A Specter Is Haunting Texas

by Fritz Leiber

  And when one of the two responded to my “Zdraste, tovarisch,” with a softly guttural, “Spasebaw,” and in answer to my question gave me the simple directions needed to reach the Registry of Mining Claims, I felt preposterously pleased, as if I were in a fairyland of talking animals.

  Of course these were very different Russians from the generally hairless Slavic Thins, Fats and Athletics of Circumluna, but in a way I liked them better. They seemed less supercilious, less morally conceited and puritanical.

  One of the soldiers stayed at his post, the other companionably dropped in beside me, carrying his laser rifle in a relaxed, casual manner.

  I pointed toward the distant, silvery prow of the spaceship rising above the low buildings around us and asked, “Goddard?”

  “Nyet,” he replied emphatically.

  “Tsiolkovsky?” I suggested.

  “Da!” he confirmed in something of a growl, eying me for a moment severely before resuming his smiling, animal placidity.

  We passed several bombed and laser-charred areas.

  We met ten more furry soldier-pairs before we reached the Registry, and in each instance the first procedure was repeated, so that by the time I entered the dingy building I had an escort of what seemed to me charming and docile teddy-bears, of average human height but more than human breadth. The facts that I was a good two feet taller than any of them and that none of them showed surprise at my height or exoskeleton doubtless added to my feeling of fairytale confidence.

  It did not even bother me when the bear-soldiers pressed into the building before, beside and behind me, and then remained in a half circle around me as I introduced myself to a Kapitan Taimanov, a gloriously golden-furred Russian who appeared to be in charge of things at the Registry. I believed they were merely child-curious about me.

  Taimanov waved me into a seat, called for vodka and caviar, and offered me a box from which I took a long thin cigarette. He snapped his furry fingers, and a soldier leaped to light it. Somewhat to my disappointment, it was only tobacco. Nevertheless I puffed it graciously.

  Kapitan Taimanov was all smiles and courtesy. We chatted together lightly of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, of Dostoyevsky and Pasternak, of Moussorgsky and Khachaturian, of Alekhine and Keres. We almost started to play a game of chess. the only time his lip curled up from his formidable teeth was when a brown-pelted soldier ran his tongue around his furry mouth as I downed my sip and the captain his glass of vodka.

  We complimented each other on our command of Russian, though his seemed to me a kind of pidgin compared to that I’d picked up in Circumluna.

  Then he led the conversation around to myself.

  For starters, I explained that I was a simple worker in the Communist underground in Texas and how I had played the part of Kawstee Chiluhvehk or Bone Man — El Esqueleto — from Dallas to Fort Johnson, Helping foment the Bent-Back Revolution which had drawn Ranger units southward from Zhawlty Nawsh.

  “Then I take it you are not one of ours?” he said. “I mean, those grown tall by deliberate misuse of the directional hormone in the laboratories and creches of Lake Baikal, taught Texan and sent to infiltrate that last evil stronghold of capitalism?”

  “No,” I answered truthfully. “What is this about misuse of the directional Hormone? I thought it was used solely by Texans to give them greater height.”

  He laughed and said, “I can see you are an innocent in some matters — that freakish thing, a native revolutionary.” He paused a moment to frown, the short golden fur of his forehead furrowing. “Or else those at Baikal decided it was best to equip you with a completely false memory and Identity. No matter. As for the directional hormone, we Russians employ it as Nature always intended — Horizontally, so that we are stronger without additional strains on the heart, men able to cope with the surface gravity of Jupiter, if that should ever become necessary. It also acts upon our hair in a multiplicatory fashion, producing those pelts which make Siberian weather far easier to cope with and which also make summer nudity more esthetic and cultural. Ah, my poor friend, you should see us sporting by the tens of thousands on the beaches around Baikal and the Black Sea!”

  “Or around the nearest mud-hole,” I thought I heard a soldier mutter.

