American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56

by Gary K. Wolfe

  “Stop the car, damn it!”

  The man stiffened. “Speak with respect to your superior, lout!” he snapped. His right hand drew back suddenly and smashed against the side of Scott’s head, knocking him against the door.

  Scott pushed up quickly, realizing, with a burst of panic, that he was no stronger than a boy.

  “Dear boy, I apologize,” the man said instantly, hiccuping. “Did I hurt you?”

  “I live down the next road,” Scott said tensely. “Stop here, please.”

  The man plucked out his cigar and threw it on the floor.

  “I offend you, boy,” he said, sounding as if he were about to cry. “I offend you with distasteful words. Please. Please. Look behind the words, behind the peeling mask of jollity. For there is utter sadness, there utter loneliness. Can you understand that, dear boy? Can you, in your tender years, know my—”

  “Mister, I want to get out,” Scott said. His voice was that of a boy, half angry, half frightened. And the horror of it was that he wasn’t sure if there was more of acting or of actuality in his voice.

  Abruptly the man pulled over to the side of the highway.

  “Leave me, leave me, then,” he said bitterly. “You’re no different from the rest, no, not at all.”

  Scott shoved open the door with trembling hands.

  “Good night, sweet prince,” said the heavy man, fumbling for Scott’s hand. “Good night and dreams of plenteous goodness bless thy repose.” A wheezy hiccup jarred his curtain speech. “I go on—empty, empty . . . empty. Will you kiss me once? For good-by, for—”

  But Scott was already out of the car and running headlong toward the service station they had just passed. The man turned his heavy head and watched youth racing away from him.

  Chapter Eight

  There was a thumping sound, like that of a hammer on wood; like the sound of a huge fingernail tapping, falsely patient, on a blackboard. The tapping pounded at his sleeping brain. He stirred on the bed, rolling over on his back with a fitful toss of arms. Thump—thump—thump. He moaned. At his sides, his hands raised up a trifle, then dropped again. Thump. Thump. He groaned irritably, still not fully conscious.

  Then the water drop burst across his face.

  Gagging and coughing, he reared up on the sponge, hearing a loud squishing noise. Another drop splashed off his shoulder.

  “What!” His brain struggling to orient itself, his wide-eyed, startled gaze fled around the darkness. Thump! Thump! It was a giant’s fist beating at a door; it was a monster gavel pounding on a rostrum.

  Sleep was gone. He felt his chest jerk with staggering heartbeats. “Good God,” he muttered. He threw his legs over the side of the sponge.

  They landed in lukewarm water.

  He jerked his legs back with a gasp. Overhead the noise seemed to be coming faster. Thump-thump-thump! Breath caught in his throat. What in God’s name . .

  Grimacing at the brain-jolting sound, he let his legs over the side of the bed again and let them sink in the warm water. He stood hastily, rigid hands clamped over his ears. Thump thump thump! It was like standing inside a fiercely beaten drum. Gasping, he lurched for the edge of the box top. He slipped on the water-slick surface, crying out as his right knee banged down on the cement. He pushed up with a groan, then slipped again.

  “Damn it!” he screamed. He hardly heard his voice; the noise was almost deafening. Frantic, he braced his feet and, reaching up, lifted the box-top edge and ducked out under it.

  He slipped again, crashing down on an elbow. Pain knifed up his arm. He started up. A drop of water slammed across his back, sending him sprawling again. He twisted over like a fish and saw the water heater leaking.

  “Oh, my God,” he muttered, wincing at the pain in his knee and elbow.

  He stood up, watching great drops splatter off the box top and cement. The water ran warmly across his ankles; there was a minor waterfall of it flowing over the edge of the block, splashing on the cellar floor.

  For a long moment he stood there indecisively, staring at the falling water, feeling the robe cling warm and wet to his body.

  Then he cried out suddenly. “The crackers!”

  He lunged at the box top again, sliding and struggling for balance. He lifted the top and carried it over the bed, feet almost slipping out from under him all the way. He dropped it, then flung himself across the sponge, hearing water burst out from its swollen pores.

