At first, everything was as usual. The shuttle pulled against the curb, blowers whining, fountaining snow on all sides. It settled into the thick white carpet, and the rotars stopped beating altogether. The driver got out and went into the lobby, leaving the passengers alone. Almost panting, trembling, I flicked the lamp on and off six times, then stopped and waited.
That was when things changed. Someone returned my signal. There was a flicker of yellow. Another. A third. Six in all. Frantically, I wiped the window to be sure I hadn't been seeing things, a trick of lights reflecting on my glass from farther down the street. I signaled again. Now the window was clear, and there was nothing to obstruct my view of the cigarette lighter that burned, then flicked off, then burned again.
I think I laughed. I know I lunged against the window, trying to see better, for that was when I knocked the lamp off the sill. It bounced once on my bed, fell over the side, and smashed loudly on the floor.
I scrambled after it, discovered the bulb was ruined. The rest of the lamp seemed undamaged. But I needed a bulb. Any minute now, the driver might finish his coffee and go back to the bus, leaving me alone, taking away the man or woman with the lighter and leaving me by myself. I needed a bulb. Badly.
I remembered the one in the floor lamp on the other side of the room. In the darkness, I stumbled across to it, tripped over a leg of my only chair, and fell before I could throw my hands up to protect my face. I bruised my jaw and snapped off the end of a front tooth. The tooth was driven forward into my lip which was bleeding steadily and which was the only thing that really hurt. I lay dazed, feeling the floor roll under me like small breakers on a warm beach. Finally, I got up and went on, found the floor lamp and tried to get the bulb out of it.
My hands don't work so good. They were both broken several times and never set properly. I'm missing three fingers altogether, which doesn't help much. And I don't have any feeling in my right thumb, though it can grip things readily enough. I was a musician. That's why it was just my hands that were worked over. I really didn't get as bad treatment as some Stunteds got.
I fumbled with the bulb, but it kept slipping out of my hands. I cursed it, wrenched at it, tripped again, bringing the lamp down onto the floor with me.
Well, dammit, you know how it was. A man comes along with the Empathy Circuits to augment the brain, and you are happy to let them install one in your own head. I mean, everyone's one big family now. No war. No misunderstandings. Only love. Right? Well, eventually. It's going to be great. Someone's having problems, everyone helps straighten him out, gives him love and understanding so that he can eventually come to terms with himself. And no words are needed. Man, not when everyone is an Empathist! So you come out of the operating room, chrome and white and tile and crisp nurses and doctors that smell of antiseptics, all around you. And that's when you find out, in your case, the circuits didn't work. At first, everyone is afraid, because they think it means a lot of people are going to be unreachable. Then, five years later and a few billion simple operations later, they know the unreachables are not many. Just a few. Stunteds. Closed to telepathic understanding. Always wanting to talk, talk, talk when talk is no longer necessary. So they are singled out immediately as being different. Different. And one day when some of your children and more perverted older citizens beat a Stunted around just for fun, you join in. It wears off, this streak of sadism, and you are ashamed. Mankind is rapidly approaching total sanity and you realize your attack on the Stunteds was a last fling of bestiality, the last brutal act before the coming of age. So the next stage in the Empathist establishment's treatment of the Stunteds is to, in a flurry of liberalism, pass flocks of laws under whose wings the Stunteds will be protected. So things are rosy, right? So there is a happy ending, check? So, forget the Stunteds. And slowly, it becomes obvious that the Stunteds need more than laws to protect them from physical violence. There is another kind of violence that is much more deadly, much more defeating. It is the violence of indifference, the violence of being a caste apart from the rest of the world, the violence of being ignored, the violence of sitting alone, living on a pension, searching through the tattered, yellowed pages of old books for the lingering warmth of human understanding the writer may have been able to impart to his words. Look up other Stunteds. Yeah, try that. Only problem is that there are only fifteen thousand of them in a world of four and a half billion. And when you do find some, you discover that the mental type that is not susceptible to the Empathy Circuits is not always stable to begin with. Finally, you realize there is no place to go. Absolutely no place at all . . .And the men who keep them, the sleazy hotel operators, the two-bit roominghouse executives don't mind beating them a little to keep them quiet, because Stunteds don't really exist, do they? They aren't really people, are they? It is no longer the bestiality of out-and-out torture, just the rather boring, necessary task of discipline.
