THE hunters were murmuring among themselves:
“Slick fancy-talking bastard.”
“Forget it. All Quarries talk like that.”
“Thinks he’s better than us, him and his classy legal talk.”
“We’ll see how good he talks with a bit of steel through him.” Hull smiled coldly. “Excellent. I believe the situation is clear. Now, if you please, tell me what your weapons are.”
One by one, the hunters answered:
“Mace.”
“Net and trident.”
“Spear.”
“Morning-star.”
“Bola.”
“Scimitar.”
“Bayonet rifle,” Blaine said when his turn came.
“Broadsword.”
“Battle-axe.”
“Saber.”
“Thank you, gentlemen,” Hull said. “I will be armed with a rapier, naturally, and no armor. Our meeting will take place Sunday, at dawn, on my estate. The butler will give each of you a paper containing full instructions on how to get there. Let the bayonet man remain. Good morning to the rest of you.”
The hunters left. Hull said, “Bayonetry is an unusual art. Where did you learn it?”
Blaine hesitated, then said, “In the Army, 1943 to 1945.”
“You’re from the past?”
Blaine nodded.
“Interesting,” Hull said, with no particular sign of interest. “Then this, I daresay, is your first hunt?”
“It is.”
“You appear a person of some intelligence. I suppose you have your reasons for choosing so hazardous and disreputable an employment?”
“I’m low on funds,” Blaine said, “and I can’t find anything else to do.”
“Of course,” said Hull, as though he had known it all along. “So you turned to hunting. Yet hunting is not a thing merely to turn to; and hunting the beast Man is not for everyone. The trade calls for certain special abilities, not the least of which is the ability to kill. Do you think you have that innate talent?”
“I believe so,” Blaine said, though he hadn’t considered the question until now.
“I wonder,” Hull mused. “In spite of your bellicose appearance, you don’t seem the type. What if you find yourself incapable of killing me? What if you hesitate at the crucial moment when steel grates on steel?”
“I’ll chance it,” Blaine said.
HULL nodded agreeably. “And so will I. Perhaps, hidden deep within you, a spark of murder burns. Perhaps not. This doubt will add spice to the game—though you may not have time to savor it.”
“That’s my worry,” Blaine said, feeling an intense dislike for his elegant and rhetorical employer. “Might I ask you a question?”
“Consider me at your service.”
“Thank you. Why do you wish to die?”
Hull stared at him, then burst into laughter. “Now I know you’re from the past! What a question!”
“Can you answer it?”
“Of course,” Hull said. He leaned back in his chair, and his eyes took on the distant look of a man dictating his memoirs. “I am forty-three years old and weary of nights and days. I am a wealthy man and an uninhibited one. I have experimented, contrived, laughed, wept, loved, hated, tasted and drunk—my fill. I have sampled all that Earth and elsewhere have to offer me, and I choose not to tediously repeat the experience. When I was young, I pictured this excellent green planet revolving mysteriously around its flamboyant yellow luminary as a treasure trove, a brass box of delights inexhaustible in content and immeasurable in their effect upon my ever-eager desires.
“But now, sadly, I have lived longer and have witnessed sensation’s end. And now I see with what obese complacency our fat round Earth circles, at servile distance and unvarying pace, its gaudy, dreaded star. And the imagined treasure chest of the Earth seems now a child’s painted toy box, shallow in its contents and mediocre in its effect upon nerves too quickly deadened to all delight.”
Hull glanced at Blaine to note the effect of his words, and then went on.
“Boredom stretches before me now like a vast, arid plain—and I choose not to be bored. I choose, instead, to move on, move forward, move out, to sample Earth’s last and greatest adventure—the adventure of Death, gateway to the afterlife. Can you understand that?”
“Certainly,” Blaine said, irritated yet impressed by Hull’s theatricals. “But what’s the hurry? Life might have some good things still in store for you. And death is inevitable. Why rush it?”
