A for Anything

by Damon Knight

  Guided by some obscure compulsion, he took the first stairway down.

  He found himself in a clutter of objects piled helter-skelter: tables, sofas, chairs thrusting their legs at him; books sliding and squirming under foot as he moved, lamp shades shaking down clouds of dust.

  In the distance, someone sneezed.

  The sound echoed and re-echoed under the vaulted ceilings. Dick held his breath, listening, and after a moment heard a faraway, sliding clatter. Someone …someone …. Who else could it be?

  He moved forward cautiously, trying to avoid making any noise, but it was useless. A tilted chair slid out from under him, and his foot went through a fragile table-top with a crunching, rending sound.

  Instantly, somewhere in the distance, there was a crash and a scurrying noise. Dick swore, wrenched the table-top loose, and clambered in pursuit. His heart was racing; he vaulted a fallen bookcase, danced precariously in a nest of chairs, climbed an up-ended divan. He stopped to listen.

  Faintly, in the distance: clatter, crash.

  For what seemed like hours, the chase went on. Dick fought his way a few yards at a time through the tangle of furniture and crates; stopped to listen; plunged forward again. Soaked with sweat, gasping like a fish in the stagnant air, he paused with one leg up over the ridge of a mountainous sideboard. There was no sound. He gulped air, held his breath for a moment: still nothing but the pounding of blood in his own ears.

  He stared from side to side. In all the vast sea of tablelegs, headboards, mirrors, there was no movement under the dim lights. Impossible that she could have escaped from the vault: the nearest doors were almost invisible in the distance. She had gone to ground: she might be anywhere in that hard-wood jungle—crouching under a table, or inside a buried wardrobe; lying still trying not to let him hear her breathing, like a rabbit in a hedge.

  He waited, in hopes she would lose her nerve and bolt again, until he had his breath back. Then he began to move slowly and carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible. He quartered the ground patiently, pausing frequently to listen. On the third cast, a tiny sound broke the silence—the faint creak of wood. Probably she had shifted her position. Not everybody could stand lying still on a hard surface for long.

  There was an open crate full of glass-shaded lamps nearby. He took a chance: he lifted one out, a dusty dumb-bell-shaped thing, and lobbed it in the direction he thought the sound had come from. It burst with a startling crash. Shards tinkled all around.

  Sharp-eyed, Dick saw a convulsive movement in the forest of chair-legs. He vaulted an Empire sofa, zigzagged precariously across stacks of nested tables, and found himself looking down into a hollow under a big desk. Curled in the hollow, looking up at him with frightened eyes, was the girl.

  “All right, come out,” he said.

  She rose slowly, dusty and tousled in the dim light. There was something curiously pathetic about her thinness, and the smudge of dirt on one cheek. She had ripped half the skirt off her antique dress, he saw: it was not the costume for scrambling around in the storage cellars.

  Her frightened expression changed, doubtfully. “Oh, aren’t you—”

  “Dick Jones. That’s right.” They had met once, at the last briefing, but only for a minute.

  She was trying to laugh. “Well, then, why didn’t you say so? I mean, all this—” She gestured helplessly.

  “Would you have believed me if I’d told you who I was?” he asked smoothly. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  She put her hand in his; her palm was cool and soft. “Where are we going?” she asked as he helped her up. She brushed her long hair back from her forehead. “Can we go back up now? Golly, I must look like an awful mess.”

  Dick improvised lies about turnover, which she seemed to accept without question. How young she was! His mind kept coming back to that, newly astonished by the gawky slenderness of her body, or the innocence that showed itself in every word she spoke. Had he ever been that dumb, even back at Buckhill? It seemed unlikely.

  He tried to steer a course for the door he had come in by, but when they reached it, it was the wrong one. There was a short stair going down, none going up. A stronger glow of light came from the landing.

  The way might be clearer one level down: heaven knew, they could waste days fighting their way through that tangle of furniture, “Come on,” he said, taking her arm.

