A for Anything

by Damon Knight

  “I think I understand, mister,” said Dick. Curiosity was overcoming his resentment. So far all this was preliminary: what was going to happen next?

  “Now,” said Melker, folding his hands into a steeple. “We were agreed that it was desirable to make sure of Oliver before the turnover.”

  “But not about the methods of doing so,” put in collundra.

  “No. True.” Melker drew a deep breath; his shrewd eyes twinkled. “But I am able to tell you now that we have succeeded in what we regarded as the most desirable but least likely possibility.”

  The others were leaning forward, excitement showing in their faces. “Have you—?” said Belasco.

  “We have,” Melker said, “obtained the prote of the young lady in question, and have had her duped as one of a routine requisition of servant girls. She is in this suite now. Clay has been preparing him all morning, and when he judges Oliver is ripe for the meeting—Yes?”

  A dark-eyed man in Melker’s livery came forward and murmured something in his ear. “Good!” said Melker. “Men and ladies, the time is at hand. If you will gather around the TV, in a few moments you’ll see something interesting.”

  Dick found himself beside Melker as the group re-established itself on the other side of the room. The TV was on, showing a view of one of the small rooms in this same suite; but the room was empty. Judging by the camera angle, the pickup must be hidden in some piece of furniture, perhaps under a table.

  Melker grinned up at him with infectious good spirits. “You may possibly find yourself a little bewildered at all this?”

  “A little!” said Dick.

  “It’s a rare story. Perhaps we have just time for me to run over the high spots. Thaddeus Crawford, the man who built Eagles, married a slave girl. It wasn’t unusual in those times; the distinctions weren’t as rigidly drawn. She bore him a son, sickened and died; however, Thaddeus had taken the precaution of duping her when he first got her: after all, she was a slave.”

  “But his wife?” said Dick.

  “Oh, yes. Certainly. Well, mister, in his later years Thaddeus became somewhat, let us say unusual in his thinking. He grew obsessed by the fear of losing Eagles to upstarts: he wanted to ensure a succession of Thaddeuses. So he prevailed upon his son to marry the dupe of his own wife.”

  Dick could not repress a start of revulsion.

  “Just so; however, you see, technically it wasn’t incest—the dupe was a twenty-year-old girl; his mother had died at the age of twenty-five, fifteen years earlier. Well, mister, he married her and they had a son—the present Boss of Colorado. And she died. A congenital weakness, apparently. By this time a kind of tradition had been established, you see, and you know what tradition is in a big house; I believe there is even a widespread superstition that no man can hold Eagles who doesn’t marry the Bosswife. At any rate, our present Boss Thaddeus II, duped and married her when he was twenty-four. She had a son the same year—Oliver—and died in 2032. The joke is—” Melker grinned like a gargoyle, putting a skinny hand on Dick’s sleeve. “The joke is, genetically the idea is all wrong. Thaddeus’s son Edmond had half his mother’s genes, naturally. Edmond’s son, Thaddeus II, has three-quarters of his mother’s genes, and Oliver seven-eights. If this keeps up another few generations, the line will consist of nothing but genes inherited from the mother; not that that wouldn’t give a good deal of variation for a while; but poor Thaddeus—fft!” Melker waved his hand. “He might just have well have mated his wife to his butler.”

  Dick felt a stifening of the bodies around him, and Melker’s glance flickered away toward the screen.

  He turned. In the screen, Oliver and Clay had just walked into the room. Oliver was dressed in white and gold, gaudier than his usual costume; his hair was freshly coiffed and he looked pale. His lips moved, but whatever he said was lost in the rustle of movement.

  “Sh!” said Miss Flavin, angrily. The group quieted.

  “Wait here just a minute,” Clay’s voice said. “I’ll have her brought in.”

  He left the room. Oliver glanced around nervously, one hand on the engraved metal stick he wore, the other fidgeting with the lace at his throat. He flung himself down on a divan, stared blankly at a picture on the wall—one side of it was visible in the screen; it was Frans Hals’ “Laughing Cavalier”—then got up again and began pacing back and forth.

