Who would have thought that among these—
But you know. If there are even a few such among them, it is unavailing; this race is one we shall never conquer. Release all of them, brothers, and return while there is time. We must die, and lie in wait again . . . for a million years, or a billion years, until our time shall come. . . .
XI
The derelict hurtled along its curve, leaving the Belt and its dwellers behind. Before long it would be time to fire the distress rockets; but for the present there was nothing to do.
For some time no one had said anything. Mostly they didn’t look at each other either. It was as if the complex threads of communication, the relationships that had bound them all together in one pattern rather than any other, had snapped all at once, and it would be a long time, if ever, before a new pattern was established.
Harry Burk sought to break the silence. He said heavily, “I can’t figure it. We all came through . . . but nobody seems to know why.” His shoulders slumped. “I suppose we’ll never know.”
No one appeared to be listening.
Charles Linforth stood staring down dry-eyed at the shrouded body of his wife; his face was haggard and remote, as it had been ever since their awakening, and since he had announced his decision to resign from all connection with the Jordan Company—announced it as a decision taken some time earlier, upon due consideration, for reasons of health. . . . They could guess all they liked, that was all he would ever let them know, as far as he would ever let the mask slip.
Leoce sat apart, her slanted eyes sleepy and unseeing. At first she had wept bitterly, terribly, till they had feared she was insane, wept as for something lost and now never again to be found. Her father and Harry had been awkward and helpless in the face of the girl’s hysteria; it had been the dark Ilena, who alone seemed unchanged, who had talked to her comfortingly, soothed her at last. Now Leoce was quiet and oddly intent. She was trying to conjure up the face of the hooded priest in her dream, trying to remember some glimpse, some clue. . . . She no longer glanced at Harry Burk.
Mrs. Jordan was not listening. She lay back in her big chair, her hands limp in her lap, her face placid, eyes closed. She no longer cared what might become of her golden yacht, her many possessions, all the wealth whose extent she’d never quite comprehended. She was no longer even afraid of dying; she was dead.
Burk got restlessly to his feet and nodded to his wife. Ilena rose like an automaton and followed him into the starboard gallery, away from the rest, where space looked in through the glass walls.
He stared hard at her smooth, unrevealing face, and had trouble finding the words. “You might as well know now—” he began, and stopped.
“Yes?” said Ilena, unhurried, waiting.
“We won’t know, of course, till we find out the terms of the will. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll sign it all over, if necessary. I’m through;” Harry Burk, small-time gambler, whose luck and whose nerve ran out when the stakes got so big he couldn’t really see them. Not his kind of game, he knew now. He’d seen himself in the mirror—maybe they all had; about Ilena it was hard to tell. . . .
“I see,” said Ilena. “Mother’s dead, Mr. Linforth’s resigned, now you’re resigning. You’re all going off and leaving me, aren’t you?” Her voice was unemotional, factual. It was only natural that it should be so: that they should all go away in the end and leave her alone with the burden she had chosen.
“I’m not talking about leaving,” said Burk roughly.
“No, of course. There’s the child.”
“Yes, the child. He’ll be different!”
“He will be.”
Just how different, they could have no idea.
1955
SINGLE COMBAT
One of the many reasons for my admiration of Robert Abernathy is that I have yet to see two stories of his which resemble each other—save in originality and skill. Here, in a quite different vein from any of his previous F&SF stories, he tells the nightmare of a man who declared war against the inanimate stones of a city . . . and found his challenge answered.
HE CAME WARILY OUT OF THE BASEment room and locked the door behind him. Tense nerves spurred him suddenly to flight, and he started to bolt up the stair that led from the airwell. He tripped on a step that was crumbling, barely caught himself, and stood, swaying, chest heaving, fighting down panic.
Take it easy. Plenty of time.
