by Jerome Bixby
The story of that night is no story, for it has no plot. Rather, it is a few nasty incidents whose only connection is a three-hundred pound, mercury-steel, Space Patrolman’s bulger. But, since you ask...
* * * *
The Maestro was old, vintage 2080 or so. The contralto whose voice swelled from it had died long before that, around 1970. The song was a wiring of one of those antique modulated-groove “records” that gave their impulse to a “needle” and thence to a diaphragm-type speaker. Thorens could faintly hear the “surface-noise” behind the music.. .sweet and low, sweet and low:
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child—
Thorens’ discolored, half-closed left eye ached. He held his drink to his lips, elbow on table, his head bent forward a little over the soiled cloth. This shielded his face from the lamp overhead and kept Turk and the others from seeing the tears that might trigger one of them—or all of them—into coming over and knocking his head off.
Far—far—from home...
Thorens’ chin moved under its sandy beard as he tried to soften the lump that was hurting his throat. He took a quick unpleasing sip of the whiskey, winced as it knifed into his cut lips, set the glass on the table. Then he looked hesitantly at Turk, knowing somehow that the fat man was studying him.
Five months on Limbo had taught him that the best defense was a reasonable pretense. He cleared his throat and said falteringly, “Kind of gets you, doesn’t it?”
Turk stared at him unwinkingly. Thorens’ eyes sheered away, ran the length of the floor, up and along the dirty mirror that hung behind the bar—in it, his own reflection, dark shadows and smudgy faces, dingy chromium, the amber monotony of bottles, cigarette and marijuana smoke coiling, the spider-shaped bloodstain on the wall where the little Spaniard’s high blood-pressure had geysered through his cut throat.
“It don’t get me,” Turk rumbled. He got up, wheezing, flat dark face glistening, carefully plucked eyebrows arched into the satanic shape that pleased him. “This is home. Don’ you like Limbo? I like Limbo. Don’ you? You make your friends feel bad!”
Thorens’ head lowered again. Turk chuckled and moved to the bar—big, slow man whose bulk had no solidity but instead ran to pouches and blobs that bulged sleekly in Limbo’s .63 Earth gravity.
He thumped for a refill, and Potts turned and said sharply, “Keep your pants on, boy. I’ll get to you when .”
Watching them from shadowed eye-sockets, Thorens thought fiercely how stupid they were, with Turk a little more exquisitely so than Potts—and how he loathed them both, and feared them both, as he loathed and feared all the half-men here on Limbo.
Suddenly Thorens closed his eyes, making the shadowed eye-sockets darker...the old, old fear that somebody was reading his mind. Not really reading it, but detecting from visible signs what his thoughts were about. Covertly he brushed a hand across his forehead, up into his thin hair, down again, bringing with it a workable shield of hair from behind which his eyes flickered, searching for the clenched fist, the boot, the knife—
Nothing. Shadows. Men drinking.
He released his hate. It filled his mind and exploded against the far corners of his skull. Turk—fat strong-arm artist, with glands for brains! Potts—wife carver! Of all on Limbo, I hate you most! His eyes flickered again. They hadn’t “heard.” He sat there, hating. Why do I hate you most? Because you have hurt me most...
“I ain’t a boy,” Turk said. He leaned over the bar, his belly rolling onto it like a squeezed balloon. “I’m a man.”
Potts spun a beer at him. Turk picked it up and turned around. His muddy eyes brushed Thorens, and he decided to sit elsewhere. He went over to the front window, where there was a booth that Potts kept a little neater and cleaner because business was still business, even on Limbo, and sat down, inching himself along until he sat almost pressing the window.
Thorens was reminded of a captive hippo, stinking and streaked, looking dully through bars at a world it hadn’t the brains to realize was there and strange.
“I bet he’s a liar,” said one of the men at the bar. The man turned toward Turk, hand on knife. He was drunk and out to bury his steel—his left hand made the challenge-sign. “Tell us what you are.” Turk didn’t look at him.
“No good, Sammy. Old Turk’s too slow for knives.” (He carried spring-knives up his sleeves, but the other was too far away. Just a little closer Sammy, he chuckled silently to himself.)