  Beside Dick, Melker was breathing stridently. He glanced that way; Melker’s eyes were bright, his parted lips moist. “His mother died when he was six,” he whispered. “Watch him now: watch him!”

  Oliver turned at some sound not audible in the screen. After a moment, there was movement: a person advanced slowly into the room.

  Like the rest,Dick strained idiotically to see around the side of the TV screen. In a moment, she moved again: the girl took another hesitant step forward, and stood looking speechlessly at Oliver.

  She was dressed in the puff-skirted formal costume that had been popular in Eagles twenty years ago; there was something about the arrangement of her pale blonde hair that was even older. She was slender and awkward, and her long, green eyes gazed at Oliver with a kind of numb astonishment. Her parted lips quivered as if they had forgotten there were such things as words.

  Oliver went down slowly on his knees. His arms lifted helplessly. “Oh, Mama!” he said. “Mama Elaine!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dick awoke to a thunder of running footsteps in the corridor; screams, the crash of glass. He sat up, heart pounding. He blinked as lights flared on in the outer rooms. A door slammed.

  “Who’s that?” he called. “What is it?”

  Alex came running into view, his thin face scared and paper-white. “Oh, misser, misser, they are killing people in the corridors!”

  There was a distant explosion that jarred the floor. Then more screams, farther away. Dick got out of bed, thinking furiously. Turnover Day had been put off again and again, in spite of Melker’s good intentions; the last Dick had heard, it was set for three days in the future.

  Either they had started it prematurely, without warning him, or else there had been a slip-up and the turnover was betrayed.

  The valet, shaking but still correct, was holding out his trousers. If only he knew more! “Tell me what you saw, Alex. No, not those—the dress uniform.”

  “Misser, it was terrible. I was in the Long Corridor, on my way to the Gismo Room for the morning quota. I heard explosions, like it was gunshots. I turned around, all the people was staring, they couldn’t believe their eyes. There was running a man, and then just by the little gold fountain, there was another gunshots, and he fell down. It was like a terrible, terrible dream. And the blood, you have no idea …”

  “Who shot him?”

  “I didn’t see. I ran. But in our corridor, Misser Jones, it came gunshots again, and then I saw a whole lot of men running, with guns in their hands. And behind them, the red ones, shooting.”

  “Household Guards?”

  “Yes. Shooting, shooting, shooting—I thought they would kill me. Two they did kill, they are lying there in the corridor. I saw also the black ones, Gismo Guards; but then I came in before they could shoot me. Misser Jones, what is going to happen?”

  “Hell!” said Dick, jerking at the elbow-chain attached to his belt. It wouldn’t give, and then it did. He pulled the chain through the sleeve, then did the same for the other side. Wherever he was going, he might need his arms free.

  He knew one thing, at any rate: if the Guards were chasing conspirators, it was all up; one way or another, the attempt had failed. The only question was, how much did they know? If they had all the names, it was just a matter of time before they picked him up. The best thing he could do would be to try to get out of Eagles as fast as possible.

  But if they didn’t have his name, and he ran, it would be an admission of guilt; whereas if he brazened it out, he might have a chance.

  In the corridor were two dead bodies, both huddled against the blood-sp
attered wall. Dick recognized one of them; it was Thor Swenson, with whom he had been drinking beer only the night before last. The funny thing was, he hadn’t known Thor was in the conspiracy.

  Up in the Long Corridor there were more bodies, both sexes, slobs as well as people.

  An incongruous memory came into his mind, for no reason that he could see: the dead mongrel, back at Buckhill on his last day, with the little slob boy kneeling in tears over it.

  He listened. There was no more firing, nothing to be heard except a faint, cadenced marching and a rumble of wheels that grew slowly louder. He heard a voice shouting orders. Out of a cross corridor suddenly appeared a squad of Household Guards with two field artillery pieces. Dick saw the officer in charge glance sharply in his direction, and felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. It occurred to him for the first time that an Army uniform might be no protection at all; the Army had been deeply infiltrated, and it was ten to one that some of the conspirators had been in uniform when the fighting broke out.