“Spoken like a true 20th century optimist,” said Hull, laughing. “ ‘Life is real, life is earnest. In your day, one had to believe that life was real and earnest. What alternative was there? How many of you really believed in a life after death?”
“That doesn’t alter the validity of my point,” Blaine argued, hating the stodgy, cautious, reasonable position he was forced to assume.
“But it does! The perspective on life and death has changed now. Instead of Longfellow’s prosy advice, we follow Nietzsche’s dictum—to die at the right time! Intelligent people don’t clutch at the last shreds of life like drowning men clinging to a bit of board. They know that the body’s life is only an infinitesimal portion of Man’s total existence. Why shouldn’t they speed the body’s passing by a few years, if they so desire? Why shouldn’t those bright pupils skip a grade or two of school? Only the frightened, the stupid, the uneducated grasp at every possible monotonous second on Earth.”
“The frightened, stupid and uneducated,” Blaine repeated. “And the unfortunates who can’t afford Hereafter insurance.”
“WEALTH and class have their privileges,” Hull said, smiling faintly, “and their obligations as well. One of those obligations is the necessity of dying at the right time, before one becomes a bore to one’s peers and a horror to oneself. But the deed of dying transcends class and breeding. It is every man’s patent of nobility, his summons from the king, his knightly adventure, the greatest deed of his life. And how he acquits himself in that lonely and perilous enterprise is his true measure as a man.”
Hull’s blue eyes were fierce and glittering. He said, “I do not choose to experience this crucial event in bed. I do not wish a dull, tame, commonplace death to sneak over me disguised as sleep. I choose to die fighting!”
Blaine nodded in spite of himself and felt regret at his own prosaic death. A car accident! How dull, tame, commonplace! And how strange, dark, atavistic and noble seemed Hull’s lordly selection of death. Pretentious, of course, but then life itself was a pretension in the vast universe of unliving matter. Hull was like an ancient Japanese nobleman calmly kneeling to perform the ceremonial act of hara-kiri, and emphasizing the importance of life in the very selection of death. But hara-kiri was a passive Eastern avowal, while Hull’s manner of dying was a Western death, fierce, violent, exultant.
It was admirable. But intensely irritating to a man not yet prepared to die.
Blaine said, “I have nothing against you or any other man choosing his own death. But what about the hunters you plan to kill? They haven’t chosen to die and they have no assurance they’ll survive in the hereafter.”
Hull shrugged his shoulders. “They choose to live dangerously. In Nietzsche’s phrase, they prefer to run risk and danger, and play dice with death. Blaine, have you changed your mind?”
“No.”
Then we will meet Sunday.” Blaine went to the door and took his paper of instructions from the butler. As he was leaving, he said, “I wonder if you’ve considered one last thing.”
“What is that?” Hull asked. “You must have thought of it,” Blaine said. “The possibility that this whole elaborate setup—the scientific hereafter, voices of the dead, ghosts—is merely a gigantic hoax, a money-making fraud perpetrated by Hereafter, Inc.” Hull stood perfectly still. When he spoke, there was a hint of anger in his voice. “That is quite impossible. Only a very uneducated man could think such a thing.”
“Maybe,” Blaine
said. “But wouldn’t you look silly if it were a hoax! Good morning, Mr. Hull.” He left, glad to have shaken up that smooth, fancy, rhetorical smugness even for a moment—and sad that his own death had been so dull, tame and commonplace.
14.
THE following day, Saturday, Blaine went to Franchel’s apartment for his rifle, bayonet, hunter’s uniform and pack. He was given half his salary in advance, less ten per cent and the cost of the equipment. The money was very welcome, for he had been down to three dollars and change.
He went to the Spiritual Switchboard, but Melhill had left no further messages for him. He returned to his hotel room and spent the afternoon practicing lunges and parries.
That evening, Blaine found himself tense and despondent, nervous at the thought of the hunt beginning in the morning. He went to a small West Side cocktail lounge that had been designed to resemble a 20th century bar, with a dark gleaming bar, wooden stools, booths, a brass rail, and sawdust on the floor. He slid into a booth and ordered beer.
