A Specter Is Haunting Texas

by Fritz Leiber

  He said, “I have learned one thing, Death. Without your armor, you are very weak. I have always suspected that.”

  I smiled at him and nodded a forefinger. I did not think he would note the latter, but his eyes shifted to it. Perhaps my hand lay outside the buffalo robe covering me.

  I also later learned that what pillowed me so softly, with some effect of freefall, were three eiderdown mattresses. I bless those gravity-conquering birds who think so much of their young that they line their nests with down which they pluck from their breasts and which man steals.

  I felt thirsty and hungry. As if the mere feeling were a cue, Rachel Vachel and La Cucaracha walked smiling into view, the hand of the former resting lightly on the shoulder of the latter. They both looked lovely in the red glow. Rachel had on her Black Madonna garb, while La Cucaracha wore a flaming red dress with belt and necklace of hammered silver plates. She walked proudly. Rachel had to dodge the stalactites with her Head.

  Without a word, Rachel drew down my buffalo robe and began to inspect my wounded chest, dripping on antiseptic here, renewing a bandage there. While La Cucaracha, using a corner of the furnace for stove, began to make a gruel of water and my protein food-pellets.

  After getting a sip of water, I told the Mexo-Tex girl I liked to chew the pellets dry. She allowed me to do so with a couple.

  While the good food worked in me, I marveled lazily at the amity of the dear girls. Last time they had been battling for me like wolf against musk-ox. Now they had made a truce. I wondered what that portended for me.

  El Toro had entered and was standing before me, a hard grin on his swarthy face.

  “How do you feel, comrade?” he asked.

  “Very much better,” I told him.

  “Bueno!” he said with a nod like a gavel rapping a speaker’s rostrum. “Very good indeed. You shall begin your work for the revolution tomorrow with an appearance at Tulsa.”

  “It will take longer than that, comrade,” I informed him in my harshest base. I mustn’t let these little Marxists think they owned me. “Your metal-working comrades have done a passable job straightening my bones, as far as I can see. But I personally — with the Indian’s help in holding and handling, of course — must rewind my cables, adjust their tension and test every motor, lead and part.”

  “Not so!” he snapped at me and crooked a finger. There strode into view, yawning and rubbing sleep from his eyes, none other than Professor Fanninowicz. He bumped his head on a stalactite and cursed, “Donnerwetter!”

  El Toro said proudly, “We had kidnapped him even before we rescued you from the pool. It is he who supervised repairs to your skeleton. He worked through the night and into the afternoon. Three hours ago we permitted him to rest.”

  “Forced me to, you mean, you lazy and undisciplined sub-man!” Fanninowicz barked at him. He screwed a monocle into his right eye and standing very erect after a quick glance overhead, surveyed us all contemptuously.

  “Understand, please,” he said curtly, “that I detest you all and your ignorant, sentimental revolution. When the Lone Star Republic, vessel of noblest fascism, arrests you, as is inevitable, I shall smile at your punishments and hope they will be of the harshest. If death, then only after torture!”

  “Why, Fanny,” Rachel said under her breath, in hurt tones.

  Ignoring her, he aimed his glare at me. “And that goes for you too, you miserable mummer from the slums of space!”

  Then he relaxed, lost height, and with a shrug that was surely only unconsciously Jewish, he smiling said to me, “however, I am hopelessly enamored of your peerless exoskeleton. It is monomania, an idee fixe against which even my sternest military compulsions and compunctions are powerless. Within twelve hours your exoskeleton will be in finer shape than when you received it from those Russo-American swine, the technicians of Circumluna.”

  I had a great many doubts and reservations about that, but I did not voice them. El Toro, Rookie, Rachel and even the old Indian were simply too happily self-satisfied and too infatuated with their revolutionary cunning in having used Fanmnowicz’s monomania against him,

  Next day we skittered for Tulsa, Oklahoma, Texas, in three kacks taking different routes. We flew under and through low clouds shot with lightning, navigating in part by an echo device called radar, which was new to me since there are neither swarms of water-droplets nor starless times in space.

  The kack’s transparency made it seem as if we were swimming through a gray ocean. At any rate, the dank, dingy super-soup with its electrical seasoning was not to my taste. But it cheered my comrades because, they said, it disordered communications and hid us from Lone Star vulture-planes.

