A for Anything

by Damon Knight

  The crowd closed in, and Dick saw no more.

  Chapter Twenty

  For hours the crowds had been roaring through the corridors of Eagles. Once started, it went on and on, incredibly, without a pause. At first the Frankies had tried to control the mob by exhorting them over the loudspeakers; then they had thrown up barriers across the main corridors. The mob had rolled over them; some Frankies had been killed. Now the rest were staying out of harm’s way, on balconies and other perches in plain view, watching. The sound of the crowd never stopped, never varied, and it was a dreadful thing to hear: a rushing, roaring, inhuman sound, beating like surf at the eardrums, with a high, almost inaudible, nerve-grating treble of hysteria in it.

  From insulting and killing freemen in the corridors, the mob had progressed to breaking down doors of private apartments, and for a while the booming of sledges had punctuated the uproar, with the crowds swarming suddenly around a door that had gone down, the corridors half-emptying, and then after ten minutes or half an hour of insensate destruction, the crowds would swarm out again until the whole thing repeated itself somewhere else.

  Towards midnight, the Gismo Guards had fought a pitched battle in the Lower Mezzanine, using mortars, grenades and small arms. Someone had blasted down half the ceiling on top of them, and the concussion had been felt everywhere in Eagles. A little later, some of the slaves had begun turning up with Gismoed weapons, but by then there were no freemen left to kill.

  The mob swept on. It was not satisfied by the massacre it had done all that afternoon, by the hundreds of corpses, men, women and children mangled and dismembered. It pulled down hangings, broke furniture into splinters, ripped paneling off walls, smashed lamps and ornaments, tore books. One fire after another billowed greasy, choking white smoke out into the corridors. The Frankies fought them with Gismo-fed extinguishers and hoses; the corridors streamed water and blood. The fires died, leaving a wet, acrid reek and a black mud of ash; the crowd roared on.

  Every window had been smashed, and the cold air of the heights searched in through the doors hanging awry on their jambs; papers blew in gusts down the corridors between the hurrying figures, and the garments of corpses lifted in the wind. Some of the crowd had axes now, the sledges were in use again, and great strips of metal paneling came down with a clatter; masonry fell in choking clouds, marble cracked and thundered.

  Transfigured faces shone in the broken light: eyes wide and aglitter, mouths grinning—masks of cruelty and triumph, all fixed and all alike. They recognized one another only by their common expression: gardener and room girl, valet, cook and craftsman, they mingled indistinguishably, running and stumbling without fatigue, staring as if drugged, croaking at each other out of their parrot-grins; grimed, shiny with sweat, bloody, blackened and staring, staring.

  Dick was one of them. Dressed in rags torn from a dead slave, his face and hands filthy, he ran with the rest. The faces floating around him were like reflections of his own. He had been running and shouting for hours, but he felt no tiredness, and he did not notice that only a hoarse whisper came out of his throat now.

  At the beginning, when he had robbed the corpses of clothing for Elaine and himself, he had known that only one disguise would really work: to be one of the mob, to feel what they felt, to think what they thought. He had tried to tell her before they went out into the corridor; there had not been much time. They had been separated almost at once. He had not seen her since.

  He had known that the only way to survive was to become one of the hunters. He had done so. He had no identity now, no anxieties for himself, no feeling of separation from the mob around him. Elaine was only a dim figure in the back of his mind. He was a drifting yell, a bright light moving, a brain full of violence and noise looking for more.

  He remembered capering in the Big Plaza, holding something round and dark and shapeless that swung by its long black hair from his fist; and the shouting, joyful faces, the arms and bodies leaping to take it away from him. Then somehow he had got into the Gismo Rooms under the Guard barracks, and in the light of one unbroken fluorescent, someone was passing out bundles of dynamite sticks to the crowd, but he had seen a pickaxe and had taken it instead; and then, without any transition, he was in the Elwyn Conservatory half a mile away swinging his pick crazily through the polished glass screens that stood everywhere, hearing them scream and clatter, seeing the gashed trunks and branches full of glittering shards.

