The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin
Page 27
Flin turned and opened the door for her. He noticed over the low roof of the car that men were beginning to come from across the street, and already a number of boys had sprung from nowhere and were clustering like insects, their eyes bright and excited.
He helped Ruvi out, slim in her yellow tunic, her silver curls picking up the light from the tall front door of the hotel.
One of the men said in a high shrill voice, “Green as grass, by God!” There was laughter and somebody whistled.
Flin’s face tightened but he did not say anything nor look at the men. He took Ruvi’s arm and they went into the hotel.
They walked on a faded carpet, between islands of heavy furniture in worn leather and dusty plush. Fans turned slowly against the ceiling, barely disturbing either the hot air or the moths that had come in to flutter around the lights. There was a smell that Flin could not fully identify. Dust, the stale stink of dead tobacco, and something else—age, perhaps, and decay. Behind the large wooden desk a gray-haired man had risen from a chair and stood with his hands spread out on the desk top, watching them come.
The men from the street followed, crowding quickly through the doors. One particular man seemed to lead them, a red-faced fellow wearing an amulet on a gold chain across his broad paunch.
Flin and Ruvi stood in front of the desk. Once more Flin smiled. He said, “Good evening.”
The gray-haired man glanced past them at the men who had come in, bringing with them a many-faceted odor of sweat to add to what was already inside. They had stopped talking, as though they were waiting to hear what the gray-haired man would say. The fans in the ceiling creaked gently as they turned.
The gray-haired man cleared his throat. He, too, smiled, but there was no friendliness in it.
“If you’re wanting a room,” he said, with unnecessary loudness as though he were speaking not to Flin but to the others in the lobby, “I’m sorry, but we’re filled up.”
“Filled up?” Flin repeated.
“Filled up.” The gray-haired man took hold of a large book which lay open in front of him and closed it in a kind of ceremonial gesture. “You understand now, I’m not refusing you accommodations. I just don’t have any available.”
He glanced again at the men by the door and there was a little undertone of laughter.
“But—” said Ruvi, on a note of protest.
Flin pressed her arm and she stopped. His own face was suddenly hot. He knew the man was lying, and that his lie had been expected and was approved by the others, and that he and Ruvi were the only two people there who did not understand why. He also knew that it would do them no good to get into an argument. So he spoke, as pleasantly as he could.
“I see. Perhaps then you could tell us of another place in town—”
“Don’t know of any,” said the gray-haired man, shaking his head. “Don’t know of a single place.”
“Thank you,” said Flin and turned around and walked back across the lobby, still holding Ruvi’s arm.
The crowd had grown. Half the people in Grand Falls, Flin thought, must be gathered now on that one corner. The original group of men, reinforced to twice its size, blocked the doorway. They parted to let Flin and Ruvi through but they did it with a certain veiled insolence, staring hard at Ruvi who bent her head and did not look at them.
Flin walked slowly, refusing to notice them or be hurried. But their nearness, the heat and smell of them, the sense of something menacing about them that he did not understand, twisted his nerves to a painful tightness.
He passed through the door, almost brushing against a young girl who squealed and jumped back out of his way with a great show of being afraid of him. There was a bunch of young people with her, both boys and girls, and they began a great cackling and shoving. The crowd had become more vocal as it grew. There were a lot of women in it now. Flin waited politely for them to separate, moving a step at a time toward the car, and the voices flew back and forth over his head, at him, around him.
—ain’t even human!
Hey, greenie, can’t you afford to feed your women where you come from? Lookit how skinny—
Are they kidding with that crazy hair?
—just like I seen on the teevee, and I says to Jack then, Jack Spivey I says, if you ever see anything like them coming down the road—
Hey, greenie, is it true your women lay eggs?
Laughter. Derision. And something deeper. Something evil. Something he did not understand.
He reached the car and got Ruvi into it. As he bent close to her he whispered in her ear, in their own language, “Just take it easy. We’re getting out.”
Mama, how come them funny niggers got a bigger car’n we got?
Because the Government’s payin’ them big money to come and kindly teach us what we didn’t know before.
“Please hurry,” whispered Ruvi.
He started around the car to get in and found his way blocked by the red-faced man with the gold chain, and beyond him a solid mass in the street in front of the car. He sensed that they were not going to let him through, so he stopped as though he had intended to do so and spoke to the man with the chain.
“I beg your pardon—could you tell me how far it is to the next city?”
The girls were giggling loudly over Ruvi’s tunic and the way she looked generally. They were all the fat-hipped, heavy-breasted local type, with thick legs and thick faces. Flin thought they had very little to criticize. Just beyond the man with the gold chain were four or five younger men standing together. They had very obviously come out of one of the taverns. They were lean rangy young men with their hair slicked down and their hips thrust forward in a curiously insolent slouch. They had eyes, Flin thought, like animals. They had been by the door when he came out. They were still looking at Ruvi.
“The next city?” said the man with the gold chain. He accented the word city as Flin had. He had a deep, ringing voice, apparently well used to addressing crowds. “A hundred and twenty-four miles.”
