The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  The Vogelsang Camp had already been closed for the winter. No snow yet, but the days were chilly and the nights below freezing. If the plague was present, it wasn’t really going to be a problem until spring. We amused ourselves, poking sticks into warm burrows looking for dead rodents. We set out some traps. Not many. You don’t want to decrease the rodent population.

  Deprive the fleas of their natural hosts, and they just look for replacements. They just bring the war home.

  We picked up a few bodies, but no positives. We could have dusted the place anyway as a precaution. Silent Spring came out in 1962, but I hadn’t read it.

  I saw the coyote on the fourth day. She came out of a hole on the bank of Lewis Creek and stood for a minute with her nose in the air. She was grayed with age around her muzzle, possibly a bit arthritic. She shook out one hind leg. She shook out the other. Then, right as I watched, Caroline’s boy climbed out of the burrow after the coyote.

  I couldn’t see the boy’s face. There was too much hair in the way. But his body was hairless, and even though his movements were peculiar and inhuman, I never thought that he was anything but a boy. Twelve years old or maybe thirteen, I thought, although small for thirteen. Wild as a wolf, obviously. Raised by coyotes maybe. But clearly human. Circumcised, if anyone is interested.

  I didn’t move. I forgot about Procopius and stepped into the National Enquirer instead. Marilyn was in my den. Elvis was in my rinse cycle. It was my lucky day. I was amusing myself when I should have been awed. It was a stupid mistake. I wish now that I’d been someone different.

  The boy yawned and closed his eyes, then shook himself awake and followed the coyote along the creek and out of sight. I went back to camp. The next morning we surrounded the hole and netted them coming out. This is the moment it stopped being such a lark. This is an uncomfortable memory. The coyote was terrified, and we let her go. The boy was terrified, and we kept him. He scratched us and bit and snarled. He cut me, and I thought it was one of his nails, but he turned out to be holding a can opener. He was covered with fleas, fifty or sixty of them visible at a time, which jumped from him to us, and they all bit, too. It was like being attacked by a cloud. We sprayed the burrow and the boy and ourselves, but we’d all been bitten by then. We took an immediate blood sample. The boy screamed and rolled his eyes all the way through it. The reading was negative. By the time we all calmed down, the boy really didn’t like us.

  Clint and I tied him up, and we took turns carrying him down to Tuolumne. His odor was somewhere between dog and boy, and worse than both. We tried to clean him up in the showers at the ranger station. Clint and I both had to strip to do this, so God knows what he must have thought we were about. He reacted to the touch of water as if it burned. There was no way to shampoo his hair, and no one with the strength to cut it. So we settled for washing his face and hands, put our clothes back on, gave him a sweater that he dropped by the drain, put him in the backseat of my Rambler, and drove to Sacramento. He cried most of the way, and when we went around curves he allowed his body to be flung unresisting from one side of the car to the other, occasionally knocking his head against the door handle with a loud, painful sound.

  I bought him a ham sandwich when we stopped for gas in Modesto, but he wouldn’t eat it. He was a nice-looking kid, had a normal face, freckled, with blue eyes, brown hair, and if he’d had a haircut you could have imagined him in some Sears catalog modeling raincoats.

  One of life’s little ironies. It was October 14. We rescue a wild boy from isolation and deprivation and winter in the mountains. We bring him civilization and human contact. We bring him straight into the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  Maybe that’s why you don’t remember reading about him in the paper. We turned him over to the state of California, which had other things on its mind.

  The state put him in Mercy Hospital and assigned maybe a hundred doctors to the case. I was sent back to Yosemite to continue looking for fleas. The next time I saw the boy, about a week had passed. He’d been cleaned up, of course. Scoured of parasites, inside and out. Measured. He was just over four feet tall and weighed seventy-five pounds. His head was all but shaved so as not to interfere with the various neurological tests, which had turned out normal and were being redone. He had been observed rocking in a seated position, left to right and back to front, mouth closed, chin up, eyes staring at nothing. Occasionally he had small spasms, convulsive movements, which suggested abnormalities in the nervous system. His teeth needed extensive work. He was sleeping under his bed. He wouldn’t touch his Hawaiian Delight. He liked us even less than before.