Deliberately he turned back to the door, made sure once more of the heavy lock. He thrust the key into his pocket, then drew it out with a wry face and, instead, tossed it at the drainpipe grating. It hit a crossbar and rebounded to lie gleaming on the concrete.
Feverishly, like a man stamping on a scorpion, he kicked the key at the grating. It hung, slipped through tinkling, and fell out of sight.
He was under control again. He climbed the steps without looking back, and paused in the empty alley. No one was watching, there was nothing there but the usual litter, in the narrow way beneath the blind eyes of high painted-out windows. Among soiled papers a garbage can lay overturned. Against the brick wall opposite, a pint whisky bottle stood, placed upright with meaningless care by whoever had drained and left it.
He looked at these things, the ugliness that for so long had seeped into his soul and almost destroyed him, with a new, ironic detachment, seeing them as temporary and devoid of significance.
Late cloudless afternoon lay like a blanket on the city. Above the squat grimy structures close at hand, the great buildings soared, flashing with windows. Above all smoke smudges drifted, lazy in the smothering calm. In the streets traffic growled past, shedding gasoline fumes and the smell of heated asphalt. The alley stank; the city stank; even the swift river stank.
Head back, eyes narrowed against reflected sunlight, he snuffed its air that was rank with memory.
The stench of many summers . . . Get up, I smell gas. No, it’s the wind from across the river. The refineries there. Well, it’s making the baby choke. Can’t we do something?
The everlasting cough and rumble, the voice of the city . . . Goddamn trucks, going by all night. Can’t sleep for them. If I could just get some sleep . . .
The raucous voices, the jeers, the blows, brutality of life trapped in a steel and cement jungle . . . Hit him, run him out of the neighborhood. Hit him again. Dirty nigger, dago, kike . . .
The pavement burning your feet through worn out shoe soles, after miles of tramping on pavement . . . You’re too late, there’s no jobs left. Move along. No, I tell you. No. No.
The hate, growing always.
He spat against the bricks. He said half aloud, “You asked for it. When it happens—maybe, just maybe you’ll know it was me, I did it to you!”
In that moment he imagined that the city heard him, that it shrank from him in fear. That a shudder ran through the miles of it, along steel and copper nerves, from its cloudiest spires to its bowels mined deep in the living rock, from the rich men’s houses on its heights to its squalid tenements and slimy waterfronts.
Plenty of time. Three hours to go. He would be a long way off, watching, when the moment came. A garbled fragment of Scripture came to his mind: They shall watch the smoke of her burning from afar off, and the smoke of her burning goeth up forever and ever.
He emerged almost blindly from the alley mouth, brushing past people on the sidewalk. One foot before the other. Each step took him farther away from the basement room, the closed and locked door.
One foot before the other—as so often, in weariness and despair and hatred, he’d walked these streets before. But now, at every step it seemed that the city rocked under his tread, the tall towers reeled toward engulfment, and the city was afraid.
The blind passersby, the walking dead, noticed nothing. They didn’t see that he, who had been small and reviled, had grown taller than the towers, that he had become an avenging giant. . . .
Brakes screamed. He stumbled backward, shaken. He would have taken oath that the light had been green a
n instant before, as he stepped off the curb.
Engines snorted anger, great wheels pounded past over the uneven pavement. The street was suddenly wide and perilous. He moved back, eying the murky red of the warning light, and set his shoulders against the corner store-front, trying to still his fingers’ quivering by fumbling for a cigarette.
He might have been killed. Not now, he thought, not by a damfool accident! Or worse than killed. He had a sickening vision of himself injured, carried helpless but conscious to a hospital, dreadfully aware that back there, not far enough away, behind the locked door one element was changing into another at an unchangeable rate, and time was running out.
Jerkily he snapped his lighter, but it obstinately refused to catch. He swore at it; then he froze. In his ears was the strident twanging of a plucked and broken string, indeterminable of source, stinging nerves already taut.
