A for Anything

by Damon Knight

  He was looking up a smooth, dark bore to a circle of light, at an apparent distance of ten or twelve feet; he could see the underside of the little gangway, and the brace that supported it. Above, the yellow-painted ceiling glittered in the floodlights.

  He punched the next button. The top of the shaft leaped back, diminished to a tiny button; this second camera was a hundred feet down. Hooded lamps at intervals of about ten feet made flares and then rings of light up the length of the shaft, as if it were the inside of a great annular worm.

  His lips pulled back over his teeth; he heard himself grunt, an unwilling sound.

  He punched the fourth button. Now the view was almost the same, but the top of the shaft was invisible; the rings of light seemed to melt together as they converged. This camera was four hundred feet down.

  He punched the fifth button. The shaft looked the same; this was at the nine-hundred-foot level.

  He punched the sixth button. His breath was beginning to come short and heavy, rasping in his throat. The screen showed a light grid of iron, half-inch criss-crossing five inches apart. Above the grid, he saw the same diminishing perspective. This was the lowest point, sixteen hundred feet down; under this, there was nothing but the pit.

  He punched the first button: the telltale read, “Platform.” The camera was located at eye level across the shaft opening from the gangway. On the far side, across the railing, a small crowd was gathered. There were the ten slaves in white shirts, and half a dozen guards. They were all waiting in silence, heads down, as if the glare hurt their eyes.

  The Boss’s throat was dry. He touched the audio key and said, “Get the first one out.”

  All the heads jumped, turning toward the loudspeaker. The guard corporal pointed to one of the slaves, and two guards hustled him out, white-faced and slack in the knees. He was a thin man with a ragged mustache. They forced him out to the end of the gangway, with vacancy under his feet, and held him there. The Boss could see his Adam’s apple work convulsively as he tried to swallow.

  The Boss poised his heavy fingers over the buttons. His jaw and throat were tense, brow knotted. “Get ready,” he said. In the screen, the doomed man’s mouth opened, his body went rigid all over.

  “Go,” said the Boss.

  Chapter Twelve

  Dick was half undressed, and more than half drowsy, when there came a cautious rapping at the door. Rather than wake up one of the servants, he went to answer it himself. “Yes? Who is it?”

  But no answer came, and the Judas window was empty. Dick heard a faint rustling at his feet, and looked down in time to see a white envelope sliding under the door.

  He bent and picked it up. The envelope was blank; inside was a single sheet of paper. He stooped under the nearest light to unfold and read it:

  Dear Enemy:

  Seeing you today reminded me how anxious I am to renew our acquaintance. The grille, which some wag removed from the Trout Brook, before our first meeting, has since been welded in place, so I’m afraid I can’t offer to drown you there. In fact, it would be awkward if I were to leave your corpse anywhere in Eagles. I suggest, therefore, that we meet for a game of follow-the-leader outside Eagles. If you use the maintenance exit at the north end of the Upper Promenade within the next half hour, you will find me waiting on the roofs. Bring warm clothing and climbing gear. I trust you as a man of your honor to burn this note beforehand, and not to tell anyone.

  Sincerely,

  A Friend

  P.S. If you don’t happen to feel well enough to come, I’ll understand perfectly; I wouldn’t dream of calling you a coward the next time we meet.

  Dick crumpled the paper. His hands were cold; his heart was thumping with anger and apprehension. Coward, was he? Keel was the coward, ducking a fair fight for a crazy thing like this. Probably he wouldn’t even be there himself; it was ridiculous… even in daylight, the thought of those dizzy heights was unpleasant; it would be twice as bad at night, in the cold, with that wind rushing up the mountain.

  He turned. No, he’d be a fool to walk into such a trap. Besides, it was late, and he was tired, and not completely sober… .

  Reluctantly, he halted. That was all true, but it didn’t make any difference: of course he’d have to go.