  El Toro told me, with mixed pride and envy, that Texas newsmen have dubbed me The Specter and that I have been declared Public Enemy Number One of the Republic. The Rangers have sworn to nail my hide to a bam door, which I hope is hypothetical, alongside those of Clyde and Bonnie, whoever they be or have been. The search for us has become hot, El Toro affirmed, with both Hunt and Chase living up to their names.

  “They going to burn you if they can, Sky Boy,” Guchu assured me from the pilot’s pad. “But have no fear. Death by fire is purifying.”

  Fanninowicz was not aboard our kack, which was a relief — the German is an insufferable combination of martinet (of me) and high priest (of my exo). But neither were Rachel and Kookie, which I found depressing — and determined to remedy, if we lived that long.

  I put in time talking with a gray-topped much-bent Mex named Pedro Ramirez, who had been in a cyborged work-gang for twenty years. He pulled his shirt off his knobby shoulder to show me the puckered scars where deep-probing tubes had once fed tranquilizers, energizers and hormones from his yoke into artery and vein. He also insisted I inspect the curious callosities in his ears, made by the command plugs which had been housed there daily for two decades. Meantime he began softly to hum, I think without realizing it, a medley of monstrous tunes, and I once caught the curious English words:

  Every day, two hours times twelve,

  A million yokemen dig and delve.

  But when I questioned him about the details of his gang work, he became excited and emotional. I easily quieted him with a few calm and confident suggestions.

  I concluded that cyborging involves no direct control of the nervous system, but is merely a means of chemical and hypnotic supervision, the command plugs transmitting both an audio background of tranquillizing propaganda and also the orders of a Texan overseer observing the work site directly or by 3D.

  Or the orders, El Toro told me, of a cyborg ed Mex strawboss, in turn overseen by a Texan, who in this fashion control as many as a dozen work-gangs.

  It struck me as a vastly overcomplicated as well as degrading system for work more easily done by machines, or for that matter by uncyborged workers energized by coca leaves and tranquilized by marijuana. I decided the Texans favored it because it allowed them to keep the Mexicans uneducated and, probably more to the point, catered to the Texan conviction that Mexicans and other “primitives” are ineducable.

  “And those pitiful peones don’t even know the work they do, Esquel,” El Toro topped my guesses. “They get powerful hypnotic commands to forget, when the yoke is off, the details and even nature of all labor they perform while cyborged.”

  “Hyper-security, man,” Guchu nodded. “Surer than cuttin’ out the tongue and poppin’ the eye. A blind mute can gesture and draw and maybe write, but nobody can tell what he’s forgot.”

  I realized this was why my questions had disturbed Pedro Ramirez. Nevertheless, after administering soothing suggestions, I asked if he had done work within the outsize oil-rig towers.

  “Never in those, Senor Espectro!” he assured me with a shuddering, wide-eyed headshake. “No, never once!”

  His denial struck me as too strong to be true — especially along with the “dig and delve” drone — but I had no desire to torment further in order to satisfy idle curiosity. So I calmed
him once more and shortly had him asleep, suggesting that he wake feeling well and happy. A leading actor who is not a passable hypnotist is hardly worth his salt.

  It occurred to me, as the trip grew long and I began to ache in my exo, that it would be pleasant if there were someone to hyp me asleep. Somehow I did not want to do a self-hyp. I recalled wistfully the tender nursing I had got from Rachel and La Cucaracha in the cave. I had loved them as co-mothers then, nurses within gravity’s womb. But now I reminded myself, slapping the rib-cage of my trusty exo, that I loved them in quite a different fashion. The thought heartened me greatly.

  My rib-cage was a new one, made of solid silver, weighing a few pounds more, but with a lovely dull shimmer. Its luxury contrasted nicely with my martial headbasket, the dents in which had only imperfectly been beaten out.

  But by the time we reached the central square of the Tulsa greasertown, my mood was once more as low and dark as the weather continued to be. The girls’ brief greetings raised it a bit, but it immediately dropped to a new low when El Toro whispered, “Just keep in mind, camarado, that thirteen known informers have had their throats slit or been otherwise taken care of, to safeguard tonight’s gathering against interruption.”