  About this time I had a brief conversation with a doctor whose name I didn’t notice. I was never able to find him again. Red-haired doctor with glasses. Maybe thirty, thirty-two years old. “He’s got some unusual musculature,” this red-haired doctor told me. “Quite singular. Especially the development of the legs. He’s shown us some really surprising capabilities.” The boy started to howl, an unpleasant, inhuman sound that started in his throat and ended in yours. It was so unhappy. It made me so unhappy to hear it. I never followed up on what the doctor had said.

  I felt peculiar about the boy, responsible for him. He had such a boyish face. I visited several times, and I took him little presents, a Dodgers baseball cap and an illustrated Goldilocks and the Three Bears with the words printed big. Pretty silly, I suppose, but what would you have gotten? I drove to Fresno and asked Manuel Rodriguez if he could identify the can opener. “Not with any assurance,” he said. I talked personally to Sergeant Redburn, the man from Missing Persons. When he told me about the Beckers, I went to the state library and read the newspaper articles for myself. Sergeant Redburn thought the boy might be just about the same age as Paul Becker, and I thought so, too. And I know the sergeant went to talk to Anna Becker’s mother about it, because he told me she was going to come and try to identify the boy.

  By now it’s November. Suddenly I get a call sending me back to Yosemite. In Sacramento they claim the team has reported a positive, but when I arrive in Yosemite, the whole team denies it. Fleas are astounding creatures. They can be frozen for a year or more and then revived to full activity. But November in the mountains is a stupid time to be out looking for them. It’s already snowed once, and it snows again, so that I can’t get my team back out. We spend three weeks in the ranger station at Vogelsang huddled around our camp stoves while they air-drop supplies to us. And when I get back, a doctor I’ve never seen before, a Dr. Frank Li, tells me the boy, who was not Paul Becker, died suddenly of a seizure while he slept. I have to work hard to put away the sense that it was my fault, that I should have left the boy where he belonged.

  And then I hear Sergeant Redburn has jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Non Gratum Anus Rodentum. Not worth a rat’s ass. This was the unofficial motto of the tunnel rats. We’re leaping ahead here. Now it’s 1967. Vietnam. Does the name Cu Chi mean anything to you? If not, why not? The district of Cu Chi is the most bombed, shelled, gassed, strafed, defoliated, and destroyed piece of earth in the history of warfare. And beneath Cu Chi runs the most complex part of a network of tunnels that connects Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border.

  I want you to imagine, for a moment, a battle fought entirely in the dark. Imagine that you are in a hole that is too hot and too small. You cannot stand up; you must move on your hands and knees by touch and hearing alone through a terrain you can’t see toward an enemy you can’t see. At any moment you might trip a mine, put your hand on a snake, put your face on a decaying corpse. You know people who have done all three of these things. At any moment the air you breathe might turn to gas, the tunnel become so small you can’t get back out; you could fall into a well of water and drown; you could be buried alive. If you are lucky, you will put your knife into an enemy you may never see before he puts his knife into you. In Cu Chi the Vietnamese and the Americans created, inch by inch, body part by body part, an entirely new type of warfare.

&
nbsp; Among the Vietnamese who survived are soldiers who lived in the tiny underground tunnels without surfacing for five solid years. Their eyesight was permanently damaged. They suffered constant malnutrition, felt lucky when they could eat spoiled rice and rats. Self-deprivation was their weapon; they used it to force the soldiers of the most technically advanced army in the world to face them with knives, one on one, underground, in the dark.

  On the American side, the tunnel rats were all volunteers. You can’t force a man to do what he cannot do. Most Americans hyperventilated, had attacks of claustrophobia, were too big. The tunnel rats could be no bigger than the Vietnamese, or they wouldn’t fit through the tunnels. Most of the tunnel rats were Hispanics and Puerto Ricans. They stopped wearing after-shave so the Vietcong wouldn’t smell them. They stopped chewing gum, smoking, and eating candy because it impaired their ability to sense the enemy. They had to develop the sonar of bats. They had, in their own words, to become animals. What they did in the tunnels, they said, was unnatural.

