A for Anything

by Damon Knight

  Moonlight was slanting down the wall, picking out every tiny irregularity. The more he stared, the more it seemed to him that some of those dark spots were actually pits in the masonry. There was a cluster of them directly below, and then a few more at random intervals to the left. About halfway to the next roof, a shallow groove began; if he could reach that, with his toes on the narrow ridge—It began to seem remotely possible; but that first five feet of wall, with emptiness yawning under it: that was a horror.

  The moonlight was deceptive; it was impossible to tel how deep the pits might be. The darkest ones were out of reach; Dick leaned over and probed the nearer ones with his fingertips, but found them disconcertingly shallow, mere hollows in the stonework.

  Sitting with his legs crossed on the cold ledge, he stripped off his gloves—another reminder of Keel—and then, after a moment’s hesitation, his boots and socks as well. The boots were too unwieldy to carry, but he would need them again if he managed the crossing, whereas if he didn’t— He slung them one at a time across to the adjoining roof, where they slid to the gutter with an unpleasant slithering rattle.

  He knelt, then lay down with his legs dangling over. It was easy enough to find the crannies with his bare toes, although they already ached with cold; it was harder to let himself down with his weight on his forearms, searching for lower toe-holds; then the moment came when he was clinging by toes and fingertips, and could get no farther down without releasing the top of the wall: and that was impossible.

  Somehow he did it, with one hand and then the other. Gripping with fingers and toes, he pressed himself to the wall. Once, when he took one hand away to hunt for another hold, the fingers of his other hand began to slip. A cold dizziness took him; he clawed for the same hold again, found it and hung panting, while the salt sweat stung his eyes.

  After a time he gathered up courage to try it again, and this time succeeded. Now his toes were on the masonry ridge, and the worst was over. In a few cautious steps he reached the groove at chest level. When the groove ended, the roof was tantalizingly close. He inched toward it, straining as far as he could from his last hold, then jumped. He landed flat on his chest, knee and one hand in the gutter.

  It would have been pleasant just to lie there, with the roof solid under him. But he still had a long way to go. He found his arms and legs astonishingly weak, but contrived to get his boots back on, and climb to the ridge of the roof.

  The pyramidal roof was set as a corner-piece between two gable roofs forming an L; it was too steep to climb safely, but it gave him only one nasty moment as he swung across the corner from one gutter to the next.

  From the ridge of the third roof, far down, glimmering distantly, he saw a glow of yellow light.

  It was a glass-roofed courtyard, and the light came from a row of antique city street lamps that lined the ornamental pathway, three levels down. Dick knew the place well; Vivian’s suite overlooked it at the back, and he even thought he could tell which was her bedroom window.

  He had been over an hour reaching the spot across the roofs; he was tired and half frozen, and there was no more sensation in his fingers. He had fallen, coming down the lightning rod to the sunken glass roof, and bruised his shoulder; now he crouched on the glass, feeling the warmth from below while his breath steamed around his head. There was a maintenance door in the corner of the roof; from here he could see the ladder and the little platform that led up to it; but it was locked.

  The lights, down under the glass, seemed to swell and contract as he looked at them. His head was clear, but everything he saw had an unreal vividness and beauty: the lamps, the flagstones glittering, the very stones of the façade held him with their unusual shapes and textures. He could see each leaf of the plane tree to his right, silhouetted, yellow-green intermingling with a mystery of darkness.

  He was out of the wind here, and the slow warmth from the glass relaxed his limbs. He had no desire to be elsewhere, or even to get up from his knees; his body seemed almost to belong to someone else.

  A vague idea came to him that he ought to make an effort now, while he still could. He got one foot up and stamped with it half-heartedly on the glass pane. He stamped harder: the outer pane broke, and a rush of warm air came up around his ankle.

  He stepped down with both feet, pushing the slabs and splinters of glass aside. He stamped, with one foot at a time and then, holding onto the framework, with both. The inner pane cracked; he felt himself falling, and clutched hard at the framework. There was a wrench at his shoulders, then the balcony of the topmost window was coming up to meet him. He fell, and lay where he fell, looking up incuriously as a dim light came on inside.