  It seemed a dismally high price for a performance — there’d been nothing about murder in my contract — and I feared I’d be a flop. Up to my entrance, I kept seeing those gaping gullets and also the pitiful bent-backs who had died at Dallas, inflamed by my rantings. While the lightning of electric whips and laser beams framed my thoughts.

  But as soon, as I faced my audience I was in a controlled revolutionary frenzy, sardonic and heartless as only Death can be. It’s a perpetual miracle how a part takes hold and carries one, even when one actively dislikes the role.

  I was afraid too that Fanninowicz had booby-trapped my exoskeleton, perhaps by time-bomb, but it actually continued to operate more smoothly than ever. What strange and contradictory compulsions fire men!

  At the end of my oration I was so worked up that I wanted to lead the mob into Tulsa’s texastown to commit acts of violence. But locals did that, and I took off with El Toro and the rest for the abandoned atomic shelter that would be our camp until we headed for Little Rock, Wichita or Springfield, Missouri, as tactics dictated.

  I wondered at an atomic shelter being deserted in a world that had endured one nuclear war and now seemed minimally peaceful, but El Toro explained to me that radioactives were everywhere in such short supply, due to their military and industrial use, that they would no more be used again as major weapons than the last natural gasoline would have been used for molotov cocktails.

  To my surprise, Fanninowicz haughtily confirmed El Toro’s explanation, though with a curse for a world that had lost with Germany the industry and patience to mine and smelt low-grade uranium ores — and also with a final sardonic smile that lingered in my memory.

  I pointed out that a small atomic bomb had been expended on Austin’s praetorian guard.

  “A few tacticals left, yes,” El Toro agreed. “Museum pieces, one might say. Texans are loco.”

  “Your figures on the radioactives shortage are right, Tor,” Guchu said, “but you get the wrong analogy. “Last native gas wasn’t used to run a motor, but to fry a black.” He paused. “Or maybe whitey. Who knows?”

  He landed our kack in a drizzle where I saw only one darkness instead of earth and air. Then he turned toward me and said, “Real reason no earthling — except a few locos with bloated egos — would risk more fallout is that we all know we still got a little death ticking in our bones from the Big Poison War. Even you’re getting a little of that death into you, Mister Death, every day you stay here. No, Tor, we got to have confrontation. That’s the trouble with you Mexes — always being gracious to people, to whitey even, and smoothing things out — combo, I guess, of the old hidalgo dream and your Indian ability to take anything that’s handed to you and endure it, like your yokes, without striking back except for an occasional knife in the dark.

  “No, we got to tell Mr. Death here the truth. Such as the real reason A-shelters are taboo. One, a lot of them got worse poisoned from fallout than the toplands — through ground water and kinked ventilation systems, and because who hits low gets hit low back. Now don’t get edgy about that, Sky Boy — any cobalt-90 in this shelter has been, ticking a hundred years. Two, whitey thinks the shelters have got hants in them and he’s scared, though he won’t admit it”

  Ghosts I could laugh at, and did. Before we entered the shelter I peered vainly for the moon. El Toro asked with a sympathy that surprised me whether I was homesick. I replied with minimal untruth that, no, I just wanted to know the date — I was uncertain how long I had been in the cave.

  “It is the 27th of Alamo, Esquel,” he told me. “Come down now.”

  I decided that the Texan calendar would have to do for me for my stay on Terra, or until I glimpsed Luna once more.

  Ghosts did not seem so laughable when I was in the huge and shadowy shelter, where our camp was dwarfed and faint echoes returned from black unexplored corridors. But I saw no cracks or other bomb-damage. Tulsa, I reminded myself, had lain inside the Texas Bunker. Dinner cheered me further; and during it, while still, stirred with after-show excitement, I began with La Cucaracha a discussion of history which we carried into the curtained space I thought of as my star dressing room.

  It turned out that she has a bright hard head on that exciting little athletic body. She pointed out rather bitterly that a Mexo-Tex female is the lowest of the low and must have ten times the brains of a man to get anywhere.

  She insisted that most of the Texas history Elmo had fed me was pure Texas brag, though she did admit that back at the time of the annexation in 1845 Sam Houston had cowed Washington with the prediction that if Texas weren’t admitted to the Union on generous terms — such as permission to divide into five states with ten senators whenever desired — then Texas would engulf all the West to the Pacific and assume leadership of the southern states when the inevitable break over slavery came.

