Many of the contestants had met their fate in urban-idiosyncratic ways. Freihoff St. John had been imprisoned for second-degree litterbugging. And the party that crossed the Verrazzano Bridge had subsequently disappeared into the snow-capped fastnesses of Brooklyn Heights and had not been heard from again.
Baxter realized that he was still in the running.
His spirits were considerably lifted when he started forth once again. But now he fell into an overconfidence more dangerous than the most profound depression. Journeying rapidly to the south, he took advantage of a traffic lull to step onto an express walkaway. He did this carelessly, without a proper examination of the consequences.
Irrevocably committed, he found to his horror that he was on a one-way route, no turns permitted. This walkaway, he now saw, led nonstop to the terra incognita of Jones Beach, Fire Island, Patchogue, and East Hampton.
The situation called for immediate action. To his left was a blank concrete wall. To his right there was a waist-high partition marked NO VAULTING ALLOWED BETWEEN 12:00 NOON AND 12:00 MIDNIGHT, TUESDAYS, THURSDAYS, AND SATURDAYS.
Today was Tuesday afternoon—a time of interdiction. Nevertheless, without hesitation, Steve vaulted over the barrier.
Retribution was swift and terrible. A camouflaged police car emerged from one of the city’s notorious ambushes. It bore down upon him, firing wildly into the crowd. (In this unhappy age, the police were required by law to fire wildly into the crowd when in pursuit of a suspect.)
Baxter took refuge in a nearby candy store. There, recognizing the inevitable, he tried to give himself up. But this was not permitted because of the overcrowded state of the prisons. A hail of bullets kept him pinned down while the stern-faced policemen set up mortars and portable flame-throwers.
It looked like the end, not only of Steve Baxter’s hopes, but of his very life. Lying on the floor among gaudy jawbreakers and brittle liquorice whips, he commended his soul to God and prepared to meet his end with dignity.
But his despair was as premature as his earlier optimism had been. He heard sounds of a disturbance and, raising his head, saw that a group of armed men had attacked the police car from the rear. Turning to meet this threat, the men in blue were enfiladed from the flank and wiped out to the last man.
Baxter came out to thank his rescuers and found Flame O’Rourke Steinmetz at their head. The beautiful bandit girl had been unable to forget the soft-spoken stranger. Despite the mumbled objections of her drunken father, she had shadowed Steve’s movements and come to his rescue.
The black-hatted men plundered the area with noisy abandon. Flame and Steve retired to the shadowy solitude of an abandoned Howard Johnson’s restaurant. There, beneath the peeling orange gables of a gentler, more courteous age, a tremulous love scene was enacted between them. It was no more than a brief, bittersweet interlude, however. Soon. Steve Baxter plunged once again into the ravening maelstrom of the city.
Advancing relentlessly, his eyes closed to slits against the driving smog storm and his mouth a grim white line in the lower third of his face, Baxter won through to 49th Street and Eighth Avenue. There, in an instant, conditions changed with that disastrous suddenness typical of a Jungle City.
While crossing the street, Baxter heard a deep, ominous roar. He realized that the traffic light had changed. The drivers, frenzied by days of waiting and oblivious to minor obstacles, had simultaneously floored their accelerators. Steve Baxter was directly in the path of a vehicular stampede.
Advance or retreat across the broad boulevard was clearly impossible. Thinking fast, Baxter flung aside a manhole cover and plunged underground. He made it with perhaps a half-second to spare. Overhead, he heard the shrieks of tortured metal and the heavy impact of colliding vehicles.
He continued to press ahead by way of the sewer system. This network of tunnels was densely populated, but was marginally safer than the surface roads. Steve encountered trouble only once, when a jackroller attacked him along the margin of a sediment tank.
Toughened by his experiences. Baxter subdued the bravo and took his canoe—an absolute necessity in some of the lower passageways. Then he pushed on, paddling all the way to 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue before a flash flood drove him to the surface.