  But Taimanov did not catch that. He was slowly and solemnly looking me up and down, concealing whatever pity or contempt he may have felt for my miserable figure — asthenic or cerebrotonic ultimate — in contrast with his own magnificent animal one. Finally he said most soulfully, a tear dripping from his left eye, “Poor tortured comrade, I can see without being told that you have spent many years in the prisons of Texas. It must have been there that you learned Russian, from some equally unfortunate and heroic captive. No, you do not have to explain, I know it all. They have accused us Russians of brainwashing our enemies by deprivation of food, sleep and exercise, but what nation — except Texas! — has applied carefully calculated starvation — and perhaps the rack! — to a point where a man is literally skin and bones, his muscles shriveled possibly beyond regeneration? Truly, the Soviets owe you much! But tell me this — what unsung genius of the revolution provided you with that most clever powered framework which enables you to walk?”

  “The Russians gave it to me,” I answered, thinking further to win his favor — and actually lying not so much. At least half the technicians who had built my exo had been Circumlunan Russians.

  “Chawrtuh vuh ahduh!” he cursed, half rising to his feet and pounding on the table until the bottle jumped; and it would have cracked, except it was four inches thick. “For fifty years the military has been asking the scientists for powered body-armor for soldiers, and now at last we see it — secretly given away to a foreign agent by the state security apparatus! Your pardon, comrade. This is not your fault, but the practice makes me furious.” “You and your soldiers look to me so physically powerful,” I put in placatingly, “that it would seem you would have no need of mechanical aids.”

  “True, we are as strong as kodiak bears,” he agreed. “But with powered body-armor, we could leap rivers and Single-handed encounter tanks and devastate cities. The atomic bomb would become a side-arm. One soldier could liberate an entire Central American country. Grrr!”

  The idea of bears able to leap rivers sounded to me about as desirable as spiders able to fly, though I did not voice the thought. Meanwhile Taimanov was muttering, “Nothing too good for our foreign agents! Anything good enough for our soldiers! Grrr! But once more your pardon. Have mare vodka. How else can I serve you?”

  Emboldened by this encouragement and another large sip of vodka, I told him about my local mining claim. I pointed out that as an ardent revolutionary crippled for life, I perhaps deserved financial compensation.

  He looked interested, said, “Da?” and inquired if I had documents to prove my claim.

  Now was my big moment. I asked if he could provide me with the amenities of a powerful sunlamp and a razor or electric clippers.

  Though mystified, he complied with my request. The electric clippers were especially fine, and he confided in me that he cut his entire pelt close — en brosch — for the summer months.

  Downing half of another vodka, I unlocked my rib-cage at its center and folded it away to either side. Next I unzipped my winter suit from neck to crotch. The soldiers murmured approvingly at the amount of hair disclosed. I clipped it all off close and directed the large sunlamp at my ventral side.

  “You are that cold, tovarisch?” Taimanov expostulated. “Even the vodka has not warmed you? Perhaps a steam bath—”

  I lifted my hand and pointed it toward my middle.

  “Watch,” I said.

  The twelve pairs of fur-circled soulful eyes grew larger as tiny blue-gray marks began to appear on my torso. Soon the message there was completely developed.

  Beginning high on my chest and traveling interminably downward, somewhat distorted by the scars of my patio crawl and by various rashes, but legible all the same, were line after line
of slate-blue print and script, interspersed with signatures, X-marks, letterheads and seals.

  It was all upside-down to me, but I knew it by heart.

  For it was simply a facsimile of Nicholas Nimzovitch Nisard’s provisional claim to his pitchblende mine, together with the three transfers of ownership and a Circumlunan confirmation.

  My father hadn’t entrusted me with the provisional claim but, probably stealing the idea from some spy story, had had a facsimile of it tattooed on my chest and belly in a preparation of silver nitrate, so that it would be invisible until I exposed it to bright sunlight or a sunlamp, whereupon the hitherto invisible silver would precipitate out as a dark powder and the claim appear written on my skin, clearly and permanently.

  I had certainly had a devil of a time keeping it undeveloped, especially in Lamar’s patio. Now I felt fully repaid for my efforts.