The classic neon lights glowed softly and a genuine antique jukebox played the sentimental tunes of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. Blaine sat hunched over his glass of beer, drearily asking himself who and what he was.
Was it truly he taking casual employment as a hunter and killer of men?
Then what happened to Tom Blaine, the former designer of sailboats, former listener to high-fidelity music, former reader of choice books, former viewer of good plays? What happened to that quiet, sardonic, non-aggressive man?
Surely that man, housed in his slender, nervous, unassuming body, would never choose to kill!
Would he?
Was that familiar and mourned Blaine defeated and smothered by the large, square-muscled, quick-reflexed fighter’s body he had acquired? And was that body, with its own peculiar glandular secretions dripping into the dark bloodstream, its own distinct and configurated brain, its own system of nerves and signals and responses—was that domineering body responsible for everything, dragging its helpless owner into murderous violence?
Blaine rubbed his eyes and told himself that he was dreaming nonsense. The truth was simply this: He had died through circumstances beyond his control, been reborn in the future, and found himself unemployable except as a hunter. Q.E.D.
But that rational explanation didn’t satisfy him and he had no time to search out the slippery and elusive truth.
He was no longer a detached observer of 2110. He had become a biased participant, an actor instead of an onlooker, with all of an actor’s thoughtless sweep and rush. Action was irresistible; it generated its own momentary truth. The brakes were off and the engine Blaine was rolling down the steep hill Life, gathering momentum but no moss. Perhaps this, now, was his last chance for a look, a summing up, a measured choice . . .
But it was already too late, for a man slid into the booth opposite him like a shadow across the world. And Blaine was looking into the white and impassive face of the zombie.
“GOOD evening,” said the zombie.
“Good evening,” Blaine said steadily. “Would you care for a drink?”
“No, thank you. My system doesn’t respond to stimulation.”
“Sorry to hear it,” said Blaine.
The zombie shrugged his shoulders. “I have a name now,” he said. “I decided to call myself Smith, until I remember my real name. Smith. Do you like it?”
“It’s a fine name.”
“Thank you. I went to a doctor,” Smith said. “He told me my body’s no good. No stamina, no recuperative powers.”
“Can’t you be helped?”
Smith shook his head. “The body’s definitely zombie. I occupied it much too late. The doctor gives me another few months at most.”
“Too bad,” said Blaine, feeling nausea rise in his throat at the sight of that thick-featured, leadenskinned face with its unharmonious features and patient Buddha’s eyes.
Smith sat slack and unnatural in rough workman’s clothes, his black-dotted white face close-shaven and smelling of strong lotion. But he had changed. Already Blaine could see a certain leathery dryness in the once-pliant skin, certain striations in the flesh around the eyes, nose and mouth, minute creases in the forehead like toolmarks in old leather. And, mingled with the heavy after-shaving lotion, Blaine thought he could sense the first faint odor of dissolution.
“What do you want with me?” Blaine asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Then leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that,” Smith said apologetically.
“Do you want to kill me?” Blaine persisted, his throat dry.
“I don’t know! I can’t remember! Kill you, protect you, maim you, love you—I don’t know yet! But I’ll remember soon, Blaine, I promise!”
“Leave me alone,” warned Blaine, his muscles tensing.
“I can’t,” Smith said. “Don’t you understand? I know nothing except you. Literally nothing! I don’t know this world or any other, no person, face, mind or memory. You’re my only landmark, the center of my existence, my only reason for living.”
“Stop it!”
“But it’s true! Do you think I enjoy dragging this tattered flesh through the streets? What good is life with no hope before me and no memory behind me? Death is better! Life means filthy decaying flesh, and death is pure spirit! I’ve thought about it, dreamed about it, beautiful fleshless death! But one thing stops me. I have you, Blaine, to keep me going!”
“Get out of here,” Blaine said, nausea bitter in his mouth.
