she_ was feeling the two urges. Was she attracted to the ridgy
scars on my cheeks half revealed by my scarf?--to me they have a
pleasing symmetry. Was she wondering how my head and face looked without
the black felt skullcap low-visored over my eyes? Or was she thinking
mostly of that hook swinging into my throat under the chin and dragging
me down?
I couldn't tell. She looked as poker-faced as I was trying to.
* * * * *
For that matter, I asked myself, how was _I_ feeling the two urges?--how
was I feeling them as I watched this girl with the blue eyes and the
jaunty scar and the arrogantly thinned lips that asked to be smashed,
and the slender throat?--and I realized that there was no way to
describe that, not even to myself. I could only feel the two urges grow
in me, side by side, like monstrous twins, until they would simply be
too big for my taut body and one of them would have to get out fast.
I don't know which one of us started to slow down first, it happened so
gradually, but the dust puffs that rise from the ground of the
Deathlands under even the lightest treading became smaller and smaller
around our steps and finally vanished altogether, and we were standing
still. Only then did I notice the obvious physical trigger for our
stopping. An old freeway ran at right angles across our path. The
shoulder by which we'd approached it was sharply eroded, so that the
pavement, which even had a shallow cave eroded under it, was a good
three feet above the level of our path, forming a low wall. From where
I'd stopped I could almost reach out and touch the rough-edged
smooth-topped concrete. So could she.
We were right in the midst of the gas tanks now, six or seven of them
towered around us, squeezed like beer cans by the decade-old blast but
their metal looking sound enough until you became aware of the red light
showing through in odd patterns of dots and dashes where vaporization or
later erosion had been complete. Almost but not quite lace-work. Just
ahead of us, right across the freeway, was the six-storey skeletal
structure of an old cracking plant, sagged like the power towers away
from the blast and the lower storeys drifted with piles and ridges and
smooth gobbets of dust.
* * * * *
The light was getting redder and smokier every minute.
With the cessation of the physical movement of walking, which is always
some sort of release for emotions, I could feel the twin urges growing
faster in me. But that was all right, I told myself--this was the
crisis, as she must realize too, and that should key us up to bear the
urges a little longer without explosion.
I was the first to start to turn my head. For the first time I looked
straight into her eyes and she into mine. And as always happens at such
times, a third urge appeared abruptly, an urge momentarily as strong as
the other two--the urge to speak, to tell and ask all about it. But even
as I started to phrase the first crazily happy greeting, my throat
lumped, as I'd known it would, with the awful melancholy of all that was
forever lost, with the uselessness of any communication, with the
impossibility of recreating the past, our individual pasts, any pasts.
And as it always does, the third urge died.
I could tell she was feeling that ultimate pain just like me. I could
see her eyelids squeeze down on her eyes and her face lift and her
shoulders go back as she swallowed hard.
She was the first to start to lay aside a weapon. She took two sidewise
steps toward the freeway and reached her whole left arm further across
her body and laid the dart gun on the concrete and drew back her hand
from it about six inches. At the same time looking at me hard--fiercely
angrily, you'd say--across her left shoulder. She had the experienced
duelist's trick of seeming to look into my eyes but actually focussing
on my mouth. I was using the same gimmick myself--it's tiring to look
straight into another person's eyes and it can put you off guard.
My left side was nearest the wall so I didn't for the moment have the
problem of reaching across my body. I took the same sidewise steps she
had and using just two fingers, very gingerly--_disarmingly_, I hoped--I
lifted my antique firearm from its holster and laid it on the concrete
and drew back my hand from it all the way. Now it was up to her again,
or should be. Her hook was going to be quite a problem, I realized, but
we needn't come to it right away.
She temporized by successively unsheathing the two knives at her left
side and laying them beside the dart gun. Then she stopped and her look
told me plainly that it was up to me.
* * * * *
Now I am a bugger who believes in carrying _one perfect
knife_--otherwise, I know for a fact, you'll go knife-happy and end up
by weighing yourself down with dozens, literally. So I am naturally very
reluctant to get out of touch in any way with Mother, who is a little
rusty along the sides but made of the toughest and most sharpenable
alloy steel I've ever run across.
Still, I was most curious to find out what she'd do about that hook, so
I finally laid Mother on the concrete beside the .38 and rested my
hands lightly on my hips, all ready to enjoy myself--at least I hoped I
gave that impression.
She smiled, it was almost a nice smile--by now we'd let our scarves drop
since we weren't raising any more dust--and then she took hold of the
hook with her left hand and started to unscrew it from the
leather-and-metal base fitting over her stump.
Of course, I told myself. And her second knife, the one without a grip,
must be that way so she could screw its tang into the base when she
wanted a knife on her right hand instead of a hook. I ought to have
guessed.
I grinned my admiration of her mechanical ingenuity and immediately
unhitched my knapsack and laid it beside my weapons. Then a thought
occurred to me. I opened the knapsack and moving my hand slowly and very
openly so she'd have no reason to suspect a ruse, I drew out a blanket
and, trying to show her both sides of it in the process, as if I were
performing some damned conjuring trick, dropped it gently on the ground
between us.
She unsnapped the straps on her satchel that fastened it to her belt and
laid it aside and then she took off her belt too, slowly drawing it
through the wide loops of weathered denim. Then she looked meaningfully
at my belt.
I had to agree with her. Belts, especially heavy-buckled ones like ours,
can be nasty weapons. I removed mine. Simultaneously each belt joined
its corresponding pile of weapons and other belongings.
She shook her head, not in any sort of negation, and ran her fingers
into the black hair at several points, to show me it hid no weapon, then
looked at me questioningly. I nodded that I was satisfied--I hadn't seen
anything run out of it, by the way. Then she looked up at my black
skullcap and she raised her eyebrows and smiled again, this time with a
spice of mocking anticipation.
In some ways I hate to part with that headpiece more than I do with
Mother. Not really because of its sandwiched lead-mesh inner lining--if
the rays haven't baked my brain yet they never will and I'm sure that
the patches of lead mesh sewed into my pants over my loins give a lot
more practical protection. But I was getting real attracted to this girl
by now and there are times when a person must make a sacrifice of his
vanity. I whipped off my stylish black felt and tossed it on my pile and
dared her to laugh at my shiny egg top.
Strangely she didn't even smile. She parted her lips and ran her tongue
along the upper one. I gave an eager grin in reply, an incautiously wide
one, and she saw my plates flash.
* * * * *
My plates are something rather special though they are by no means
unique. Back toward the end of the Last War, when it was obvious to any
realist how bad things were going to be, though not how strangely
terrible, a number of people, like myself, had all their teeth jerked
and replaced with durable plates. I went some of them one better. My
plates were stainless steel biting and chewing ridges, smooth continuous
ones that didn't attempt to copy individual teeth. A person who looks
closely at a slab of chewing tobacco, say, I offer him will be puzzled
by the smoothly curved incision, made as if by a razor blade mounted on
the arm of a compass. Magnetic powder buried in my gums makes for a real
nice fit.
This sacrifice was worse than my hat and Mother combined, but I could
see the girl expected me to make it and would take no substitutes, and
in this attitude I had to admit that she showed very sound judgment,
because I keep the incisor parts of those plates filed to razor
sharpness. I have to be careful about my tongue and lips but I figure
it's worth it. With my dental scimitars I can in a wink bite out a chunk
of throat and windpipe or jugular, though I've never had occasion to do
so yet.
For the first minute it made me feel like an old man, a real dodderer,
but by now the attraction this girl had for me was getting irrational. I
carefully laid the two plates on top of my knapsack.
In return, as a sort of reward you might say, she opened her mouth wide
and showed me what was left of her own teeth--about two-thirds of them,
a patchwork of tartar and gold.
We took off our boots, pants and shirts, she watching very
suspiciously--I knew she'd been skeptical of my carrying only one knife.
Oddly perhaps, considering how touchy I am about my baldness, I felt no
sensitivity about revealing the lack of hair on my chest and in fact a
sort of pride in displaying the slanting radiation scars that have
replaced it, though they are crawling keloids of the ugliest, bumpiest
sort. I guess to me such scars are tribal insignia--one-man and
one-woman tribes of course. No question but that the scar on the girl's
forehead had been the first focus of my desire for her and it still
added to my interest.
By now we weren't staying as perfectly on guard or watching each other's
clothing for concealed weapons as carefully as we should--I know I
wasn't. It was getting dark fast, there wasn't much time left, and the
other interest was simply becoming too great.
* * * * *
We were still automatically careful about how we did things. For
instance the way we took off our pants was like ballet, simultaneously
crouching a little on the left foot and whipping the right leg out of
its sheath in one movement, all ready to jump without tripping
ourselves if the other person did anything funny, and then skinning down
the left pants-leg with a movement almost as swift.
But as I say it was getting too late for perfect watchfulness, in fact
for any kind of effective watchfulness at all. The complexion of the
whole situation was changing in a rush. The possibilities of dealing or
receiving death--along with the chance of the minor indignity of
cannibalism, which some of us practice--were suddenly gone, all gone. It
was going to be all right this time, I was telling myself. This was the
time it would be different, this was the time love would last, this was
the time lust would be the firm foundation for understanding and trust,
this time there would be really safe sleeping. This girl's body would be
home for me, a beautiful tender inexhaustibly exciting home, and mine
for her, for always.
As she threw off her shirt, the last darkly red light showed me another
smooth slantwise scar, this one around her hips, like a narrow girdle
that has slipped down a little on one side.
CHAPTER 2
_Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural._
--Hamlet
When I woke the light was almost full amber and I could feel no flesh
against mine, only the blanket under me. I very slowly rolled over and
there she was, sitting on the corner of the blanket not two feet from
me, combing her long black hair with a big, wide-toothed comb she'd
screwed into the leather-and-metal cap over her wrist stump.
She'd put on her pants and shirt, but the former were rolled up to her
knees and the latter, though tucked in, wasn't buttoned.
She was looking at me, contemplating me you might say, quite dreamily
but with a faint, easy smile.
I smiled back at her.
It was lovely.
Too lovely. There had to be something wrong with it.
There was. Oh, nothing big. Just a solitary trifle--nothing worth
noticing really.
But the tiniest solitary things can sometimes be the most irritating,
like _one_ mosquito.
When I'd first rolled over she'd been combing her hair straight back,
revealing a wedge of baldness following the continuation of her forehead
scar deep back across her scalp. Now with a movement that was swift
though not hurried-looking she swept the mass of her hair forward and to
the left, so that it covered the bald area. Also her lips straightened
out.
I was hurt. She shouldn't have hidden her bit of baldness, it was
something we had in common, something that brought us closer. And she
shouldn't have stopped smiling at just that moment. Didn't she realize
I loved that blaze on her scalp just as much as any other part of her,
that she no longer had any need to practice vanity in front of me?
Didn't she realize that as soon as she stopped smiling, her
contemplative stare became an insult to me? What right had she to stare,
critically I felt sure, at my bald head? What right had she to know
about the nearly-healed ulcer on my left shin?--that was a piece of
information worth a man's life in a fight. What right had she to cover
up, anyways, while I was still naked? She ought to have waked me up so
that we could have got dressed as we'd undressed, together. There were
lots of things wrong with her manners.
Oh, I know that if I'd been able to think calmly, maybe if I'd just had
some breakfast or a little coffee inside me, or even if there'd been
some hot breakfast to eat at that moment, I'd have recognized my
irritation for the irrational, one-mosquito surge of negative feeling
that it was.
Even without breakfast, if I'd just had the knowledge that there was a
reasonably secure day ahead of me in which there'd be an opportunity for
me to straighten out my feelings, I wouldn't have been irked, or at
least being irked wouldn't have bothered me terribly.
But a sense of security is an even rarer commodity in the Deathlands
than a hot breakfast.
Given just the ghost of a sense of security and/or some hot breakfast,
I'd have told myself that she was merely being amusingly coquettish
about her bald streak and her hair, that it was natural for a woman to
try to preserve some mystery about herself in front of the man she beds
with.
But you get leery of any kind of mystery in the Deathlands. It makes you
frightened and angry, like it does an animal. Mystery is for cultural
queers, strictly. The only way for two people to get along together in
the Deathlands, even for a while, is never to hide anything and never to
make a move that doesn't have an immediate clear explanation. You can't
talk, you see, certainly not at first, and so you can't explain anything
(most explanations are just lies and dreams, anyway), so you have to be
doubly careful and explicit about everything you do.
* * * * *
This girl wasn't being either. Right now, on top of her other
gaucheries, she was unscrewing the comb from her wrist--an unfriendly if
not quite a hostile act, as anyone must admit.
Understand, please, I wasn't _showing_ any of these negative reactions
of mine any more than she was showing hers, except for her stopping
smiling. In fact _I hadn't_ stopped smiling, I was playing the game to
the hilt.
But inside me everything was stewed up and the other urge had come back
and presently it would begin to grow again. That's the trouble, you
know, with sex as a solution to the problem of the two urges. It's fine
while it lasts but it wears itself out and then you're back with Urge
Number One and you have nothing left to balance it with.
Oh, I wouldn't kill this girl today, I probably wouldn't seriously think
of killing her for a month or more, but Old Urge Number One would be
there and growing, mostly under cover, all the time. Of course there
were things I could do to slow its growth, lots of little gimmicks, in
fact--I was pretty experienced at this business.
* * * * *
For instance, I could take a shot at talking to her pretty soon. For a
catchy starter, I could tell her about Nowhere, how these five other
buggers and me found ourselves independently skulking along after this
scavenging expedition from Porter, how we naturally joined forces in
that situation, how we set a pitfall for their alky-powered jeep and
wrecked it and them, how when our haul turned out to be unexpectedly big
the four of us left from the kill chummied up and padded down together
and amused each other for a while and played games, you might say. Why,
at one point we even had an old crank phonograph going and read some
books. And, of course, how when the loot gave out and the fun wore off,
we had our murder party and I survived along with, I think, a bugger
named Jerry--at any rate, he was gone when the blood stopped spurting,
and I'd had no stomach for tracking him, though I probably should have.
And in return she could tell me how she had killed off her last set of
girlfriends, or boyfriends, or friend, or whatever it was.
After that, we could have a go at exchanging news, rumors and
speculations about local, national and world events. Was it true that
Atlantic Highlands had planes of some sort or were they from Europe?
Were they actually crucifying the Deathlanders around Walla Walla or
only nailing up their dead bodies as dire warnings to others such? Had
Manteno made Christianity compulsory yet, or were they still tolerating
Zen Buddhists? Was it true that Los Alamos had been completely wiped out
by plague, but the area taboo to Deathlanders because of the robot
guards they'd left behind--metal guards eight feet tall who tramped
across the white sands, wailing? Did they still have free love in
Pacific Palisades? Did she know there'd been a pitched battle fought by
expeditionary forces from Ouachita and Savannah Fortress? Over the loot
of Birmingham, apparently, after yellow fever had finished off that
principality. Had she rooted out any "observers" lately?--some of the
"civilized" communities, the more "scientific" ones, try to maintain a
few weather stations and the like in the Deathlands, camouflaging them
elaborately and manning them with one or two impudent characters to whom
we give a hard time if we uncover them. Had she heard the tale that was
going around that South America and the French Riviera had survived the
Last War absolutely untouched?--and the obviously ridiculous rider that
they had blue skies there and saw stars every third night? Did she think
that subsequent conditions were showing that the Earth actually had
plunged into an interstellar dust cloud coincidentally with the start of
the Last War (the dust cloud used as a cover for the first attacks, some
said) or did she still hold with the majority that the dust was solely
of atomic origin with a little help from volcanoes and dry spells? How
many green sunsets had she seen in the last year?
* * * * *
After we'd chewed over those racy topics and some more like them, and
incidentally got bored with guessing and fabricating, we might, if we
felt especially daring and conversation were going particularly well,
even take a chance on talking a little about our childhoods, about how
things were before the Last War (though she was almost too young for
that)--about the _little_ things we remembered--the big things were much
too dangerous topics to venture on and sometimes even the little
memories could suddenly twist you up as if you'd swallowed lye.
But after that there wouldn't be anything left to talk about. Anything
you'd risk talking about, that is. For instance, no matter how long we
talked, it was very unlikely that we'd either of us tell the other
anything complete or very accurate about how we lived from day to day,
about our techniques of surviving and staying sane or at least
functional--that would be too imprudent, it would go too much against
the grain of any player of the murder game. Would I tell her, or anyone,
about how I worked the ruses of playing dead and disguising myself as a
woman, about my trick of picking a path just before dark and then
circling back to it by a pre-surveyed route, about the chess games I
played with myself, about the bottle of green, terribly hot-looking
powder I carried to sprinkle behind me to bluff off pursuers? A fat
chance of my revealing things like that!