  Then there was the time the man came running across the floor, hoarsely shouting, with a woman in his arms, and dashed himself against the cracked Promenade window, breaking it, and fell into the darkness outside… . The running footsteps, the shout, “Yahhh!” and the crash. The footsteps, “Yahhh!” crash of glass, kept going meaninglessly through his brain.

  There was a heavy explosion somewhere below, and the floor bounced as if hit with a giant hammer, knocking him off his feet. He climbed erect again, a little sobered and stunned, seeing the faces around him half shocked to reason for a moment. They were in the New Gallery, and he saw the smashed picture frames hanging empty from the walls. Then the crowd was up, confused, in movement now in a new direction, down the steep ramp to the plaza behind the Sports-garden, running hard at the bottom, and exploding out across the empty plaza, mixing with another stream of people on the far side, scattering unexpectedly in a dozen directions—some across the arcade into Jewelers’ Courts, some down the tunnel toward the museum annex, some into the little rabbit-warren corridors that branched every which way from the end of the plaza. Dick found himself, breathing heavily, in a dark low corridor of empty shop window-frames, littered with bits of glass and paper. Footsteps crunched rapidly away into the distance; he was alone.

  Across the corridor was a telebooth, doorless, the broken picture tube like a blind eye. On a sudden impulse, Dick lurched over to it and pushed the buttons for a scramble call. The speakers hummed faintly; the circuits were alive, anyhow. Nothing else happened, and when he punched the combination for a relay broadcast outside Eagles, there was no response: naturally, you couldn’t use these booths for outside calls unless special circuits were set up through Central Monitoring. He thought about that, aware of his own harsh breathing as he leaned with both hands over the control panel in the dark little booth. His body was beginning to feel numb with fatigue, now that he had stopped; he was sweating as he leaned there in the dark, orienting himself. Central was only two levels down; it would be easy to get there, but was the chance worth taking? He knew it was dangerous to be out of the crowd like this, out of the protective crowd feeling, but it was also a chance he might not get again.

  Dick hesitated, then levered himself wearily upright and broke into a leaden run down the corridor, setting his face into a staring blankness.

  Central was a huge room full of wreckage. All but a few of the picture tubes along the walls had been broken, and the control panels had been attacked apparently with axes—wiring and components chopped into, drawers opened and the contents spilled, chairs and tables overturned. Dick wedged the door shut and went feverishly from one board to another, trying to find one that was still in operating condition. It looked hopeless; the mobs must have torn through here not once, but half a dozen times.

  He stood staring in frustration at the ruined panels. Then he walked slowly once more around the room.

  In the corner by the door was a heap of wreckage larger than the rest, where two cabinets had been toppled over, their contents spilling out. He stirred the heap with his foot; under the sliding rubble of glass and pasteboard there was a gleam of something big and undamaged. He fished it out: it was a portable TV, of the kind used for intramural broadcasts in Eagles—six inches square by eight deep, with its own power pack and antenna, completely undamaged, not even a scratch on it.

  He pried open the back, hunted up two adapter cables, and attached them to the TV’s binding posts. Time was passing. He trotted back to the control panels, found two jacks marked “BCAST” and “RCVE,”
and plugged the TV in.

  The screen lighted up. It was Channel 3, one of the usual adventure films; he caught a glimpse of a man being bowled over and shaken by a lion. He dialed quickly to Channel 9.

  The screen flickered, steadied to show a gray card with a white lettering: “ALL CIRCUITS BUSY.” The switchboard’s recorded voice said, “This is Rocky Mountain Relay. All circuits are busy, please stand by.”

  He waited impatiently. The visual display stayed the same; the recorded message repeated itself every few seconds. At last the screen flickered and cleared again: another card, lettered, “YOUR CALL PLEASE.” The voice said, “This is Rocky Mountain Relay. Please give your call clearly, naming place and location.”

  Dick said, “Buckhill, in the Poconos.” He added, “Urgent!”

  The display changed to read, “THANK YOU.” The voice said. “Thank you. Your call is now being relayed. Please stand by.”

  A minute or more passed. The display changed to read, “SIGNALING,” with a disc that lighted up and went out, lighted and went out.

