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Defining Decay Down by David Plotz
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" Defining Decay Down", David Plotz, 1999.
Defining Decay Down
If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the "intra-oral camera." As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. "You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth," says one recent victim of the camera. "You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth."
The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island.
Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. "People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you," says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does.
The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. "We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look," says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. "You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves," says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist.
People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are "very satisfied" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. "It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job," says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual .
To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. "My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' " says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem "weak."
Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a "preventive measure." (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price.
Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or "halitosis," as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a "halimeter," a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. "Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years," says Hartel.
Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to "trade up" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as "how to move your patients to 'yes.' "
The industry calls this technique "treatment acceptance," a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day "Treatment Acceptance" seminar "for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care."
This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass.
It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life.
Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is "an excellent form of birth control," as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works.
"If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure," says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist.
Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago.
When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth.
"Dentists are aware of providing what patients want," says Hartel. "I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it."
Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.
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Fight Clubbed by David Plotz
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" Fight Clubbed", David Plotz, 1999.
Fight Clubbed
Fight Club , a movie about a fictional organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked more than its share of media hand-wringing, particularly diatribes about Hollywood's infatuation with violence and Faludi-esque ruminations about the emasculated American male. Fight Club , however, has not sparked an iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp: the Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC's flameout from national sensation to total irrelevance is a tragedy of American sports, a cautionary tale of prudishness, heavy-handed politics, and cultural myopia.
UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. What would happen if a kickboxer fought a wrestler? A karate champion fought a sumo champion? Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. "There are no rules!" bragged an early press release. Contestants would fight till "knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or death." UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Four-hundred-pound men were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.
The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What happens when a 620-pound sumo champion fights a 200-pound kickboxer? Answer: The kickboxer knocks him silly in 35 seconds. They tuned in for bloodshed--"the damage," as fans like to call it. UFC fights could be horrifying. Tank Abbott, an ill-tempered, 270-pound street fighter, knocks out hapless opponent John Matua in 15 seconds. Then, before the ref can intervene, Abbott belts the unconscious Matua in the head, sending him into a fit, limbs quivering uncontrollably, blood spurting from his mouth. Abbott, naturally, became a cult hero and won a guest spot on Friends . (Matua walked out of the ring.) Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions.
But a subtle sport was emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which is also called "extreme" or "no-holds-barred" fighting) began when I saw the finals of UFC IV. Royce Gracie, a 180-pound Brazilian jujitsu specialist, was matched against a 275-pound beast named Dan Severn, one of the top heavyweight wrestlers in the world and a national champion many times over. In 30 seconds, Severn had grabbed Gracie, flung him to the canvas, and mounted him. For the next 15 minutes, Severn pummeled and elbowed and head-butted the smaller man. Gracie's face grew drawn, and he squirmed wildly to avoid Severn's bombardment. Then, all of sudden, Gracie, still lying on his back, saw an opening, wrapped his arms and legs around Severn like a python and choked the giant into submission.
UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Nursed on boxing and Hollywood, Americans imagine fights as choreography, a dance of elegant combinations, roundhouse kicks, clean knockouts. The UFC punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as karate and tae kwon do, who fancied themselves the world's greatest fighters, found themselves pretzeled by jujitsu masters, who pulled them to the ground and slowly choked or leg-locked them. "UFC immediately debunked a lot of myths of fighting, of boxing, karate, kung fu. It showed the reality of what works in an actual fight," says Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer .
Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like ... sex. Almost all fights ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the pair of them wiggling mysteriously along the canvas for five, 10, even 30 minutes. There were few spectacular knockouts. The referee--yes, there was always a referee--stopped many bouts, and in most others, fighters "tapped out," surrendering to mild-looking but agonizing chokes and joint locks. It was not barbarism. It was science.
The UFC spawned a new breed of "mixed martial artists." World-class wrestlers learned to kickbox. Champion kickboxers learned to grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, the best fighters in the world. (Click for more about the fighters.) Mike Tyson wouldn't last 30 seconds in an ultimate fighting match. When Olympic gold medal wrestler Kevin Jackson came to the UFC, a fighter named Frank Shamrock KO'd him with a submission hold in 16 seconds. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work.
UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art. Instead, it fell apart. The collapse began in 1996, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saw a UFC tape. McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was "barbaric," he said. It was "not a sport." He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against "human cockfighting" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding.
UFC fell victim to cultural determinism about what a fight is. In countries such as Brazil and Japan, where no-holds-barred fighting has a long history, it is popular and uncontroversial. But Americans adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. A fight consists of an exchange of upper-body blows that halts when one fighter falls.
Any blood sport can be barbaric, whether it's boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.
Similarly, the chain-link fence surrounding the octagon looks grotesque. Critics have demanded that UFC install ropes instead. But ropes are a major cause of death and injury in boxing: Fighters hyperextend their necks when they are punched against the ropes, because nothing stops their heads from snapping back. The chain-link fence prevents hyperextension.
When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: "Don't people get killed all the time doing that?" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.
But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, "If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.
But logic has not served the UFC well. Where McCain led, a prudish nation followed. George Will opined against UFC. The American Medical Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as did other states. The Nevada Athletic Commission refused to sanction UFC bouts, barring the UFC from the lucrative casino market. (One public TV station refused a UFC sponsorship ad. The only other organization the station ever rejected was the Ku Klux Klan.) Lawsuits blocked or delayed UFC events all over the country, forcing the promoters to spend millions in legal fees. The UFC was exiled from mega-arenas to ever-smaller venues in ever more out-of-the-way states: Louisiana, Iowa, and Alabama. The match I attended in October 1997 was held in the parking lot of a small Mississippi casino.
The cable TV industry struck the fatal blow. In early 1997, McCain became chairman of the commerce committee, which oversees the cable industry. In April 1997, the president of the National Cable Television Association warned that UFC broadcasts could jeopardize the cable industry's influence in Washington. Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer's Choice, and other major operators stopped airing UFC events, saying they were too violent for children. Never mind that 1) UFC only aired on pay-per-view, so children could not see it unless their parents paid for it; and 2) the same cable outfits carried boxing matches, R and NC-17 movies, and professional wrestling shows far more violent than UFC. The UFC's "addressable audience"--the potential number of PPV subscribers--shrank from 35 million at its peak to 7.5 million today.
"It was a very cheap way for the cable companies to portray themselves as anti-violence. It did not cost them much and it made them look good in Washington," says Carol Klenfner, spokeswoman for UFC's parent company, SEG.
The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own cause. The UFC promoted itself less as a serious sport than as a circus of carnage. Its early ads emphasized extreme fighting's potential for death. UFC folks accused McCain, without any evidence, of opposing the sport as a favor to campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the other ultimate fighting operation, the now-defunct Battlecade, were arrested for violating Canadian prizefighting laws when they fought on an Indian reservation outside Montreal.
In the past two years, an increasingly desperate UFC has been trying to assuage its critics. The competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first fight, imposed even more. It institued rounds and a "10-point must" scoring system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear thin martial arts gloves (a purely cosmetic change). The UFC imposed weight classes, ending the David-and-Goliath mismatches that made early fights so compelling.
None of this soothed the cable operators, who have kept UFC off the air. The pay-per-view audience has plunged from 300,000 per show to 15,000. UFC can no longer afford its best fighters: Some are fighting overseas. Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. Fights have deteriorated. UFC is limping along, but it has been reduced to scheduling events in Japan and Brazil.
"Sports fans want to grow with the sport," says former UFC fighter David Beneteau. "They want to recognize the athletes. They want to see the same fighters come back. When you compare UFC now to what it was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have no story to follow."
Even as it disappears from public view, ultimate fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, state legislators, and McCain, kids are still learning mixed martial-arts techniques, and small-time promoters are quietly staging events. You can see Kage Kombat competitions at Dancing Waters nightclub in San Pedro, Calif. You can watch the Warrior's Challenge at a small Indian casino outside Sacramento. Texans compete in Houston's Dungal All Styles Fighting Championship. Tribal casinos in Northern Idaho are hosting small Pankration tournaments. The Extreme Fighting Challenge is popular in Iowa. The money is low; the crowds are small; and there's not a TV camera in sight. Ultimate fighting should have become boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club.
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I, Antichrist? by Jeffrey Goldberg
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" I, Antichrist?", Jeffrey Goldberg, 1999.
I, Antichrist?
Early one shiny autumn morning, I got in my car and drove to Lynchburg, Va., in order to find out whether or not I am the Antichrist. You know: the Beast, the Worthless Shepherd, the Little Horn, the Abomination, the linchpin of the Diabolical Trinity. That Antichrist.
I had my suspicions. Nowhere on my body could I find the mark of the Beast--666--but I do have a freckle that's shaped like Bermuda. And though I have never been seized by a desire to lead the armies of Satan in a final, bloody confrontation with the forces of God on the plain of Armageddon, I do suffer from aggravated dyspepsia, as well as chronic malaise, conditions that I'm sure afflict the Antichrist.
The surest suspicion I had about my pivotal role in Christian eschatology grew from the fact that I am Jewish, male, and alive. These are the qualifications for the job of Antichrist as specified by Lynchburg's most famous preacher, Jerry Falwell, in a speech he made earlier this year.
I was actually going to see the Rev. Falwell on a different matter, the future of Jerusalem, but I thought I might just slip this question--the one about me maybe being the Antichrist--into the stream of the interview. Falwell, I guessed, wouldn't be happy to discuss his views on the identity of the Antichrist--he had apologized for the remark but took quite a load of grief for it anyway.
As it turned out, though, Falwell was eager to talk about the Antichrist. And, as it also turned out, he didn't really feel bad for saying what he said. In fact, he was more convinced than ever that the Antichrist is a Jew who walks among us.
Let me pause for a moment to give three concise reasons why I'm so curious about the identity of the Antichrist:
1) I think I speak for all the approximately 4.5 million adult male Jews in the world when I say that we get a little antsy when Christians start looking at us like we're the devil. This is on account of Christian behavior over the past 2,000 years, by which I mean blood libels and pogroms and inquisitions, those sorts of things.
2) I've always been possessed by the delusional notion that I am to play a major role in world history, so why not a role in the End of Days? And I don't mean the Schwarzenegger movie.
3) Now that we stand on the lip of the millennium, much of the evangelical Christian world is in the grip of Armageddon fever, and, according to the evangelical interpretation of the books of Daniel and Revelation, the Antichrist will make his appearance before Christ makes his, and his is looking kinda imminent. The Antichrist, in this reading, will be a world leader who strikes a peace deal with Israel, only to betray the Jewish state and make war on it, until Jesus comes to the rescue. The thankful Jews, those who are still alive, will then become Christians and live happily ever after. These beliefs, held by tens of millions of Christians are, journalistically speaking, worthy of note.
The day before my visit with the Rev. Falwell, I had just finished reading a novelistic treatment of these events, Assassins , which is subtitled Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist . Assassins is the sixth book in the "Left Behind" series, "left behind" referring to those unfortunate nonevangelical Christians who are not taken up to heaven in the Rapture--the opening act in God's end days plan--and are forced to contend with the Antichrist's evil reign on Earth. The "Left Behind" series, co-written by Tim LaHaye, the prominent right-wing screwball and husband of Beverly LaHaye, the even more prominent right-wing screwball, and Jerry B. Jenkins, who, his biography states, is the author of 130 books, which is a lot of books for one guy to write, is a phenomenon. Ten million copies of the series have sold already--hundreds in my local PriceClub alone. "Left Behind" is the Harry Potter of the Armageddon set.
The notable thing for me about the "Left Behind" series--beside the fact that few in the secular media have noticed that millions of Americans are busy reading books warning about the imminence of one-world government, mass death, and the return of the Messiah, is that all the Jewish characters are Christian. LaHaye and Jenkins are both active participants in the absurd and feverish campaign by some evangelical Christians to redefine Judaism in a way that allows for belief in Jesus.
Jews (and again, I feel comfortable speaking for all of us here) find this sort of Christian imperialism just a wee bit offensive. Just imagine if Jews began an official campaign calling Muhammad irrelevant to Islam--can you imagine the fatwas that would produce?
But evangelical leaders, who are, in my experience, uniformly kind and generous in their personal relations, can also be terribly obnoxious in their relations with Jews.
There is only one road to salvation for Jews, and that road runs through Jesus, LaHaye told me. To his credit, though, LaHaye doesn't believe that the Antichrist will be Jewish. He will be a European gentile, who will kill lots of Jews. "The Jews will be forced to accept the idolatry of the Antichrist or be beheaded," he said. This will take place during the seven-year Tribulation.
Jewish suffering, though, is divinely ordained. Even though the Antichrist will not be Jewish, Jews are still capable of great evil and have often been punished for their evil, LaHaye explained. "Some of the greatest evil in the history of the world was concocted in the Jewish mind," LaHaye told me, for reasons that aren't entirely clear--he knew what the name "Goldberg" generally signifies. "Sigmund Freud, Marx, these were Jewish minds that were infected with atheism."
I asked LaHaye to tell me more about the Jewish mind.
"The Jewish brain also has the capacity for great good," he explained. "God gave the Jews great intelligence. He didn't give them great size or physical power--you don't see too many Jews in the NFL--but he gave them great minds."
Of all the evangelical leaders I have interviewed, LaHaye is capable of some of the most anti-Semitic utterances, which is troublesome, because he is also the most popular author in the evangelical world.
The Rev. Falwell is smoother than LaHaye. He acknowledges "where the sensitivity comes from," though he shows no understanding of the role the myth of the Antichrist played in the history of anti-Semitism, and he refuses to back away from his opinion that somewhere in Great Neck or West L.A. or Shaker Heights is living Satan's agent.
"In my opinion," he told me, "the Antichrist will be a counterfeit of the true Christ, which means that he will be male and Jewish, since Jesus was male and Jewish."
I asked him if he understood that such statements strip Jews of their humanity, which is the first step anti-Semites take before they kill them. He responded, "All the Jewish people we do business with on a daily basis, not one has ever got upset over this." It is not Jews who picked this most recent fight, he said, it is supporters of President Clinton.
"Billy Graham made the same statement a dozen times last year, but there was no comment about that," Falwell said. "But Billy Graham was not calling for the resignation of the president." Falwell, you'll recall, is no fan of Clinton's; he has even peddled a video accusing the president of murder.
Falwell is right: Evangelical preachers are constantly accusing the Jews of harboring the Antichrist.
I asked Falwell if he knew the actual identity of the Antichrist. No, he said. "People might say, it's a certain person, it's Henry Kissinger, like that, but the Lord does not let us know that."
So there's a chance, then, that I'm the Antichrist?
Falwell chuckled a condescending chuckle. "It's almost amusing, that question. Of course not. I know that you're not."
Why?
"The Antichrist will be a world leader, he'll have supernatural powers," he said.
He got me there--I have no supernatural powers. I can't even drive a stick shift.
