Short Fiction, page 19
Curving down from the house came a weedy and balding expanse that had obviously once been a well-tended lawn. A few stalwart patches of thick grass held out tenaciously.
Pale-trunked eucalyptus trees towered behind the house and to either side of the road where it curved over the hill.
In a hollow at the foot of the onetime lawn, just where it met the road, something gleamed. As Madson, Ellenby and Vera-Ellen tramped forward, they saw it was an old automobile, one of the jet antiques that were the rage around 1970—in fact, a Lunar ’69. Coming closer Ellenby realized that it had custom-built features, such as jet brakes and collision springs.
A man with an odd cap was poking a probe into the air intake, while in the back seat a woman was sitting, shadowed by a hat four feet across. At the sound of their footsteps the man whirled to his feet, quickly enough though unsteadily. He stared at them, wagging the probe. Just at that moment something that looked like an animated orange furpiece leaped from the tonneau.
“George!” the woman cried. “Widgie’s got away.”
The small flattish creature came on in undulating bounds. It was past the man in the cap before he could turn. It headed for Ellenby, then changed direction. Madson made an impulsive dive for it, but it widened itself still more and sailed over him straight into Vera-Ellen’s arms.
They walked toward the car. Widgie wriggled, Vera-Ellen stroked his ears. He seemed to be a flying fox of some sort. The man eyed them hostilely, raising the probe. Madson stared puzzledly at the cap. Out of his older knowledge Ellenby whispered an explanation: “Chauffeur.”
The woman stood in the back seat, swaying slightly. She was wearing a white swim suit and dark teleglasses under her hat. At first she seemed a somewhat ravaged thirty. Then they began to see the rest of the wrinkles.
* * *
She received Widgie from Vera-Ellen, shook him out and tucked him under her arm, where he hung limply, moving his tiny red eyes.
“Come in with me, my dear,” she told Vera-Ellen. “George, put down that crazy pole. Pay no attention to George—he can’t recognize gentlefolk when he sees them, especially when he’s drunk. Gentlemen,” she continued, waving graciously to Madson and Ellenby, “you have the thanks of Rickie Vickson.” As she pronounced the name she surveyed them sharply. Her gaze settled on Ellenby. “You know me, don’t you?”
“Certainly,” he answered instantly. “You were my first—my favorite straight 3D star.”
“Are you in 3D?” Vera-Ellen asked, a sudden gleam in her eyes.
“Was, my dear,” Rickie said grandly. She ogled Ellenby through the fisheye glasses. “Ah, straight 3D,” she sighed. “Simple video-audio in depth—there was a great art-form.” She began to sway again and they caught the reek of alcohol. “You know, gentlemen, it was handies that ruined my career. I had the looks and the voice, but I lacked the touch. Something in me shrank from the whole idea—be still, Widgie—and the girls with itchy fingers took over. But I’m talking too much about myself. It’s hot and you wonderful gentlemen must be thirsty. Here, have a—”
The chauffeur glared at her as she reached fumblingly down into the tonneau. She caught the look and quailed slightly.
“—sandwich,” she finished, coming up with a shiny can.
Madson accepted it from her, clicking the catch. The top popped four feet in the air, followed lazily by the uppermost sandwich which he caught deftly. He handed the can to Ellenby, who served himself and handed it up to Vera-Ellen. Soon all three of them were munching.
“Miss Vickson,” Vera-Ellen asked between mouthfuls, “do you think I could get a job in broadcast entertainment?”
Rickie looked at her sideways, leaning away to focus. “Not with that ghastly atomglow hair,” she said. “Violet is old hat this year—it’s either black, blonde or bald. But give me your hand, my dear.”
“Going to tell my fortune?”
“After a fashion.” She held up Vera-Ellen’s hand, squeezing and prodding it thoughtfully, as if she were testing the carcass of an alleged spring chicken. Then she nodded. “You’ll do. Good strong hand, that’s all that’s needed, so you can really crunch the knuckles of the bohunks. They love it rough. Of course the technicians could step up the power when they broadcast your hand-squeeze, but the addicts don’t feel it’s the same thing.” She looked sourly at her own delicate claws. “Yes, my dear, you’ll have a chance in handies if you don’t mind cuddling with two million dirty-minded bohunks every night and if Rickie Vickson’s still got any entrée at the studios.” She made a face and dipped again into the tonneau, apparently to gulp something, for the chauffeur’s glare was intensified.
“You’re from New Angeles?” Madson asked politely when Rickie came up beaming.
“Old Angeles,” she corrected. “My home’s in a contaminated area. After 3D lighting I’ve never been afraid of hard radiations. But this time my psychic counselor told me—Widgie, I’m going to put you away in a nice little urn—that the bombs are going to miss New Angeles and fall on Old. That’s why George is jetting me to the mountains. Others drink to still their fears. I do something about it—too.”
“You mean you’re going away from the studio?” Vera-Ellen demanded incredulously while Ellenby mumbled “Bombs?” through a mouthful of sandwich.
