Collected Short Fiction, page 674
I recall jumbled fragments of sensation. A vague dark line of wind-whipped trees. A ripple of blue lightning, illuminating a toysized train creeping toward a toy grain elevator. Ripe wheat beaten flat with hail. A jolt, a pitch, a dazing blow . . .
The time after that crash is still a shadowy nightmare in my memory. The plane didn’t burn, perhaps because the snake had drained so much of our heat. I believe McAble and Gort both lived the recollection is dim as a dream, but I think they came together to visit me in the hospital, Gort on crutches, McAble with his arm in a sling.
As I try to look back, my own survival seems surprising. I believe I had a brain concussion. For a long time I lay in traction, with both legs broken. On top of such injuries I contracted a severe gamma-form infection. Perhaps it saved my life.
Dr. Ram Narasimachar was my physician. I knew him first as a brisk foreign voice, as a hand very deft with the needles that went into my veins, long before I saw his darkly arrogant face. Gort may have told him in the beginning that I was someone worth saving, but his passion was the space diseases. The mutant gamma-forms in my blood made me a laboratory specimen.
Living in my own delirium, for a long, long time I didn’t care where I was or what was happening to the planet. Though I must have heard talk about the space war, its appalling disasters were never quite as real as my lurid private dreams of the children and the ants.
A quiet old Dane named Andy Elving used to clean my room in the morning. He had been to the moon as a systems engineer on the seeker craft. Now his wife was dead of a space infection and his son was gone to the war. He lived alone in a small white house we could see from my window. He was growing roses in his back yard and he used to keep a vase of them on my window ledge.
He talked about roses and the town. Pitman had been a prosperous agricultural center. There was a militia camp near it now and a new munitions factory below it on the river. A long way from the mountains where the snakes had begun to nest and the seas where the fog kept spreading, it offered all the security he could find.
Even the ants had never come to Pitman, Andy Elving said. Their lust was for metal and power. As if fed by the nuclear strikes, they had scattered at first to Albuquerque and Las Alamas and White Sands. Later they swarmed unpredictably into larger cities, leveling everything to build their impregnable nests. Now, however, they were leaving the cities to mine the earth itself. With no ore-bodies near, Pitman was probably safe.
A YEAR and a half had passed when I began to care about the calendar. I started asking questions about the moon children. Andy Elving remembered reading about Guy’s stealing the moon jewel. Nick and Kyrie had been killed, he thought, in the bombardment of the ants at Skygate. But that was all he knew.
Nobody had heard about any transgalactic terminal. I began to feel that the messenger missile had lain on the moon for sixty million years for no result at all, that the children had been born for nothing. I thought we had lost our race to stop the chaos of conflicting biocosms. For a long time I didn’t even want to recover.
Andy Elving didn’t like to talk about the war. Dr. Narasimachar was too sick and self-absorbed by now to talk much about anything. He had an acute gamma-form infection, probably picked up from me, and he was trying desperately to immunize himself with transfusions of my blood.
My first real news of the war came from other patients, after I was well enough to be moved out of isolation. Clayton Carter was a sunburnt ghost when he came into the ward, but his weakness came from hardship and exposure, not from any space disease. He was out of his head at first—maybe most of the time—but his unbelievable story rekindled my interest in the world.
A veteran Space Force pilot, he told me how the mechanics of his militia unit had built what he believed was the last spaceplane in America, out of salvaged wreckage. When it was ready his first test flight was a scouting mission across the Rockies. Flying low and fast, he hoped to evade the snakes and bring back a report on what the ants were doing in the Skygate area. A diving snake killed his jets and forced him down, however, somewhere beyond the Rio Grande.
As the spaceplane went down, Carter glimpsed something that strained his faith in his own sanity. Even now he couldn’t quite believe what he had seen and I had to coax the story from him. He was sitting up in bed that day, a black-bearded skeleton smeared with chalky ointments. I remember the tortured hesitation in his hoarse cattle-country drawl—he was a native New Mexican.