  I explained the gist of the document and its postscripts to Kapitan Taimanov.

  He was amazed, as were his soldiers. He told me that I could undoubtedly obtain some large financial compensation, though it was not within his immediate power to grant it. General Kan would have to be consulted and possibly Novy Moscow. He poured me another vodka, offered me another cigarette and came around his desk to examine the tattooing more closely.

  I delicately sipped white fire and savored that burnt essence of earthiness, tobacco.

  Taimanov pointed a furry finger, horn-tipped, at the nethermost seal, a mandala quartering a cogwheel, tuning fork, beaker and atom.

  “What is that?” he inquired.

  “The great seat of Circumluna,” I explained, “confirming all the writing above to be authentic. You see, there is one further detail about myself which I have neglected to tell you: that in addition to my revolutionary status I am also a Circumlunan of the Sack, visiting Terra under the protection of —”

  My words were lost in Taimanov’s growl of fury and command.

  I realized that somehow success and vodka had made me careless.

  Before I could so much as up the power of my exo, I was seized from all sides. A hard paw-edge chopped expertly between my headbasket and shoulder girdle, paralyzing me and, I thought, breaking my neck. Quite unnecessarily another hand jabbed up under the front of my rib-cage into my solar plexus, cutting off my breath'.

  Then Taimanov, his face the mask of an enraged bear, procured a pair of insulated wire cutters and snipped all the leads from my batteries to my servomotors.

  I was hoisted up and rushed across the street to the old Amarillo Cuchillo jail, where my exo was removed and the two lightning pistols in my pouch waved in my face as proof that I was an assassin at least. I was shaken until I decided my neck wasn’t broken, but would be shortly.

  Next I found myself strapped down on a table, again quite unnecessarily, and being interrogated by a formidable black-furred Colonel Bolbochan, who smoked an atrocious fat cigar, about a Circumlunan plot to seize all Russia and, though he seemed to think this matter of minor importance, the rest of Terra. He demanded to know how I had smuggled myself out of the Tsiolkovsky, what special instructions for sabotage and terrorism I had been given and what devilish plans for further horrors the crew of the Tsiol had up their sleeves.

  Apparently the ground-bear Russians were unable to assault the ship directly, though able to prevent its takeoff. It was a mystery to me.

  In vain I insisted that I had left the Tsiol at Dallas and thereafter devoted myself to a rabble-rousing advantageous to Russia. In vain I assured him that the Circumlunan Russians were very nice people and constituted somewhat less than half of its population, and that they certainly had no designs against or much interest in Terran Russia. In vain I explained that I wasn’t a true dweller in Circumluna, only an inhabitant of the sub-proletarian Sack, a harmless actor.

  When after a short period I did not produce answers of the sort Bolbochan wanted, I was systematically beaten with rubber truncheons. The humiliation was immense and the pain most excruciating. I had feared I would be driven mad if again deprived of my exoskeleton on Terra, but that fear was quite swallowed up in the physical agonies I was suffering. The shock of the blows prevented me from inventing a story that might even temporarily have satisfied the Black Colonel. It even stopped me from getting any profit from the philosophic notion that Death should make himself familiar with suffering, pain and all other approaches toward . . . himself.

  At one point I was asked to name my confederates: those still aboard the Tsiol, those who had sneaked aground with me and also the still fouler beings — Terran collaborators with the Russo-Circumlunan devils.

  The only thing that kept me silent then was the remaining tatter of rational thought that it wouldn’t help me one bit to have Mendoza and Company rounded up and beaten like myself. Still, I would soon have confessed even that, to halt the torture, if Black Bolbochan’s questions had not gone rocketing off into a farago about “moon monsters” which the satellitic Russians were planning to set loose in Siberia. Was I a moon monster?

  He had embarked on an even wilder inquiry about “Mars beetles” capable of devouring all Terra’s vegetation, when a grizzled General Kan came galloping in and raised his hand — to command, I supposed, new and more ingenious tortures.

  But I never learned what they were, for at that moment a velvet-gloved inner blackness seized me and dragged me deep, deep down.

