The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  “How far from the window?”

  “Fifty or sixty feet. Dan, be careful. He may be nearer now, waiting for you to do something reckless.”

  “I don’t like not knowing,” Blakemore whispered. “If he’s up tight he won’t just go away—not if he came here to kill me.”

  There had been a few times in Blakemore’s life when so great a recklessness had come upon him that he had thrust aside all caution and taken almost suicidal risks. But at such times his thinking had not been entirely without merit, for he could usually make the way he felt fit in with what he had come to believe from experience.

  When the danger was immediate and very great it was often best to take unusual risks, to dare greatly and put a quick end to all uncertainty. If you wavered and hung back you were more likely to lose than to win.

  Beyond the shattered pane a man bent on cold-blooded murder might be waiting with a weapon held steady—waiting for a slowly rising head to come into view. He might even be hoping that Blakemore would make himself a better target by arising to his full height.

  It would have been natural enough for Blakemore to have regarded obliging him to that extent as an incredible act of folly. But he refused to let himself think of it in that way. It was undoubtedly the most dangerous thing he could have done. But it was also the best and quickest way of finding out just how great the danger was.

  Unless he was met by the blast of a weapon at point-blank range or a distant shot aimed with miraculous timing and skill he could duck down below the sill again as swiftly as he had arisen and would remain in sight for no more than a second or two. And in no other way could he take in the entire wide sweep of the wheat field at a glance.

  Just possibly he might get his head blown off. But that was no worse than waiting for a blast to occur inside the sun room, with a weapon moving from himself to his wife and back again, in the hands of a man who had leapt right over the sill.

  Wait, and try to trip the would-be assassin up by making a mad grab for his legs as he came in? No, the odds against that would be too great. The man would be almost sure to anticipate such a tackling attempt and stay alert enough to forestall it. In a furious struggle an armed man had an enormous advantage, for even if his arm was twisted and he was forced to blast at random, the shot could wreak unimaginable havoc.

  Blakemore got to his feet abruptly, ignoring his wife’s startled gasp. He took two quick steps backward as he arose, to keep as far from the window as possible without bringing the wheat field less completely into view. Farther back he could have seen almost all of it, but not the vital quarter-acre immediately below.

  Not one or two but twenty seconds went by as Blakemore stared out, his body as rigid as a totem pole. But if the head at the top of a totem pole could be thought of as the best of all possible targets that were small in size the man whom Blakemore saw was no longer capable of realizing that.

  He was at least eighty feet away and fleeing with his body grotesquely bent, his arms in flailing motion. He was clearing a path for himself as he fled, with the vegetation-crushing frenzy of a terrified animal, separated from its kill by the approach of an armed hunter.

  But Blakemore wasn’t armed and he had certainly not gone out into the wheat and inspired that kind of terror. It was only when the fleeing man turned once to look back and Blakemore saw how close to a skeleton he was that the fright which had overtaken him became easy to understand.

  Starvation, or near-starvation, could do that to a man, strip his nerves ragged and make him recoil from his own act of violence as if it had turned into an accusing fury, relentlessly pursuing him.

  Suddenly the wheat closed in around him and he vanished from sight. But the long-barreled weapon that had served him as a threshing implement, along with his flailing arms, remained visible above the wheat for several seconds longer, standing straight up like a periscope.

  Blakemore bent then, and helped his wife to her feet. There was no mistaking the look of overwhelming relief in her eyes when he told her what he had seen. But her voice shook and she continued to cling to him for support.

  “He must have lost his nerve,” she said. “Or perhaps he just wanted to frighten you, just wanted you to know that you’d be making a mistake to count on being safe here while other men are starving.”

  Blakemore shook his head. “He came here to kill me. I haven’t the slightest doubt of it. If he’d been a better marksman his first shot might still have shattered the aquarium. But it would have passed right through me first.”

  “Dan, is that the image they’re beginning to have of you? A lord of life and death, with a golden harvest key dangling at your waist?”

  “I’m very much afraid so,” Blakemore said. “And it means I’ve got to go after him. He’s the first marauder to appear on this particular stretch of coastline. Until he’s caught we won’t know if the hatred here is likely to spread as fast as it did on the West Coast.”

  “But there’s been no actual famine yet, anywhere in New England.”

  “That depends on what you mean by ‘famine,’” Blakemore said.

  Blakemore turned abruptly and strode to the opposite wall of the sun room. The thought flashed across his mind that just the fact that the communicator disk was in the precise middle of the wall, surrounded by concentric coils of wiring, made it possible for him to think of it as a target. It was an absurd thought perhaps. But centering something that you wanted to demonstrate in that way could bring it to a sharper focus in the eyes of a viewer.

  “It will take him at least thirty minutes to get out of the wheat,” he said. “The neutronic barriers I’ve set up will keep him fleeing straight ahead until he reaches the sea wall. I can pick him up in ten minutes from the astrojet. So we’ve time enough left to try for another glimpse of him. With eighteen visual transmission mechanisms scattered about the field it won’t be difficult to activate the one nearest to him. I want you to see what he looked like when he turned—exactly how emaciated he was. Then we’ll talk some more about famine—and starvation, if you wish. You may not want to.”