  He picked up the wadded paper where he had dropped it, and burned it in an ashtray. It went up with a mocking whoosh, as if it had been soaked in some inflammable solution. Nerves jangling, Dick went back to his wardrobe to dress. He chose the warmest clothes he could find, heavy riding pants, a fleece-lined sweat shirt, loose and comfortable, worn over a turtle-necked jersey. he hesitated between warm gloves and thin ones; finally chose the latter. It would be bad to have numb fingers, but worse, probably, to have a clumsy grip. He put on a pair of his Army riding boots; they were strong, but as flexible as chamois. he clipped his stick to the belt, but removed the elbow chains. As an afterthought, he filled a small flask with brandy and stuffed it into his pocket. He cast a glance around the apartment, at the warm bed waiting and the rich disarray of the wardrobe. Then he slipped out into the corridor.

  The Upper Promenade was deserted under the stars. Dick found the maintenance door, an unobtrusive gray-painted square of metal, under the ornamental scrollwork on the north wall. It had a stout latch, hanging open.

  He slid the door open against its spring and cautiously put his head out. It was a bright, cold night, the blue of gunmetal. High in the starred dome hung a crazy, three-quarter moon, and here below, all things were flooded with an eerie whiteness: roofs, copings, cupolas, and the upper slopes of the mountain itself, all silent and bare in the night.

  A few yards away, standing at ease on the ribbed metal roof, was Keel. His breath puffed white. Under the shelf of his brow, his eyes glittered.

  Dick moved forward, letting the door close behind him. The wind was chill on his face; the stars in their vast dome seemed to crackle with cold. He looked around. Beyond the bulk of the Promenade, from which he had just emerged, Eagles showed itself as a forest of peaked roofs, domes and minarets. Every window was a dark eye; only the Tower itself, looming like a mirage beyond the sea of roofs, sprayed yellow light from its peak.

  The wind howled steadily, beyond the short roof on which they stood. Keel’s voice rang hollow: “Well met by moonlight!”

  Dick kept advancing until he was only a few paces from Keel. The blond man was dressed much like himself, in leather jacket and whipcord trousers with high laced boots. With the moon behind him, his face was in shadow, lit only by the faint reflection that came from the polishe roof. Behind a puff of vapor, his teeth gleamed. “I thought I had suggested that we come without weapons?”

  Dick pointed to the long-handled pickaxe that protruded over Keel’s shoulder. “What about that?”

  Keel glanced toward it. “climbing equipment… very useful, but let’s start even.” He unlung the axe, together with the coil of light rope that was clipped at his shoulder, and flung them together toward the edge of the roof. They fell into silence.

  Dick shrugged and removed his stick. It clattered briefly on the roof, then a gust took it and he saw it whirling end over end, receding into the void, before it dipped downward again and was lost.

  Keel was waiting with an ironic smile. “Ready, then? Let’s go.” he turned his back and started off diagonally across the roof. At a corner of the Promenade there was a steel ladder. Keel grasped the rungs and clambered quickly up. Dick watched him a moment, then followed. The rungs were icy cold in his hands, and he wished he had chosen the other gloves. Keel’s white, foreshortened form was silhouetted a moment against the sky, then it disappeared. Dick climbed, with the wind fluttering and pawing at his back.

  At the top of the ladder, he found himself facing an unsuspected slant of metal roof, rising steeply to a peak high over his head. Keel stood up there, in silver and black, waiting.

  The ladder continued in widely spaced steel rungs up the slope of the roof. There was nothing for it but to keep on climbi
ng. As he ascended, Keel made him a mocking salute and moved on out of sight again.

  The peak of the roof turned out to be one end of a long ridge that ran straight away into the distance and then made a sharp turn, ending in a blocky tower. Tower and roofs were washed in clear white; below them, everything was one inky gulf of shadow, without a gleam to tell its depth.

  The ridge itself was flattened, forming a sort of catwalk perhaps eight inches across. On this precarious perch, a few dozen yards away, Keel was standing with his arms akimbo, waiting.

  By stretching upward from the last rung, it was possible to plant one foot on the ridge, and then, raising the other, to bring yourself up in an awkward, crouching position. With the cold wind whipping unpredictably against one side and then the other, it was all he could do to steady himself with hands and feet; but shame drove him upright. He stood, with his heart thundering, fighting for balance.