  Table of Contents

  - XV -

  DEATH WITH SPIDERS

  As I came back to consciousness — or rather, as consciousness came back to me, for I certainly didn’t want it — I discovered that I was in my coffin and they were nailing it up.

  The hammering awakened all of my old pains and a remarkable number of new ones. And the greatest of the new ones was cold.

  I figured that there must be about ten hammerers pounding away, and the nails by now as thick as pearls on a string.

  I knew I was still on Terra, because Gravity was in the coffin with me. It struck me as peculiarly unfair that Gravity should operate even inside coffins. One would think that at least death would bring release from the horrible force, but it doesn’t. Such are the merciless ways of Terra.

  I commanded my eyes to open, so that I could look at the absolute darkness around me. I knew it would be absolute darkness, because no slightest glow came through my eyelids.

  But my eyelids, which were heavy and thick with one of the new pains, refused to part. One more proof that I was dead indeed.

  How I could still feel pain while dead was a problem which I pigeonholed. I guess I didn’t want to have to admit that Hell existed.

  I attempted to reassess my situation philosophically. I was in great cold, in absolute darkness, in great pain (pigeonhole that one!), and inside my coffin (and they were still pounding on it).

  Well, one expects a coffin to be chilly and dark. It is also in the nature of coffins to be nailed up (though this one was taking a long time about it).

  But, especially if one has any illusions whatever left about the courtesy of humanity, one expects a coffin to fit — to be, in my case, about ten by two by one-and-a-half feet, inside dimensions. And, if humanity is especially considerate, to be comfortably lined, preferably with quilted silk.

  My coffin had no lining, and it definitely did not fit. In fact, from the way my body was contorted, I could tell that it was little more than four by four by four feet. My Head, tilted up, lay in a bottom corner. My back was gravity-pressed against the coffin’s hard bottom, which had a lattice of cracks in it, rather like the floor of President Lamar’s patio. My legs rose sharply up and my feet were wedged into the upper corner of the box opposite my liead.

  Yes, my coffin was a mere box, an ignominious cube. And would they please stop pounding on it!

  It next occurred to me that, as a Hero of the Bent-Back Revolution, I should have been encoffined in high state, wearing my exoskeleton and with at least two gold medals, the other reading Socialist Actor Extraordinary.

  B
ut I clearly didn’t have my exoskeleton. I was wearing only my winter suit and it was strangely loose on my torso, accounting in part for my frigid state.

  I began to try to figure out what had happened to me prior to my encoffination. My first theory was that I had been thrown down the Crazy-Russian Mohole, landed in a bed of feathers a kilometer thick and found myself in the Realm of the Dead, whose monitors had nailed me up in this cramping and shameful box as punishment for impersonating Death in the world above.

  And were continuing to nail.

  There were several things wrong with that theory. To mention only one, the Crazy-Russian Mohole was filled from bottom to top with red-hot and blue-radioactive magma.

  I tried to think of another theory, but the hammering wouldn’t let me. Instead, it re-ignited my every pain.

  It got louder and louder, less and less endurable.

  It became a hammering not on my coffin, but on my headbasket, then on my naked skull and face.

  As I realized I had been wanting to do all along, I escaped by dying.

  I instantly made a remarkable discovery. Whether one dies for a minute or a million years, it seems no time at all to the one who dies.

  For the next thing I knew, consciousness had come snuffling back to my body like the persistent beast it is. It sniffed me from head to toes, from feet to fingertips. Then it nuzzled my neck and leaped inside my skull and curled up there, wide-eyed, ears a-prick, and still sniffing.

  I was in precisely the same situation as I had been before, except for one wonderful difference: the hammering had stopped. I still felt a wide spectrum of pains, but now I felt them silently. Whoever had been pounding my coffin had gone away.

  Perhaps the pounding had been only in my head all along. Perhaps it had been the pounding of my heart frantically trying to make my ghost-muscles work by over-supplying them with glucose and oxygen, and now at last sensibly shifted into neutral and only idling along.