  Someone came to the windows and opened them; he saw eyes staring and heard exclamations. Then he had the notion that he was being carried, and some time afterward, looked up to see Vivian Demetriou bending over him, her dark eyes depthless in the lamplight.

  It was a different bed, and a different room, but the impression was very strong that he was back in that bedroom after his fight with Ruell; he had a curious feeling that Clay had been here only a moment ago, but he was certainly not here now; there was no one in the room but Vivian and a servant girl moving quietly at the sideboard. She came across with a tray now, and Vivian took the ruby wineglass from it, dismissing her with a turn of the head.

  With a rustle, Vivian moved to the bed beside him and 44 The People Maker T 2558 leaned over to raise his head. She held the glass to his lips: it was tawny port, rich and warming on the tongue. His head rested in the curve of her arm; he could smell her scent, dry and fresh, like sandalwood.

  “Was it a walk on the roofs?” she asked softly.

  He closed his eyes briefly in assent.

  “It must have been terrible,” she said in the same drowsy half-whisper. Her brown satin negligee was open loosely down the front, lace-edged, and in the opening there was a shadowed gleam of flesh that moved liquidly when she moved. The rim of the glass touched his lower lip again; he shook his head.

  She set the glass down behind her and let his head fall gently back to the pillow. “And the other man?… Was he killed?”

  He nodded, conscious of the warm curve of her side that pressed against him as she breathed. His lips were sweet and sticky with the wine.

  Slowly she leaned nearer; slowly and deliberately her mouth descended on his.

  Chapter Fourteen

  On a fine morning in July, the Boss and some men of his inner circle were standing, dressed for the hunt, waiting to board the express car that would take them to the valley floor. The men of the circle had been scrupulously early; the Boss had been even later than usual, but now he seemed in no hurry. He stood at the edge of the terrace, a little separated from the group, staring out through the glass at the clear, bright arch of the sky, palest of blues, with a few high streaks of cirrus visible. A con-trail was slowly prolonging itself from left to right in the middle distance; the Boss watched it, absently pulling one glove tighter and then the other.

  The white line of vapor suddenly bloomed at the end: petals of gray sprouted and spread. There was an exclamation from someone in the group; heads turned.

  Seconds went by; then the glass rattled suddenly and fiercely to a rushing whoom of sound that passed overhead. “My God!” said someone. The gray cloud was diffusing; there were some descending streaks of vapor. The con-trail was still etched across the sky, ending now in a round blur. Lower down, three or four small craft began to converge toward a spot on the ground.

  The Boss turned his head slightly and asked a question; one of his secretaries scurried forward and answered it. Nothing more was said. The Boss signed for the car to be opened, and they all trooped aboard.

  Half an hour later, by chance, two of the men met beside the body of a freshly killed buck. It was in a stony clearing in the foothills south of Eagles; the airport was only a quarter of a mile away, invisible over the rise. The Boss’s helicopter, from which he had shot the buck, was hovering no
t far away. Two foresters were working over the body, poisoning it for the vultures that wheeled high overhead.

  “Those carrion eaters are getting to be a problem,” said Palmer, casually, reining his horse nearer. He was the Boss’s Transport Secretary, a choleric man with deceptively mild blue eyes.

  “They are,” said Cruikshank, stroking his red-gold whiskers. Both men glanced up, not at the vultures, but at the hovering copter.

  “Do you know who was on that plane?” Cruikshank asked.

  “Certainly. It was Rumsen, on his way back to Ischia.”

  “I was afraid of that,” said Cruikshank. He was the Secretary of the Army. “The question is now, what will the Duce do?”

  “Send another messenger next time, I suppose: that much is all to the good.”

  “No.” Cruikshank turned to look at him directly. “It’s a bad business, Gene. I’ve seen them go like this before. They’re like old rogues; they get the taste of it and can’t stop.”

  Palmer took out a cigarette and lit up, blinking at Cruikshank over the pale flame. “He’ll never kill anybody in Eagles. That’s an obsession with him.”

