Short Fiction, page 40
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 handholds. 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 E.T. 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.
Kreativity for Kats
Gummitch peered thoughtfully at the molten silver image of the sun in his little bowl of water on the floor inside the kitchen window. He knew from experience that it would make dark ghost suns swim in front of his eyes for a few moments, and that was mildly interesting. Then he slowly thrust his head out over the water, careful not to ruffle its surface by rough breathing, and stared down at the mirror cat—the Gummitch Double—staring up at him.
Gummitch had early discovered that water mirrors are very different from most glass mirrors. The scentless spirit world behind glass mirrors is an upright one sharing our gravity system, its floor a continuation of the floor in the so-called real world. But the world in a water mirror has reverse gravity. One looks down into it, but the spirit-doubles in it look up at one. In a way water mirrors are holes or pits in the world, leading down to a spirit infinity or ghostly nadir.
Gummitch had pondered as to whether, if he plunged into such a pit, he would be sustained by the spirit gravity or fall forever. (It may well be that speculations of this sort account for the caution about swimming characteristic of most cats.)
There was at least one exception to the general rule. The looking glass on Kitty-Come-Here’s dressing table also opened into a spirit world of reverse gravity, as Gummitch had discovered when he happened to look into it during one of the regular visits he made to the dressing table top, to enjoy the delightful flowery and musky odors emanating from the fragile bottles assembled there.
But exceptions to general rules, as Gummitch knew well, are only doorways to further knowledge and finer classifications. The wind could not get into the spirit world below Kitty-Come-Here’s looking glass, while one of the definitive characteristics of water mirrors is that movement can very easily enter the spirit world below them, rhythmically disturbing it throughout, producing the most surreal effects, and even reducing it to chaos. Such disturbances exist only in the spirit world and are in no way a mirroring of anything in the real world: Gummitch knew that his paw did not change when it flicked the surface of the water, although the image of his paw burst into a hundred flickering fragments. (Both cats and primitive men first deduced that the world in a water mirror is a spirit world because they saw that its inhabitants were easily blown apart by the wind and must therefore be highly tenuous, though capable of regeneration.)
Gummitch mildly enjoyed creating rhythmic disturbances in the spirit worlds below water mirrors. He wished there were some way to bring their excitement and weird beauty into the real world.
* * *
On this sunny day when our story begins, the spirit world below the water mirror in his drinking bowl was particularly vivid and bright. Gummitch stared for a while longer at the Gummitch Double and then thrust down his tongue to quench his thirst. Curling swiftly upward, it conveyed a splash of water into his mouth and also flicked a single drop of water into the air before his nose. The sun struck the drop and it flashed like a diamond. In fact, it seemed to Gummitch that for a moment he had juggled the sun on his tongue. He shook his head amazedly and touched the side of the bowl with his paw. The bowl was brimful and a few drops fell out; they also flashed like tiny suns as they fell. Gummitch had a fleeting vision, a momentary creative impulse, that was gone from his mind before he could seize it. He shook his head once more, backed away from the bowl, and then lay down with his head pillowed on his paws to contemplate the matter. The room darkened as the sun went under a cloud and the young golden dark-barred cat looked like a pool of sunlight left behind.