Now, indeed, his long-desired goal was near to hand. Only one more block remained; one block, and he would be at the Times Square Land Office!
But at this moment he encountered the final, shattering obstacle that wrote finis to all his dreams.
In the middle of 42nd Street, extending without visible limit to the north and south, there was a wall. It was a cyclopean structure, and it had sprung up overnight in the quasi-sentient manner of New York’s architecture. This, Baxter learned, was one side of a gigantic new upper-middle-income housing project. During its construction, all traffic for Times Square was being rerouted via the Queens-Battery Tunnel and the East 37th Street Shunpike.
Steve estimated that the new route would take him no less than three weeks and would lead him through the uncharted Garment District. His race, he realized, was over.
Courage, tenacity, and righteousness had failed; and, were he not a religious man, Steve Baxter might have contemplated suicide. With undisguised bitterness, he turned on his little transistor radio and listened to the latest reports.
Four contestants had already reached the Land Office. Five others were within a few hundred yards of the goal, coming in by the open southern approaches. And, to compound Steve’s misery he heard that Freihoff St. John, having received a plenary pardon from the governor, was on his way once more, approaching Times Square from the east.
At this blackest of all possible moments, Steve felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned and saw that Flame had come to him again. Although the spirited girl had sworn to have nothing further to do with him, she had relented. This mild, even-tempered man meant more to her than pride; more, perhaps, than life itself.
What to do about the wall? A simple matter for the daughter of a bandit chief! If one could not go around it or through it or under it, why, one must then go over it! And to this purpose she had brought ropes, boots, pitons, crampons, hammers, axes—a full complement of climbing equipment. She was determined that Baxter should have one final chance at his heart’s desire—and that Flame O’Rourke Steinmetz should accompany him, and not accept no for an answer!
They climbed, side by side, up the building’s glass-smooth expanse. There were countless dangers—birds, aircraft, snipers, wise guys—all the risks of the unpredictable city. And, far below, old Pablo Steinmetz watched, his face like corrugated granite.
After an eternity of peril, they reached the top and started down the other side—
And Flame slipped!
In horror Baxter watched the slender girl fall to her doom in Times Square, to die impaled upon the needle-sharp point of a car’s aerial. Baxter scrambled down and knelt beside her, almost out of his head with grief.
And, on the other side of the wall, old Pablo sensed that something irrevocable had happened. He shuddered, his mouth writhed in anticipation of grief, and he reached blindly for a bottle.
Strong hands lifted Baxter to his feet. Uncomprehendingly, he looked up into the kindly red face of the Federal land clerk.
It was difficult for him to realize that he had completed the race. With curiously deadened emotions, he heard how St. John’s pushiness and hauteur had caused a riot in the explosive Burmese Quarter of East 42nd Street, and how St. John had been forced to claim sanctuary in the labyrinthine ruins of the Public Library, from which refuge he still had not been able to extricate himself.
But it was not in Steve Baxter’s nature to gloat, even when gloating was the only conceivable response. All that mattered to him was that he had won, had reached the Land Office in time to claim the last remaining acre of land.
All it had cost was effort and pain, and the life of a young bandit girl.
Time was merciful; and some weeks later, Steve Baxter was not th
inking of the tragic events of the race. A Government jet had transported him and his family to the town of Cormorant in the Sierra Nevada mountains. From Cormorant, a helicopter brought them to their prize. A leathery Land Office marshal was on hand to greet them and to point out their new freehold.
Their land lay before them, sketchily fenced, on an almost vertical mountainside. Surrounding it were other similarly fenced acres, stretching as far as the eye could see. The land had recently been strip-mined; it existed now as a series of gigantic raw slashes across a dusty, dun-colored earth. Not a tree or a blade of grass could be seen. There was a house, as promised; more precisely, there was a shack. It looked as if it might last until the next hard rain.
For a few minutes the Baxters stared in silence. Then Adele said, “Oh, Steve.”
Steve said, “I know.”
“It’s our new land,” Adele said.
Steve nodded. “It’s not very—pretty,” he said hesitantly.