“Y’ain’t too slow to bleed.”
Another man said, from the shadows, “Sammy, is it? Well, I’m a stranger here, Sammy, and I don’t know you—but I’ll tell you something. I’m not too slow.” Sammy’s knife was out. “You know what else you are?”
“Not slow.”
They moved toward each other, coming to a crouch. Potts leaned over the bar and broke a bottle of bourbon over Sammy’s head. Sammy shrieked and dropped his knife. He fled for the door, blood and whiskey masking his face.
The stranger drew back his knife for the throw.
Potts said harshly, “Outside, damn it! I run a friendly place. Why do you think I bumped in?”
Sammy slammed through the door. The stranger cursed and followed. Footsteps faded.
Thorens allowed his gaze to fall beyond the specter of knives, out the window and across the glistening concrete roadway and the fog-shrouded fields of tobacco and marijuana to the spaceport. The gray shapes of its administration-building and hangars were beaded with faint strings of window-lights. Its cradles slanted up like fingers pointed at the stars—giant fingers that could unleash the Jovian lightning of rocket-power to reach those stars.
Now a glow washed into Limbo’s thin air. It widened and brightened, beating down from the night. The bottles on Potts’ shelves behind the bar began to vibrate. The trembling grew, and Thorens shifted as the bench tickled his rear. Men looked up, listened. Potts came around from behind the bar and went to stand beside Turk’s table, looking out through the metaglass.
Turk said, not looking at Thorens, “Patrol ship. Maybe the Hand got his transfer. Maybe he’ll take off pretty soon. Maybe he wants a so-long present.”
Thorens’ belly twisted hotly into itself. He kept his face down, eyes in hiding. The whiskey in the bottom of his glass danced. His trembling hand forced the glass flat on the table, released it, fell limp. He sat and waited.
Outside, the glare was bright as day. High in the air, a roaring pinpoint appeared, lowering, spitting out light like a fragment of the Sun. Fog boiled around it. Above it the sky was night. As the speck descended, night followed it down through the fog almost respectfully until, as the ship hovered over the pitted apron of the port, its rocket-glare had contracted to a blinding conical affair only a few hundred yards across.
Thorens dared to glance up.
It had been just talk. Turk’s heavy features, disinterested in Thorens, were reflected in the window as he looked out.
* * * *
Rocket-sound thundered, slammed, snarled. The ship touched a cradle, rocked, and the magnetics took hold to fit it tight. The pilot boomed the tubes once, unnecessarily—maybe he was just glad he’d worlded his ship. The boom lit the scene like a flash-bulb, then there was blackness into which the distant dim windows of the port slowly faded as pupils dilated.
Potts was back at his bar, setting up bottles, opening new ones and sticking spouts into them. Solar-system cash was good on Limbo. The wife carver would make money tonight.
A far, faint, dying bleat cut the night. Sammy’s? Impossible to tell. Turk gazed dully out the window and Thorens wondered if the man could see in the dark. Nothing of the beast in Turk would surprise him. Turk had forcibly taken a girl, back on Earth—a very young girl—and while he might prefer to be elsewhere than on Limbo, the preference depended on no major discontent. Turk functioned. There were the monthly supply ships, and the frequent stopovers of ships making the Callisto freight-run. There would sometimes be, with so many ships worlding on Limbo, a young and curious p
assenger who, prepared by the dark lonely months of space, could be persuaded to new adventure. And Turk could be convincing, even likable, when he put his mind to it. He kept, Thorens knew, a small hoard of handkerchiefs, buttons, dog-tags, carefully worded notes, personal jewelry, clothing, souvenirs.
With a hand that was heavier for the ring it had lost, Thorens picked up his drink, mouth twisting bitterly at the rim of the glass. His eyes closed again. He began to assemble words in the darkness, slowly, carefully, picturing them in the cramped pencil strokes that would be realized later when he returned to his office and added them to this manuscript:
The always dubious coin of sensitivity and intellect amounts to less than ever when you are forty and undersized and alone in a cultural cesspool. Brutality it buys, without being tendered, and ridicule and violation, mixed to a poison whose taste is Fear—
No, no no, he thought—too flowery, too abstruse...
