From the Land of Fear

by Harlan Ellison

  Then the ’copter was gone, and they watched the projectile falling straight for them. Gyp Williams began screaming, “Fire, fire, hit it hit it hitithitithitit…” and they all poured flame into the sky, missing the tear gas bomb as it fell a few yards from their enclosure, exploded, and sent rolling clouds of tear gas straight toward them.

  The vapors struck, and they began to feel the sting of the chemicals, and their eyes went blood-red in a moment, and Don Karpinsky fell on his side, clutching his face, crying like an infant. Lew Steiner grabbed up another bomb from somewhere, and hurled it at the empty yard, a motion of wanton fury and impotence that no one saw, himself most of all. Gyp Williams refused to cry. He dug his broad face deep into the dirt and enjoyed the cool feel of pain from gravel and sod, but the stinging was terrible and his grunts of feeling were strangely intermingled.

  The others recoiled, tried to protect themselves, and knew the guards would attack in this moment. They could hear them coming, rebel yells of victory and bloodlust strung out rustily in the air. And over the battle cries, the malicious rattle of the machine gun as Chocolate sprayed the yard in steady, back and forth sweeps. Blind to everything, tears running out of his burning eyes, knowing only that he had the power to cut them down, the young man with the livid scar continued his barrage, building a wall of death the guards in their white uniforms could not penetrate.

  And after a while, when the belts were exhausted, and the guards had gone back to cover, when the gas had blown away, stringers of mist on a late afternoon breeze some God had sent to prolong their passion, they they all lay back with eyes crimson and streaming, knowing it had to be over soon, and hoping the second group would finally, please dear Lord, blow that frigging gate!

  “Man, how long, how long,” Nigger Joe spoke to the advancing dusk. “How long this gotta go on. It seem like I been livin’ off misery all my life, you’d think it’d end sometime, not just keep goin’ on and on and on.”

  Simon Rubin sat up and looked at him, and there was compassion in his lean, ascetic face.

  “How many lives I gotta lead, steppin’ down into the gutter for some ’fay cat? How many times I gotta be called ’Boy’, an’ when’m I gonna get some memories I wanta put away to think back on, another time?” His eyes were lost in the twilight, set deep under bony eyebrow ridges, but his fierce voice was all around them, very soft but compelling. “Even in here they makin’ me be somethin’ I ain’t. Even in here I’m tryin’ to get away, get some life, what’s left to me, and they got me down with my face in the dirt; they don’t know. Man, they’ll never know. I can remember every one them cats, makin’ jokes, pokin’ fun, sayin’ things, a man’s got to have pride, that’s what matters, just his goddam pride. They can have all the rest of it, just gimme the pride. An’ when they come ’round takin’ that too, then you gotta raise up and split some sonofabitch’s head with a shovel…”

  Simon Rubin’s voice came sliding in on the semi-darkness, a cool soft fabric covering tiny sounds of crickets and metal clanking on metal from somewhere out there. “I know how you feel, Joe. There are a lot of us in that kind of ghetto.

  “Only for some of us it gets worse, even when it gets better. You knew your kind of hate, but it was different for me.”

  Gyp Williams snorted in disgust. “Sheet, man, when you Jewish cats gonna come off that kick? When you gonna stop lyin’ on yourself, man, that you been persecuted, so you know how a black man feels? Jeezus, you Jewish own most of the tenements up in Harlem. You as bad as any the rest of them cats.” He turned away in suppressed fury, turning his anger on the machine rifle, whose bolt he snapped back twice quickly.

  Simon Rubin began speaking again, as though by the continuing stream of words he could negate what Gyp Williams had said. “I wanted to get into dental college, but they had a quota on Jews. I didn’t have the money or the name to be in that quota, so I went out for veterinary medicine. I got set back and set back so many times, I finally said to hell with it, and I changed my name, and had my nose fixed, and then I married a gentile.