  “Oh, no.”

  He couldn’t drag the package up, it was so waterlogged. Face wild with frightened anger, he tore it open, the soggy paper parting like tissue in his hands.

  He stared at the water-soaked cracker bits molded together into an ashen paste. He picked up a handful and felt the sodden drag of it, like day-old porridge.

  With a curse he flung the dripping mass away. It flew over the edge of the block and splattered into a hundred pale scraps on the floor.

  He knelt there on the sponge, oblivious now of the water that poured around and over him. His eyes were fastened to the pile of crumbs, his lips pressed into a blood-pinched, hating line.

  “What’s the use?” he muttered. His fists snapped shut like jaws. “What’s the use?” A water drop fell in front of him and he took a savage punch at it, losing balance and toppling over, face first, on the sponge. Water flooded from the compressed honeycomb.

  He jolted to his feet on the block, hard with fury.

  “You’re not going to beat me,” he said, he hadn’t the slightest idea to whom. His teeth jammed together and it was defiance and a challenge that he hurled. “You’re not going to beat me!”

  He grabbed up handfuls of the soggy cracker and carried it up to the dry safety of the first black metal shelf of the water heater. What good are soaked crackers? asked his brain. They’ll dry! he answered. They’ll rot first, said his brain. Shut up! he answered.

  He yelled it. “Shut up!” God! he thought. He flung a cracker snowball at the water heater and it spatted off the metal.

  Suddenly he laughed. Suddenly the whole thing seemed hilarious—him four-sevenths of an inch tall, in a tentlike robe, standing ankle-deep in lukewarm water and throwing soggy cracker balls at a water heater. He threw back his head and laughed loudly. He sat down in the warm water and slapped his palms at it, splashing geysers of it across himself. He pulled off his robe and rolled around in the warm water. A bath! he thought. I’m having my goddam morning bath!

  After a while he got up and dried himself on what was left of the handkerchief around the sponge. Then he squeezed the water from the robe and hung it up to dry. My throat is sore, he told himself. So what? he said. It’ll have to wait its turn.

  He didn’t know why he felt so exhilarated and stupidly amused. He was certainly in a fix. It was just, he guessed, that when things got so bad they were absurd, you couldn’t take them straight any more; you had to laugh or crack. He almost imagined that if the spider came lumbering over the edge of the block now, he’d laugh at it.

  He ripped up the handkerchief with teeth, nails, and hands, and made a flimsy robe of it, tying up the sides as he had done with the other robe. He put it on hastily. He had to get over to the sewing box.

  Picking up the heavy pin, he threw it to the floor, then climbed down the cement block and retrieved it. I’ll have to find another sleeping place now, he thought. It was amusing. He might even have to go up the great cliff face after that slice of dry bread. That was amusing, too. He shook his head as he jogged across the floor toward the carton, sunlight streaming through the windows over him.

  It was like the time after he’d broken the contract. There were all the bills, the pitiless insecurity, the problems of adjustment. He’d tried to go back to work. He’d begged Marty, and Marty had reluctantly agreed. But it hadn’t worked. It had got worse and worse until one day Therese had seen him trying to climb onto a chair and had picked him up like a boy and set him on it.

  He’d screamed at her and gone storming to Marty’s office; but before h
e could say a word Marty had shoved a letter across the desk at him. It had been from the Veterans Administration. The GI loan had been turned down.

  And that afternoon, driving home, when the same tire had gone flat a second time, half a block from the apartment, Scott had sat in the car shrieking with laughter, so hysterical that he’d fallen off his special seat, bounced off the regular one, and landed in a laughter-twitching heap on the floor boards.

  It was the way. Self-defense; a mechanism the brain devised to protect itself from detonation; a release when things became wound up too tightly.

  When he reached the carton, he climbed in, not even caring if the spider was waiting in there for him. He walked in long strides to the sewing box and found a small thimble. It took all the strength in him to push it up the hill of clothes and shove it out through the opening.