I lay with the lamp, holding it, saying, "Dear Jesus, don't let the bulb be broken; Dear Jesus, don't let the bulb be broken," over and over until I suddenly realized how eerie I sounded. I shivered a while and felt like I might vomit. Then I pulled myself together and felt around the inside of the lampshade. The bulb was intact. I whimpered while I fumbled it out of its socket, but I couldn't help it. I was so happy!
A minute later, I was back at the window. The shuttle was still there, but it could not stay for long. I picked up the table lamp and tried to unscrew the broken bulb. My hands slipped, and I slashed my fingers on the paper-thin glass, but I got it out. I screwed the new bulb in and brought the lamp back to the window. I was about to flash a signal to the passenger with the cigarette lighter when the driver and Belias came out of the hotel lobby.
I stopped my work and leaned my head against the glass, shivering. I felt miserable. My head was all covered with sweat. It dripped into my eyes and made them sting. Yet my stomach was cold—cold and flopping around like a dying fish. I had missed my chance. I had utterly missed it. After a few moments, I raised my head and looked back at the shuttle, expecting it to be gone. I don't know why I was still interested in watching it. Perhaps it was because I was curious about Belias being outside. He never went outside before. It was always the other way around: the driver came in. And they drank coffee by the fireplace and laughed but didn't talk and transferred the mail and I cried about it but didn't know why. Anyway, when I looked up, I saw something else strange. Belias and the driver were lifting the sidewalk SHUTTLE STOP sign into the luggage rack on the rear of the bus. They shoved it back in. The driver stayed there, chaining it in place so it would not roll against the passengers' luggage. Belias went back inside. When he finished with the sign, the driver followed him.
There was more snow.
I watched it.
I watched the dark shapes of the passengers' heads against the window, thought about them resting in there between sleep and wakefulness, thought about them being lulled by the dull roar of the blades and the soft swish of the snow as they barreled through the night from one place to another.
Then I remembered the lamp.
I was about to signal when Belias and the driver returned. They were carrying a lobby sign indicating the hours the shuttles arrived and departed, rates and so forth. They started putting that in the luggage compartment too.
And then I understood. The fan shuttle was not going to come through town anymore. This was the last trip. From now on, some new air-cushion by-pass, some fast solid surface that would give the fans a better beat top to press against. An open stretch without buildings on both sides so that there would be no necessity to cut speed to keep from breaking windows. They would go away, leaving the streets empty, and that was how the streets would stay. Tomorrow night, I would look out the window, and there would be no warm, yellow lights coming brighter and brighter. There would be no thundering fans. No clouds of displaced snow.
The lamp switch was slick with blood from my fingers.
I got off the bed and found the door, somehow. I h
ad to get down there. There was nothing to do but get down there. I went into the hallway and started running, but found I was going in the wrong direction. I came to a dead end on the other side of the hotel and just stood there, trying to think what had happened. Then I remembered where the stairs were and said, "Shit!" though I almost never swear, and ran back the other way. I found the stairs and went banging down them and across the raggedy lobby carpet.
I pushed through the glass doors and went down the steps. I slipped on the ice and fell across the sidewalk, caking myself with dry snow that melted against me and became ice on my clothes when it refroze. I remember that I was crying—and that I was embarrassed because I was crying—and that I just couldn't stop. Again, my gut heaved like I would vomit, but all that came out of my throat was a dry, racking heave that made my eyes water. And me a grown man.