  After a long interval, the screen flickered and cleared again. Something dark was being withdrawn from the screen; Dick glimpsed a tall figure against the background of a familiar room. He said, “Dad—”

  His voice stopped. The figure in the screen was not his father; realizing that, he saw that the tower room was in wreckage, papers spilled from the desk, windows and casements shattered. Then he saw who it was: one of the garden slobs, a big buck named Roy—standing there, dull-eyed, with a bloody butcher knife in his hand.

  The mob flowed on, endlessly. Some of its members were still ferociously active; some had been overtaken by fatigue and were shuffling along, blank-faced, somnambulistic; but the human river never stopped. There was now no place where the sated ex-slaves might have paused to sit down and look at what they had won. Every chair and table had been broken, windows smashed, small objects spilled and trampled underfoot; paneling had been ripped away from walls, even the flooring pried up; Eagles had been changed, in fourteen hours, from a magnificent palace-city to a honeycomb of gray, debris-choked cells. A fire was burning unchecked now in the North Colonnades, sending up a thick dark pillar of smoke to be whipped away by the winds into the upper air. Outer walls had been battered down, portions of roofs were gone, and the cold air howled through all the corridors. Some areas were still blazing with light from high-placed fixtures; others, where the wiring had been damaged, were pitch dark or illuminated only by the weak bluish light of morning. Passing continually from light to darkness, to half-light, the people looked at each other out of stunned wooden faces, jaws slack, eyes filmed. They went on moving because there was nothing else left for them to do; and because there was nothing else left for them to do; and because they felt that if they should stop, it would somehow be terrible.

  The explosions continued at long intervals. The roof of the Rose Court came down, burying hundreds; the Long Corridor was blasted into rubble. There was a puff of smoke against one flank of the Tower; scales of gold glittered briefly, each a hand-worked panel nine feet square, but so small in the distance that they looked like pollen, drifting and gleaming, then gone.

  Dick was watching from a balcony overlooking Marson Court, now open to the sky. An explosion had torn off the whole roof, exposing the rubble-strewn court with its balconies, stairways and descending levels, all silent and mysterious, like something just dug up by archaeologists. The cold wind whipped by overhead with a shriek, fingering the balcony as it went; Dick stood gripping the rail, buffeted and numb. He had been wandering without thought or feeling for hours, ever since the call to Buckhill. Now, from this height, he could see the roofs of Eagles spread out around him. Many other rooms were gaping open to the sky, like rotten teeth, and in them he could see other figures standing, staring up as the dawn brightened.

  Down below, the roofs fell away in dizzy leaps. The mountain swooped down below them, blue-shadowed, with the broken line of the funicular like a hasty chalkline in the darkness. The shadow pooled deep at the bottom, but Dick could just begin to make out the blocky shapes of the airport buildings, and the wrecked planes on the field.

  Another puff of white caught his eye, and as he turned to look, the sound came muffled after it, a swallowed roar in the wind. More scales of gold drifted away from the side of the Tower, and the whole tall structure appeared to lurch. Faintly, on the wind, came a grinding protest. In the dawn, against the silken blue of the sky, the Tower was more beautiful than he had ever seen it. It rose now like a golden tree, limbless and eaten hollow, shining in the naked beauty of its wounds, with its mighty buttresses, like roots, gripping the mountain.

  Another white puff bulged out from the side of the Tower. It trembled visibly, like a tree at the axe stroke; then he saw it lean.

  The enormous shaft of the Tower leaned, very slowly, and went on leaning, with incredible nightmare slowness, forever and ever, growing larger against the bright sky and yet still leaning, while distant seismic ripping and crackling sounds came on the wind; and still it was leaning nearer, so that he could see the scaly pattern of gold panels in its framework, and the dull light glinting off the pinnacle as it went over, now faster and faster, while panic held him in a tingling, breathless waiting, too shocked to shout, and still faster, resistlessly, like all heaven falling to smash the earth, larger and larger like a moon descending, and then it flashed down, with fountains of gray rubble flying at its torn-up roots, and somehow failed to destroy him; and looking down he saw it dissolve into golden chaos while the lazy fragments of roofs came spiraling up into the air around it: then the mountain shook under him, once, twice and again.