  In 1967 I was attached to the 521st Medical Detachment. I was an old man by Vietnamese standards, but then, I hadn’t come to fight in the Vietnam War. Remember that the fourth pandemic began in China. Just before he died, Chinese poet Shih Tao-nan wrote:

  Few days following the death of the rats,

  Men pass away like falling walls.

  Between 1965 and 1970, 24,848 cases of the plague were reported in Vietnam.

  War is the perfect breeding ground for disease. They always go together, the trinity: war, disease, and cruelty. Disease was my war. I’d been sent to Vietnam to keep my war from interfering with everybody else’s war.

  In March we received by special courier a package containing three dead rats. The rats had been found—already dead, but leashed—inside a tunnel in Hau Nghia province. Also found—but not sent to us—were a syringe, a phial containing yellow fluid, and several cages. I did the test myself. One of the dead rats carried the plague.

  There has been speculation that the Vietcong were trying to use plague rats as weapons. It’s also possible they were merely testing the rats prior to eating them themselves. In the end, it makes little difference. The plague was there in the tunnels whether the Vietcong used it or not.

  I set up a tent outside Cu Chi town to give boosters to the tunnel rats. One of the men I inoculated was David Rivera. “David has been into the tunnels so many times, he’s a legend,” his companions told me.

  “Yeah,” said David. “Right. Me and Victor.”

  “Victor Charlie?” I said. I was just making conversation. I could see David, whatever his record in the tunnels, was afraid of the needle. He held out one stiff arm. I was trying to get him to relax.

  “No. Not hardly. Victor is the one.” He took his shot, put his shirt back on, gave up his place to the next man in line.

  “Victor can see in the dark,” the next man told me.

  “Victor Charlie?” I asked again.

  “No,” the man said impatiently.

  “You want to know about Victor?” David said. “Let me tell you about Victor. Victor’s the one who comes when someone goes down and doesn’t come back out.”

  “Victor can go faster on his hands and knees than most men can run,” the other man said. I pressed cotton on his arm after I withdrew the needle; he got up from the table. A third man sat down and took off his shirt.

  David still stood next to me. “I go into this tunnel. I’m not too scared, because I think it’s cold; I’m not feeling anybody else there, and I’m maybe a quarter of a mile in, on my hands and knees, when I can almost see a hole in front of me, blacker than anything else in the tunnel, which is all black, you know. So I go into the hole, feeling my way, and I have this funny sense like I’m not moving into the hole; the hole is moving over to me. I put out my hands, and the ground moves under them.”

  “Shit,” said the third man. I didn’t know if it was David’s story or the shot. A fourth man sat down.

  “I risk a light, and the whole tunnel is covered with spiders, covered like wallpaper, only worse, two or three bodies thick,” David said. “I’m sitting on them, and the spiders are already inside my pants and inside my shirt and covering my arms—and it’s fucking Vietnam, you know; I don’t even know if they’re poisonous or not. Don’t care, really, because I’m going to die just from having them on me. I can feel them moving toward my face. So I start to scream, and then this little guy comes and pulls me back out a ways, and then he sits for maybe half an hour, calm as can be, picking spiders off me. When I decide to live after all, I go back out. I tell everybody. ‘That was Victor,’ they say. ‘Had to be Victor.’ ”

  “I know a guy says Victor pulled him from a hole,” the fourth soldier said. “He falls through a false floor down maybe twelve straight feet into this tiny little trap with straight walls all around and no way up, and Victor comes down after him. Jumps back out, holding the guy in his arms. Twelve feet; the guy swears it.”

  “Tiny little guy,” said David. “Even for V.C., this guy’d be tiny.”

  “He just looks tiny,” the second soldier said. “I know a guy saw Victor buried under more than a ton of dirt. Victor just digs his way out again. No broken bones, no nothing.”