I pressed him further on the identity of the Antichrist, but Falwell wouldn't play. "We'll know the Antichrist when he arrives," he said.
Most evangelical leaders, in fact, refuse to publicly guess the name of the Antichrist--though, as Falwell suggests, Kissinger is a perennial favorite, at least among those evangelicals who believe the Antichrist will be Jewish. For most of their history, Christian leaders had been content to ascribe the characteristics of the Antichrist to the Jewish people as a whole. "Ever since the 2 nd century CE, the very beginning of the Antichrist legend, Christians have associated Jews with everything unholy," Andrew Gow, who teaches Christian history at the University of Alberta, told me. In the minds of early Christian leaders, the church was the new Israel; God's covenant with the Jews was obsolete. Therefore, the Jews who remained on Earth were there to serve devilish purposes, Gow explained.
There are plenty of evangelical thinkers who differ with Falwell, who believe, like LaHaye, that the Antichrist will be a gentile who rises out of Europe. "The Antichrist is supposed to make a peace treaty with Israel," Ed Hindson, the author of Is the Antichrist Alive and Well? , explained. "Why would a Jew make a peace treaty with a Jewish state?"
Hindson suggested that Satan will make the Antichrist the leader of the European Union--the revived Roman Empire, eternal enemy of Israel--though Hindson disputed one popular idea advocated by Monte Judah, an Oklahoma-based prophecy-teacher, that Prince Charles is the Antichrist.
"There's no way Prince Charles is the Antichrist," Hindson said. "Satan can do better than that."
In his book, Hindson runs through a list of potential candidates. Bill Clinton is there, of course, as well as Saddam Hussein and Ronald Wilson Reagan (six letters in each of his three names. Get it?).
Of course, none of these men are gay.
"It says in the Bible that the Antichrist will have 'no regard for women,' and so many evangelicals interpret that to mean that he will be a homosexual," Hindson said, though he added that he's not entirely convinced.
This idea--the Antichrist as gay--strikes a chord with many evangelicals, just as the idea that the Antichrist is Jewish strikes a chord.
I gradually came to see how far-fetched it was to think that I might be the Antichrist. I'm not gay, I'm not famous, I wouldn't know a euro if I found one in my wallet.
Then it struck me: Barry Diller is the Antichrist.
There's no way to know for sure. But if you wake up one morning to read that Barry Diller is the head of the European Union (and that David Geffen is his deputy), well, remember where you read it first.
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It's Time To Keelhaul U-Haul! by Jeffrey Goldberg
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" It's Time To Keelhaul U-Haul!", Jeffrey Goldberg, 1999.
It's Time To Keelhaul U-Haul!
Like all superheroes worthy of the title, the Shopping Avenger has an Achilles' heel. In the case of the Shopping Avenger, his Achilles' heel is not animal, vegetable, or mineral but something less tangible.
An explanation: Last week, the magazine you are currently reading forced the Shopping Avenger at gunpoint to read a series of treacle-filled self-help books, and then to . The Shopping Avenger, who can withstand radiation, extreme heat and cold, hail, bear attacks, and Eyes Wide Shut , almost succumbed to terminal jejuneness after reading these books. Except for one thing: One of the books, The Art of Happiness , which collects and simplifies the Dalai Lama's philosophy, got the Shopping Avenger to thinking. This, in a way, is the Shopping Avenger's Achilles' heel: thinking. Perhaps it is wrong, the Shopping Avenger thought, to complain about the petty insults and inconveniences of life in the materialistic '90s. The Shopping Avenger felt that perhaps he should counsel those who write seeking help to meditate, to accept bad service the way one accepts the change of seasons, and to extend a compassionate hand of forgiveness to those who provide poor customer care.
But then the Shopping Avenger sat down, and the feeling passed.
The Shopping Avenger does not make light of the Dalai Lama or of the notion that there is more to life than the impatient acquisition of material goods. If the Shopping Avenger were not, for a superhero, extremely nonjudgmental--as opposed to his alter ego, who is considered insufferably judgmental by his alter ego's wife--the Shopping Avenger would tell the occasional correspondent to let go of his petty grievance and get a life.
But the Shopping Avenger also believes that the Dalai Lama has never tried to rent a truck from U-Haul. If he had tried to rent from U-Haul, he never would have escaped from Tibet. (For the complete back story, see "Shopping Avenger" column and one.)
The complaints about U-Haul's nonreservation reservation policy continue to pour in through the electronic mail. One correspondent, B.R., wrote in with this cautionary tale: "Last weekend, I went to San Francisco to help my brother and his family move into their first house. My brother had reserved a moving truck with U-Haul for the big day. I warned my brother about U-Haul's 'not really a reservation per se' policy that I learned from the Shopping Avenger. He didn't believe such a thing would happen to him, so he didn't act on my warning."
B.R. continues--as if you don't know what happened already--"I went to U-Haul with my brother to get our 'reserved' truck. The store had many customers standing around looking frustrated. When we got to the front of the line, the clerk informed us that our 'reserved' truck had not yet been returned. We asked if we could rent one of the many trucks sitting idle in the parking lot. The clerk laughed and said the keys to those trucks were lost."
B.R. and his chastened brother--the Shopping Avenger is resisting the urge to gloat--went to Ryder. "Ryder had a truck available for us. The gentleman who helped us at Ryder said Ryder prides itself on being everything U-Haul is not."
The Shopping Avenger has still not received a call from U-Haul spokeswoman Johna Burke explaining why U-Haul refuses to provide trucks to people who reserve trucks, but the Shopping Avenger is pleased to note that several correspondents have written in over the past month saying that, based on what they have read in this column, they will be taking their business to Ryder or Budget or elsewhere.
The Shopping Avenger will undoubtedly return to the sorry state of affairs at U-Haul in the next episode, but now on to this month's airline debacle.
Before we begin, though, the Shopping Avenger nearly forgot to announce the winner of last month's contest, in which readers were asked to answer the question, "What's the difference between pests and airlines?"
The winner is one Tom Morgan, who wrote, "You can hire someone to kill pests." Tom is the winner of a year's supply of Turtle Wax, and he will receive his prize just as soon as the Shopping Avenger figures out how much Turtle Wax actually constitutes a year's supply. The new contest question: How much Turtle Wax comprises a year's supply of Turtle Wax?
This month's airline in the spotlight is Southwest. Loyal readers will recall that last month the Shopping Avenger praised Southwest Airlines for its "sterling" customer service. This brought forth a small number of articulate dissensions. The most articulate, and the most troubling, came from M., who wrote, "Last year, flying from Baltimore to Chicago with my entire family (two really little kids included), we set down at Midway in a rainstorm. And waited for our bags. And waited for bags. And waited for bags."
An hour later, M. says, the bags showed up, "soaked through. We took them to baggage services at SW and were faced with the most complicated, unclear, and confusing mechanism for filing a claim we experienced flyers have ever seen."
When they arrived at their destination, M. and her family made a terrible discovery, "We discovered that our clothes were soaked through--the top clothes were so wet that the dye had bled through down to the lower levels, destroying lots of other clothes. Obviously, our bags had just been sitting out on the runway in the rain. To this day, I've never heard a thing from SW, despite calls and letters."
This, of course, is where Shopping Avenger steps in. Shopping Avenger knows that Southwest is different from the average airline, in that it doesn't go out of its way to infuriate its paying customers (see: ), so I expected a quick and generous resolution to M.'s problem.
What I got at first, though, was a load of corporate hoo-ha.
"The airline's policy, which is consistent with all contracts of carriage at all airlines, requires that passengers file a report in person for lost or damaged luggage within four hours of arrival at their destination," a Southwest spokeswoman, Linda Rutherford, e-mailed me. "[M.] indicates she called for a few days, but did not file a report in person until April 12--three days later. Southwest, as a courtesy, took her report anyway and asked for follow up information and written inventory of the damage." Rutherford said that M. should have submitted detailed receipts and photographs of the damage in order to make a claim.
Harrumph, the Shopping Avenger says. It is a bad hair day at Southwest when its officials defend themselves by comparing their airline to other airlines. I forwarded this message to M., who replied:
"Wow. Well, of course I didn't file it at the airport on the 9 th because I didn't know the clothes were ruined at the airport. I didn't know until I opened the baggage at my hotel and saw the ruined stuff. (And it's worth noting that we had already waited for about an hour for our luggage with two little kids and impatient in-laws nipping at our heels.)"
She goes on, "I did call that evening ... and was told that that sufficed. This is the first time I've been told that I had to file a complaint in person within four hours. ... When I filed on the 12 th , I was never told that I needed any receipts or photos or other type of documentation. The baggage folks seemed pretty uninterested in all of this. ... They know that the type of 'evidence' they want is impossible to obtain. They also know that on April 9 they screwed up the luggage retrieval and left bags out in the rain a long time."
Southwest's response actually served to anger M. more than the original problem. "Before, they had a mildly annoyed but loyal customer (who would have been placated by an apology and thrilled with some modest token of their regret). Now they have a pissed-off customer."
Things do look bad for Southwest, don't they? The Shopping Avenger sent M.'s response to Rutherford, who e-mailed back saying she thought the Shopping Avenger was asking for "policy information." The Shopping Avenger e-mailed back again, stressing to Rutherford that the Great Court of Consumer Justice would, if this case were brought to trial, undoubtedly find for the plaintiff (the Shopping Avenger serves as prosecutor, judge, and jury in the Great Court of Consumer Justice--defendants are represented by the president of U-Haul), and that Southwest was precipitously close to feeling the sword of retribution at its neck.
But then she came through, provisionally, "Yep, you can be sure if [M.] will call me we will get everything squared away. I'm sorry it's taken this long for her to get someone who can help, but we will take care of it from here."
Stay tuned, shoppers, to hear whether Southwest makes good it promise to compensate M. and apologize to her for her troubles.
The story of M. reminds the Shopping Avenger of a central truth of consumer service: It's not the crime, it's the cover-up.
Take the case of K., who found himself waiting in vain for Circuit City to repair his television. Televisions break, even 1-year-old televisions, as is the case with K's. But Circuit City, where he bought the television, gave him a terrible runaround. The Shopping Avenger dispatched his sidekick, Tad the Deputy Avenger, to get to the bottom of K.'s story. This is what he found: K. grew concerned, Tad the Deputy Avenger reports, after his television had been in the Circuit City shop for a week. When he called, he was told to "check back next week." When he asked if someone from the store could call him with more information, he was refused. Weeks went by. When K. told one Circuit City employee that he really would like to get his television back, the employee, K. says, asked him, "Don't you have another television in your house?"
More than a month later--after hours and hours and hours of telephone calls and days missed at work--K. received his television back.
Mistakes happen, but not, Tad the Deputy Avenger found out, at Circuit City. The case, K. was told by a Circuit City official, was "handled perfectly." Another official, Morgan Stewart in public relations, assured Deputy Avenger Tad that "We got to be a big and successful company by treating customers better than the other guy." The Shopping Avenger and his loyal sidekick would like to hear from other Circuit City customers: Does Circuit City, in fact, treat its customers better than the other guy?
Stay tuned for answers. And next month, a Shopping Avenger clergy special: TWA screws with a Hasidic rabbi's travel plans, leaving the rabbi's wife crying at the airport. Find out if the Shopping Avenger can save TWA from certain heavenly punishment, in the next episode.
Got a consumer score you want settled? Send e-mail to shoppingavenger@slate.com.
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My Father's Estate by Ben Stein
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" My Father's Estate", Ben Stein, 1999.
My Father's Estate
A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: "I saw that your father had died," she wrote. "He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?" It's a rude question, but it has an answer.
My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.
He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.
The nest egg is going to be taxed at a federal rate of about 55 percent, after an initial exemption and then a transition amount taxed at around 40 percent (and all that after paying estate expenses). When I think about it, I want to cry. My father and mother lived frugally all their lives. They never had a luxury car. They never flew first-class unless it was on the expense account. They never in their whole lives went on an expensive vacation. When he last went into the hospital, my father was still wearing an old pair of gray wool slacks with a sewed-up hole in them from where my dog ripped them--15 years ago.
They never had live-in help. My father washed the dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home.
They made not one penny of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who were less self-disciplined.
There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931 until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are poetry.
That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.
Some of them will go to the Nixon Library, and some will be on bookshelves in the (very small and modest) house my wife and I own in Malibu, a place he found beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could be no more racial segregation in schools. And there are his mementos of Richard Nixon, his White House cufflinks, photos of Camp David, certificates and honorary degrees, and clippings of great events of state. And there are his love letters to and from my mother when they were courting in 1935 and 1936, still tied with light blue ribbon in what was my mother's lingerie drawer, talking about their love triumphing over the dangers of the Depression. I suppose we'll have to place a value on these and have them taxed, too.
But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents.
The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.
My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon.
Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been.
"Loyalty." There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.
My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life.
When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.
He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer.
This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.
He appreciated his friends and did not differentiate between them on the basis of fame or position. He took the words of his longtime pal Murray Foss at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank where he hung his hat for many years, into account; and the words of Mrs. Wiggins, who ran the cafeteria at the AEI; and the thoughts of Alan Greenspan or the head of Goldman, Sachs; and valued them entirely on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him. He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.
My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury.
Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)
Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever.
This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.
My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.
Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others.
He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as "Suvorov," after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.
He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called "Route 29") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled "Only You") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.
Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. ("He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' " my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.)
Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, "Let's do it together. It'll take half as long." I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.
This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge.
And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.
This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value.
So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, "Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax." The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.
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"Phone Me in Central Park" by McConnell, James V.
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""Phone Me in Central Park"", James V. McConnell, 1956.
"Phone Me in Central Park"
By JAMES McCONNELL
There should be an epitaph for every
man, big or little, but a really grand
and special one for Loner Charlie.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Charles turned over on his side to look at her. She lay quietly in the
other bed, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was blonde to
perfection, exquisitely shaped, and the rich promise of her body was
exposed to his view.
"Why?" he thought as he looked at her. "Why did it have to happen like
this?"
The whole thing was still like a dream to him, and as yet he couldn't
decide whether it was a good or a bad dream. A year ago she had been
unattainable, a face to conjure with in erotic dreams, far beyond his
ken. A year ago she had been a public idol, the most popular actress of
the day. And he had been a nobody, full of a nobody's idle hopes and
schemes.
And now he was lying in the bed next to hers in her swank Manhattan
apartment in the most exclusive hotel in town. The unrealness of the
situation overwhelmed him. His mind was a picture of confused thoughts.
Meanings and answers to his questions slithered out of his reach.
"God," he said. It was not an exclamation, nor yet an expletive. It was
a mere statement of fact.
A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided
that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the
room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the
illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.
Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.
"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or
longer. But not now. Not now." He turned away and walked to the window.
"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead."
New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when
day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet
attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric
patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were
shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A
reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.
It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself
freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known
that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the
circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—
"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to
anybody! Why!"
