by Damon Knight
The old man waits at the window. He dozes and starts into wakefulness many times, and his legs grow stiff with cold and fatigue. There is a ringing in his head, and when he is awake, he has a sense of euphoria now, of well-being and contentment. Suddenly he wakes thoroughly and knows that he will freeze to death if he doesn’t move. He should have eaten. He should have brought food with him. He tries to stand and reels into the wall and nearly falls down, catching himself clumsily. A fall could be fatal, he knows. A broken leg or hip, and he will die in this office building. He flexes his muscles slowly, and with each movement there is a burning pain that races through his body. Finally he is able to move; he stumbles to the door and down to the street again. He stays in the alleys until he is very close to the bridge. The other three children are back. He counts them. Seven. The old man is almost close enough now to reveal himself, to be able to fire into the group and be certain of killing or injuring most of them with the two shots in his gun. He takes another step, and suddenly he hears a whisper behind him.
“Lew! Damn it, wait a minute!” It is Jake Pulaski, with his rifle. Jake hurries to him. “Wait a minute until Harry has time to get to the other side of the bridge, to head them off.”
The old man stares at Jake in perplexity; he has forgotten what it was he meant to do. He sees the rifle in Jake’s hands and without thinking he swings his shotgun hard, catches Jake in the stomach and knocks him down. And he steps into the open and walks toward the children.
They jump up wildly. Their faces are pinched with cold.
“You get to the hospital and wait for me,” the old man says in his hardest voice. “Or you will be killed.”
They don’t move. Behind him the old man hears Jake advancing, and he hears the click of a safety being released.
“There are many men who are coming to kill you!” the old man thunders. “Run to the hospital and wait for me there!” He whirls around and sees Jake at the alley mouth now, the rifle rising, pointing past him at the group. The old man raises his shotgun and pulls both triggers together, and the shocking noise of his gun drowns out the sound of the rifle. At the noise the children scatter like leaves in a whirlwind.
For hours the old man stumbles in the ruins. He weeps and his tears freeze in his beard. Sometimes he can hear voices close by and he reaches for them, tries to find them, and even as he does so, he knows the voices are in his head. The voices of his mother and father. Monica’s voice. Sid’s voice. Sometimes he sees Boy ahead and he finds strength to walk on when he would rather sit down and sleep. And finally he comes back to the hospital when the day is finished and the shadows fill all open spaces.
Numbly he lights the stove and then he falls to the floor and sleeps. When he awakens the children are there. The old man sits up, suffering, and he finds his shotgun on his legs. He lifts it and the children cringe away from him.
“You are filth and scum,” he says savagely at them. “And I shall punish you. And your punishment will be life, life for your children, for their children.” And he laughs.
He drags himself to his feet, each new motion a new agony. He raises his shotgun and the children cover their faces in terror, and bow before him and his terrible wrath.
THE BRIDGE BUILDER
The grave itself is but a covered bridge
Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness.
Gary K. Wolf
I find a lousy coat of particulate muck right near Portland, but a coupla swipes with my Freon rag, I clean it all off my bridge like a dream.
Lemme tell you a story on myself. I think it’s kinda funny. I built this bridge once, started in Sioux City, went south-southwest for … oh … I don’t know. Not too far. Wasn’t a long bridge as bridges go. To Greenville, I think it went. Yeah, to Greenville, I’m sure. Anyways, ’bout a month before I built it, these mass transit planner types hauled me up in an airplane cause they thought I ought to see where it was gonna go, that bridge of mine, exactly from where to where. So, here I am, see, I’m sitting there right in the middle of all these high level big shots. So what happens? Well, we no sooner get up in the sky than I take one look out that airplane window, and barf all over my lap. You see, heights make me sick. Always have.
I got to yank out a mica in Concord. I replace it with a 4X950. It’s a tricky operation, but when I run it through test, it shows right on the money. I could kiss it, it’s working so good.
