by Jerome Bixby
To Thorens’ last question, as he ushered the Hand out the anything-proof steelite door, the secretary had answered, No, Patrol regulations forbade any civilian communication over Patrol radio apparatus.
Thorens had next systematically buttonholed the captains of the freight ships that sat down every week or so—a simple matter of hanging around bars, since liquor was not permitted aboard ship. He would pay his fare—twice that—ten times that. But soon he came to anticipate their reply: No passage off Limbo without Patrol authorization. HH authorization, authorization, authorization...
They had seemed somewhat understanding, however—and one in particular had sympathized. Thorens had promptly tried to stow away on that one’s ship, believing he had detected in the man’s manner tacit approval of the measure. He was caught and sympathetically turned over to the Patrol. Back in the bored-eyed man’s office, he was told that that was scarcely the way to keep his nose clean. did he want to end up as a Limbo himself, charged as a stowaway?
“What am I now?” Thorens said dully. “They are your prisoners, and I am theirs. Give me sanctuary.”
“Nothing will happen to you if you keep your head.”
“Do you know what happened to my predecessor’s head? Do you see these bruises? Help me!”
“Roughed up a little, eh? Well, I’ll tell you, I personally don’t think too much missionary zeal will pay off here. Better just sit it out.”
“The worst torture is the threats.”
“You’ve been threatened?”
“Every moment is a threat. Every look is a threat. Everyone I meet is a threat. It’s not only the bruises. God, it’s the fear of bruises!”
“Fear can do strange things to one’s imagination, eh?”
“How often have you been outside these walls? And for how long?”
“I get out occasionally. I don’t have much reason—”
“I’ve told you what is happening”
“Surely you’ve exaggerated.”
Ushered out, Thorens cringed against the wall of a hangar, staring around through the ever-night at the vast, waiting, murmuring, neon-lit, death-shot psychopathy that was Limbo. Then he darted into the building, into depths cool with the presence of positives— discipline, order, repair, precaution, direction, rational quantities, and qualities in rational degree. He veered this way and that through the darkened silver forest of Patrol steel—cranes, engine-pits, fuel storage tanks, machine-shops, great trolleys, giant vaulted ceilings cobwebbed with girders—and hid.
Next morning he was found and ejected.
Temporarily unbalanced, he got drunk. Three bars later, he was smashed. A grinning Limbo shoved a weed under his nose, and Thorens experienced his first flight, during which he challenged three men to a fistic duel and won hands-down when they all collapsed laughing. This was the first, vague, exciting glimpse of the unique “value” he might have to the Limbos. He grabbed at it frantically. He stayed drunk for three days, and bought drinks for the house in every dive from Damn Earth to Saintsville, in an effort to buy more good will as a dividend. He bought pack after pack of reefers from the machines, and distributed them lavishly. He bought six kits of Harrigan’s Horse (powder, self-heating water capsule, disposable hardware) in the General Store in Virtue, and gave them to those whom he considered his closest buddies. By this time he had attracted quite a coterie. They wound up their blast by driving to Virgin Springs, down in the southern hemisphere.
The next six hours were quite unforgettable.
Thorens knew this to be true. He tried to forget them—and failed.
III
The HH records—all of them; the records of nineteen years of HH activity on Limbo; quite irreplaceable, if hardly of any significant worth—made quite a fire in the potbelly stove in Thorens’ office. Until the wee hours, he tore the contents of six filing-cabinets and his desk into thumbnail-size pieces and fed them to the flames. He crouched before the pot-belly, face contorted, eyes glazed to a mica finish, mouth busy (pursed, stretched to gargoyle width, pursed again), like some alchemist working a miracle of hate. Then he danced around the room, laying about him with a poker, creating dents and splinters in the woodwork and breaking every pane of glass in the place.
He then set fire to the desk and lay down to die.
When the smoke became too much to bear, he got up and doused the fire with water from the sink. Death might be a welcome end— but too much discomfort preceded it.
At that moment, and in the days that followed, he set himself to survive. The nightmares of that task refuted Darwin.