She would have given herself to any man—
His thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating
sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of
protest.
To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!
Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through
the thick pane of window glass.
A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,
attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying
flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary
meanings.
He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His
stomach clenched up like an angry fist.
"But I don't want to be the last man alive!" he shouted. "I don't know
what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—"
A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his
knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands
clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite
of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the
bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the
window for several minutes.
"
Maybe I'm not the last!
"
The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with
swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.
Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers
were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.
He had to know—he had to find out.
As he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant
state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her
gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against
her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position
and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles
picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started
to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his
conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.
The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it
on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing
Rachmaninoff's
Isle of the Dead
on full automatic. The music haunted
him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.
The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles
ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics
was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts
smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.
"That was it," he said to himself. "Pride. We called this the 'Proud
Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings
were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity
seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small
unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,
ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.
"We were free. We seemed, almost, to have accomplished something. The
world was running well. No wonder we called it the 'Proud Era.' Life
was fun, just a bowl of cherries, until...."
Two years ago the animals had started dying. Strangely enough the
rats had gone first, to anybody's notice. Sales of poison dropped,
scientific laboratories chained to a perpetual rodent-cycle began to
complain bitterly.
Then the lovers who hunted out and haunted the lonely lanes through the
countryside began to remark that the locusts were late that year. The
Southern states joyously reported that mosquito control was working to
an unprecedented degree. The largest cotton crop ever was forecast and
rumors from Mexico had it that no one had died from scorpion bite in
several weeks.
A month later the meat animals, the birds and the household pets
began dropping as rapidly as the flies which had dropped earlier.
Congress was called into special session, as were all of the national
governments around the world. The U.N. met at emergency sessions to
cope with the situation. The president of the world-wide Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals committed suicide.
Within a year it was obvious to everyone that man was the only animal
left on earth.
The panic which had begun with the death of the animals was quieted
somewhat by the fact that humans seemed immune to the pandemic. But the
lakes full of dead fish caused a great stink and residents along the
coasts began to move inland. Sales of perfumes and deodorants soared.
Then just one year ago, the first human became infected with the
strange malady. Within six months, half of the world's population was
gone. Less than a month ago no more than a few thousand people remained
in New York. And now....
"I've got to find out," Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,
but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might
give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. "But I've got to try." He
walked on down the bloody street.
Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's
crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of
a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every
human on earth.
Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by
means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for
man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,
who was dead, and where everybody was.
Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's
four billion inhabitants. Four billion names and addresses, compressed
into microprint, a tremendous achievement even for the "Proud Era."
In all of his life, Charles had never once glanced at The Index.
The average person had little necessity to do so since the Bureau
information service would answer questions free of charge at any time.
Reaching the gigantic building, Charles pushed aside the body of a
young man and walked into the main foyer. Passing behind once-guarded
doors, he entered the giant computer room and paused in admiration.
Only once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room.
But he still remembered it and he still recalled the powerful emotional
experience it had been those many years ago.
All children had to have a brain-wave recording made by the Bureau
during the first month of their life. And again at the age of 10 each
child returned to the Bureau for a recheck. It was for this latter
recording that Charles had come to the Bureau some twenty-two years
before and a friendly guard had let him peep briefly into the computer
room. The impression of intense activity, of organized confusion, of
mechanical wonder had remained with him the rest of his life.
"So different now," he thought, surveying the room. "Now it's empty, so
empty." The machine seemed to reflect the stillness, the very deadness
of the world. The silence became unbearable.
Charles walked to the master control panel. With newly acquired
dexterity he switched the computer screens on and watched them glow
to life. All around the world sensitive receiving stations pulsed to
activity, sending out searching fingers, hunting for elusive patterns
of neutral energy, mapping and tabulating the results.
The main computer screen dominated one wall of the room. Other smaller
screens clustered around it. On these screens could be graphed the
population of any and every part of the globe. An illuminated counter
immediately above it would give the numerical strength of the area
being sampled while the screen would show population density by
individual pinpoints of light that merged to form brightness patterns.
"I'll try New York first," he said to himself, knowing that he was a
coward, afraid to check the whole world from the start. "I'll start
with New York and work up."
Charles activated the switches that would flash a schematic map of New
York on the screen. "There's bound to be somebody else left here. After
all, there were at least twenty of us just a couple of days ago." And
one of them, a beautiful woman, had invited him up to her apartment,
not because she liked him, but because....
The main screen focused itself, the patterns shifting into a
recognizable perceptual image.
"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of
us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us
alive then." Including the blond young woman who had died just this
afternoon....
Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision
caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes
continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief
of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining
dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.
His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.
One.
He gasped.
The counter read
one
.
Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.
He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press
quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer
controls.
New York State. One.
The entire United States. One.
The western hemisphere, including islands.
(Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).
One.
The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near
East, Africa and then Europe.
England!
There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter
clicked forward.
Two!
His trembling stopped. He breathed again.
"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the
plague. It's only logical that—"
He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter
clicked again.
One.
Alone.
Alone!
Charles screamed.
The bottom dropped out from under him!
Why?
Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of
human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than
the so-called "basic" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,
companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of
the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other
animals, when he first asked the question: "Why?"
But thinking about "why" didn't answer the question itself, Charles
thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central
Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly
free of bodies.
"You've got about ten minutes warning," he said to himself. "I guess
that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.
Not out in the unprotected open."
The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect
noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream
of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.
Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....
Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on
earth, me. The last. Why me?
Average, that's what he was. Height: 5'11". Weight: 165. Age: 32.
Status: Married, once upon a time.
The Norm, with no significant departures, all down the line. Church
member, but not a good one. Could that be it? Could the most normal be
the most perfect? Had he led the best of all possible lives? Was that
it? Had God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, spared his life, saved
him, singled him out because he was most nearly a saint, most nearly
Christ-like, most nearly....
Lies—His mind snapped back to reality. He half smiled. Saint? Christ?
The Second Coming?
He was no saint.
Charles sighed.
What about—?
Chance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,
normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square
foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New
York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from
here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.
So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying
assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments
concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had
to be the last to go and that was—
"No," Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.
"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind
rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.
There must be!"
He sighed slowly.
"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it," he said in derision to
the gravel path as he walked along it. "A hermit in the midst of a city
of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?"
It was hard to realize, even now. "A hermit, alone—and I haven't even
got a cave...."
Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to
sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change
things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.
And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his
"cave."
It took him almost an hour to find the proper tools, and better than
two hours more of hard, nighttime work to get the hole dug to his
satisfaction. It took almost three hours to find the right sort of
casket, durable but not too heavy for one man to handle. He carted it
out to a grassy plot close to the center of the park where the grave
was. He let the coffin down slowly into the depression, then piled up
loose dirt on the sloping sides of the hole so that the rain would wash
it down over him.
"I can't very well bury myself," he said. "I guess it will rain after
I'm gone." He looked carefully down at the metallic container.
Wait now. There was something wrong, something missing. It was—oh,
yes, he caught it. It was the stone. There wasn't any stone to go at
the head of the grave. "I'll have to fix that."
A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby
tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of
the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.
"It ought to be something impressive," he thought out loud. "Something
fitting the occasion."
What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to
practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to
be proper.
"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds
too ... too...."
Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:
HERE LIES THE BODY OF
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH
Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the
rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.
Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants
near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece
of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time
carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real
shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to
go with the stone.
Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much
difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time
to wait. "Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to
smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it."
He smiled. Strange, but now he wanted very much to go on living,
alone or not. There were things he could do, ways to keep occupied.
He wouldn't mind it so much. But he wanted more and more desperately
with each passing second to retain his foothold on the tenuous path of
physical existence.
The tantalizing thought of "why" puzzled its way back into his mind.
But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the
conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days
perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of
opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for
now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He
thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses
of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to
forget.
Charles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across
from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and
almost fell as he stepped from the curb.
"Look at me, nervous as a cat."
He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.
"I—" He started to say something, to think something. But some hidden
part of his mind clamped down, obscuring the thought, rejecting the
concept.
The tremor turned to a shake before he reached the far curb, and the
first burst of wild pain came as he laid his shoulder against the door
to the restaurant. This was the way the plague began, but—His mind
quickly repressed the idea. It couldn't be the plague. He was immune!
Another burst of pulsating, shattering pain crashed through his body,
tearing down the defenses of his mind, putting an end of his thoughts
of immunity. Colors flared before his eyes, a persistent, irresistible
susurrus flooded his ears.
He wanted to protest, but there was no one to listen to him. He
appealed to every divinity he knew, all the time knowing it would be
useless. His body, out of his voluntary control, tried to run off in
all directions at once.
Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to
channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into
action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had
to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow
home. He couldn't die until then.
Ten minutes.
He was allotted ten minutes before the end.
It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time
meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and
minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.
He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling
machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs
gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his
stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.
Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do
not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he
pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace
and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.
His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.
Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped
his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching
for the grave.
And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched
bare space instead.
He was home.
He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final
movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He
tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll
into the hole.
Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The
answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and
sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying
muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.
He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down
into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the
empty coffin.
The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the
last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.
Charles screamed.
The large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire
State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by
another of its kind.
"It is finished?" asked the second.
"Yes. Just now. I am resting."
"I can feel the emptiness of it."
"It was very good. Where were you?"
"On the next planet out. No beauty to it at all; no system. How was
yours?"
"Beautiful," said the first. "It went according to the strictest
semantic relationship following the purest mathematical principles.
They made it easy for me."
"Good."
"Well, where to now?"
"There's another system about four thoughts away. We're due there soon."
"All right. Let's go."
"What's that you have there?"
"Oh, this?" replied the first. "It's a higher neural order compendium
the Things here made up. It's what I used."
"You can't take it with you, you know. They don't allow souvenirs."
"I know."
"Well?"
"All right, all right. You're so good, see if you can compute the
scatter probability."
The first being moved imperceptably and the heavy plastoid binding of
the book disappeared. The thousands of pages dropped softly, caught
at the wind like hungry sails, separated, and pulled by the fingers of
gravity, went their disparate ways.
Here a page scuttled into a broken window of the Chrysler Building
(read the names: Aabat, Aabbs, Aabbt).
Here a page landed upright on the head of one of the library lions
and sloughed softly to the ground (read the names: Looman, Loomana,
Loomanabsky).
Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the
riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read
the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).
And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,
promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of
metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).
It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they
fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on
the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:
HERE LIES THE BODY OF
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—
CHARLES J. ZZYZST
GO TO HELL!
|
...After a Few Words... by Garrett, Randall
|
"...After a Few Words...", Randall Garrett, 1957.
... After a Few Words ...
by Seaton McKettrig
Illustrated by Summer
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Analog October 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright
on this publication was renewed.]
This is a science-fiction story. History is a science; the other
part is, as all Americans know, the most fictional field we have
today.
He settled himself comfortably in his seat, and carefully put the helmet
on, pulling it down firmly until it was properly seated. For a moment,
he could see nothing.
Then his hand moved up and, with a flick of the wrist, lifted the visor.
Ahead of him, in serried array, with lances erect and pennons flying,
was the forward part of the column. Far ahead, he knew, were the Knights
Templars, who had taken the advance. Behind the Templars rode the mailed
knights of Brittany and Anjou. These were followed by King Guy of
Jerusalem and the host of Poitou.
He himself, Sir Robert de Bouain, was riding with the Norman and English
troops, just behind the men of Poitou. Sir Robert turned slightly in his
saddle. To his right, he could see the brilliant red-and-gold banner of
the lion-hearted Richard of England—
gules, in pale three lions passant
guardant or
. Behind the standard-bearer, his great war horse moving
with a steady, measured pace, his coronet of gold on his steel helm
gleaming in the glaring desert sun, the lions of England on his
firm-held shield, was the King himself.
Further behind, the Knights Hospitallers protected the rear, guarding
the column of the hosts of Christendom from harassment by the Bedouins.
"By our Lady!" came a voice from his left. "Three days out from Acre,
and the accursed Saracens still elude us."
Sir Robert de Bouain twisted again in his saddle to look at the knight
riding alongside him. Sir Gaeton de l'Arc-Tombé sat tall and straight in
his saddle, his visor up, his blue eyes narrowed against the glare of
the sun.
Sir Robert's lips formed a smile. "They are not far off, Sir Gaeton.
They have been following us. As we march parallel to the seacoast, so
they have been marching with us in those hills to the east."
"Like the jackals they are," said Sir Gaeton. "They assail us from the
rear, and they set up traps in our path ahead. Our spies tell us that
the Turks lie ahead of us in countless numbers. And yet, they fear to
face us in open battle."
"Is it fear, or are they merely gathering their forces?"
"Both," said Sir Gaeton flatly. "They fear us, else they would not dally
to amass so fearsome a force. If, as our informers tell us, there are
uncounted Turks to the fore, and if, as we are aware, our rear is being
dogged by the Bedouin and the black horsemen of Egypt, it would seem
that Saladin has at hand more than enough to overcome us, were they all
truly Christian knights."
"Give them time. We must wait for their attack, sir knight. It were
foolhardy to attempt to seek them in their own hills, and yet they must
stop us. They will attack before we reach Jerusalem, fear not."
"We of Gascony fear no heathen Musselman," Sir Gaeton growled. "It's
this Hellish heat that is driving me mad." He pointed toward the eastern
hills. "The sun is yet low, and already the heat is unbearable."
Sir Robert heard his own laugh echo hollowly within his helmet. "Perhaps
'twere better to be mad when the assault comes. Madmen fight better than
men of cooler blood." He knew that the others were baking inside their
heavy armor, although he himself was not too uncomfortable.
Sir Gaeton looked at him with a smile that held both irony and respect.
"In truth, sir knight, it is apparent that you fear neither men nor
heat. Nor is your own blood too cool. True, I ride with your Normans and
your English and your King Richard of the Lion's Heart, but I am a
Gascon, and have sworn no fealty to him. But to side with the Duke of
Burgundy against King Richard—" He gave a short, barking laugh. "I
fear no man," he went on, "but if I had to fear one, it would be Richard
of England."
Sir Robert's voice came like a sword: steely, flat, cold, and sharp. "My
lord the King spoke in haste. He has reason to be bitter against Philip
of France, as do we all. Philip has deserted the field. He has returned
to France in haste, leaving the rest of us to fight the Saracen for the
Holy Land leaving only the contingent of his vassal the Duke of Burgundy
to remain with us."
"Richard of England has never been on the best of terms with Philip
Augustus," said Sir Gaeton.
"No, and with good cause. But he allowed his anger against Philip to
color his judgment when he spoke harshly against the Duke of Burgundy.
The Duke is no coward, and Richard Plantagenet well knows it. As I said,
he spoke in haste."
"And you intervened," said Sir Gaeton.