And when all the talk was over, what would it have gained us? Our
minds would be filled with a lot of painful stuff better kept
buried--meaningless hopes, scraps of vicarious living in "cultured"
communities, memories that were nothing but melancholy given concrete
form. The melancholy is easiest to bear when it's the diffused
background for everything; and all garbage is best kept in the can. Oh
yes, our talking would have gained us a few more days of infatuation, of
phantom security, but those we could have--almost as many of them, at
any rate--without talking.
For instance things were smoothing over already between her and me again
and I no longer felt quite so irked. She'd replaced the comb with an
inoffensive-looking pair of light pliers and was doing up her hair with
the metal shavings. And I was acting as if content to watch her, as in a
way I was. I'd still made no move to get dressed.
She looked real sweet, you know, primping herself that way. Her face was
a little flat, but it was young, and the scar gave it just the fillip it
needed.
But what was going on behind that forehead right now, I asked myself? I
felt real psychic this morning, my mind as clear as a bottle of White
Rock you find miraculously unbroken in a blasted tavern, and the answers
to the question I'd asked myself came effortlessly.
* * * * *
She was telling herself she'd got herself a man again, a man who was
adequate in the primal clutch (I gave myself that pat on the back), and
that she wouldn't have to be plagued and have her safety endangered by
_that_ kind of mind-dulling restlessness and yearning for a while.
She was lightly playing around with ideas about how she'd found a home
and a protector, knowing she was kidding herself, that it was the most
gimcracky feminine make-believe, but enjoying it just the same.
She was sizing me up, deciding in detail just what I went for in a
woman, what whetted my interest, so she could keep that roused as long
as seemed desirable or prudent to her to continue our relation.
She was kicking herself, only lightly to begin with, because she hadn't
taken any precautions--because we who've escaped hot death against all
reasonable expectations by virtue of some incalculable resistance to the
ills of radioactivity, quite often find we've escaped sterility too. If
she should become pregnant, she was telling herself, then she had a real
sticky business ahead of her where no man could be trusted for a second.
And because she was thinking of this and because she was obviously a
realistic Deathlander, she was reminding herself that a woman is
basically less impulsive and daring and resourceful than a man and so
had always better be sure she gets in the first blow. She would be
thinking that I was a realist myself and a smart man, one able to
understand her predicament quite clearly--and because of that a much
sooner danger to her. She was feeling Old Number One Urge starting to
grow in her again and wondering whether it mightn't be wisest to give it
the hot-house treatment.
That is the trouble with a clear mind. For a little while you see things
as they really are and you can accurately predict how they're going to
shape the future ... and then suddenly you realize you've predicted
yourself a week or a month into the future and you can't live the
intervening time any more because you've already imagined it in detail.
People who live in communities, even the cultural queers of our maimed
era, aren't much bothered by it--there must be some sort of blinkers
they hand you out along with the key to the city--but in the Deathlands
it's a fairly common phenomenon and there's no hiding from it.
* * * * *
Me and my clear mind!--once again it had done me out of days of fun,
changed a thoroughly-explored love affair into a one night stand. Oh,
there was no question about it, this girl and I were finished, right
this minute, as of now, because she was just as psychic as I was this
morning and had sensed every last thing that I'd been thinking.
With a movement smooth enough not to look rushed I swung into a crouch.
She was on her knees faster than that, her left hand hovering over the
little set of tools for her stump, which like any good mechanic she'd
lined up neatly on the edge of the blanket--the hook, the comb, a long
telescoping fork, a couple of other items, and the knife. I'd grabbed a
handful of blanket, ready to jerk it from under her. She'd seen that I'd
grabbed it. Our gazes dueled.
There was a high-pitched whine over our heads! Quite loud from the
start, though it sounded as if it were very deep up in the haze. It
swiftly dropped in pitch and volume.
The top of the skeletal cracking plant across the freeway glowed with
St. Elmo's fire! Three times it glowed that way, so bright we could see
the violet-blue flames of it reaching up despite the full amber
daylight.
The whine died away but in the last moment, paradoxically, it seemed to
be coming closer!
This shared threat--for any unexpected event is a threat in the
Deathlands and a mysterious event doubly so--put a stop to our murder
game. The girl and I were buddies again, buddies to be relied on in a
pinch, for the duration of the threat at least. No need to say so or to
reassure each other of the fact in any way, it was taken for granted.
Besides, there was no time. We had to use every second allowed us in
getting ready for whatever was coming.
First I grabbed up Mother. Then I relieved myself--fear made it easy.
Then I skinned into my pants and boots, slapped in my teeth, thrust the
blanket and knapsack into the shallow cave under the edge of the
freeway, looking around me all the time so as not to be surprised from
any quarter.
Meanwhile the girl had put on her boots, located her dart gun, unscrewed
the pliers from her stump, put the knife in, and was arranging her scarf
so it made a sling for the maimed arm--I wondered why but had no time to
waste guessing, even if I'd wanted to, for at that moment a small dull
silver plane, beetle-shaped more than anything else, loomed out of the
haze beyond the cracking plant and came silently drifting down toward
us.
The girl thrust her satchel into the cave and along with it her dart
gun. I caught her idea and tucked Mother into my pants behind my back.
I'd thought from the first glimpse of it that the plane was disabled--I
guess it was its silence that gave me the idea. This theory was
confirmed when one of its very stubby wings or vanes touched a corner
pillar of the cracking plant. The plane was moving in too slow a glide
to be wrecked, in fact it was moving in a slower glide than I would have
believed possible--but then it's many years since I have seen a plane in
flight.
It wasn't wrecked but the little collision spun it around twice in a
lazy circle and it landed on the freeway with a scuffing noise not fifty
feet from us. You couldn't exactly say it had crashed in, but it stayed
at an odd tilt. It looked crippled all right.
An oval door in the plane opened and a man dropped lightly out on the
concrete. And what a man! He was nearer seven feet tall than six,
close-cropped blond hair, face and hands richly tanned, the rest of him
covered by trim garments of a gleaming gray. He must have weighed as
much as the two of us together, but he was beautifully built, muscular
yet supple-seeming. His face looked brightly intelligent and
even-tempered and kind.
Yes, kind!--damn him! It wasn't enough that his body should fairly glow
with a health and vitality that was an insult to our seared skins and
stringy muscles and ulcers and half-rotted stomachs and half-arrested
cancers, he had to look kind too--the sort of man who would put you to
bed and take care of you, as if you were some sort of interesting sick
fox, and maybe even say a little prayer for you, and all manner of other
abominations.
* * * * *
I don't think I could have endured my fury standing still. Fortunately
there was no need to. As if we'd rehearsed the whole thing for hours,
the girl and I scrambled up onto the freeway and scurried toward the man
from the plane, cunningly swinging away from each other so that it would
be harder for him to watch the two of us at once, but not enough to make
it obvious that we attended an attack from two quarters.
We didn't run though we covered the ground as fast as we dared--running
would have been too much of a give-away too, and the Pilot, which was
how I named him to myself, had a strange-looking small gun in his right
hand. In fact the way we moved was part of our act--I dragged one leg as
if it were crippled and the girl faked another sort of limp, one that
made her approach a series of half curtsies. Her arm in the sling was
all twisted, but at the same time she was accidently showing her
breasts--I remember thinking _you won't distract this breed bull that
way, sister, he probably has a harem of six-foot heifers_. I had my head
thrown back and my hands stretched out supplicatingly. Meanwhile the
both of us were babbling a blue streak. I was rapidly croaking something
like, "Mister for God's sake save my pal he's hurt a lot worse'n I am
not a hundred yards away he's dyin' mister he's dyin' o' thirst his
tongue's black'n all swole up oh save him mister save my pal he's not a
hundred yards away he's dyin' mister dyin'--" and she was singsonging an
even worse rigamarole about how "they" were after us from Porter and
going to crucify us because we believed in science and how they'd
already impaled her mother and her ten-year-old sister and a lot more of
the same.
It didn't matter that our stories didn't fit or make sense, the babble
had a convincing tone and getting us closer to this guy, which was all
that counted. He pointed his gun at me and then I could see him hesitate
and I thought exultingly _it's a lot of healthy meat you got there,
mister, but it's tame meat, mister, tame!_
He compromised by taking a step back and sort of hooting at us and
waving us off with his left hand, as if we were a couple of stray dogs.
It was greatly to our advantage that we'd acted without hesitation, and
I don't think we'd have been able to do that except that we'd been all
set to kill each other when he dropped in. Our muscles and nerves and
minds were keyed for instant ruthless attack. And some "civilized"
people still say that the urge to murder doesn't contribute to
self-preservation!
* * * * *
We were almost close enough now and he was steeling himself to shoot and
I remember wondering for a split second what his damn gun did to you,
and then me and the girl had started the alternation routine. I'd stop
dead, as if completely cowed by the threat of his weapon, and as he took
note of it she'd go in a little further, and as his gaze shifted to her
she'd stop dead and I'd go in another foot and then try to make my halt
even more convincing as his gaze darted back to me. We worked it
perfectly, our rhythm was beautiful, as if we were old dancing partners,
though the whole thing was absolutely impromptu.
Still, I honestly don't think we'd ever have got to him if it hadn't
been for the distraction that came just then to help us. I could tell,
you see, that he'd finally steeled himself and we still weren't quite
close enough. He wasn't as tame as I'd hoped. I reached behind me for
Mother, determined to do a last-minute rush and leap anyway, when there
came this sick scream.
I don't know how else to describe it briefly. It was a scream, feminine
for choice, it came from some distance and the direction of the old
cracking plant, it had a note of anguish and warning, yet at the same
time it was weak and almost faltering you might say and squeaky at the
end, as if it came from a person half dead and a throat choked with
phlegm. It had all those qualities or a wonderful mimicking of them.
And it had quite an effect on our boy in gray for in the act of shooting
me down he started to turn and look over his shoulder.
Oh, it didn't altogether stop him from shooting me. He got me partly
covered again as I was in the middle of my lunge. I found out what his
gun did to you. My right arm, which was the part he'd covered, just went
dead and I finished my lunge slamming up against his iron knees, like a
highschool kid trying to block out a pro footballer, with the knife
slipping uselessly away from my fingers.
But in the blessed meanwhile the girl had lunged too, not with a slow
slash, thank God, but with a high, slicing thrust aimed arrow-straight
for a point just under his ear.
She connected and a fan of blood sprayed her full in the face.
I grabbed my knife with my left hand as it fell, scrambled to my feet,
and drove the knife at his throat in a round-house swing that happened
to come handiest at the time. The point went through his flesh like
nothing and jarred against his spine with a violence that I hoped would
shock into nervous insensibility the stoutest medulla oblongata and
prevent any dying reprisals on his part.
I got my wish, in large part. He swayed, straightened, dropped his gun,
and fell flat on his back, giving his skull a murderous crack on the
concrete for good measure. He lay there and after a half dozen gushes
the bright blood quit pumping strongly out of his neck.
Then came the part that was like a dying reprisal, though obviously not
being directed by him as of now. And come to think of it, it may have
had its good points.
* * * * *
The girl, who was clearly a most cool-headed cuss, snatched for his gun
where he'd dropped it, to make sure she got it ahead of me. She
snatched, yes--and then jerked back, letting off a sizable squeal of
pain, anger, and surprise.
Where we'd seen his gun hit the concrete there was now a tiny
incandescent puddle. A rill of blood snaked out from the pool around his
head and touched the whitely glowing puddle and a jet of steam sizzled
up.
Somehow the gun had managed to melt itself in the moment of its owner
dying. Well, at any rate that showed it hadn't contained any gunpowder
or ordinary chemical explosives, though I already knew it operated on
other principles from the way it had been used to paralyze me. More to
the point, it showed that the gun's owner was the member of a culture
that believed in taking very complete precautions against its gadgets
falling into the hands of strangers.
But the gun fusing wasn't quite all. As the girl and me shifted our gaze
from the puddle, which was cooling fast and now glowed red like the
blood--as we shifted our gaze back from the puddle to the dead man, we
saw that at three points (points over where you'd expect pockets to be)
his gray clothing had charred in small irregularly shaped patches from
which threads of black smoke were twisting upward.
Just at that moment, so close as to make me jump in spite of years of
learning to absorb shocks stoically--right at my elbow it seemed to (the
girl jumped too, I may say)--a voice said, "Done a murder, hey?"
Advancing briskly around the skewily grounded plane from the direction
of the cracking plant was an old geezer, a seasoned, hard-baked
Deathlander if I ever saw one. He had a shock of bone-white hair, the
rest of him that showed from his weathered gray clothing looked fried by
the sun's rays and others to a stringy crisp, and strapped to his boots
and weighing down his belt were a good dozen knives.
Not satisfied with the unnerving noise he'd made already, he went on
brightly, "Neat job too, I give you credit for that, but why the hell
did you have to set the guy afire?"
CHAPTER 3
_We are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals.
None of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow._
--The Undiscovered Self,
_by Carl Jung_
Ordinarily scroungers who hide around on the outskirts until the
killing's done and then come in to share the loot get what they
deserve--wordless orders, well backed up, to be on their way at once.
Sometimes they even catch an after-clap of the murder urge, if it hasn't
all been expended on the first victim or victims. Yet they _will_ do it,
trusting I suppose to the irresistible glamor of their personalities.
There were several reasons why we didn't at once give Pop this
treatment.
In the first place we didn't neither of us have our distance weapons. My
revolver and her dart gun were both tucked in the cave back at the edge
of the freeway. And there's one bad thing about a bugger so knife-happy
he lugs them around by the carload--he's generally good at tossing them.
With his dozen or so knives Pop definitely outgunned us.
Second, we were both of us without the use of an arm. That's right, the
both of us. My right arm still dangled like a string of sausages and I
couldn't yet feel any signs of it coming undead. While she'd burned her
fingers badly grabbing at the gun--I could see their red-splotched tips
now as she pulled them out of her mouth for a second to wipe the Pilot's
blood out of her eyes. All she had was her stump with the knife screwed
to it. Me, I can throw a knife left-handed if I have to, but you bet I
wasn't going to risk Mother that way.
Then I'd no sooner heard Pop's voice, breathy and a little high like an
old man's will get, than it occurred to me that he must have been the
one who had given the funny scream that had distracted the Pilot's
attention and let us get him. Which incidentally made Pop a quick
thinker and imaginative to boot, and meant that he'd helped on the
killing.
* * * * *
Besides all that, Pop did not come in fawning and full of extravagant
praise, as most scroungers will. He just assumed equality with us right
from the start and he talked in an absolutely matter-of-fact way,
neither praising nor criticizing one bit--too damn matter-of-fact and
open, for that matter, to suit my taste, but then I have heard other
buggers say that some old men are apt to get talkative, though I had
never worked with or run into one myself. Old people are very rare in
the Deathlands, as you might imagine.
So the girl and me just scowled at him but did nothing to stop him as he
came along. Near us, his extra knives would be no advantage to him.
"Hum," he said, "looks a lot like a guy I murdered five years back down
Los Alamos way. Same silver monkey suit and almost as tall. Nice chap
too--was trying to give me something for a fever I'd faked. That his gun
melted? My man didn't smoke after I gave him his quietus, but then it
turned out he didn't have any metal on him. I wonder if this chap--" He
started to kneel down by the body.
"Hands off, Pop!" I gritted at him. That was how we started calling him
Pop.
"Why sure, sure," he said, staying there on one knee. "I won't lay a
finger on him. It's just that I've heard the Alamosers have it rigged so
that any metal they're carrying melts when they die, and I was wondering
about this boy. But he's all yours, friend. By the way, what's your
name, friend?"
"Ray," I snarled. "Ray Baker." I think the main reason I told him was
that I didn't want him calling me "friend" again. "You talk too much,
Pop."
"I suppose I do, Ray," he agreed. "What's your name, lady?"
The girl just sort of hissed at him and he grinned at me as if to say,
"Oh, women!" Then he said, "Why don't you go through his pockets, Ray?
I'm real curious."
"Shut up," I said, but I felt that he'd put me on the spot just the
same. I was curious about the guy's pockets myself, of course, but I was
also wondering if Pop was alone or if he had somebody with him, and
whether there was anybody else in the plane or not--things like that,
too many things. At the same time I didn't want to let on to Pop how
useless my right arm was--if I'd just get a twinge of feeling in that
arm, I knew I'd feel a lot more confident fast. I knelt down across the
body from him, started to lay Mother aside and then hesitated.
* * * * *
The girl gave me an encouraging look, as if to say, "I'll take care of
the old geezer." On the strength of her look I put down Mother and
started to pry open the Pilot's left hand, which was clenched in a fist
that looked a mite too big to have nothing inside it.
The girl started to edge behind Pop, but he caught the movement right
away and looked at her with a grin that was so knowing and yet so
friendly, and yet so pitying at the same time--with the pity of the old
pro for even the seasoned amateur--that in her place I think I'd have
blushed myself, as she did now ... through the streaks of the Pilot's
blood.