  “No,” but are you safe now?” He saw Palmer glance up involuntarily toward the dark shape in the copter. “Will you be safe tomorrow, or next month? You know he’s tired of slaves, Gene—he wants bigger game.”

  Palmer said, “I’ve got to think about it.”

  Cruikshank sat his horse quietly. The sun was warm on his shoulders; beyond Palmer, the buck’s filmed eyes stared up at him. It was a good buck, an eight-pointer. Files were clustered on the spot of blood that had welled from one nostril. It was a duped buck, of course; plentiful as game was in the surrounding country, they had to stock these few hundred acres for the Boss’s hunts. It even seemed to Cruikshank that there was something familiar about the buck; after all it was possible; how many times, he wondered, had this same buck died here in the sun?

  Palmer said, “If I thought there was any alternative—”

  Cruikshank said with gloomy satisfaction, “But there isn’t.”

  “I wonder if we’ll like the next one any better?”

  Cruikshank smiled grimly, gathering up the reins. The foresters were finished and walking toward their horses; the copter was drifting off to westward.

  “Julius, Augustus, Tiberius,” said Cruikshank under his breath, “Caligula, claudius, Nero …”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The patrol slogged down the stony mountain trail. The sun was burning overhead in a bright, clear sky. Bringing up the rear, Dick looked with distaste at the bobbing heads of the six foot-soldiers, the rumps of the two pack animals. His throat ached for water, but there was no use risking another rebuff by asking Lindley to halt the column while he refilled his canteen.

  The transport had dropped them with what seemed to Dick very short supplies. There was a rule, of course, against carrying a Gismo into hostile territory; they were “roughing it,” Lindley said.

  Up ahead, a voice was lifted in nasal song: “A girl who played poker with Tucker, was deathly afraid that—” Lindley, who looked frail as a pipestem, was enjoying himself.

  Two days ago, Clay had come to him with an air of suppressed excitement. “Dick, something big is about to happen.”

  “You mean the turnover?”

  “Hush! Yes, that’s what I mean. How did you know?”

  “You’ve been building me up to it for weeks, haven’t you? I wondered when you were going to say something.”

  “They wouldn’t let me be more definite till now. All right, look, this is your chance to get on the right side. There’s a man named Lindley in your regiment who’s about to be sent out on a routine mission. When he comes back, he’s going to get a promotion and a new assignment, to the Chief Armorer’s office. Now, we have to have a man in that spot, and it can’t be Lindley—he’s untrustworthy. So we’re going to get you assigned to that mission under Lindley. All you have to do is …make sure he doesn’t come back.”

  There was no question in Dick’s mind which side he was on, in spite of the traditional loyalty of Buckhill to the Boss’s family. Such considerations did not bother him at all. What was bothering him was this business of Lindley. It wasn’t that he liked the man, either: Lindley was a pale-haired, pink-skinned, popeyed man with an intensely irritating condescension of manner, and a really reptilian irony. It would actually be a pleasure to kill him …and that was the trouble.

  Whenever he thought about Buckhill—infrequently, nowadays, there was so much else to occupy his mind—he was sobered to realize how deeply he had changed in a matter of a few months. He could still remember the anguish and horror he had felt, that afternoon on the lawn, when Cashel fell.

  Now, that image was all blurred and mixed up with the memory of Keel’s body dropping into the moonlit canyon. Two duels, two deaths, and now he was being asked to bloody his hands again.

  What if he found he liked it? …

  Toward noon they stopped and broke out duped rations, watering the horses from a tiny stream that rushed down the valley side. Lindley, reclining at ease with his pack for a pillow, examined the hill above them through a pair of binoculars. “Ah,” he said suddenly. “Sergeant, take two boys and see if there’s anybody home up there—right there, above that big gray boulder.”

  The slob saluted, motioned to two others; in a few moments they were out of sight in the thick second growth of hemlock and spruce. Dick trained his own binoculars on the spot Lindley had indicated. All he could make out was a tangle of dead branches, like a heap of deadwood washed down in the spring floods, or like an impossibly big bird’s nest.