  “It even worked for a while.” He smiled thinly, remembering, out of his not-very-Semitic face. “And then one night we had a fight about something, I don’t remember what, and we went to bed angry, and in the middle of the night I turned to her and we started to make love, and when she was ready she began saying over and over in my ear, ‘Now, you dirty kike, now, you dirty kike…’”

  Simon Rubin buried his face in his hands.

  Don Karpinsky asked, “Simon…?”

  “So…so I know how you feel Joe,” Simon finished. “I hated myself more than she could ever hate me; and when they sent me here for her, because of her, what I did to her, I gave them my name the way I came into the world with it. So I know, Joe, believe me, I know.”

  Nigger Joe started to turn away, his thoughts turned inward. He paused, looked directly at Simon Rubin: “I’m sorry you feel bad, Simon,” he lamented, “it’s just I been in chains four hundred years, and all that clankin’ makes me hear not so good. I’m sorry you got troubles, man.”

  And their contest of agonies, their cataloguing of misery, their one-up of sorrow was cut short as the loudspekaer blared from across the yard, from the Administration Building.

  “Hey! Hey over there!”

  It was the main loudspeaker, mounted on the Administration Building, where the guards were waiting to come for them, holding out—it was now obvious—until their nerves were raw.

  “Hey, Simon…Lew…all the rest of you…this is David, do you hear me, can you hear me, all of you?”

  Gyp Williams fired off a long flaming burst, and they could hear the tinkle and shatter of window glass when he hit. It was an answer, of sorts.

  “Listen, we can’t blow the gate. We just can’t do it, you guys.” Chocolate rasped at his companions, “Hey! That’s David, the one who was with the second group, what’s he doin’ in there with them?” Gyp Williams motioned him to silence. They listened.

  “They’ve got the gate staked out, listen you men! They have it fixed so we can’t get at it. Simon! Lew Steiner! All of you, Gyp, Gyp Williams, listen! They said they won’t punish us if we go back to our cells. They said they wouldn’t demand payment, we can go right on like we were before, it’s better this way, it isn’t so bad, we know what we can do, we know what they won’t let us do! Simon, Gyp, come on back, come on back and they won’t make any trouble for us, we can go on the way we were before, don’t rock the boat, you guys, don’t rock the boat!”

  Gyp Williams rose to both knees, somehow manhandling the heavy machine rifle against his chest, and he screamed at the top of his voice, throwing his head back so his very white teeth stood out like a necklace of sparkling gems in his mouth—“Sellout bastards!” and he fired, without taking his finger from the trigger, he fired and the flames and heat and steel and anguish went cascading across the yard, hitting unreceptive stone and gravel and occasionally one of the already dead would leap as a slug tore its cold flesh.

  Finally, when he had made it clear what their answer was to be, he fell exhausted behind the sandbags, where he would die.

  In that instant of minor silence, Simon Rubin said, “I’m going back.” And he got up and walked across the yard, his head down, his hands locked behind his head.

  Don Karpinsky began to cry, then, and Chocolate slid across to him, trying by his nearness to stop the fear and the fury of being too brave to live, too cowardly to die without tears. No one behind the barricade moved to shoot Simon Rubin. There was no point to it, no anger at him, only pity and deep revulsion. And the guards in their immaculate white did not shoot him. Back in their world he was infinitely more valuable as a symbol, a broken image, for the others who might try to free themselves another time.

  They would point to him and say, “See Simon Rubin, he tried to rock the boat, and see what he’s like?”

  Behind the barricade Nigger Joe turned to Lew Steiner and the crying kid who had not fled with Simon Rubin. �
�There, that’s how much your people understand,” he condemned them all.

  And Lew Steiner said, “There were half a dozen of your boys in that second group, Joe. My back aches again, you feel like doing that thing?”

  Nigger Joe chuckled lackadaisically, slid over and began thumbing Lew Steiner’s back.

  They were like that, waiting, when the final assault began. The high keening whine of a mortar shell came at them like the doppler of a train passing on a track, and it landed far down at the end, where Chocolate caught it full, and split up like a ripe, dark pod. He was dead even as it struck, and the other four fell in a heap to protect themselves from screaming shrapnel.