  There was a long moment when he was certain he would fall; then that passed, and he could stand without windmilling his arms. The distant figure of Keel made him another ironic salute, and, turning, made off toward the bend in the ridge.

  He followed, planting one cautious foot after the other, in an unreal stillness. Except for the wind, and Keel’s distant figure moving, there was not a stir of life anywhere in the world; they had left all that down below. The thought of the warm, lighted, busy corridors gave Dick a curious pang: how many times had he walked by down there, without ever suspecting the existence of this lonely world a few yards overhead?

  His moon-shadow glided along ahead of him. He could make out the Little Bear, low over the rooftops, and a little higher, the Big Bear, upside down. The Milky Way sprawled in a gigantic arch high above; he hardly dared glance at it, for fear of losing his balance. Imperceptibly, as the minutes went by, he was growing light-headed from the height and the cold, and the theatrical white glare of the rooftops. Up the low tower he went, following Keel, and down the other side into a bewildering maze of roofs and walls. They climbed ladders sometimes, and sometimes scaled crowstep gables where the pitch of the roof was too steep to walk. Dick’s ears were singing with the cold, his fingers and toes numb with it, but he followed wherever Keel led; his sense of danger was muted, almost inaudible, like a familiar sound droning away somewhere in the distance.

  After a long time they paused to rest, each astride the ridge of a steep roof; Keel turned and they sat facing each other, a dozen yards apart. All around them was the sky and the silent sea of rooftops.

  Keel’s breath puffed frostily over his head, and his eyes glittered. From somewhere he produced a leather-covered flask, raised it in salute. Remembering, Dick took out his own flask and unscrewed the top. They drank together. The brandy was cold and smooth down his throat, spreading fiery inside his body.

  He saw Keel’s teeth glitter. “Sorry you came?”

  “No!” he called; and in a strange way it was true.

  Keel nodded and turned, holding himself precariously with his hands on one slope of the roof while his legs dangled down the other. Then he was hitching himself forward again, and Dick followed.

  Now their way was along cornices, clinging by fingertips while the wind lashed them from below; along copings, so weathered that they could not stand but must embrace the frigid stone with legs and arms; down rabbeted quoins and along the gutters of roofs, inching, spread-eagled.

  The moon was high when they reached what might have been the end of the world: a steep curb roof, slanting down almost vertically to a curious, wide ledge nearly twenty feet below. Beyond that and on either side there was a chasm which even the rays of the high moon did not fill; it went down and down, and ended only in black shadow.

  Standing at a wary distance from Keel, Dick glanced at him uneasily. This was a dead end; there was no way to go on from here. But Keel was turning his back on the gulf, lowering himself carefully until he hung by his hands from the coaming, his body flattened along the lower slope. His face shone pale, upturned in the moonlight. Then he was gone with a sliding rush, and peering down, Dick saw him safe on the ledge below.

  For the first time since the beginning of the adventure, Dick felt foreboding strike his heart. Were they going down into that endless moonlit canyon—over the ledge and down?

  “Afraid?” Keel called up softly.

  Dick set his jaw. He turned and gripped the curb as Keel had done, then let himself down. The smooth leads were clammy and cold against his body. He swallowed hard; he couldn’t see anything below him, and it was hard to make his hands let go. But there was no turning back; his fingers relaxed, then gripped frantically as the slope rushed upward. His feet struck the ledge with a jar. He came upright, dizzy and shaken.

  Keel was standing a short distance away, staring across emptiness to the closed and shuttered building opposite. Directly across from him, there was a little iron balcony which Dick had not noticed before. It looked deceptively close. It was set a little lower than the level on which they were standing. But the two buildings, as well as Dick could judge, were at least fifteen feet apart.

  “This is where the tackle would have helped,” said Keel, without turning his head. Dick saw what he meant. There was a projecting cornice above the balcony; if you could catch a hook on that, you could swing across quite easily. But without a rope, it was out of the question. It was fifteen feet or more—a standing jump, in heavy clothes, and with that chasm under you. You would have to jump headfore-most, as if into a pool; it would take more nerve than most men had.