  He rolled the thimble across the floor like a giant empty hogshead, the pin stuck through his handkerchief robe and scraping behind him on the cement as he moved.

  At the heater he thought first of trying to lift the thimble to the top of the cement block, then realized it was much too heavy and pushed it up against the base of the block, where the torrent of water quickly filled it.

  The water was a little dirty, but that didn’t matter. He picked up palmfuls of it and washed his face. It was a luxury he’d not experienced for many months. He wished he could shave off his thick beard, too; that would really feel good. The pin? No, that wouldn’t work.

  He drank some of the water and made a face. Not too good. Well, it would cool. Now he wouldn’t have to climb all the way down to the pump.

  Straining, he managed to drag the thimble a little bit away from the waterfall and let the quivering surface still itself. Then, propping the pin against the side of the thimble, he shinnied up its slanting length to the lip. There, amidst the faint spray, he looked into the mirror-like water at his face.

  He grunted. Truly, it was remarkable. Small, yes, a particled fraction of its former self; yet still the same, line for line. The same green eyes, the same dark-brown hair, the same broad taper of nose, the same jawline, the same ears and full lips. He grimaced. And the same teeth, though likely rotted after so long a time without being brushed. Yet they were still white; rubbing on them with a moistened finger had accomplished that. Amazing. He would be a poor testimonial for a toothpaste concern.

  He stared a while longer at his face. It was unusually calm for the face of a man who lived each day with dread and peril. Perhaps jungle life, despite physical danger, was a relaxing one. Surely it was free of the petty grievances, the disparate values of society. It was simple, devoid of artifice and ulcer-burning pressures. Responsibility in the jungle world was pared to the bone of basic survival. There were no political connivings necessary, no financial arenas to struggle in, no nerve-knotting races for superior rungs on the social ladder. There was only to be or not to be.

  He ruffled the water with a hand. Begone, face, he thought, you matter nothing in this cellar life. That he had once been called handsome seemed stupid. He was alone, with no one to please or cater to or like because it was expedient.

  He let himself slide down the pin. Except, he thought, wiping spray from his face, that he still loved Louise. It was a final standard. To love someone when there was nothing to be got from that person; that was love.

  He had just measured himself at the ruler and was walking back to the water heater when there came a loud creaking noise, a thunderous crash, and a glaring carpet of sunlight flung across the floor. A giant came clumping down the cellar steps.

  Paralysis locked him.

  He stood horror-rooted to the spot, staring up at the mammoth figure bearing down on him, its plunging shoes raised higher than his head, then slamming down and shaking the floor beneath him. It was double shock that froze him into heart-leaping petrifaction: seeing the mountainous being so abruptly and, at the same time, realizing despite numb terror that he had once been that very size himself. Head thrown back, he stared, open-mouthed, at the giant’s approach.

  Then thought and immobility were torn away by a bolt of instinct and with a gasp he sprinted toward the edge of the engulfing shadow. The floor shook harder; he heard the bat squeak of gigantic shoes about to mash him like a bug. With a sucked-in cry, he lunged another yard, then dived headlong toward the light, arms out to brace himself.

  He landed hard, rolling on his shoulder to break the fall. The vast shoe, like a whale leaping, slammed down inches from his body.

  The giant stopped. From the tunnel of a pocket it withdrew a screw driver as long as a seven-story building, then billowed out its black shadow like a spreading pool as it crouched before the water heater.

  Scott ran, splashing, around its right shoe, the top of his head level with the lip of the sole. Standing beside the cement block, he peered up at the colossus.

  Far up—so far he had to squint to see—was its face: nose like a precipitous slope that he could ski on; nostrils and ears like caves into which he could climb; hair a forest he could lose himself in; mouth a vast, shut cavern; teeth (the giant grimaced suddenly) he could slide an arm between; eye pupils the height of him, black irises wide enough to crawl through, lashes like dark, curling sabers.

  He stared mutely at the giant. That was what Lou looked like now—monstrously tall, with fingers as thick as redwood trees, feet like elephants that never were, breasts like pliant, hill-peaked pyramids.

