“I'll come either on bat-wings or by commercial flight, Freddy.”
It is good to have one rich and powerful friend.
An hour and a bit to the west another young man found himself circumscribed and threatened with confinement. Hasty army units of two nations had him nearly in a pocket. United States forces, with plane and copter overhead, with radios sputtering back and forth and up and down, mobile with jeep and track, toothed with rifle and automatic rifle and bazooka and machine gun, covered both sides of Canyon Creek to its nearly dry mouth and spread out both ways along the Rio Grande itself. Mexican forces had worked out of the wild and rocky mountains of Serranias del Burro and covered most of the near south shore of the same big river. Little armed river boats stood ready with roaring power barely muted, and ripped here and there in the chocolate colored water.
Miguel Fuentes and his one hundred men; no, his sixty men; no, his twenty-five men, were nearly in the bag. But their numbers and grouping dwindled as streams sometimes dwindle into the sand in that region. Half of them had merged into the roving Mexican patrols; many of them actually belonged to those patrols, but now they had a new loyalty.
Fifteen men and a leader. Where had the rest escaped the closing net? Then three men down with gunfire. Twelve men and a leader into a canyon between rough bald-headed hills, and the covered mouth of the canyon was right on the river. Got them from both ends, got them from sides, covered them from above, harried into the last turn; shouts, warnings, expectations, rattle of hard weapon fire. Final caution, and the converging troops came together.
The bag was closed, but there was nothing in the bag. Every way out still closed. Most minute search. Counsel and cursing. Air to ground to air communication in two languages. Flame throwers firing every thicket. Where were the twelve men and their leader? They had gone into the short bare canyon, they had not come out of it, and they were not in it.
“Federico, Federico, hey Freddy,” a voice communicated from cave via weave to distant city. “Do you watch the trick? Hey, is that ever a trick!”
“Go away, Miguel, I have no time for you,” Freddy Foley communicated. “I've got a noose around my own neck and I'll have to learn to like the feel of hemp.”
“Noose I'm talking about,” Miguel exulted. “Hombre, was there ever a noose around me! You have watched, I know you have watched.”
“I watched you but I had other things on my eyes,” Freddy communicated. “Anybody could do it with a setup like that. But how will I do it?”
“You know where I am? In the very middle of the earth I am.”
“You're down in the complex of caves that Auclaire the patrick told me about, Miguel. You'll get lost in them and never get out. They're thirty miles each way and nobody but the patrick knows their windings.”
“And can I not compel the mind of the patrick Auclaire? Now I give you statements which you will proclaim.”
“I haven't the time for you, Miguel. You're taking things by the wrong end of the stick. You're as vile a thing as the other creatures.”
“I may be so, Federico. If it is so, then I am called to be vile; it is my mission which I may not question. If I am as vile as the other creatures, yet I am not the other creatures. I beset them, I cut them down. I am the snake-eater. What, is the snake-eater not as vile as the snakes? But I eat them up, Federico, I eat them up. I come soon to my hour. Now you will proclaim the statements I give. I compel your mind to this.
“I have loosened more than eighty men, more than eighty seeds. They are scattered even now. They find quick places to root. They are completely instructed by me, even if only for short hours. They will root, they will grow, they will form other groups immediately. Tell the world that I am down in the middle of the world now, that I am under the ground in a grave. And tell them that I will emerge on the third day as a sign and a wonder. Is that not a blasphemous way to put it! Hey, it is fun to cut these holy corners sometimes and shake the elementals. Proclaim it for me, Federico. I compel you to.”
“I know you do, Miguel. Rot your brown bones anyhow! I'll proclaim your stuff and then I'll be shed of you. Emerge on the third day as a sign and wonder! Oh brother!”
“A tip, Federico, a tip. You also will go underground, be hunted into a hole, be trapped underground inside a confinement and inside yourself within that. You will be invaded, you will be dead, you will be buried underground in a peculiar grave. And on the third day you also will emerge. Don't knock it, Freddy, it's a good trick.”
