A Specter Is Haunting Texas

by Fritz Leiber

  Referring to the last, I asked politely as we bobbed up and down, “Some of your manuscripts, princess?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “includin’ Houston’s Afire and Storm Over El Paso. Scully, you’re a skunk. Or at least you were last night, when you told Daddy about my lingerie drawers. He bust ’em all up, lookin’ for subversive literature, and would have found the secret drawer for sure, except I was gettin’ undressed so fast he had to scuttle out. He likes me to hand him my clothes through a door open about six inches — before he locks it.”

  “But princess.” I told her gravely, “you did me, my father, and my family a great wrong when you revealed to your father the secret of the Lost Crazy-Russian Pitchblende Mine and that I carried it on my person. Only a very odd circumstance prevented your father from getting hold of the map and claim when he searched and slashed up my sack suit.”

  “Scully, you’re a numbskull!” she snapped at me. “Sorry I got to tell you this, but that map-claim business is pure dream. Bought from an Aleut who had it off a Cree Injun! Why, that’s the oldest swindle goin’. Scully, you got no more chance of making money out of that mining claim than you have of making time with La Cucaracha when I’m around. Last night I brought it up just as a red herring to distract Daddy and win back some favor with him. He’ll believe anything, long as it means more money for him. Scully, you don’t know the rudiments of high revolutionary intrigue.”

  “But princess,” I began injuredly. Truly, I was shaken.

  At that moment a shouting started at the poolside. Rachel turned my face so that I too could see Burleson, hands on knees yet still reeling a little, as he yelled overshoulder toward the gringo door.

  “Hey, Governor! Come out if you can hear me. Come out arushing. Your honorable daughter’s swimming bare-naked with that skin-and-bones revolutionary from outer space. He’s bare-naked too!”

  I was impressed by the relish with which Burleson reported to Lamar his daughter’s misbehavior.

  “Sure you don’t need a little mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?” Rachel asked sportively. “You look peaked, you know. It’d make Bilious Burly boil, besides drivin’ Lushy Lamar plumb loco if he gets here in time. Incidentally, I’m not quite bare naked, as those fat-guts insist on describing the highly civilized state of total nudity. I’m wearing my flesh-toned mini-underwear, which is all the clothes Daddy allowed me when he locked me up — unless you count the profusion of unshocked pink sheets I knotted together for my escape.”

  “Bussing would be beautiful, but —” I began.

  She was already off again with, “Hey, is free fall a little like this? I guessed it! You’ll show me the real thing some day, won’t you, Scully? You know, I think Daddy’s got a great big sex-thing going for me, maybe unconscious, but maybe not. Else why this eternal lockin’ in bedrooms and takin’ away all the clothes except a tease-minimum? You know how he’s always pickin’ off his coat and pants lint that ain’t there? I bet those are snowflakes from the blizzard of puritanic guilt that’s forever buffetin’ him!”

  “Excellent armchair analysis, princess,” I agreed. “But should not we be doing something? Soon the houseboys will come running and then Rangers, I suppose, and between them they’ll be able to figure out a way to capture us? Surely some of them besides yourself can swim. And is there not a cowboy waldo called a lasso? Have you your horse or a swifter vehicle nearby? Then there may still be time for you to swim me to the shore away from Burleson and carry me — I am featherweight, you are strong — to that vehicle rind — ”

  “Hush up and stop frettin’, Scully,” she ordered gayly. “Everything’s under control and proceeding according to schedule. Now take houseboys. Not a one of them turned up this morning. That great speech of yours last night sure started a bully ruckus. El Toro says you are guilty of premature activism and romantical individualism, but he’s playing along. Jeepers, what I’d give for your actin’ skill! But you’ll teach me everything, darling, won’t you? Why, there’s rumors the remains of the late Austin’ Praetorian Guard are holed up in Greasertown. Hunty-Wunt’s having conniptions decidin’ whether to rush', besiege or atom-bomb. Hey, here come Daddy and Big Foot! Hi-yah, Lushy Lamar! Mornin’, Bilious Burly! Greetin’s Chinchy Chase! Come on in, all of you, the water’s fine. We’re havin’ fun!”