"You don't have to worry none about me, lady," he said, running a hand
through his white hair and incidentally touching the pommel of one of
the two knives strapped high on the back of his jacket so he could reach
one over either shoulder. "I quit murdering some years back. It got to
be too much of a strain on my nerves."
"Oh yeah?" I couldn't help saying as I pried up the Pilot's index finger
and started on the next. "Then why the stab-factory, Pop?"
"Oh you mean those," he said, glancing down at his knives. "Well, the
fact is, Ray, I carry them to impress buggers dumber than you and the
lady here. Anybody wants to think I'm still a practicing murderer I got
no objections. Matter of sentiment, too, I just hate to part with
them--they bring back important memories. And then--you won't believe
this, Ray, but I'm going to tell you just the same--guys just up and
give me their knives and I doubly hate to part with a gift."
I wasn't going to say "Oh yeah?" again or "Shut up!" either, though I
certainly wished I could turn off Pop's spigot, or thought I did. Then I
felt a painful tingling shoot down my right arm. I smiled at Pop and
said, "Any other reasons?"
"Yep," he said. "Got to shave and I might as well do it in style. A new
blade every day in the fortnight is twice as good as the old ads. You
know, it makes you keep a knife in fine shape if you shave with it. What
you got there, Ray?"
"You were wrong, Pop," I said. "He did have some metal on him that
didn't melt."
I held up for them to see the object I'd extracted from his left fist:
a bright steel cube measuring about an inch across each side, but it
felt lighter than if it were solid metal. Five of the faces looked
absolutely bare. The sixth had a round button recessed in it.
From the way they looked at it neither Pop nor the girl had the faintest
idea of what it was. I certainly hadn't.
"Had he pushed the button?" the girl asked. Her voice was throaty but
unexpectedly refined, as if she'd done no talking at all, not even to
herself, since coming to the Deathlands and so retained the cultured
intonations she'd had earlier, whenever and wherever that had been. It
gave me a funny feeling, of course, because they were the first words
I'd heard her speak.
"Not from the way he was holding it," I told her. "The button was
pointed up toward his thumb but the thumb was on the outside of his
fingers." I felt an unexpected satisfaction at having expressed myself
so clearly and I told myself not to get childish.
The girl slitted her eyes. "Don't you push it, Ray," she said.
"Think I'm nuts?" I told her, meanwhile sliding the cube into the
smaller pocket of my pants, where it fit tight and wouldn't turn
sideways and the button maybe get pressed by accident. The tingling in
my right arm was almost unbearable now, but I was getting control over
the muscles again.
"Pushing that button," I added, "might melt what's left of the plane, or
blow us all up." It never hurts to emphasize that you may have another
weapon in your possession, even if it's just a suicide bomb.
"There was a man pushed another button once," Pop said softly and
reflectively. His gaze went far out over the Deathlands and took in a
good half of the horizon and he slowly shook his head. Then his face
brightened. "Did you know, Ray," he said, "that I actually met that man?
Long afterwards. You don't believe me, I know, but I actually did. Tell
you about it some other time."
I almost said, "Thanks, Pop, for sparing me at least for a while," but I
was afraid that would set him off again. Besides, it wouldn't have been
quite true. I've heard other buggers tell the yarn of how they met (and
invariably rubbed out) the actual guy who pushed the button or buttons
that set the fusion missiles blasting toward their targets, but I felt a
sudden curiosity as to what Pop's version of the yarn would be. Oh well,
I could ask him some other time, if we both lived that long. I started
to check the Pilot's pockets. My right hand could help a little now.
* * * * *
"Those look like mean burns you got there, lady," I heard Pop tell the
girl. He was right. There were blisters easy to see on three of the
fingertips. "I've got some salve that's pretty good," he went on, "and
some clean cloth. I could put on a bandage for you if you wanted. If
your hand started to feel poisoned you could always tell Ray here to
slip a knife in me."
Pop was a cute gasser, you had to admit. I reminded myself that it was
Pop's business to play up to the both of us, charm being the secret
weapon of all scroungers.
The girl gave a harsh little laugh. "Very well," she said, "but we will
use my salve, I know it works for me." And she started to lead Pop to
where we'd hidden our things.
"I'll go with you," I told them, standing up.
It didn't look like we were going to have any more murders today--Pop
had got through the preliminary ingratiations pretty well and the girl
and me had had our catharsis--but that would be no excuse for any such
stupidity as letting the two of them get near my .38.
Strolling to the cave and back I eased the situation a bit more by
saying, "That scream you let off, Pop, really helped. I don't know what
gave you the idea, but thanks."
"Oh that," he said. "Forget about it."
"I won't," I told him. "You may say you've quit killing, but helped on a
do-in today."
"Ray," he said a little solemnly, "if it'll make you feel any happier,
I'll take a bit of the responsibility for every murder that's been done
since the beginning of time."
I looked at him for a while. Then, "Pop, you're not by any chance the
religious type?" I asked suddenly.
"Lord, no," he told us.
That struck me as a satisfactory answer. God preserve me from the
religious type! We have quite a few of those in the Deathlands. It
generally means that they try to convert you to something before they
kill you. Or sometimes afterwards.
We completed our errands. I felt a lot more secure with Old Financier's
Friend strapped to my middle. Mother is wonderful but she is not enough.
I dawdled over inspecting the Pilot's pockets, partly to give my right
hand time to come back all the way. And to tell the truth I didn't much
enjoy the job--a corpse, especially such a handsome cadaver as this,
just didn't go with Pop's brand of light patter.
* * * * *
Pop did up the girl's hand in high style, bandaging each finger
separately and then persuading her to put on a big left-hand work glove
he took out of his small pack.
"Lost the right," he explained, "which was the only one I ever used
anyway. Never knew until now why I kept this. How does it feel, Alice?"
I might have known he'd worm her name out of her. It occurred to me that
Pop's ideas of scrounging might extend to Alice's favors. The urge
doesn't die out when you get old, they tell me. Not completely.
He'd also helped her replace the knife on her stump with the hook.
By that time I'd poked into all the Pilot's pockets I could get at
without stripping him and found nothing but three irregularly shaped
blobs of metal, still hot to the touch. Under the charred spots, of
course.
I didn't want the job of stripping him. Somebody else could do a little
work, I told myself. I've been bothered by bodies before (as who hasn't,
I suppose?) but this one was really beginning to make me sick. Maybe I
was cracking up, it occurred to me. Murder is a very wearing business,
as all Deathlanders know, and although some crack earlier than others,
all crack in the end.
I must have been showing how I was feeling because, "Cheer up, Ray," Pop
said. "You and Alice have done a big murder--I'd say the subject was six
foot ten--so you ought to be happy. You've drawn a blank on his pockets
but there's still the plane."
"Yeah, that's right," I said, brightening a little. "There's still the
stuff in the plane." I knew there were some items I couldn't hope for,
like .38 shells, but there'd be food and other things.
"Nuh-uh," Pop corrected me. "I said _the plane_. You may have thought
it's wrecked, but I don't. Have you taken a real gander at it? It's
worth doing, believe me."
I jumped up. My heart was suddenly pounding. I was glad of an excuse to
get away from the body, but there was a lot more in my feelings than
that. I was filled with an excitement to which I didn't want to give a
name because it would make the let-down too great.
One of the wide stubby wings of the plane, raking downward so that its
tip almost touched the concrete, had hidden the undercarriage of the
fuselage from our view. Now, coming around the wing, I saw that _there
was no undercarriage_.
I had to drop to my hands and knees and scan around with my cheek next
to the concrete before I'd believe it. _The "wrecked" plane was at all
points at least six inches off the ground._
* * * * *
I got to my feet again. I was shaking. I wanted to talk but I couldn't.
I grabbed the leading edge of the wing to stop from falling. The whole
body of the plane gave a fraction of an inch and then resisted my
leaning weight with lazy power, just like a gyroscope.
"Antigravity," I croaked, though you couldn't have heard me two feet.
Then my voice came back. "Pop, Alice! They got antigravity!
Antigravity--and it's working!"
Alice had just come around the wing and was facing me. She was shaking
too and her face was white like I knew mine was. Pop was politely
standing off a little to one side, watching us curiously. "Told you
you'd won a real prize," he said in his matter-of-fact way.
Alice wet her lips. "Ray," she said, "we can get away."
Just those four words, but they did it. Something in me unlocked--no,
exploded describes it better.
"We can go places!" I almost shouted.
"Beyond the dust," she said. "Mexico City. South America!" She was
forgetting the Deathlander's cynical article of belief that the dust
never ends, but then so was I. It makes a difference whether or not
you've got a means of doing something.
"Rio!" I topped her with. "The Indies. Hong Kong. Bombay. Egypt.
Bermuda. The French Riviera!"
"Bullfights and clean beds," she burst out with. "Restaurants. Swimming
pools. Bathrooms!"
"Skindiving," I took it up with, as hysterical as she was. "Road races
and roulette tables."
"Bentleys and Porsches!"
"Aircoups and DC4s and Comets!"
"Martinis and hashish and ice cream sodas!"
"Hot food! Fresh coffee! Gambling, smoking, dancing, music, drinks!" I
was going to add _women_, but then I thought of how hard-bitten little
Alice would look beside the dream creatures I had in mind. I tactfully
suppressed the word but I filed the idea away.
I don't think either of us knew exactly what we were saying. Alice in
particular I don't believe was old enough to have experienced almost any
of the things the words referred to. They were mysterious symbols of
long-interdicted delights spewing out of us.
"Ray," Alice said, hurrying to me, "let's get aboard."
"Yes," I said eagerly and then I saw a little problem. The door to the
plane was a couple of feet above our heads. Whoever hoisted himself up
first--or got hoisted up, as would have to be the case with Alice on
account of her hand--would be momentarily at the other's mercy. I guess
it occurred to Alice too because she stopped and looked at me. It was a
little like the old teaser about the fox, the goose, and the corn.
Maybe, too, we were both a little scared the plane was booby-trapped.
* * * * *
Pop solved the problem in the direct way I might have expected of him by
stepping quietly between us, giving a light leap, catching hold of the
curving sill, chinning himself on it, and scrambling up into the plane
so quickly that we'd hardly have had time to do anything about it if
we'd wanted to. Pop couldn't be much more than a bantamweight, even with
all his knives. The plane sagged an inch and then swung up again.
As Pop disappeared from view I backed off, reaching for my .38, but a
moment later he stuck out his head and grinned down at us, resting his
elbows on the sill.
"Come on up," he said. "It's quite a place. I promise not to push any
buttons 'til you get here, though there's whole regiments of them."
I grinned back at Pop and gave Alice a boost up. She didn't like it, but
she could see it had to be her next. She hooked onto the sill and Pop
caught hold of her left wrist below the big glove and heaved.
Then it was my turn. I didn't like it. I didn't like the idea of those
two buggers poised above me while my hands were helpless on the sill.
But I thought _Pop's a nut. You can trust a nut, at least a little ways,
though you can't trust nobody else._ I heaved myself up. It was strange
to feel the plane giving and then bracing itself like something alive.
It seemed to have no trouble accepting our combined weight, which after
all was hardly more than half again the Pilot's.
* * * * *
Inside the cabin was pretty small but as Pop had implied, oh my!
Everything looked soft and smoothly curved, like you imagine your
insides being, and almost everything was a restfully dull silver. The
general shape of it was something like the inside of an egg. Forward,
which was the larger end, were a couple of screens and a wide viewport
and some small dials and the button brigades Pop had mentioned, lined up
like blank typewriter keys but enough for writing Chinese.
Just aft of the instrument panel were two very comfortable-looking
strange low seats. They seemed to be facing backwards until I realized
they were meant to be knelt into. The occupant, I could see, would sort
of sprawl forward, his hands free for button-pushing and such. There
were spongy chinrests.
Aft was a tiny instrument panel and a kind of sideways seat, not nearly
so fancy. The door by which we'd entered was to the side, a little aft.
I didn't see any indications of cabinets or fixed storage spaces of any
kinds, but somehow stuck to the walls here and there were quite a few
smooth blobby packages, mostly dull silver too, some large, some
small--valises and handbags, you might say.
All in all, it was a lovely cabin and, more than that, it seemed lived
in. It looked as if it had been shaped for, and maybe by one man. It had
a personality you could feel, a strong but warm personality of its own.
Then I realized whose personality it was. I almost got sick--so close to
it I started telling myself it must be something antigravity did to your
stomach.
But it was all too interesting to let you get sick right away. Pop was
poking into two of the large mound-shaped cases that were sitting loose
and open on the right-hand seat, as if ready for emergency use. One had
a folded something with straps on it that was probably a parachute. The
second had I judged a thousand or more of the inch cubes such as I'd
pried out of the Pilot's hand, all neatly stacked in a cubical box
inside the soft outer bag. You could see the one-cube gap where he'd
taken the one.
I decided to take the rest of the bags off the walls and open them, if I
could figure out how. The others had the same idea, but Alice had to
take off her hook and put on her pliers, before she could make progress.
Pop helped her. There was room enough for us to do these things without
crowding each other too closely.
By the time Alice was set to go I'd discovered the trick of getting the
bags off. You couldn't pull them away from the wall no matter what force
you used, at least I couldn't, and you couldn't even slide them straight
along the walls, but if you just gave them a gentle counterclockwise
twist they came off like nothing. Twisting them clockwise glued them
back on. It was very strange, but I told myself that if these boys could
generate antigravity fields they could create screwy fields of other
sorts.
It also occurred to me to wonder if "these boys" came from Earth. The
Pilot had looked human enough, but these accomplishments didn't--not by
my standards for human achievement in the Age of the Deaders. At any
rate I had to admit to myself that my pet term "cultural queer" did not
describe to my own satisfaction members of a culture which could create
things like this cabin. Not that I liked making the admission. It's hard
to admit an exception to a pet gripe against things.
The excitement of getting down and opening the Christmas packages saved
me from speculating too much along these or any other lines.
I hit a minor jackpot right away. In the same bag were a compass, a
catalytic pocket lighter, a knife with a saw-tooth back edge that made
my affection for Mother waver, a dust mask, what looked like a compact
water-filtration unit, and several other items adding up to a deluxe
Deathlands Survival Kit.
There were some goggles in the kit I didn't savvy until I put them on
and surveyed the landscape out the viewport. A nearby dust drift I knew
to be hot glowed green as death in the slightly smoky lenses. Wow! Those
specs had Geiger counters beat a mile and I privately bet myself they
worked at night. I stuck them in my pocket quick.
* * * * *
We found bunches of tiny electronics parts--I think they were; spools of
magnetic tape, but nothing to play it on; reels of very narrow film with
frames much too small to see anything at all unmagnified; about three
thousand cigarettes in unlabeled transparent packs of twenty--we lit up
quick, using my new lighter; a picture book that didn't make much sense
because the views might have been of tissue sections or starfields, we
couldn't quite decide, and there were no captions to help; a thin book
with ricepaper pages covered with Chinese characters--_that_ was a
puzzler; a thick book with nothing but columns of figures, all zeros and
ones and nothing else; some tiny chisels; and a mouth organ. Pop, who'd
make a point of just helping in the hunt, appropriated that last item--I
might have known he would, I told myself. Now we could expect "Turkey in
the Straw" at odd moments.
Alice found a whole bag of what were women's things judging from the
frilliness of the garments included. She set aside some squeeze-packs
and little gadgets and elastic items right away, but she didn't take any
of the clothes. I caught her measuring some kind of transparent chemise
against herself when she thought we weren't looking; it was for a girl
maybe six sizes bigger.
* * * * *
And we found food. Cans of food that was heated up inside by the time
you got the top rolled off, though the outside could still be cool to
the touch. Cans of boneless steak, boneless chops, cream soup, peas,
carrots, and fried potatoes--they weren't labeled at all but you could
generally guess the contents from the shape of the can. Eggs that heated
when you touched them and were soft-boiled evenly and barely firm by the
time you had the shell broke. And small plastic bottles of strong coffee
that heated up hospitably too--in this case the tops did a five-second
hesitation in the middle of your unscrewing them.
At that point as you can imagine we let the rest of the packages go and
had ourselves a feast. The food ate even better than it smelled. It was
real hard for me not to gorge.
Then as I was slurping down my second bottle of coffee I happened to
look out the viewport and see the Pilot's body and the darkening puddle
around it and the coffee began to taste, well, not bad, but sickening. I
don't think it was guilty conscience. Deathlanders outgrow those if they
ever have them to start with; loners don't keep consciences--it takes
cultures to give you those and make them work. Artistic
inappropriateness is the closest I can come to describing what bothered
me. Whatever it was, it made me feel lousy for a minute.
About the same time Alice did an odd thing with the last of _her_
coffee. She slopped it on a rag and used it to wash her face. I guess
she'd caught a reflection of herself with the blood smears. She didn't
eat any more after that either. Pop kept on chomping away, a slow feeder
and appreciative.
To be doing something I started to inspect the instrument panel and
right away I was all excited again. The two screens were what got me.
They showed shadowy maps, one of North America, the other of the World.