“The army don’t believe what I saw—or thought I saw.” His inflamed eyes peered uneasily at me. “A building on the mesa where Skygate was. A kind of tower—taller than the Rockies! Call me a liar—”
“Was it white?” I whispered. “Was it seven columns in a cluster? Did the tops of the outer columns make a kind of spiral stair? Did the center column have a pointed, shining dome?”
“Have you—” He gulped and wet his ulcerated lips. “Mister, have you been there?”
“WHAT’S the transgalactic terminal!” My voice was as rough and breathless as his own. “The station the moon children were born to build, so the tachyon ships could come from the stars.” For the first time I tried to sit up in bed. “Are you sure it’s really there?”
“It’s there, all right.” Awe echoed in his voice. “Taller than I dared fly and shaped exactly like you say. “Except—” He paused to frown. “Except for that high dome. It wasn’t bright or shining at all. It was black as midnight.”
“Just so it’s there.” I was trying to climb out of bed. “Now the tachyon ships will come.”
“Not for us they won’t.” He sank back against the pillows. “Because that terminal don’t belong to no friends of ours.”
I had to wait while a nurse sprayed his sadly damaged feet. Then he went on with his tantalizing story.
“I was Tom Fool Lucky in a way,” he said. “The plane came down dead, but the ejection gear did kick me out before the crash. All I got was a twisted ankle and a few cracked ribs. Not bad, considering the rocky arroyo I came down in.
“I scrabbled around in the wreckage, but I never found my survival kit. The desert got hot and my ankle swelled and I began to wonder how lucky I really was. But when I climbed out of the gully I could see that tower. Taller than the clouds!
“I waited till sundown, afraid it might be a mirage. But it stayed there. The sun blazed on it, long after the desert was dark. Mister, it was something! Golden up high where the sun still struck, with zones of red and purple slowly climbing out of the night around me. I never imagined the towers of heaven quite so beautiful.
“I made a sort of crutch out of parts from my ejection shell. When dawn came I started toward the tower. The top of it was already blazing before day came, gold and rose-colored under that dead black dome.
“It looked about a mile off when I set out. I hobbled along till sundown and it still looked a mile away. By that time my tongue was thick and my ankle was killing me and the tower didn’t seem so pretty any longer.
“I hadn’t seen a sign of a human being anywhere, or even any animal bigger than a packrat. I guess the fallout from Skygate got most of the larger life. It may have been still active—I had no meter for it. That next day might have been my last if I hadn’t stumbled into the old Albuquerque road.
“There wasn’t any traffic. Hadn’t been, for a long time. Rocks washed into the highway dips. One funny thing—all the bridges had been taken out. I was still sane enough to wonder why. I limped on till I came to the old Dos Lobos trading post.
“I used to stop there on vacation trips, but I barely recognized it now. Everything metal was gone. Signs and gas pumps and the tin roof off the buildings. Even the junk cars piled up behind the garage.
“Rain had begun to crumble the ’dobe walls, but I dug in the dried mud with my crutch till I uncovered a bottle of apple cider. That saved my life. I sipped and slept all night—and dreamed about people with golden wings letting me into that tower, like old Saint Pete admitting the children of God.
“In the morning I dug again. Most of the metal cans were gone or rusted through and rain and rats had spoiled a lot of the rest, but I found three more cases of cider and enough other stuff still good in glass and plastic.
“I stayed there at the ’dobe walls, lying in the shade at noon and watching that tower the rest of the day, till I could leave the crutch and carry a pack. I walked on, then, following the old pavement and climbing through the dry canyons where the bridges were missing.
“A half-moon was out the night I came to the mesa. Feeling too eager to stop, I climbed the old mesa road by moonlight. The moon was low when I got to the rim—but there it was.
“The foot of it was still a mile or two away, but that black dome was lost in the stars. I got a crick in my neck, looking up at it. Mister, I wish I could tell you how I felt.
Crazy with wonder, but somehow afraid—”
At that point the nurse came back. She told Carter he was getting too tired. Though he protested, she turned his pillow and lowered his bed and snapped her sleeper gun at his head. Next day, after his feet were sprayed, I begged him to go on.