  Suddenly the vast shape wavered before the colorless gelatine of tears. It had never struck him so hard before. Not seeing her, his own physique the norm, he had imagined her as someone he could touch and hold, even knowing it wasn’t so. Now he knew it completely; and the knowing was a cruel weight that crushed all memory beneath itself.

  He stood there crying silently, not even caring when the giant picked up his sponge and, with a dinosaur grunt, tossed it aside. Moods had come with quicksilver indistinction that morning—panic to misery to hilarity to peacefulness to terror, now to misery again. He stood by the block watching the giant remove the skyscraper side of the water heater and set it aside to poke the screw driver into the heater’s belly.

  A cold wind fogged across him then and his head snapped around so quickly it sent painful twinges down his neck. The door!

  “Oh, my God,” he muttered, astonished at his own stupidity. To stand here in disconsolate gloom when all the time his escape route was waiting.

  He almost dashed straight across the floor. Then, with a rocking lurch, he realized that the giant might see and think him an insect, being conscious only of smallness and movement.

  Eyes on the looming figure, he backed along the side of the block until he reached the wall. Then, turning, he raced along its base to the great shadow of the fuel tank. Eyes still on the giant, he ran underneath the tank, past the fifty strides of the ladder, under the red metal table, the wicker table, hardly starting at all when the oil burner flared once more into sound. Behind, the giant tapped and probed at the machinery of the water heater. Scott reached the foot of the steps.

  The first one loomed fifty feet above him. He paced in the chilly shadow of it, looking up its sheer face at the sunlight pouring overhead like a golden canopy. It was still early morning, then; the back of the house faced east.

  Abruptly he ran along the block-long distance of the step, looking for a place to climb. But there was nothing except a narrow vertical passage at the far right end where mortar between two cement blocks had contracted, leaving a three-sided chimney about the thickness of his body. He’d have to climb it as mountaineers did—braced rigid between back and sandal bottoms, inching himself up by leg tension. It was a terribly difficult way, and there were seven steps to the back yard. Seven fifty-foot faces to climb. If he were exhausted after the first one . .

  The thread. It might help. He ran back to the wicker table and shook loose the bar from its place. He glanced over at the giant, still crouching in front of the heater, then ran back to the step, dragging t
he thick thread behind him. There was just a chance.

  He flung the bar up. But it wouldn’t reach the top of the step, and even if he could throw it that high, there wasn’t likely to be any niche for it to catch in. He dragged the thread to the three-sided chimney and stood there searching its narrow height for a crevice in which he might lodge the bar. There was none.

  He threw the bar down and, half walking, half running, moved restlessly along the base of the steps. He turned like a trapped animal and ran back again. There had to be a way. He’d been waiting for this opportunity for months; through half a winter in the cellar, waiting for someone to open that vast door so he could climb to freedom.

  But he was so small. “No, no.” He wouldn’t let himself think about that. There was a way; there always was a way. No matter how difficult, there always was a way. He had to believe that. Nervously he cast another glance back at the crouching giant. How long would he stay there? Hours? Minutes? There was no time to waste.

  The broom.

  Whirling again, Scott raced across the floor, shivering in the wind. He should have put on the heavier robe. But there had been no time. Besides, it was probably still wet. The thimble; he wondered whether the giant’s monstrous feet had knocked it over, perhaps even crushed it.

  It doesn’t matter! he yelled at himself. I’m getting out of here! He skidded to a halt in front of the broom that leaned against the refrigerator.

  There was a spider web across the top of the bound bristles. He knew it wasn’t the black widow’s work, but it reminded him that his pin was back at the water heater. Should he go back and try to get it?

  He shook that off too. It doesn’t matter! He was going to get out of there. That was all he’d let himself concentrate on. I’m going to get out, that’s all; I’m going to get out.

  He grabbed one of the club-thick straws and pulled at it with all his strength. It stuck. He pulled again, with the same result. He grabbed the next straw and jerked at it. It stuck fast. With an impatient curse, he grabbed the next straw and pulled and the next and the next. They all stuck fast.