"It was my duty." Sir Robert's voice was stubborn. "Could we have
permitted a quarrel to develop between the two finest knights and
warleaders in Christendom at this crucial point? The desertion of Philip
of France has cost us dearly. Could we permit the desertion of Burgundy,
too?"
"You did what must be done in honor," the Gascon conceded, "but you have
not gained the love of Richard by doing so."
Sir Robert felt his jaw set firmly. "My king knows I am loyal."
Sir Gaeton said nothing more, but there was a look in his eyes that
showed that he felt that Richard of England might even doubt the loyalty
of Sir Robert de Bouain.
Sir Robert rode on in silence, feeling the movement of the horse beneath
him.
There was a sudden sound to the rear. Like a wash of the tide from the
sea came the sound of Saracen war cries and the clash of steel on steel
mingled with the sounds of horses in agony and anger.
Sir Robert turned his horse to look.
The Negro troops of Saladin's Egyptian contingent were thundering down
upon the rear! They clashed with the Hospitallers, slamming in like a
rain of heavy stones, too close in for the use of bows. There was only
the sword against armor, like the sound of a thousand hammers against a
thousand anvils.
"Stand fast! Stand fast! Hold them off!" It was the voice of King
Richard, sounding like a clarion over the din of battle.
Sir Robert felt his horse move, as though it were urging him on toward
the battle, but his hand held to the reins, keeping the great charger in
check. The King had said "Stand fast!" and this was no time to disobey
the orders of Richard.
The Saracen troops were coming in from the rear, and the Hospitallers
were taking the brunt of the charge. They fought like madmen, but they
were slowly being forced back.
The Master of the Hospitallers rode to the rear, to the King's standard,
which hardly moved in the still desert air, now that the column had
stopped moving.
The voice of the Duke of Burgundy came to Sir Robert's ears.
"Stand fast. The King bids you all to stand fast," said the duke, his
voice fading as he rode on up the column toward the knights of Poitou
and the Knights Templars.
The Master of the Hospitallers was speaking in a low, urgent voice to
the King: "My lord, we are pressed on by the enemy and in danger of
eternal infamy. We are losing our horses, one after the other!"
"Good Master," said Richard, "it is you who must sustain their attack.
No one can be everywhere at once."
The Master of the Hospitallers nodded curtly and charged back into the
fray.
The King turned to Sir Baldwin de Carreo, who sat ahorse nearby, and
pointed toward the eastern hills. "They will come from there, hitting us
in the flank; we cannot afford to amass a rearward charge. To do so
would be to fall directly into the hands of the Saracen."
A voice very close to Sir Robert said: "Richard is right. If we go to
the aid of the Hospitallers, we will expose the column to a flank
attack." It was Sir Gaeton.
"My lord the King," Sir Robert heard his voice say, "is right in all but
one thing. If we allow the Egyptians to take us from the rear, there
will be no need for Saladin and his Turks to come down on our flank. And
the Hospitallers cannot hold for long at this rate. A charge at full
gallop would break the Egyptian line and give the Hospitallers breathing
time. Are you with me?"
"Against the orders of the King?"
"The King cannot see everything! There are times when a man must use his
own judgment! You said you were afraid of no man. Are you with me?"
After a moment's hesitation, Sir Gaeton couched his lance. "I'm with
you, sir knight! Live or die, I follow! Strike and strike hard!"
"Forward then!" Sir Robert heard himself shouting. "Forward for St.
George and for England!"
"St. George and England!" the Gascon echoed.
Two great war horses began to move ponderously forward toward the battle
lines, gaining momentum as they went. Moving in unison, the two knights,
their horses now at a fast trot, lowered their lances, picking their
Saracen targets with care. Larger and larger loomed the Egyptian
cavalrymen as the horses changed pace to a thundering gallop.
The Egyptians tried to dodge, as they saw, too late, the approach of the
Christian knights.
Sir Robert felt the shock against himself and his horse as the steel tip
of the long ash lance struck the Saracen horseman in the chest. Out of
the corner of his eye, he saw that Sir Gaeton, too, had scored.
The Saracen, impaled on Sir Robert's lance, shot from the saddle as he
died. His lighter armor had hardly impeded the incoming spear-point, and
now his body dragged it down as he dropped toward the desert sand.
Another Moslem cavalryman was charging in now, swinging his curved
saber, taking advantage of Sir Robert's sagging lance.
There was nothing else to do but drop the lance and draw his heavy
broadsword. His hand grasped it, and it came singing from its scabbard.
The Egyptian's curved sword clanged against Sir Robert's helm, setting
his head ringing. In return, the knight's broadsword came about in a
sweeping arc, and the Egyptian's horse rode on with the rider's headless
body.
Behind him, Sir Robert heard further cries of "St. George and England!"
The Hospitallers, taking heart at the charge, were going in! Behind them
came the Count of Champagne, the Earl of Leister, and the Bishop of
Beauvais, who carried a great warhammer in order that he might not break
Church Law by shedding blood.
Sir Robert's own sword rose and fell, cutting and hacking at the enemy.
He himself felt a dreamlike detachment, as though he were watching the
battle rather than participating in it.
But he could see that the Moslems were falling back before the Christian
onslaught.
And then, quite suddenly, there seemed to be no foeman to swing at.
Breathing heavily, Sir Robert sheathed his broadsword.
Beside him, Sir Gaeton did the same, saying: "It will be a few minutes
before they can regroup, sir knight. We may have routed them
completely."
"Aye. But King Richard will not approve of my breaking ranks and
disobeying orders. I may win the battle and lose my head in the end."
"This is no time to worry about the future," said the Gascon. "Rest for
a moment and relax, that you may be the stronger later. Here—have an
Old Kings
."
He had a pack of cigarettes in his gauntleted hand, which he profferred
to Sir Robert. There were three cigarettes protruding from it, one
slightly farther than the others. Sir Robert's hand reached out and took
that one.
"Thanks. When the going gets rough, I really enjoy an
Old Kings
."
He put one end of the cigarette in his mouth and lit the other from the
lighter in Sir Gaeton's hand.
"Yes, sir," said Sir Gaeton, after lighting his own cigarette, "
Old
Kings
are the greatest. They give a man real, deep-down smoking
pleasure."
"There's no doubt about it,
Old Kings
are a
man's
cigarette." Sir
Robert could feel the soothing smoke in his lungs as he inhaled deeply.
"That's great. When I want a cigarette, I don't want just
any
cigarette."
"Nor I," agreed the Gascon. "
Old Kings
is the only real cigarette when
you're doing a real
man's
work."
"That's for sure." Sir Robert watched a smoke ring expand in the air.
There was a sudden clash of arms off to their left. Sir Robert dropped
his cigarette to the ground. "The trouble is that doing a real he-man's
work doesn't always allow you to enjoy the fine, rich tobaccos of
Old
Kings
right down to the very end."
"No, but you can always light another later," said the Gascon knight.
King Richard, on seeing his army moving suddenly toward the harassed
rear, had realized the danger and had charged through the Hospitallers
to get into the thick of the fray. Now the Turks were charging down from
the hills, hitting—not the flank as he had expected, but the rear!
Saladin had expected him to hold fast!
Sir Robert and Sir Gaeton spurred their chargers toward the flapping
banner of England.
The fierce warrior-king of England, his mighty sword in hand, was
cutting down Turks as though they were grain-stalks, but still the
Saracen horde pressed on. More and more of the terrible Turks came
boiling down out of the hills, their glittering scimitars swinging.
Sir Robert lost all track of time. There was nothing to do but keep his
own great broadsword moving, swinging like some gigantic metronome as he
hacked down the Moslem foes.
And then, suddenly, he found himself surrounded by the Saracens! He was
isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the Christian forces! He
glanced quickly around as he slashed another Saracen from pate to
breastbone. Where was Sir Gaeton? Where were the others? Where was the
red-and-gold banner of Richard?
He caught a glimpse of the fluttering banner far to the rear and started
to fall back.
And then he saw another knight nearby, a huge man who swung his
sparkling blade with power and force. On his steel helm gleamed a golden
coronet! Richard!
And the great king, in spite of his prowess was outnumbered heavily and
would, within seconds, be cut down by the Saracen horde!
Without hesitation, Sir Robert plunged his horse toward the surrounded
monarch, his great blade cutting a path before him.
He saw Richard go down, falling from the saddle of his charger, but by
that time his own sword was cutting into the screaming Saracens and
they had no time to attempt any further mischief to the King. They had
their hands full with Sir Robert de Bouain.
He did not know how long he fought there, holding his charger motionless
over the inert body of the fallen king, hewing down the screaming enemy,
but presently he heard the familiar cry of "For St. George and for
England" behind him. The Norman and English troops were charging in,
bringing with them the banner of England!
And then Richard was on his feet, cleaving the air about him with his
own broadsword. Its bright edge, besmeared with Saracen blood, was
biting viciously into the foe.
The Turks began to fall back. Within seconds, the Christian knights were
boiling around the embattled pair, forcing the Turks into retreat. And
for the second time, Sir Robert found himself with no one to fight.
And then a voice was saying: "You have done well this day, sir knight.
Richard Plantagenet will not forget."
Sir Robert turned in his saddle to face the smiling king.
"My lord king, be assured that I would never forget my loyalty to my
sovereign and liege lord. My sword and my life are yours whenever you
call."
King Richard's gauntleted hand grasped his own. "If it please God, I
shall never ask your life. An earldom awaits you when we return to
England, sir knight."
And then the king mounted his horse and was running full gallop after
the retreating Saracens.
Robert took off his helmet.
He blinked for a second to adjust his eyes to the relative dimness of
the studio. After the brightness of the desert that the televicarion
helmet had projected into his eyes, the studio seemed strangely
cavelike.
"How'd you like it, Bob?" asked one of the two producers of the show.
Robert Bowen nodded briskly and patted the televike helmet. "It was
O.K.," he said. "Good show. A little talky at the beginning, and it
needs a better fade-out, but the action scenes were fine. The sponsor
ought to like it—for a while, at least."
"What do you mean, 'for a while'?"
Robert Bowen sighed. "If this thing goes on the air the way it is, he'll
lose sales."
"Why? Commercial not good enough?"
"
Too
good! Man, I've smoked
Old Kings
, and, believe me, the real
thing never tasted as good as that cigarette did in the commercial!"
|
...And It Comes Out Here by Del Rey, Lester
|
"...And It Comes Out Here", Lester Del Rey, 1954.
... and it comes out here
By LESTER DEL REY
Illustrated by DON SIBLEY
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction February 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
There is one fact no sane man can quarrel
with ... everything has a beginning and an end.
But some men aren't sane; thus it isn't always so!
No, you're wrong. I'm not your father's ghost, even if I do look a bit
like him. But it's a longish story, and you might as well let me in.
You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always
have ... or do ... or will. I don't know, verbs get all mixed up. We
don't have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this.
Anyhow, you'll let me in. I did, so you will.
Thanks. You think you're crazy, of course, but you'll find out you
aren't. It's just that things are a bit confused. And don't look at the
machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you'll find it's
hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You'll get used
to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years.
You're wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not?
And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for
me as you're having. Of course we have the same tastes—we're the same
person. I'm you thirty years from now, or you're me. I remember just
how you feel; I felt the same way when he—that is, of course, I or
we—came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago.
Here, have one of these. You'll get to like them in a couple more
years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt
my story. You'll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn't matter.
Right now, you're shocked. It's a real wrench when a man meets himself
for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two
of the same people. You
sense
things. So I'll simply go ahead talking
for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you'll come
along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling
what happened to me; but he—I—told me what I was going to do, so I
might as well do the same. I probably couldn't help telling you the
same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don't intend to
try. I've gotten past that stage in worrying about all this.
So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me.
You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty
obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen
it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and
a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you,
and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes
atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man
who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but
you'll want to go along.
I'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I
cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a green button,
and everything seems to cut off around us. You can see a sort of
foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that
prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section
isn't protected, though.
You start to say something, but by then I'm pressing a black button,
and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but
it isn't there. There is exactly nothing there—in fact, there is no
there
. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can
guess how things are.
You can't feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out
through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out,
all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just
turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn't hurt, and when you pull your
arm back, you're still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening
and you don't try it again.
Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time.
You turn to me, getting used to the idea. "So this is the fourth
dimension?" you ask.
Then you feel silly, because you'll remember that I said you'd ask
that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it
to you, and I still can't help answering when you speak.
"Not exactly," I try to explain. "Maybe it's no dimension—or it might
be the fifth; if you're going to skip over the so-called fourth without
traveling along it, you'd need a fifth. Don't ask me. I didn't invent
the machine and I don't understand it."
"But...."
I let it go, and so do you. If you don't, it's a good way of going
crazy. You'll see later why I couldn't have invented the machine. Of
course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have
been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first,
then the time-machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and
saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once
that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space
dimensions. It's simpler just to figure that this is the way time got
bent back on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier
for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as
I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer.
Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time,
apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space.
You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either
carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small
increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't
think about that then, either.
I'm smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a
bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide
open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss.
"Where are we getting our air?" you ask. "Or why don't we lose it?"
"No place for it to go," I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither
time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel
gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a
gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is
responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the
idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still.
Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You
feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe
easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in
the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement
floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the
machine, just as I do.
I've got a bundle of clothes and I start changing. It's a sort
of simple, short-limbed, one-piece affair I put on, but it feels
comfortable.
"I'm staying here," I tell you. "This is like the things they wear in
this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to
pass fairly well. I've had all my fortune—the one you make on that
atomic generator—invested in such a way I can get it on using some
identification I've got with me, so I'll do all right. I know they
still use some kind of money, you'll see evidence of that. And it's a
pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see. We'll go up and
I'll leave you. I like the looks of things here, so I won't be coming
back with you."
You nod, remembering I've told you about it. "What century is this,
anyway?"
I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. "As near as I can guess,
it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an
interstellar civilization."
You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small
flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor.
This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs,
and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.
"What about the time machine?" you ask.
"Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe."
We get in the elevator, and I say "first" to it. It gives out a
coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's
no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the
future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says "first" back at us.
It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with
nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. "You go that way. Don't
worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum,
grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you."
You act as if you're dreaming, though you can't believe it's a dream.
You nod at me and I move out into the main corridor. A second later,
you see me going by, mixed into a crowd that is loafing along toward
a restaurant, or something like it, that is just opening. I'm asking
questions of a man, who points, and I turn and move off.
You come out of the side corridor and go down a hall, away from the
restaurant. There are quiet little signs along the hall. You look at
them, realizing for the first time that things have changed.
Steij:neri, Faunten, Z:rgat Dispenseri.
The signs are very quiet and
dignified. Some of them can be decoded to stationery shops, fountains,
and the like. What a zergot is, you don't know. You stop at a sign
that announces:
Trav:l Biwrou—F:rst-Clas Twrz—Marz, Viin*s, and
x: Trouj:n Planets. Spej:l reits tu aol s*nz wixin 60 lyt iirz!