“YOU ain’t laughing at me, mister?” He squinted suspiciously through his wild black beard and his chalky facial dressings. “You don’t think I’m nuts?”
“I knew the moon kids,” I assured him. “I watched them working two years on the plans for that terminal, hoping COSMOS would build it. I hope—I hope it’s real.”
“It’s plenty real.” He punched the button to raise his bed and sat glaring strangely at me. “But the builders ain’t human,” he muttered. “They ain’t setting it up for us.”
I waited uneasily till he went on.
“They were working overtime the night I got there. I couldn’t see much, because the moon was nearly down by then. But I could hear—” one bandaged hand made a hesitant groping motion—“a sort of humming whine like a million dentists drilling. Or a billion hives of bees. Then there was a kind of booming beat, deep and slow, like the biggest drum that ever was.
“I dropped my pack at the mesa rim and started toward the tower. But I didn’t get far. I began to wonder why those workers used no lights. And why I heard no human voices. Then the wind must have changed, because I caught an odor that choked me. A scent like burning sulfur.
“All that was too much. I picked up my pack and scuttled down the road to a sort of shallow cave I had passed. I crawled in there to hide. It was cold, but I couldn’t risk a fire. Finally I shivered myself to sleep.
“Something woke me about sunup. Something crawling on my chest. I batted it away before my eyes were open. It had a cold metal feel. I heard a whine and smelled sulfur and saw it hovering over my head.
“A damn mechanical ant! I’d seen news pictures, but still the thing shook me up. That blind six-sided head, watching me with no eyes to watch with. The legs of it like a bunch of thin wire snakes—coiled around the coins and keys it had stolen out of my pocket. Even the class ring off my finger!
“It watched me for maybe half a minute before it sailed away with the loot. I was sick after it left. Lost my supper and what little strength I had. But finally, after an hour or two, I nerved myself to climb back to the rim for another look.
“The tower wasn’t heaven to me now.” Carter shivered under his sheet. “It looked more like the gate to hell—with all those metal ants for junior demons. They were swarming as far as I could see, swirling like dark clouds all around the bottom of the tower.
“Near me, so close I could see their flat bright heads and their black tail-balls, they came and went from a metal-rimmed pit. In one stream they brought materials—hundreds of them clinging to a rusty ingot or a mass of ore or a scrap of junk that might have come from my own spaceplane. In another stream they came out with fabricated parts they carried to the tower. Bright metal and big white blocks. Their noise shook the rocks under me and their hot reek burned my eyes. They’re building an ant hill—into the stratosphere.
“Standing there, I forgot to be frightened, till one of them came whining around my head. I was afraid it wanted my gold tooth. When it flew back to the pit I turned and ran. Nothing followed me—but I nearly died getting out.”
Carter sighed as if still exhausted.
“I wandered out of the desert and over the mountains and all the way back. The ants had scavanged all the metal everywhere and I never saw a human being. Water and food were hard to find. After my shoes wore out I had to tear up my clothes for bandages—that’s how I got cooked with the sun. I was nearly back to Oklahoma when the militia scouts picked me up.
“That’s it, mister.” He sat up, glaring fiercely through his chalky mask. “The militia don’t believe me and I ain’t got no proof. The snakes have downed our last airplane. But that tower’s standing there where Skygate was. Taller than the clouds! I ain’t no liar, mister.”
“I’m sure you aren’t,” I said.
But suddenly I wasn’t sure. Something about his angry challenge made me think of Yuri Marko, who had once been just as positive that he had found a transgalactic terminal on the moon.
XVII
WITH new skin grown on his feet, Clayton Carter went back to his militia unit. He wanted to lead a mounted party west. Neither the snakes nor the ants, he thought, would interfere with horses. He hoped to photograph the terminal and perhaps to try communicating with the ants, but I never learned what became of him.
The next man beside me lay three days in a heal-sleep tent.