  After a while he saw the soldiers’ mottled green uniforms appear among the trees. Lindley’s squawk-box came to life and said, “Nobody here, misser.”

  “Anything inside?”

  “Just some junk, misser—couple of skins, bones. Garbage.”

  “All right,” Lindley said indifferently, “photograph it, leave a trap and come down.”

  Dick looked with puzzlement at the two Polaroid snapshots the sergeant brought back: they showed a man-high tangle of sticks, rudely interlaced, matted with dead leaves and mud. The interior view showed a few well-gnawed bones, probably of deer and rabbit, and a small heap of stiff-looking skins. There was a shard of pottery in the litter.

  “Ever see a lair like that?” Lindley asked, taking the pictures.

  “No, never. What kind of animal is it?”

  “Human animal,” said Lindley, scribbling on the backs of the snapshots. “Worst and most vile scavenger in the world. Poisonous bits, too. Well, we’ll surprise this one if he comes back. Probably he won’t.”

  “Are you saying that somebody lived in that pile of branches?”

  “House, if you please,” said Lindley, with his ironic popeyed stare. “Don’t they have anything like that in your part of the country?”

  “No. There are a few colonies of fishers in the swampland, but they live in something that looks like a house, at least—some even have chimneys.”

  “That’s because you keep the Indians out,” Lindley commented. “A mistake, if you don’t mind my saying so. Give me a nice clean Comanche any time.”

  Dick was staring up the hillside. “What do they do in the winter?”

  “Oh, starve. Freeze. They’ve forgotten how to make fire, you know. Some of them last through, eating all the grease they can get. There’s plenty of game, of course, but they can only catch cripples. Very bad nutrition. They have scurvy and rickets, not to mention lice, fleas, ticks and mites.” He looked at his watch. “Time to be moving. Sergeant, saddle up.”

  A few hours later they were filing into a steep little valley, past hillsides blue and fragrant with lupines, down to the foaming stream that sparkled under the cottonwoods. Dick saw a fish leap, a clean arc in the sunlight; the air was full of the thunder and spray of the water, the rocks in the stream glistened with it. He swallowed involuntarily, feeling an itch to dismount and c
lamber down among those stones.

  To his astonishment, Lindley gave the signal to halt. In a few moments, the horses were pegged out under the trees, two soldiers were scrambling for firewood, and Lindley himself was squatting tailor-fashion beside the stream, rummaging in his pack.

  “What now?” asked Dick, coming up.

  “Now,” said Lindley, fitting together the sections of a fly rod, “we wait. We are at the agreed spot, at the agreed time. Our contact may please himself to turn up today, or he may not. In the meantime—” he handed Dick the rod, and began to assemble another—”we fish.”

  Dick chose a colorful, wet fly from Lindley’s collection, and cast upstream with care, but little finesse was needed: the stream was swarming with trout. Between them they had landed a dozen in less than half an hour, all of the same species, unfamiliar to Dick, with red-spotted sides and a yellow dorsal fin.

  After dinner they lay at ease on their sleeping bags, watching the sky darken and the first stars come out. Crickets were thrumming in the fields above; a fresh, cool air drifted up from the stream, invisible now behind the dark tree-trunks. The dying fire glowed red. A little distance away, one of the tethered horses stamped and nickered. Lindley rolled over on one elbow; Dick saw his eyes glisten in the half-light.

  From up the slop came a hail: “Halt! Who goes there?”

  The answer came in a low, guttural voice: “Friend.”

  “Advance and be recognized, friend.”

  Lindley had his revolver in one hand; with the other, he stubbed out his cigarette in a shower of tiny red sparks. Dick sat up. At first he could see nothing, then he made out two shadowy forms descending the slope. At Lindley’s command, one of the other soldiers threw a handful of branches on the fire. The dry twigs balzed up; in the wavering light, Dick saw the approaching man’s face. It was flat and brown, the nose wide, the hair coarse and black under a dirty felt hat. Gold rings glittered in the man’s ears; he was dressed in a leather jacket and blue Levi’s that clung to his bandy legs.