The first one was a whole lot like the map I'd been imagining
earlier--faint colors marked the small "civilized" areas including one
in Eastern Canada and another in Upper Michigan that must be "countries"
I didn't know about, and the Deathlands were real dark just as I'd
always maintained they should be!
South of Lake Michigan was a brightly luminous green point that must be
where we were, I decided. And for some reason the colored areas
representing Los Alamos and Atlantic Highlands were glowing brighter
than the others--they had an active luminosity. Los Alamos was blue,
Atla-Hi violet. Los Alamos was shown having more territory than I
expected. Savannah Fortress for that matter was a whole _lot_ bigger
than I'd have made it, pushing out pseudopods west and northeast along
the coast, though its red didn't have the extra glow. But its
growth-pattern reeked of imperialism.
* * * * *
The World screen showed dim color patches too, but for the moment I was
more interested in the other.
The button armies marched right up to the lower edge of the screens and
right away I got the crazy hunch that they were connected with spots on
the map. Push the button for a certain spot and the plane would go
there! Why, one button even seemed to have a faint violet nimbus around
it (or else my eyes were going bad) as if to say, "Push me and we go to
Atlantic Highlands."
A crazy notion as I say and no sensible way to handle a plane's
navigation according to any standards I could imagine, but then as I've
also said this plane didn't seem to be designed according to any
standards but rather in line with one man's ideas, including his whims.
At any rate that was my hunch about the buttons and the screens. It
tantalized rather than helped, for the only button that seemed to be
marked in any way was the one (guessing by color) for Atlantic
Highlands, and I certainly didn't want to go there. Like Alamos, Atla-Hi
has the reputation for being a mysteriously dangerous place. Not openly
mean and death-on-Deathlanders like Walla Walla or Porter, but buggers
who swing too close to Atla-Hi have a way of never turning up again. You
never expect to see again two out of three buggers who pass in the
night, but for three out of three to keep disappearing is against
statistics.
Alice was beside me now, scanning things over too, and from the way she
frowned and what not I gathered she had caught my hunch and also shared
my puzzlement.
Now was the time, all right, when we needed an instruction manual and
not one in Chinese neither!
Pop swallowed a mouthful and said, "Yep, now'd be a good time to have
him back for a minute, to explain things a bit. Oh, don't take offense,
Ray, I know how it was for you and for you too, Alice. I know the both
of you _had_ to murder him, it wasn't a matter of free choice, it's the
way us Deathlanders are built. Just the same, it'd be nice to have a way
of killing 'em and keeping them on hand at the same time. I remember
feeling that way after murdering the Alamoser I told you about. You see,
I come down with the very fever I'd faked and almost died of it, while
the man who could have cured me easy wouldn't do nothing but perfume the
landscape with the help of a gang of anaerobic bacteria. Stubborn
single-minded cuss!"
* * * * *
The first part of that oration started up my sickness again and irked me
not a little. Dammit, what right had Pop to talk about how all us
Deathlanders _had to_ kill (which was true enough and by itself would
have made me cotton to him) if as he'd claimed earlier _he'd_ been able
to quit killing? Pop was, an old hypocrite, I told myself--he'd helped
murder the Pilot, he'd admitted as much--and Alice and me'd be better
off if we bedded the both of them down together. But then the second
part of what Pop said so made me want to feel pleasantly sorry for
myself and laugh at the same time that I forgave the old geezer.
Practically everything Pop said had that reassuring touch of insanity
about it.
So it was Alice who said, "Shut up, Pop"--and rather casually at
that--and she and me went on to speculate and then to argue about which
buttons we ought to push, if any and in what order.
"Why not just start anywhere and keep pushing 'em one after
another?--you're going to have to eventually, may as well start now,"
was Pop's light-hearted contribution to the discussion. "Got to take
some chances in this life." He was sitting in the back seat and still
nibbling away like a white-topped mangy old squirrel.
Of course Alice and me knew more than that. We kept making guesses as to
how the buttons worked and then backing up our guesses with hot
language. It was a little like two savages trying to decide how to play
chess by looking at the pieces. And then the old escape-to-paradise
theme took hold of us again and we studied the colored blobs on the
World screen, trying to decide which would have the fanciest
accommodations for blase ex-murderers. On the North America screen too
there was an intriguing pink patch in southern Mexico that seemed to
take in old Mexico City and Acapulco too.
"Quit talking and start pushing," Pop prodded us. "This way you're
getting nowhere fast. I can't stand hesitation, it riles my nerves."
Alice thought you ought to push ten buttons at once, using both hands,
and she was working out patterns for me to try. But I was off on a kick
about how we should darken the plane to see if any of the other buttons
glowed beside the one with the Atla-Hi violet.
"Look here, you killed a big man to get this plane," Pop broke in,
coming up behind me. "Are you going to use it for discussion groups or
are you going to fly it?"
"Quiet," I told him. I'd got a new hunch and was using the dark glasses
to scan the instrument panel. They didn't show anything.
"Dammit, I can't stand this any more," Pop said and reached a hand and
arm between us and brought it down on about fifty buttons, I'd judge.
The other buttons just went down and up, but the Atla-Hi button went
down and stayed down.
The violet blob of Atla-Hi on the screen got even brighter in the next
few moments.
The door closed with a tiny thud.
We took off.
CHAPTER 4
_Any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of
thinking, and truly inaccurate principles._
--_Thomas de Quincey in_
Murder Considered as
One of the Fine Arts
For that matter we took off _fast_ with the plane swinging to beat hell.
Alice and me was in the two kneeling seats and we hugged them tight, but
Pop was loose and sort of rattled around the cabin for a while--and
serve him right!
On one of the swings I caught a glimpse of the seven dented gas tanks,
looking like dull crescents from this angle through the orange haze and
getting rapidly smaller as they hazed out.
After a while the plane levelled off and quit swinging, and a while
after that my image of the cabin quit swinging too. Once again I just
managed to stave off the vomits, this time the vomits from natural
causes. Alice looked very pale around the gills and kept her face buried
in the chinrest of her chair.
Pop ended up right in our faces, sort of spread-eagled against the
instrument panel. In getting himself off it he must have braced his
hands against half the buttons at one time or another and I noticed that
none of them went down a fraction. They were _locked_. It had probably
happened automatically when the Atla-Hi button got pushed.
I'd have stopped him messing around in that apish way, but with the
ultra-queasy state of my stomach I lacked all ambition and was happy
just not to be smelling him so close.
I still wasn't taking too great an interest in things as I idly watched
the old geezer rummaging around the cabin for something that got
misplaced in the shake-up. Eventually he found it--a small almond-shaped
can. He opened it. Sure enough it turned out to have almonds in it. He
fitted himself in the back seat and munched them one at a time. Ish!
"Nothing like a few nuts to top off with," he said cheerfully.
I could have cut his throat even more cheerfully, but the damage had
been done and you think twice before you kill a person in close quarters
when you aren't absolutely sure you'll be able to dispose of the body.
How did I know I'd be able to open the door? I remember philosophizing
that Pop ought at least to have broke an arm so he'd be as badly off as
Alice and me (though for that matter my right arm was fully recovered
now) but he was all in one piece. There's no justice in events, that's
for sure.
The plane ploughed along silently through the orange soup, though there
was really no way to tell it was moving now--until a skewy spindle shape
loomed up ahead and shot back over the viewport. I think it was a
vulture. I don't know how vultures manage to operate in the haze, which
ought to cancel their keen eyesight, but they do. It shot past _fast_.
Alice lifted her face out of the sponge stuff and began to study the
buttons again. I heaved myself up and around a little and said, "Pop,
Alice and me are going to try to work out how this plane navigates. This
time we don't want no interference." I didn't say a word more about what
he'd done. It never does to hash over stupidities.
"That's perfectly fine, go right ahead," he told me. "I feel calm as a
kitten now we're going somewheres. That's all that ever matters with
me." He chuckled a bit and added, "You got to admit I gave you and Alice
something to work with," but then he had the sense to shut up tight.
* * * * *
We weren't so chary of pushing buttons this time, but ten minutes or so
convinced us that you couldn't push any of the buttons any more, they
_were_ all locked down--all locked except for maybe one, which we didn't
try at first for a special reason.
We looked for other controls--sticks, levers, pedals, finger-holes and
the like. There weren't any. Alice went back and tried the buttons on
Pop's minor console. They were locked too. Pop looked interested but
didn't say a word.
We realized in a general way what had happened, of course. Pushing the
Atla-Hi button had set us on some kind of irreversible automatic. I
couldn't imagine the why of gimmicking a plane's controls like that,
unless maybe to keep loose children or prisoners from being able to mess
things up while the pilot took a snooze, but there were a lot of whys to
this plane that didn't seem to have any standard answers.
The business of taking off on irreversible automatic had happened so
neatly that I naturally wondered whether Pop might not know more about
navigating this plane than he let on, a whole lot more in fact, and the
seemingly idiotic petulance of his pushing all the buttons have been a
shrewd cover for pushing the Atla-Hi button. But if Pop had been acting
he'd been acting beautifully, with a serene disregard for the chances of
breaking his own neck. I decided this was a possibility I could think
about later and maybe act on then, after Alice and me had worked through
the more obvious stuff.
The reason we hadn't tried the one button yet was that it showed a green
nimbus, just like the Atla-Hi button had had a violet nimbus. Now there
was no green on either of the screens except for the tiny green star
that I had figured stood for the plane and it didn't make sense to go
where we already were. And if it meant some other place, some place not
shown on the screens, you bet we weren't going to be too quick about
deciding to go there. It might not be on Earth.
Alice expressed it by saying, "My namesake was always a little too quick
at responding to those DRINK ME cues."
I suppose she thought she was being cryptic, but I fooled her. "_Alice
in Wonderland_?" I asked. She nodded, and gave me a little smile, not at
all like one of the EAT ME smiles she'd given me last evening.
It is funny how crazily happy a little touch of the intellectual past
like that can make you feel--and how horribly uncomfortable a moment
later.
We both started to study the North America screen again and almost at
once we realized that it had changed in one small particular. The green
star had twinned. Where there had been one point of green light there
were now two, very close together like the double star in the handle of
the Dipper. We watched it for a while. The distance between the two
stars grew perceptibly greater. We watched it for a while longer,
considerably longer. It became clear that the position of the more
westerly star on the screen was fixed, while the more easterly star was
moving east toward Atla-Hi with about the speed of the tip of the minute
hand on a wrist watch (two inches an hour, say). The pattern began to
make sense.
* * * * *
I figured it this way: the moving star must stand for the plane, the
other green dot must stand for where the plane had just been. For some
reason the spot on the freeway by the old cracking plant was recognized
as a marked locality by the screen. Why I don't know. It reminded me of
the old "X Marks the Spot" of newspaper murders, but that would be
getting very fancy. Anyway the spot we'd just taken off from was so
marked and in that case the button with the green nimbus ...
"Hold tight, everybody," I said to Alice, grudgingly including Pop in my
warning. "I got to try it."
I gripped my seat with my knees and one arm and pushed the green
button. It pushed.
The plane swung around in a level loop, not too tight to disturb the
stomach much, and steadied out again.
I couldn't judge how far we'd swung but Alice and me watched the green
stars and after about a minute she said, "They're getting closer," and a
little while later I said, "Yeah, for sure."
I scanned the board. The green button--the cracking-plant button, to
call it that--was locked down of course. The Atla-Hi button was up,
glowing violet. All the other buttons were still up and _locked_ up--I
tried them all again.
* * * * *
It was clear as day used to be. We could either go to Atla-Hi or we
could go back where we'd started from. There was no third possibility.
It was a little hard to take. You think of a plane as freedom, as
something that will carry you anywhere in the world you choose to go,
especially any paradise, and then you find yourself worse limited than
if you'd stayed on the ground--at least that was the way it was
happening to us.
But Alice and me were realists. We knew it wouldn't help to wail. We
were up against another of those "two" problems, the problem of two
destinations, and we had to choose ours.
_If we go back_, I thought, _we can trek on somewhere--anywhere--richer
by the loot from the plane, especially that Survival Kit. Trek on with
some loot we'll mostly never understand and with the knowledge that we
are leaving a plane that can fly, that we are shrinking back from an
unknown adventure_.
_Also if we go back there's something else we'll have to face, something
we'll have to live with for a little while at least that won't be nice
to live with after this cozily personal cabin, something that shouldn't
bother me at all but, dammit, it does._
Alice made the decision for us and at the same time showed she was
thinking about the same thing as me.
"I don't want to have to smell him, Ray," she said. "I am not going back
to keep company with that filthy corpse. I'd rather anything than that."
And she pushed the Atla-Hi button again and as the plane started to
swing she looked at me defiantly as if to say I'd reverse the course
again over her dead body.
"Don't tense up," I told her. "I want a new shake of the dice myself."
"You know, Alice," Pop said reflectively, "it was the smell of my
Alamoser got to me too. I just couldn't bear it. I couldn't get away
from it because my fever had me pinned down, so there was nothing left
for me to do but go crazy. No Atla-Hi for me, just Bug-land. My mind
died, though not my memory. By the time I'd got my strength back I'd
started to be a new bugger. I didn't know no more about living than a
newborn babe, except I knew I couldn't go back--go back to murdering
and all that. My new mind knew that much though otherwise it was just a
blank. It was all very funny."
"And then I suppose," Alice cut in, her voice corrosive with sarcasm,
"you hunted up a wandering preacher, or perhaps a kindly old hermit who
lived on hot manna, and he showed you the blue sky!"
"Why no, Alice," Pop said. "I told you I don't go for religion. As it
happens, I hunted me up a couple of murderers, guys who were worse cases
then myself but who'd wanted to quit because it wasn't getting them
nowhere and who'd found, I'd heard, a way of quitting, and the three of
us had a long talk together."
"And they told you the great secret of how to live in the Deathlands
without killing," Alice continued acidly. "Drop the nonsense, Pop. It
can't be done."
"It's hard, I'll grant you," Pop said. "You have to go crazy or
something almost as bad--in fact, maybe going crazy is the easiest way.
But it can be done and, in the long run, murder is even harder."
* * * * *
I decided to interrupt this idle chatter. Since we were now definitely
headed for Atla-Hi and there was nothing to do until we got there,
unless one of us got a brainstorm about the controls, it was time to
start on the less obvious stuff I'd tabled in my mind.
"Why are you on this plane, Pop?" I asked sharply. "What do you figure
on getting out of Alice and me?--and I don't mean the free meals."
He grinned. His teeth were white and even--plates, of course. "Why,
Ray," he said, "I was just giving Alice the reason. I like to talk to
murderers, practicing murderers preferred. I need to--_have_ to talk to
'em, to keep myself straight. Otherwise I might start killing again and
I'm not up to that any more."
"Oh, so you get your kicks at second hand, you old peeper," Alice put in
but, "Quit lying, Pop," I said. "About having quit killing, for one
thing. In my books, which happen to be the old books in this case, the
accomplice is every bit as guilty as the man with the slicer. You helped
us kill the Pilot by giving that funny scream and you know it."
"Who says I did?" Pop countered, rearing up a little. "I never said so.
I just said, 'Forget it.'" He hesitated a moment, studying me. Then he
said, "I wasn't the one gave that scream. In fact, I'd have stopped it
if I'd been able."
"Who did then?"
Again he studied me as he hesitated. "I'm not telling," he said,
settling back.
"Pop!" I said, sharp again. "Buggers who pad together tell everything."
"Oh yeah," he agreed, smiling. "I remember saying that to quite a few
guys in my day. It's a very restful comradely sentiment. I killed every
last one of 'em, too."
"You may have, Pop," I granted, "but we're two to one."
"So you are," he agreed softly, looking the both of us over. I knew what
he was thinking--that Alice still had just her pliers on and that in
these close quarters his knives were as good as my gun.
"Give me your right hand, Alice," I said. Without taking my eyes off Pop
I reached the knife without a handle out of her belt and then I started
to unscrew the pliers out of her stump.
"Pop," I said as I did so, "you may have quit killing for all I know. I
mean you may have quit killing clean decent Deathland style. But I don't
believe one bit of that guff about having to talk to murderers to keep
your mind sweet. Furthermore--"
"It's true though," he interrupted. "I got to keep myself reminded of
how lousy it feels to be a murderer."
"So?" I said. "Well, here's one person who believes you've got a more
practical reason for being on this plane. Pop, what's the bounty Atla-Hi
gives you for every Deathlander you bring in? What would it be for two
live Deathlanders? And what sort of reward would they pay for a lost
plane brought in? Seems to me they might very well make you a citizen
for that."
"Yes, even give you your own church," Alice added with a sort of wicked
gaiety. I squeezed her stump gently to tell her let me handle it.
"Why, I guess you can believe that if you want to," Pop said and let out
a soft breath. "Seems to me you need a lot of coincidences and
happenstances to make that theory hold water, but you sure can believe
it if you want to. I got no way, Ray, to prove to you I'm telling the
truth except to say I am."