A long way at night through strange country. A great anger boiled up in Flin but he kept it carefully inside.
“Thank you. I wondcr where we might get something to eat before we start?”
“Well now, it’s pretty late,” the man said. “Our restaurants have just about now stopped serving. Am I right, Mr. Nellis?”
“You are, Judge Shaw,” said a man in the crowd.
This too was a lie, but Flin accepted it. He nodded and said, “I must have fuel. Where—”
“Garage is closed,” Shaw said. “If you got enough to get you down the road apiece there’s a pump at Patch’s roadhouse. He’s open late enough.”
“Thank you,” said Flin. “We will go now.”
He started again, but Shaw did not move out of Flin’s way. Instead he put up his hand and said, “Now just a minute there, before you go. We’ve been reading about you people in the papers and seeing you on the teevee but we don’t get much chance to talk to celebrities here. There’s some questions we’d like to ask.”
The rangy young men with the animal eyes began to sidle past Shaw and behind Flin toward the car, leaving a heavy breath of liquor where they moved.
“A damn lot of questions,” somebody shouted from the back, “like why the hell don’t you stay home?”
“Now, now,” said Shaw, waving his hand, “let’s keep this friendly. Reverend, did you have something to say?”
“I certainly do,” said a fat man in a soiled dark suit, shouldering his way through the crowd to stand peering at Flin. “I bet I’ve preached a sermon on this subject three Sundays out of five and it’s the most important question facing this world today. If we don’t face it, if we don’t answer this question in a way that’s acceptable to the Almighty, we might just as well throw away all these centuries of doing battle with Satan and admit we’re licked.”
Reverend Tibbs thrust his face close to Flin’s and said, “Do you consider yourselves human?”
Flin knew that he was on dangerous ground here. This was a religious man and religion was strictly a local affair, not to be discussed or meddled with in any way.
So he said cautiously, “On our own worlds we consider ourselves so. However, I am not prepared to argue it from your viewpoint, sir.”
He moved toward the car, but the crowd only pulled in and held him tighter.
“Well now,” said the Reverend Tibbs, “what I want to know is how you can call yourselves human when it says right in Scriptures that God created this good Earth here under my feet and then created man—human man—right out of that self-same earth. Now if you—”
“Oh, hell, save that stuff for the pulpit,” said another man, pushing his way in front of Tibbs. This one was sunburned and leathery, with a lantern jaw and keen hard eyes. “I ain’t worried about their souls and I don’t care if they’re all pups to the Beast of the Apocalypse.” Now he spoke directly to Flin. “I been seeing faces on my teevee for years. Green faces like yours. Red ones, blue ones, purple ones, yellow ones—all the colors of the rainbow, and what I want to know is, ain’t you got any white folks out there?”
“Yeah!” said the crowd and nodded its collective heads.
The man they called Judge Shaw nodded too and said, “I reckon you put the question for all of us, Sam.”
“What I mean is,” said the lantern-jawed Sam, “this here is a white town. In most other places nowadays, I understand, you’ll find blacks and whites all run together like they were out of the same still, but we got kind of a different situation here, and we ain’t the only ones, either. There’s little pockets of us here and there, kind of holding out, you might say. And we ain’t broken any laws. We didn’t refuse to integrate, see. It was just that for one reason or another what colored folks there was around—”
Here the crowd snickered knowingly.
“—decided they could do better somewheres else and went there. So we didn’t need to integrate. We don’t have any color problem. We ain’t had any for twenty years. And what’s more, we don’t want any.”
A shout from the crowd.
Shaw said in his big booming voice, “The point we’d like to make clear to you, so you can pass it on to whoever’s interested, is that some of us like to run our lives and our towns to suit ourselves. Now, this old Earth is a pretty good place just as she stands, and we never felt any need for outsiders to come and tell us what we ought to do. So we ain’t any too friendly to begin with, you see? But we’re not unreasonable, we’re willing to listen to things so as to form our own judgments on them. Only you people had better understand right now that no matter what goes on in the big cities and other places like that, we aren’t going to be told anything by a bunch of colored folks and it doesn’t matter one damn bit what color they are. If—”
Ruvi gave a sudden cry.
Flin spun around. The young men who smelled of liquor were beside the car, all crowded together and leaning in over the door. They were laughing now and one of them said, “Aw now, what’s the matter? I was just—”
“Flin, please!”
He could see her over their bent backs and bobbing heads, as far away from them as she could get on the seat. Other faces peered in from the opposite side, grinning, hemming her in.
Somebody said in a tone of mock reproach, “You got her scared now, Jed, ain’t you ashamed?”
Flin took two steps toward the car, pushing somebody out of the way. He did not see who it was. He did not see anything but Ruvi’s frightened face and the backs of the young men.
“Get away from there,” he said.
The laughter stopped. The young men straightened slowly. One of them said, “Did I hear somebody say something?”
“You heard me,” said Flin. “Get away from the car.”
