by Fritz Leiber
The glasses slipped from my hands, I don’t know to whom. I stood there a long time, with head bowed. Or perhaps it only seemed a long time.
Then among many unnoticed remarks, I heard someone, I do not recall who, say, “Yes, the cyborgs are all gone. The eight last threw something down the hole. Yes, a thing, not a man.”
I looked up. The sky was dark. Toward Amarillo Cuchillo, a few lasers still lanced, all green.
I heard someone — again I do not recall who; can it have been that in my peculiar state I was hearing not voices, but meanings?
— at any rate, I heard someone say matter-of-factly, “Well, the Russians have licked the Texans this time, that’s for sure.”
Until that moment, except for the brief period when I thought the Rangers were chasing us, I hadn’t the faintest idea of who was fighting whom at the Battle of Amarillo Cuchillo.
And then I began to hear it — no, not the shrill wailing again, thank Mars! — though it was even fainter than that to begin with. It was a sound that was lilting, and rhythmic, and deep, and — one had at last to recognize — both musical and human. It was coming out of the dark, across the white waste, from the direction of Amarillo Cuchillo, and it was slowly getting stronger.
For a long while I tried to convince myself it was an illusion — perhaps something generated deep in my mind to erase those dreadful screams — but then I realized that all those around me were motionless and listening too. And then I saw the first white form appear in the dark like a ghost, small at first, but growing taller.
I heard Guchu come up behind us and begin to whisper harshly, “You all better—!”
I think he was going to say “— beat it back to the kack!” and then seeing how far the situation had developed, changed his mind.
For he finished, “— Hold damn still! Tacito, dig your gun in the Professor’s guts.”
By that time all the marching men had appeared from the frosty murk. There were a scant dozen of them. They were in white fatigues and they carried their lasers at the slope, or hanging farther over-shoulder with muzzle down, or casually under-arm. They all stood tall and now I could make out all the words of the march they were singing soft and low to a hauntingly familiar tune:
From the hills of Guatemala
To the frozen Arctic sea
Texas Rangers fight the battles
In the name of liberty.
We have kicked the Russki and Chinee
Until his butt is sore.
We’re the Lone Star’s guts and guns and fists,
We’re the Texas Ranger Corps.
At first I assumed they were headed for the tower, to hunt down the revolted cyborgs. Then, with a spasm of fear, I thought they were coming for us.
It turned out they were simply marching south between us, though much nearer us than the tower. They halted less than a hundred yards away. We all held dead still indeed. With blown snow half coating us, we were hard to see. At least I hoped so.
In the lull of the wind, I heard a gruff voice say, “Wal, Custer done wuss,” and another reply, “And so did Lyndon, bless ’im,” and a third comment, “Yup, the mysterious east weren’t never meant for human man to meddle with.”
I heard nothing else coming from the northwest, but the Rangers must have, for now they scattered and knelt in a long curve, their lasers pointing back along the line of their retreat.
What came out of the north-westem murk wasn’t a band of pursuing Russians, but a big long white vehicle, which moved silently across the snow, weaving like a snake.
It halted by the Rangers and I heard a hoarse voice command, “Jump aboard, boys.”
They obeyed, though they didn’t move as fast as the voice had demanded. Then the huge vehicle was slithering south.
I thought I heard again, very faintly, the two lines:
Texas Rangers fight the battles in the name of Liberty!
Perhaps I should have felt contemptuous, or at least sardonic. I didn’t. Something deep inside me, which I had never suspected was there, was touched.
We had started back for the kack when the roaring began. It came first through the rock we trod, making it vibrate and shake. We staggered and reeled.
Then the roar became deafening as the purple tower blew up. First the violet beam grew much brighter and burst through the roof, shining toward the zenith as if exultantly bound for the stars. Then great gouts of bright purple molten stuff were mixed with it Then the walls of the tower were driven outward. In a few moments, where the tower and great machines had been, there was only a cone of bright purple, viscous, semi-solid lava, hugely squirming and swiftly growing taller.