But
there is only a single picture of a dull-looking metal sphere, with
passengers moving up a ramp, and the office is closed. You begin to get
the hang of the spelling they use, though.
Now there are people around you, but nobody pays much attention to you.
Why should they? You wouldn't care if you saw a man in a leopard-skin
suit; you'd figure it was some part in a play and let it go. Well,
people don't change much.
You get up your courage and go up to a boy selling something that might
be papers on tapes.
"Where can I find the Museum of Science?"
"Downayer rien turn lefa the sign. Stoo bloss," he tells you. Around
you, you hear some pretty normal English, but there are others using
stuff as garbled as his. The educated and uneducated? I don't know.
You go right until you find a big sign built into the rubbery surface
of the walk:
Miuzi:m *v Syens
. There's an arrow pointing and you turn
left. Ahead of you, two blocks on, you can see a pink building, with
faint aqua trimming, bigger than most of the others. They are building
lower than they used to, apparently. Twenty floors up seems about the
maximum. You head for it, and find the sidewalk is marked with the
information that it is the museum.
You go up the steps, but you see that it seems to be closed. You
hesitate for a moment, then. You're beginning to think the whole affair
is complete nonsense, and you should get back to the time machine and
go home. But then a guard comes to the gate. Except for the short legs
in his suit and the friendly grin on his face, he looks like any other
guard.
What's more, he speaks pretty clearly. Everyone says things in a sort
of drawl, with softer vowels and slurred consonants, but it's rather
pleasant.
"Help you, sir? Oh, of course. You must be playing in 'Atoms and
Axioms.' The museum's closed, but I'll be glad to let you study
whatever you need for realism in your role. Nice show. I saw it twice."
"Thanks," you mutter, wondering what kind of civilization can produce
guards as polite as that. "I—I'm told I should investigate your
display of atomic generators."
He beams at that. "Of course." The gate is swung to behind you, but
obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a
lock. "Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight
of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got
the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using
them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could
not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though.
Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a
hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period.
Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our
oldest tapes."
You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building
seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your
right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly
plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it
goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row
of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny
toward you.
"Souvenir," it announces in a well-modulated voice. "This is a typical
gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known
technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats
in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during
morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child,
press the red button for the number of stones you desire."
You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the
corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of
spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is
labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with
miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then
there is one labeled
Wep:nz
, filled with everything from a crossbow
to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil,
marked
Fynal Hand Arm
. Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big
place that bears a sign,
Mad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez
.
By that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of
thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking
in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it.
You notice that the models are all mounted on tables and that they're a
lot smaller than you thought. They seem to be in chronological order,
and the latest one, marked
2147—Rincs Dyn*pat:
, is about the size
of a desk telephone. The earlier ones are larger, of course, clumsier,
but with variations, probably depending on the power output. A big sign
on the ceiling gives a lot of dope on atomic generators, explaining
that this is the first invention which leaped full blown into basically
final form.
You study it, but it mentions casually the inventor, without giving
his name. Either they don't know it, or they take it for granted that
everyone does, which seems more probable. They call attention to the
fact that they have the original model of the first atomic generator
built, complete with design drawings, original manuscript on operation,
and full patent application.
They state that it has all major refinements, operating on any fuel,
producing electricity at any desired voltage up to five million, any
chosen cyclic rate from direct current to one thousand megacycles,
and any amperage up to one thousand, its maximum power output being
fifty kilowatts, limited by the current-carrying capacity of the
outputs. They also mention that the operating principle is still being
investigated, and that only such refinements as better alloys and the
addition of magnetric and nucleatric current outlets have been added
since the original.
So you go to the end and look over the thing. It's simply a square box
with a huge plug on each side, and a set of vernier controls on top,
plus a little hole marked, in old-style spelling,
Drop BBs or wire
here
. Apparently that's the way it's fueled. It's about one foot on
each side.
"Nice," the guard says over your shoulder. "It finally wore out one of
the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly
as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever.
Like to have me tell you about it?"
"Not particularly," you begin, and then realize bad manners might be
conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls
something out of his pocket and stares at it.
"Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is
arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine
some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared
to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?"
You pardon him pretty eagerly and he wanders off happily. You go up
to the head of the line, to that Rinks Dynapattuh, or whatever it
transliterates to. That's small and you can carry it. But the darned
thing is absolutely fixed. You can't see any bolts, but you can't budge
it, either.
You work down the line. It'd be foolish to take the early model if you
can get one with built-in magnetic current terminals—Ehrenhaft or
some other principle?—and nuclear binding-force energy terminals. But
they're all held down by the same whatchamaycallem effect.
And, finally, you're right back beside the original first model. It's
probably bolted down, too, but you try it tentatively and you find it
moves. There's a little sign under it, indicating you shouldn't touch
it, since the gravostatic plate is being renewed.
Well, you won't be able to change the time cycle by doing anything I
haven't told you, but a working model such as that is a handy thing.
You lift it; it only weighs about fifty pounds! Naturally, it can be
carried.
You expect a warning bell, but nothing happens. As a matter of fact,
if you'd stop drinking so much of that scotch and staring at the time
machine out there now, you'd hear what I'm saying and know what will
happen to you. But of course, just as I did, you're going to miss a
lot of what I say from now on, and have to find out for yourself. But
maybe some of it helps. I've tried to remember how much I remembered,
after he told me, but I can't be sure. So I'll keep on talking. I
probably can't help it, anyhow. Pre-set, you might say.
Well, you stagger down the corridor, looking out for the guard, but all
seems clear. Then you hear his voice from the weapons room. You bend
down and try to scurry past, but you know you're in full view. Nothing
happens, though.
You stumble down the stairs, feeling all the futuristic rays in the
world on your back, and still nothing happens. Ahead of you, the gate
is closed. You reach it and it opens obligingly by itself. You breathe
a quick sigh of relief and start out onto the street.
Then there's a yell behind you. You don't wait. You put one leg in
front of the other and you begin racing down the walk, ducking past
people, who stare at you with expressions you haven't time to see.
There's another yell behind you.
Something goes over your head and drops on the sidewalk just in front
of your feet, with a sudden ringing sound. You don't wait to find out
about that, either. Somebody reaches out a hand to catch you and you
dart past.
The street is pretty clear now and you jolt along, with your arms
seeming to come out of the sockets, and that atomic generator getting
heavier at every step.
Out of nowhere, something in a blue uniform about six feet tall and
on the beefy side appears—and the badge hasn't changed much. The cop
catches your arm and you know you're not going to get away, so you stop.
"You can't exert yourself that hard in this heat, fellow," the cop
says. "There are laws against that, without a yellow sticker. Here, let
me grab you a taxi."
Reaction sets in a bit and your knees begin to buckle, but you shake
your head and come up for air.
"I—I left my money home," you begin.
The cop nods. "Oh, that explains it. Fine, I won't have to give you
an appearance schedule. But you should have come to me." He reaches
out and taps a pedestrian lightly on the shoulder. "Sir, an emergency
request. Would you help this gentleman?"
The pedestrian grins, looks at his watch, and nods. "How far?"
You did notice the name of the building from which you came and you
mutter it. The stranger nods again, reaches out and picks up the other
side of the generator, blowing a little whistle the cop hands him.
Pedestrians begin to move aside, and you and the stranger jog down the
street at a trot, with a nice clear path, while the cop stands beaming
at you both.
That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might
like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation
here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there
before you.
And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach
it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod
at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some
dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too
dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck.
"You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications," he says.
"They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A
good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in
this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and
we'll pick it up."
You swallow several sets of tonsils you had removed years before, and
take the bundle of papers he hands you out of the little case. He pumps
you for some more information, which you give him at random. It seems
to satisfy your amiable guard friend. He finally smiles in satisfaction
and heads back to the museum.
You still don't believe it, but you pick up the atomic generator and
the information sheets, and you head down toward the service elevator.
There is no button on it. In fact, there's no door there.
You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is
right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were.
Then there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It
forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in,
gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how
a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What
the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has
closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at
the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light.
You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back
in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering
here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then
a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine.
You've located it.
You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers
down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You
reach forward toward the green button and hesitate. There's a red one
beside it and you finally decide on that.
Suddenly, there's a confused yell from the direction of the elevator
and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating
it. Your finger touches the red button.
You'll never know what the shouting was about—whether they finally
doped out the fact that they'd been robbed, or whether they were trying
to help you. You don't care which it is. The field springs up around
you and the next button you touch—the one on the board that hasn't
been used so far—sends you off into nothingness. There is no beam of
light, you can't hear a thing, and you're safe.
It isn't much of a trip back. You sit there smoking and letting your
nerves settle back to normal. You notice a third set of buttons, with
some pencil marks over them—"Press these to return to yourself 30
years"—and you begin waiting for the air to get stale. It doesn't
because there is only one of you this time.
Instead, everything flashes off and you're sitting in the machine in
your own back yard.
You'll figure out the cycle in more details later. You get into the
machine in front of your house, go to the future in the sub-basement,
land in your back yard, and then hop back thirty years to pick up
yourself, landing in front of your house. Just that. But right then,
you don't care. You jump out and start pulling out that atomic
generator and taking it inside.
It isn't hard to disassemble, but you don't learn a thing; just some
plates of metal, some spiral coils, and a few odds and ends—all
things that can be made easily enough, all obviously of common metals.
But when you put it together again, about an hour later, you notice
something.
Everything in it is brand-new and there's one set of copper wires
missing! It won't work. You put some #12 house wire in, exactly like
the set on the other side, drop in some iron filings, and try it again.
And with the controls set at 120 volts, 60 cycles and 15 amperes, you
get just that. You don't need the power company any more. And you
feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn't
insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward
in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth—minus the
replaced wires the guard mentioned—which probably wore out because of
the makeshift job you've just done.
But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are
all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and
that the date of the patent application is 1951.
It will begin to soak in, then. You pick up an atomic generator in the
future and bring it back to the past—your present—so that it can be
put in the museum with you as the inventor so you can steal it to be
the inventor. And you do it in a time machine which you bring back to
yourself to take yourself into the future to return to take back to
yourself....
Who invented what? And who built which?
Before long, your riches from the generator are piling in. Little
kids from school are coming around to stare at the man who changed
history and made atomic power so common that no nation could hope to
be anything but a democracy and a peaceful one—after some of the
worst times in history for a few years. Your name eventually becomes as
common as Ampere, or Faraday, or any other spelled without a capital
letter.
But you're thinking of the puzzle. You can't find any answer.
One day you come across an old poem—something about some folks
calling it evolution and others calling it God. You go out, make a few
provisions for the future, and come back to climb into the time machine
that's waiting in the building you had put around it. Then you'll be
knocking on your own door, thirty years back—or right now, from your
view—and telling your younger self all these things I'm telling you.
But now....
Well, the drinks are finished. You're woozy enough to go along with me
without protest, and I want to find out just why those people up there
came looking for you and shouting, before the time machine left.
Let's go.
|
A Coffin for Jacob by Ludwig, Edward W.
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"A Coffin for Jacob", Edward W. Ludwig, 1955.
A Coffin for Jacob
By EDWARD W. LUDWIG
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
With never a moment to rest, the pursuit
through space felt like a game of hounds
and hares ... or was it follow the leader?
Ben Curtis eased his pale, gaunt body through the open doorway of the
Blast Inn, the dead man following silently behind him.
His fear-borne gaze traveled into the dimly illumined Venusian gin
mill. The place was like an evil caldron steaming with a brew whose
ingredients had been culled from the back corners of three planets.
Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco
smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. Here and
there, Ben saw moving figures. He could not tell if they were Earthmen,
Martians or Venusians.
Someone tugged at his greasy coat. He jumped, thinking absurdly that it
was the dead man's hand.
"
Coma esta, senor?
" a small voice piped. "
Speken die Deutsch?
Desirez-vous d'amour? Da? Nyet?
"
Ben looked down.
The speaker was an eager-eyed Martian boy of about ten. He was like
a red-skinned marionette with pipestem arms and legs, clad in a torn
skivvy shirt and faded blue dungarees.
"I'm American," Ben muttered.
"Ah,
buena
! I speak English
tres
fine,
senor
. I have Martian
friend, she
tres
pretty and
tres
fat. She weigh almost eighty
pounds,
monsieur
. I take you to her,
si
?"
Ben shook his head.
He thought,
I don't want your Martian wench. I don't want your opium
or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug that'd
bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul.
"It is deal,
monsieur
? Five dollars or twenty
keelis
for visit
Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams—"
"I'm not buying."
The dirty-faced kid shrugged. "Then I show you to good table,—
tres
bien
. I do not charge you,
senor
."
The boy grabbed his hand. Because Ben could think of no reason for
resisting, he followed. They plunged into shifting layers of smoke and
through the drone of alcohol-cracked voices.
They passed the bar with its line of lean-featured, slit-eyed
Earthmen—merchant spacemen.
They wormed down a narrow aisle flanked by booths carved from Venusian
marble that jutted up into the semi-darkness like fog-blanketed
tombstones.
Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO
2
-breathing
Venusians, the first he'd ever seen.
They were smoky gray, scaly, naked giants, toads in human shape.
They stood solitary and motionless, aloof, their green-lidded eyes
unblinking. They certainly didn't look like telepaths, as Ben had heard
they were, but the thought sent a fresh rivulet of fear down his spine.
Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security
Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club
against the stone booths.
Keep walking
, Ben told himself.
You look the same as anyone else
here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead.
The officer passed. Ben breathed easier.
"Here we are,
monsieur
," piped the Martian boy. "A
tres
fine table.
Close in the shadows."
Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows?
Frowning, he sat down—he and the dead man.
He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra.
The Martians were fragile, doll-like creatures with heads too large for
their spindly bodies. Their long fingers played upon the strings of
their
cirillas
or crawled over the holes of their flutes like spider
legs. Their tune was sad. Even when they played an Earth tune, it still
seemed a song of old Mars, charged with echoes of lost voices and
forgotten grandeur.
For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead
man. He thought,
What are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in
a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world?
Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me,
felt the challenge of new worlds?
He sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese
waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the
faces of the Inn's other occupants.
You've got to find him
, he thought.
You've got to find the man with
the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.
The dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and
about forty and he hated spacemen.
His body was buried now—probably in the silent gray wastes outside
Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a
part of Ben as sight in his eyes.
Sometimes the image would be shuffling drunkenly beside him, its lips
spitting whiskey-slurred curses.
Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist
thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the
whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle
from a corner of the gaping mouth.
You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or
ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a
memory that has burned into your mind.
It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had
been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate.
He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb
plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.
"Spacemen," he muttered, "are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you
see's spacemen."
He was a neatly dressed civilian.
Ben smiled. "If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here."