"Right," I said and then I threw the next one at him real fast. "What's
more, Pop, weren't you traveling in this plane to begin with? That cuts
a happenstance. Didn't you hop out while we were too busy with the Pilot
to notice and just _pretend_ to be coming from the cracking plant?
Weren't the buttons locked because you were the Pilot's prisoner?"
* * * * *
Pop creased his brow thoughtfully. "It could have been that way," he
said at last. "Could have been--according to the evidence as you saw it.
It's quite a bright idea, Ray. I can almost see myself skulking in this
cabin, while you and Alice--"
"You were skulking somewhere," I said. I finished screwing in the knife
and gave Alice back her hand. "I'll repeat it, Pop," I said. "We're two
to one. You'd better talk."
"Yes," Alice added, disregarding my previous hint. "You may have given
up fighting, Pop, but I haven't. Not fighting, nor killing, nor anything
in between those two. Any least thing." My girl was being her most
pantherish.
"Now who says I've given up _fighting_?" Pop demanded, rearing a little
again. "You people assume too much, it's a dangerous habit. Before we
have any trouble and somebody squawks about me cheating, let's get one
thing straight. If anybody jumps me I'll try to disable them, I'll try
to hurt them in any way short of killing, and that means hamstringing
and rabbit-punching and everything else. Every least thing, Alice. And
if they happen to die while I'm honestly just trying to hurt them in a
way short of killing, then I won't grieve too much. My conscience will
be reasonably clear. Is that understood?"
I had to admit that it was. Pop might be lying about a lot of things,
but I just didn't believe he was lying about this. And I already knew
Pop was quick for his age and strong enough. If Alice and me jumped him
now there'd be blood let six different ways. You can't jump a man who
has a dozen knives easy to hand and not expect that to happen, two to
one or not. We'd get him in the end but it would be gory.
* * * * *
"And now," Pop said quietly, "I _will_ talk a little if you don't mind.
Look here, Ray ... Alice ... the two of you are confirmed murderers, I
know you wouldn't tell me nothing different, and being such you both
know that there's nothing in murder in the long run. It satisfies a
hunger and maybe gets you a little loot and it lets you get on to the
next killing. But that's all, absolutely all. Yet you got to do it
because it's the way you're built. The urge is there, it's an
overpowering urge, and you got nothing to oppose it with. You feel the
Big Grief and the Big Resentment, the dust is eating at your bones, you
can't stand the city squares--the Porterites and Mantenors and
such--because you know they're whistling in the dark and it's a dirty
tune, so you go on killing. But if there were a decent practical way to
quit, you'd take it. At least I think you would. When you still thought
this plane could take you to Rio or Europe you felt that way, didn't
you? You weren't planning to go there as murderers, were you? You were
going to leave your trade behind."
It was pretty quiet in the cabin for a couple of seconds. Then Alice's
thin laugh sliced the silence. "We were dreaming then," she said. "We
were out of our heads. But now you're talking about practical things, as
you say. What do you expect us to do if we quit our trade, as you call
it--go into Walla Walla or Ouachita and give ourselves up? I might lose
more than my right hand at Ouachita this time--that was just on
suspicion."
"Or Atla-Hi," I added meaningfully. "Are you expecting us to admit we're
murderers when we get to Atla-Hi, Pop?"
The old geezer smiled and thinned his eyes. "Now that wouldn't
accomplish much, would it? Most places they'd just string you up, maybe
after tickling your pain nerves a bit, or if it was Manteno they might
put you in a cage and feed you slops and pray over you, and would that
help you or anybody else? If a man or woman quits killing there's a lot
of things he's got to straighten out--first his own mind and feelings,
next he's got to do what he can to make up for the murders he's
done--help the next of kin if any and so on--then he's got to carry the
news to other killers who haven't heard it yet. He's got no time to
waste being hanged. Believe me, he's got work lined up for him, work
that's got to be done mostly in the Deathlands, and it's the sort of
work the city squares can't help him with one bit, because they just
don't understand us murderers and what makes us tick. We have to do it
ourselves."
* * * * *
"Hey, Pop," I cut in, getting a little interested in the argument (there
wasn't anything else to get interested in until we got to Atla-Hi or Pop
let down his guard), "I dig you on the city squares (I call 'em cultural
queers) and what sort of screwed-up fatheads they are, but just the same
for a man to quit killing he's got to quit lone-wolfing it. He's got to
belong to a community, he's got to have a culture of some sort, no
matter how disgusting or nutsy."
"Well," Pop said, "don't us Deathlanders have a culture? With customs
and folkways and all the rest? A very tight little culture, in fact.
Nutsy as all get out, of course, but that's one of the beauties of it."
"Oh sure," I granted him, "but it's a culture based on murder and
devoted wholly to murder. Murder is our way of life. That gets your
argument nowhere, Pop."
"Correction," he said. "Or rather, re-interpretation." And now for a
little while his voice got less old-man harsh and yet bigger somehow, as
if it were more than just Pop talking. "Every culture," he said, "is a
way of growth as well as a way of life, because the first law of life is
growth. Our Deathland culture is devoted to growing _through_ murder
_away from_ murder. That's my thought. It's about the toughest way of
growth anybody was ever asked to face up to, but it's a way of growth
just the same. A lot bigger and fancier cultures never could figure out
the answer to the problem of war and killing--_we_ know that, all right,
we inhabit their grandest failure. Maybe us Deathlanders, working with
murder every day, unable to pretend that it isn't part of every one of
us, unable to put it out of our minds like the city squares do--maybe us
Deathlanders are the ones to do that little job."
"But hell, Pop," I objected, getting excited in spite of myself, "even
if we got a culture here in the Deathlands, a culture that can grow, it
ain't a culture that can deal with repentant murderers. In a _real_
culture a murderer feels guilty and confesses and then he gets hanged
or imprisoned a long time and that squares things for him and everybody.
You need religion and courts and hangmen and screws and all the rest of
it. I don't think it's enough for a man just to say he's sorry and go
around glad-handing other killers--_that_ isn't going to be enough to
wipe out his sense of guilt."
Pop squared his eyes at mine. "Are you so fancy that you have to have a
sense of guilt, Ray?" he demanded. "Can't you just see when something's
lousy? A sense of guilt's a luxury. Of course it's not enough to say
you're sorry--you're going to have to spend a good part of the rest of
your life making up for what you've done ... and what you will do, too!
But about hanging and prisons--was it ever proved those were the right
thing for murderers? As for religion now--some of us who've quit killing
are religious and a lot of us (me included) aren't; and some of the ones
that are religious figure (maybe because there's no way for them to get
hanged) that they're damned eternally--but that doesn't stop them doing
good work. I ask you now, is any little thing like being damned
eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat?"
That did it, somehow. That last statement of Pop's appealed so much to
me and was completely crazy at the same time, that I couldn't help
warming up to him. Don't get me wrong, I didn't really fall for his line
of chatter at all, but I found it fun to go along with it--so long as
the plane was in this shuttle situation and we had nothing better to do.
Alice seemed to feel the same way. I guess any bugger that could kid
religion the way Pop could got a little silver star in her books.
Bronze, anyway.
* * * * *
Right away the atmosphere got easier. To start with we asked Pop to tell
us about this "us" he kept mentioning and he said it was some dozens (or
hundreds--nobody had accurate figures) of killers who'd quit and went
nomading around the Deathlands trying to recruit others and help those
who wanted to be helped. They had semi-permanent meeting places where
they tried to get together at pre-arranged dates, but mostly they kept
on the go, by twos and threes or--more rarely--alone. They were all men
so far, at least Pop hadn't heard of any women members, but--he assured
Alice earnestly--he would personally guarantee that there would be no
objections to a girl joining up. They had recently taken to calling
themselves Murderers Anonymous, after some pre-war organization Pop
didn't know the original purpose of. Quite a few of them had slipped and
gone back to murdering again, but some of these had come back after a
while, more determined than ever to make a go of it.
"We welcomed 'em, of course," Pop said. "We welcome everybody.
Everybody that's a genuine murderer, that is, and says he wants to quit.
Guys that aren't blooded yet we draw the line at, no matter how fine
they are."
Also, "We have a lot of fun at our meetings," Pop assured us. "You never
saw such high times. Nobody's got a right to go glooming around or pull
a long face just because he's done a killing or two. Religion or no
religion, pride's a sin."
Alice and me ate it all up like we was a couple of kids and Pop was
telling us fairy tales. That's what it all was, of course, a fairy
tale--a crazy mixed-up fairy tale. Alice and me knew there could be no
fellowship of Deathlanders like Pop was describing--it was impossible as
blue sky--but it gave us a kick to pretend to ourselves for a while to
believe in it.
* * * * *
Pop could talk forever, apparently, about murder and murderers and he
had a bottomless bag of funny stories on the same topic and character
vignettes--the murderers who were forever wanting their victims to
understand and forgive them, the ones who thought of themselves as
little kings with divine rights of dispensing death, the ones who
insisted on laying down (chastely) beside their finished victims and
playing dead for a couple of hours, the ones who weren't so chaste, the
ones who could only do their killings when they were dressed a certain
way (and the troubles they had with their murder costumes), the ones who
could only kill people with certain traits or of a certain appearance
(red-heads, say, or people who read books, or who couldn't carry tunes,
or who used bad language), the ones who always mixed sex and murder and
the ones who believed that murder was contaminated by the least breath of
sex, the sticklers and the Sloppy Joes, the artists and the butchers, the
ax- and stiletto-types, the _com_pulsives and the _re_pulsives--honestly,
Pop's portraits from life added up to a Dance of Death as good as
anything the Middle Ages ever produced and they ought to have been
illustrated like those by some great artist. Pop told us a lot about his
own killings too. Alice and me was interested, but neither of us wasn't
tempted into making parallel revelations about ourselves. Your private
life's your own business, I felt, as close as your guts, and no joke's
good enough to justify revealing a knot of it.
Not that we talked about nothing but murder while we were bulleting
along toward Atla-Hi. The conversation was free-wheeling and we got onto
all sorts of topics. For instance, we got to talking about the plane and
how it flew itself--or levitated itself, rather. I said it must generate
an antigravity field that was keyed to the body of the plane but nothing
else, so that _we_ didn't feel lighter, nor any of the objects in the
cabin--it just worked on the dull silvery metal--and I proved my point
by using Mother to shave a little wisp of metal off the edge of the
control board. The curlicue stayed in the air wherever you put it and
when you moved it you could feel the faintest sort of gyroscopic
resistance. It was very strange.
Pop pointed out it was a little like magnetism. A germ riding on an iron
filing that was traveling toward the pole of a big magnet wouldn't feel
the magnetic pull--it wouldn't be operating on him, only on the
iron--but just the same the germ'd be carried along with the filing and
feel its acceleration and all, provided he could hold on--but for that
purpose you could imagine a tiny cabin in the filing. "That's what we
are," Pop added. "Three germs, jumbo size."
Alice wanted to know why an antigravity plane should have even the
stubbiest wings or a jet for that matter, for we remembered now we'd
noticed the tubes, and I said it was maybe just a reserve system in case
the antigravity failed and Pop guessed it might be for extra-fast battle
maneuvering or even for operating outside the atmosphere (which hardly
made sense, as I proved to him).
"If we're a battle plane, where's our guns?" Alice asked. None of us had
an answer.
We remembered the noise the plane had made before we saw it. It must
have been using its jets then. "And do you suppose," Pop asked, "that it
was something from the antigravity that made electricity flare out of
the top of the cracking plant? Like to have scared the pants off me!" No
answer to that either.
Now was a logical time, of course, to ask Pop what he knew about the
cracking plant and just who had done the scream if not him, but I
figured he still wouldn't talk; as long as we were acting friendly there
was no point in spoiling it.
* * * * *
We guessed around a little, though, about where the plane came from. Pop
said Alamos, I said Atla-Hi, Alice said why not from both, why couldn't
Alamos and Atla-Hi have some sort of treaty and the plane be traveling
from the one to the other. We agreed it might be. At least it fitted
with the Atla-Hi violet and the Alamos blue being brighter than the
other colors.
"I just hope we got some sort of anti-collision radar," I said. I
guessed we had, because twice we'd jogged in our course a little, maybe
to clear the Alleghenies. The easterly green star was by now getting
pretty close to the violet blot of Atla-Hi. I looked out at the orange
soup, which was _one_ thing that hadn't changed a bit so far, and I got
to wishing like a baby that it wasn't there and to thinking how it
blanketed the whole Earth (stars over the Riviera?--don't make me
laugh!) and I heard myself asking, "Pop, did you rub out that guy that
pushed the buttons for all this?"
"Nope," Pop answered without hesitation, just as if it hadn't been four
hours or so since he'd mentioned the point. "Nope, Ray. Fact is I
welcomed him into our little fellowship about six months back. This is
_his_ knife here, this horn-handle in my boot, though he never killed
with it. He claimed he'd been tortured for years by the thought of the
millions and millions he'd killed with blast and radiation, but now he
was finding peace at last because he was where he belonged, with the
murderers, and could start to do something about it. Several of the boys
didn't want to let him in. They claimed he wasn't a real murderer, doing
it by remote control, no matter how many he bumped off."
"I'd have been on their side," Alice said, thinning her lips.
"Yep," Pop continued, "they got real hot about it. _He_ got hot too and
all excited and offered to go out and kill somebody with his bare hands
right off, or try to (he's a skinny little runt), if that's what he had
to do to join. We argued it over, I pointed out that we let ex-soldiers
count the killings they'd done in service, and that we counted
poisonings and booby traps and such too--which are remote-control
killings in a way--so eventually we let him in. He's doing good work.
We're fortunate to have him."
"Do you think he's really the guy who pushed the buttons?" I asked Pop.
"How should I know?" Pop replied. "He claims to be."
I was going to say something about people who faked confessions to get a
little easy glory, as compared to the guys who were really guilty and
would sooner be chopped up than talk about it, but at that moment a
fourth voice started talking in the plane. It seemed to be coming out of
the violet patch on the North America screen. That is, it came from the
general direction of the screen at any rate and my mind instantly tied
it to the violet patch at Atla-Hi. It gave us a fright, I can tell you.
Alice grabbed my knee with her pliers (she changed again), harder than
she'd intended, I suppose, though I didn't let out a yip--I was too
defensively frozen.
* * * * *
The voice was talking a language I didn't understand at all that went up
and down the scale like atonal music.
"Sounds like Chinese," Pop whispered, giving me a nudge.
"It _is_ Chinese. Mandarin," the screen responded instantly in the
purest English--at least that was how I'd describe it. Practically
Boston. "Who are you? And where is Grayl? Come in, Grayl."
I knew well enough who Grayl must be--or rather, have been. I looked at
Pop and Alice. Pop grinned, maybe a mite feebly this time, I thought,
and gave me a look as if to say, "_You_ want to handle it?"
I cleared my throat. Then, "We've taken over for Grayl," I said to the
screen.
"Oh." The screen hesitated, just barely. Then, "Do any of 'you' speak
Mandarin?"
I hardly bothered to look at Pop and Alice. "No," I said.
"Oh." Again a tiny pause. "Is Grayl aboard the plane?"
"No." I said.
"Oh. Incapacitated in some way, I suppose?"
"Yes," I said, grateful for the screen's tactfulness, unintentional or
not.
"But you have taken over for him?" the screen pressed.
"Yes," I said, swallowing. I didn't know what I was getting us into,
things were moving too fast, but it seemed the merest sense to act
cooperative.
"I'm very glad of that," the screen said with something in its tone that
made me feel funny--I guess it was sincerity. Then it said, "Is the--"
and hesitated, and started again with "Are the blocks aboard?"
I thought. Alice pointed at the stuff she dumped out of the other seat.
I said. "There's a box with a thousand or so one-inch underweight steel
cubes in it. Like a child's blocks, but with buttons in them. Alongside
a box with a parachute."
"That's what I mean," the screen said and somehow, maybe because whoever
was talking was trying to hide it, I caught a note of great relief.
"Look," the screen said, more rapidly now, "I don't know how much you
know, but we may have to work very fast. You aren't going to be able to
deliver the steel cubes to us directly. In fact you aren't going to be
able to land in Atlantic Highlands at all. We're sieged in by planes and
ground forces of Savannah Fortress. All our aircraft, such as haven't
been destroyed, are pinned down. You're going to have to parachute the
blocks to a point as near as possible to one of our ground parties
that's made a sortie. We'll give you a signal. I hope it will be
later--nearer here, that is--but it may be sooner. Do you know how to
fight the plane you're in? Operate its armament?"
"No," I said, wetting my lip.
"Then that's the first thing I'd best teach you. Anything you see in the
haze from now on will be from Savannah. You must shoot it down."
