the devils appeared, a horde of them, over a hundred, in the classical connotation of satanism. Red–skinned, horns jutting from foreheads, tails snapping with diamond–pointed barbs at the end…
Rennert made a strangled noise, and charged directly into them shrieking, “Hiyahh! Hiyahhh! Hi! Hi!” and began to stomp the ants. Under his boots the tiny creatures were crushed and beaten flat and dark blood drenched his boots. He jumped and leaped, ignoring the devils that milled about, uncertainty furrowing their crimson brows, their pitchforks clutched awkwardly, as though they should have been trumpets or rolling pins. Rennert shrieked insanely, drunk with the fury of hatred for the little creatures that did not move from beneath his crushing onslaught.
The devils disappeared and a great death’s head was there, unmoving, with a quizzical expression on its fleshless face.
Cornfeld got to his feet, unstuck the ball peen hammer from his tool–belt, and calmly tracked down the slope of the dune to Rennert’s mad thrashings. Hundreds of thousands of ant creatures had been stomped to greasy blackheads against the flesh of the dunes.
Cornfeld grasped the head of the hammer, and clubbed not too gently with the handle—behind Rennert’s left ear.
The handsome man slumped forward, his face crushing a few more ants, as the death’s head disappeared, and the ant horde moved out. The black shadow of them wallowed across the sand, and into the jungle, and was gone.
Cornfeld replaced the hammer, and stooped to grasp one of Rennert’s arms. Carefully avoiding the dark goo that dripped from Rennert’s boots, Cornfeld hoisted the pilot to his shoulders.
It was not a long walk to the ship. It only seemed that way.
She was cursing. Her mouth was a thin whip of crimson that flailed Rennert again and again, till her throat could contain no further moisture. Then she stopped and raised ineffectual fists to his ruggedly handsome face.
“Fool!” Vicious beyond compare. “Fool! We’ve come across something so unbelievable a million years of scientists would trade their souls and skills to see it…and you! you, you vermin! You kill them…kill them! Step on them as though they were ants. God knows how many of them you killed.
“Pray God it wasn’t enough to damage the group mind. Because if you did, Wayne Rennert, you maniac! If you did! I’ll see you’re broken for it.”
She subsided, and when it seemed she was finished, she whirled as far as her broken legs would allow, and commanded him, “Come here. Both of you. Just come over here and see this!”
Cornfeld came forward, was stopped by a flat hand against his chest as Rennert moved in front of him. “After me.”
Rennert bent to the binocular eyepiece of the instrument.
Rennert looked up with annoyance. “So cut the damned melodrama; what am I supposed to see…besides a bug with a crewcut and a hundred eyes?”
“The crewcut—that isn’t hair! They’re sensitivity antennae.”
“So?”
“Oh, God!”
“You mean it took you three days to figure out these damned things have antennae where they should have hair?”
“It took me three days to figure out that these bugs—well, they’re not really bugs, either, but that’s something else again—anyway, it took me three days to realize that each of these creatures is—”
Rennert burst in, snidely. “Sex–starved.”
“—part of a group mind,” she finished, her dark eyes smoldering with anger now. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Each bug is a segment of the greatest gestalt mind imaginable.”
Cornfeld’s gasp escaped despite his attempt to stifle it. “You’re saying these bugs think?”
“That’s just what I’m not saying. They can’t think; they’re idiot minds, separately. They have no more thought than the ants they resemble. But put them together, by the thousands, the millions, and they have a means of defense, a means of pseudo–communication.”
Cornfeld was gripped with interest, ignoring with pointedness Rennert’s snort of humor. “They can communicate? Speech, thought, what?”
She shook her head. “No, they don’t have separate thoughts, or even one great group–thought. But put them together, and they become a great mental mirror, absorbing the thoughts and mind–images of any creatures within their range, and they reflect them back, make them almost substantial.”