They turned around, and now the crowd was all quiet and watching. The young men were tall. They had big coarse hands, strong for any task. Their mouths hung open a little to show their teeth, and they breathed and smiled, and their eyes were cruel.
“I don’t think,” said the one they called Jed, “I liked the tone of your voice when you said that.”
“I don’t give a damn whether you liked it or not.”
“You gonna take that, Jed?” somebody yelled. “From a nigger, even if he is a green one?”
There was a burst of laughter. Jed smiled and tilted his weight forward over his bent knees.
“I was just trying to talk friendly with your woman,” he said. “You shouldn’t object to that.”
He reached out and pushed with his stiffened fingers hard against Flin’s chest.
Flin turned his body and let the force of the thrust slide off his shoulder. Everything seemed to be moving very slowly, in a curiously icy vacuum which for the moment contained only himself and Jed. He was conscious of a new and terrible feeling within him, something he had never felt before. He stepped forward, lightly, strongly, not hurrying. His feet and hands performed four motions. He had done them countless times before in the gymnasium against a friendly opponent. He had never done them like this before, full force, with hate, with a dark evil brute lust to do injury. He watched the blood spurt from Jed’s nose, watched him fall slowly, slowly to the pavement with his hands clutching his belly and his eyes wide open and his mouth gasping in astonishment and pain.
Outside this center of subjective time and hate in which he stood Flin sensed other movement and noise. Gradually, then with urgent swiftness, they came clear. Judge Shaw had thrust himself in front of Flin. Others were holding Jed, who was getting up. A swag-bellied man with a badge on his shirt was waving his arms, clearing people away from around the car, Jed’s friends among them. There was a confused and frightening clamor of voices and over it all Shaw’s big authoritative voice was shouting.
“Calm down now, everybody, we don’t want any trouble here.”
He turned his head and said to Flin, “I advise you to be on your way just as fast as you can go.”
Flin walked around the car where the policeman had cleared the way. He got in and started the motor. The crowd surged forward as though it was going to try and stop him in spite of Shaw and the policeman.
Suddenly he cried out at them.
“Yes, we have white folks out there, about one in every ten thousand, and they don’t think anything of it and neither do we. You can’t hide from the universe. You’re going to be tramped under with color—all the colors of the rainbow!”
And he understood then that that was exactly what they feared.
He let in the drive and sent the big car lurching forward. The people in the street scattered out of his way. There were noises as thrown objects struck the top and sides of the car and then the street was long and straight and clear ahead of him and he pushed the throttle lever all the way down.
Lights flashed by. Then there was darkness and the town was gone.
Flin eased back on the throttle. Ruvi was bent over in the seat beside him, her hands covering her face. She was not crying. He reached out and touched her shoulder. She was trembling, and so was he. He felt physically sick, but he made his voice quiet and reassuring.
“It’s all right now. They’re gone.”
She made a sound—a whimper, an answer, he was not sure. Presently she sat erect, her hands clenched in her lap. They did not speak again. The air was cooler here but still oppressive with moisture, almost as clammy as fog against the skin. No stars showed. Off to the right there were intermittent flashes of lightning and a low growling of thunder.
A clot of red light appeared on the night ahead, resolving itself into a neon sign. Patch’s. The roadhouse with the pump.
Ruvi whispered,
“Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
“I have to,” he said gently, and pulled off the road onto a wide gravelled space beside a ramshackle frame building with dimly lighted windows. Strongly rhythmic music played inside. There was a smaller building, a dwelling-house, beside the tavern, and midway between them was a single fuel pump.
Flin stopped beside it. Hardly realizing what he was doing, he turned and fumbled in the back seat for his hat and jacket and put them on, pulling the hatbrim down to hide his face as much as possible. Ruvi had a yellow shawl that matched her tunic. She drew it over her head and shoulders and made herself small in the corner of the seat. Flin switched off the dashboard lights.
A raw-boned lanky woman came out of the dwelling. Probably the man ran the tavern, leaving her to tend to smaller matters. Trying to keep his voice steady, Flin asked her to fill the tank. She hardly glanced at him and went surlily to the pump. He got out his wallet and felt with shaking hands among the bills.
On the dark road beyond the circle of light from the tavern, a car went slowly past.
The pump mechanism clicked and rang its solemn bells and finally was still. The woman hung up the hose with a clash and came forward. Flin took a deep breath. He thrust a bill at her. “That’ll be eight-eighty-seven,” she said and took the bill and saw the color of the hand she took it from. She started to speak or yell, stepping back and bending suddenly in the same movement. He saw her eyes shining in the light, peering into the car. Flin had already started the motor. He roared away in a spurt of gravel, leaving the woman standing with her arm out, pointing after them.
“We won’t have to stop again until we reach the city. It’ll be all right there.”
He threw his hat into the back seat. Ruvi let the shawl fall away from her head.
“I’ve never wanted to hide my face before,” she said. “It’s a strange feeling.”
Flin muttered savagely, “I’ve got a lot to say but I can’t say it now, not if I’m going to drive.”
The road was narrow and black beneath the thunderous sky, between the empty fields and dark woods.