  Downstairs there was another vault, illimitable, misty under the bluish ceiling lights. Crates and stacks of all sizes stood at random, but at least there was some space to move between them. Also, there were tracks in the dust that looked recent.

  Dick frowned over this. He did not like the idea of meeting anyone before he could get back to the authorities with his prisoner: some officious nobody was likely to take him for the girl’s accomplice instead of her captor. However, it was worth the risk to get out of here that much faster. Somewhere on this vast floor there must be an elevator or a stair going up.

  Still, the aisle grew narrower and more erratic the farther they went, and the things in the crates began to get very queer, too. Here was a box taller than their heads, through whose dusty, plastic sides they could see, as if frozen in a dirty block of ice, a heap of stuffed animals—rumpled velvet pelts, button eyes staring, threadbare paws. There were teddy bears, elephants, tigers, lions, monkeys …all used-looking, not collector’s items by any stretch of the imagination, but just junk.

  Here was a long case full of books in individual plastic envelopes. Some of the bindings were good, some were even elaborately tooled, but others were scuffed, cracked and torn. Dick paused to read a few of the titles: Treasure Island; Ozma of Oz; Pepper and Salt. Then there was a row of narrow volumes with nothing on the spines but a monogram, “TC.” One was rat-gnawed; Dick took it down, pulled the envelope off, and opened it in the middle. Under an exercise in square roots, in a boyish hand, was a riddle:

  “What has 22 legs and flies? Ans.: A dead football team.”

  Under that, a drawing of a knife, the pencil lines deeply scored. Dick shut the book and put it back.

  “What is all this?” the girl asked. “Do you know?”

  “It looks as if he never threw anything away,” said Dick. He glanced at her curiously. Her face was unconcerned; she looked back at him with a tremulous smile—more aware of him than of anything so remote as the Boss’s boyhood.

  Curious to think that she had given birth to that boy, who was now the gray toad who ruled Eagles. In fact, if Thaddeus II had been nine or so when that journal was written, then she must have been dead for about four years …. It made him a little dizzy to think about it. All that, so deep now in the past, was nothing but an unrealized future to her: she was twenty again, and looked about eighteen; the best thing that could happen to her, he supposed, was to go through it all over again. A good thing for her that she didn’t know.

  The floor seemed endless. The sounds of their footsteps were muffled; there was a gray musty smell in the air—a smell of papers turning dusty and brittle, packed away out of the light. Everywhere stood the plastic-sided boxes and bundles, some still whole, some not. Then the character of the place began to change. They were passing a row of little buildings, standing isolated like so many crates, some faced with stone or brick on one side, bare wood and plaster on the rest. One had a sign over it, “STRIPPEL’S DRUGS”; the door had been carefully sealed, but the glass was broken out of it.

  “Can’t we sit down and rest for a minute?” the girl asked. “I’m so tired, I could just die.”

  Against the dimness inside, he could see the outlines of a table and chairs. “Careful.” With a hand on her elbow, he helped her through the broken door, bits of glass snapping underfoot. The chairs were of flimsy wood, cheap twentieth century stuff, but they seemed sound, and there was not even very much dust. Probably the interior had been sealed and filled with inert gas until recently.

  They sat down, surrounded on all sides by racks, display cases, pigeonh
oles: candy here, greeting cards, boxes of film over there, yellowing magazines and paperbacked books. The counters were crowded with cardboard displays; some had fallen to the floor. Dick idly picked one up; there were a few tiny bags of peanuts clipped to the front of it. On the back he read: “Say! Mr. Retailer! Here’s a colorful counter display box that has been designed expressly to help you make MORE SALES and MORE PROFITS ….”A reconstruction, probably; hardly anything of this kind had survived through the Turnover years.

  He was surprised to see the girl’s eyes glistening with tears. “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” she said thickly. She leaned her head on one hand, rubbing the heel into her eye. The posture made her neck and shoulders look absurdly fragile; he had an impulse to put his arm around her. Her pale lashes were quite thick and long; he saw; they didn’t show when she was looking up. “Don’t mind me, I’m just being silly.” Her lips were swollen, her cheeks softly flushed.

