It all happened so quickly that it still boggles my mind to reconstruct the scene. As Cork talked, I didn’t notice Tremont’s trigger finger, but as he swung to fire on the Captain, Tunxis’s knife smashed into Tremont’s chest, deflecting the muzzle blast to the ground. I later estimated that the Indian had hit his target from at least twenty feet away.

  “Tremont’s method was obvious from the first,” Cork told us later that day as Goodwife Stemple served us a piping-hot corn pudding and generous cups of hard cider. “He was enraged at the thought of being spurned by Faith, and sought vengeance on Greenspawn.”

  “But such an elaborate plan for a crude backwoodsman!”

  “I don’t think it was a plan, Squire. It was luck and everyone’s ignorance that brought the Indian scalping into it. Tremont lurked about that night, and when all was quiet, he removed some of the dry mud chinking from between the logs of the north wall. It could easily be replaced and be dry by morning. Using an arrow attached to a tag line, he killed his victim as the Delawares catch fish, harpoon fashion.

  “But when he tugged his line to retrieve the arrow from Greenspawn’s head, he found he had caught more than death. You see, a close examination of Greenspawn showed me that this vain man was somewhat bald, and wore a wig piece, as is fashionable on the Continent. When the arrow was retrieved, the wig came with it, hence, the look of a scalping.”

  “And the gold dust, Captain?” Stemple asked.

  “I suggest that you examine your strongbox, Stemple. I think you’ll find that your coins have been cleverly shaved since Greenspawn’s arrival. And what better place to hide his ill-gotten gains than in the lining of a wig nobody even suspected he wore.”

  We All Have to Go

  Elizabeth A. Lynn

  FUTURE SHOCK

  Nothing gives us more pleasure than reading a good piece of work by a promising new writer, and Elizabeth Lynn’s “We All Have to Go” is just that—and then some. Among other things, it is a suspense tale told with feeling and efficacy, an in-depth character study, and a wholly chilling and plausible extrapolation of what might be in store for the television viewer of tomorrow. Ms. Lynn lives in San Francisco, where she is currently devoting her full time to writing mystery and science fiction. You’ll be reading more of her work soon: we guarantee it. - B.P.

  Eight a.m. Friday, September 4, 1998, Chicago: Jordan Granelli sat at his desk, reading the Corpse Roster. High above the street, on the two hundredth floor of Daley Tower, he escaped the noise of city sirens and chatter of voices: here there was only rustling paper and the click of computers, and a blue, silent sky.

  He read the printouts slowly and carefully, making little piles on the desk top. On Sheridan Road, in the heart of the Gold Coast, there was a crippled girl whose rich family bankrupted itself to keep her alive; she died at four this morning. On Kedzie, the hard-working mother of three just died of DDT poisoning… Good, heartbreaking stories. In Evanston, a widower’s only son was just killed swinging on a monorail pylon, ten last night… He frowned and tossed that one aside. They’d done a dead child Tuesday.

  He flipped back, pulled a sheet out of the pile, and buzzed for a messenger.

  Noon, on a Friday in Chicago: it’s 1:00 in New York, 11:00 in Denver, 10:00 in Los Angeles. In L.A. the housewives turn off their vacuums and turn on the TVs, and the secretaries in San Francisco and in Denver take their morning half-hour breaks in a crowded lounge. In New York, clerks and tellers and factory workers take a late lunch, and the men in the bars, checking their watches, order one last quick one.

  And in Chicago, the entire city settles into appreciative stillness. On lunch counters and in restaurants, up on the beams of rising buildings jutting through dust clouds and smog, like Babel, even inside the ghastly painted cheerfulness of hospitals, mental homes, and morgues, TV sets glow.

  Jordan Granelli looked out at them all through the camera. “It is a sad thing,” he said, his voice graceful and deep, “when the very young are called. Who of us has not, would not, mourn for the death of a child? But it is doubly sad when young and old join in mourning for one they loved, and miss. Today, my friends, we talk with Ms. Emily Maddy, who has lost her only daughter, Jennifer. Jennifer was a woman in her prime, with three young children of her own, and now they and her own mother have lost her.”

