by Fritz Leiber
“Texas in Brief and Big”
Houston House, Chicago, Texas
“Ah yes,” Rosa replied. “But Dallas is Dallas. And also what is said in Dallas. While Amarillo Cuchillo is another thing. Carlos, what are our contacts there?” “Among the Cree Indians,” Mendoza replied. “They are wanderers, though some live in encampment outside the town. And of course among the cyborged, but such have no station or influence. As for town-dwellers, I know of none. Perhaps—” He broke off with a sharp headshake.
I guessed that he had been about to say, “Perhaps El Toro knew, but neglected to inform me.” Another matter occurred to me.
“There is also the Lost Crazy-Russian Pitchblende Mine,” I said. “Though I know some of you think it a fable,” I added with a glance at Rachel. “Nevertheless, my sole reason for coming to Earth was to find it and lay claim to it if I can. To achieve the latter, I had hoped to make use of well placed local revolutionaries as intermediaries. But even if there are none such, I must still make a full effort. Perhaps in making the claim, I can use my Texan disguise, which worked well enough for me in the Kansas City Plaza los Toros.” Rachel interrupted with, “But Senor La Cruz, how will the matter of making the claim ever come up, since we know you don’t have even the map with you?”
So she was senoring me too! “I have the map here,” I told her icily, touching my head. “That was one thing about Terra I memorized in complete detail while still in the Sack. If the mine exists, I can find it”
“Yes, and you may have the claim in your head too, all perfectly memorized,” Rachel rejoined. “But a claim in the head isn’t a document. It isn’t seals and signatures.”
“I carry the claim here,” I told her, laying my hand on my chest over my Heart. “And as to how I propose to assert that claim — that is my business, Senorita Lamar!”
She shrank back a little with tipped shoulder, pretending to be withered. I could have kicked her! I caught Rosa quirking a grin. There was occupation for my other foot!
Mendoza said with mild argumentativeness, “But if you truly have the claim, I do not see the need either for map or mine-hunt. A claim describes the exact location of a mine.”
“This one does not,” I asserted. Then before any or all could accuse me of insanity, I went on, “However, the original crazy Russian, who sold it to the Cree, who sold it to the Aleut, who sold it to my ancestor — that crazy Russian, whose name by the way was Nicholas Nimzovitch Nisard — he, before disappearing forever, deposited with the then Yellowknife Registry of Mining Claims, in an envelope bearing his signature, samples of the unique mixture of pitchblende, syenite, pitch-rock, and granite from his mine. On the basis of those samples, he was granted a provisional claim. If anyone can produce matching samples, plus a verifiable description of the mine’s location, plus the provisional claim, then the claim becomes absolute.”
“The Russian was crazy like a fox,” Mendoza observed, nodding his head wisely. “he was afraid that the Registry, agent of capitalist government, might jump his claim.”
I said, “So all I need now is your help in finding the mine. I know you carry radioactivity detectors as standard safety equipment. While this kack is the perfect vehicle in which to hunt for the landmarks of the mine: three large low outcroppings of rock forming the apexes of an equilateral triangle with sides a kilometer long. The outcroppings to north and south are of pale granite, but the one to the west is of darker hue — and there lies the pitchblende.”
Mendoza nervously shook his head. “I fear I have not the authority to detach a revolutionary vehicle for such an individualistic enterprise.”
“Is true,” Rosa supported Kim. “The Revolution comes before all else.”
Rachel said, “I think it’s a mercy not to encourage Senor La Cruz in his delusions about this non-existent mine.”
Kicking, I thought, is much too good for those two abominable females. However, I found myself too weary and dispirited to indulge even in sadistic fantasies. I deserve all this, I thought. To put my trust in a gang of utterly selfish traitors such as constitutes any revolutionary committee — Fanninowicz’s cackle of sardonic mirth was the final stab to the deflating balloon of my ego, flattening it completely.