“Get out of my head, Miguel. I've had enough of you.”
“But you will proclaim my statement, Freddy. I compel you to.”
“I know it. I'll do it. And then we're quits. Gah, they're worse than reptiles before they're full-feathered!”
Fred Foley phoned Tankersley and gave him the statement of Miguel Fuentes.
“He really has the Messiah fever, has he, Freddy? Say, there's a group in Norway came out for Miguel today, and one in Indonesia. And about all they know about him they have from our own dispatches. Sure, I'll run it, Freddy. You've kept us ahead of the world on it so far.”
Then Freddy started out toward the office of Carmody Overlark. He didn't know where Overlark's office was any more than he had known where was the office of the doctor of solid reputation; but his feet would bring him to it.
Something clicked in Freddy's head. The appointment he had been wanting had come through. Overlark had given the word that Foley was to be admitted at once, and Foley was coming at once.
X: ARE YOU NOT OF FLIMSY FLESH TO BE SO AFRAID?
Ere Mor the Peacock flutters, ere the Monkey People cry,
Ere Chil the Kite swoops down a furlong sheer,
Through the Jungle very softly flits a shadow and a sigh —
He is fear, O Little Hunter, he is fear!
Kipling
OVERLARK's secretary had a rough, white, unfinished face that seemed to Foley to express cruelty and cowardice. “You are his dog and you mirror him,” Foley said softly to himself.
This may have been Foley's imagination. The secretary might have been a nice enough fellow but he wasn't the jolly type. He had smoky eyes that almost made it appear that he was blind.
“I have no idea why Mr. Overlark is willing to see you,” he said, “but I must write down your reason for visiting him. What is it?”
“I want to give him some advice,” said Fred Foley.
“He is hardly in need of that, from you at any rate,” the secretary said.
“Since that's the commodity he deals most in he might want a new line of it,” Foley said stoutly. “Mine is a little out of the ordinary and it's given freely.”
“He has sent out instructions that you be admitted, Mr. Foley. I had just made attempts to reach you but I failed.”
“No, you succeeded, smoky-eyes, you succeeded. You reached me nicely.”
“Go in then. But I beg you not to take any more of his time than is necessary. His time is very limited.”
“So is mine, but I haven't learned to budget it so finely.”
Oh it was a plush place inside, but a different plush than Freddy had imagined. It looked like an office where a great amount of work was done, and this surprised him. It was large but still crowded, containing files (files which were themselves works of art in their haunting ornamentation), two very large tables that could have been conference tables if only the piles of bulletins were ever cleared off them, several desks that were almost cockpits with the amount of instrumentation about them, and a variety of taping and viewing and communication equipment. And there was Carmody Overlark himself, an ornamental man.
“You were intending to ask me questions, Foley,” said Carmody Overlark (he didn't ask Foley to sit, but Foley did, and it seemed to irritate the man), “but I imagine I'll do most of the talking. First off, and naturally, we are not alone, in case you have any wild ideas.”
“Why are you afraid of little Fred Foley?” Freddy mocked him.
“I'm afr
aid of nobody, Foley. I'm physically capable but I seldom task myself with the duties that belong to subordinates. I hear you've been acting oddly today. Why?”
Carmody's eyes weren't those of a prisoner looking out; they were those of one who had taken refuge within. He didn't want out. He wouldn't come out.
“I went to a doctor this morning, Mr. Kar-everlasting-Mod, to get an opinion on myself. I don't know whether that's odd behavior or not, but the doctor was odd. He tried to get me to doubt my own sanity.”
“He tried to get you to recognize your own insanity, Foley. That's the first step toward a cure, and we have cures for everyone.”
“There's a proverb about the cure being worse than the disease, Mr. Overlark. I want to ask you some questions about a strange movement. I believe you're near the center of it,” Freddy said, and Carmody looked at him with eyes like shattered glass. They were disconcerting, those eyes. One couldn't look into them; one bounced off their facets.