“His name’s Ballou,” old Andy Elving told me. “He’s got friends. They brought him on a horse cart from back east and threatened to burn the hospital if Doc Narasimachar wouldn’t take him in ahead of the war refugees that are dying in the streets.”
“A space case?”
“Some woman carved him up. Slashed his face and stabbed him in the gut. He came in with peritonitis and it took some fancy surgery to save him.”
Awake, Ballou was an angular waspish man with thick dark hair and a complaining nasal whine. He fumed when the doctor hurt his face, peeling off the bandages, and demanded a mirror to inspect himself.
“Look what you’ve done to me!” He fingered the forked blue seam across his cheek. “I used to be a fine-lookin’ man. Folks said I coulda been a trivee star. Now look what a fright you’ve made of me.” He threw the mirror at the doctor. “You clumsy bastard vet!”
Narasimachar ducked the mirror, which shattered on the floor. My blood had failed to stop the gamma-life teeming in his flesh and his worsening palsy had in fact begun to spoil his surgery. I saw the stifled fury on his dark face and the way he clutched his gaunt hands together to slop their shaking. He stalked out silently.
“Call him back,” Ballou snarled at the nurse. “I won’t be insulted. Not by any pill-pushing quack. I’ll have you know I’m somebody. We’re the Fairfax Ballous. I guess you’ve heard of us.”
“I’ve heard plenty.”
The nurse whisked out and he turned fretfully to me.
“I’m Spiro Ballou.” An ingratiating smile twitched across the unscarred half of his face. “Call me Spike. Back in Fairfax, I was somebody. People didn’t insult me there. Not twice!”
I was about to introduce myself, but his plaintive voice ran on, quivering with self-pity now.
“All this crap is hard for me to take, because of who I was. My old man was president of the Fairfax National Bank and chairman of the board of Fairball Industries. He owned the best half of the town. When I married he bought me the Poppy-Cola franchise for a wedding present. But look at me now.”
He sniffled and fingered his scar.
“My wife was Billie Fran—the sexiest doll in town. I had four acres out in Faircrest. An eight-room home of hand-laid brick. I drove a Cadillac Hydrocat and traded twice a year. I thought I had everything till the Moon King came along—”
“The Moon King?” I had been thoroughly bored with Spike Ballou, but that jolted me awake. “Who’s the Moon King?”
“You remember the Moon Kids? Two cute little scamps and one like a hairy bear? There used to be Moon Kid dolls, Moon Kid toys and Moon Kid picture books—”
I said I remembered the moon children.
“People sort of turned against ’em as I grew up. I guess just because space didn’t mean fun and games any more, after we got into the other biocosms. Anyhow, a couple of years ago this animal type ran off with what he calls the moon jewel—”
“Have you seen it?” I interrupted him. “A glowing pyramid—”
“Billie Fran saw it.” Rancor growled in his throat. “Most of the women in Fairfax did. But he never showed it to me. He don’t take to men.”
“IS GUY—” I caught myself. “Is this jewel in Fairfax now?”
“It sure is.” Ballou nodded bitterly. “I hear he stores it in the vault of my old man’s bank. Billie Fran says it keeps the space things out of Fairfax. The killer fog and the flying snakes and them iron-eating ants. She thinks it cures the space diseases.”
“This moon boy has it?”
“He ain’t no boy. Big as a grizzly. But he come to Fairfax with the jewel a couple of years ago. About the time the world began to fall apart. Only I didn’t know him then. One that did was Billie Fran. My own wife—”
Ballou gritted his teeth.
“That was when she turned cold to me. If you can imagine—” He choked with indignation, as if he couldn’t imagine. “They were slick enough. It was just lately anybody found out about ’em. My wife—and that hairy beast! They should have been buried alive.”
He sat up in bed, breathing hard and glaring at a nurse who had stopped to listen at the door until at last she sniffed and disappeared. He lay back to get his breath.
“Seems the moon thing come into the country with some circus. Like the animal freak he is. Billed as the Siberian talking bear. One night a college professor got to asking questions he didn’t like. He smashed the guy’s face against the bars and broke out of his cage before the cops got there.