  And with that she kissed me passionately until we had sunk at least three feet, whereupon with two powerful kicks she surfaced us again, and I was able to honor that kiss with the gasp it deserved.

  “You swim here at once, sugar, you hear me?” Lamar was raving, tearing his hair with one hand and pointing at us with the other. “It’s a million bedroom-years I’m going to give you this time. And no clothes at all.”

  “Why, Daddy, I’d think you’d be happy you’d left me those two scraps of panties and bra,” she called back sweetly. “For all you know, I may be wearin’ ’em now. That is, if you’re lucky. Tell me, Scully, have I got my pants on?”

  As I groped for an answer which would be offensive to Lamar, yet still gallant, a large smooth metal hook settled around my neck. Rachel whipped it off barely in time. She shoved it away from us, then yanked it back. On the poolside, Sheriff Chase staggered and lost hold of the 10-meter pole on which the hook was mounted. It floated in the pool.

  “Sugar, I’m beggin you,” Lamar called, on his knees now and wringing his hands. “Why, there hasn’t been a like scandal since Jefferson Davis, looking for a place to smoke and purely by accident, walked in on Portia Calpumia Lamar while she was taking a spit-bath. Swim to your Daddy, sugar.”

  Rachel called back, “Daddy, why don’t you buy yourself a townhouse of teenage sportin’ gals? Come to terms with life, Governor.”

  “But that’s not the same thing, sugar!”

  During this interchange, three Rangers with lasar rifles had come hurrying, as far as Texans ever do hurry, out of the gringo door. Chase conferred with them. One retrieved the pole and started around the pool with it. Chase took out of his pocket one of those black squeeze cylinders Hunt had been playing with yesterday, and he inspected it narrowly. Simultaneously Burleson drew from a holster at his side a revolver of ancient aspect and goggled at it somewhat wonderingly.

  “Princess, we can’t talk our way out of this, we must do something,” I whispered urgently-

  “Scully, I told you everything’s on,” she whispered loudly back, “but if it makes you feel any better —” She opened her pink purse one-handed and clicked a lever on the tiny box inside.

  “Black Madonna calling Submarine. Come in, Submarine,” she softly said to it, holding it close to her mouth and ear, all three just above water. I heard but could not distinguish the words of a reply. She continued, “Roger. Look here, me and La Muerta are pool-center and we’re going to be in trouble in about 30 seconds. You’ll be Here in 25? Swell!”

  Clicking it off and shutting her purse, she whispered, “Antique crystal AM radio. Baffles the Rangers.”

  I did my best to feel encouraged. Did the pool connect with a river or underground lake? It sounded difficult. Still, the pool was deep. There was a big bang and something very solid splatted the water a foot from my head. Blast stung my skin. I saw Burleson leveling his smoking revolver toward me, swinging it in arcs of about twenty degrees.

  Rachel trod water strongly and swung me around so she was between me and the gun. Meanwhile she yelped, “Daddy, you gonna let him kill me? You want your lovin’ Rachel with holes in her, deader than the Laredo cowboy?”

  Lamar sprang up and grappled with the mayor, who protested, “Just firing a shot across their bows, Governor, maybe pick off the sky-greaser. No harm meant your precious one.”

  Chase shouted, “Come out, Miss Lamar and tug La Cruz with you. No back-talk either — we’ve quit fooling. Boy, get ready to boil the water around them.”

  The laser rifles were leveled to either side of us. Their heat surely couldn’t boil the whole pool. But maybe if the beams were kept close enough —

 
Rachel put my hands behind her neck and then embraced me. “Hold me tight, Scully,” she said, treading water so that I faced away from the patio. Perhaps she meant us to die together. Little I could do.

  The third Ranger was reaching the hook toward us. But before I could warn Rachel, he jerked it away in a wide circle as he turned.

  Weaving its way toward us amongst the cryptic towers, was s menacing plume of brown dust. It grew larger and higher by seconds. I began to hear a roar.

  “It’s a twister! Run for your lives!” the ranger cried, dropping the hook and pounding back around the pool.