“Of course,” Rickie nodded. “Don’t you know? Russia’s touched a match to the Hot Truce. You charming gentlemen should keep up with these things.”
“You see, I told you!” Madson said to Ellenby. “One more victory for science!”
“Miss Vickson, we better be getting on,” the chauffeur interrupted, speaking for the first time. His voice was drunkenly thick. “We aren’t out of the fusion fringe by a long shot and I don’t like the looks of this place.”
Rickie ignored him. Ellenby asked, “Was the news about Russia telefaxed?”
“Of course not.” Rickie’s smile was scornful. “They never tell the real truth these days. But they said to get out of our houses, and what else could that mean?”
“Miss Vickson, we better—” George began again.
“Quiet, George,” Rickie ordered.
George groaned faintly, shrugged his shoulders, and reached out an arm to her without looking. Rickie handed him a red, limp plastic bottle. Just as he was putting it to his lips, he jerked as if stung, vaulted into the car, and began to stamp and punch at the controls.
With a mighty pouf the jet took hold. Ellenby skittered away from the hot blast. The Lunar ’69 jumped forward.
* * *
Things hissed and snicked through the air. From nowhere, men began to appear. With a great lurch the car gained the road, roared toward the bridge. Vera-Ellen jumped up as if to get out, then was thrown back into the tonneau. Rickie lunged forward across the seat to save the red bottle. Her four-foot hat leaped upward, hesitated, and then spun off like a flying saucer.
A man rose from the wheat near the bridge. As the car jounced across it, he leveled a rapid-fire weapon. But just as he got it trained on the car, Rickie’s hat landed on him. He went over backwards, firing at the sky.
Madson and Ellenby looked around in bewilderment. There must have been a dozen men. As they stared, another bunch came hurrying down the ruined lawn from the house on the hill.
The man by the bridge got up, went over to Rickie’s hat and stamped on it.
Madson and Ellenby jumped as the sky-climbing missiles from his gun pattered down around them. When they looked around again, the men from the house on the hill were closing in.
Their leader was about five feet tall, but thick. His head had been formed in a bullet mold, his features looked drop-forged.
“I’m Harvey,” he told them blankly. “What you got?”
Harvey’s people wore everything from evening dress to shorts. There were even two women (who drifted toward Harvey) one in a gold kimono, the other in an off-the-bosom frock of filthy white lace. Everybody was armed.
“What you got?” Harvey repeated sharply. “I know you’re loaded, I saw you talking with that rich-witch in the jet.” He looked them over and grabbed at Madson’s side pocket. “Books, huh?” he said like a hangman, dangling the Keats by a stray page. Then he turned to Ellenby. “Come on, Skinny,” he said, “shell out.”
When Ellenby hesitated, two of Harvey’s men grabbed him, dumped him, and passed the contents of his pockets to their chief. When the spectroscope turned up, Harvey grinned. The eyes of his people twinkled in anticipation.
“Science gadget, huh?” he said. “Folks, there’s been too much science in the world and too many words. Any minute now, more bombs are gonna fall. I do my humble bit to help ’em. I’m a great little junkman.” He let the brass tube fall to the ground and lifted his foot. “Blow it a goodbye kiss, Skinny.”
“Wait,” Madson said abruptly, taking a step toward Harvey. “Don’t do it.” Then the poet’s eyes grew wide and alarmed, as if he hadn’t known he was going to say it.
Breaths sucked in around them. Harvey’s turret head slowly turned toward Madson, its expression seemingly vacuous. “Why not?” Harvey whispered.
“Don’t pay any attention to my friend,” Ellenby interjected rapidly. “He just said that on account of me. Actually he hates science as much as you do. Don’t—”
“Shaddup!” Harvey roared. Then his voice instantly went low again. “Ain’t nobody hates science more’n me, but ain’t nobody tells me so. Shoulda kept your mouth shut, Skinny. Now there’s gonna be more’n gadgets stomped, more’n books tore.”
* * *
Silence came except for the faint sucks of breath, the faint scuffle of shoes on grit as Harvey’s people slowly moved in. Ellenby stood helplessly, yet at the same time he felt a widening and intensification of his sensory powers. He was aware of the delicately lace-edged tree shadows cast from the hill ahead by the westering sun. At the other limit of his vision the copter no longer trailed its green caterpillar; for some reason it was buzzing closer along the road. At the same time he was conscious with a feverish clarity of the page by which Harvey dangled the Keats, and without reading the words he saw the lines:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Suddenly the slowly advancing faces seemed to freeze and Ellenby was aware of something spectral and ominous about the yellowing sunlight and the whole acid-etched scene around him. It was something more than the physical threat to him and Madson—it was something that seemed to well up menacingly from the ground under his feet.
There was a sudden faint thunder and even as something inside Ellenby said, “That isn’t it, that isn’t what the sky’s waiting for,” he saw the chrome muzzle of the Lunar ’69 bulleting toward them across the bridge with Vera-Ellen’s violet mop above the wheel.