  “No Esqueleto amado, in verity it was like this: the wealthy gringo junta which arranged the removal of President Kennedy soon became the entire heart of the Texas Establishment. Thereafter things happened much as you’ve been told. The blacks, reckless and inspired as their Zulu and Madhi progenitors, carved out their countries to southeast and southwest during the disorders following the Atomic war. We forgotten Mexes, fiery but incurably fatalistic, indolent yet good workers and breeders, remained the undercats and grew into the new servile class.”

  I asked her what had happened to Elmo. She said she had no idea, but that he was resourceful and shrewd under his blather, and whatever happened would land on his feet. I agreed he had big ones. She admitted she had an affection for the man despite, or perhaps because of the genially bullying ways. This led me to inquiring indirectly whether she wasn’t now lonely.

  I was on the point of making time with her when, with consummate disregard of privacy, Rachel Vachel wandered in. I expected another bruhaha, but the Black Madonna appeared not to note that Kookie and I were moving toward intimacies. Shortly the two girls departed, leaving me aroused and frustrated. I damned them heartily, summon ed El Toro to help me out of my exo, refused to see Fanninowicz, downed a pill and slept.

  Our next revolutionary gathering was on Alamo 29th at Wichita, Kansas, Texas, a city much like Dallas or Tulsa, except I began to note scars of the Atomic War and also short Texans — poor whites and northerners not given the hormones.

  El Toro kept me unpleasantly aware of the price being paid for my performances by telling me about the diversionary riots being staged in Little Rock and Colorado Springs to keep the Rangers’ attention off Wichita. He also informed me that I am creating a panic across Texas. Not only is the Mex World in a fever of excitement at the coming of El Esqueleto, but the Tall World has got the jitters. There have been rumors and reports of the dread skeleton-man everywhere. I was simultaneously leadin
g mobs in Denver and Corpus Christi. Twenty minutes later I was captured in Memphis. Meanwhile I was seen grinning horrendously down from a copter that buzzed the streets of El Paso. Et cetera.

  I was flattered yet unimpressed. I asked El Toro how the revolution we’ve stirred up is going in the south. I got evasive answers.

  I told myself not to think about that, but to remember I am Christopher Crockett La Cruz, touring Texas with the Revolutionary Ramblers on a physiologically limited engagement. No joke about that last — I was suffering from digestive disorders, while gravity became a deadly drag despite my exo and eiderdowns. I insisted oh a warm bath at last, with a support-net to keep me from sinking. Little relief. Could I be provided with a tub of heavy water? That might float me. I was laughed at, especially by Rachel, who said I had more expensive notions than Daddy.

  “Nevertheless she and I had a cozy chat together, which again turned toward history. In different ways we both became nostalgic about the vanished U.S.A., the industrial and scientific inspiration it gave the world, and its truly great men — Franklin, Jefferson, Houston, Poe, Lincoln, Edwin Booth, Ingersoll, David Griffith, Roosevelt Two (though she like Elmo thought him a figurehead), Dr. King, and so on.

  It had been an ideal country for men with grand imaginations, for geographical and industrial pioneers — until they turned the grandeur to grandiosity and began to broadcast it over the newly discovered mass media. We grieved at that robust and shrewd land’s fatal weakness for making right, then wrong decisions, and standing by the latter beyond all reason and with puritanic perversity. The Civil War, which freed the slaves, and the deals of the 1870’s, which again crushed the blacks, recreating tensions and problems which had to be solved with violence a hundred years later. The Great Experiment of prohibiting alcoholic beverages, which nurtured America’s wealthy criminal class and allowed it to entrench itself. The later hysterical agitation against marijuana, with exactly the same results. (I was surprised to discover from Rachel how much, according to her thinking, Texas’s sly legalization of weed, a Mex smoke to start with, helped lead Texas to her primacy among the states and also her domination of Latin Americans.) The First World War, followed by isolationism and repudiation of the League of Nations. The brief dream of a monopoly of atomic power, followed by unending nightmares. The Long Adventure in Indo-China with its tragic consequences for all Terra.