Ellison Wonderland

by Harlan Ellison

  “But who’re you?” Hirt persisted. (The madness of it all hadn’t really caught up with him yet.)

  “Oh, man, if you must hang a tag, lay it on me like Skidoop. You dig?”

  “Y–yes, I suppose so.”

  “Now, like I’ve made the scene, Pops, so what do you want? You name it, I frame it. Swing.”

  “Like I was saying,” Hirt squeezed his hands together in anguish, “there isn’t anything you can do for me, unless you can get me out of here. Otherwise I go to the gas chamber tomorrow morning.”

  Skidoop shook his head, and looked ceilingward. “No skin, man. I can do almost anything, but not that. It involves your destiny, and that’s His bailiwick.” He pointed at the ceiling. “Got the whole damned market on destinies cornered. Got there first.”

  “Well, then what good are you?”

  Skidoop looked pained. “Man, I’m beginning to feel you are very unhip. Come to think of it, you dig Camus, Goethe, Kerouac, Rexroth, the rest of the boppers?”

  “Uh . . . ” Hirt began.

  “I figured. You’re so far out you’d have to masquerade to get back in. But like my uncle Moishe keeps tellin’ me, biz is biz. So what can I do for you, right?”

  “Yes. What can you do for me?”

  “Well, we can always introduce an extenuating circumstance, that’s cool. No rules against that; I introduce the e.c. and you change your own destiny. How’s that swing?”

  “Fine, but how can you do it?”

  Skidoop fingered his beard, muttered something about getting a bellows and trimming it with a pair of wire cutters, and jubilantly replied, “There! You’re writing down your last meal. So okay, so I give you the ability to eat. To eat and eat and eat, just keep feeding your face, without any debilitating physical side–effects, and they never gas you.”

  “They never gas me? Why not?”

  “Who ever heard of killing a guy when he’s eating his last meal? It can’t be done. It’s barbaric. A cincheroonie.”

  Maxim Hirt’s commercially handsome face sloughed into an expression connoting thought. A look of guile overcame his features. “You guarantee it’ll work? I can keep eating indefinitely and it won’t hurt me at all?”

  The bearded one waved a negligent palm. “Not a bit.”

  “I’ve heard about deals with you people,” Hirt noted. “I’d have to have immortality along with it. You might fix it so I’d eat myself to death. Can you give me immortality with it?”

  Skidoop thought for a moment, then said thoughtfully, “Well, we’d have to put in a clause about that. Contingent on whether or not they avoid frying you. If they don’t, you get the immortality. But if they do, why should I waste valuable life–force on you, since His destiny ruling would come first, anyhow, and they’d gas you anyway.”

  “I get immortality if this extenuating circumstance works, right?”

  “Correct–o–roony,” said Skidoop, snapping his fingers in contrapuntal variation.

  Hirt again looked wary. “What do you get? I’ve heard about how you guys always gyp a client.”

  “The vicissitudes of a bad press, man. Nothin’ but a hard sell from Him. We wouldn’t stay in business long if we didn’t give good service.”

  “What do you get, then?”

  “Your soul, man, the standard kick.”

  Hirt went white, and shook his head from side–to–side with frantic intensity. “Uh–uh, uh–uh, uh–uh!” he voted the motion down.

  Skidoop spread his hands. “Oh, man, will you like please cool it. I mean, fade, blade. You know what your soul is?”

  Hirt waggled his head again.

  “It’s only your imagination. That’s all. I mean, they jabber about this and that and the soul kick and the life force kick, and all of it, when the straight poop is that it’s only your imagination.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all, daddy–cool. And let’s face it, if I wasn’t bound by the Fair Trade Union, I wouldn’t even have come on this summons. I mean, let’s face it, dad, you haven’t got much imagination to begin with.”

  “And nothing else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Honest Injun?”

  “Tear out my heart and hope to burn!”