The roaring died down, though the rock still vibrated underfoot.
Guchu yelled, “Back to the kack! The geiger’s gone crazy!”
Fanninowicz broke away from the group and ran lumberingly up the hillock. El Tacito drew a bead on him. I forced down his pistol, saying, Uno momento! Por favor!” and took out after the German. Rachel and Rosa followed me.
Fanninowicz stopped at the summit of the rocky hummock. He was bathed in bright purple light, while he who followed him stayed in the hummock’s shadow.
Shaking his fist alternately at the purple pyramid and at us, he roared out, “Yes, the dirty Russians have won a battle, but now they will lose two, ten, a Hundred! With his back to the wall, Hitler created the V-l and the V-2! Now the Texans, sole heirs of the virile Germanic spirit, have won the means to throw back and conquer the jealous world! Faced by the shortage of radioactives, they have had the the vision and daring and heavy technology to tap pockets of radioactive magma under Earth’s crust! Across their great land, at every likely spot, they have with admirable secrecy created the mohole mines! The Lost Crazy-Russian Mine was the clue that led to the new Spindle-top! Everywhere the ultimate gushers are coming in, as at Fort Johnson last night, though you fools had not the wit to read the meaning of that glow! They will make Texas all-powerful!” And facing the glow with fist held High, he shouted, “Sieg Heil!” and again, “Sieg Heil!”
Perhaps I should have been touched by that too. I wasn’t. All I could think was that Germans were maniacs and that the grandiose Texans were giving poor old atom-scarred Terra another horse-size dose of deadly radioactivity.
Meanwhile I had grabbed Fanninowicz’s ankle and jerked. He came tumbling heavily down. Rachel and I each grabbed him by a shoulder and rushed him toward the kack. When he didn’t move fast enough, Rosa kicked him viciously from behind.
As we scrambled aboard Guchu yelled, “You dumb ofays are crazy-lucky I waited for you. Now hang on!”
The kack took off straight east, hugging the ground to get the most protection out of the hillock’s low shadow. We traveled east many miles before we began the long circle north and west to find the tents of the Crees.
Table of Contents
- XIV -
ZHAWLTY NAWSH
Fanninowicz continued euphoric in the kack. He discoursed to us like a paranoically insane schoolteacher in his grandiose phase. He sprayed spittle like my father acting Macbeth, and his voice often rose with a Iago’s or Richard the Third’s evil glee.
“It is a commonplace,” He began, “that common men never perceive the wonders of science and technology until the rockets roar, until the nuclei give up their energy at interior solar heat, or until the rich thor-uranic lava spouts from a mohole. Now you have seen, and the secret is out. So, attend me, children.”
El Tacito made as if to club him with the butt of his rifle, but Mendoza shook his head.
“It has long been known, even to oafs like you,” Fanninowicz continued on without notice, “that Terra has a crust of solid rock as much as seventy kilometers thick. Below that is the mantle: three thousand kilometers of molten rock under increasingly vast pressure.
“Once it was thought that the mantle was slowly cooling and shrinking.
“But as early as the twentieth century, the preponderance of evidence indicated that the heat of
the mantle was steadily maintained by cells of rich radioactives in it.
“These deep cells produced slow convection currents in the mantle, leading straight up to the crust, spreading sideways there and then descending. The Dutchman Veneg-Meinez first suggested that. Which is to say that a German first developed the theory, for despite their reputation for peacefulness, the Dutch were the ancestors of the brave and long-moumed-for Boers, which proves the Dutch to have been subconscious Prussians.
“Up the slow convection currents rode the rich radioactive ores, bit by bit. They were the hottest and most expanded of all the materials in the current, since they were the source of its Heat.
“Each current melted a dome in the solid crust above it. Some of the radioactives moved sideways with the current to its areas of descent hundreds of miles away. But others accumulated in an ever-richer pocket inside the dome.