CHAPTER 5
_And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night._
--Dover Beach,
_by Matthew Arnold_
I am not going to try to describe point by point all that happened the
next half hour because there was too much of it and it involved all
three of us, sometimes doing different things at the same time, and
although we were told a lot of things, we were seldom if ever told the
why of them, and through it all was the constant impression that we
were dealing with human beings (I almost left out the "human" and I'm
still not absolutely sure whether I shouldn't) of vastly greater
scope--and probably intelligence too--than ourselves.
And that was just the _basic_ confusion, to give it a name. After a
while the situation got more difficult, as I'll try to tell in due
course.
* * * * *
To begin with, it was extremely weird to plunge from a rather leisurely
confab about a fairy-tale fellowship of non-practicing murderers into a
shooting war between a violet blob and a dark red puddle on a shadowy
fluorescent map. The voice didn't throw any great shining lights on this
topic, because after the first--and perhaps unguarded--revelation, we
learned little more of the war between Atla-Hi and Savannah Fortress and
nothing of the reasons behind it. Presumably Savannah was the aggressor,
reaching out north after the conquest of Birmingham, but even that was
just a guess. It is hard to describe how shadowy it all felt to me;
there were some minutes while my mind kept mixing up the whole thing
with what I'd read long ago about the Civil War: Savannah was Lee,
Atla-Hi was Grant, and we had been dropped spang into the middle of the
second Battle of the Wilderness.
Apparently the Savannah planes had some sort of needle ray as part of
their armament--at any rate I was warned to watch out for "swinging
lines in the haze, like straight strings of pink stars" and later told
to aim at the sources of such lines. And naturally I guessed that the
steel cubes must be some crucial weapon for Atla-Hi, or ammunition for a
weapon, or parts for some essential instrument like a giant computer,
but the voice ignored my questions on that point and didn't fall into
the couple of crude conversational traps I tried to set. We were to drop
the cubes when told, that was all. Pop had the box of them closed again
and rigged to the parachute--he took over that job because Alice and me
were busy with other things when the instructions on that came
through--and he was told how to open the door of the plane for the drop
(you just held your hand steadily on a point beside the door), but, as I
say, that was all.
Naturally it occurred to me that once we had made the drop, Atla-Hi
would have no more use for us and might simply let us be destroyed by
Savannah or otherwise--perhaps _want_ us to be destroyed--so that it
might be wisest for us to refuse to make the drop when the signal came
and hang onto those myriad steel cubes as our only bargaining point.
Still, I could see no advantage to refusing _before_ the signal came.
I'd have liked to discuss the point with Alice and maybe Pop too, but
apparently everything we said, even whispered, could be overheard by
Atla-Hi. (We never did determine, incidentally, whether Atla-Hi could
_see_ into the cabin of the plane also. I don't believe they could,
though they sure had it bugged for sound.)
All in all, we found out almost nothing about Atla-Hi. In fact, three
witless germs traveling in a cabin in an iron filing wasn't a bad
description of us at all. As I often say of my deductive
faculties--think--shmink! But Atla-Hi (always meaning, of course, the
personality behind the voice from the screen) found out all it wanted
about us--and apparently knew a good deal to start with. For one thing,
they must have been tracking our plane for some time, because they
guessed it was on automatic and that we could reverse its course but
nothing else. Though they seemed under the impression that we could
reverse its course to Los Alamos, not the cracking plant. Here obviously
I did get a nugget of new data, though it was just about the only one.
For a moment the voice from the screen got real unguarded--anxious as it
asked, "Do you know if it is true that they have stopped dying at Los
Alamos, or are they merely broadcasting that to cheer us up?"
I answered, "Oh yes, they're all fine," to that, but I couldn't have
made it very convincing, because the next thing I knew the voice was
getting me to admit that we'd only boarded the plane somewhere in the
Central Deathlands. I even had to describe the cracking plant and
freeway and gas tanks--I couldn't think of a lie that mightn't get us
into as much trouble as the truth--and the voice said, "Oh, did Grayl
stay there?" and I said, "Yes," and braced myself to do some more
admitting, or some heavy lying, as the inspiration took me.
But the voice continued to skirt around the question of what exactly had
happened to Grayl. I guess they knew well enough we'd bumped him off,
but didn't bring it up because they needed our cooperation--they were
handling us like children or savages, you see.
* * * * *
One pretty amazing point--Atla-Hi apparently knew something about Pop's
fairy-tale fellowship of non-practicing murderers, because when he had
to speak up, while he was getting instructions on preparing the stuff
for the drop, the voice said, "Excuse me, but you sound like one of
those M. A. boys."
Murderers Anonymous, Pop had said some of their boys called their
unorganized organization.
"Yep, I am," Pop admitted uncomfortably.
"Well, a word of advice then, or perhaps I only mean gossip," the screen
said, for once getting on a side track. "Most of our people do not
believe you are serious about it, although you may think that you are.
Our skeptics (which includes all but a very few of us) split quite
evenly between those who think that the M. A. spirit is a terminal
psychotic illusion and those who believe it is an elaborate ruse in
preparation for some concerted attack on cities by Deathlanders."
"Can't say that I blame the either of them," was Pop's only comment. "I
think I'm nuts myself and a murderer forever." Alice glared at him for
that admission, but it seemed to do us no damage. Pop really did seem
out of his depth though during this part of our adventure, more out of
his depth than even Alice and me--I mean, as if he could only really
function in the Deathland with Deathlanders and wanted to get anything
else over quickly.
* * * * *
I think one reason Pop was that way was that he was feeling very
intensely something I was feeling myself: a sort of sadness and
bewilderment that beings as smart as the voice from the screen sounded
should still be fighting wars. Murder, as you must know by now, I can
understand and sympathize with deeply, but war?--no!
Oh, I can understand cultural queers fighting city squares and even get
a kick out of it and whoop 'em on, but these Atla-Hi and Alamos folk
seemed a different sort of cat altogether (though I'd only come to that
point of view today)--the kind of cat that ought to have outgrown war or
thought its way around it. Maybe Savannah Fortress had simply forced the
war on them and they had to defend themselves. I hadn't contacted any
Savannans--they might be as blood-simple as the Porterites. Still, I
don't know that it's always a good excuse that somebody else forced you
into war. That sort of justification can keep on until the end of time.
But who's a germ to judge?
A minute later I was feeling doubly like a germ and a very lowly one,
because the situation had just got more difficult and depressing
too--the thing had happened that I said I'd tell you about in due
course.
The voice was just repeating its instructions to Pop on making the drop,
when it broke off of a sudden and a second voice came in, a deep voice
with a sort of European accent (not Chinese, oddly)--not talking _to_
us, I think, but to the first voice and overlooking or not caring that
we could hear.
"_Also_ tell them," the second voice said, "that we will blow them out
of the sky the instant they stop obeying us! If they should hesitate to
make the drop or if they should put a finger on the button that reverses
their course, then--_pouf!_ Such brutes understand only the language of
force. _Also_ warn them that the blocks are atomic grenades that will
blow them out of the sky too if--"
"Dr. Kovalsky, will you permit me to point out--" the first voice
interrupted, getting as close to expressing irritation as I imagine it
ever allowed itself to do. Then both voices cut off abruptly and the
screen was silent for ten seconds or so. I guess the first voice thought
it wasn't nice for us to overhear Atla-Hi bickering with itself, even if
the second voice didn't give a damn (any more than a farmer would mind
the pigs overhearing him squabble with his hired man; of course this guy
seemed to overlook that we were killer-pigs, but there wasn't anything
we could do in that line just now except get burned up).
When the screen came on again, it was just the first voice talking once
more, but it had something to say that was probably the result of a
rapid conference and compromise.
"Attention, everyone! I wish to inform you that the plane in which you
are traveling can be exploded--melted in the air, rather--if we activate
a certain control at this end. We will _not_ do so, now or subsequently,
if you make the drop when we give the signal and if you remain on your
present course until then. Afterwards you will be at liberty to reverse
your course and escape as best you may. Let me re-emphasize that when
you told me you had taken over for Grayl I accepted that assertion in
full faith and still so accept it. Is that all fully understood?"
We all told him "Yes," though I don't imagine we sounded very happy
about it, even Pop. However I did get that funny feeling again that the
voice was being really sincere--an illusion, I supposed, but still a
comforting one.
Now while all these things were going on, believe it or not, and while
the plane continued to bullet through the orange haze--which hadn't
shown any foreign objects in it so far, thank God, even vultures, let
alone "straight strings of pink stars"--I was receiving a cram course in
gunnery! (Do you wonder I don't try to tell this part of my story
consecutively?)
* * * * *
It turned out that Alice had been brilliantly right about one thing: if
you pushed some of the buttons simultaneously in patterns of five they
unlocked and you could play on them like organ keys. Two sets of five
keys, played properly, would rig out a sight just in front of the
viewport and let you aim and fire the plane's main gun in any forward
direction. There was a rearward firing gun too, that you aimed by
changing over the World Screen to a rear-view TV window, but we didn't
get around to mastering that one. In fact, in spite of my special
talents it was all I could do to achieve a beginner's control over the
main gun, and I wouldn't have managed even that except that Alice, from
the thinking she'd been doing about patterns of five, was quick at
understanding from the voice's descriptions which buttons were meant.
She couldn't work them herself of course, what with her stump and burnt
hand, but she could point them out for me.
After twenty minutes of drill I was a gunner of sorts, sprawled in the
right-hand kneeling seat and intently scanning the onrushing orange haze
which at last was beginning to change toward the bronze of evening. If
something showed up in it I'd be able to make a stab at getting a shot
in. Not that I knew what my gun fired--the voice wasn't giving away any
unnecessary data.
Naturally I had asked why didn't the voice teach me to fly the plane so
that I could maneuver in case of attack, and naturally the voice had
told me it was out of the question--much too difficult and besides they
wanted us on a known course so they could plan better for the drop and
recovery. (I think maybe the voice would have given me some hints--and
maybe even told me more about the steel cubes too and how much danger we
were in from them--if it hadn't been for the second voice, which
presumably had issued from a being who was keeping watch to make sure
among other things that the first voice didn't get soft-hearted.)
So there I was being a front gunner. Actually a part of me was getting a
big bang out of it--from antique Banker's Special to needle cannon (or
whatever it was)--but at the same time another part of me was disgusted
with the idea of acting like I belonged to a live culture (even a smart,
unqueer one) and working in a war (even just so as to get out of it
fast), while a third part of me--one that I normally keep down--was very
simply horrified.
Pop was back by the door with the box and 'chute, ready to make the
drop.
Alice had no duties for the moment, but she'd suddenly started gathering
up food cans and packing them in one bag--I couldn't figure out at first
what she had in mind. Orderly housewife wouldn't be exactly my
description of her occupational personality.
Then of course everything had to happen at once.
The voice said, "Make the drop!"
Alice crossed to Pop and thrust out the bag of cans toward him, writhing
her lips in silent "talk" to tell him something. She had a knife in her
burnt hand too.
* * * * *
But I didn't have time to do any lip-reading, because just then a
glittering pink asterisk showed up in the darkening haze ahead--a whole
half dozen straight lines spreading out from a blank central spot, as if
a super-fast gigantic spider had laid in the first strands of its web.
Wind whistled as the door of the plane started to open.
I fought to center my sight on the blank central spot, which drifted
toward the left.
One of the straight lines grew dazzlingly bright.
I heard Alice whisper fiercely, "Drop _these_!" and the part of my mind
that couldn't be applied to gunnery instantly deduced that she'd had
some last-minute inspiration about dropping a bunch of cans instead of
the steel cubes.
I got the sight centered and held down the firing combo. The thought
flashed to me: _it's a city you're firing at, not a plane_, and I
flinched.
The dazzlingly pink line dipped down toward me.
Behind me, the sound of a struggle. Alice snarling and Pop giving a
grunt.
Then all at once a scream from Alice, a big whoosh of wind, a flash way
ahead (where I'd aimed), a spatter of hot metal inside the cabin, a
blinding spot in the middle of the World Screen, a searing beam inches
from my neck, an electric shock that lifted me from my seat and ripped
at my consciousness!
* * * * *
When I came to (if I really ever was out--seconds later, at most) there
were no more pink lines. The haze was just its disgustingly tawny
evening self with black spots that were only after-images. The cabin
stunk of ozone, but wind funneling through a hole in the one-time World
Screen was blowing it out fast enough--Savannah had gotten in one lick,
all right. And we were falling, the plane was swinging down like a
crippled bird--I could feel it and there was no use kidding myself.
But staring at the control panel wouldn't keep us from crashing if that
was in the cards. I looked around and there were Pop and Alice glaring
at each other across the closing door. He looked mean. She looked
agonized and was pressing her burnt hand into her side with her elbow as
if he'd stamped on the hand, maybe. I didn't see any blood though. I
didn't see the box and 'chute either, though I did see Alice's bag of
groceries. I guessed Pop had made the drop.
Now, it occurred to me, was a bully time for Voice Two to melt the
plane--if he hadn't already tried. My first thought had been that the
spatter of hot metal had come from the Savannah craft spitting us, but
there was no way to be sure.
I looked around at the viewport in time to see rocks and stunted trees
jump out of the haze. _Good old Ray_, I thought, _always in at the
death_. But just then the plane took a sickening bounce, as if its
antigravity had only started to operate within yards of the ground.
Another lurching fall and another bounce, less violent. A couple of
repetitions of that, each one a little gentler, and then we were sort of
bumping along on an even keel with the rocks and such sliding past fast
about a hundred feet below, I judged. We'd been spoiled for altitude
work, it seemed, but we could still cripple along in some sort of
low-power repulsion field.
I looked at the North America screen and the buttons, wondering if I
should start us back west again or leave us set on Atla-Hi and see what
the hell happened--at the moment I hardly cared what else Savannah did
to us. I needn't have wasted the mental energy. The decision was made
for me. As I watched, the Atla-Hi button jumped up by itself and the
button for the cracking plant went down and there was some extra bumping
as we swung around.
Also, the violet patch of Atla-Hi went real dim and the button for it no
longer had a violet nimbus. The Los Alamos blue went dull too. The
cracking-plant dot glowed a brighter green--that was all.
All except for one thing. As the violet dimmed I thought I heard Voice
One very faintly (not as if speaking directly but as if the screen had
heard and remembered--not a voice but the fluorescent ghost of one):
"Thank you and good luck!"
CHAPTER 6
_Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that
perhaps he thought little of at the time._
--Thomas de Quincey
"And a long merry siege to you, sir, and roast rat for Christmas!" I
responded, very out loud and rather to my surprise.
"War! How I hate war!"--that was what Pop exploded with. He didn't
exactly dance in senile rage--he was still keeping too sharp a watch on
Alice--but his voice sounded that way.
"Damn you, Pop!" Alice contributed. "And you too, Ray! We might have
pulled something, but you had to go obedience-happy." Then her anger got
the better of her grammar, or maybe Pop and me was corrupting it. "Damn
the both of you!" she finished.
It didn't make much sense, any of it. We were just cutting loose, I
guess, after being scared to say anything for the last half hour.
I said to Alice, "I don't know what you could have pulled, except the
chain on us." To Pop I remarked, "You may hate war, but you sure helped
that one along. Those grenades you dropped will probably take care of a
few hundred Savannans."
"That's what you always say about me, isn't it?" he snapped back. "But I
don't suppose I should expect any kinder interpretation of my motives."
To Alice he said, "I'm sorry I had to slap your burnt fingers, sister,
but you can't say I didn't warn you about my low-down tactics." Then to
me again: "I _do_ hate war, Ray. It's just murder on a bigger scale,
though some of the boys give me an argument there."
"Then why don't you go preach against war in Atla-Hi and Savannah?"
Alice demanded, still very hot but not quite so bitter.
"Yeah, Pop, how about it?" I seconded.
"Maybe I should," he said, thoughtful all at once. "They sure need it."
Then he grinned. "Hey, how'd this sound: HEAR THE WORLD-FAMOUS MURDERER
POP TRUMBULL TALK AGAINST WAR. WEAR YOUR STEEL THROAT PROTECTORS. Pretty
good, hey?"
We all laughed at that, grudgingly at first, then with a touch of
wholeheartedness. I think we all recognized that things weren't going to
be very cheerful from here on in and we'd better not turn up our noses
at the feeblest fun.
"I guess I didn't have anything very bright in mind," Alice admitted to
me, while to Pop she said, "All right, I forgive you for the present."
"Don't!" Pop said with a shudder. "I hate to think of what happened to
the last bugger made the mistake of forgiving me."
We looked around and took stock of our resources. It was time we did. It
was getting dark fast, although we were chasing the sun, and there
weren't any cabin lights coming on and we sure didn't know of any way of
getting any.
We wadded a couple of satchels into the hole in the World Screen without
trying to probe it. After a while it got warmer again in the cabin and
the air a little less dusty. Presently it started to get too smoky from
the cigarettes we were burning, but that came later.
We screwed off the walls the few storage bags we hadn't inspected. They
didn't contain nothing of consequence, not even a flashlight.