However, the cold laughter was followed by a warm chuckle. Guchu, whom I had thought to be asleep, had opened his bloodshot eyes and now lifted up on an orange-robed elbow.
“Aw, give the stupid square a square deal, I say. At first I agreed with you all — we’d use him and now was the time to dump him, along with Professor Fanninowicz. But then he told his story and, man, it was so crazy that my sympathies were aroused in spite of myself! Loco Russian to a Cree Injun to an Aleut to his bombed-out ancestor! Man, oh man!” Again came the warm chuckle. “Not that we owe him anything as Senor La Cruz from the sky. First principle of being a black is that he can’t ever owe an ofay anything. Ofays are a doomed breed, and its a kindness to help them along toward extinction — and that goes for you too, Miss Lamar. But taking La Cruz just as an actor — pure ham, but at least lively and hard-working — I think we owe him a little help hunting this crazy mine of his.”
El Tacito looked back from the controls and nodded once.
Mendoza looked around, shrugged, and nodded too, albeit unwillingly.
I gazed at Guchu and opened my mouth to thank him.
But the words that came out were, “Thank you for nothing, you bloodthirsty black, more besotted with your race than even Fanninowicz here! I imagine the first act of your so-called Pacific Republic was to slaughter every miserable white in California, giving priority to women and children.”
Guchu’s answering chuckle was as warm and rich as either of his earlier ones. I hadn’t touched his ego, I hadn’t got within a light-year of it “That’s not true, Scully,” he said. “Most of them we made Honorary blacks.”
Not trusting myself to speak to him, or so much as look at the girls, I crawled forward beside El Tacito.
“You Heard what they said,” I told him gruffly. “Please approach Amarillo Cuchillo on a south-north line, ten kilometers to the east. That is a trifle more than six miles.”
Once again he nodded.
Except for changing the batteries of my exo, I spent the rest of the long day horizontal there, occasionally peering north — not hungrily, but with a definite though very small appetite.
After a tiny eternity, the flat blue of Great Slave Lake edged reluctantly into view. To the west I could make out low forest; to the east, the barrens.
Then for a time land retreated in all directions as we crossed the lake. To me it was as if we were crossing one of those unimaginable oceans.
The sun was low when the barrens reappeared ahead.
Guchu took over the controls. When the barrens had been below us for half an hour, the sun was setting. Its horizontal, deep yellow light was just right to show me, a little to the west, three long shadows traveling east from the apexes of an equilateral triangle with sides about a kilometer long.
My teeth were chattering as I pointed out the miraculous sight to Guchu. I chiefly wanted him to confirm what I saw. It was impossible that I should find the mine so easily. There must be a catch somewhere.
If there was, Guchu didn’t tell me. He just grunted appreciatively and swung the kack west and down.
The shadows of the two eastern outcroppings were about a half kilometer long. But that of the western one, where the mine was, seemed to stretch east forever.
I snatched up binoculars. There was indeed a catch. The long shadow was cast by one of the now-familiar huge towers.
My mine had been discovered and was being worked by the Texans.
Yet that didn’t make sense.
Surely the huge rigs scattered down across Texas at least as far as Dallas were not for mining surface deposits of pitchblende.
I focused more carefully and upped the magnification and electronic gain. Now I could see a great door standing open in the eastern side of the tower. Before it,
figures tinier than ants were slowly milling about. I saw the hairline red needles of laser beams. A revolutionary rising? I wondered, pulse quickening.
I scanned west of the tower. I saw nothing whatever besides the monotonous landscape of the barrens, until there came into view the narrow, dark-gold sheen of a river, dark short dashes of two bridges crossing it, and just beyond them the huddled low buildings and narrow streets of what must be Amarillo Cuchillo.
The tops of a few of the buildings still caught sunlight. Elsewhere, twilight was gathering.
Northeast of the tiny city I spotted an airfield with two huge Texan cargo jets and a narrow shaft, its upper quarter sun-gilded, which might well be the Tsiolkovsky or her sister ship, the Goddard.