  Blakemore clicked on the disk and waited for it to light up before he began to make some quick readjustments on the remote control dial. It would take, he knew, two full minutes for an image to come through, even if he was lucky, for the activated transmission instrument would have to pick up the fleeing man’s body warmth and the precise texture of his skin, muscles and bones before it could rise into the air and follow him.

  It took longer than he had anticipated, close to four minutes. But there was a compensating factor involved, for the transmission instrument had been stabilized by his care in tuning the controls until the stipplings on the V-tube had been transformed, without flickerings, into light and sound and color.

  First the back of the fleeing man’s head and shoulders leapt into sharp relief on the light-suffused disk, then his face as seen from in front in an enlarged close up.

  Helen Blakemore cried out and swayed a little. But she waved her husband back as he started to re-cross the room to her side.

  “All right,” she said. “Turn if off. I’ve seen enough.”

  Blakemore hadn’t. It was sometimes hard to tell, just by studying a man’s face, how likely he was to be a victim of mental illness, particularly if it was the gaunt, emaciated face of a starving man. The dejected, tight-lipped, hopeless look that went with involutional melancholy was usually a dead giveaway. But a close-to-maniacal look was something else again. Stark fright alone could produce it, the feeling of being trapped, with all hope of escape cut off.

  The neutronic shields that guarded the wheat field on the north and the south could keep a man confined to a limited area, as Blakemore had pointed out, forcing him to flee in just one direction. If he veered too much a jolting shock, accompanied by a muscle-contracting spasm, could lift him up and hurl him to the ground. That the experience was a painful one
went without saying.

  Blakemore was sure of only one thing. No one could have been more hollow-eyed, or displayed, in the region of his cheekbones, a more parchment-thin stretching of the skin and gone on living. His eyes were not only feverishly bright. They looked like holes in a skull, filled with a phosphorescent gleaming.

  Blakemore hardly dared hope that his wife would forgive him. But he continued to stare for another minute, experiencing both a feeling of profound compassion, and an anger that was detached and impersonal. He could forgive the man for trying to kill him, and bore him no ill-will as an individual. But what he had attempted to do was a threat that could not be ignored, for it struck directly at something more precious to Blakemore than his own survival and dwarfed it to insignificance.

  For most of the few seconds remaining to him—he was on the verge of reaching out to click the disk off—the visual transmission instrument continued to accompany the fleeing man through the wheat, dipping and soaring like a wheeling bat with an abnormality of vision which enabled it to see in the sunlight just as clearly as it could in the dark.

  Then, for the barest instant, the fleeing skeleton-figure vanished and a wide expanse of open sky swept into view. High in the sky a single, dark-plumaged bird hovered. It resembled a vulture, but could just as easily have been a crow. Blakemore preferred to think that it was either a crow or a chicken hawk.

  The instant the disk went dark he made a slight readjustment in the remote control dial, to keep it from cooling too rapidly and returned across the room to the shattered picture window.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For not turning it right off? I didn’t expect you to, really. It would have been a crazy thing to do. It’s just that—”

  She hesitated, her gaze accusing. “Oh, I don’t know. It was all right this time. But you always seem to end by doing exactly what you want to do. It was the same way last night, when we were discussing news censorship. You knew I suspected you were keeping something from me. But you didn’t want me to know about New York, Baltimore and Charleston. So you started talking, in an evasive way, about news blackouts in general—what a good thing they sometimes are.”

  “All right,” Blakemore said. “The shipments of vegetables and dairy produce from the non-famine areas are being stretched dangerously thin, in New York especially. But there’s no actual famine-stage scarcity there yet. It’s only what you just said about New England that made me feel you might as well see what starvation can do to a man who’s probably a native.”

  “So you waited until he tried to kill you before you decided I might as well know the truth. Why, Dan?”

  “There’s a word that may help to explain it,” Blakemore said. “‘Extrapolate.’ It means, of course, to take what is known and infer from it some likely future development. I’ve tried to spare you because it’s hard for you, at times, to get a purchase on something that’s actually quite simple. If the premise—the basic data—you start off with when you extrapolate is unsound, the picture you come up with is certain to be a distortion of reality.”

  Helen Blakemore seemed suddenly to decide not to remain angry, for her accusing look vanished.

  “Dan, listen to me,” she said, almost pleadingly. “I wish you’d tell me in exactly what way I’m distorting reality. I shouldn’t have to remind you that it’s what complicates the blight that makes it so insurmountable. If it were just soil impoverishment alone—or industrial waste pollution alone—the outlook might not be much darker than it was in, say, 1980, when the danger was still being aggressively attacked on a wide scale and before human perversity brought about a kind of backlash.”

  “It wasn’t so much a backlash as a surrender to sheer inertia,” Blakemore said. “That always seems to happen when an effort is sustained too long, and the odds against it keep mounting. People—even the best minds—develop an almost compulsive need to chuck everything and go fishing. Hedonistic drives take over, on other levels as well.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with hedonism, up to a point,” Helen Blakemore said. “It can make people more tolerant, generous, willing to devote a larger share of their lives to enriching human experience and relieving human suffering.”