"The name's Cobb." The man hiccoughed. "Spacemen in their white monkey
suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a
little tin god." He downed a shot of whiskey.
Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white,
crimson-braided uniform of the
Odyssey's
junior astrogation officer.
He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining
uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe.
He'd sought long for that key.
At the age of five—perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents'
death in a recent strato-jet crash—he'd spent hours watching the night
sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground
his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on
the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his
collection of astronomy and rocketry books.
At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys
Town No. 5 in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among
the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friends who
understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the
U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space.
And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the
Odyssey
—the first ship, it
was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps
beyond.
Cobb was persistent: "Damn fools shoulda known enough to stay on Earth.
What the hell good is it, jumpin' from planet to planet?"
The guy's drunk
, Ben thought. He took his drink and moved three
stools down the bar.
Cobb followed. "You don't like the truth, eh, kid? You don't like
people to call you a sucker."
Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and
held him there.
"Thas what you are—a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll
be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!"
Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and
without warning, it welled up into savage fury.
His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked
horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of
the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of
life.
He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw.
Ben knew that he was dead.
Then, for a single absurd second, Ben was seized with terror—just as,
a moment before, he'd been overwhelmed with anger.
He ran.
For some twenty minutes, he raced through a dizzying, nightmare world
of dark rocketfront alleys and shouting voices and pursuing feet.
At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw
that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tycho-ward side of the
city.
He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette.
A thousand stars—a thousand motionless balls of silver fire—shone
above him through Luna City's transparent dome.
He was sorry he'd hit Cobb, of course. He was not sorry he'd run.
Escaping at least gave him a power of choice, of decision.
You can do two things
, he thought.
You can give yourself up, and that's what a good officer would do.
That would eliminate the escape charge. You'd get off with voluntary
manslaughter. Under interplanetary law, that would mean ten years in
prison and a dishonorable discharge. And then you'd be free.
But you'd be through with rockets and space. They don't want new
men over thirty-four for officers on rockets or even for third-class
jet-men on beat-up freighters—they don't want convicted killers. You'd
get the rest of the thrill of conquering space through video and by
peeking through electric fences of spaceports.
Or—
There were old wives' tales of a group of renegade spacemen who
operated from the Solar System's frontiers. The spacemen weren't
outlaws. They were misfits, rejectees from the clearing houses on Earth.
And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the
souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids. Their
headquarters was Venus. Their leader—a subject of popular and
fantastic conjecture in the men's audiozines—was rumored to be a
red-bearded giant.
So
, Ben reflected,
you can take a beer-and-pretzels tale seriously.
You can hide for a couple of days, get rid of your uniform, change your
name. You can wait for a chance to get to Venus. To hell with your
duty. You can try to stay in space, even if you exile yourself from
Earth.
After all, was it right for a single second, a single insignificant
second, to destroy a man's life and his dream?
He was lucky. He found a tramp freighter whose skipper was on his last
flight before retirement. Discipline was lax, investigation of new
personnel even more so.
Ben Curtis made it to Venus.
There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the
memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him
as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs.
But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead
voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways
obscure the dead face?
So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant,
and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.
"You look for someone,
senor
?"
He jumped. "Oh. You still here?"
"
Oui.
" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. "I
keep you company on your first night in Hoover City,
n'est-ce-pas
?"
"This isn't my first night here," Ben lied. "I've been around a while."
"You are spacemen?"
Ben threw a fifty-cent credit piece on the table. "Here. Take off, will
you?"
Spiderlike fingers swept down upon the coin. "
Ich danke, senor.
You
know why city is called Hoover City?"
Ben didn't answer.
"They say it is because after women come, they want first thing a
thousand vacuum cleaners for dust. What is vacuum cleaner,
monsieur
?"
Ben raised his hand as if to strike the boy.
"
Ai-yee
, I go. You keep listen to good Martian music."
The toothpick of a body melted into the semi-darkness.
Minutes passed. There were two more whiskeys. A ceaseless parade of
faces broke through the smoky veil that enclosed him—reddish balloon
faces, scaly reptilian faces, white-skinned, slit-eyed faces, and
occasionally a white, rouged, powdered face. But nowhere was there a
face with a red beard.
A sense of hopelessness gripped Ben Curtis. Hoover City was but one of
a dozen cities of Venus. Each had twenty dives such as this.
He needed help.
But his picture must have been 'scoped to Venusian visiscreens. A
reward must have been offered for his capture. Whom could he trust? The
Martian kid, perhaps?
Far down the darkened aisle nearest him, his eyes caught a flash of
white. He tensed.
Like the uniform of a Security Policeman, he thought.
His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness.
And then he saw another and another and another.
Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a
wheel with Ben as their focal point.
You idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have known!
Light showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded,
realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been
turned on.
The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding
wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debris-strewn floor.
Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and
a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like
tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away.
Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward,
falling.
The white-clad men charged, neuro-clubs upraised.
A woman screamed. The music ceased. The Martian orchestra slunk with
feline stealth to a rear exit. Only the giant Venusians remained
undisturbed. They stood unmoving, their staring eyes shifting lazily in
Ben's direction.
"Curtis!" one of the policemen yelled. "You're covered! Hold it!"
Ben whirled away from the advancing police, made for the exit into
which the musicians had disappeared.
A hissing sound traveled past his left ear, a sound like compressed air
escaping from a container. A dime-sized section of the concrete wall
ahead of him crumbled.
He stumbled forward. They were using deadly neuro-pistols now, not the
mildly stunning neuro-clubs.
Another hiss passed his cheek. He was about twelve feet from the exit.
Another second
, his brain screamed.
Just another second—
Or would the exits be guarded?
He heard the hiss.
It hit directly in the small of his back. There was no pain, just a
slight pricking sensation, like the shallow jab of a needle.
He froze as if yanked to a stop by a noose. His body seemed to be
growing, swelling into balloon proportions. He knew that the tiny
needle had imbedded itself deep in his flesh, knew that the paralyzing
mortocain was spreading like icy fire into every fiber and muscle of
his body.
He staggered like a man of stone moving in slow motion. He'd have
fifteen—maybe twenty—seconds before complete lethargy of mind and
body overpowered him.
In the dark world beyond his fading consciousness, he heard a voice
yell, "Turn on the damn lights!"
Then a pressure and a coldness were on his left hand. He realized that
someone had seized it.
A soft feminine voice spoke to him. "You're wounded? They hit you?"
"Yes." His thick lips wouldn't let go of the word.
"You want to escape—even now?"
"Yes."
"You may die if you don't give yourself up."
"No, no."
He tried to stumble toward the exit.
"All right then. Not that way. Here, this way."
Heavy footsteps thudded toward them. A few yards away, a flashlight
flicked on.
Hands were guiding him. He was aware of being pushed and pulled. A
door closed behind him. The glare of the flashlight faded from his
vision—if he still had vision.
"You're sure?" the voice persisted.
"I'm sure," Ben managed to say.
"I have no antidote. You may die."
His mind fought to comprehend. With the anti-paralysis injection,
massage and rest, a man could recover from the effects of mortocain
within half a day. Without treatment, the paralysis could spread to
heart and lungs. It could become a paralysis of death. An effective
weapon: the slightest wound compelled the average criminal to surrender
at once.
"Anti ... anti ..." The words were as heavy as blobs of mercury forced
from his throat. "No ... I'm sure ... sure."
He didn't hear the answer or anything else.
Ben Curtis had no precise sensation of awakening. Return to
consciousness was an intangible evolution from a world of black
nothingness to a dream-like state of awareness.
He felt the pressure of hands on his naked arms and shoulders,
hands that massaged, manipulated, fought to restore circulation and
sensitivity. He knew they were strong hands. Their strength seemed to
transfer itself to his own body.
For a long time, he tried to open his eyes. His lids felt welded
shut. But after a while, they opened. His world of darkness gave way
to a translucent cloak of mist. A round, featureless shape hovered
constantly above him—a face, he supposed.
He tried to talk. Although his lips moved slightly, the only sound was
a deep, staccato grunting.
But he heard someone say, "Don't try to talk." It was the same gentle
voice he'd heard in the Blast Inn. "Don't talk. Just lie still and
rest. Everything'll be all right."
Everything all right
, he thought dimly.
There were long periods of lethargy when he was aware of nothing. There
were periods of light and of darkness. Gradually he grew aware of
things. He realized that the soft rubber mouth of a spaceman's oxygen
mask was clamped over his nose. He felt the heat of electric blankets
swathed about his body. Occasionally a tube would be in his mouth and
he would taste liquid food and feel a pleasant warmth in his stomach.
Always, it seemed, the face was above him, floating in the obscuring
mist. Always, it seemed, the soft voice was echoing in his ears:
"Swallow this now. That's it. You must have food." Or, "Close your
eyes. Don't strain. It won't be long. You're getting better."
Better
, he'd think.
Getting better....
At last, after one of the periods of lethargy, his eyes opened. The
mist brightened, then dissolved.
He beheld the cracked, unpainted ceiling of a small room, its colorless
walls broken with a single, round window. He saw the footboard of his
aluminite bed and the outlines of his feet beneath a faded blanket.
Finally he saw the face and figure that stood at his side.
"You are better?" the kind voice asked.
The face was that of a girl probably somewhere between twenty-five
and thirty. Her features, devoid of makeup, had an unhealthy-looking
pallor, as if she hadn't used a sunlamp for many weeks. Yet, at the
same time, her firm slim body suggested a solidity and a strength. Her
straight brown hair was combed backward, tight upon her scalp, and
drawn together in a knot at the nape of her neck.
"I—I am better," he murmured. His words were still slow and thick. "I
am going to live?"
"You will live."
He thought for a moment. "How long have I been here?"
"Nine days."
"You took care of me?" He noted the deep, dark circles beneath her
sleep-robbed eyes.
She nodded.
"You're the one who carried me when I was shot?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Suddenly he began to cough. Breath came hard. She held the oxygen mask
in readiness. He shook his head, not wanting it.
"Why?" he asked again.
"It would be a long story. Perhaps I'll tell you tomorrow."
A new thought, cloaked in sudden fear, entered his murky consciousness.
"Tell me, will—will I be well again? Will I be able to walk?"
He lay back then, panting, exhausted.
"You have nothing to worry about," the girl said softly. Her cool hand
touched his hot forehead. "Rest. We'll talk later."
His eyes closed and breath came easier. He slept.
When he next awoke, his gaze turned first to the window. There was
light outside, but he had no way of knowing if this was morning, noon
or afternoon—or on what planet.
He saw no white-domed buildings of Hoover City, no formal lines of
green-treed parks, no streams of buzzing gyro-cars. There was only a
translucent and infinite whiteness. It was as if the window were set on
the edge of the Universe overlooking a solemn, silent and matterless
void.
The girl entered the room.
"Hi," she said, smiling. The dark half-moons under her eyes were less
prominent. Her face was relaxed.
She increased the pressure in his rubberex pillows and helped him rise
to a sitting position.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"Venus."
"We're not in Hoover City?"
"No."
He looked at her, wondering. "You won't tell me?"
"Not yet. Later, perhaps."
"Then how did you get me here? How did we escape from the Inn?"
She shrugged. "We have friends who can be bribed. A hiding place in the
city, the use of a small desert-taxi, a pass to leave the city—these
can be had for a price."
"You'll tell me your name?"
"Maggie."
"Why did you save me?"
Her eyes twinkled mischievously. "Because you're a good astrogator."
His own eyes widened. "How did you know that?"
She sat on a plain chair beside his bed. "I know everything about you,
Lieutenant Curtis."
"How did you learn my name? I destroyed all my papers—"
"I know that you're twenty-four. Born July 10, 1971. Orphaned at four,
you attended Boys Town in the Catskills till you were 19. You graduated
from the Academy at White Sands last June with a major in Astrogation.
Your rating for the five-year period was 3.8—the second highest in a
class of fifty-seven. Your only low mark in the five years was a 3.2 in
History of Martian Civilization. Want me to go on?"
Fascinated, Ben nodded.
"You were accepted as junior astrogation officer aboard the
Odyssey
.
You did well on your flight from Roswell to Luna City. In a barroom
fight in Luna City, you struck and killed a man named Arthur Cobb, a
pre-fab salesman. You've been charged with second degree murder and
escape. A reward of 5,000 credits has been offered for your capture.
You came to Hoover City in the hope of finding a renegade group of
spacemen who operate beyond Mars. You were looking for them in the
Blast Inn."
He gaped incredulously, struggling to rise from his pillows. "I—don't
get it."
"There are ways of finding out what we want to know. As I told you, we
have many friends."
He fell back into his pillows, breathing hard. She rose quickly.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have told you yet. I felt so happy
because you're alive. Rest now. We'll talk again soon."
"Maggie, you—you said I'd live. You didn't say I'd be able to walk
again."
She lowered her gaze. "I hope you'll be able to."
"But you don't think I will, do you?"
"I don't know. We'll try walking tomorrow. Don't think about it now.
Rest."
He tried to relax, but his mind was a vortex of conjecture.
"Just one more question," he almost whispered.
"Yes?"
"The man I killed—did he have a wife?"
She hesitated. He thought,
Damn it, of all the questions, why did I
ask that?
Finally she said, "He had a wife."
"Children?"
"Two. I don't know their ages."
She left the room.
He sank into the softness of his bed. As he turned over on his side,
his gaze fell upon an object on a bureau in a far corner of the room.
He sat straight up, his chest heaving.
The object was a tri-dimensional photo of a rock-faced man in a
merchant spaceman's uniform. He was a giant of a man with a neatly
trimmed
red beard
!
Ben stared at the photo for a long time. At length, he slipped into
restless sleep. Images of faces and echoes of words spun through his
brain.
The dead man returned to him. Bloodied lips cursed at him. Glassy eyes
accused him. Somewhere were two lost children crying in the night.
And towering above him was a red-bearded man whose great hands reached
down and beckoned to him. Ben crawled through the night on hands and
knees, his legs numb and useless. The crying of the children was a
chilling wail in his ears.
His head rose and turned to the red-bearded man. His pleading voice
screamed out to him in a thick, harsh cackle. Yet even as he screamed,
the giant disappeared, to be replaced by white-booted feet stomping
relentlessly toward him.
He awoke still screaming....
A night without darkness passed. Ben lay waiting for Maggie's return, a
question already formed in his mind.
She came and at once he asked, "Who is the man with the red beard?"
She smiled. "I was right then when I gave you that thumbnail biog. You
were
looking for him, weren't you?"
"Who is he?"
She sat on the chair beside him.
"My husband," she said softly.
He began to understand. "And your husband needs an astrogator? That's
why you saved me?"
"We need all the good men we can get."
"Where is he?"
She cocked her head in mock suspicion. "Somewhere between Mercury and
Pluto. He's building a new base for us—and a home for me. When his
ship returns, I'll be going to him."
"Why aren't you with him now?"
