by Roger Elwood
“But, with one hand, you couldn’t make the music.”
“Not as well, Benji. Not as well.”
Benji thought as he had never thought before. If he took in Rolf s hand, he would have sixteen years of existing in the City, and then he would be Expired, fair game for some youngster nearing Half Life. Nothing in the City could compare with what he had seen this evening, here in this house with its magic piano that made the achingly lovely music. Suddenly the solution to his problem seemed so simple.
“If I don’t go back—if I lose my honor by refusing my Half Life obligation, would you—would you—?” He couldn’t say the words.
But Rolf knew. “I get lonely, Benji. We’ll start your piano lessons in the morning.”
That night Benji lay on a narrow bed that faced an uncurtained window. The moon rose, huge and orange, over the mountain and flooded his tiny room with its peaceful light. He had scarcely seen the moon before, because it wasn’t safe to be above ground in the City at night. Too excited to sleep, Benji wondered: Someday, will some boy nearing Half Life come here hunting me? If he does, I hope that I can help him, as Rolf has helped me.
And he slept, soundly, dreaming of the morning . . . and the music.
thomas n. scortia
The Tower
Tuesday . . . This house, which was once a fortress, has become a prison. I walk the halls softly, dreading even the whisper of footsteps that might disturb him. This helplessness . . . knowing that he is dying and that I cannot help him, but I cannot leave the house. It is only a short walk across the ruined town to where the doctor lives, but I cannot bring myself . . .
Yesterday he said, “What will you do?”
“Do?” I asked.
“When I die,” he said. The furrows of pain deepened in his tired face.
“Nonsense, Father,” I said. “You’re not going to die.” We both knew better. He shook his fevered head and looked down to me as I kneeled beside his bed. The old wonder again crept into his eyes, that familiar look of pain at the sight of my misshapen mass of a body.
He is so huge and I am so small.
There are more like me to the east of the town—in the mountains—he tells me. The townspeople hunt for them with dogs and traps. They catch only the warped and the weak ones, though. Some of them can run swiftly, some of them dig, and there are some, Father said, who can even fly.
If only . . .
“I’m glad your mother is no longer alive,” he said this evening.
Wednesday . . . I spent all morning in the tower, looking out over the town with its tumbled shells of gutted buildings. In many spots, even the streets are plowed lines of concrete shards and decaying brick. This house was old even before the Blowup, that time of total nuclear war over the earth. Now, standing at the edge of the desolation, it is the tallest structure in sight. There are no trees, of course. Two stories of ugly brick and concrete block with an awkward mansard roof; and the tower protruding upward, topped by its own small mansard and a heavy, cast-iron railing, giving the impression of some ungainly medieval fortress. Even the windows are long and narrow.
I have seen the house only once from the outside. When I was young, I crept outdoors, but Mother saw me and grabbed me by the shoulder. I can still remember the fierce bite of her nails as she pulled me inside, and the haunted look of fear in her eyes as she told my father. He threatened to whip me if I ever went out again.
“They’ll kill you if they see you,” he said.
“Why?” I sobbed. “Why, why?”
“You’re different . . .”
I looked up at his great bulk, his strong clean shoulders, his firm flat chest; and suddenly I felt the horrible weight of my own deformity, the heavy twisted chest with its weight of banded muscle, my back . . .
“I know,” I cried, the tears burning my eyes, “but why should they want to kill me?”
He shook his head wearily and turned away. He watched carefully after that to see that I never left the house again. When Mother died, I watched him do what had to be done from the concealment of the tower.
The tower became my refuge. I often sunned myself on its small roof, peering down over the spear-tipped, cast-iron railing into the town. I rarely saw anyone, but the shells and heaps of rubble fascinated me with their suggestive shapes of what once had been. Fragments of stone and brick litter the streets. Why this house is not more damaged than it is, I do not know. The bricks on the north side are badly scorched and crumbling, but apparently some freak of screening saved it from further destruction. There are no windowpanes, however.
Thursday . . . He is getting weaker. Today he was delirious at times. I offered again to get the doctor, but he rose to one elbow and looked wildly about the room. “No,” he said through scarcely moving lips. “No, the muties . . . They kill the muties.”
Toward evening, he slept. I went to the tower and watched the sun sink below the ruins of the church to the west. In the distance, I heard the shouts of children and I sank down into the concealment of the protruding roof. Children rarely venture this far south of the ruined area, but I was afraid. For a moment, the old loneliness welled over me. I have never played with other children.
I have made my decision. Tomorrow, if he is no better, I will go. It is only a quarter of a mile to the doctor’s house. I can see the battered red tile roof that Father pointed out to me once as his house. It is not too far. Surely . . .
Friday . . . Horrible little animals! If only I could have escaped without their following me. The mountains . . . I must get east to the mountains . . .
Father was delirious again when I awoke this morning, his thin face flushed, his hot hands grasping futilely at the ragged blankets.
I decided to go.
I sneaked from the house and made my way along the weed-choked streets, hiding behind the piles of debris. With luck, I might have made it.