“Pretty? What do we care about that?” Adele declared. “It’s ours, Steve, and there’s a whole acre of it! We can grow things here, Steve!”
“Well, maybe not at first—”
“I know, I know! But we’ll put this land back into shape, and then we’ll plant it and harvest it! We’ll live here, Steve! Won’t we?”
Steve Baxter was silent, gazing over his dearly won land. His children—Tommy and blonde little Amelia—were playing with a clod of earth. The US marshal cleared his throat and said, “You can still change your mind, you know.”
“What?” Steve asked.
“You can still change your mind, go back to your apartment in the city. I mean, some folks think it’s sorta crude out here, sorta not what they was expecting.”
“Oh, Steve, no!” his wife moaned.
“No, Daddy, no!” his children cried.
“Go back?” Baxter asked. “I wasn’t thinking of going back. I was just looking at it all. Mister, I never saw so much land all in one place in my whole life!”
“I know,” the marshal said softly. “I been twenty years out here and the sight of it still gets to me.”
Baxter and his wife looked at each other ecstatically. The marshal rubbed his nose and said, “Well, I reckon you folks won’t be needin’ me no more.” He exited unobtrusively.
Steve and Adele gazed out over their land. Then Adele said, “Oh, Steve, Steve! It’s all ours! And you won it for us—you did it all by yourself!”
Baxter’s mouth tightened. He said very quietly, “No, honey, I didn’t do it all alone. I had some help.”
“Who, Steve? Who helped you?”
“Some day I’ll tell you about it,” Baxter said. “But right now—let’s go into our house.”
Hand in hand they entered the shack. Behind them, the sun was setting in the opaque Los Angeles smog. It was as happy an ending as could be found in the latter half of the twenty-first century.
REDFERN’S LABYRINTH
CHARLES ANGIER REDFERN received two curious letters in his mail on an otherwise undistinguished morning. One letter was in a plain white envelope, and for a moment Redfern thought he recognized the handwriting. He opened the envelope and took out a letter with no salutation or signature. He puzzled for a while over the strange yet familiar handwriting, then recognized it as an imitation of his own. Mildly intrigued, but with a faint anticipation of boredom, he read the following:
Most of the propositions in Redfern’s ineptly titled Labyrinth will doubtless go unchallenged, as no one could possibly care one way or another. Redfern’s Labyrinth fails to evoke anything except Redfern’s own baffled impotence. One senses that Redfern has failed to overcome his own meek and hateful slavishness, his boundless desire to comply.
Because of this resonant failure, the reader’s first sensation is apt to be pointedly inconsequential: a concern with the humble brevity of the Labyrinth, and a spiteful wish that it were shorter still.
But this quickly passes, and the reader discovers that his predominant mood is a muted reluctance to feel anything at all. With gratitude he discovers himself to be indifferent. And, although he surely does not wish to remember the Labyrinth, he does not even care enough to forget it.
Thus the reader meets Redfern’s boredom with an even more devastating boredom of his own; he imitates Redfern’s hostility, and easily surpasses it. He refuses even to acknowledge Redfern’s existence; and to that end, he has the absentminded sensation of never having experienced the Labyrinth at all. (He is right, of course; no number of re-encounters would ever correct that eminently logical conclusion.)
This Labyrinth, it seems, could be used as an exemplary monument to tedium, were it not marred (how typical of Redfern!) by a single provocative idea.
This occurs in Proposition 113, which states: ‘All men know that the Maze rules its haphazard victims with an iron law; but very few realize the logical consequences of this: namely, that the Maze itself must be one of these victims, and must therefore be equally subject to the rule of an irksome law.’
Redfern does not state the ‘law’, a lapse which we might have anticipated. But it can easily be inferred from his otherwise meaningless Proposition 282: “Providence, despite all outward appearances, is inevitably merciful.’