I had one last go at the buttons, though there weren't any left with
nimbuses on them--the darker it got, the clearer that was. Even the
Atla-Hi button wouldn't push now that it had lost its violet halo. I
tried the gunnery patterns, figuring to put in a little time taking pot
shots at any mountains that turned up, but the buttons that had been
responding so well a few minutes ago refused to budge. Alice suggested
different patterns, but none of them worked. That console was really
locked--maybe the shot from Savannah was partly responsible, though
Atla-Hi remote-locking things was explanation enough.
"The buggers!" I said. "They didn't have to tie us up _this_ tight.
Going east we at least had a choice--forward or back. Now we got none."
"Maybe we're just as well off," Pop said. "If Atla-Hi had been able to
do anything more for us--that is, if they hadn't been sieged in, I
mean--they'd sure as anything have pulled us in. Pull the plane in, I
mean, and picked us out of it--with a big pair of tweezers, likely as
not. And contrary to your flattering opinion of my preaching (which by
the way none of the religious boys in my outfit share--they call me
'that misguided old atheist'), I don't think none of us would go over
big at Atla-Hi."
* * * * *
We had to agree with him there. I couldn't imagine Pop or Alice or even
me cutting much of a figure (even if we weren't murder-pariahs) with the
pack of geniuses that seemed to make up the Atla-Alamos crowd. The
Double-A Republics, to give them a name, might have their small-brain
types, but somehow I didn't think so. There must be more than one
Edison-Einstein, it seemed to me, back of antigravity and all the
wonders in this plane and the other things we'd gotten hints of. Also,
Grayl had seemed bred for brains as well as size, even if us small
mammals had cooked his goose. And none of the modern "countries" had
more than a few thousand population yet, I was pretty sure, and that
hardly left room for a dumbbell class. Finally, too, I got hold of a
memory I'd been reaching for the last hour--how when I was a kid I'd
read about some scientists who learned to talk Mandarin just for kicks.
I told Alice and Pop.
"And if _that's_ the average Atla-Alamoser's idea of mental recreation,"
I said, "well, you can see what I mean."
"I'll grant you they got a monopoly of brains," Pop agreed. "Not sense,
though," he added doggedly.
"Intellectual snobs," was Alice's comment. "I know the type and I detest
it." ("You _are_ sort of intellectual, aren't you?" Pop told her, which
fortunately didn't start a riot.)
Still, I guess all three of us found it fun to chew over a bit the new
slant we'd gotten on two (in a way, three) of the great "countries" of
the modern world. (And as long as we thought of it as fun, we didn't
have to admit the envy and wistfulness that was behind our wisecracks.)
I said, "We've always figured in a general way that Alamos was the
remains of a community of scientists and technicians. Now we know the
same's true of the Atla-Hi group. They're the Brookhaven survivors."
"Manhattan Project, don't you mean?" Alice corrected.
"Nope, that was in Colorado Springs," Pop said with finality.
* * * * *
I also pointed out that a community of scientists would educate for
technical intelligence, maybe breed for it too. And being a group picked
for high I. Q. to begin with, they might make startlingly fast progress.
You could easily imagine such folk, unimpeded by the boobs, creating a
wonder world in a couple of generations.
"They got their troubles though," Pop reminded me and that led us to
speculating about the war we'd dipped into. Savannah Fortress, we knew,
was supposed to be based on some big atomic plants on the river down
that way, but its culture seemed to have a fiercer ingredient than
Atla-Alamos. Before we knew it we were, musing almost romantically about
the plight of Atla-Hi, besieged by superior and (it was easy to suppose)
barbaric forces, and maybe distant Los Alamos in a similar
predicament--Alice reminded me how the voice had asked if they were
still dying out there. For a moment I found myself fiercely proud that I
had been able to strike a blow against evil aggressors. At once, of
course, then, the revulsion came.
"This is a hell of a way," I said, "for three so-called realists to be
mooning about things."
"Yes, especially when your heroes kicked us out," Alice agreed.
Pop chuckled. "Yep," he said, "they even took Ray's artillery away from
him."
"You're wrong there, Pop," I said, sitting up. "I still got one of the
grenades--the one the pilot had in his fist." To tell the truth I'd
forgotten all about it and it bothered me a little now to feel it
snugged up in my pocket against my hip bone where the skin is thin.
"You believe what that old Dutchman said about the steel cubes being
atomic grenades?" Pop asked me.
"I don't know," I said, "He sure didn't sound enthusiastic about telling
us the truth about anything. But for that matter he sounded mean enough
to tell the truth figuring we'd think it was a lie. Maybe this _is_ some
sort of baby A-bomb with a fuse timed like a grenade." I got it out and
hefted it. "How about I press the button and drop it out the door? Then
we'll know." I really felt like doing it--restless, I guess.
"Don't be a fool, Ray," Alice said.
"Don't tense up, I won't," I told her. At the same time I made myself
the little promise that if I ever got to feeling restless, that is,
restless and _bad_, I'd just go ahead and punch the button and see what
happened--sort of leave my future up to the gods of the Deathlands, you
might say.
"What makes you so sure it's a weapon?" Pop asked.
"What else would it be," I asked him, "that they'd be so hot on getting
them in the middle of a war?"
"I don't know for sure," Pop said. "I've made a guess, but I don't want
to tell it now. What I'm getting at, Ray, is that your first thought
about anything you find--in the world outside or in your own mind--is
that it's a weapon."
"Anything worthwhile in your mind is a weapon!" Alice interjected with
surprising intensity.
"You see?" Pop said. "That's what I mean about the both of you. That
sort of thinking's been going on a long time. Cave man picks up a rock
and right away asks himself, 'Who can I brain with this?' Doesn't occur
to him for several hundred thousand years to use it to start building a
hospital."
"You know, Pop," I said, carefully tucking the cube back in my pocket,
"you _are_ sort of preachy at times."
"Guess I am," he said. "How about some grub?"
* * * * *
It was a good idea. Another few minutes and we wouldn't have been able
to see to eat, though with the cans shaped to tell their contents I
guess we'd have managed. It was a funny circumstance that in this wonder
plane we didn't even know how to turn on the light--and a good measure
of our general helplessness.
* * * * *
We had our little feed and lit up again and settled ourselves. I judged
it would be an overnight trip, at least to the cracking plant--we
weren't making anything like the speed we had been going east. Pop was
sitting in back again and Alice and I lay half hitched around on the
kneeling seats, which allowed us to watch each other. Pretty soon it got
so dark we couldn't see anything of each other but the glowing tips of
the cigarettes and a bit of face around the mouth when the person took a
deep drag. They were a good idea, those cigarettes--kept us from having
ideas about the other person starting to creep around with a knife in
his hand.
The North America screen still glowed dimly and we could watch our green
dot trying to make progress. The viewport was dead black at first, then
there came the faintest sort of bronze blotch that very slowly shifted
forward and down. The Old Moon, of course, going west ahead of us.
After a while I realized what it was like--an old Pullman car (I'd
traveled in one once as a kid) or especially the smoker of an old
Pullman, very late at night. Our crippled antigravity, working on the
irregularities of the ground as they came along below, made the ride
rhythmically bumpy, you see. I remembered how lonely and strange that
old sleeping car had seemed to me as a kid. This felt the same. I kept
waiting for a hoot or a whistle. It was the sort of loneliness that
settles in your bones and keeps working at you.
"I recall the first man I ever killed--" Pop started to reminisce
softly.
"Shut up!" Alice told him. "Don't you ever talk about anything but
murder, Pop?"
"Guess not," he said. "After all, it's the only really interesting topic
there is. Do you know of another?"
It was silent in the cabin for a long time after that. Then Alice said,
"It was the afternoon before my twelfth birthday when they came into the
kitchen and killed my father. He'd been wise, in a way, and had us
living at a spot where the bombs didn't touch us or the worst fallout.
But he hadn't counted on the local werewolf gang. He'd just been slicing
some bread--homemade from our own wheat (Dad was great on back to nature
and all)--but he laid down the knife.
"Dad couldn't see any object or idea as a weapon, you see--that was his
great weakness. Dad couldn't even see weapons as weapons. Dad had a
philosophy of cooperation, that was his name for it, that he was going
to explain to people. Sometimes I think he was glad of the Last War,
because he believed it would give him his chance.
"But the werewolves weren't interested in philosophy and although their
knives weren't as sharp as Dad's they didn't lay them down. Afterwards
they had themselves a meal, with me for dessert. I remember one of them
used a slice of bread to sop up blood like gravy. And another washed his
hands and face in the cold coffee ..."
She didn't say anything else for a bit. Pop said softly, "That was the
afternoon, wasn't it, that the fallen angels ..." and then just said,
"My big mouth."
"You were going to say 'the afternoon they killed God?'" Alice asked
him. "You're right, it was. They killed God in the kitchen that
afternoon. That's how I know he's dead. Afterwards they would have
killed me too, eventually, except--"
* * * * *
Again she broke off, this time to say, "Pop, do you suppose I can have
been thinking about myself as the Daughter of God all these years? That
that's why everything seems so intense?"
"I don't know," Pop said. "The religious boys say we're all children of
God. I don't put much stock in it--or else God sure has some lousy
children. Go on with your story."
"Well, they would have killed me too, except the leader took a fancy to
me and got the idea of training me up for a Weregirl or She-wolf Deb or
whatever they called it."
"That was my first experience of ideas as weapons. He got an idea about
me and I used it to kill him. I had to wait three months for my
opportunity. I got him so lazy he let me shave him. He bled to death the
same way as Dad."
"Hum," Pop commented after a bit, "that was a chiller, all right. I got
to remember to tell it to Bill--it was somebody killing his mother that
got _him_ started. Alice, you had about as good a justification for your
first murder as any I remember hearing."
"Yet," Alice said after another pause, with just a trace of the old
sarcasm creeping back into her voice, "I don't suppose you think I was
right to do it?"
"Right? Wrong? Who knows?" Pop said almost blusteringly. "Sure you were
justified in a whole pack of ways. Anybody'd sympathize with you. A man
often has fine justification for the first murder he commits. But as you
must know, it's not that the first murder's always so bad in itself as
that it's apt to start you on a killing spree. Your sense of values gets
shifted a tiny bit and never shifts back. But you know all that and who
am I to tell you anything, anyway? I've killed men because I didn't like
the way they spit. And may very well do it again if I don't keep
watching myself and my mind ventilated."
"Well, Pop," Alice said, "I didn't always have such dandy justification
for my killings. Last one was a moony old physicist--he fixed me the
Geiger counter I carry. A silly old geek--I don't know how he survived
so long. Maybe an exile or a runaway. You know, I often attach myself
to the elderly do-gooder type like my father was. Or like you, Pop."
Pop nodded. "It's good to know yourself," he said.
* * * * *
There was a third pause and then, although I hadn't exactly been
intending to, I said, "Alice had justification for her first murder,
personal justification that an ape would understand. I had no personal
justification at all for mine, yet I killed about a million people at a
modest estimate. You see, I was the boss of the crew that took care of
the hydrogen missile ticketed for Moscow, and when the ticket was
finally taken up I was the one to punch it. My finger on the firing
button, I mean."
I went on, "Yeah, Pop, I was one of the button-pushers. There were
really quite a few of us, of course--that's why I get such a laugh out
of stories about being or rubbing out the _one_ guy who pushed all the
buttons."
"That so?" Pop said with only mild-sounding interest. "In that case you
ought to know--"
We didn't get to hear right then who I ought to know because I had a fit
of coughing and we realized the cigarette smoke was getting just too
thick. Pop fixed the door so it was open a crack and after a while the
atmosphere got reasonably okay though we had to put up with a low lonely
whistling sound.
"Yeah," I continued, "I was the boss of the missile crew and I wore a
very handsome uniform with impressive insignia--not the bully old
stripes I got on my chest now--and I was very young and handsome myself.
We were all very young in that line of service, though a few of the men
under me were a little older. Young and dedicated. I remember feeling a
very deep and grim--and _clean_--responsibility. But I wonder sometimes
just how deep it went or how clean it really was.
"I had an uncle flew in the war they fought to lick fascism, bombardier
on a Flying Fortress or something, and once when he got drunk he told me
how some days it didn't bother him at all to drop the eggs on Germany;
the buildings and people down there seemed just like toys that a kid
sets up to kick over, and the whole business about as naive fun as
poking an anthill.
"_I_ didn't even have to fly over at seven miles what I was going to be
aiming at. Only I remember sometimes getting out a map and looking at a
certain large dot on it and smiling a little and softly saying,
'Pow!'--and then giving a little conventional shudder and folding up the
map quick.
"Naturally we told ourselves we'd never have to do it, fire the thing, I
mean, we joked about how after twenty years or so we'd all be given jobs
as museum attendants of this same bomb, deactivated at last. But
naturally it didn't work out that way. There came the day when our side
of the world got hit and the orders started cascading down from Defense
Coordinator Bigelow--"
"Bigelow?" Pop interrupted. "Not Joe Bigelow?"
"Joseph A., I believe," I told him, a little annoyed.
"Why he's my boy then, the one I was telling you about--the skinny runt
had this horn-handle! Can you beat that?" Pop sounded startlingly happy.
"Him and you'll have a lot to talk about when you get together."
I wasn't so sure of that myself, in fact my first reaction was that the
opposite would be true. To be honest I was for the first moment more
than a little annoyed at Pop interrupting my story of my Big Grief--for
it was that to me, make no mistake. Here my story had finally been
teased out of me, against all expectation, after decades of repression
and in spite of dozens of assorted psychological blocks--and here was
Pop interrupting it for the sake of a lot of trivial organizational
gossip about Joes and Bills and Georges we'd never heard of and what
they'd say or think!
But then all of a sudden I realized that I didn't really care, that it
didn't feel like a Big Grief any more, that just starting to tell about
it after hearing Pop and Alice tell their stories had purged it of that
unnecessary weight of feeling that had made it a millstone around my
neck. It seemed to me now that I could look down at Ray Baker from a
considerable height (but not an angelic or contemptuously superior
height) and ask myself _not_ why he had grieved so much--that was
understandable and even desirable--but why he had grieved so _uselessly_
in such a stuffy little private hell.
And it _would_ be interesting to find out how Joseph A. Bigelow had
felt.
"How does it feel, Ray, to kill a million people?"
* * * * *
I realized that Alice had asked me the question several seconds back and
it was hanging in the air.
"That's just what I've been trying to tell you," I told her and started
to explain it all over again--the words poured out of me now. I won't
put them down here--it would take too long--but they were honest words
as far as I knew and they eased me.
I couldn't get over it: here were us three murderers feeling a trust and
understanding and sharing a communion that I wouldn't have believed
possible between _any_ two or three people in the Age of the Deaders--or
in _any_ age, to tell the truth. It was against everything I knew of
Deathland psychology, but it was happening just the same. Oh, our
strange isolation had something to do with it, I knew, and that
Pullman-car memory hypnotizing my mind, and our reactions to the voices
and violence of Atla-Alamos, but in spite of all that I ranked it as a
wonder. I felt an inward freedom and easiness that I never would have
believed possible. Pop's little disorganized organization had really
got hold of something, I couldn't deny it.
* * * * *
Three treacherous killers talking from the bottoms of their hearts and
believing each other!--for it never occurred to me to doubt that Pop and
Alice were feeling exactly like I was. In fact, we were all so sure of
it that we didn't even mention our communion to each other. Perhaps we
were a little afraid we would rub off the bloom. We just enjoyed it.
We must have talked about a thousand things that night and smoked a
couple of hundred cigarettes. After a while we started taking little
catnaps--we'd gotten too much off our chests and come to feel too
tranquil for even our excitement to keep us awake. I remember the first
time I dozed waking up with a cold start and grabbing for Mother--and
then hearing Pop and Alice gabbing in the dark, and remembering what had
happened, and relaxing again with a smile.
Of all things, Pop was saying, "Yep, I imagine Ray must be good to make
love to, murderers almost always are, they got the fire. It reminds me
of what a guy named Fred told me, one of our boys ..."
Mostly we took turns going to sleep, though I think there were times
when all three of us were snoozing. About the fifth time I woke up,
after some tighter shut-eye, the orange soup was back again outside and
Alice was snoring gently in the next seat and Pop was up and had one of
his knives out.
He was looking at his reflection in the viewport. His face gleamed. He
was rubbing butter into it.
"Another day, another pack of troubles," he said cheerfully.
The tone of his remark jangled my nerves, as that tone generally does
early in the morning. I squeezed my eyes. "Where are we?" I asked.
He poked his elbow toward the North America screen. The two green dots
were almost one.
"My God, we're practically there," Alice said for me. She'd waked fast,
Deathlands style.
"I know," Pop said, concentrating on what he was doing, "but I aim to be
shaved before they commence landing maneuvers."
"You think automatic will land us?" Alice asked. "What if we just start
circling around?"