“So pockets of molten radioactives are marked by mantle domes, somewhat as oil is associated with salt domes.
“The Texans—”
“I was waiting for them,” Guchu muttered from the pilot’s seat.
“Silence! By their ability to think big and to do big, the Texans provided the skill and unceasing industry to dig the roomy shafts.”
“Lies!” Rosa interjected. “Our cyborged men provided that.”
Fanninowicz continued unperturbed, “The lower courses of the shafts were lined with woven molecular-ribbon ferro-ceramics of great strength, through which the radioactives might gush upward, depositing on earth’s surface great cones of thor-uranic ores. The Pharaohs built limestone pyramids in which they buried themselves with a little gold and a few soft gems. But the Texans have cajoled Nature into creating hundreds of radioactive pyramids, each worth Hundreds of billions of dollars!”
“A few Texans got buried today in one of their hot pyramids,” Guchu put in.
“While we Texo-Germans,” Fanninowicz continued modestly but unshaken, “merely provided all the general theory and also the means to locate mantle domes.”
“Which is?” Mendoza asked after a few seconds. He was still interested. Myself, I had become sickened by all this horrible talk of oceans of molten rock megameters deep. A planet is hell with a crust! Then it occurred to me that my nausea migh't be the first symptoms of a dose of radioactivity.
When Fanninowicz, prior to an elaborate yawn, brushed his hand through his short hair, I was pleased to see that none fell out.
“Oh,” he said tantalizingly, “we have had some success with counts of anti-neutrinos coming through the earth at night from the sun. But chiefly we have located mantle domes by the same method the Great Fuehrer’s naval command located battleships in the Atlantic — that is, by dowsing over maps of Texas! Ho-ho, I see I have startled you. I see you are prepared to sneer. Do so, if you wish. It will not alter the fact that we Germans are the ancient and original spiers-out of metals, the ultimate chemists, the chthonic race, the wise old kobolds, as the names of the elements testify!”
I did not listen to the discussion which followed, in which words like “cobalt” and “cuckoo” were bandied about. I was thinking that if only one dab of ferric ore were left in all Terra, a German would find it and forge from it an Iron Cross. My mind was also invaded by a compulsive, nightmarish vision in which a parade of Germans and Egyptians wound among vast, blue-lit pyramids, the hair of the marchers falling out on the way and their flesh shredding off and they slowly turning to shining blue skeletons topped by eerie animal heads and spiked gray helmets.
I was not aware the kack had landed until someone guided me from it, my exoskeleton jigging and shimmying from shiver-jerks in my chilled ghost muscles. I dimly noted puckered, blackeyed, leathery faces framed in fur. I smelled old hides, unwashed live ones, burning fat and cold machine oil. I glimpsed leather walls with shadows reeling across them. Then I felt coarse fur beneath me. I heard a faint shivery rattle, and realized just as I fell asleep, that it had come from my exo.
I spent the next two days in the encampment of the Crees, recuperating. Which, to a man with gravity sickness on a gravity-body, means no improvement at all, only a bitter hanging on to what little health he has, with growing irritability, fatigued restlessness, swift loss of reasonableness, and ballooning negativism.
There were a dozen tents masked by a strip of forest so thin and ragged that Amarillo Cuchillo and its airfield-spaceport could be glimpsed distantly through the stunted trees, with here and there small patrols of burly-looking Russians.
This nearness did not whet my hope. It only made me impatient.
Mendoza and the rest explained to me that I must stay hidden while they made contact and dickered with the Russians. My Texan height and generally strange appearance, they said, might arouse suspicion in the Russian military, who might not have been informed at all about the part I had played in the Bent-Back Revolt.
I argued at all this. Was I not El Esqueleto, I asked, and was he not known by now around the world? Even Rachel and Rosa could not win from me more than surly agreement to cooperate for the present.