“That was the weeping woman, and the maniac, and the dev—” Cornfeld began. Rennert’s snort of disgust cut him off.
“Prove it.”
So she proved it. She took three of the ant–like creatures and put them together inside a tiny crystal sphere, under an amalgam of instruments that propagated a blue field of energy. The powers of the creatures were magnified, and after Cornfeld and Rennert had seen the slack–jowled hyena, the whispering wall of water, the three–winged dragonfly that divided into five, and the rubies that grew from air, they accepted what she had said.
That was the second thing that happened that day.
It had become a game.
Cornfeld and Rennert went out often, to test the gestalt reflectivity of the ant–colony mind. At first, as with any new encountering, the ants had not known how to get to the thoughts and mind–images of the Earthmen—which had been the reason they had not seen images the first time the ants came—but their drawing or “grab–power” as Iris called it, strengthened, and they dealt back the thoughts and visions of the two men with ease.
Iris Crosse’s legs had nearly knitted. She was still confined to the ship, but she was able to move her legs without too much pain. It was this that caused her spirits to lift, and her manner of speech, which had been distinctly cool and antagonistic, to lighten. She would often not realize it when she called Rennert, “Wayne,” or even “hon,” and her lapsing into these familiarities—without a similar friendliness to Cornfeld—made him more withdrawn and brooding.
Iris could be heard laughing gaily in her laboratory, after Rennert had returned to her from a Visioning—as the trips had grown to be called—with detailed accounts of what he had done. It was during one of these sessions, late in the evening, that it happened.
Cornfeld was lounging half–in, half–out of the ship, his legs dangling a foot above the warm evening sands. He hardly noticed when Iris Crosse’s resonant laughter tinkled hesitantly into awkward silence. But his mind resigned itself, and only subliminally did he hear her annoyed exclamation; another; her request in strained tones that Wayne stop. And then Cornfeld heard her scream.
It was that same nightmare, come to haunt him again.
He swung his legs up into the ship, and slammed through the tilting corridor toward the tiny laboratory.
Rennert had not even paid him the compliment of locking the stateroom. It stood open, and Iris Crosse was in plain sight, lying across her bunk, her chiton about her hips, her hair wild and dark, while she struggled with Rennert between her legs.
Cornfeld came through the doorway at a dead run and laid both hands with a thwack across the bigger man’s shoulders. He heaved back, and Rennert’s hands untangled themselves from the woman’s clothing. He lost balance, and came tumbling back on Cornfeld. Cornfeld stepped to the side; the larger man fell to the deck.
He tried to rise, and Cornfeld brought up his booted foot, catching Rennert across the bridge of the nose. The captain of the ship squealed high and soprano, and fell back, clutching his broken nose. He lay there whimpering.
Iris Crosse sprawled across her bunk; she too whimpered.
Cornfeld stared at them. Both of them. God, how these two deserved each other.
Rennert could not be blamed entirely. She had no doubt flirted and goaded him, till he had lost his sense of right and propriety. But then, had he ever really had such a sense? Rennert was not of that cut. She lay there, her legs still splinted in the healing packs, and her white thighs were only cream against the whiter material of the splint–packs.
“You maniac!” Cornfeld found himself yelling at Rennert, lying at his feet
. “You maniac! You couldn’t wait. You had to try it now, didn’t you? You had to have her again before the beamspitter got here, wasn’t that it? You scum…she’s in splints, you scum, in splints yet, can’t you see?”
Fury drained through him. He dragged Rennert up by the collar, and forced his head toward the woman, lying disheveled, wracked by sobs, on her bunk.
Then Rennert got to his feet.
His face had crumbled and all expression but self–pity and degradation were gone. His nose was streaming crimson down across his tunic, and he made no effort to staunch the violent flow.
He stared at her an instant, and then, without his head turning, he stared at Cornfeld, livid in his wrath. Without warning, without preamble, he turned and ran from the lab–stateroom, the tool belt tinkling faintly at his waist.