  Rachel turned us so that I was the one facing the patio. My hands were clasped together behind her neck. My chin rested on her shoulder. I closed my teeth on my wrist to make sure my head stayed up. Even if Rachel my beloved decided to sink us. I was going to stay up as long as possible.

  The roaring was louder, closer. The two other Rangers and Lamar were shouldering each' other through the gringo door, with Burleson a couple of groggy steps behind, while the third Ranger 108 now was about to pass him.

  Chase, still at the poolside, was pointing something. Then it was as if an invisible hand and pen had very swiftly drawn a narrowing black line from him to us. Its end struck Rachel’s back below my clasped hands and I felt her muscles go slack, even as leaked electricity tingled through me, almost making me unclasp my hands.

  As we started to sink because she was no longer treading water, and as Chase turned and lumbered after the others, the roar became deafening. The plume of dust hit the pool, and became a fountain of white spray.

  I had to suck in a big breath before it struck us. Amidst blasting spray we were tugged upward a few centimeters, then shoved underwater by a great hand of wind.

  Rachel’s positive buoyancy more than counterbalanced my negative, but as we began to rise we were again shoved under.

  Coming up a second time we made it. I blew through my nostrils, gasped through my wrist-obstructed mouth.

  The tornado had halted over the patio, unable to decide whether to enter the house, climb over it, or back out. It was still shooting up spray from the end of the pool a few meters away.

  “Scully, I’m paralyzed below the neck. Don’t let go of me,” Rachel gasped in my ear, her voice barely audible.

  “Don’t worry about that, my princess,” I replied grimly, though my voice was much muffled by my wrist in my mouth. Let go of her? She was my float!

  The tornado made decision three. Once more we were pushed under. When we came up for the third time, we were inside a weird, dim, tall igloo of spray. The tornado’s eye, I told myself, doubtful if there were such a thing in Terran Nature.

  The whole Nature theory lost ground when I saw, vanishing upward, my bent exoskeleton and slashed sack suit, both in the grip of some metal claws on the end of a line.

  My hands shifted their grip from each other to Rachel’s hair, in which they knotted themselves. Unclasping my jaws, I let my head fall back.

  Directly above, through what might be a large circular hole in spray-dashed transparent plastic, a fierce copper-hued face, made fiercer by lines of red and white paint and black top-knot, was peering. Something snaked down and landed across my head and Rachel’s. Unsmiling thin lips opened to command, “Grab on, palefaces! Must move now!”

  What had fallen was a rope with knots every quarter meter. I clenched my teeth on it, then crawled one hand out of Rachel’s hair to clench the rope with that too.

  The rope straightened as it began to lift me from the water by head and hand. With the other I gripped Rachel’s unfortunately thick hair as strongly as I could.

  As my body lifted from the water, I felt my neck stretching and hastily let loose my teeth. It had been a grand gesture, but I didn’t want my spinal cord snapped. However, I told myself heroically, I would hang on with my hands to the rope and Rachel to the point of shoulder dislocation and beyond.

  My head flopped and I was looking down. As I felt my shoulders begin to dislocate in stabs of pain, I saw Rachel come to and grab the rope herself strongly — with both hands and teeth also.

  At that moment I had an utterly convincing premonition: some day she and I would be a great aerial or even freefall team.

  We were swiftly drawn through the hole and found ourselves sprawled in a vehicle which mostly wasn’t there.

  By that I mean it was constructed chiefly of a dear plastic with the same refractive index as Terran atmosphere. Here and there parts of it were visible — motors, a shaft, some rods and its crew of two.

  They were the Amerind who had hoisted us and, sitting at a medley of metal and plastic controls, Guchu.

  He grinned at us but spoke no word.

  Beyond the plastic enclosing us, brown dust was pouring upward on all sides. Overhead, great swift-flashing invisible blades cut through it.

  “It’s a kack CACC — Combo Air-Cushion and Copter,” Rachel explained over the roar, crawling toward me.

  Ruler-straight lightning bolts flashed through the dust, turning it all dark red.

  Guchu chortled. I felt the vehicle sharply tilt and rise. We were free of the dust, though no more red lightning bolts came near us.