I heard about poor old Tiny Hammond the other day. Tough luck. Had a coupla kids, too. I worked with old Tiny once. He reamed out the suspension on that Ocala-Natchez bridge of mine. A ballsy guy, Tiny. Kind of a daredevil, but I guess that’s what it takes to ream a suspension, what with the way you never know if the end’ll be there when you are. Too risky for me. Far as I’m concerned, let somebody else ream out the suspensions. I’ll stick to building bridges. I ain’t no hero.
There’s a metallic discontinuity just this side of Greenfield. I catch it on meter just in time to keep it from slicing off my head. I trace out its limits. Just a little fellow, it turns out. Easy as pie, I straighten it out, bend it back around, and rivet it down good. When I get done with it, I know one thing for sure. The bastard ain’t gonna pop loose again.
Speaking of bridges, that one I built from Eau Claire to Colter Bay was quite the project. I remember, the suspension’s all reamed out, I’m ready to get to work, when along comes this corporate guy who wastes a whole day running something he calls a “mathematically simulated construction analysis.” Oh, he don’t go through the suspension or nothing. He just pretends to. Anyway, I, he announces waving around a big sheet of numbers after he’s all done, have got only a fifty-four percent something or other of building this bridge and staying alive. Do tell, I say (as if this was something new). Thank you very much for that tidbit of information, I say. That throws a whole different slant on things, I say. I’m gonna have to talk to some people about this, I say.
So I shake his hand, and I wait till he’s gone, and I hop in the wire, and I build me a bridge.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, but what kind of horseshit is this? The tracking is way under spec, I find bad tolerances bouncing me around like a basketball, and to top it all off, there’s a dead zone in the junction. I tear everything all the way down, strap it back together right, and make Albany feeling like a million bucks.
I been building bridges since I was eighteen.
The bridges I built were a lot shorter in those days. Four, five miles long, max. Nothing like some of the ones you see going up today. My first bridge went from downtown Larchmont to a shopping center just north of New Rochelle. Shopper’s Special, the transit guys called it. It was one of the first bridges in the whole goddamned world. Still carrying traffic, too. When I build ’em, I build ’em to last.
My longest bridge came six years ago. Pittsburgh to Reno through Columbus, Kansas City, Arvata, and Provo. I was the proudest man alive when I finished that one.
I had enough time chalked up in the wire after that Pittsburgh to Reno to retire at full pay. Wouldn’t have been a bad deal, looking back on it. I was only forty-two. Making eighty-six K a year. Course, I didn’t take it.
I love building bridges.
I pick up a degradation in edge speed, some overshoot, and a small ringing just outside Cleveland. Nothing I can’t handle. After I retune the Q channel and polish the link coupler, the signal profile shows good and fiat. Just like it should.
For me, building bridges comes easy. I got what they call a natural feel for it, you understand? Guys nowadays go to college to learn how to build bridges. To college, for Christ’s sake. Know how I learned how to build bridges? By God, I just jumped in a wire and built one, that’s how. Or did I tell you already? Too bad if I did, ’cause you’re gonna hear it again.
I was eighteen. Just out of high school. Had a double E degree, but you know where that gets you nowadays. So I was looking through the paper one night, scoping the wants, when I see this one reads “Wanted. Bridge installation
engineer. Double E preferred. Small mass essential.” Seeing’s how I measured only five feet two on tiptoes, I hauled my ass down there straightaway yelling “Take me, take me.”
Course, they did.
I didn’t find out until after that Larchmont to New Rochelle that nobody else had applied.
Right before Indianapolis, I get a foul VSAT on a triple-diffused Darlington. But the Darlington’s redundant, so I leave it for maintenance.