I lowered the binoculars to rest my eyes. There was shadow around me. The kack had dropped out of sight of the sun.
Without warning, Amarillo Cuchillo became the center of a spiderweb of thread-thin, ruler-straight beams of light, some of them, red, shot up toward infinity or lanced across the barrens.
Others, green, originated in the sky or in the northwest distance, and ended around the city in incandescent points from which sparks fountained upward.
Some of the red beams ended similarly in points beyond Amarillo Cuchillo, two of them in the sky.
The kack rocked and a blinding green flare flashed across the thick plastic a foot above my head.
That convinced me that the Rangers had found us at last. Though why they had to shoot up the whole sky and landscape to down one miserable little ship of actors, I couldn’t grasp. Sheer Texan exuberance, perhaps.
By the time I got my sight back, Guchu was landing the kack behind the southernmost of two eastern outcroppings. Near at hand the rocky hillock looked almost impressive — a glacier-smoothed bump of granite ten meters high.
I could see the brown furrow which the green laser beam had melted in the plastic, not quite cutting through. The furrow was barely three decimeters wide, testifying to the photonic weapon’s fantastic “choke” at a distance over ten miles.
There was a soft bump and my wrists were twisting. I realized that we had touched down and that Mendoza was trying to wrench the binoculars away from me.
I saw Rachel drop recklessly down from the kack’s trap to the snowy carpet below. I too was seized by the desire to know what was going on. Jerking the binoculars away from Mendoza, and upping my power, though not as much as I had for the duel, I followed her.
Offstage, the Revolutionary Ramblers are anything but a well disciplined company.
The snow was barely ankle deep. The wind of my movement instantly began to chill my face and hands. But I did not pause to put on gloves and mask, or even to turn up my suit’s heat, until I was crouched beside Rachel on a rough granite ledge and peering over the hillock’s top.
There were no more little red laser flashes from the foot of the tower, before the great door.
The earth’s curvature now hid Amarillo Cuchillo, but the green and red laser beams continued their battle. I could no longer see the incandescent hits, though there were brief ghostly white glows here and there along the horizon’s rim, and also long-lasting deep orange glows which I took to come from flames. Several times too I saw brief glares and later heard the distant boom of explosions, but for the most part the battle was so silent that it seemed more like one more natural display — the northern lights reduced to a weird, bright geometry — rather than a human conflict.
Somewhere along the line I had decided that the laser display was not directed at us, that I and my fellow actor-revolutionaries had merely been struck one accidental blow and become witnesses of some much larger conflict.
Though when one green ray flashed a half kilometer overhead, I flinched.
I turned up my heating a notch, put on gloves and mask and looked around me. Rachel was using my binoculars. Mendoza had found another pair and was peering through them. Rosa and Fanninowicz and Father Francisco had also come down. And El Tacito too, his pistols out, stolidly watching Fanninowicz and myself rather than the battle.
There were two battles, I remembered then. I snatched the glasses from Rachel with no more than a growled, “I want them!” in answer to her challenging, “I beg your pardon?”
I focused them carefully on the western tower a kilometer away, upped magnification and electronic gain to maximum and gradually made out the details.
Slowly I interpreted a sight that I am sure will never stop returning to me in nightmares.
The huge tower loomed darkly against the twilight sky. Facing me, two doors thirty meters High and ten wide stood open.
The inside of the tower showed a single great room. With one exception, the central space was empty. To either side, a purplish glow showed me sections of great tall machines. One reminded me of one of those big gantries a rocket needs on a gravity satellite.
The reason it reminded me of a gantry was that I saw, standing in the center of the tower, a gleaming violet rocket taller than the door. It must be lit by invisible banks of floodlights, I thought. I fancied it quivered, as if it were anxious for the tower’s roof to lift aside, so it could take off.
By Diana! — I thought — Texas is preparing a new conquest of space. I must warn Circumluna!