  Rachel cradled my aching neck and my head, turning the latter so I could see how one of the big towers cut us off from Lamer’s ranch and the laser rifles of the Rangers.

  Guchu said, flashing teeth', “We ride in the tallboy rig-cover’s shadow until we’re out of range.”

  The Amerind said, “No dead Indians, no dead black, no dead palefaces. Good. Everything is going fine.”

  I looked around, somewhat listlessly. Even sight of my poor exo and sack suit didn’t make me sad or mad. The last hour had been a very full one.

  The sophistication of the vehicle clashed with the air of revolutionary simplicity and poverty I had encountered in the church and cemetery late last night.

  “If it’s a kack, why do you call it Submarine?” I asked Rachel and yawned.

  “Because it ain’t one,” she answered. She was dabbing antiseptics and fixing adhesive bandages on my chest. “ ’Nother red herring for the Rangers.”

  “And you’re not Black Madonna, you’re Mary Magdalene,” I observed lazily.

  “You hush up.”

  I noted, stamped in black letters on the plastic near me: ACIFICPAY ACHBLAY EPUBLICRAY.

  Slowly and with some difficulty I translated that from Pig Latin to: Pacific Black Republic.

  Oh well, I thought languidly, all revolutions are poorer than third political parties and must accept foreign financing and military aid.

  Then I passed out, or simply went to sleep.

  Ho for Texas*, land that restores us

  When houses choke us, and great books bore us!

  “The Santa Fe Trail,” by Vachel Lindsay

  (*Kansas in the original, but changed to Texas when the de facto annexation of Kansas by Texas was made public)

  Table of Contents

  - X -

  RIDING THE WHIRLWIND

  Once again I woke in the Sack, but this time my stay was shorter. Mother was cradling me in her plump arms against her pneumatic bosom. There was a rhythmic sharp tapping. Father must be throwing a set together a few hours before curtain-time. I pictured him slowly twisting in freefall, two plastic scantlings and a nail gripped in one hand, a nervous hammer in the other.

  But then my nose was tickled by the acrid odor of hot metal.

  Was Father spot-welding again? — against all safety regulations established by Circumluna for the Sack. Very likely. Father often broke regulations, but always for the sake of the theater and art, at least as he explained it. Then why the hammering? — which really was in a more deliberate rhythm than Father’s.

  Why ask questions? I wasn’t hurting. And I was where I wanted to be. Stay shut-eyed. Sleep.

  Along with the tapping, I heard Father’s panting breath. Rhythmic gasps. Anxiety stirred. Father mustn’t work so hard. He would die. (One of my earliest secret
fears was that Father would soon die, he looked so much like a skeleton. That was before I understood about Thins, Fats and Muscles.)

  The imagined scene altered, dropping back ten thousand years or more. We were a cave family at home. I could feel against my chin and cheek the coarse fur of the bear’s hide Mother wore. The hoarse breath was that of a dragon snuffing outside the cave. At a tiny hot fire, Father was forging the copper sword with which he would slay the dragon.

  I opened my eyes. The last vision was closer to truth. I lay in a cave with stubby round spears of rock pointing down, I was softly cushioned against gravity, my head propped up. Long-haired fur covered me to my chin.

  Across from me, an Indian sat behind a small walled fire, the heat of which I could feel. Wraithlike flames rose from the small red bed whenever I heard the snuffing. It was a bellows, worked by his knee.

  Across the open furnace lay a femur of my exoskeleton, its cables removed. It glowed red in in the middle, where the bend was. The bend was not as great as I recalled.

  Pads shielding his palms, the Indian lay the femur across an anvil began straightening the exobone further with taps of a tiny-headed sledge.

  The femur was still attached to the rest of the exoskeleton. The other bends had all been straightened. The metal where they had been was discolored. The rib-cage was gone. The shallow dents were still in my headbasket.

  The Indian was not the one who had been in the kack. This one’s hair was silvery, his face a mass of wrinkles. Out of them, his black eyes watched me as he hammered. Nearby were piled my three cushion-cases. That pleased me.

  The red in my femur faded, but the bend was gone. The Indian pointed his sledge at me.