“What you want is to startle me with how much you've guessed, Foley, and to force a full revelation from me. That's pretty childish. Don't you realize what a nonentity you are?”
“No. I've never admitted to myself that I'm a nonentity. I have always believed that every man — ”
“ — is entitled to his mete of human dignity. That's really a very late idea and there's nothing to it. You're here without any advantage at all. What possible circumstance would impel me to tell you everything or anything?”
“The circumstance that I'll soon be put out of the way and won't be able to use the information. And the sort of pride that holders of tight secrets take in revealing such secrets to their captives.”
“I have no such pride, Foley. Oh, maybe a little. No, that's not at all the circumstance that would impel me to tell everything or even nearly everything to you. But there is such a circumstance.”
“Is it present?”
“Oh yes. But barely. It seems to me, from what I've heard of your activities, that you've already discovered the essentials about us. This is: that we live when we want to live, that we go into a non-aging state that is very near death when we want to do so, and that we live again, and then again: that we try always to live at most heightened experience and to spread ourselves out for as long as we possibly can; and that we do not permit interference. What else do you want to know about us?”
Fred Foley understood in a sudden glimpse that Carmody Overlark was mad. What, “The Sanity of the Centuries” (that had been one of his titles when he was Khar-ibn-Mod) was mad? Absolutely. He lived in a different world entirely. He didn't see the world before him, not even with his multiplex eyes. That was madness.
“Why don't you live and die and live again without bothering the world with your doings, Overlark? Why do you impose a deleterious effect on the world?”
(I've been wrong about him, Foley thought. What I guessed, what he himself believes to be the way of it, isn't the truth of the matter at all. There's much less here than meets the eye.)
“Let me go back to the beginning, Foley, or a little before,” Carmody said. (There was always laughter just behind his voice, but it had no real merriment in it.) “You'll see that one man's deleteriousness is another man's delectation. The world is for ourselves and not we for the world. Anything we do to the world is right, so long as it gives us pleasure. You believe you have some sort of standards, and you haven't. Most of the things that you believe are eternal are really very recent. We of the older recension aren't bound by them. We've been in combat with you for a long time. You believe, in one of your theories, that we're in control of the world. We aren't. But we have been, and we will be whenever we wish. It's a day you will fear to see, that we come fully awake again. And we do come awake now. We will regain the world. Certain later interlopers have for some time ruled heaven and earth. Now we come back — ruthlessly.”
“Don't you believe the others also have rights?”
“The others have had the run of their rights long enough. They are the interlopers, and it's time that the ancient line is restored. — Oh, Foley, I misunderstand you completely; that's always the difficulty of conversing with infants. You mean people. You mean do people have any rights? Oh no, I don't believe that people have any rights.”
“Are you and yours not people, Carmody?”
“No. Not in every sense. Our apotheosis was effected very long ago.” Clear mad; this man with the edgy eyes, with the complexion that was sometimes ghost-lighted and sometimes dead-fish color, with the laughing tainted cruelty and the sick fear. If he was on top of it all, why was he so scared?
“A man doesn't become a god, Carmody, except for purposes of rhetoric,” Freddy said. “I assume that your apotheosis was like that of the Caesars.”
“Foley, the next time you skim through the Lives of the Twelve Caesars (for you will be allowed books in your confinement) see if you can guess which three of those emperors were of us — for three were. They were already gods. Their confirmation in public godhead was only that the public be appeased.”
“You're giving an ironic twist to the words, Carmody. What real effect could your auto-apotheosis have?”