  He didn’t hesitate. He strode toward the officer, bringing his heels down hard. The guards were wrestling the two field pieces around back to back, to sweep the corridor in both directions. The Officer raised his pistol. “Halt. Identify yourself.”

  “Lieutenant,” said Dick firmly but respectfully, “there’s some mistake here. General Myer is about to set up an artillery post in that same spot—he went off to see about requisitions not fifteen minutes ago. I’m his adjutant, Lieutenant Jones.”

  “I take my orders from Home Guard H.Q.,” said the other, lowering his pistol. “Where’s your sidearm?”

  “We haven’t been issued any yet. Look, Lieutenant, you haven’t got enough men for this operation anyhow. You could be enfiladed from that cross corridor.”

  “We hold that, clear back to the Arcades,” said the Guard officer, but his tone sounded a little less surly. “You Army puffs have got lead in your scuts, like always. Hell, it’s all over—we’re just here in case. You tell your General Myer—”

  He was interrupted by a stentorian voice that shouted, “Your attention! Your attention! There has been an attempt on the life and property of the Boss. All of the ringleaders have been killed or captured by the alertness of the Household Guard. However, some minor members of the gang are still at large. Stay in your present locations until a room to room search can be completed.” By craning his neck, Dick could see the source of the voice, a public telescreen in the plaza just ahead. Even from this angle, the picture was clear though distorted. The camera was panning over the heaped bodies of men sprawled in the Armory Courtyard; the bronze Fountain of Commemoration was visible in the background. Dick saw Melker’s gnomish face, with all the meaning gone out of it. Blood was matted in his forked beard.

  The camera panned up, and he saw a group of people standing near the wall, with their hands tied behind them. One of them was Clay; he glanced at the camera without expression, and looked away.

  The camera moved on. Twirling slowly in the air, trussed up by the legs like a fowl from the balcony railing, was another body. With difficulty, Dick recognized the upsidedown face.

  It was Oliver.

  The voice boomed out again: “One of the missing gang members is a woman, age about twenty, hair blonde, complexion fair, eyes gray-green. Any person found harboring this woman will be shot. Any person delivering this woman alive or furnishing information where she may be found, will be rewarded according to status, with quota advancement or high office. Any servant delivering this woman or providing such information, will be rewarded with free status.”

  The Guard lieutenant whistled under his breath. His loutish face was suddenly drawn and intent. Behind him, all the other guards were looking up with the same expression. They were all slaves, of course; a special kind of slave, with the privilege of bearing arms in Eagles, which made them in some ways superior to any free man; but you could see that any of them would give an arm or a leg to be a person. It almost never happened; it was a measure of the woman’s importance to the Boss, that he should offer it.

  The woman was Elaine. There was no doubt of that, from the description. It was natural for the Boss to want her accounted for—any idiot who had her might think himself qualified to lead another revolt. But if that were all, would he take the risk of manumitting slaves?

  There was another possible explanation. When Melker’s group had obtained a dupe of Elaine, they might have destroyed or hidden the prote at the same time. Misfiling it would have been enough: it would take forever to find one misfiled prote among the billions.

  If that were so, then even if Dick’s name was on the black-list—when things settled down, if he returned with the Bosswife, that might be enough to buy his immunity. It was something: it was a chance.

  Feeling the Guards’ eyes on him, he glanced at his watch. “I suppose the plans have been changed again,” he said. “I’d better go and check.”

  The Guard lieutenant nodded gloomily. Dick turned and walked away.

  Which way? He had to decide quickly: but the girl might have taken any of dozens of exits from the sector of Melker’s suite. There were uncountable nooks and crannies; he had less than a chance in a thousand of guessing the right one.

  But when he stopped wondering where the girl might be, and thought of his own danger, he had only one instinct: down.

  So much the better. To track a deer, you had to be a deer. Dick boarded the down escalator at the next plaza, thinking, I’m frightened. I’ve got to hide—get out of sight, or they’ll kill me. Down. Down deep. Make myself small and pull the covers over my head.

  Now he was on the lowest residential level. The corridors were beginning to fill up here; he passed a roving squad of Guards, and remembered just in time to straighten his back and let his footsteps fall hard. They looked at him sharply, but let him go: he was a man in uniform, moving as if he had a legitimate errand.