  “Okay, it’s a deal. But let’s get it straight once more . . . ”

  “I’ll run through it, from the top: I give you the ability to keep eating, as long as you live, and if they don’t gas you, then you get immortality on top of it. In exchange for which all I take is your imagination.”

  “Where’s the pen to sign the paper?” Hirt asked, now anxious.

  “Paper, pen? Oh, man, all them modern fantasy writers been corrupting the legend again. We do it in blood; good old legal tender. No contract, just a mix of the haemoglobin, tom.”

  Hirt was surprised.

  “What type are you, man, so I’ll know if I have to ring in a notary with all–purpose corpuscles? CPA, Corpuscle Public Accountant.”

  Hirt tried to remember, then said, “I’m type ‘O’.”

  “Nutsville,” Skidoop caroled, and bit a hole in his wrist. The blood began spurting. He offered a finger to Hirt, and the condemned man used the sharp fingernail to start a scratch on his own forearm. They mixed.

  “Done!” Skidoop chortled, grabbed the imagination in both hands, wrenched it loose, and split the scene.

  Maxim Hirt sat on the bunk, and knew all would be well. He had it knocked.

  Which was true. Because when they brought him his meal, he ate and ate and ate and ate.

  And did not stop eating; so they commuted his sentence to life, because you can’t strap a man in the gas chamber who hasn’t finished his last meal.

  Which would not have been such a bad way to finish out a life, sitting there eating all day and night, except that when Skidoop took Hirt’s imagination, he took Hirt’s ability to think of anything else but baked beans to eat.

  So the last meal consisted of baked beans, plate by plate by plate by . . .

  Obviously, it was a deal from the bottom.

  In many ways, it was a fate worse than death.

  Since I was thirteen, to greater or lesser degree, I have been a rootless person. Oh, there have been homes and residences and all the trappings of being settled, but aside from my days in New York, which always seem to me to be the best days, I’ve wandered. Up and down and back across the United States, wherever the vagaries of life have carried me with my writing, military service, marriage, job opportunities or just plain chance. And from these peregrinations has come the belief that not only is home where the heart is, but the heart is undeniably where the home is. I was also prompted by this obscure notion, to write

  The Wind Beyond the Mountains

  It is down in the Book of the Ancestors with truth. The Ruskind know but one home. Ruska is home, for home shall be where the heart is. The stars are not for the Ruskind, for they know, too, that the heart is where the home is.

  Wummel saw the shining thing come down. He watched it from the stand of gnarl–bushes as the pointed thing flamed across the sky, streaking toward the red sun. It flashed brightly above the land, and disappeared quickly. Wummel found himself shaking.

  His pointed face quivered, and his split tongue slipped in and out of his mouth nervously. It had not been a bird, that was obvious. Nor a beast of the land. Whatever it had been, it stirred a strange sensation in him.

  As though he were seeing a long–missing brother returning from across the mountain passes, coming home finally, after a long, long absence. But that could not be: this metal thing he had never seen before. Yet he could not shake the feeling.

  Wummel, for the first time in a life marked by terrors, was totally frightened.

  He crouched, his triple–jointed legs crossed beneath him. He watched the sky. If the flaming thi
ng was to make another appearance, he would be there to see it when it reappeared.

  He had not long to wait. The sun had slipped across the pale blotch of gray sky, when the thing appeared again. The thing dipped as it approached The Forest, and banked down toward the rising yellow–feathertops of the trees. In a few moments Wummel saw the falling thing point its sharp beak into the trees, and disappear through the foliage.

  A muted roaring came to Wummel’s horn–bell ears, and a ropey pillar of angry smoke twisted up into the late afternoon sky.

  The roaring grew in violence, then suddenly ceased. The semi– silence of The Forest dropped down again, as though it had never been shattered.

  The swip–swip–swip of the forest crickets resumed. The cough and growl of the land beasts took up from its echo. A yellow–striped prowl–cat slipped through the trees at the edge of the clearing. The wind whistled softly in among the yellow feather–tops, and The Forest looked as it had always looked.