  The camera swung slowly around a shack-like house, and stopped at the face of a bent, tired woman looking dully up at Jordan Granelli. “The kids don’t understand it yet,” she said. “They think she’s coming back. I wish it had been me. It should have been me.”

  A woman in a factory in Atlanta rubs her eyes. “She looks like my mother. I’m voting my money to her.”

  “Look at that hole she’s living in!” comments a city planner in San Diego, watching the miniature Japanese set on his secretary’s desk. “Mary and I just bought our voting card last week. I wonder if we’ll get to see the kids?”

  A man on a road construction crew in Cleveland says: “I’m voting for her.”

  “You said Tuesday you were gonna vote for the guy whose son was killed by the fire engine,” his neighbor reminds him.

  “Well, this old lady needs it more; she’s got those kids to look after.”

  On their big wall screen in Chicago, the network executives watch the woman’s tears with pleasure.

  “That son-of-a-bitch sure knows how to play it,” says a vice-president. “I’m damned if I know why no one ever thought of it before. It’s a great gimmick, death. He’ll top last week’s ratings.”

  “Shh!” says his boss. “I want to hear what he says.”

  The woman’s sobs were at last quieting. She bent her head away from the bright lights, and they touched the white streaks in her hair with silver. One shaky hand shaded her eyes. Jordan Granelli took hold of the other with tender insistence. The camera moved in closer; the button mike on Granelli’s collar caught each meticulous word, and resonated it out to eighty million people.

  “Let your grief happen,” he said softly. It was one of his favorite remarks. “Ms. Maddy, you’ve told us that your daughter was a good person.”

  “Yes,” said her mother, “oh, yes, she was. Good with the kids, and always laughing and sunny—”

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of in tears for youth and grace and goodness. In all your pain, remember—” he paused histrionically, and she looked up at him as if he might, indeed, comfort her, with his precisely rounded sentences, “—remember, my friends, that we are all in debt, and we pay it with our sorrow. Ms. Maddy, there are millions of people feeling for you at this very moment. We live by chance, and Dame Fortune, who smiles on us today, cuts the thread of our lives tomorrow. Mourn for those you love—for you may not mourn for yourself—and think kindly of those that death has left behind. In life—we are in death—and we all have to go.”

  Poetic, smooth, Christy Holland thought. She moved her camera closer in, catching his craggy expressive hand holding the old woman’s, the dirty, dark furniture, the crinkled photograph of the dead daughter on the table, the stains on the floor—push that poverty, girl, it brings in the money every time—and, as the light booms drew back, the play of moving shadows across white hair. That ought to do it.

  The sound crew had cut out at Granelli’s final echoing syllable. She cut out and stepped back; simultaneously, Leo, the set director, standing to her left, sliced his long fingers through the air. The crew relaxed.

  Granelli stood briskly up, dropping the old woman’s hand. He brushed some dirt off his trousers and walked towards the door. As he passed Christy he inclined his head: “Thank you, Ms. Holland.”

  She ignored his thanks. She would have turned her back, except that would have been too pointedly rude, and even she, his chief camerawoman, could not be rude with impunity to Jordan Granelli. One word from him and the network would break her down to children’s shows. She concentrated on storing her camera in its case. Her arms ached. Ms. Maddy, she saw, was looking after Granelli as if he had left a hole in the air.

  Zenan, the second cameraman, strolled over to her from his leaning place against the wall. She smelled the alcohol on his breath. He stayed drunk most of the time now.

  “You okay?” she asked him.

  “Another day, another death, right, Chris?” he said.

  “Shut up, Zen.’’

  “Tell me, Christy, how much do you think the great-hearted American public will pay the lady for her sterling performance? Friday’s death has an edge, they say, on the ones at the beginning of the week. If ten million people vote a dollar a week, take away the network cut, and Mr. Granelli’s handsome salary, and what you and I need to pay our bills—hell, I was never very good at arithmetic at school. But it’s a lot of money. Weep your heart out for Mr. Death, and win a million!” he proclaimed.