  Inexcusably slow, and I’d been told twice, but I had just figured out that Victor wasn’t short for V.C. “I’d better inoculate this Victor,” I said. “You think you could send him in?”

  The men stared at me. “You don’t get it, do you?” said David.

  “Victor don’t report,” the fourth man says.

  “No C.O.,” says the third man. “No unit.”

  “He’s got the uniform,” the second man tells me. “So we don’t know if he’s special forces of some sort or if he’s AWOL down in the tunnels.”

  “Victor lives in the tunnels,” said David. “Nobody up top has ever seen him.”

  I tried to talk to one of the doctors about it.” Tunnel vision,” he told me. “We get a lot of that. Forget it.”

  In May we got a report of more rats—some leashed, some in cages—in a tunnel near Ah Nhon Tay village in the Ho Bo Woods. But no one wanted to go in and get them, because these rats were alive. And somebody got the idea this was my job, and somebody else agreed. They would clear the tunnel of V.C. first, they promised me. So I volunteered.

  Let me tell you about rats. Maybe they’re not responsible for the plague, but they’re still destructive to every kind of life-form and beneficial to none. They eat anything that lets them. They breed during all seasons. They kill their own kind; they can do it singly, but they can also organize and attack in hordes. The brown rat is currently embroiled in a war of extinction against the black rat. Most animals behave better than that.

  I’m not afraid of rats. I read somewhere that about the turn of the century, a man in western Illinois heard a rustling in his fields one night. He got out of bed and went to the back door, and behind his house he saw a great mass of rats that stretched all the way to the horizon. I suppose this would have frightened me. All those naked tails in the moonlight. But I thought I could handle a few rats in cages, no problem.

  It wasn’t hard to locate them. I was on my hands and knees, but using a flashlight. I thought there might be some loose rats, too, and that I ought to look at least; and I’d also heard that there was an abandoned V.C. hospital in the tunnel that I was curious about. So I left the cages and poked around in the tunnels a bit; and when I’d had enough, I started back to get the rats, and I hit a water trap. There hadn’t been a water trap before, so I knew I must have taken a wrong turn. I went back a bit, took another turn, and then another, and hit the water trap again. By now I was starting to panic. I couldn’t find anything I’d ever seen before except the damn water. I went back again, farther without turning, took a turn, hit the trap.

  I must have tried seven, eight times. I no longer thought the tunnel was cold. I thought the V.C. had closed the door on my original route so that I wouldn’t find it again. I th
ought they were watching every move I made, pretty easy with me waving my flashlight about. I switched it off. I could hear them in the dark, their eyelids closing and opening, their hands tightening on their knives. I was sweating, head to toe, like I was ill, like I had the mysterious English sweating sickness or the Suette des Picards.

  And I knew that to get back to the entrance, I had to go into the water. I sat and thought that through, and when I finished, I wasn’t the same man I’d been when I began the thought.

  It would have been bad to have to crawl back through the tunnels with no light. To go into the water with no light, not knowing how much water there was, not knowing if one lungful of air would be enough or if there were underwater turns so you might get lost before you found air again, was something you’d have to be crazy to do. I had to do it, so I had to be crazy first. It wasn’t as hard as you might think. It took me only a minute.

  I filled my lungs as full as I could. Emptied them once. Filled them again and dove in. Someone grabbed me by the ankle and hauled me back out. It frightened me so much I swallowed water, so I came up coughing and kicking. The hand released me at once, and I lay there for a bit, dripping water and still sweating, too, feeling the part of the tunnel that was directly below my body turn to mud, while I tried to convince myself that no one was touching me.

  Then I was crazy enough to turn my light on. Far down the tunnel, just within range of the light, knelt a little kid dressed in the uniform of the rats. I tried to get closer to him. He moved away, just the same amount I had moved, always just in the light. I followed him down one tunnel, around a turn, down another. Outside, the sun rose and set. We crawled for days. My right knee began to bleed.