Cornfeld heard his heavy boots go clattering down the decks, and then there was silence. He stared at the woman for an interminable, obstinately endless second, and then left the cabin.
He found Rennert far over the dunes, silvered like a fish thrown up on a beach, there in the moonlight, standing silent, staring off across the great ocean without a name. In that moment he felt a compassion, a nearness, a warmth and kinship, almost a brotherhood, with this big, amoral man.
He came up behind him, and was about to speak, when he realized abruptly that the ants were there, too. A great living body of them, stretching almost out of sight, from dune to dune, and from jungle’s edge to nearly where the great waves hummed into silence on the beach.
He saw Rennert and he saw the ants, and what came to him came unbidden. “Ask them, Rennert. Go ahead. Ask them what you are. Ask them to show you what you are inside, the image of yourself. Ask them, Rennert.”
The big man turned to Cornfeld, and his broken face was shining with blood in the moonlight. He turned slowly back again, and it was so apparent. He was thinking.
The tools on his belt glittered softly in the moonlight.
The ants were all darkness and life…and truth.
After it was over, Cornfeld returned to the ship. To wait. The beamspitter had to come now. Fate had delayed it just long enough.
He came into Iris Crosse’s stateroom, and she had pulled down her garments, and was lying with eyes closed on the bed. Drained of emotion, he no longer saw her as an object of desire. She was what she was, and he could not hate her.
But neither could he love her.
He wondered if he would love at all, for a great while.
She looked up, then, and her face had dark, dirty rivulets where tears had washed to their end, down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth.
“Where is he?” she asked.
He did not answer, but turned to the lab table where a book had been turned over to maintain its place. He fingered the book absently.
“Where is he?”
After a pause, he answered, “He won’t be coming back.”
She stared at him with her wide, dark eyes that had once been beautiful, and could no longer understand. “What do you mean? Where is he?”
“He’s dead.”
Her mouth opened, and her hand had no place to find peace. It roved to her mouth, her eyes, her throat. Softly: “You killed him!”
Cornfeld was not aroused or surprised by her emotions, her tone, her attitude. It fit. It was natural. He shook his head somberly. “No.”
“Then tell me, what happened, tell me!” she shrieked, her face the white of death and stillness.
“He killed himself. He used the Phillips head from his tool belt. He stabbed himself in the throat. It took him a long time to die, he—”
Her scream choked away his words. He had been speaking for himself, but her scream was the end of that too.
“Dead! OhmyGod, he killed himself, why, but why, oh God, why?”
Cornfeld started to leave.
The beamspitter would be here soon. He could stay in another section of the ship till it arrived, and not have to see her. It would make things easier. And then, when he got back to soil that was familiar, he would go and find some bar to drink in. Some dark bar, where no one knew him, and he could lose his identity thoroughly, for a good long while. But till then, he had to get away from her and the things she would know, that he would tell her.
Her voice stopped him in the doorway. “Why? Why did he do it? You tell me!” A little girl demanding to know who had broken her dolly.
He decided, before he went away from her, to kill that little girl; kill her completely. He turned back, and very calmly said:
“He killed himself because the ants showed him what he was. What he really was. As much truth as a man can stand and then some. They showed him the essence of himself.”
The dawning of comprehension was not swift enough for him, and he spelled it out with brutal simplicity.
“The ants took his thoughts and his nature, and they fed them back to him as an image. Too much truth, Iris. Too much for a man like Rennert. He couldn’t rationalize it when it got that bad; it was the full picture of how someone else saw him. He killed himself because they showed him the image of the incarnation of evil.”
And the little girl died, as the man had died, because the realization was there that sometime, before the rescue ship came, she would have to know about herself; she would have to go out there and let the ants show her truth.
And Cornfeld silently prayed he would not do the same.
He went away from her, then; he went to lie down, hoping there was a future, but doubting it; really doubting it.