  When the ground had ceased to tremble, and they could see the world again, they tried not to look toward the end of the barricade, where a brown leg and a torn bit of cloth showed from under the heap of rubble, from under the fallen sheets of metal. They tried not to look, and succeeded, but Gyp Williams’s face was now incapable of even that half-bitter, knowing smile he had offered before.

  Another whining shell came across, struck the wall above them and exploded violently, with Lew Steiner’s howl of pain matching it on a lower level.

  The shard of twisted metal had caught him in the neck, ripping through and leaving him with a deep furrow, welling out wetly, black-red down his shirt and over the hand he raised to staunch the flow. Nigger Joe tore his shirt down the front and made a crude bandage. “It ain’t bad, Lew, here, hold this on if you can.”

  The four of them turned back to see the first wave of white-uniformed guards breaking from the cover of the Administration Building and another group from around the end of the Laundry.

  They came on like a wide-angled “V” with a longarm grenade hurler at the point. Gyp Williams turned loose with the machine rifle, and swept the first attackers; they fell, but one of them got off a grenade, and it sailed almost gracefully, a balloon of hard stuff, over and over into the enclosure. The earth split up and deafened them, and great chunks of steel and stone cascaded about them. It was enough to ruin the machine gun, and send Don Karpinsky tumbling over backward, his body saturated with tiny bits of steel and sand. He lay sprawled backward, eyes open at the sky of free darkening blue, over the wall he would never climb.

  They huddled there, the three of them left—Gyp Williams, Nigger Joe and Lew Steiner, still clutching the bloody rag to his neck.

  The guards in their white uniforms would not let them go back to the cells. They knew the ones who were weak enough to keep from rocking the boat, and they knew the ones who had to be destroyed. These three were the last of the ones who had sought their freedom and their pride. They would be killed where they lay, when the ammunition had run out and all the strength was sapped from them, not only by the fighting, but by the ones who had betrayed them, the ones who had said it was better not to make trouble.

  And as the waves of faceless, soulless attackers streamed toward them across the dead-piled yard, no more intent on the particular men behind the barricade than they would have been about any other vermin who threatened them, Gyp Williams said it all for all three of them, and for the few strong ones who had found peace, if not pride: “We all of us down in the dark. Some day, maybe…some day.”

  Then he managed somehow to get the machine rifle steadied, and he fired into the midst of them, screaming and running with their immaculate white uniforms the badges of purity and cleanliness.

  But there were just too many of them.

  There were always, just too many of them.

  The story that follows is one of the original group from “A Touch of Infinity.” It was written while I was in the Army, and on rereading it seems a pleasant enough little fillip. I doubt seriously whether the story, even when fresh, could have changed the course of Western Civilization; and now that it’s almost ten years old. I’m positive it was merely good clean fun. Yes, I know that practically, the gimmick in this story could never work, that people would never allow it to work, but when you are a paid liar—né Writer—you presuppose people will go along with you. That, Virginia, is called the “suspension of disbelief” and without it Heinlein, Asimov, Vonnegut and myself would be the most imaginative quartet of bricklayers in the world. The story is called

  Back to the Drawing Boards

  PERHAPS it was inevitable, and perhaps it was only a natural result of the twisted eugenics that produced Leon Packett. In either case, the invention of the perambulating vid-robot came about, and nothing has been at all the same since.

  The inevitability factor was a result of live tri-vid, and the insatiable appetite for novelty of the vid audience. If vid broadcasts came from Bermuda in tri-vid color with feelie and whiff, then they wanted wide-band transmission from the heart of the Sudetenland. If they got that, it wasn’t enough; next they wanted programs from the top of Everest. And when they had accomplished that—God only knows how—the voracious idiot mind of the audiences demanded more. They demanded live casts from the Millstone, circling above the Earth; then it was Lunar fantasies with authentic settings…and Mars…and Venus…and the Outer Cold Ones.

