by Fritz Leiber
A nation nurtured on cowboy tales and the illusion of eternal righteousness, perpetual victory.
A nation that sought to create, simultaneously, in the same people, a glutton’s greed for food, comfort and possessions — and a puritanic morality. Merciless competition — and docile co-operation. Timid safety mindedness — and reckless self-sacrifice. A hard-boiled but docile young. Worship of success so long as it could be thought due to hick — and hatred of outstandingness granted by nature and/or hard work. Great scientists and scholars — and a contempt for same. The welfare state — and entrenched wealth. The brotherhood of man and racial discrimination. In short, nul program. Order, counterorder, disorder. No wonder even Texas made more sense than that.
Rachel told me that Kookie’s views of the Texas Establishment were much oversimplified, but admitted' her father’s power was derived ultimately from the Texan Cabal, which dominated American policies from the middle of the twentieth century.
She laughingly revealed she had no notion whatever as to whether she and her father were actually related by blood to the second president of the Lone Star Republic. Likely Lamar had been a political name taken by one of her most recent ancestors. That had become a custom during the bloody years after the Atomic War, when Texas conquered — for its own good — most of the bomb-shattered and fallout-diseased U.S.A. and also Mexico, Central America and Canada, finally establishing the atom-scarred Stikine and Mackenzie Mountains as the Russo-Texan boundary.
I pointed out to the Black Madonna that she and Captain Skull proved by their sentimentalizing over the U.S.A. that they were both hopeless romantics, addicted to lost causes. She liked that, and I was getting primal places with her, when Kookie popped into my supposedly private room in the deserted country mental hospital, no longer approachable by wheeled vehicles, where our company was bivouacking.
Once again there was no fracas whatever, no observable hard feelings. Once again the girls tripped off together. And once again I was left tense and uncatharsized. I decided to give up women. At least on Terra. And certainly for that night!
An Alamo 30th the weather stayed overcast. Likewise my spirits. We played Topeka. It was a re-run of Wichita. Outside of myself, the performance was strictly amateur. I rewrote the script, giving Kookie and Rachel brief appearances. Thumbs were turned down on my innovations by El Toro, Guchu, F. Francisco. Latins and Indians resent women getting the spotlight, they said. The committee was also shocked by my suggestion that I wear my blond wig for variety.
Later El Toro approached me privately about elocution lessons. I agreed to give him same, in strict secrecy — as far as his bull voice permitted. At least I might be able to get him to cut down on the muscle-show.
I decided R. V. and La C. Had entered into some private agreement about me. I played it very cool with them. No more tete-a-tetes. I couldn’t stand another interruption.
For that matter, I would have found it difficult to be private with a woman if I had desired. Fanninowicz was forever at my heels, wanting to test my exo, check batteries, increase power, try out new wirings — his concern and new ideas were limitless. I felt like Frankenstein’s monster pursued by Thomas Edison. I decided Germans are maniacs.
Yet El Toro insisted I humor the beady-eyed Bavarian as much as possible. And truly my exo was kept perfectly tuned.
But my physical condition was deteriorating, though I mentioned this to no one. No stiff upper lip, just didn’t want to be fussed over. The Monocled Monster might have announced he is doctor of flesh-medicine also.
I kept reminding myself that my only real aim was (1) get to Yellowknife; (2) check and double-check on the Lost Crazy-Russian Pitchblende Mine, despite Rachel’s damnably plausible discouragements; (3) put the bite on the committee and use my Circumlunan passport to hightail it for the Sack on the first ship available.
Rachel asked me why worry about the mine, since it had been clearly proved I don’t have the claim with me, either in my baggage or on my person. I wondered if I should tell her the truth. Concluded: Definitely not!
At Kansas City, Kansas, Texas, on Spindletop 1st, El Toro decided I needed a holiday. He took me and La Cucaracha to a bullfight at the stadium of the former Wyandotte High School.
I was disguised by a big hat, big boots, padded suit over my exo and vast blond mustache over cheekplates. El Toro and Kookie were servants. We got by. My ability to pass as a Texan, at least under casual inspection, struck me as something which might prove useful.
The bullfight was delightful. They used hormoned bulls, huge and slow, true “cathedrals,” while the matadors were young Mexes, male and female, who dodged the bull acrobatically and even did knee-swings and giant swings on horns. Like ancient Crete.
Kookie told me she had trained as a bullfighter, then decided life as a “sociable secretary” provided greater financial satisfactions, and revolutionary work greater emotional ones, while acrobatics were useful in both activities. This with a hearty wink. I remembered in time not to start flirting with her. “Play it cool, even cold,” is the motto of La Muerta Alta, I told myself. What did I need with women?
Besides, if I held out, one of them would be sure to give in.
Our revolutionary gathering at night was in the huge and straggling greasertown along the river in Kansas City, Missouri, Texas. The greatest stockyards in the world, I was told, before it had taken a direct nuclear hit decades later, when radioactivity had dropped to a tolerable level, the Mexes had slowly built their way into it, partly forced by local population pressure and partly spontaneously, with the residual radioactivity providing some assurance that their masters would stay out, or at least cut their visits short.