"He said unexplored space is no place for a woman. So I've been
studying criminal reports and photos from the Interplanetary Bureau of
Investigation and trying to find recruits like yourself. You know how
we operate?"
He told her the tales he'd heard.
She nodded. "There are quite a few of us now—about a thousand—and a
dozen ships. Our base used to be here on Venus, down toward the Pole.
The dome we're in now was designed and built by us a few years ago
after we got pushed off Mars. We lost a few men in the construction,
but with almost every advance in space, someone dies."
"Venus is getting too civilized. We're moving out and this dome is only
a temporary base when we have cases like yours. The new base—I might
as well tell you it's going to be an asteroid. I won't say which one."
"Don't get the idea that we're outlaws. Sure, about half our group is
wanted by the Bureau, but we make honest livings. We're just people
like yourself and Jacob."
"Jacob? Your husband?"
She laughed. "Makes you think of a Biblical character, doesn't it?
Jacob's anything but that. And just plain 'Jake' reminds one of a
grizzled old uranium prospector and he isn't like that, either."
She lit a cigarette. "Anyway, the wanted ones stay out beyond the
frontiers. Jacob and those like him can never return to Earth—not even
to Hoover City—except dead. The others are physical or psycho rejects
who couldn't get clearance if they went back to Earth. They know
nothing but rocketing and won't give up. They bring in our ships to
frontier ports like Hoover City to unload cargo and take on supplies."
"Don't the authorities object?"
"Not very strongly. The I. B. I. has too many problems right here to
search the whole System for a few two-bit crooks. Besides, we carry
cargoes of almost pure uranium and tungsten and all the stuff that's
scarce on Earth and Mars and Venus. Nobody really cares whether it
comes from the asteroids or Hades. If we want to risk our lives mining
it, that's our business."
She pursed her lips. "But if they guessed how strong we are or that we
have friends planted in the I. B. I.—well, things might be different.
There probably would be a crackdown."
Ben scowled. "What happens if there
is
a crackdown? And what will you
do when Space Corps ships officially reach the asteroids? They can't
ignore you then."
"Then we move on. We dream up new gimmicks for our crates and take them
to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. In time, maybe, we'll be
pushed out of the System itself. Maybe it won't be the white-suited
boys who'll make that first hop to the stars. It
could
be us, you
know—if we live long enough. But that Asteroid Belt is murder. You
can't follow the text-book rules of astrogation out there. You make up
your own."
Ben stiffened. "And that's why you want me for an astrogator."
Maggie rose, her eyes wistful. "If you want to come—and if you get
well." She looked at him strangely.
"Suppose—" He fought to find the right words. "Suppose I got well and
decided not to join Jacob. What would happen to me? Would you let me
go?"
Her thin face was criss-crossed by emotion—alarm, then bewilderment,
then fear. "I don't know. That would be up to Jacob."
He lay biting his lip, staring at the photo of Jacob. She touched his
hand and it seemed that sadness now dominated the flurry of emotion
that had coursed through her.
"The only thing that matters, really," she murmured, "is your walking
again. We'll try this afternoon. Okay?"
"Okay," he said.
When she left, his eyes were still turned toward Jacob's photo.
He was like two people, he thought.
Half of him was an officer of the Space Corps. Perhaps one single
starry-eyed boy out of ten thousand was lucky enough to reach that goal.
He remembered a little picture book his mother had given him when she
was alive. Under the bright pictures of spacemen were the captions:
"A Space Officer Is Honest" "A Space Officer Is Loyal." "A Space
Officer Is Dutiful."
Honesty, loyalty, duty. Trite words, but without those concepts,
mankind would never have broken away from the planet that held it
prisoner for half a million years.
Without them, Everson, after three failures and a hundred men dead,
would never have landed on the Moon twenty-seven years ago.
|
A Fall of Glass by Lee, Stanley R.
|
"A Fall of Glass", Stanley R. Lee, 1965.
A FALL OF GLASS
By STANLEY R. LEE
Illustrated by DILLON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine October 1960.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The weatherman was always right:
Temperature, 59; humidity, 47%;
occasional light showers—but of what?
The pockets of Mr. Humphrey Fownes were being picked outrageously.
It was a splendid day. The temperature was a crisp 59 degrees, the
humidity a mildly dessicated 47%. The sun was a flaming orange ball in
a cloudless blue sky.
His pockets were picked eleven times.
It should have been difficult. Under the circumstances it was a
masterpiece of pocket picking. What made it possible was Humphrey
Fownes' abstraction; he was an uncommonly preoccupied individual. He
was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses,
one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions.
But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to
begin with for a person living in a domed city. He was thinking so
deeply about it that it never occurred to him that entirely too many
people were bumping into him. He was thinking about Optimum Dome
Conditions (a crisp 59 degrees, a mildly dessicated 47%) when a bogus
postman, who pretended to be reading a postal card, jostled him. In the
confusion of spilled letters and apologies from both sides, the postman
rifled Fownes's handkerchief and inside jacket pockets.
He was still thinking about temperature and humidity when a pretty girl
happened along with something in her eye. They collided. She got his
right and left jacket pockets. It was much too much for coincidence.
The sidewalk was wide enough to allow four people to pass at one time.
He should surely have become suspicious when two men engaged in a
heated argument came along. In the ensuing contretemps they emptied his
rear pants pockets, got his wristwatch and restored the contents of the
handkerchief pocket. It all went off very smoothly, like a game of put
and take—the sole difference being that Humphrey Fownes had no idea he
was playing.
There was an occasional tinkle of falling glass.
It fell on the streets and houses, making small geysers of shiny mist,
hitting with a gentle musical sound, like the ephemeral droppings of
a celesta. It was precipitation peculiar to a dome: feather-light
fragments showering harmlessly on the city from time to time. Dome
weevils, their metal arms reaching out with molten glass, roamed the
huge casserole, ceaselessly patching and repairing.
Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still
intrigued by a temperature that was always 59 degrees, by a humidity
that was always 47%, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this
rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight
surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting
his fingerprints off the postman's bag, and which photographed, X-rayed
and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning
them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a
five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of
Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and
handedness behind.
By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete
with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an
orange patrol car parked down the street.
Lanfierre had undoubtedly been affected by his job.
Sitting behind the wheel of the orange car, he watched Humphrey Fownes
approach with a distinct feeling of admiration, although it was an
odd, objective kind of admiration, clinical in nature. It was similar
to that of a pathologist observing for the first time a new and
particularly virulent strain of pneumococcus under his microscope.
Lanfierre's job was to ferret out aberration. It couldn't be tolerated
within the confines of a dome. Conformity had become more than a social
force; it was a physical necessity. And, after years of working at it,
Lanfierre had become an admirer of eccentricity. He came to see that
genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own
small efforts, rarer.
Fownes was a masterpiece of queerness. He was utterly inexplicable.
Lanfierre was almost proud of Humphrey Fownes.
"Sometimes his house
shakes
," Lanfierre said.
"House shakes," Lieutenant MacBride wrote in his notebook. Then he
stopped and frowned. He reread what he'd just written.
"You heard right. The house
shakes
," Lanfierre said, savoring it.
MacBride looked at the Fownes house through the magnifying glass of
the windshield. "Like from ...
side to side
?" he asked in a somewhat
patronizing tone of voice.
"And up and down."
MacBride returned the notebook to the breast pocket of his orange
uniform. "Go on," he said, amused. "It sounds interesting." He tossed
the dossier carelessly on the back seat.
Lanfierre sat stiffly behind the wheel, affronted. The cynical MacBride
couldn't really appreciate fine aberrations. In some ways MacBride
was a barbarian. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He
had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly
absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. It was
only with the greatest reluctance that he finally mentioned Fownes
to MacBride. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had
seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly
resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. They spoke
in an incessant chatter of cliches, and their actions were unbelievably
trite.
Then a fine robust freak came along and the others—the echoes—refused
to believe it. The lieutenant was probably on the point of suggesting a
vacation.
"Why don't you take a vacation?" Lieutenant MacBride suggested.
"It's like this, MacBride. Do you know what a wind is? A breeze? A
zephyr?"
"I've heard some."
"They say there are mountain-tops where winds blow all the time. Strong
winds, MacBride. Winds like you and I can't imagine. And if there was
a house sitting on such a mountain and if winds
did
blow, it would
shake exactly the way that one does. Sometimes I get the feeling the
whole place is going to slide off its foundation and go sailing down
the avenue."
Lieutenant MacBride pursed his lips.
"I'll tell you something else," Lanfierre went on. "The
windows
all
close at the same time. You'll be watching and all of a sudden every
single window in the place will drop to its sill." Lanfierre leaned
back in the seat, his eyes still on the house. "Sometimes I think
there's a whole crowd of people in there waiting for a signal—as if
they all had something important to say but had to close the windows
first so no one could hear. Why else close the windows in a domed city?
And then as soon as the place is buttoned up they all explode into
conversation—and that's why the house shakes."
MacBride whistled.
"No, I don't need a vacation."
A falling piece of glass dissolved into a puff of gossamer against the
windshield. Lanfierre started and bumped his knee on the steering wheel.
"No, you don't need a rest," MacBride said. "You're starting to see
flying houses, hear loud babbling voices. You've got winds in your
brain, Lanfierre, breezes of fatigue, zephyrs of irrationality—"
At that moment, all at once, every last window in the house slammed
shut.
The street was deserted and quiet, not a movement, not a sound.
MacBride and Lanfierre both leaned forward, as if waiting for the
ghostly babble of voices to commence.
The house began to shake.
It rocked from side to side, it pitched forward and back, it yawed and
dipped and twisted, straining at the mooring of its foundation. The
house could have been preparing to take off and sail down the....
MacBride looked at Lanfierre and Lanfierre looked at MacBride and then
they both looked back at the dancing house.
"And the
water
," Lanfierre said. "The
water
he uses! He could be
the thirstiest and cleanest man in the city. He could have a whole
family of thirsty and clean kids, and he
still
wouldn't need all that
water."
The lieutenant had picked up the dossier. He thumbed through the pages
now in amazement. "Where do you get a guy like this?" he asked. "Did
you see what he carries in his pockets?"
"And compasses won't work on this street."
The lieutenant lit a cigarette and sighed.
He usually sighed when making the decision to raid a dwelling. It
expressed his weariness and distaste for people who went off and got
neurotic when they could be enjoying a happy, normal existence. There
was something implacable about his sighs.
"He'll be coming out soon," Lanfierre said. "He eats supper next door
with a widow. Then he goes to the library. Always the same. Supper at
the widow's next door and then the library."
MacBride's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. "The library?" he
said. "Is he in with that bunch?"
Lanfierre nodded.
"Should be very interesting," MacBride said slowly.
"I can't wait to see what he's got in there," Lanfierre murmured,
watching the house with a consuming interest.
They sat there smoking in silence and every now and then their eyes
widened as the house danced a new step.
Fownes stopped on the porch to brush the plaster of paris off his
shoes. He hadn't seen the patrol car and this intense preoccupation
of his was also responsible for the dancing house—he simply hadn't
noticed. There was a certain amount of vibration, of course. He
had a bootleg pipe connected into the dome blower system, and the
high-pressure air caused some buffeting against the thin walls of the
house. At least, he called it buffeting; he'd never thought to watch
from outside.
He went in and threw his jacket on the sofa, there being no room
left in the closets. Crossing the living room he stopped to twist a
draw-pull.
Every window slammed shut.
"Tight as a kite," he thought, satisfied. He continued on toward the
closet at the foot of the stairs and then stopped again. Was that
right? No,
snug as a hug in a rug
. He went on, thinking:
The old
devils.
The downstairs closet was like a great watch case, a profusion of
wheels surrounding the Master Mechanism, which was a miniature see-saw
that went back and forth 365-1/4 times an hour. The wheels had a
curious stateliness about them. They were all quite old, salvaged from
grandfather's clocks and music boxes and they went around in graceful
circles at the rate of 30 and 31 times an hour ... although there
was one slightly eccentric cam that vacillated between 28 and 29. He
watched as they spun and flashed in the darkness, and then set them for
seven o'clock in the evening, April seventh, any year.
Outside, the domed city vanished.
It was replaced by an illusion. Or, as Fownes hoped it might appear,
the illusion of the domed city vanished and was replaced by a more
satisfactory, and, for his specific purpose, more functional, illusion.
Looking through the window he saw only a garden.
Instead of an orange sun at perpetual high noon, there was a red sun
setting brilliantly, marred only by an occasional arcover which left
the smell of ozone in the air. There was also a gigantic moon. It hid a
huge area of sky, and it sang. The sun and moon both looked down upon a
garden that was itself scintillant, composed largely of neon roses.
Moonlight, he thought, and roses. Satisfactory.
And cocktails for
two.
Blast, he'd never be able to figure that one out! He watched as
the moon played,
Oh, You Beautiful Doll
and the neon roses flashed
slowly from red to violet, then went back to the closet and turned on
the scent. The house began to smell like an immensely concentrated rose
as the moon shifted to
People Will Say We're In Love
.
He rubbed his chin critically. It
seemed
all right. A dreamy sunset,
an enchanted moon, flowers, scent.
They were all purely speculative of course. He had no idea how a rose
really smelled—or looked for that matter. Not to mention a moon. But
then, neither did the widow. He'd have to be confident, assertive.
Insist
on it. I tell you, my dear, this is a genuine realistic
romantic moon. Now, does it do anything to your pulse? Do you feel icy
fingers marching up and down your spine?
His own spine didn't seem to be affected. But then he hadn't read that
book on ancient mores and courtship customs.
How really odd the ancients were. Seduction seemed to be an incredibly
long and drawn-out process, accompanied by a considerable amount
of falsification. Communication seemed virtually impossible. "No"
meant any number of things, depending on the tone of voice and the
circumstances. It could mean yes, it could mean ask me again later on
this evening.
He went up the stairs to the bedroom closet and tried the rain-maker,
thinking roguishly:
Thou shalt not inundate.
The risks he was taking!
A shower fell gently on the garden and a male chorus began to chant
Singing in the Rain
. Undiminished, the yellow moon and the red sun
continued to be brilliant, although the sun occasionally arced over and
demolished several of the neon roses.
The last wheel in the bedroom closet was a rather elegant steering
wheel from an old 1995 Studebaker. This was on the bootleg pipe; he
gingerly turned it.
Far below in the cellar there was a rumble and then the soft whistle of
winds came to him.
He went downstairs to watch out the living room window. This was
important; the window had a really fixed attitude about air currents.
The neon roses bent and tinkled against each other as the wind rose and
the moon shook a trifle as it whispered
Cuddle Up a Little Closer
.
He watched with folded arms, considering how he would start.
My dear
Mrs. Deshazaway.
Too formal. They'd be looking out at the romantic
garden; time to be a bit forward.
My very dear Mrs. Deshazaway.
No.