“It was an act, an utterance, a statement that became true as it was uttered. Let me say simply that this is always a possible development of man. Oh, not of every man, but of many. Many more than you'd suppose. There's the one man in a thousand, perhaps the one man in a hundred, who is capable of turning into a god. This is as true as that many bees could turn into queen-bees, should the proper historic surge be present. You find it extravagant that I should speak of historic surge as applying to so small a thing as a swarm of insects? But it's also extravagant that we should apply it to so small a thing as a swarm of men. The point is that a small hive of bees has more claim on you to importance than you have on us. We're much further above you than you are above the bees. You'd feel no compunction in the destruction of the bees of a region if for some reason it worked to your profit or ease — let's say that the bees of a region bore what seemed to you to be a disease. And we would feel no compunction at destroying most or all of you, if it should be necessary or convenient to us, and it may well be.”
“Yes, I do find your ideas a little extravagant, Carmody. When you speak of being gods you actually mean an elite group of demagogues, a bunch of supermen (in your own opinion).”
“You don't know what I speak of, Foley. I was once a tribal deity, literally and actually. All of us were.”
“How many is all of you?”
“The first clutch of us, the first dozen; and it was many times that many millennia ago. I was a true tribal deity, Foley. I exceeded even the rest. I was deified, and as a deified one I had access to the several veins of secret knowledge. We were all of us remarkably intelligent in what was a very intelligent age, one that didn't yet hobble on the crutches of literacy and compilation. What we knew we knew directly. We formed a confederacy and established Olympus. We destroyed the Titans, and we ruled. I beg your pardon, Foley, but I caught a country expression going through your mind: something ‘as a peach-orchard boar.’ It seems I've brushed this expression in minds of men talking to me before. What is it? Even in our earliest mythologies there's nothing about a peach-orchard boar.”
“You've forgotten your mythology then, Carmody,” Fred Foley told him. “I assure you that the peach-orchard boar is there strongly, early and late. But when you speak of destroying the Titans and ruling, you don't speak literally.”
“Oh, but I do! Olympus is actually a phonetic equivalent of the name of our old high mountain lodge. We were gods and we lived there as gods.”
“And you interfered in the affairs of men like the Homeric gods?”
“We did, and we still do. We are the Homeric gods, though much older and more crafty than Homer supposed. We're also the gods of wilder epics. Like all epic gods, we had our twilights and resurrections, and we — Foley, I warn you! Don't do it! You're dead on the spot if you do it
.”
And Carmody Overlark had risen to his feet in pale fury.
“Don't do what?” Fred Foley protested. “I'm honestly puzzled. I'm unarmed and completely without a plan. I really don't know what you're talking about.”
“Don't laugh at me, Foley! You're dead on the spot if you do! I will not tolerate it. You laughed at my poor wife, but I will not tolerate being so wounded. You're brainless if you try it. I'll have you killed at once. I mean it.”
“Continue, Mr. Overlark. You were telling me a good story and I wouldn't break it up, even though I nearly break up myself. I'm properly quelled by your threat; I don't want to be killed on the spot. That's no laughing matter for me. Continue.”
“I will. Perhaps you don't know that laughing at us was the offense of the Titans themselves. For that we slaughtered them, and no such battle has been seen since. We're not only tribal deities, Foley, but also national heroes. There's one element common to all national heroes: that they disappear, and that they will come back. We're the thing behind that archetype. It's part of every national lore that the national hero will awaken again and lead like a Messias. There's even a variant Jewish belief that the Messias has lived before, that his appearance will be a returning rather than an advent.
“Now then, behind every legend is fact, and behind these legends is solid fact. The national heroes, under their own or other names, lived and seemed to die. But they only slept. And they will return. Most of them, most of us, have done it several times. I was such a legend myself long ago, and the last written traces of my own legend have now nearly disappeared.”
“Your ears twitch, Carmody,” Foley said. “Is that a property of archaic ears?”
“Foley, ours are the itching ears mentioned in scripture. They itch for novelty; we're not ashamed of that. And they do twitch physically. Oh how seldom are new things heard! So often they itch in vain! I was saying, Foley, that the last written traces of my own legend have nearly disappeared, so now I set about renewing my own legend.”
Fourth Mansions Page 16