But even as the braking blasts gouted out redly from under the hood and the car crunched toward a stop in their midst, even as Harvey’s people broke to either side and pistols popped with queerly toylike reports, the thunder multiplied until it was impossible that the Lunar ’69 was causing it, until it was like the thunder of a thousand invisible jets crushing the air around them. The sky shifted, rocked. The road shook. There came a shock that numbed Ellenby’s feet and sent everyone around him reeling, and a pounding, smashing sound that made any remembered noise seem puny.
The Lunar ’69, which had stopped a dozen feet from Ellenby, was pitching and tossing like a silver ship in a storm. Vera-Ellen was gripping the steering wheel with one hand and motioning to him frantically with the other. In the seat beyond her Rickie Vickson was jouncing as if in a merry-go-round chariot.
Ellenby lurched as a hand clutched his shoulder and a staggering Madson howled in his ear through the tumult, “Now you’ve got your rotten bombs!” Between him and the car Harvey’s bullet head reared up and as suddenly dropped away. Looking down, Ellenby saw that a chasm four feet wide had split the road between him and the car. Its walls were raw, smoking earth and rock. Down it Ellenby saw vanishing, in one frozen moment, Harvey and the Keats and the little brass spectroscope.
Then Ellenby realized he had grabbed Madson by the shoulder and thrown the two of them forward and shouted “Jump!” For a moment the chasm gaped beneath them and a white little face stared upward. Then the chasm closed with a giant crunch and Ellenby’s hand caught the side of the heaving car and he pitched into the back seat.
Through the diminishing thunder and shaking there came the toy roar of the car’s jet and a new movement tipped him backward and he was looking toward the hill and it was getting bigger. He tried to put his feet down and felt something bulk under them. For a moment he thought it was Madson, but Madson was beside him on the seat, and then he saw it was George. He looked up and Rickie Vickson was watching him from where she was crouched in the front seat, her eyes without the teleglasses looking as foxy as Widgie’s, whom she was holding close to her wrinkle-etched cheek.
“Vera-Ellen had to conk him,” she explained, her gaze dipping to George. “The bum tried to betray us.”
The pitching of the car had given way to a steady forward lunge. Ellenby nodded dully at Rickie and hitched himself around and looked back.
Harvey’s people were scattering like ants through a dust cloud rising from the road.
The house on the hill still stood, though there were more and larger cracks in it and a nimbus of whiter dust around it.
By the bridge the copter had crashed and was flaming brightly. A tiny figure was running away from it.
* * *
Ellenby’s face slowly lightened with understanding.
“We were on the San Andreas Rift,” he said softly. “Madson, that wasn’t the bombs at all. That wasn’t Technology or Man.” A smile trembled on his lips. “That was Nature. An earthquake.”
Madson was the first to comment. “All right,” he said, “it was Nature—Nature showing her disgust for Man.”
“An idea like that is the sheerest animism,” Ellenby reacted automatically. “Now if you try analyzing—”
“Analyzing!” Madson snorted with a touch of the old fire. “You scientists are always—”
“Whoa, boys,” Rickie Vickson interrupted. “If it hadn’t been for that little quake to confuse things, Vera-Ellen couldn’t have snatched you out no matter how pretty she tried. And I’m in no mood for arguments now. I’m not the arty type and all the science I know is what my psychic counselor tells me. Widgie, quit pounding your heart; it’s all over now.”
Ellenby touched her arm. “Do I understand,” he asked, “that Vera-Ellen made you turn back just to save us?”
“Of course not,” Rickie assured him. “Her father and his pals tried to stop us a couple of miles back. They’d been radioed by a farmer in a copter and had the road blocked. George wanted to hand you all over to Vera-Ellen’s father, but we conked George—he’s such a weakling—and got away. Picking you up was an afterthought.”
Vera-Ellen flashed a wicked smile over her shoulder.
Ellenby realized he was feeling vastly contented. He started to lift his feet off George, then settled them more comfortably. He looked at the violet-topped new chauffeur handling the Lunar as if she’d never done anything else, and she picked that moment to flash him another half friendly, half insulting grin. He nudged Madson and said, “We’ll continue our argument later—all our argument.” Madson looked at him sharply and almost grinned too. Ellenby wondered idly what jobs they had for poets and physicists in 3D and handie studios.
Rickie Vickson’s eyes widened. “Say,” she said, “if they were just warning us about that little old earthquake, then Old Angeles isn’t radioactive—I mean any more radioactive than it’s ever been.”
“Oh boy,” Vera-Ellen crowed as the car topped the hill and the blue spires came back in sight, “New Angeles, here we come.”
Time in the Round
From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.
The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog’s tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog’s face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.
The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: “Hi, Butch! Sic ’em, Darter, sic ’em!”
A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch’s gray dog.
Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice: “Kill ’em, Brute.”
* * *
The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.