  “Zen, for pity’s sake!” She could see Jake leaning toward them from his post near the door, listening.

  “For pity’s sake?” Zen repeated. He looked down at her from his greater height. “Here I am, a sodden voice crying in the wilderness, crying that when Jordan Granelli walks, on the dark nights when the moon is full, the deathlight shines around him!”

  And Jake was there, one big hand holding Zenan’s arm. “Come on, Zen, come outside.”

  Christy watched them go. Have I really only been doing this for two years?

  She lugged her case over to Willy, manager of Stores. “See you Monday,” he said cheerily. He’d been there eight years, longer than anybody. Nothing seemed to touch him.

  She ducked out of the house to get a breath of air. Granelli’s limousine, pearl-white with a black crest on the side, sat parked at the curb. Around the house, in a big semicircle, kept back by a line of police, a crowd had gathered to watch.

  Jake came around the corner. “What’d you do with Zenan?” she asked him.

  “Locked him in the crew trailer with Gus,” Jake said. He looked worried. “Christy, you a friend of Zenan’s? Tell him to shut up about Mr. Granelli. If he starts upsetting people, Mr. Granelli won’t like it, and the network won’t either.”

  “I don’t know what he has to complain about—Zenan, I mean,” Christy said. “Any TV show that gets eighty million people watching it every day can’t be wrong.”

  He started to answer, and then the car motor rumbled and he ran for his seat, riding shotgun next to Cary, who drove. Stew sat in the back next to Jordan Granelli. Does he ever talk to them? Christy wondered. Does he know that Jake used to be a skyhook, and Cary paints old houses for fun? Or are they merely pieces of furniture for him—part of the landscape-conveniences bought for him by the grateful network, like the cameras, and the car?

  Leo came walking out of the house as the white car pulled away. “Another week gone,” he said.

  “Jake stuck Zenan in the crew trailer,” Christy said.

  Leo wiped his big hand across his eyes and shrugged. “I don’t want to deal with it,” he said. “I think I’ll just go home. It’s Friday. Want to walk to the subway?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Good. I’ll tell Gus to go without us.” He strolled down the sidewalk to the crew trailer and leaned his head in to talk to the driver.

  They walked down Kedzie Street to Lake, and turned east. The sun was hot; Chris felt her shirt starting to stick to her back. She hummed. The show was behind her now, and with all her will she would forget it; today was Friday, and she was going home, home to two days with Paul. Leo’s head was down, as if he were counting the cracks in the broken pavement. He looked tired and bothered. Maybe he was worried about Zenan.

  He surprised her. “Do you ever think about Dacca?”

  I never forget it, she thought.

  Once she had tried to tell Paul about it, what it had been like for her, for them all, that summer in Bangladesh. For him it was barely remembered history: he had been fourteen. He had stopped her after five minutes, because of what it did to her eyes and mouth and hands. But Leo remembers it just the way I do.

  Scenes unreeled in the back of her mind. Babies, crawling over one another on slimy floors, dying as they crawled, and bodies like skeletons with grotesque, distended bellies, piled along dirt roads; the skitter of rats in the gutters like the drift of falling leaves, and flies, numerous as grains of rice—and no rice. No food. The Famine Year: it had killed fifty million people in Bangladesh. And she and Leo had met there, on the network news team in Dacca. “I remember it. I dream about it sometimes.”

  He nodded. “Me, too. Thirteen years, and I still have nightmares. The gods like irony, Christy. When I came home, I asked for daytime TV, asked to work on soap operas and children’s shows and giveaways. And here I am working for Jordan Granelli.” He stopped. “I sound like Zenan, don’t I? I know why he drinks. We’re the modem equivalent of a Roman circus. Under the poetry and Granelli’s decorum, the viewers can smell the blood—and they love it. It titillates them, being so close to it, and safe. Death is something that happens to other people. And when it happens—call an ambulance! Call a hospital! Tell the family gently. And bring the camera close, so we can watch. We all have to go.”

  “I have Paul,” Christy said. “What do you do, Leo?”