Better be ready to come a-running, children,” Guchu called from behind us. “The geiger shows a little activity from the direction of the purple tower. Nothing dangerous. As of now.”
Then, through the rocket, I dimly made out more machines behind it. I realized, at first with relief, that the rocket was only a shaft of violet light shining up like a giant laser through a hole in the floor or ground and beating against the tower’s ceiling, to be reflected as the purple glow.
The purple glow, fanning out through the door showed me many bodies lying at random on the snow. Little bodies, the bodies of bent-backs. I think I saw stains beside some of them. At any rate, they did not move.
But there were many more Mexes moving about freely, seen blackly in silhouette. Some stood in groups. Others moved singly. When a group did move, there was a surge about it which I did not like. I do not know whether it reminded me of half-disciplined soldiers, or packs of animals, or what. I only know I did not like it.
Also, to one side of the door, there was what I took to be a small stack of big logs, bigger than the stems of any of the trees I had seen growing in the Land of Little Sticks.
If El Toro had been with us, he might have led us toward the tower. I only know that Carlos Mendoza did not, and that I had no desire to go there, and that I twice caught Father Francisco crossing himself.
My glasses kept going back in fascination to the violet pillar of light. I fancied that it pulsed and vibrated. It seemed a living thing. I marveled with a shudder at the Mexes moving freely in its glow, the crescent edges of their silhouetted heads like anodyzed aluminum, or mercury vapor lashed by electrons.
I wondered about the source of the violet light. A huge vat of molten metal just below the floor? — for there was heat there; the lengthening fan of dark ground before the door, where the snow had melted, showed that.
Or great filaments? Or a sea of thin vapor, conceivably mercury, electrically blasted into fluorescence?
Somehow I felt the source was deeper than that. I pictured a great shaft going down, and down, and down, until I felt vertigo. Federico’s shaft, but with all the elevators removed and the change points smoothed out, until it was an uninterrupted 40-kilometer hole.
I lowered my glasses, blinking my smarting eyes and shaking my head to get rid of that illusion of dizziness.
I looked toward Amarillo Cuchillo. The lasers still lanced there, though I saw more greens than reds.
I was just handing my binoculars to Rachel, when I heard Mendoza, whose own binoculars were still fixed on the purple tower, give a sibilant hiss.
Ignoring Rachel’s angry protests, I snatched back the glasses and put them to my eyes.
I am sometimes sorry I did so, yet it is perhaps b
etter that I saw, than she.
Eight Mexes were returning from the violet beam. A gang of eight others rushed with that unpleasant surge toward the log stack, which seemed slightly smaller than before, hoisted a log between them, surged with it to the center of the tower and cast it into the violet light, where it was brightly and lividly visible for a moment before dropping into the hole whence the light came.
During that cinema-bright moment I saw that it was not a log, but a tall man with legs bound together and arms to his sides, a big man made bigger by the ropes swathing him from neck to ankles.
I watched that action repeated six times more, until the stack was gone. Although several attempts, which rocked me, were made to drag the binoculars away from me, I held onto them with the maximum strength of my hands and exoskeleton — held onto them and fought to keep them focused continually on the base of the violet column.
I do not think I wanted to watch. I believe I hated to. I know it tore me inside. One moment I felt like a snarling animal, next like a compassionate man, next like a maniac, next like a camera frozen in ice.
Yet I had to watch, I had to witness. I had each time to try, unsuccessfully yet desperately, to catch the expression on the face of the bound Texan falling into the brilliant hole.
Meanwhile I was hearing a faint wailing that rose and fell irregularly. I told myself it was the wind rising. I told myself it was wolves. I told myself it was not the screaming of men, either in ultimate terror or murderous fury, or the two mixed.
Buddhists have much to say about karmic burdens and duties, karmic works and acts, karmic moments when all of the moral past of a being and perhaps the future too, is laid bare, is nakedly seized and known. That perhaps comes closest to describing what I felt and why I had to feel it. Besides, was I not Death?