  Only Wummel, of all the Ruskind, knew the thing had come, knew The Forest was not as it had always been.

  And he turned immediately, scuttling off on digger fingers and triple–jointed legs, to tell the Ruskind. He might have sent the message by thought to the One, who would have told the Ruskind, but — somehow — this message had to be delivered personally. He disappeared through the undergrowth.

  In The Forest, there was movement from the thing that had ceased to flame.

  “Sellers, dispatch your crew into that section of the forest over there. See if you can find anything of the creatures who built that village.

  “Galen, I’d like you to take the flit — be careful now — and check if those mountains we saw are inhabited. Let’s make this a thorough one, boys. It’s the last one before home.”

  He fitted the picture of a spaceman. Tall; bronzed from many suns; wide and blocky hands, altogether able hands that commanded with ease.

  Eyes blue as the seas over which he had flown, a mouth that spoke sharply, but bore no grudge. A man with lines of character in his face; not a blank mold of a face that smiled and made sounds, but a face that had been the home of sadness and hard times. A man who had grown tired but never beaten, searching for an ideal.

  “This survey has to be really good, Charlie,” the Captain said to his First. “There’s talk back home about too much for appropriations for the Mapping Command. They may swallow us into the mercantile guild systems. That wouldn’t be so hot.” He spoke earnestly, and there was a depth to his words.

  The First Mate wanted badly to touch this man, to lay a hand on his arm and say, “We’ll make it, Vern,” or something less trite. But he could not. Instead, he remarked, “You look tired, Vern. Catch much during the last leg?”

  The Captain shook his head and grinned broadly, though the weariness was moving in his eyes. “You know me, Charlie. ‘No–Wink, No–Blink, No–Nod Kovasic’ they called me at the Academy.” Then, the jibe still moist on his lips, he sobered.

  “Bring something back, Charlie. Bring it back — we need it bad. We need something to open their eyes back home. To make them understand we’re not just idly flitting around the galaxy — that we can bring back useful information. We have to keep the Command in business. It was thirty years coming, Charlie — be a hell of a note to lose it now.

  “We need it, Charlie.” He added softly, almost to himself, as he turned away, “Need it bad.”

  They came clumping through The Forest, nineteen of them, walking strangely.

  They moved erect, with their hands swinging at their sides. Their hands were even different. How could they dig without spade–shaped fingers? How could they hear from those odd little flat things so close to their heads?

  Their eyes. Such strange eyes. Mere angry slits.

  The eyes watching the strange ones were not slits. They were huge, platter–like organs without lids. They watched unblinking as the strangers from the flaming thing tromped through The Forest.

  They were going to the Village Home.

  The thought went out from the One, to the other Ruskind, Be careful, my children. They seem to bode no harm, but they are not of Ruska, they are not the Ruskind; not of the land, nor of the sea, nor of the air we know. Be careful.

  Wummel heard the thought, and hunkered deeper under the spread roots of the gnarl–bush. Yet . . . there was something about these strange erect wanderers that drew him.

  Is it because I saw them first? he wondered. Or is it something else. I feel — I sense — a deeper bond in these strange ones. They are not wholly unknown to me.

  He reached out daintily, searching with his mind, plucking delicately as though on some fragile musical instrument.

  A stirring of buried racial memory. A common germ, a flame, a whirling nebula and a throwing–out of flashing arms. One parent. One world, so far back even the concept had been drowned by memory on memory.

  He watched their progress, deeper into the mingled tree–shapes. The Forest held many of Wummel’s people. The Ruskind had left the Village Home, till the strange ones left the planet.

  His eager eyes caught the every flicker of their bodies, the every tread of their step, the every thought of their minds. A wild, conflicted and confused something, as rolled and entwined as the slender stringer arms of the sewlan vines. Their minds were never at rest. They could not speak between each other — in thoughts — and they struggled in the cages of their bodies to communicate.