He must polish dirty apples, lick boots, take every kind of filth and violence the diseased minds of Limbo could dish out. He must be the mascot of maniacs, the whipping-boy of a collective Id, the creature around explicitly to be hurt, bullied, tormented, used; for this gave him a functional value not easily duplicated on this little world of paranoid sadists. He was the goat among the Judas wolves; he gave them something they needed, the sight of abject fear, and it bought his life from day to day, for the Limbos held everything but themselves in hate and contempt, and “everything” was so far away—except John Thorens.
* * * *
He won scars, hideous memories, and the continuation of life. His first serious beating was at the hands of Turk. Thorens was bedridden for three days, with hot pads on his abdomen and groin. Turk came around on the second night for some more of the same, took one look at Thorens’ haunted eyes and went away muttering something about “necrophilia”—possibly the only five-syllable word the man knew; certainly in a predictable category.
His value as patsy begot Thorens champions: it was circulated that the man who killed him would be buried all around him as a garnish; and when one day a visitor from the nearby town of Freedom had thumbed his knife and advanced to whittle Thorens for the sin of stumbling against him, another knife, flipped expertly from sheath and halfway across the street into the back of the visitor’s skull, had ended that. Two days later Thorens’ rescuer got whopped at blackjack and worked off his annoyance by beating Thorens into a state of gibbering half-consciousness and throwing him at the mirror behind Potts’ Bar. Potts, in order to save the mirror, had hastily interposed his own body. Staggered by the impact, he had missed his first knife-throw at the offender. Not so the second. Then, upset by the entire episode, he had himself completed the job on Thorens and thrown him out.
Of course, not all the Limbos were as totally vicious and depraved as Turk, Potts, and their crowd.
Some were scarcely more than brutally playful. Others were as often as not oblivious of Thorens’ existence, unless he made the mistake of attracting their attention. In all, however, was the corrupt vein of cruelty, whether manifested by sins of commission or omission...a cruelty born of not-caring, of detachment from things human, of ruthless self-interest. They had stepped out of society and out of history to live their lives as a whim. They could not be predicted.
So he couldn’t count on protectors—except on an unpredictable basis, where a wrong guess might be fatal. Nor, failing human bulwarks, could he find shelter, haven, sanctuary—for there was no place on Limbo to hide.
On a few occasions, Thorens thought he had made friends—especially among the newcomers who arrived in batches now and then. There was even camaraderie. But always came betrayal. At last he grew to understand the contamination factor in this world where the floodgates were down and the newcomer quickly inundated. He developed an instinct that told him that now was the time to step out of the path of one he had befriended, for another superego had gasped its last and another brawling madman been born.
Unlike his predecessor, Thorens had no devout religious convictions to sustain him (or, for that matter, to cause his immediate downfall).
No protectors. No physical escape. No mystical source of courage and strength...
Naturally, then, Thorens had a project underway, as sensitive men will have when forced to exist under conditions which they cannot bear bu
t must. To it he devoted the predictable amount of fanatic concentration. Its title was LIMBO—Hell in Space, and some forty thousand words were completed in first draft. Thorens had a knack for literary expression. But the book, growing as it did from daily torment and indignation, was jumbled, incoherent, chaotic. Into it he poured his boundless hatred, his piteous cries, his curses and protests all unuttered in actuality. In it were masses of words bundled into sobs; scalding portraits of his individual tormentors, and descriptions in vivid and anatomical detail of the punishments he wished he could visit upon them; lengthy, sprawling psychosocial analyses that would not have satisfied a more objective eye. The book was a monstrous panorama which, drawn in the convulsive strokes of his agony, had even a certain power. With words as weapons, he slew his tormentors; and without that outlet he might have gone mad.
Or perhaps the book was itself his madness, externalized.
So far—so far—from home....
Three hundred million miles.
Turk shifted heavily (the hippopotamus responding to what?) His eyes turned to stare back into the room, seeking Thorens. “Patrol ship,” he said sourly, disappointedly. “Tough guys.” (That was what.) Then he kept his eyes on Thorens. Savoring melodrama, he grinned a slow grin.