It was too late when I saw them. They were playing in a depression of an old basement, hiding and quarreling in shrill tones. Their voices were muffled and I thought they were some distance away until they erupted from concealment. They saw me before I saw them.
They swarmed out of the hole. There were five of them, and they circled me warily.
“What is it?” one yelled.
“Mutie.” Loathing and disgust in the voice.
“Dirty animal.”
“That skin and those . . . things.”
“Kill it! Kill it!”
One of them scooped a stone from the pavement and threw it. Then another. The second hit the heavy growths on my back and I screamed in pain and anger.
One of them laughed as I turned to run. There were two behind me blocking my escape. They were both much bigger and heavier than I was. I grabbed one of the bricks that cluttered the street.
Somehow, I escaped.
The sight of blood unnerved them.
But they followed, and now they know where I am. Father was dead when I returned. I have barricaded the door and closed the rude shutters on the windows.
If only I could escape, get to the mountains before they bring the old ones. What shall I do?
Later . . . They are all around the house. It is dark but the men carry torches . . . torches and clubs and knives. I can hear the barking of dogs below. Thank God there are no guns left. I stand on the roof of the tower and watch them gather below. They are trying to break down the front door with a log.
I can hear them shout over and over, “Kill the mu tie, kill him.”
I know what to do now. It is the only answer.
They are inside. I can see them streaming through the door below me. Someone shouts, “Don’t let him get away.”
But I will. They’ll never get me.
They are on the narrow steps that lead from the second floor up into the tower. I look below and see the rest of them staring up at me. Their faces are filled with hate and bloodlust, their eyes gleaming in the dirty light of the torches.
I stand, hearing the heavy
leathery rustling to my rear.
They cannot stop me. Before they reach the roof, I will . . .
I climb over the rail and stand erect on the brink of the roof. From my height, their figures are distorted and squat.
I weave, poised for the leap into space. They draw back, waiting for my body to plunge among them.
Behind me, the trap to the roof swings back.
All sight flickers in wild confusion. Momentary sensations of falling, of weightlessness . . . Then . . .
I can fly!
I can fly!
dean r. koontz
Wake Up to Thunder
Connections were broken as a child might snap the legs from flies; the darkness retreated into a hole no larger than a pinprick. . . .
Thunder, the ruler of all Earth, beneficent and protective, had used a direct communications link to my cell to call me from my dreams, and now he spoke to me without using words. His meanings were carried in subvocal, beautiful, oscillating choruses of deep, base sound which I did not hear with my ears, but which I sensed with every cell of my body. Indeed, my ears reported nothing but silence in the great hive, the leaden quietude of dreaming Earth.
A renegade was loose in the hive, Thunder informed me. The man had awakened without Thunder’s call or permission, had found his way out of the uppermost levels, and had destroyed a hundred cells of Workers. I had been chosen, along with a hundred others, to seek out this misfit and destroy him. It was a great honor. I loved
the unseen Thunder with all my heart for providing me with the opportunity to prove my loyalty.
I rose from my cell, the viscous contact jelly sliding away from me, and I was not even wet from my monthlong bath. I thought only a month had passed since the last hunt, although a year or a decade may as easily have slipped by. Time is nonexistent inside Thunder’s hive.
I looked down at my body, the lower half obscured by the contact jelly, and I saw a hairless, well-muscled eighteen-year-old. My biceps were thick and formidable.
I pulled myself completely free of the jelly by grasping two curved grips above my head. My touch activated hidden motors, and I was raised and swung clear of my cell walls. I touched bare feet to the floor, somehow certain it would be cold. It was warm. I had forgotten how much Thunder loved us, especially those of us who were his servants whenever a renegade was loose. Thunder saw to it that we had not even the slight discomfort of cold floors to bother us.
Thunder still spoke; I listened. I could not help but listen, because I contained special receivers to pick up all that he said.
He directed me to the main shaft.
I went.
Although it was good to lie in my cell and produce for Thunder, to dream of pleasures unnumbered in visions Thunder provided, it was also good to walk through the smooth corridors of the hive, to see the millions of shining, plastiglass cells and the countless dreaming children of Thunder. It gave me a sense of solidity and security, knowing that Thunder maintained it all so well. As it was, so it would be forever, all one with Thunder.
I felt much love.
In a few minutes, I reached the main shaft and stood on the flat departure rim with, perhaps, forty others, waiting for the full contingent to arrive. On every side, other unclothed young men, raised to fight and endure, exited corridors identical to the one I had come from. Everyone smiled, and no one spoke.
No one but Thunder, that is. We listened as he detailed his plans for the hunt.
The hundred hunters now assembled, we stepped over the silver rim and dropped down the shaft, level after level flitting by without much detail. We rested easy, not worried about getting off the lift beam at the proper floor, because Thunder was directing us where he wished. Ahead of me, other young men spun out of the shaft, moving abruptly sideways into the less-powerful handling beams of various arrival platforms. Behind, others left the shaft.
I continued to fall.