Contrived. How about a simple,
Dear Mrs. Deshazaway
. That might be
it.
I was wondering, seeing as how it's so late, if you wouldn't
rather stay over instead of going home....
Preoccupied, he hadn't noticed the winds building up, didn't hear the
shaking and rattling of the pipes. There were attic pipes connected
to wall pipes and wall pipes connected to cellar pipes, and they made
one gigantic skeleton that began to rattle its bones and dance as
high-pressure air from the dome blower rushed in, slowly opening the
Studebaker valve wider and wider....
The neon roses thrashed about, extinguishing each other. The red sun
shot off a mass of sparks and then quickly sank out of sight. The moon
fell on the garden and rolled ponderously along, crooning
When the
Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day
.
The shaking house finally woke him up. He scrambled upstairs to the
Studebaker wheel and shut it off.
At the window again, he sighed. Repairs were in order. And it wasn't
the first time the winds got out of line.
Why didn't she marry him and save all this bother? He shut it all down
and went out the front door, wondering about the rhyme of the months,
about stately August and eccentric February and romantic April. April.
Its days were thirty and it followed September.
And all the rest have
thirty-one.
What a strange people, the ancients!
He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street.
"Men are too perishable," Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. "For all
practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die."
"Would you pass the beets, please?" Humphrey Fownes said.
She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. "And don't look at me
that way," she said. "I'm
not
going to marry you and if you want
reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse."
The widow was a passionate woman. She did everything
passionately—talking, cooking, dressing. Her beets were passionately
red. Her clothes rustled and her high heels clicked and her jewelry
tinkled. She was possessed by an uncontrollable dynamism. Fownes had
never known anyone like her. "You forgot to put salt on the potatoes,"
she said passionately, then went on as calmly as it was possible for
her to be, to explain why she couldn't marry him. "Do you have any
idea what people are saying? They're all saying I'm a cannibal! I rob
my husbands of their life force and when they're empty I carry their
bodies outside on my way to the justice of the peace."
"As long as there are people," he said philosophically, "there'll be
talk."
"But it's the air! Why don't they talk about that? The air is stale,
I'm positive. It's not nourishing. The air is stale and Andrew, Curt,
Norman and Alphonse couldn't stand it. Poor Alphonse. He was never so
healthy as on the day he was born. From then on things got steadily
worse for him."
"I don't seem to mind the air."
She threw up her hands. "You'd be the worst of the lot!" She left the
table, rustling and tinkling about the room. "I can just hear them. Try
some of the asparagus.
Five.
That's what they'd say. That woman did
it again. And the plain fact is I don't want you on my record."
"Really," Fownes protested. "I feel splendid. Never better."
He could hear her moving about and then felt her hands on his
shoulders. "And what about those
very
elaborate plans you've been
making to seduce me?"
Fownes froze with three asparagus hanging from his fork.
"Don't you think
they'll
find out?
I
found out and you can bet
they
will. It's my fault, I guess. I talk too much. And I don't
always tell the truth. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Fownes, it
wasn't the old customs at all standing between us, it was air. I can't
have another man die on me, it's bad for my self-esteem. And now you've
gone and done something good and criminal, something peculiar."
Fownes put his fork down. "Dear Mrs. Deshazaway," he started to say.
"And of course when they do find out and they ask you why, Mr. Fownes,
you'll tell them. No, no heroics, please! When they ask a man a
question he always answers and you will too. You'll tell them I wanted
to be courted and when they hear that they'll be around to ask
me
a
few questions. You see, we're both a bit queer."
"I hadn't thought of that," Fownes said quietly.
"Oh, it doesn't really matter. I'll join Andrew, Curt, Norman—"
"That won't be necessary," Fownes said with unusual force. "With all
due respect to Andrew, Curt, Norman and Alphonse, I might as well state
here and now I have other plans for you, Mrs. Deshazaway."
"But my dear Mr. Fownes," she said, leaning across the table. "We're
lost, you and I."
"Not if we could leave the dome," Fownes said quietly.
"That's impossible! How?"
In no hurry, now that he had the widow's complete attention, Fownes
leaned across the table and whispered: "Fresh air, Mrs. Deshazaway?
Space? Miles and miles of space where the real-estate monopoly has
no control whatever? Where the
wind
blows across
prairies
; or is
it the other way around? No matter. How would you like
that
, Mrs.
Deshazaway?"
Breathing somewhat faster than usual, the widow rested her chin on her
two hands. "Pray continue," she said.
"Endless vistas of moonlight and roses? April showers, Mrs. Deshazaway.
And June, which as you may know follows directly upon April and is
supposed to be the month of brides, of marrying. June also lies beyond
the dome."
"I see."
"
And
," Mr. Fownes added, his voice a honeyed whisper, "they say
that somewhere out in the space and the roses and the moonlight,
the sleeping equinox yawns and rises because on a certain day it's
vernal
and that's when it roams the Open Country where geigers no
longer scintillate."
"
My.
" Mrs. Deshazaway rose, paced slowly to the window and then came
back to the table, standing directly over Fownes. "If you can get us
outside the dome," she said, "out where a man stays
warm
long enough
for his wife to get to know him ... if you can do that, Mr. Fownes ...
you may call me Agnes."
When Humphrey Fownes stepped out of the widow's house, there was a
look of such intense abstraction on his features that Lanfierre felt a
wistful desire to get out of the car and walk along with the man. It
would be such a
deliciously
insane experience. ("April has thirty
days," Fownes mumbled, passing them, "because thirty is the largest
number such that all smaller numbers not having a common divisor
with it are
primes
." MacBride frowned and added it to the dossier.
Lanfierre sighed.)
Pinning his hopes on the Movement, Fownes went straight to the
library several blocks away, a shattered depressing place given over
to government publications and censored old books with holes in
them. It was used so infrequently that the Movement was able to meet
there undisturbed. The librarian was a yellowed, dog-eared woman of
eighty. She spent her days reading ancient library cards and, like the
books around her, had been rendered by time's own censor into near
unintelligibility.
"Here's one," she said to him as he entered. "
Gulliver's Travels.
Loaned to John Wesley Davidson on March 14, 1979 for
five
days. What
do you make of it?"
In the litter of books and cards and dried out ink pads that surrounded
the librarian, Fownes noticed a torn dust jacket with a curious
illustration. "What's that?" he said.
"A twister," she replied quickly. "Now listen to
this
. Seven years
later on March 21, 1986, Ella Marshall Davidson took out the same book.
What do you make of
that
?"
"I'd say," Humphrey Fownes said, "that he ... that he recommended it
to her, that one day they met in the street and he told her about
this book and then they ... they went to the library together and she
borrowed it and eventually, why eventually they got married."
"Hah! They were brother and sister!" the librarian shouted in her
parched voice, her old buckram eyes laughing with cunning.
Fownes smiled weakly and looked again at the dust jacket. The twister
was unquestionably a meteorological phenomenon. It spun ominously, like
a malevolent top, and coursed the countryside destructively, carrying
a Dorothy to an Oz. He couldn't help wondering if twisters did anything
to feminine pulses, if they could possibly be a part of a moonlit
night, with cocktails and roses. He absently stuffed the dust jacket
in his pocket and went on into the other rooms, the librarian mumbling
after him: "Edna Murdoch Featherstone, April 21, 1991," as though
reading inscriptions on a tombstone.
The Movement met in what had been the children's room, where unpaid
ladies of the afternoon had once upon a time read stories to other
people's offspring. The members sat around at the miniature tables
looking oddly like giants fled from their fairy tales, protesting.
"Where did the old society fail?" the leader was demanding of them. He
stood in the center of the room, leaning on a heavy knobbed cane. He
glanced around at the group almost complacently, and waited as Humphrey
Fownes squeezed into an empty chair. "We live in a dome," the leader
said, "for lack of something. An invention! What is the one thing
that the great technological societies before ours could not invent,
notwithstanding their various giant brains, electronic and otherwise?"
Fownes was the kind of man who never answered a rhetorical question. He
waited, uncomfortable in the tight chair, while the others struggled
with this problem in revolutionary dialectics.
"
A sound foreign policy
," the leader said, aware that no one else had
obtained the insight. "If a sound foreign policy can't be created the
only alternative is not to have any foreign policy at all. Thus the
movement into domes began—
by common consent of the governments
. This
is known as self-containment."
Dialectically out in left field, Humphrey Fownes waited for a lull
in the ensuing discussion and then politely inquired how it might be
arranged for him to get out.
"Out?" the leader said, frowning. "Out? Out where?"
"Outside the dome."
"Oh. All in good time, my friend. One day we shall all pick up and
leave."
"And that day I'll await impatiently," Fownes replied with marvelous
tact, "because it will be lonely out there for the two of us. My future
wife and I have to leave
now
."
"Nonsense. Ridiculous! You have to be prepared for the Open Country.
You can't just up and leave, it would be suicide, Fownes. And
dialectically very poor."
"Then you
have
discussed preparations, the practical necessities of
life in the Open Country. Food, clothing, a weapon perhaps? What else?
Have I left anything out?"
The leader sighed. "The gentleman wants to know if he's left anything
out," he said to the group.
Fownes looked around at them, at some dozen pained expressions.
"Tell the man what he's forgotten," the leader said, walking to the far
window and turning his back quite pointedly on them.
Everyone spoke at the same moment. "
A sound foreign policy
," they all
said, it being almost too obvious for words.
On his way out the librarian shouted at him: "
A Tale of a Tub
,
thirty-five years overdue!" She was calculating the fine as he closed
the door.
Humphrey Fownes' preoccupation finally came to an end when he was one
block away from his house. It was then that he realized something
unusual must have occurred. An orange patrol car of the security police
was parked at his front door. And something else was happening too.
His house was dancing.
It was disconcerting, and at the same time enchanting, to watch one's
residence frisking about on its foundation. It was such a strange sight
that for the moment he didn't give a thought to what might be causing
it. But when he stepped gingerly onto the porch, which was doing its
own independent gavotte, he reached for the doorknob with an immense
curiosity.
The door flung itself open and knocked him back off the porch.
From a prone position on his miniscule front lawn, Fownes watched as
his favorite easy chair sailed out of the living room on a blast of
cold air and went pinwheeling down the avenue in the bright sunshine. A
wild wind and a thick fog poured out of the house. It brought chairs,
suits, small tables, lamps trailing their cords, ashtrays, sofa
cushions. The house was emptying itself fiercely, as if disgorging an
old, spoiled meal. From deep inside he could hear the rumble of his
ancient upright piano as it rolled ponderously from room to room.
He stood up; a wet wind swept over him, whipping at his face, toying
with his hair. It was a whistling in his ears, and a tingle on his
cheeks. He got hit by a shoe.
As he forced his way back to the doorway needles of rain played over
his face and he heard a voice cry out from somewhere in the living room.
"Help!" Lieutenant MacBride called.
Standing in the doorway with his wet hair plastered down on his
dripping scalp, the wind roaring about him, the piano rumbling in the
distance like thunder, Humphrey Fownes suddenly saw it all very clearly.
"
Winds
," he said in a whisper.
"What's happening?" MacBride yelled, crouching behind the sofa.
"
March
winds," he said.
"What?!"
"April showers!"
The winds roared for a moment and then MacBride's lost voice emerged
from the blackness of the living room. "These are
not
Optimum Dome
Conditions!" the voice wailed. "The temperature is
not
59 degrees.
The humidity is
not
47%!"
Fownes held his face up to let the rain fall on it. "Moonlight!" he
shouted. "Roses! My
soul
for a cocktail for two!" He grasped the
doorway to keep from being blown out of the house.
"Are you going to make it stop or aren't you!" MacBride yelled.
"You'll have to tell me what you did first!"
"I
told
him not to touch that wheel! Lanfierre. He's in the upstairs
bedroom!"
When he heard this Fownes plunged into the house and fought his way
up the stairs. He found Lanfierre standing outside the bedroom with a
wheel in his hand.
"What have I done?" Lanfierre asked in the monotone of shock.
Fownes took the wheel. It was off a 1995 Studebaker.
"I'm not sure what's going to come of this," he said to Lanfierre with
an astonishing amount of objectivity, "but the entire dome air supply
is now coming through my bedroom."
The wind screamed.
"Is there something I can turn?" Lanfierre asked.
"Not any more there isn't."
They started down the stairs carefully, but the wind caught them and
they quickly reached the bottom in a wet heap.
Recruiting Lieutenant MacBride from behind his sofa, the men carefully
edged out of the house and forced the front door shut.
The wind died. The fog dispersed. They stood dripping in the Optimum
Dome Conditions of the bright avenue.
"I never figured on
this
," Lanfierre said, shaking his head.
With the front door closed the wind quickly built up inside the house.
They could see the furnishing whirl past the windows. The house did a
wild, elated jig.
"What kind of a place
is
this?" MacBride said, his courage beginning
to return. He took out his notebook but it was a soggy mess. He tossed
it away.
"Sure, he was
different
," Lanfierre murmured. "I knew that much."
When the roof blew off they weren't really surprised. With a certain
amount of equanimity they watched it lift off almost gracefully,
standing on end for a moment before toppling to the ground. It was
strangely slow motion, as was the black twirling cloud that now rose
out of the master bedroom, spewing shorts and socks and cases every
which way.
"
Now
what?" MacBride said, thoroughly exasperated, as this strange
black cloud began to accelerate, whirling about like some malevolent
top....
Humphrey Fownes took out the dust jacket he'd found in the library. He
held it up and carefully compared the spinning cloud in his bedroom
with the illustration. The cloud rose and spun, assuming the identical
shape of the illustration.
"It's a twister," he said softly. "A Kansas twister!"
"What," MacBride asked, his bravado slipping away again, "what ... is a
twister?"
The twister roared and moved out of the bedroom, out over the rear of
the house toward the side of the dome. "It says here," Fownes shouted
over the roaring, "that Dorothy traveled from Kansas to Oz in a twister
and that ... and that Oz is a wonderful and mysterious land
beyond the
confines of everyday living
."
MacBride's eyes and mouth were great zeros.
"Is there something I can turn?" Lanfierre asked.
Huge chunks of glass began to fall around them.
"Fownes!" MacBride shouted. "This is a direct order! Make it go back!"
But Fownes had already begun to run on toward the next house, dodging
mountainous puffs of glass as he went. "Mrs. Deshazaway!" he shouted.
"Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Deshazaway!"
The dome weevils were going berserk trying to keep up with the
precipitation. They whirred back and forth at frightful speed, then,
emptied of molten glass, rushed to the Trough which they quickly
emptied and then rushed about empty-handed. "Yoo-hoo!" he yelled,
running. The artificial sun vanished behind the mushrooming twister.
Optimum temperature collapsed. "Mrs. Deshazaway!
Agnes
, will you
marry me? Yoo-hoo!"
Lanfierre and Lieutenant MacBride leaned against their car and waited,
dazed.
There was quite a large fall of glass.
|
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