“You, my sun and moon, my stars, my Earth, my total universe, my life, my reason, my friend, enemy, lover, murderer, wife, father, child, husband—” Blaine’s fist shot out, striking Smith high on the cheekbone. The zombie was flung back in the booth. His expression did not change, but a great purple bruise appeared on his lead-colored cheekbone.
“Your mark!” Smith said.
Blaine’s fist, poised for another blow, dropped.
Smith stood up. “I’m going. Take care of yourself, Blaine. Don’t die yet! I need you. Soon I’ll remember, and I’ll come to you.”
Smith, his slack, bruised face impassive, left the bar.
Blaine ordered a double whisky and sat for a long time over it, trying to still the shaking in his hands.
15.
BLAINE arrived at the Hull estate by rural jetbus, an hour before dawn. He was dressed in a traditional hunter’s uniform—khaki shirt and slacks, rubber-soled shoes and wide-brimmed hat. Slung over one shoulder was his field pack; over the other, he carried his rifle and bayonet in a plastic bag.
A servant met him at the outer gate and led him to the low, rambling mansion. Blaine learned that the Hull estate consisted of ninety wooded acres in the Adirondack Mountains between Keene and Elizabethtown.
Here, the servant told him, Hull’s father had died at the age of fifty-one, taking the lives of six hunters with him before a saber man slashed his head off. Glorious death! Hull’s uncle, on the other hand, had chosen to berserk in San Francisco, a city he had always loved. The police had to beam him twelve times before he dropped, and he took seven bystanders with him. The newspapers made much of the exploit and accounts of it were preserved in the family scrapbook.
It just went to show, the garrulous old retainer pointed out, the difference in temperaments. Some, like the uncle, were friendly, fun-loving men who wanted to die in a crowd, attracting an enviable amount of attention. Others, like the present Mr. Hull, were more given to the love of solitude and nature.
Blaine nodded politely to all this and was taken to a large rustic room where the hunters were assembled, drinking coffee and honing a last razor edge to their weapons. Light flashed from the blued-steel broadsword and silvery battle-axe, wavered along the polished spearhead and glinted frostily from the diamond points of the mace and morning-star. At first glance, Blaine thought it looked like a scene from medieval times. But on second thought he decided it was more like a movie set.
; “Pull up a chair, pal,” the axeman called. “Welcome to the Benevolent Protective Society of Butchers, Slaughterhouse Men, and Killers-at-Large. I’m Sammy Jones, finest axeman in the Americas and probably Europe, too.” Blaine sat down and was introduced to the other hunters. They represented half a dozen nationalities, although English was their common tongue.
SAMMY Jones was a squat, black-haired, bull-shouldered man, dressed in patched and faded khakis, with several old hunting scars across his craggy, thick-browed face.
“First hunt?” he asked, glancing at Blaine’s neat pressed khakis.
Blaine nodded, removed his rifle from its plastic bag and fitted the bayonet to its end. He tested the locking mechanism, tightened the rifle’s strap, and removed the bayonet again.
“Can you really use that thing?” Jones queried interestedly.
“Sure,” Blaine said, more confidently than he felt.
“Hope so. Guys like Hull have a nose for the weak sisters. They try to cut ’em out of the pack early.”
“How long does a hunt usually last?” Blaine asked.
“Well,” Jones said, “longest I was ever on took eight days. That was Asturias, where my partner Sligo got his. Generally a good pack can pin down a Quarry in a day or two. Depends on how he wants to die. Some try to hang on as long as they can. They run to cover. They hide in caves and ravines, the dirty treacherous dogs, and you have to go in for them and chance a thrust from the dark. That’s how Sligo got it. But I don’t think Hull’s that way. He wants to die like a great big fireeating he-man hero. So he’ll stalk around and take chances, looking to see how many of us he can knock off with his pigsticker.”
“You sound as if you don’t approve,” Blaine said.
Sammy Jones raised his bushy eyebrows. “I don’t hold with making a big fuss about dying. Here comes the hero himself.”
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