"We can figure out what to do when it happens," Pop said, whittling away
at his chin. "Until then, I'm not interested. There's still a couple of
bottles of coffee in the sack. I've had mine."
I didn't join in this chit-chat because the green dots and Alice's first
remark had reminded me of a lot deeper reason for my jangled nerves than
Pop's cheerfulness. Night was gone, with its shielding cloak and its
feeling of being able to talk forever, and the naked day was here, with
its demands for action. It is not so difficult to change your whole
view of life when you are flying, or even bumping along above the ground
with friends who understand, but soon, I knew, I'd be down in the dust
with something I never wanted to see again.
"Coffee, Ray?"
"Yeah, I guess so." I took the bottle from Alice and wondered whether my
face looked as glum as hers.
"They shouldn't salt butter," Pop asserted. "It makes it lousy for
shaving."
"It was the _best_ butter," Alice said.
"Yeah," I said. "The Dormouse, when they buttered the watch."
It may be true that feeble humor is better than none. I don't know.
"What are you two yakking about?" Pop demanded.
"A book we both read," I told him.
"Either of you writers?" Pop asked with sudden interest. "Some of the
boys think we should have a book about us. I say it's too soon, but they
say we might all die off or something. Whoa, Jenny! Easy does it.
Gently, please!"
That last remark was by way of recognizing that the plane had started an
authoritative turn to the left. I got a sick and cold feeling. This was
it.
Pop sheathed his knife and gave his face a final rub. Alice belted on
her satchel. I reached for my knapsack, but I was staring through the
viewport, dead ahead.
The haze lightened faintly, three times. I remembered the St. Elmo's
fire that had flamed from the cracking plant.
"Pop," I said--almost whined, to be truthful, "why'd the bugger ever
have to land here in the first place? He was rushing stuff they needed
bad at Atla-Hi--why'd he have to break his trip?"
"That's easy," Pop said. "He was being a bad boy. At least that's my
theory. He was supposed to go straight to Atla-Hi, but there was
somebody he wanted to check up on first. He stopped here to see his
girlfriend. Yep, his girlfriend. She tried to warn him off--that's my
explanation of the juice that flared out of the cracking plant and
interfered with his landing, though I'm sure she didn't intend the last.
By the way, whatever she turned on to give him the warning must still be
turned on. But Grayl came on down in spite of it."
* * * * *
Before I could assimilate that, the seven deformed gas tanks
materialized in the haze. We got the freeway in our sights and steadied
and slowed and kept slowing. The plane didn't graze the cracking plant
this time, though I'd have sworn it was going to hit it head on. When I
saw we _weren't_ going to hit it, I wanted to shut my eyes, but I
couldn't.
The stain was black now and the Pilot's body was thicker than I
remembered--bloated. But that wouldn't last long. Three or four vultures
were working on it.
CHAPTER 7
_Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead._
--A Forsaken Garden,
_by Charles Swinburne_
Pop was first down. Between us we helped Alice. Before joining them I
took a last look at the control panel. The cracking plant button was up
again and there was a blue nimbus on another button. For Los Alamos, I
supposed. I was tempted to push it and get away solo, but then I
thought, _nope, there's nothing for me at the other end and the
loneliness will be worse than what I got to face here_. I climbed out.
I didn't look at the body, although we were practically on top of it. I
saw a little patch of silver off to one side and remembered the gun that
had melted. The vultures had waddled off but only a few yards.
"We could kill them," Alice said to Pop.
"Why?" he responded. "Didn't some Hindus use them to take care of dead
bodies? Not a bad idea, either."
"Parsees," Alice amplified.
"Yep, Parsees, that's what I meant. Give you a nice clean skeleton in a
matter of days."
Pop was leading us past the body toward the cracking plant. I heard the
flies buzzing loudly. I felt terrible. I wanted to be dead myself. Just
walking along after Pop was an awful effort.
"His girl was running a hidden observation tower here," Pop was saying
now. "Weather and all that, I suppose. Or maybe setting up a robot
station of some kind. I couldn't tell you about her before, because you
were both in a mood to try to rub out anybody remotely connected with
the Pilot. In fact, I did my best to lead you astray, letting you think
I'd been the one to scream and all. Even now, to be honest about it, I
don't know if I'm doing the right thing telling and showing you all
this, but a man's got to take some risks whatever he does."
"Say, Pop," I said dully, "isn't she apt to take a shot at us or
something?" Not that I'd have minded on my own account. "Or are you and
her that good friends?"
"Nope, Ray," he said, "she doesn't even know me. But I don't think she's
in a position to do any shooting. You'll see why. Hey, she hasn't even
shut the door. That's bad."
He seemed to be referring to a kind of manhole cover standing on its
edge just inside the open-walled first story of the cracking plant. He
knelt and looked down the hole the cover was designed to close off.
"Well, at least she didn't collapse at the bottom of the shaft," he
said. "Come on, let's see what happened." And he climbed into the shaft.
We followed him like zombies. At least that's how I felt. The shaft was
about twenty feet deep. There were foot- and hand-holds. It got stuffy
right away, and warmer, in spite of the shaft being open at the top.
At the bottom there was a short horizontal passage. We had to duck to
get through it. When we could straighten up we were in a large and
luxurious bomb-resistant dugout, to give it a name. And it was stuffier
and hotter than ever.
There was a lot of scientific equipment around and several small control
panels reminding me of the one in the back of the plane. Some of them, I
supposed, connected with instruments, weather and otherwise, hidden up
in the skeletal structure of the cracking plant. And there were signs of
occupancy, a young woman's occupancy--clothes scattered around in a
frivolous way, and some small objects of art, and a slightly more than
life-size head in clay that I guessed the occupant must have been
sculpting. I didn't give that last more than the most fleeting look,
strictly unintentional to begin with, because although it wasn't
finished I could tell whose head it was supposed to be--the Pilot's.
* * * * *
The whole place was finished in dull silver like the cabin of the plane,
and likewise it instantly struck me as having a living personality,
partly the Pilot's and partly someone else's--the personality of a
marriage. Which wasn't a bit nice, because the whole place smelt of
death.
But to tell the truth I didn't give the place more than the quickest
look-over, because my attention was rivetted almost at once on a long
wide couch with the covers kicked off it and on the body there.
The woman was about six feet tall and built like a goddess. Her hair was
blonde and her skin tanned. She was lying on her stomach and she was
naked.
She didn't come anywhere near my libido, though. She looked sick to
death. Her face, twisted towards us, was hollow-cheeked and flushed. Her
eyes, closed, were sunken and dark-circled. She was breathing shallowly
and rapidly through her open mouth, gasping now and then.
I got the crazy impression that all the heat in the place was coming
from her body, radiating from her fever.
And the whole place stunk of death. Honestly it seemed to me that this
dugout was Death's underground temple, the bed Death's altar, and the
woman Death's sacrifice. (Had I unconsciously come to worship Death as a
god in the Deathlands? I don't really know. There it gets too deep for
me.)
No, she didn't come within a million miles of my libido, but there was
another part of me that she was eating at ...
If guilt's a luxury, then I'm a plutocrat.
... eating at until I was an empty shell, until I had no props left,
until I wanted to die then and there, until I figured I had to die ...
There was a faint sharp hiss right at my elbow. I looked and found that,
unbeknownst to myself, I'd taken the steel cube out of my pocket and
holding it snuggled between my first and second fingers I'd punched the
button with my thumb just as I'd promised myself I would if I got to
really feeling bad.
It goes to show you that you should never give your mind any kind of
instructions even half in fun, unless you're prepared to have them
carried out whether you approve later or not.
Pop saw what I'd done and looked at me strangely. "So you had to die
after all, Ray," he said softly. "Most of us find out we have to, one
way or another."
We waited. Nothing happened. I noticed a very faint milky cloud a few
inches across hanging in the air by the cube.
Thinking right away of poison gas, I jerked away a little, dispersing
the cloud.
"What's that?" I demanded of no one in particular.
"I'd say," said Pop, "that that's something that squirted out of a tiny
hole in the side of the cube opposite the button. A hole so nearly
microscopic you wouldn't see it unless you looked for it hard. Ray, I
don't think you're going to get your baby A-blast, and what's more I'm
afraid you've wasted something that's damn valuable. But don't let it
worry you. Before I dropped those cubes for Atla-Hi I snagged one."
And darn if he didn't pull the brother of my cube out of his pocket.
"Alice," he said, "I noticed a half pint of whiskey in your satchel when
we got the salve. Would you put some on a rag and hand it to me."
Alice looked at him like he was nuts, but while her eyes were looking
her pliers and her gloved hand were doing what he told her.
Pop took the rag and swabbed a spot on the sick woman's nearest buttock
and jammed the cube against the spot and pushed the button.
"It's a jet hypodermic, folks," he said.
He took the cube away and there was the welt to substantiate his
statement.
"Hope we got to her in time," he said. "The plague is tough. Now I guess
there's nothing for us to do but wait, maybe for quite a while."
I felt shaken beyond all recognition.
* * * * *
"Pop, you old caveman detective!" I burst out. "When did you get that
idea for a steel hospital?" Don't think I was feeling anywhere near that
gay. It was reaction, close to hysterical.
Pop was taken aback, but then he grinned. "I had a couple of clues that
you and Alice didn't," he said. "I knew there was a very sick woman
involved. And I had that bout with Los Alamos fever I told you. They've
had a lot of trouble with it, I believe--some say its spores come from
outside the world with the cosmic dust--and now it seems to have been
carried to Atla-Hi. Let's hope they've found the answer this time.
Alice, maybe we'd better start getting some water into this gal."
After a while we sat down and fitted the facts together more orderly.
Pop did the fitting mostly. Alamos researchers must have been working
for years on the plague as it ravaged intermittently, maybe with
mutations and ET tricks to make the job harder. Very recently they'd
found a promising treatment (cure, we hoped) and prepared it for rush
shipment to Atla-Hi, where the plague was raging too and they were
sieged in by Savannah as well. Grayl was picked to fly the serum, or
drug or whatever it was. But he knew or guessed that this lone woman
observer (because she'd fallen out of radio communication or something)
had come down with the plague too and he decided to land some serum for
her, probably without authorization.
"How do we know she's his girlfriend?" I asked.
"Or wife," Pop said tolerantly. "Why, there was that bag of woman's
stuff he was carrying, frilly things like a man would bring for a woman.
Who else'd he be apt to make a special stop for?
"Another thing," Pop said. "He must have been using jets to hurry his
trip. We heard them, you know."
That seemed about as close a reconstruction of events as we could get.
Strictly hypothetical, of course. Deathlanders trying to figure out what
goes on inside a "country" like Atla-Alamos and _why_ are sort of like
foxes trying to understand world politics, or wolves the Gothic
migrations. Of course we're all human beings, but that doesn't mean as
much as it sounds.
* * * * *
Then Pop told us how he'd happened to be on the scene. He'd been doing a
"tour of duty", as he called it, when he spotted this woman's
observatory and decided to hang around anonymously and watch over her
for a few days and maybe help protect her from some dangerous characters
that he knew were in the neighborhood.
"Pop, that sounds like a lousy idea to me," I objected. "Risky, I mean.
Spying on another person, watching them without their knowing, would be
the surest way to stir up in me the idea of murdering them. Safest thing
for me to do in that situation would be to turn around and run."
"_You_ probably should," he agreed. "For now, anyway. It's all a matter
of knowing your own strength and stage of growth. Me, it helps to give
myself these little jobs. And the essence of 'em is that the other
person shouldn't know I'm helping."
It sounded like knighthood and pilgrimage and the Boy Scouts all over
again--for murderers. Well, why not?
Pop had seen this woman come out of the manhole a couple of times and
look around and then go back down and he'd got the impression she was
sick and troubled. He'd even guessed she might be coming down with
Alamos fever. He'd seen us arrive, of course, and that had bothered him.
Then when the plane landed she'd come up again, acting out of her head,
but when she'd seen the Pilot and us going for him she'd given that
scream and collapsed at the top of the shaft. He'd figured the only
thing he could do for her was keep us occupied. Besides, now that he
knew for sure we were murderers he'd started to burn with the desire to
talk to us and maybe help us quit killing if we seemed to want to. It
was only much later, in the middle of our trip, that he began to suspect
that the steel cubes were jet hypodermics.
While Pop had been telling us all this, we hadn't been watching the
woman so closely. Now Alice called our attention to her. Her skin was
covered with fine beads of perspiration, like diamonds.
"That's a good sign," Pop said and Alice started to wipe her off. While
she was doing that the woman came to in a groggy sort of way and Pop fed
her some thin soup and in the middle of his doing it she dropped off to
sleep.
Alice said, "Any other time I would be wild to kill another woman that
beautiful. But she has been so close to death that I would feel I was
robbing another murderer. I suppose there is more behind the change in
my feelings than that, though."
"Yeah, a little, I suppose," Pop said.
I didn't have anything to say about my own feelings. Certainly not out
loud. I knew that they had changed and that they were still changing. It
was complicated.
After a while it occurred to me and Alice to worry whether we mightn't
catch this woman's sickness. It would serve us right, of course, but
plague is plague. But Pop reassured us. "Actually I snagged three
cubes," he said. "That should take care of you two. I figure I'm
immune."
Time wore on. Pop dragged out the harmonica, as I'd been afraid he
would, but his playing wasn't too bad. "Tenting Tonight," "When Johnnie
Comes Marching Home," and such. We had a meal.
The Pilot's woman woke up again, in her full mind this time or something
like it. We were clustered around the bed, smiling a little I suppose
and looking inquiring. Being even assistant nurses makes you all
concerned about the patient's health and state of mind.
Pop helped her sit up a little. She looked around. She saw me and Alice.
Recognition came into her eyes. She drew away from us with a look of
loathing. She didn't say a word, but the look stayed.
Pop drew me aside and whispered, "I think it would be a nice gesture if
you and Alice took a blanket and went up and sewed him into it. I
noticed a big needle and some thread in her satchel." He looked me in
the eye and added, "You can't expect this woman to feel any other way
toward you, you know. Now or ever."
He was right of course. I gave Alice the high sign and we got out.
No point in dwelling on the next scene. Alice and me sewed up in a
blanket a big guy who'd been dead a day and worked over by vultures.
That's all.
About the time we'd finished, Pop came up.
"She chased me out," he explained. "She's getting dressed. When I told
her about the plane, she said she was going back to Los Alamos. She's
not fit to travel, of course, but she's giving herself injections. It's
none of our business. Incidentally, she wants to take the body back with
her. I told her how we'd dropped the serum and how you and Alice had
helped and she listened."
The Pilot's woman wasn't long after Pop. She must have had trouble
getting up the shaft, she had a little trouble even walking straight,
but she held her head high. She was wearing a dull silver tunic and
sandals and cloak. As she passed me and Alice I could see the look of
loathing come back into her eyes, and her chin went a little higher. I
thought, why shouldn't she want us dead? Right now she probably wants to
be dead herself.
Pop nodded to us and we hoisted up the body and followed her. It was
almost too heavy a load even for the three of us.
As she reached the plane a silver ladder telescoped down to her from
below the door. I thought, _the Pilot must have had it keyed to her some
way, so it would let down for her but nobody else. A very lovely
gesture._
The ladder went up after her and we managed to lift the body above our
heads, our arms straight, and we walked it through the door of the plane
that way, she receiving it.
The door closed and we stood back and the plane took off into the orange
haze, us watching it until it was swallowed.
Pop said, "Right now, I imagine you two feel pretty good in a screwed-up
sort of way. I know I do. But take it from me, it won't last. A day or
two and we're going to start feeling another way, the _old_ way, if we
don't get busy."
I knew he was right. You don't shake Old Urge Number One anything like
that easy.
"So," said Pop, "I got places I want to show you. Guys I want you to
meet. And there's things to do, a lot of them. Let's get moving."
So there's my story. Alice is still with me (Urge Number Two is even
harder to shake, supposing you wanted to) and we haven't killed anybody
lately. (Not since the Pilot, in fact, but it doesn't do to boast.)
We're making a stab (my language!) at doing the sort of work Pop does in
the Deathlands. It's tough but interesting. I still carry a knife, but
I've given Mother to Pop. He has it strapped to him alongside Alice's
screw-in blade.
Atla-Hi and Alamos still seem to be in existence, so I guess the serum
worked for them generally as it did for the Pilot's Woman; they haven't
sent us any medals, but they haven't sent a hangman's squad after us
either--which is more than fair, you'll admit. But Savannah, turned back
from Atla-Hi, is still going strong: there's a rumor they have an army
at the gates of Ouachita right now. We tell Pop he'd better start
preaching fast--it's one of our standard jokes.
There's also a rumor that a certain fellowship of Deathlanders is doing
surprisingly well, a rumor that there's a new America growing in the
Deathlands--an America that never need kill again. But don't put too
much stock in it. Not _too_ much.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _Amazing Science Fiction Stories_
January 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling
and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Night of the Long Knives, by
Fritz Reuter Leiber
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