  The chair legs skreeked on the floor. He did put his arm around her. She was soft and slender; her fine hair tickled his chin. After a few moments, she gently pushed him away. “Have you got a kleenex—I mean a tish?”

  He handed her one; she blew her nose, dabbed at her eyes. She tried to smile at him. “Don’t look, I must look so awful.” It was true—her face was swollen and pink, her eyes swimmy, lips puffed—and yet something ached yearningly in his chest. I’m falling in love, he thought incredulously.

  He recognized the symptoms, although it had never happened to him before. Her features, which had seemed perfectly ordinary half an hour ago, were now unique. He saw that some of them were not particularly beautiful—her ears, for instance—but this simply gave him a feeling of pleasure and pride. Anybody could appreciate her obvious points; he loved everything about her.

  Part of him was dismayed by these thoughts—there was no sense nor reason in them—but the rest of him was happily conjuring up new ones, the more irrational, the better. Would he perform menial services for her?—tend her when she was sick, bathe her, feed her, dress her? Yes, gladly. Would he give his life for her? He boggled at that one, but then a fresh wave of feeling took him: maybe he would. His next reaction was one of horror: love was a horrible thing if it could make you destroy yourself. But somehow the horror only added to his pleasure.

  She said apologetically, “I haven’t even thought about drugstores for years. It was just so unexpected.” She looked around, biting her lip. “Carter’s Little Liver Pills. Oh, my. And there’s the fountain. I don’t suppose it really works.”

  She was looking at the dingy marble counter with the stools in front and the mirror behind. “Works?” said Dick.

  “I mean, we couldn’t make an ice cream soda, or anything. But maybe there would be some water? I’m awfully thirsty.”

  “I’ll see,” Dick said, and got up quickly. There were two taps over a slotted metal plate, and he tried them both, but nothing came out. “No, it’s dry.” Behind the counter he saw a bottle in a half-open compartment, and picked it up. “Here’s some ginger ale, though.”

  “Oh, that would be lovely.”

  He opened the bottle and used part of the contents to rinse out two glasses. Then he filled them and brought them to the table.

  She made a little face. “It’s flat, isn’t it? But nice,” she added quickly, and drank some more. She set the glass down. “I’m glad you found me. I recognized you right away—and did I feel relieved!”

  “You did?”

  “Oh, yes. You have a very distinctive face. I always remember faces. Yours is so square and serious looking. And you have those bushy eyebrows that go up—she twirled a forefinger—“at the corners.” She was smiling at him, but her eyes were still hazy with tears. “I used to know a boy who had eyebrows like that. His name was Jimmy Bowen. You remind me of him quite a bit.”

  Dick felt a curious glow of pleasure, and a stab of suspicion. “Where was that?”

  “Back at Dunrovin—Mr. Krasnow’s estate. My father was the head of the greenhouse there. I don’t suppose you ever heard of it; they say it isn’t there any more.” She looked melancholy again. “Jimmy and I wanted to get married, but Daddy thought he wasn’t good enough for me. Then Mr. Sinescu came and saw me, and brought me back here. Of course, all this wasn’t built then. There was just the one big building on top of the mountain.” She shuddered delicately. “Mr. Crawford was going to marry me, they told me afterward; I think I must have guessed it, and that was what made me fall into my deep sleep.”

  “Sleep?” said Dick curiously. It was enough just to, listen to her, but that word had jogged his attention.

  “Why, didn’t you know? It’s the craziest thing—I slept over seventy years! I don’t believe it ever happened to a human before, but they say frogs do it. I didn’t wake up till just, let’s see, about three weeks ago. I couldn’t believe it, till they showed me all this—” She waved her hands; her eyes glittered with excitement, and her teeth gleamed white. “It was just like a dream.”

  “Then you mean they didn’t dupe you?” Dick asked incredulously.