  Finally, Leon Packett stumbled upon the secret of a perfect, self-contained tri-vid camera, operating off a minute force-bead generator; and in his warped way, he struck instantly to the truth of the problem—that the only camera that could penetrate to those inner niches of the universe that the eyes of a man demanded to glimpse, was a man himself.

  How completely simple it was. The only gatherer of facts as seen by the eyes of a man…were the eyes of a man. But since no man would volunteer to have his head sliced open, his brains scooped out, and a tri-vid camera inserted, Leon Packett invented Walkaway.

  In all due to the devil, it was coldly logical, and it was a beautiful bit of workmanship. Walkaway had the form of a human being, even to ball-and-socket joints at the knees and elbows. He stood just under seven feet tall, and his hide was a burnished permanodized alumasteel suit. His hands could be screwed off, and in their stead could be inserted any one of three dozen “duty” hands, withdrawn from storage crypts, located in the limbs. His head was the only part of him that was slightly more than human. Brilliantly so, again offering Satan his plaudits.

  Where the center of the face on a human would have been, the revolving lens wheel with its five turrets bulked strangely. Beneath the lens wheel a full-range audio grid lay with criss-crossed strangeness. The audio pickups were located on either side, as well as front and rear, of the head.

  Two sets of controls were used on Walkaway. One set was imbedded in the right arm (and would snap up at the proper coded pressing of a lock-snit at the wrist) and was chiefly used by Walkaway himself when he was asked to play back what he had heard or seen.

  The other console controls were in the back, and to my knowledge, were never employed after Walkaway’s initial test runs. He disliked being pawed.

  Naturally, the dissenters at Walkaway’s birth, who declaimed the sanity of giving a robot volition and “conscience” with as much strength as his metal frame held, were shouted down. The creature—well, wasn’t he?—had to have the right of free choice, if he was going to get the story in all its fullness and with a modicum of imagination, which the vid audience demanded.

  So Walkaway was made more human.

  He was able to disagree, to be surprised, to follow instructions almost as they were given, and to select the viewing subjects he wished, when he was filming. Walkaway was a most remarkable…what?

  Creature.

  “Leon, you’ve got to do it. Don’t be obstinate, that’s just being foolish. They’ll get him somehow, Leon!”

  Leon Packett spun in the chair, facing the window. His back was very straight, and his neck held a rigid aloofness. “Get out, McCollum. Get out and tell your pony-soldiers to do the same. Leave me alone!”

  Alan McCollum threw up his hands in eloquent frustration. “Lee, I’m trying to get through to you, for God’s sake! All I ask is you listen to them, and then make a decision�
�”

  Packett spun in the chair. His feet hit the floor with a resounding clump and he leaned one elbowed arm at McCollum. His index finger was an unwavering spear, the tip of which aimed between McCollum’s sensitive dark brown eyes.

  “Now look, McCollum, I spent fifteen years in a cellar lab, working what I could, and experimenting as best I could, soldering old pieces together because I couldn’t get a Frericks Grant. Then I happened to think of putting two old gadgets together, and I came up with a miracle. Now I’m big time, and the Frericks Foundation uses me in their institutional advertisements.”

  His lean, horsey face was becoming ruby-blotched.

  “But Walkaway is mine, McCollum! Mine! I dreamed him up and I sweated constructing him. I starved for fifteen years, McCollum. Fifteen. You know how long that is? While you and all your MIT buddies were piddling around putting chrome on old discoveries, I was missing all the good things.”

  McCollum’s jaws worked. His eyes dulled with suppressed fury. “That isn’t fair, Lee. You almost enjoy your misery, and you know it.”

  Packett stood up. His face was a crimson and milk patchwork. “Get out!” he snarled. His thin lips worked loosely, and his nostrils flared. “Get out and leave me alone. Walkaway is not going to Carina. Not Epsilon Carinae, not Miaplacidus, nowhere in Carina. Walkaway is staying here, where I can keep getting my commissions, where I can guarantee my future. It’s been too dirty for me to start being patriotic now, McCollum, so you can trot out there and tell your Space Patrol buddies I’m not in the market.”