  “I’ll grant you that,” Blakemore said. “But the rub is—inertia is quite different from the pleasure principle. No one actually enjoys throwing in the sponge to that extent. Human nature isn’t built that way. But when it happens there’s a tendency to combine it with a wild excess of pleasure-seeking, to guard against going over the hill to the happy farm.”

  “But isn’t that all tied in, Dan, with what I’ve just said? The odds have become insurmountable. Radioactive seepage from the ‘peaceful’ uses of thermonuclear reactors, deadly pesticides still polluting rivers and streams after half a century, antibiotic-resistant organisms increasing on a frightening scale year after year, dreadful plagues in Eastern Europe, India and China and—five billion hungry mouths to feed.”

  “The radioactivity isn’t increasing,” Blakemore said. “We can still live with it.”

  “How wonderful! So we’ve become sane again in that one respect. And if whales and porpoises shun the North Atlantic all the way to the Arctic Circle that should be of no concern to man. He has wings and Paris is still lovely in the Spring—if you can ignore the half-starving children.”

  “I could add a dozen more blight factors,” Blakemore said. “But hunger is still the number one problem—the really big one. If we can achieve more of a breakthrough there—”

  He looked at her steadily for a moment. “There’s something I guess you might as well know. In Massachusetts people have been gathering on the Cape for close to a month now, living in shacks on the beaches, and setting on lobster traps. The rocks have been stripped bare of edible seaweeds, and the muscles lining the rocks are poisonous at this time of the year. But since they provide an illusion of food in abundance more and more people are eating them. There have been a number of deaths.”

  Helen Blakemore could not repress an exclamation of shock.

  “I guess I don’t need to tell you,” Blakemore went on, “what could happen if all of that spreads to the Connecticut beaches. Every stalk of my wheat could go up in flames.”

  “But Dan, that’s insane! Why would anyone want to set fire to it? It would make no sense.”

  “I’m afraid it would. Anything that’s understandable makes sense, no matter how distorted the motivating factors may be. Why did that man come here to kill me? If, as you’ve just said, I’ve become a symbol of an abundance of food deliberating withheld, for selfish reasons, it would seem a cruel mockery. Smoldering resentments of that nature often lead to destructive violence, without concern for the consequences.”

  “But he could have been driven to desperation by just the need to stay alive.”

  Blakemore shook his head. “I don’t think so. He could have made off with a few stalks without taking so great a risk’. His rage must have gone deep. What I’ve got to find out is whether or not it’s just the destructive rage and hatred of a single deranged man, or a contagion that has begun to spread. There are drastic steps that may have to be taken—”

  “But how would taking him captive shed more light on that?” Helen Blakemore protested. “What would you do? Give him some comparison chart tests to determine how deranged he may be?”

  “It might help,” Blakemore said. “It would be better than letting him escape. It would be in the hands of men far more adroit than I am at finding out exactly how contagious such emotional instability may become. Psychological probing in depth is hardly in its infancy today, despite a regression to infantalism by the background structure groups who play it by ear.”

  “The comparison chart technique has never impressed me very much, Dan. Grandfather felt the same way about the Freudian hypothesis before it came apart.”

  Blakemore had never known her to stand qui
te so motionless, with so tormented a look on her eyes. They were trained on the wheat field again and her voice, when she continued, had a calm incisiveness that was not in the least deceiving, since he knew how great a struggle she was putting up to remain outwardly calm.

  “That wheat could help our descendants—a century from now,” she said. “But—we won’t have any, Dan. What’s the use of pretending? It’s only a matter of time before all of the lights go out.”

  “And I still refuse to believe that,” Blakemore said. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you, that I don’t think you quite understand. It’s the way I feel about that wheat and what it has cost me to grow it.”

  Blakemore spread his arms as if, in that sweeping gesture, he was picturing them as long enough to embrace the entire vista beyond the window.

  “You may be right in many ways,” he said. “But I’ll go on believing that man’s best hope of survival would be diminished if anything happened to a single stalk of that wheat. In an experimental test project every stalk is important. Tests must still be made of the entire growth, and the exact extent of my success—or failure-balanced against the cost.”

  “But you were also thinking of something else, weren’t you, Dan?—something you were afraid I might not understand.”

  Blakemore nodded. “It’s not so easy to explain. But—well, when a man has paid a heavy price for something he can’t allow himself to think that everything he has accomplished may be meaningless. Perhaps it may be. But it would be a kind of self-betrayal to let momentary feelings of despair blind him to the fact that nothing is certain, that future events may cut across and drastically change every present-day trend. No disaster is inevitable, because the historic process simply doesn’t work in that way.”

  Although Blakemore’s rather handsome features were distinctly on the rugged side, there were moments when thought gave him more the look of a sensitive and scholarly philosopher who took his marching orders from the accumulated wisdom of mankind but was not above questioning some of those orders as well, on the basis of what he had himself experienced.