He opened his eyes slightly. In the space of a second they went from side to side, registering the murky room, the men. Then they closed again in hopelessness.
If only I could join you, be one of you, just like you—without conscience or intelligence, as far from God as you are, as close to the slime. Then I would not be set apart—I would not be a target— the hare could run with the hounds. But I could never be like you, or anything like any part of you, you scum, you filth, you animals. I could not be like you in a million years...
II
Sixty years ago the Solar Council, during the tenure as Chairman of the shrewd Ghaz of Venus, had been persuaded to launch Limbo as a money-saving proposition—a prison asteroid, undisciplined and self-sustaining, whose only upkeep would amount to the salaries of a few rookie Patrolmen assigned to orbit their ships within ’scope range and keep a bored eye out.
Ah, God! Thorens thought. Why had the Helping Hand sent him here! Why not to Neptune, or Ganymede, or Callisto, or Tethys, for the frontier duties he had expected when he’d signed on!
Council Engineers had scouted the Trojan Asteroids, selecting at last a body with adequate size and soil—one of the few fragments of Planet X’s outer surface that hadn’t been blown clean out of the System in that eons-ago catastrophe. Altering the asteroid’s core to create a decent gravity, at the same time hopping it up to function as a central heating system, they had atmospherized it, deloused it of inimical micro-organisms, installed a balanced ecology, and two weeks later blasted off, leaving some two hundred thousand crates of essentials on its twitching surface. Within another month, every male lifer in the System had been transported to Limbo to fend for himself, each new group being abruptly depleted on arrival by the settling of countless black scores...
The Helping Hand! Thorens tore at the words with his mind, shredded them with hate. The great HH! Was he, John Thomas Thorens, on file in some drawer in some office on some level of one of HH’s giant headquarters buildings in New Jersey, marked Discontent—Refer to Transfer? No, by all the nonexistent gods of Space— not even that! Not even a long wait to be endured, while the wheels of bureaucracy ground out his fate. The hated words boiled up out of memory: Transfer denied. Transfer denied. Transfer denied.
Within a year Limbo had sprouted landowners, six slapdash towns, a caste system, inter-urban warfare, and a gang-rule throne whose cushions bore the dark stains of a dozen deposed. Within five, Limbo had shaken down. Gone was the throne, for none could hold it. Warfare had ceased (having been largely a matter of indecisive knife and hatchet forays anyway, no deadlier weapons being permitted). Famine and disease had at last brought the Limbos to the realization that pull together they’d damned well better, or die of perfectly natural causes. A Council of Limbo was formed, a Plan was drawn, some shaky, jury-rigged shops thrown together, some atrocious furniture and fair-to-middling ceramics were produced, and Limbo made an earnest bid for System trade. Sanctioned by the pleased Solar Council, a valid monetary exchange sprang into being, based on Solar dollars but subject to devaluation should Limbo need chastising. The spaceport was built, and a Patrol squadron moved in to sit casually on top of the new order. Limbo bought machinery, parlayed its gains, built factories, manufactured and exported mostly—of all things—toys.
The great HH!.. .which “Watched Over its Flock in Distress and Disaster” (Our Hands Are on Venus, and They’re Helping on Mars), but which could not note the predicament of one lone, terror-bound field-worker, nor stretch red tape to free him, in its concentration on its main objective: Campaign and Collect (And They’ll Be Right There. When We Reach—the—Stars!)
Thorens sought to assemble saliva in his dry mouth, wishing he could spit his hatred.
Helping along the frontiers, maybe, where the seed of publicity might be planted to bear plump financial fruit at home—but certain as death, no HH benevolence ever came this way, out across space to Thorens’ rat-hole office on Limbo where he was a Beam of Light in the Outer Darkness.
Eventually, there being plenty of room, the life-term inmates of the Tycho Women’s Penitentiary were removed to Limbo, there to live beside and among the males to the satisfaction of both.