  “I take long walks,” he said. “I read a lot of history. I try to figure out how long it will take us to run ourselves into the ground—like Babylon, and Tyre, and Nineveh, and Rome.”

  “Are we close?”

  “I own a very unreliable crystal ball.”

  They had reached the subway line. Christy could feel beneath her feet the secret march of trains. “See you Monday,” she said.

  As she went down the stairs, Christy looked with curiosity at the people around her. Was there really such a thing as a mass mind? The faces bobbing by her—some content, some discontented, thin, fat, calm or harried, bored, or excited—what would they do, each of them, if she were to collapse at their owners’ feet? Observe, in an interested circle? Ignore it? Call the police or an ambulance, maybe; the professionals, who know how to deal with death. Death is something that happens to other people. All we, the survivors, have to do is mourn.

  She was riding on the city’s main subway line. It ran from south to north, passing beneath the city’s vital parts—City Hall, the business district, the towering apartment complexes of the rich, the university—like a notochord. East of it lay Lake Michigan, with its algae and seaweed beds, like green islands in a blue sea. West of it the bulk of the city sprawled, primitive and indolent in the summer heat, a lolling dinosaur.

  And Paul was out there, high in the smoggy sky, a mite on the dinosaur’s back. She’d first seen him through a camera’s eye. She’d been shooting a documentary on new city buildings, six years back. He had been walking the beams of a building sixty stories up, dark against the sun, his hair blazing gold, his hooks swinging on his belt. She had asked one of the soundmen: “What are those hooks they carry?”

  “Those are the skyhooks. They’re protection. See the network of cables on the frame?” Through the lens she could see it, like a spiderweb in the sun. “If a worker up there falls, he can use those books to catch the cable and save himself. Experienced workers use the cables to get around. They swing on them, like monkeys, hand over hand. The hooks don’t slip, and the cables are rough—they fit like two gears meshing.” He made a gear with the interlocking fingers of his two hands.

  “I thought the name for the people was skyhooks,” she said.

  “It is.”

  Human beings, she thought, with hooks to hold down the sky…

  She opened the door to the apartment. Paul was sitting in a chair, waiting for her.

  He jumped up and came to her across the room, fitting his hands against her backbone and his lips to hers with the precision of anticipation. His lips were salt-rimmed from a morning’s sweating in the sun. She leaned into him. At last she tugged on his ears to free her mouth. “Nice you’re home. How come?”

  “Monday’s Labor Day. Dale gave us the afternoon off. Said to get an early start on drinking, so we’d all get to work on Tuesday sober.”

  “That was smart of her.” Dale was the crew boss on the building.

  “So we have three and a half days!”

  “No,” she said sadly, “only two and a half.”

  “Why?” He pulled away.

  “The show doesn’t stop for Labor Day. Think of all those lucky folks who’ll be home to watch it! Makes more money. Christmas, New Year’s, yes. Labor Day, no.”

  He grunted, and came back to her arms abruptly. “Then let’s go to bed now.”

  Christy woke from the drowse first. Paul’s head lay against her breasts. The camera eye inside her came alive: she saw him curled like a great baby against her, chunky and strong and satiated, his skin dark red-bronze where the sun had darkened it, fairer elsewhere, his hair red-gold… How brown I am against him, she thought. A thin beard rose rough on his cheeks and chin, his chest was hairless, well-muscled, his hands work-calloused…

  He stirred, and opened his eyes. “What do you see?” he asked her.

  “I see my love. What do you see?”

  “I see my love.”

  “Thin brown woman.”

  “Beautiful woman.”

  It was an old ritual between them, six years old. It amazed Christy that, in their transient world, they had survived six years together. I love you, she thought at him.

  Suddenly, as if someone had spliced it into her mind, she saw Jordan Granelli, holding the hand of Ms. Maddy. Angrily she thrust the show from her mind. Like a shadow on a wall it crept back at her.

  “What is it?” Paul said.

  “Ah. Come with me to work Monday,” she said suddenly.

  “Why?”

  “So I can see you sooner.” So I can hold you in front of the shadow, she thought, like a bright and burnished shield. “Please.”

 

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