  In the long, unreal silence, the orange-gray cloud of dust slowly spread and trailed away in long, diminishing streamers into the air. The open places among Eagles’ roofs began to blacken with figures crowding up, standing to stare. There were no more explosions. Underfoot, Eagles seemed to breathe more slowly; the sense of frantic movement was gone. People were coming up wearily, singly, to stand in the open and look around them in wonder.

  Over the back of the world the sunrise was spreading its wings of majesty, gold billowing into scarlet, pierced and purpled. Flecks of yellowish cirrus rode infinitely high in the pure dome of air; the pale light was slowly spreading, bringing depth and roundness to the flat earth.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Going down from the courtyard into the mass of corridors, he saw the Frankies moving again purposefully through the apathetic crowds, and realized that all through the night and morning he had not once recognized the familiar face. It was as if the Frankies had been submerged in the mob mind, just as he had been himself; and only now, when individual faces were being worn again, could they be told from anyone else.

  At the corner where the smaller corridor entered North Passage, two Frankies were setting down heavy bundles of rifles. Each had a .375 Winchester slung over his shoulder, the same make and caliber as the rifles they were now unwrapping, aclatter on the floor. As Dick paused to watch, they began stopping passersby, shoving a rifle at each, saying something, pushing him away. Moving nearer, Dick found himself clutched, given a rifle, pushed off; the Frankie saying hoarsely meanwhile, in a mechanical monotone, “Get to a roof or a window. Make it quick.” There were distant shouts in other corridors; some of those with rifles were drifting off, others following more slowly. The Frankies handed out the last of their weapons, pushed a laggard or two again and repeated the order, then went away. Slowly, trying to shake some alertness into himself, Dick went back the way he had come.

  The Frankies were organizing a defense: then Eagles must be under attack, and from the air. Eagles had always been considered impregnable from the air, but he realized now, with senses sharpening a little, that with the citadel in ruins, the defenses at the bottom of the mountain shattered and unmanned, it was a different thing.

  The giant on the mountain had been crippled and mutilated; now the harpies would come.

&nbs
p; Climbing again into the open courtyard, he saw them: slender, tilt-winged shapes, bobbing and swooping in the violent up-currents. Each one was trailing a fierce tail of fire; he could make out the tiny bubble, and the pilot’s head. They were two-man aircraft of a type he had never seen, modified copters with a makeshift rocket assembly at the tail. The rockets gave them enough power to maneuver in the winds at the mountaintop; even so, they were swinging wildly in the treacherous updrafts, and Dick saw one pinwheel against the side of the mountain, exploding into a bright flare that drifted downward, a spark, diminishing. Each one must have a Gismo in it, he realized dazedly, to make it possible for a plane of that size to use sustained rocket power: in ordinary times, no one would have dared to try such a thing, not even the Boss; it must have been done on the spur of the moment… .

  He was dimly aware of a popping of gunfire somewhere to his left. Turning to look, he saw a cluster of dark figures with rifles on an exposed platform, just before a sudden blossom of masonry expanded around them. One of the swift, bobbing planes passed erratically over and rose in the updraft; he saw its rocket flaming distantly as it turned to dive again. Others were crisscrossing over the broken field of Eagles’ roofs, a landscape as skeletal as the Moon’s, with topless towers gaping like the shattered mouths of cannon. Here and there, other white puffs spouted briefly where the planes passed. Dick saw no bombs falling, and realized that the tiny flyers must be firing explosive shells. More roofs winked into ruin as he watched. Under the candid sky, the gray corruption seemed to stir itself, like something half-alive, writhing in pain.

  There was a clatter of feet and three men came straining up the staircase below him, breathing in hoarse gasps, with a mounted machine gun between them. Ignoring Dick, they set the gun up near the parapet. A plane swooped overhead, quick as a hummingbird; they trained the gun futilely after it, then turned it toward a more distant plane and began firing. Deafened, Dick saw the ejected shells spring out glittering in the pure air. Across the roofs, other guns were flashing. A plane burst in midair, first a fireball, then a greasy drifting smoke; wreckage whined and rattled around them, and Dick crouched instinctively under the parapet.