Thus Limbo functioned—unpoliced, autonomous, even profitable. There was no slightest sign of moral or spiritual rehabilitation among its populace, however. If the Limbos applied themselves to the matter of collective survival, it was only that they might survive as happy hellhounds in the biggest, goriest padded cell in history. Limbo outdid in sheer social savagery any lawless frontier that had ever existed. Frontiers always attract a percentage of misfits, outcasts and crackpots; but here was saturation. Dog snapped, snarled, chewed, and eagerly ate dog. Murder was the way of life. To hear a scream was to shrug at somebody’s clumsiness, for it is simple to kill quietly. To step in blood was to curse, for it rots shoes.
The largest town was Damn Earth. It had seven sprawling square miles of sloppily paved streets, three hundred and forty-two saloons including Potts’, four distilleries, ninety-four gambling palaces, three toy factories, a general warehouse-store, several thousand scattered huts and cabins, seventeen joy-houses (possibly the best living to be made on Limbo), a psychotic German who lived in a cave and collected skulls and the Patrol Spaceport, the latter being the only thing on the tiny planet that the Limbos had not themselves built. About the Spaceport was a network of tall silver towers—a crackling violet wall of death, if need be. But the Limbos displayed no tendency to storm the port, slay its personnel, blast off toward freedom in stolen ships—
They liked Limbo.
It was their oyster, their raw meat, their cup of bloody tea. It was as vicious, as mad, as loose and twisted as they. Paradoxically, it was their prison and the one place between Heaven and Earth where they could roam free, brawl, bay at the stars, kill, live the good life.
Any non-Limbo could, for this reason, walk the streets unescorted in perfect safety. His Visitor’s Armband was his shield and security. If he happened on a scene of battle, knives would cease flashing to allow him to pass. And anyone so thoughtless as to threaten him would be cut down by friend and foe alike. For Limbo wanted no reprisals, no curtailments, no kill-joy Patrol teams stalking its surface.
The word regarding visitors was: Leave them alone.
This did not apply to John Thorens—who had arrived five months ago, with some thirty books, a few games (checkers, Space-lanes, Guess-an-Element), a three months’ salary advance (bait conceals the point on the hook) and a twelve-week course (Encompassing the Humanities) under his belt that made him a “constructive and rehabilitative force among the unfortunate.”
He had busily cleaned the HH office, rousting vermin, painting over filth in cheerful colors. He had then thrown open the doors to the unfortunate, a few of whom took notice.
All the books had been lent out the first day, and were seen no more. The games had generated more interest, but the Limbos played rough. When at first he had sincerely tried to talk up the straight and narrow to these men, he was told that his predecessor had ended up in the quar
ry with his face torn off, because he’d had brown eyes and the Blue-Eyed Gang collected brown eyes.
(Not precisely so, other Limbos had told him later—the man had disrupted an orgy at the South Pole Arena, with loud complaints that these were Satan’s activities. His more specific comments had angered female participants, so they’d dragged him back to Damesville, where, with luck, he eventually managed suicide. When the Patrol investigated, accompanied by an HH representative, they were permitted to discover evidence that the deceased had had a sideline involving a third H, with the catch that the stuff he peddled had been sugared down to substandard. Apparently a customer had complained. End of investigation.)
Thorens naturally had tried to get out. In reply to his first frightened spacegram, HH had said: Unfortunate demise of predecessor due to involvement in prison intrigue. In no way result of duties you are expected to perform. Patrol denies conditions you describe. Extend the Hand. The essence of the reply to his second plea was that in view of the contract he had signed it was to be hoped that he might experience a change of sentiment. Extend the Hand.
Outraged, Thorens had sought a more direct means of self-preservation. His HH card brought him to the desk of the secretary of the personal aide to the secretary of the Lieutenant Commander of the Spaceport—a bored-eyed man in neat civvies who had listened carefully to Thorens’ story, managing at the same time to make Thorens feel like daddy’s little boy, and then, glancing idly out the foot-thick, ray-proof, pellet-proof window at the twisting streets of Damn Earth, candidly admitted that Limbo was a bit rough at first, but, after all, some of the Limbos, at least, were struggling along the difficult path toward readjustment and certainly deserved a Hand, and all Thorens needed to do to insure his own well-being was to be friendly, mix with those who showed interest, and, above all, keep his nose clean.