He looked anxiously right, left, all round. Then distinctly from overhead, in a moment’s hush of the traffic, came an uneasy, tortured creaking. He squinted upward, dropped lighter and unlit cigarette and sprang to one side. His heart banged painfully against his ribs.
Just over where he had been standing, the guy-wire supporting a heavy advertising sign had parted, throwing its whole weight on the angle-iron brace. The sign sagged precariously above the sidewalk, the iron buckled and almost gave way.
He stared fascinatedly at it, oblivious of sweat running down his face. The sign teetered and didn’t fall. But he had an irrational, frightening conviction that if he were to step back to the spot he had been in a moment earlier, it would fall.
That was nonsense. He tried to laugh at the nonsense, but his throat was too tight. He took a cautious step backward, then pivoted and walked swiftly away from the street-corner. He kept to the outer edge of the sidewalk, and glanced frequently upward.
When he had gone half a block, he realized with an icy start that he was going back the way he’d come, back toward the locked room.
He stopped short. But he couldn’t return to the corner where he had tried to cross. He stood wavering, again having to quell insinuations of panic.
Directly across the street there was a subway entrance. If he hadn’t been bemused he would have noticed it as he passed before.
Of course—the subway: fifteen minutes to safety. He looked to right and left, and upward—with a new caution already become almost habitual—and hurried across the street.
Midway he checked himself so suddenly that he nearly fell. He turned aside, trembling; his steps had carried him to the very edge of a yawning and unguarded manhole.
Shivering with reaction, he faced the subway entrance. And all at once it seemed to him no familiar place, but a hooded gulf leading to a fearsome underworld. From down there, from somewhere below the dimlit stairway that was all he could see, a vast rolling noise ascended, and whiffs of air that was at once dank and hot and smoky.
There was danger everywhere, above and beneath. The bellowing of a train passing below was a triumphant voice from Inferno, mingled with a cacophony of shriller notes, the cries of victims crushed and screaming in the nether blackness. For life’s own sake he would not, could not set foot on those stairs.
He retreated from the pit, and stood trying to think.
There were other means of transporation. Buses, taxis . . . But he didn’t move.
In the street the late afternoon rush traffic surged, snarled, panted. Brakes squalled, tires whimpered, horns blasted ferocious warnings, metal rang. Somewhere a few blocks away, a siren wailed suddenly, rose and fell, sobbing of disaster.
He thought of mishaps, smashups, a million and one chances. He couldn’t give up the solid feel of the pavement under his feet.
Plenty of time, he told himself. He ought to know; he’d made the settings and thrown the switch. Keep your head; you can always walk far enough.
Another thought, fleeting and dismissed—they could have provided him with a quick escape, as perhaps they’d done for the others who’d performed their tasks and left before him. But from first to last he had given them very little thought. He’d done their bidding,” dutifully learned their slogans that were loud and meaningless as a child’s rattle, knowing all along that they existed for one reason only: to make him the city’s executioner. Their purposes in doing so troubled him not at all; he had his own motives.
Keep your head, and walk out.
Accidents. In a city like this, accidents were always happening. He must avoid them and he mustn’t let them rattle him. He mustn’t attract attention—be picked up, perhaps, and lodged in jail. There was still plenty of time if he didn’t panic.
But the street was all in shadow, and on a great billboard atop the buildings opposite the light was changing, deepening with that late richness that comes before twilight.
He began walking. He watched his step, and watched the darkening air above. Perhaps because he was watchful, nothing untoward happened. Each block finished was a victory, or a step nearer victory.
Lights were coming out. Street lights dispelled the dusk, and a multitude of colored signs glowed and blinked, beckoning to the people who were now more numerous on the sidewalks, as evening came on.
The lights said, Here is food and drinks and here is music, and a moment to forget.
The people swarmed like moths beneath the lights, believing them. They were weary and eager to believe. Today had been a hard day, and they supposed that tomorrow would be like today, as tomorrow had always been before.