  Looking for a way down, he saw a door he must have passed a hundred times without seeing it: two swinging panels, with the green stencilled design that meant: SLOB COUNTRY.

  He pushed the door open and was in another world. Dim lights shone on the grime of the high ceilings; the walls were of unfinished cement, and the floors were bare except for catwalks of rubber mats laid end to end. A hum of voices and movement greeted him, together with a breath of stale air, freighted with sour, old smells. For an instant, it was like being back in the holy man’s cave, and Dick had a curious sense of double vision—the dusty fluorescents overhead, and a flickering, oil-soaked wick below; grime and soot intermingling. Then it passed, and he was moving down the main corridor. Half-dressed slobs looked up sleepily from their bunks as he passed an open doorway. From another came the clangor of tinware and a steamy smell with soap and rotten cloth in it. An old fellow in yellow denims came by, pushing a wheeled rack full of kitchenware. Dick stopped him roughly:

  “Where’s the exit to the lower level?”

  “Misser,” said the fellow, looking frightened, “there isn’t one, excuse me, except the one that has the seal on it. Nobody goes here to below, it’s forbidden. It’s forbidden. It’s the Boss’s own seal, I will show you.”

  He scurried ahead, abandoning the cart, and Dick followed into the next corridor and down a half-flight of stairs. The door was grimy with disuse. It was fastened with a hasp and a padlock; the padlock had an embossed design which Dick could feel with his thumb: a “C” with a finicky shape above it, probably an eagle.

  “Get ’me some tools,” he said. “A cold chisel and a hammer. I want that door open in less than five minutes.”

  “Misser, we have no requisition—”

  “Get ‘em!” shouted Dick. The old fellow ducked away with a gesture of despair.

  In a few minutes he was back, in the center of a little knot of other servants. One of them, inevitably, was Frankie. The gargoyle was carrying a toolbox. He looked unhappy. “Misser Jones, you know we not suppose to open that door without the word from the Bos
s heself. If you got the word—”

  “There wasn’t time for that,” said Dick. “This is an emergency. Here—” He felt in his pockets, found a scrap of paper. “Give me a pencil, I’ll sign for it.”

  Frankie handed over the stub of a carpenter’s pencil, looking dubious. Dick scrawled, “I take responsibility for opening door in servant quarters,” and signed it. The slobs looked at it with varying degrees of incomprehension; probably few of them could read or write. Frankie looked unhappier than ever, but carefully folded the paper away, and took a chisel and sledge out of his toolbox. Three powerful strokes sheared through one arm of the staple that held the padlock. Frankie worked the lock free and stood back, holding it in his palm.

  Dick opened the door, saw a glimmer of light at the end of a short passage. “Lock this up again behind me,” he said, and stepped through.

  At the end of the passage, he found himself in a wide, empty hall. The dim lights in the ceiling were not even fluorescents, but old-fashioned incandescent bulbs; they cast a sickly orange glow that left the place almost in darkness. The air was heavy and still. Silence closed in.

  Dick felt alone and a little foolish. Suppose the girl hadn’t come here at all? Through that door, at least, nobody had come for years. But there were hundreds of possible entrances; if he had stopped to test his hunch by checking each one, it would have taken him forever. Now, at least, he was here; if she had come this way, it ought to be an easy matter to pick up her trail on this side.

  He stooped: in the thick carpet of dust there were footprints, but none looked recent. At one side of the room stood several abandoned hand trucks; there were loading bays in the far wall, closed now by metal doors. To right and left were open doorways; nothing was visible through either except darkness, picked out faintly at intervals by more dim yellowish lights.

  Dick followed the left-hand corridor past still other doorways, some closed and locked, some open. Through the open doorways, in the dim light, he glimpsed piled, enigmatic masses: once he reached inside and felt the curved smoothness of a table leg. These evidently, were disused storerooms, full of articles once prized but now forgotten. A disturbing echo of memory awakened: Ruell, saying, “He collects collections …This whole mountain, in fact …” How deep did these subterranean storerooms go?