Therefore, following Redfern: the Maze rules men, but Providence rules the Maze. How can we know this? By the law to which the Maze (in common with all things except Providence) is subject. What is this law? That the Maze is under a mandate to make itself known. Our proof of this? The fact that Redfern, the meekest and most imitative of men, knows it.
But now we wish to know exactly what this law is that governs the Maze. How must the Maze make itself known? Without a description of this, we have nothing; and Redfern is useless to us in this quest. He cannot tell us, he probably would not even if he could. Therefore, for the description of the law which circumscribes the Maze, its particular manner and form, together with several homely hints to aid in its recognition, we turn to the otherwise undistinguished Charles Angier Redfern.
Redfern put down the letter. Its forced ambiguities had bored him. Its specious and arbitrary manner and its generally meretricious effect had given him the curiously comforting sensation that one gets by discovering as a falsehood what one had suspected as truth. He turned to the second letter.
The envelope was unnaturally long and narrow, and coloured a tedious aqua; it retained a faint but unmistakable odour of kelp. His name, printed in a faded, machine-simulated hand, was correctly spelled; but his address was incorrectly given as 132 Bruckner Boulevard. That had been crossed out, and a printed imitation of a post-office stamp read: ‘Return to Sender’. (There was no return address on the envelope.) That, in turn, had been slashed with a black crayon, and someone had written: ‘Try 137 W. 12th Street’, which was his true address.
Redfern realized that these details were superfluous; they seemed to be in imitation of the letter within. He opened the envelope and extracted the letter, which was written gratuitously on a torn piece of brown wrapping paper. It read:
hi there!!!
You have been selected as one of those few truly modern and discerning people for whom novelty outweighs apprehension, and whose desire for the unusual is metered only by his innate good taste and sense of style. Above all we believe that you are the sort of uninhibited free-swinger with whom we would like to be friends.
Therefore we take this opportunity of inviting you to the GRAND OPENING OF OUR LABYRINTH!!!!!
This Labyrinth (the only one of its kind on the Eastern Seaboard) is, needless to say, replete with kicks. There are no squares on our curves!!! This Labyrinth beggars the description and infantilizes the desires.
Please call us and we’ll arrange a time and place of Entrance to suit your convenience. Our charges are merely life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Call us soon, hear? and thanks a lot, fella!!!!
Instead of a signature there was a telephone number.
Redfern flicked th
e letter regretfully in his hand. It was obviously the work of an over-eager English major—tediously hip, drearily cute.
The writer of the letter was obviously trying to perpetrate a hoax; therefore, Redfern decided to hoax the hoaxer through a show of credence. He picked up the telephone and dialled the number he had been given.
The voice of a middle-aged woman, querulous but resigned, said: “Redfern Behavioural Research Institute.”
Redfern frowned, cleared his throat, and said, “I am calling to inquire about the Labyrinth.”
“About the what?” the woman said.
“The Labyrinth.”
“What number are you calling?”
Redfern told her. The woman agreed that he had the correct number for the Redfern Institute; but she knew nothing about any Labyrinth. Unless, of course, he was referring to the well-known L Series of mazes, which were used for the testing of rats. The L Series mazes, she went on, were available in various models and were priced according to their square footage. They ranged from the L-1001. a simple forced-choice binary maze of twenty-five square feet, all the way up to the L-10023, a multiple-choice random-selection model of nine hundred square feet, suitable for auditorium viewing.
“No,” Redfern said, “I’m afraid that wasn’t exactly the sort of thing I had in mind.”
“Then what exactly did you have in mind?” the woman asked. “We also build custom mazes, as our advertisement in the Yellow Pages points out.”
“But I don’t want you to build a maze for me,” Redfern said. “You see, according to the letter I received this Labyrinth, or maze, is already in existence and seems to be quite extensive in size and to have been designed for humans, that is to say, for people.”
“Just exactly what are you talking about?” the woman asked, in tones of deepest suspicion.
Redfern found himself babbling: “It’s this letter I received. I’ve been invited to the grand opening of this Labyrinth, which gave your telephone number for further information—”
Various Fiction Page 243