  “Oh, no. They were going to, but I fell asleep first, and then they couldn’t, you see. That was lucky; I wouldn’t want to be duped, would you?”

  Dick shook his head miserably. He saw it now: she thought she was the original Elaine; she refused to believe she was a dupe, and so she had invented this deep-sleep story and managed to convice herself it was true. There was something pathetic about it; it reminded him of what he had been trying to forget.

  This was the fourth Elaine. She was twenty years old, and the other three had all died at twenty-five.

  This time it would be different, he told himself fiercely. The thing was, he didn’t know what the others had died of: it might have been something to do with childbirth. Or it might be something she had now, without knowing—something that could be cured, now, if anyone took the trouble.

  At any rate, the chain was broken—she was never going to marry Oliver. He would have to improvise as he went along—get her out of here somehow without running into the Guards, smuggle her out of Eagles …and, he realized suddenly, probably off the continent. It wouldn’t be safe to bring her home to Buckhill, except perhaps years later …He had a brief formless vision of his mother and father: But who are her people? Do you mean to say she is a dupe? A slave?

  He shrugged the thought aside irritably. He couldn’t stop to worry about that now, he had too much else on his mind. If only this damned irrational thing hadn’t happened to him …He had a mental glimpse of how it might have been—his delivering the girl to the Household officials, being congratulated for discretion, perhaps by the Boss in person; preferment, honors, steps up the ladder—planks in the wall that held Buckhill strong and safe.

  Almost, he wavered. But he saw Elaine looking at him with her level green eyes; strange, strange, how there was always more meaning in her eyes than in what she said; and he put all that behind him.

  There was a scuffling noise at the door. He turned, heart jumping with alarm, but it was only the gargoyle, Frankie—two of him, dressed in gray jumpers and carrying satchels.

  He relaxed almost immediately. The Frankies were unarmed—of course—and no guards were coming into view behind them. They must have been sent into the vaults on some routine errand, perhaps to unearth some particular specimen for the Boss’s display collections. Still, it seemed odd somehow to meet anyone in this untenanted maze ….It was curious, too, how slowly they seemed to be coming forward, like figures under water. Their solemn expressions did not change, but bloomed toward him with a sort of incandescent meaning. Eyes, noses, mouths were as if lit from behind; Dick, forgetting who and where they were, could only stare at them in hopes of deciphering the riddle.

  The last thing he heard was a sound that vaguely alarmed him, one that he had been half-noticing for some time; the faint, steady hissing of escaping air.

  Chapter Eighteen

  He and Adam had drifted ov
er the deepest part of the lake, and, for a dare, he had slipped over the side of the boat, down, down to the vaguely glimmering greenish bottom, weedy and dim. Now he was coming up, but it was a long way: he could see the bottom of the boat in a little circle of light, far overhead. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer. He schooled himself to kick slowly and evenly. His hurting chest tried to breathe in spite of him; he tightened his jaw and pinched his nose between finger and thumb. There was a drumming in his ears… .

  He came up with a gasp and a shudder. For a moment the illusion was still so strong that he felt the cold water streaming from his hair; then he saw that he was in a white room, and felt the cushiony hardness of a bed under his back. The light was an old fluorescent, in a bare ceiling. There was movement, a rustle of paper; a figure came toward him.

  It was Frankie. “Feeling better?” the gargoyle asked.

  “I guess so. My head hurts. What happened?”

  Frankie grinned. “The argon knocked you out, misser. Soon as we come in the door, over you go, blam.”

  “The argon?” said Dick stupidly.

  “In the little drugstore. All those places got a little trickle of argon coming in all the time, to take care of the leakage. We never bothered to plug it up, you know, because it don’t bother you if you just go in for a minute.”

  A concentration must have built up, he thought fuzzily; argon wasn’t poisonous, but if there was enough of it in the air, it could asphyxiate you. That had been his mistake; he had taken it for granted that the place had aired out; otherwise he never would have—

  He sat up suddenly. “Where’s Elaine?”