I got a wife and four kids. Got a house overlooks Mount Ranier. A cabin on Lake Mead. A dog. A cat. Two block rounders, both Fords. I guess I’m what you might call your typical family man. Now I don’t mean to sound sarcastic when I say that. Don’t get the idea I don’t enjoy my family. I do. Just that sometimes they get on my nerves. Take my wife. For the longest time she’s been after me to hang it up, you know, knock it off, throw it the hell in. Gets dreadful monotonous, all that harping, after a while. What do you wanna keep building bridges for, she says, when it’s so dangerous, she says. You could retire, she says. She leaves me travel brochures under my goddamned pillow at night, for Christ’s sake. She sics the kids on my ass. She’s even got our family doctor stopping in once a month on his way home from his office in Wichita. You oughta think about retiring, he says staring at his beer can like this is just something he’s reading off of the label. I say, no, thanks, I’m happy building bridges, and he says that’s just fine, but I’ve got to think of my family, too, as he starts quoting me all sorts of facts and figures. The mortality rates and stuff, which, if you believe that crap, means I should have been dead and buried five years ago. For good measure, he rattles off a few of the standard horror stories. The bridge builders who come out missing arms. The bridge builders who come out missing legs. All the shitload of bridge builders who never come out, period. I thank him kindly, and tell him I’ll give it some serious thought so he’ll go home happy.
See, he means well. He just don’t know what it’s like to build a bridge.
I find a real bungle in Vandalia. Low-duty cycle on a digital signal, and a weird cross modulation in an MET. I replace all four klystrons, adjust the timing, and give the whole shebang a pat on the fanny for luck.
Never have been very handy with my hands when it comes to woodworking or putting up storm windows, or fixing broken toys or unstopping drains. Suppose that’s why I like building bridges so much. Like I mighta mentioned, I got this knack for building bridges. The only way I can explain it is to say that when I hit that wire, it’s nothing more than a little, tiny, reamed-out hole, and it’s all rough, like fishhooks poked into sandpaper. But when I leave, it’s as big around as a freeway, and that wire is glass.
The nice thing about building bridges is that it never gets routine. I liked building my last one every inch as much as my Larchmont to New Rochelle. Course, like I said, I kinda got this way when it comes to building bridges. Hit me right off. First time I climbed in the wire. I was only eighteen, like I said. I knew there were goddamned nay-sayers saying the bridges oughta be outlawed on account of them being so different, but, hell, I thought, there was people said that about airplanes, for Christ’s sake, and look how many airplanes we used to have flying around. Damn weeping willies didn’t spook me. I was a hell of a feisty kid. I just hopped in the wire, and I built the son of a bitch.
I strip a line in East St. Louis, gate a conversion, wire it to a PIN, and I’m back on my way.
I know how much a fancy vacation would mean to my old lady, but it just don’t appeal much to me. When I got some time off, I like to ride the wires. See what the competition’s up to. You wouldn’t believe the boners I catch. If you only knew how some of those so-called bridge builders clank up their bridges, you’d never ride wire again.
That’s the trouble with people today. Just out to get the job done any old way they can and that’s it. Got no pride in their work, no sense of craftsmanship. To them, a bridge is a bridge. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, can’t nobody say that about me.
Right outside St. Louis, I stumble across a feeble A
After you been around bridges long as I have, you find there ain’t no two the same. There are good ones and bad ones, like people. There are bridges give you the kind of nice, mushy feeling you got when your girl used to kiss you good night even though she wasn’t supposed to, ’cause the neighbors could see. They shape up easy. And there are the bastards. Oh, I should hope to tell you. The rowdies, the hoodlums, the foul balls. You whip one of those SOBs into shape, man, you will know you have built you a bridge.
It gets to be more. A low AN. I start to pick up all kinds of glitches, the worst being a nasty power leakage that starts licking around my ankles, but whatever’s causing it all, I can’t track it down. The parametric amplifier, the microwave filters, the ruby crystals all check out fine. I am really stumped. Must be getting old, hah, hah.