I felt nervy from the start. Our stage was in front of a riverside warehouse with thick brick walls, which above the second floor had been melted into a hillocky glazed dome from which there still thrust the huge, twisted, rust-brown fingers of old steel beams.
Underfoot was a swept, randomly crackled, greenish and brownish tesselation of fused soil, its fissures filled with new dirt.
Around this rough nuclear plaza, in front of the shacks they dwelt in, our audience began to gather silently — intent sallow and brown faces with a large scattering of darker ones: “stay behind” blacks who were incurably rooted here or at any rate hadn’t yet made it to Pacific Republic or Florida Democracy.
But it was hard to make out even faces. Our stage lighting was dim, despite the continuing overcast.
I was standing with the rest of the company in the dark inside the warehouse, back from its central doorway.
A few minutes before “curtain time” there was a commotion as a gang of locals set up a wide-spaced lattice of narrow black rods in front of and over our stage, making it even smaller. No one could or would explain to me why, El Toro being away at the moment. It seemed theatrical insanity, further spoiling the audience’s view of the actors and making them feel like beasts in a cage. At least I felt like one.
I fumed impotently, knowing that my comrades had little or no idea of what makes good theater. I scented trouble. I grew nervier. I wished the girls weren’t there, but felt unable to talk to either of them.
And then a minute before my entrance, running over my opening lines in my head, I drew a blank. It was as if I had forgotten Spanish and English both, and probably Russian too.
Instead a wordless sight slid across my mind, wiping out all other reality. I was in the same huge room. It was filled with white light, so there was not a shadow. Files of beasts lumbered into it. Men with unconcerned faces but spattered robes struck the horned heads with great mallets, adroitly cut the sleek-furred throats (each man had his one monotonous job), flayed off the hides, dismembered and disembowled the carcasses. My ears were filled with hoof-clumpings and great thuddings, with bestial grunt and screams. My nostrils were likewise crammed with the stench of frightened animals, their copious excrement and the floods of their rich, sweet blood. Other men with unconcerned faces constantly hosed t
he killing floor.
What startled me most was that the spurting, streaming, flooding, omnipresent blood was not a darkish crimson, as I had always thought of blood in quantity (something I had never seen), but a phosphorescent carmine just off fuchsia, suggestive of tropical blooms and lipstick and giddy body-paint.
Then I was being nudged in the side, not gently, and the vision shot aside. La Cucaracha was reminding me that my entrance cue had been spoken.
I strode on stage in a near trance, my entrance-applause a distant soft thudding no louder than the beat of blood in my ears.
I had always tested negative for psi in the Sack. But now I wondered how imagination alone could have created so vivid a vision of a slaughter house.
Someone else than I said, “Yo soy la Muerta,” and for at least the first five minutes I felt like a beetle lodged behind the visor of an animated and vocal suit of armor.
Then either the slaughterhouse vision lost its power, or else I grew big enough to take over the role of Death the Universal.
The laughs I got were few and low, the cheers low too but gutty. I think I never held an audience so well before. In fact, I did too well. I must have hypnotized the lookouts and my own comrades, for as I came to the finger-shaking bit and “we must risk death' and if necessary deal death,” I believe I was the first one to hear the faint rushes of air and soft drones overhead, and glance cautiously up and in one snapshot look see poised above us six copters with antennas and coils and searchlights and other electronic items where landing gear should be.
Then, but not before my eyes were slits, the plaza was flooded with hot raw white light.
There was time for each member of the audience to spring up, to take one look or one step.
Then I felt the faintest tingling and numbing in my flesh.
At the same instant each member of the audience froze like a statue, paralyzed in posture and expression.
About a third of them, off balance at the moment, tumbled down, but without an iota of change in the look of the face or the contortion, however grotesque, of the body.
I shot a glance overshoulder, noting that my actions were slowed down a trifle.
My comrades were moving about in a slow motion, as if running through invisible water. Guchu was making toward me, where I stood stage-front. The others were headed for the warehouse doorway, or already through it.
I looked back at the audience and, utterly fascinated, began to scan their faces one by one. Being an actor, expression is a mania with me.
Here and now I found great confirmation for Leonardo’s dictum that the grimaces of agony and ecstasy are almost indistinguishable, though I noted many an interesting trace of surprise, fear and rage.
In their statuesque totality, the mob was a greater work of art than Murray’s “Slaves of Gravity,” where 793 tiny figures are depicted struggling waist, shoulder, neck, or mouth, deep from a curving surface of moon marble, which might be a section of Luna Herself.
It occurred to me that the crowd constituted a semi-accidental work of art which could be titled with apt ambiguity “Field Slaves,” for now that I saw Rangers dropping from the copters on spinning shoulder vanes and also charging into the plaza afoot, all of them clad in over-suits of copper netting, I realized that the copters’ electronic gear was projecting a paralysis field from which my comrades were protected in part by the copper or other metal cores in the black painted bars around us, but I altogether by the secondary Faraday cage of my precious exoskeleton.