Now the book starts getting into the nitty–gritty. This is, I think, one of the best stories I’ve ever written. It is certainly one of the most personally important to me. It saved my sanity. It is a fantasy, of sorts, but a special kind, It is a terror of the mind. In several senses of the phrase. First, because it deals with the nightshade terrain within the thoughts. And second, because the thoughts were mine. This story grew out of a period of emotional stress after the breakup of my second marriage. I was legally separated, living alone in Los Angeles, finding it difficult to get work, and trying to run away from my own inability to cope by the senseless expedient of screwing every woman I could get my hands on. Then I began having a series of dreams; they continued for several months until, in mindless terror, I fled to the typewriter and wrote this story. When I completed it, the dreams were gone, never again to recur. There is much to be said for self–therapy. It may even be instrumental in helping someone nearing The Edge to get straight once more, to rid him of, say, a
LONELYACHE
The form of the habit she had become still drove him to one side of the bed. Despite his need for room to throw out arms, legs in a figure–4, crosswise angled body, he still slept on only one side of the big double bed. The force of memory of her body there, lying huddled on the inside, together cuddled body–into–body, a pair of question marks, whatever arrangement it might have been from night to night—still, her there. Now, only the memory of her warmth beside him kept him prisoner on his half. And reduced to memories and physical need for sleep, he retired to that slab of torture as seldom as possible. Staying awake till tiny hours, doing meaningless things, laughing at laughers, cleaning house for himself with methodical surgical tidiness till the pathology of it made him gibber and caper and shriek within his skull and soul, seeing movies that wandered aimlessly, hearing the vapors of night and time and existence passing by without purpose or validity. Until finally, crushed by the weight of hours and decaying bodily functions, desperately needing recharge, he collapsed into the bed that he loathed.
To sleep on one side only.
To dream his dreams of brutality and fear.
This was the dream, that same damned recurrent dream, never quite the same dream—but on the same subject, night after night, chapter after chapter of the same story: as if he had bought a book of horror stories; they would all be on one theme, but told differently; that was the way with this string of darkside visions.
&nbs
p; Tonight came number fourteen. A clean–cut collegiate face proudly bearing its wide, amiable grin. A face topped by a sandy brush–cut and light, auburn eyebrows, giving that sophomoric countenance a giggly, innocent vividness instantly conveying friendship. Under other circumstances Paul knew he could be close friends with this guy. Guy, that was the word he used, even in the dream, rather than fellow, or man, or—most accurately—assassin. In any other place than this misty nightmare, with any other intent than this one, they might have lightly punched each other’s biceps in camaraderie and hey, how the hell are you’d each other. But this was the dream, latest installment, and this college guy was number fourteen. Latest in an endless, competent string of pleasant types sent to kill Paul.
The plot of the dreams was long–since formulated, now merely suggested by rote in the words and deeds of the players (sections indefinite, details muzzy, transitions blurred, logic distorted dream–style): Paul had been a member of this gang, or group, or bunch of guys, whatever. Now they were after him. They were intent on killing him. If they ever came at him in a group, they would succeed. But for some reason that made sense only in the dream, they were assigned the job one by one. And as each sweet human being tried to tip him the black spot, Paul killed him. One after another, by the most detailed, violently brutal and gut–wrenching means available, he killed the killers. Thirteen times they had come against him—these men who were decent and pleasant and dedicated, whom he would have been proud to call his friends under other circumstances—and thirteen times he had escaped assassination.
Two or three or—once—four in a night, for the past several weeks (and that he had only killed thirteen till now bore witness to the frequency with which he avoided sleep entirely, or crashslept himself into exhaustion so there were no dreams).
Yet the most disturbing part of the dreams was the brutalized combat itself. Never a simple shooting or positive poisoning. Never an image that could be re–told when awakening without bringing a look of shock and horror to the face of Paul’s confidante. Always a bizarre and minutely–described affaire de morte.
I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream Page 8