I noticed a change in the air, even as I dropped, a staleness, a rise in the temperature, a closeness that was almost stifling. I decided that we must be going very deep into the hive, deeper than I had ever been on any previous mission.
New secrets of Thunder would be opened to me, and I rejoiced at this prospect. I was naive; I didn’t understand, back then, that new secrets are often unpleasant ones and, in certain ways, the ignorant are happier than the informed.
I was shunted sideways through a dilating membrane and was brought to rest on a silver shaft rim, two hundred levels below where I had awakened only minutes earlier. Ten others shared this level, and each of us stepped off into one of the eleven corridors leading away from the sprocket of the hive, like spokes.
Even in this deep place, I was proud to note, Thunder maintained the cells and the corridors in spotlessness. The materials and construction methods were not so sophisticated as what one saw on the upper floors, but one also had to realize that generations had passed since the lower floors had been built. Back then, man was imperfect, capable of error, clumsy, and only partially civilized. Thunder could only create to the limits of his helpers’ abilities.
A thousand feet along the tunnel, I reached the monitoring board that covered that wing of that level of that facet of the hive. (There were hundreds of thousands of facets—or sections—of the hive, and men like myself would be active in those, ready to apprehend the renegade if he should break through a connective wall and crawl out of his home area.) I sat in the shape-changing chair before the controls, shivered as it curled around the peculiarities of my body until it held me like a hand. With both hands, I played along the rows of toggles and buttons, going through a procedure which I had learned from Thunder during my dreams.
Television screens lighted, all soft blue. Then red lines rolled from the center of each screen, out toward the rim, like ripples in a pond when a stone has broken the calm and serenity of the surface. I scanned all those screens most carefully: No one was here.
By the time I returned to the departure rim, everyone else had arrived. It was not that I was inefficient. I was more careful than they were. I was certain that Thunder observed my caution and loved me the more for it. I thought he could not hate. I thought he only loved more or less, according to the merits of the individual.
We dropped down again.
The air grew even more fetid. The shaft became narrower, and the manner in which the departure rims joined the shaft changed a bit.
This level-by-level search swiftly became monotonous, but it was necessary work. I knew that Thunder would not have called us up if it were not vital. Besides, we were slowly approaching the oldest regions of the hive, places of legend. Since we were the bottom team, we would be the ones to see those ancient cellars of early civilization—so long as the renegade was not found first. I wanted very much to explore those barbaric underpinnings of our world, the brutal genesis of the hive, the awful places we lived in before Thunder came and brought us glory.
When we next congregated at the departure rim, Thunder told us that the renegade had left signs in the lowest levels. We must go quickly to the bottom.
We were excited, for we felt, somehow, that we were Thunder’s chosen. So many times, in these last months—years?—we had been sent after renegades, and now we were being dispatched to what were nearly sacred realms.
The last ten levels of the hive were unlike those above them. The shaft walls were tarnished, the construction materials positively primitive. I could see where the sections of metal were joined by round-headed rivets. There was no rust; Thunder saw to that, of course. But here, too, the mundane touch was the norm. These primitive men had built sturdily but without any sense of the scope of the ultimate creation.
On the lowest level, we left the shaft and stood in the gloomy corridors of the basement, overwhelmed. There was no complex departure rim, few lights. The walls were not bright, but the color of contact jelly. I could almost see the hulking, stoop-shouldered savages who had worked here, laboring without any concept of what Thunder would m
ake them into.
We stepped into different corridors, away from the hub. Each of us had to search alone, as before, but no one was frightened, for Thunder had made us strong. Instead of fear, we felt love and sweet anticipation, knowing that one of us would locate the renegade who, according to the monitoring systems, was loose here. One of us would serve Thunder well.
Spiderwebs softened the junction of walls and ceiling; fat, black arachnids tended to the creation of their nests. Where the walls joined the floor, a few cockroaches scattered before me. The floor was damp along the baseboard, and fungus had split the paneling, the resultant cracks making fine homes for the roaches. It might all have been rather fascinating, if the scene had not disturbed me so deeply.
What had happened to maintenance down here? Had Thunder forgotten?
Every twenty feet down the subterranean avenues, I passed another large tronic-sign. Most of them seemed to function well, in spite of the general decay: blue letters on white backgrounds, each board with a different but similar message. These blinking signs had been designed to deliver subliminal messages, flashing on and off so quickly that, in the fraction of a second that the words were visible, the average man would not even realize he had seen anything. However, I benefited from the superior reflexes of a policeman, which Thunder had developed in me, and I could read the boards: CHILDREN BLESS US . . . CHILDREN BLESS US; and LIFE IS THE PURPOSE OF LIFE . . . LIFE IS THE PUR POSE OF LIFE; and A MOTHER IS SACRED . . . A MOTHER IS SACRED . . .
I read them, but I could make only a little sense of what they said. Indeed, the more signs I passed, the more confusing they became. They were clearly intended for the savages who originally constructed these lower levels, the messages subliminal rather than overt, for Thunder had to work secretly in those days—at least when he was concerned with the most controversial issues. But what were these signs propagandizing them about—and why?