  Keel was removing his gloves, with jerky motions. He wiped his palms on his jacket; Dick saw that there were beads of sweat on his forehead. He stepped back until his heels met the base of the roof. He steadied himself with his hands on the leads, and looked across at Dick. His face was strained; there was something like appeal in his eyes.

  Dick watched, unable to speak.

  Keel straightened, swung his arms, and stepped forward to the front of the ledge.

  “Keel, don’t!” said Dick suddenly, with his heart at his throat.

  Keel shook his head and stepped back again. he took a deep, painful breath and let it out. he breathed in again, held it, with his eyes still fixed on the balcony across. “Shut up,” he said suddenly. “Oh, God.” His eyes closed; his teeth showed in a grimace.

  “Keel, listen—we’ll bang on the roofs—attract somebody’s attention.”

  “Never,” said Keel. He breathed deep again, hesitated, then with a curious grunt he started forward. His foot struck the front of the ledge: he launched himself out in a hard, flat dive.

  Watching, Dick felt the blood drain from his head. The other man seemed to hang in midair, arms outstretched. Then Keel’s hands struck and clutched at the iron bars. They slipped; Keel’s body went reeling under and hit the wall with a thud. There was a moment when he seemed to be hanging there, unsupported, half in shadow below the balcony. Dick heard a gasping cry, and then Keel was falling, silently, past stage after stage of the moonlit masonry wall, dwindling: the darkness swallowed him silently up, and then, after another long moment, there was a distant slapping sound that echoed and died away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dick pressed his back against the leads to keep from falling. His knees had turned to water; he was breathing in great gulps that hurt his chest, and the rooftop world was swinging slowly, nauseously around him.

  When it steadied, he looked out across a desolate sea of roofs—angular, flat, sharp-peaked, blunt, set at all angles; here a church-like spire, there two twin minarets, yonder a flattened dome. In all that expanse, not a warm light showed; even the glow at the top of the Tower had gone out. He was alone.

  Now he understood what Keel had hoped to do at the end of this journey—reach that balcony and disappear through the door behind it, to leave him here on the ledge, afraid to make the jump and unable to get back the way he had come. It would have worked; it had worked … Dick turned his eyes away from the balcony. Whatever happened, even i
f he died here of cold and exposure, he knew he could never bring himself to jump.

  What other choice did he have? The roof was sheer at his back, impossible to climb. That left the three sides of the ledge itself, and kneeling down cautiously, hating himself for the effort it took, he peered over each of them in turn. On the right, there was sheer masonry, unornamented; not a fly could get down that wall. Straight ahead, letting his head hang over, he could just make out the dim gleam of some ornamental stonework a dozen feet down; below that, nothing that offered any hope, and even that far it would be impossible to descend without climbing tackle.

  On the left, the building abutted the gable-end of a somewhat lower roof, set back ten feet or so. The next building was of the same height and had a pyramidal roof; then there seemed to be a gap. Both roofs had stout gutters, and it looked to dick as if he could make his way around that pyramidal roof on either side toward the east. It would be something, a beginning—if only he could get from the ledge to the first roof.

  But the wall on this side was as sheer as the other; only a faint continuation of the front wall’s ornamental ridge—a mere toe-hold, and that too far down to be of any use. No, Keel had known what he was doing; there was only one way to get to this ledge, and only one way to get off it. He was trapped.

  He stood erect, looking and listening. Nothing had changed; there was no movement and no sound, except the faint, far-off singing of the wind. He forced himself to turn slowly, inspecting with minutes care every visible wall and roof: there might be some small thing he had missed that would save him. But everything was the same as before; every window was shuttered and barred.

  Now that he was standing still, the cold numbed his body. He realized suddenly that this was the beginning of his death.

  At that thought, his heart began hammering again; life ran thickly at his throat, impossible to deny. He dropped down on his knees again at the left side of the ledge, staring at the distant roofs and then at the blank wall below him—concentrating fiercely, as if by an effort of will he could create a way across.