People got no idea what it’s like to go across slow. Zipping through like they do, in one end, bingo, out the other, they never get to see it the way I do. My God, but it’s pretty in here. All the colors kinda light up your eyeballs and you’re everyplace at once except you’re not, whichever way you want it. It’s kinda like almost a religious thing. You can say whatever you want to and you don’t have to feel embarrassed, ’cause nobody’s around, but still, you just know that there’s somebody listening. But the best part of all is how your brain works like the good Lord meant for it to. I mean, in here, you can figure out all kinds of stuff you ain’t never even thought about before, and when you have, you say, Jeez, but ain’t that the truth. While I don’t like to spread this around ’cause I’d take a lot of ribbing from the guys, in here, it’s sometimes so good that I cry.
Damn it, the leakage gets bigger. It creeps up around my waist so I can hardly move. And it starts to hurt a little. My right hand ain’t working so good, it turns stiff, and the next thing I know, it falls off. Why, I don’t know, but it strikes me as being a kind of a joke that’s so bad you just got to laugh at it. So I chuckle while I one-handed feel my way along a reflector.
There was a war, once, where there was a whole bunch of underground tunnels had to be cleaned out. Little guys like me used to have to go down in them tunnels with only a hunting knife ’cause the bang from a gun would blow out your eardrums. And the guys who built them tunnels used to hang ’em full of snakes so these little guys crawling through, if they weren’t careful, would get bit smack in the face and die. Tunnel rats, they called these little guys. So, when I was growing up, and these other kids and me used to play war, and nobody ever used to want me on their side ’cause I was so little, I got to telling the other kids I was being brought up special to be a tunnel rat. One day, over at my house, they called me a liar, so to show ’em, I slipped the grating off one of our hot air registers, and I hopped right on down into the heating duct system. I must have been in there for hours, really loving it. Shining my flashlight around on the lookout for snakes. They didn’t have to go and call the fire department. I would have come out when I was ready.
I laugh so hard when my leg disappears, I got all I can do to decouple the quadraxial cabling, especially since I only got one hand to work with.
Know how many bridges I built? Take a guess. Go ahead. Yeah, that’s right. I already told you before, ain’t I. Well, here’s something I never told you. Right after I built my fiftieth bridge, they went and offered me a job at the head office in Albuquerque. Can’t you just see me getting all gussied up in a suit every morning so I can go sit behind some desk, shuffling papers around and being worthless. >
Piss on that. I’ll stick to building bridges.
My other leg disappears, and I stop laughing. For the first time it dawns on me that this ain’t no laughing matter. Unless I get cracking, this bridge ain’t gonna get built. I slip through multilayer capacitors and liquefied feed-thrus like a craz
y man, trying to pinpoint the problem. For my trouble, I lose an ear and half of my only remaining hand.
Once I went to San Francisco. They got a bridge there, one of the old iron kind, lot of people told me I ought to go see. So I went and had me a look. Know what? It was nice, sure, real picturesque, but in all modesty, I got a coupla mine I like a whole lot better.
I feel a strong output signal choking me off. I’m a goddamned half-handed broomstick, and I can’t swallow air. Then I do an open-loop check straight into the Gunn amplifier.
Being honest, I suppose I’d have to say I am slowing down a little. But, Jesus H. Christ, don’t you think I’d be the first one to knock it off if I really thought I couldn’t hack it anymore?
The goddamn signal level! It’s higher at the input than at the first stage. I got me an oscillating Gunn amp, by Jesus! So I cut back on the accelerating voltage, which stabilizes the signal and sets everything up hunky-dory, except I get caught on the last bad pulse ripple, and I pick up a whole lot of steam.
You know, there are only six hundred and thirty-two qualified bridge builders. Six hundred and thirty-two in the whole frigging world.
I pass Rolla, Carthage, and Joplin, and I’m really rolling.
You should of heard ’em cheer when I came out of the wire that time after three guys before me got creamed.
A few more of my parts fall off, but I don’t care so much anymore, ’cause all they were doing was slowing me down.
I hate to keep coming back to this, I know I sound like a broken record, but I like building bridges. It’s a real nice feeling to know that you took a job that nobody else wanted, and you did it, and you made something of it, besides.
I zip through the safety interlocks like they ain’t even there.