At the bar, Potts cackled like a hen and said, “Hooray—those babies drink hard!”
Thorens got up stiffly and went toward the rear of the bar. He heard Turk wheeze behind him, the scrape of the fat man’s boots on the floor—trying to get up—and he walked faster. He reached the washroom and locked the door behind him, leaned against the wall. He stood that way for a few minutes, face wet, throat tight, stomach churning. Still nailed to the wall was the pageless binding of his copy of Paradise Lost. He put his hand on it.
Milton had lived and written (and had written Regained!)—there was an Earth, somewhere—there was a human spirit...
Finally the, nausea passed.
Turk, chuckling, had gone away too.
* * * *
They trooped in, the tough young men in Patrol uniforms. As usual, they sat around the front end of the bar, laughing, raising a hubbub, ignoring the scowling Limbos. One reached up to the shelf and turned off the maestro...
—feel like a motherless—
...and turned on the trivision. Hot, atonal music. A painted girl (gold, orange and green) dancing against a swirling, color-organ background. Whistles, laughter. Hands uplifted in the “I’ve-been-in-Space-and-I-need-it!” sign.
Back at his table, Thorens’ head bowed to his hands. Then it proceeded to the table—a terrible bereavement welling up to add mass to his present misery. He remembered a voice singing London Bridge is Falling Down, remembered clearly from childhood (or thought he did) warmth and loving caresses; a smile from close above, and sweet breath—
Strong, soft arms that now were husks, and the only truly understanding eyes in the Universe were closed and desiccated, and the last sound-wave of her voice had dispersed to become only air molecules, and the incredible goddess of every man vanishes, vanishes, save from her castle—the tortured subconscious of her son. In compound gear, where Oedipus engages Death, Thorens had wandered that night a month ago, the space-gram from his father crumpled in his hand, and for some reason—perhaps it was his eyes—the Limbos had let him alone. The next night he had been beaten twice, and started his book.
“Thorens!”
Thorens flinched and slowly raised his head. One of the Patrolmen had spotted him and got up—now came around the end of the bar lithely, one hand braced on the shoulder of a comrade. Thorens watched him come, struggling up out of his welter of tangled, miserable introspection.
“Hi!” The Patrolman dropped into a seat and in the same motion poured a little of his drink into Thorens’ empty glass. “Still alive, I see, eh?”
“Still alive, Lieutenant.”
“Not as bad as you thought at first, eh?”
“Not as bad.”
Lieutenant Mike Burman was blocky and space-burned; head well shaped, mouth wide, eyes just a little too closely set; about 26; less than a year out of the Space Academy at Gagaringrad. This was his sixth stop-over on Limbo. He had met Thorens on his first, four months ago, and each time since. In him seemed to stir a vague sympathy for the little man—as vague and unformed as his comprehension of Thorens’ true predicament on Limbo. Over any comprehension rode a Boston-bred suspicion that all such phenomena as Limbo and its gutterbums weren’t quite real, or at least shouldn’t be. But he admired the Helping Hand. His family contributed regularly. He supposed things were fairly disordered on Limbo, poor devils. It was good to see a Hand out here, on the job. When you came right down to it, it all had rather a touch of romance. Thorens’ tales of woe he chose, for the most part, to discredit. After all, there was a limit. Space, he knew, bred strange types—strong men, eccentric men—men possessed of some personal Hell. Like Thorens.
Looking at the young idiot, Thorens managed a smile. “It’s good to see you. How’s Earth?”
“Oh.. .still there, the last time I looked!” Burman laughed at his wit, and Thorens moved his lips to join in.
“Y’know, I’ve asked around a little,” Burman said. “None of the Patrolmen stationed here has ever seen anyone lay a finger on you!” He grinned, his expression somehow sly. “You were putting it on a little, eh?”
“Maybe a little.” You fool! Of course they leave me alone when the Patrol is around!
Now Mike Burman frowned suddenly, exaggeratedly, as if he had just remembered something. “Hey, that reminds me, Thorens. I’ve got a message for you. You’re supposed to go in and see the Lieutenant-Com.”