  Occasionally one would move its mouth at the other, and a fraction of the real communication would be understood.

  There was a wandering in them. They were never at rest. Their lives were meshes of step and run and scamper. Never at peace, never at rest, always driven on, always driven on . . .

  Father, the thought blossomed. I want to follow them, I want to listen more to them.

  Thought returned: Be careful, my son.

  They caught him in the village. They had been studying the thatchy hutches, when the First Mate had seen him. He had been watching them from the edge of the forest, and the First caught the movement of his green fur from the corner of his eye.

  He had dispatched men to circle the thing, and they had closed in on it carefully. It had started to scamper away when they were a good twenty feet from it. But the enmeshing action of the power–driven elasticord in their Molasses–guns had trapped it.

  The little thing lay still, as they picked him up, warped into a small furry ball, with the adhesive elasticord wound about him in many twistings. They carried him out of the forest, and laid him before the First Mate.

  It lay still even as they surrounded him. It stared up out of saucer– sized yellow eyes, and the green smooth fur of its flanks quivered under their gaze.

  “Is it animal, vegetable, or . . . ” one of the noncoms began, but the First Mate cut him off with a wave of the hand.

  “Do you feel anything?”

  The others shook their heads, but the First noticed one man whose eyes had clouded, whose brow was furrowed with lines of concentration. As though he were listening for a sound, far off.

  “Queer lookin’ little thing,” one of the men said. “Wonder what it eats. Or if we can eat it!” He began to chuckle.

  The First cut him off hard.

  “Shut up!” His face had an odd shine to it, as though a thin film of perspiration was about to break through.

  “I — I — ” the words only half–formed.

  He knew what he wanted to say, but he could not. The thing before him was a beast of the woods; a dumb thing with neither mind nor manner. Still . . . he was certain it was — he could hardly form the thought — speaking to him!

  Strange words with a strange tone. Words and thoughts of a million years. The thoughts of an entire race; a race that had never left its world, that had never climbed from the dirt, and yet was sublimely happy. Tied to its world, and at peace
with the universe.

  The First Mate had been in space eighteen years. He had grown hard fighting for the Mapping Command, and it had been many more years than he could remember since he had cried.

  But he felt the tears beginning. The thoughts were too sweet, too clear, too demanding in their picturing.

  “Take him to the ship,” he said, turning toward the forest. “We’ll let the Captain have a look at him.”

  The men lifted the little beast and carried him back through the foliage.

  The First Mate followed a few feet behind, his head lowered.

  They wanted to take Wummel to Earth.

  He could hear them saying it in the caverns of their minds. The thought came strongest from the man they called the Captain. He thought, and the thoughts came to Wummel, and Wummel listened, but he could only listen at first.

  To Earth, the thought said. To Earth, and the Command is saved. And the wandering won’t be stopped, and we can go off across the Rim and find the last planet ever. Then we can come back. But till they find the last planet, there will be movement.

  These were thoughts lower than thoughts. They were buried deeper, deeper than the fibers knew they reached. Buried down where this Captain could never really see them, only feel the burning of their message in his legs. And he moved, always moved — without rest.

  Constantly driven on, with no sleep, with no rest, no ending. Wummel felt the heart in him go out to these strange beasts of the eternally nighted sky. They were terrible in their everlasting wandering. Even the home world was to them merely a base to which they could return occasionally.

  Now they wanted to take him from his home.

  Wummel considered it, the chill spreading up from his spine. He knew he was as deeply rooted to Ruska as the sewlan or the gnarl–bushes. Could it be conceivable that he might go, and never return?

  Wummel found it difficult to live on his world, sometimes. The land beasts were huge, hungry and fearsome. The prowl–cats and the sytazill were always on the hunt, and Wummel’s people had never quite learned to avoid them. For the land beasts were not precisely ignorant brutes. They had minds, and souls, Wummel imagined, and their actions could not always be predicted. It was better that way.