He alone, pushing among them and past them, knew better. For most of these people here, there would be no tomorrow. For most of them—by now he had covered some two miles from Point Zero, which was the locked room in the center of the city, but even here most of them would never know when it came.
He didn’t hate them; he even felt a little sorry for them. They were trapped as he had been. But he hated the trap, the city itself, with the venom of bitter years. . . .
He “paused briefly on yet another street corner, and almost died there.
This far out, the streetcars ran, and one was passing, thundering steel on steel rails. As its trolley reached the intersection of overhead cables at the crossing, something caught, the line stretched tense and parted with a flash like summer lightning. The broken end came whipping toward him like a great snake striking, hissing and spewing blue flame.
His reflexes saved him with a leap he would not have thought possible. He plunged headlong, sprawling and skinning hands and knees against the pavement, and without a pause was up and running, mind blank with terror.
With a great effort of will he checked his flight and looked back. Most of a block away, the stalled streetcar stood with people beginning to cluster about it—were some of them looking after him?—and a police whistle shrilled.
The whistle stabbed him with fresh panic. He sprinted across the fortunately empty street—remembering the direction he had to keep going—and dived into the shadowy mouth of an alley between lightless buildings.
As he ran through the near-blackness of the alley something, a sixth sense or maybe a seventh, warned him, and he swerved like a football player avoiding a tackier. The section of cornice, falling soundlessly from above, shattered to bits and powder a yard away from him. Overhead disturbed pigeons fluttered sleepily.
He plunged out into the open on a lighted but almost deserted street. For a bare second he paused—with the sense that to hesitate any longer might be fatal—then, recognizing where he was, veered to the left and sprinted again.
The sidewalk here was old, of bricks. Abruptly it seemed to heave and buckle ahead of him, striving to trip him, but he hurdled the rough place and pounded on. Up the rise of a gentle hill, and past the crest. Down there the way ended in a cross-street, and there were no more lights, but beyond—darkness with a feeling of open space, and a remote glimmer of water.
He was almost there, he was going to make it—
Out of the parkway slewed a huge tank truck, taking th
e corner too fast, and as it skidded, jackknifing, the coupling between tractor and trailer gave way. The cab bounced up onto the sidewalk, snapping a lamppost before it stopped; and the tank rolled over, blocking the street, with a monstrous roar of crumpling metal. The lights all along the street went, out, but moments later it was lit by the red glare of flames. Fire, belching black smoke, rose like a wall.
He spun round, almost falling, straightarming himself off a brick wall with a violence that all but broke his wrist. He ran. There was no shred of doubt left in his mind that he was hunted—not, so far at least, by men, but by something mightier than any army of men. He ran as a hunted animal runs, making sudden shifts that might confuse the implacable enemy. There must be a limit to the number of traps it could set for him. . . .
Once more he swung into a street that led downward toward the river, and pelted headlong down it, gulping for his second wind. Closer . . . closer . . . Along the edge of the parkway were warning lamps smokily burning, a wooden barricade, and beyond it the raw black slash of a bottomless trench. But he was past being turned back. He put all he had left into one great leap, and landed rolling, clawing in loose earth that slipped treacherously away beneath him—But earth!
He reeled erect and staggered on for a few yards, feeling grass and soil underfoot, not concrete or asphalt, and seeing branches against the sky.
He sank down exhausted, and putting out one hand to steady himself felt the roughness of bark. Gratefully he leaned against the shaggy trunk, clasped lover’s arms around it. Under him were grass and leases and humus, and insects fiddled plaintively nearby.
Not far away, beyond the excavation he had sprung across, loomed the fronts of houses with lit windows scattered like misplaced eyes, and the streetlights burned; and across the river, reflected in it, were moving stars of traffic and towering buildings like constellations. Between heaven and earth hung a red star, blinking on and off, on and off, a warning to planes, a warning . . . But here he was safe, for the moment.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 72