A burst of laughter from the bar had drowned out his last few words. Thorens was blinking in that direction. Burman repeated the message: “You’re supposed to go in and see the 2nd C. O.”
* * * *
Thorens looked at him. “What for?”
“I don’t know,” Mike Burman lied. You’re shipping out, Thorens. Earthside. I know, because you’re going back on my ship. That's what the Old Man wants to tell you.
“You didn’t get the message at your office,” Burman explained, “so they told me to look you up.”
“I haven’t been there for three days.” In the dark universe behind John Thorens’ eyes there appeared the tiniest, most hesitant flicker of animation—the stirring of some minute, slumbering particle; a particle that might become a flame...a light. ..a sun. The creation of suns from empty nothingness is mysterious; the creation of Hope is mystery itself. But the stirring primal particle in John Thorens’ Universe darkened to nothingness again.
Your mother’s last wish, Thorens—and then your father got to some softie in the HH. So back you go, for the atomicremation. Frankly, though, don’t you think you’re kind of running out on the job ?
Thorens had lived with the “message” for about ten seconds now. The particle of sub-Hope dared to stir again, since no inimical forces had put in an appearance.
“Why should the Old Man want to see me?” he whispered.
“Your packet,” Burman said. “I think that’s what it’s about.” He winked at himself in the mirror. Tomorrow, after all, was soon enough for Thorens to know the facts. Besides, Burman had no authorization to pass the real dope along. The packet—clever.
“My packet?” Thorens said, still whispering. “My packet? What about it?”
(The packet was the monthly HH mailing to all its Hands, containing: Instructions [if any]; pay-check; report forms; requisition-slips for needed supplies [if any]; and the monthly news-bulletin, Brotherly Love)
“It came open, during shipping,” Burman said casually. “You’re supposed to check it over, see that it’s all in order. Regulations.”
No icy, rushing, negative forces were required to extinguish the particle. It simply went out.
“That’s funny,” Thorens whispered.
Burman milked it. “Speaking of Earth, it’s spring now in New York.”
�
��Lord,” said Thorens, after a moment, in a starving voice, “the heat’ll be coming along....”
“Bad winter. Twenty-eight inches of snow one time. You couldn’t drive a bug.”
“I know. You told me last time. How are the new model bugs?”
“Chrysler’s finally bringing out that one-wheel job.”
Thorens shook his head. “I wouldn’t trust it. You hit two hundred and the gyro goes out and you start turning thirty-foot cartwheels.”
Tears gleamed on his cheeks. Burman shot him a look and pursed his lips, feeling a slight twinge.
The trivision began to chant out a spaceman’s song, describing the average spacehand’s affection for his superior officers. The Patrolmen at the bar set up a roar, and one shouted to Mike Burman, “Hey, loot! This one’s dedicated to you!” Then they took up the song:
“ Just tell him for me, he’s an ess-uva-bee, “And his mother’s a Martian monstros-s-sity!”
Thorens blinked—(Sometimes I feel...)—and shifted in his seat, feeling the comfortable if temporary security provided by the presence of these men.
A woman came in. Tall, hard-faced, green-eyed, with clipped dark hair. She wore two knives, handles forward. Her leather breastplates were neither new nor badly scarred, which meant her steel was fast. Eyes of Limbos brushed her up and down appreciatively, but no one made the sign. The tough ones were unpredictable. She got her drink, moved to a corner table.
At the bar a big young Patrolman new to Limbo, singing, had not taken his eyes off her ample curves. His chest had swelled. Now her eyes caught his gaze and became icy green flames. He looked away hastily, remembering a briefing.
Thoren’s lips curled in loathing, hatred, contempt. The women of Limbo were even more repellent than the men. Especially the swaggering, strutting, leather-garbed alleycats of Damesville, with their cruel eyes and filthy mouths. That they should continue to live—
Mike Burman had been smiling at the song, and at his men’s loud endorsement of the fact that he was a ess-uva-bee. “Speaking of S.O.B.’s,” he grinned, “two real beauts are heading Earthside!” He almost added: “—with you, on my ship—” but fortunately he caught himself.