The Rangers, who also wore owl-eyed black gasmasks, were a superb sight in themselves: black giants who were a tesselation of small ebon diamonds mortised with gold.
Guchu’s upstretched fingers slowly clamped on my elbow and dragged on it.
“Come on, Scully,” he gasped effortfully. “Make that effort, man. You can do it.”
“Certainly,” I agreed, turning swiftly. I was greatly irritated to be jerked from my supreme artistic reverie — Death Contemplates his Victims — but realized the black had a point: an emergency was certainly developing. So I forced myself to use the most courteous tones as I asked, “But do what?”
“Beat it through the warehouse, you dumb ofay,” he exclaimed with such an attempt at vociferousness and speed — and rage at the readiness with which I moved — that he slumped on my arm and the last three words came on the in-gasp.
Since his rebuke was instantly provided with the multiple exclamation point of many objects clattering on the roof of our cage and several dropping through, I realized that Guchu had been altogether right and my attempt to be a crisis-observer wrong as always. (Yet it had been so fascinating!)
Instinctively we both took deep breaths. Then utter inky blackness exploded rather than flowed from the cannisters, one of which had fallen at our feet.
I took one sight on the door into the warehouse. Then, since the erupting blackness prickled me through my sack suit, I instantly closed tight my eyes, mouth and nostrils, clamping the latter together with finger and thumb, while my other hand gripped Guchu as I made giant strides toward my target.
My face and hands prickled and stung, but not enough to incapacitate me.
Another object thudded in the dark somewhere near us and began to say self-importantly, “I am a 60-second bomb. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven. Fifty —”
“And I’m a 90-year man, bomb, with decades to go!” Guchu answered the thing — and paid for his rash defiance with a horrendous coughing fit.
I continued to make tracks. Fortunately, my elocutionary activities have given me a lung capacity unusual in Circumluna — something which had also helped me in Governor (or would it now be President?) Lamar’s patio pool.
When counting strides told me I was well inside the warehouse, I swabbed my eyelids with water from my cheek-plate and risked another quick sighting.
We were almost out of the smoke. From a trap door five long strides away, La Cucaracha waved us on, her eyes streaming, her other hand shutting her mouth and nose.
I made the trap door, my eyes stinging, and flickered a downward glance.
There was a round well five meters deep, with ladder rungs embedded in one side and with Father Francisco peering anxiously up from the bottom.
La Cucaracha scuttled down. I got Guchu’s feet and hands on the rungs — he was blind and retching from the gas — and followed him as swiftly as I could.
Kookie called, “Close the trap!”
As I reached up, a incandescently scarlet laser beam missed my hand, spattered against and was also reflected downward from the trap’s metal in-face. I felt heat between thigh and right knee, and that leg went limp. I heard Father Francisco gasp hissingly with pain.
I shut and bolted the trap, then made it down on arms alone. Then I was hopping along a corridor I had to crouch in, supported to either side by Kookie and the padre.
There was an explosion that shook the floor.
Behind us Guchu gasped out, “Bomb weren’t bluffin”, anyhow. I hate a liar,” and managed a croaking laugh.
I wondered if he knew what bomb he was talking about.
Around that time I discovered my right leg was useless because one of the femur-cables had been melted through. The two ends dangled and jigged.
I also noted that the reflected laser beam had creased Father Francisco’s arm. The wound would have bled, but the beam’s heat had cauterized it.
Then I was being helped to crawl through a circular port. I found myself sprawled in semi-dark among my comrades in a flattened cylinder. Someone had closed the port and was locking it with a wheel.
Opposite the port was a window into darkness. Then a great white snout peered in with unwinking eyes and with long white feelers around its jaws.
The cylinder began to rock and to move in surges.
Shortly later I was told that we were in a river submarine — called “Airplane,” of course, with consummate revolutionary duplicity — and that the white monster had been a mutated and haploid c
atfish.
We rode the currents of the Kansas and Missouri for weary hours without incident except for a few bottom-scrapings and glimpses of exotic river life. On his insistence, I told El Toro about the government of Circumluna. He expressed horror at what he dubbed “Sackabondage” and insisted I carry the revolution there. As soon as I had made him understand vacuum and decompression, he saw endless possibilities in bombs artfully placed. I let him elaborate his nonsense and rested my eyes on Rachel Vachel and La Cucaracha sleeping in each other’s arms. I decided that if I escaped alive from this mortal Terran bruhaha and were able to carry anything back to the Sack, it would be something very different from revolution — unless one considers all females conspirators and destructors by nature.
We landed at dawn at a swamp-circled hideout short of Missouri City. Fanninowicz was one of the few awake and on hand to observe our limping and dispirited arrival.
“Ho-ho!” he mocked. “I see you have had a brush with the Rangers! Next time — haaaaah!” And while making this nasty noise at the back of his tongue, he drew his thumb across his throat. “And as for you, you Schafskopf, you bummer, you are no fit to be trusted with your exoskeleton than a child with a computer!”
“That’s how the Circumlunans teach their children math,” I told him as I hopped along. “Splice my cable now, you Texo-Prussian paranoid!”