The Crees were an interesting if somber folk. For instance, small jars of petroleum and chunks of coal were their money and also their gods, because they had learned that those black substances were the energy-filled residue of all animal and plant life. These they never burned, but used in trade and buried in small quantity with the dead, to “seed” them toward a similar immortality.
But the Crees did not interest me. They irked me with their atrocious English and worse Spanish and with their body odors, different from mine though worse. I did my best to ignore them.
As for staying hidden and sensibly horizontal, well, except when Russian patrols came near, I spent my days prowling about the camp with El Tacito in scowling attendance. I frequently stopped for glimpses of the silvery needle - no prow of the Tsiolkovsky or the Goddard waiting at the spaceport to take me home — at any rate that was why I felt it was there.
Meanwhile, I thought, I was wasting precious time that I could have put to use asserting my claim to the radioactive gusher — for despite Fanninowicz’s babble about dowsing and such, it seemed obvious that the Lost Crazy-Russian Pitchblende Mine had been the clue that had led the Texans to drill a mohole there.
Over and over the story, ending as he began:
“Make ye no truce with Adam-Zad — the Bear that walks like a man!
When he stands up as pleading; in wavering, man-brute guise,
When he veils the hate and cunning of his little swinish eyes;
When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer,
That is the time of peril — the time of the Truce of the Bear!”
“The Truce of the Bear,”
by Rudyard Kipling (1898)
My colleagues’ suggestions that I forget about the mine, that I face the fact that Russia had never permitted the exploitation of her mineral wealth by foreigners, and that I consider myself damn lucky if they managed to procure me an exit visa and transport to Circumluna — all these reasonable suggestions I listened to with great hostility and a growing suspicion that they wanted me off Terra so they could seize my wealth.
Suggestions that I have patience — Mendoza’s that I learn Cree, Rachel’s that I take up bow-and-arrow, Guchu’s that I drop acid — I only snarled at.
Perhaps by this time I had developed a mild chronic delirium from skin infections and fringe-adequate blood supply to the brain. But I doubt it. I think it was sheer bloated egotism on my part, slightly augmented by gravity disease. Here I was a great and heroic actor, and I was being treated like a bum.
At any rate, when Mendoza and Father Francisco went to dicker the first day and did not return, when Guchu and Rosa and Rachel — and even Fanninowicz! — took off on the second in the kack and didn’t come back either or send word, I decided on action.
I engaged El Tacito in a game of gin rummy and then a bout of drinking same — I mean rum, not gin. When he was thoroughly soused I p
ut him to bed, took his lightning pistols, equipped my exoskeleton with my last fresh batteries and waited for dawn.
At its first glimmer I emerged from our tent, menaced with my telescopic swords the Crees who would haye stopped me and walked straight to Amarillo Cuchillo.
Dawn was red when I reached the town and encountered a neat new sign with the ten Cyrillic characters spelling out “Zhawlty Nawshi” (желтый нож). Like the Texans, the Russians had literally translated Yellowknife.
I also encountered my first pair of Russian soldiers.
I’ll admit that their extreme burliness and even greater hairiness startled me at first. Ever since tearful Suzy the space hostess had mentioned “them fearful furry Russians,” I had assumed that all the references I heard to the hirsuteness of the Soviets were only one more ridiculous expression of that curse of Terran man, xenophobia.
Not so. The feet, hands, and faces, not to mention head, neck and ears, of these two infantrymen were entirely covered by thick fur, which also bulked up their coarsely woven summer uniforms. Their nails too were thickened, somewhat in the direction of claws, but seemingly not enough to interfere with humanoid manipulations.
After the first shock, the effect was delightful. The human eye looks quite soulful when surrounded by fur. It has something of the effect of a dolphin’s eye, while the fur itself modestly proclaims, “I am merely an animal, nothing special, comrade. There is nothing of the anthropocentric, supercilious, god-and-devil-creating witchdoctor about me.”
They seemed easily to accept my strangeness too, after a moment’s initial shock. Most cosmopolitan beasts, I thought.