The driver and Belias had not seen me yet. I got up and swayed back and forth, the wind very cold and sharp against my skin. I went along the side of the shuttle until I found the fifth window where the cigarette lighter had fluttered. I rapped on the glass until a face turned to me. It was a woman, very heavyset, with long, stringy brown hair. She looked at me oddly while she tried to find my thought lines, then opened her mouth in a little round "O" and looked right through me—that look a Stunted gets used to.
I shouted at her. "Hey!" I beat on her window. "Hey! Hey!"
Suddenly there were arms around me, Belias' arms. He held me firmly, and I finally stopped trying to get away. The driver came around and looked at the woman in the seat. They were all talking, but I couldn't hear any of it. Then I saw a small boy in the seat beside the woman, and I guessed what it had been. The boy had seen me flicking the light and had taken his mother's lighter out of her purse. Maybe she was asleep, one of those lulled by the rushing and the beating of the fast machine. He had flicked it at me in answer. His mother had awakened and had taken it from him, had changed seats with him to keep him out of trouble.
Children are the only ones who can really be cruel anymore. They go through a stage when taunting is fun to them.
But, at least, there was one consolation.
He did not look through me.
No glass eyes. No fish stares. Our eyes met once, quickly, before Belias carried me back inside.
He made me go back to my room, back to my bed. I lay with my face down on the mattress, panting and shaking and trying to think. Then there was the roar of the fan shuttle blowers starting up. I got quickly to the window, kneeling on the bed, just in time to see the bus disappear down the road, its canopy of blown snow sealing it permanently out of sight.
That was when I started to scream.
Belias came and kicked open the door. The other man, whose name I do not know, came to me and told me to stop. I tried to stop. I really did. But the repressed sob would catch in my throat when I tried to force it down and come back twice as hard. I screamed and cried and couldn't seem to make enough noise to satisfy me. I thought of the quiet streets, the quiet snow falling softly, noiselessly upon other snow; I thought of the quiet of the hotel and of the quiet way in which the driver and Belias had talked to the fat woman. I screamed even louder. The nameless one backhanded me several times across the face, then dragged me from the bed and threw me against the wall the way he always does. He slammed a fist into my stomach three times, very quickly, and knocked all the breath out of me. But I screamed silently. And when the breath came back, the scream came with it.
Belias crossed to my lamp and turned it on. The light was dim and ugly. The second one thrust me into a chair and began slapping me again and again, back and forth, top to bottom, until there was blood coming out of my nose. He split my lip farther than my fall had, and he punched once at my teeth, breaking loose the one I had partially damaged earlier.
While he was hitting me, I saw his face for the first time. It had always been dark before, and I had never been able to see him. It was an ordinary face—except that he was not looking through me. He was looking at me. Directly at me. And he was laughing. His mouth was pried wide by his broad, white teeth, and there was laughter wrapped around his tongue. I knew, immediately, why he was able to beat me. He was not an Empathist. He was a Stunted like me. Probably roomed here too. A sort of handy man to keep the other invisible people quiet.
I stopped screaming.
They watched me a moment.
I stared back at them.
They went away, leaving me in the dim light.
I found my way to the bed and stretched out on it, tasting blood and salt. Far away, in another room, a woman was screaming. She's the one who breaks things too. She's the blonde. Or she used to be before her hair turned color. I remember her. I remember her sleek loins, the moment when our friendship had changed, the moment when we had lain together, the moment of sliding, sleek, long, trembling penetration, that special closeness that changes always and forever any friendship. I remembered our falling away after that special closeness—and the discovery that the short minutes of connection, the fleeting seconds of tight, wet togetherness had only served to indicate how bad the loneliness was the rest of the time.
And now she was screaming. She was too old to find, in copulation, even fleeting seconds of warmth and light. And I guess I had started her. I was sorry my screaming had triggered hers. I was sorry I had caused the scene at the bus. I was sorry that I was a Stunted. But sorrow, after all, does absolutely nothing. It is much like holy water. It is not even used to quench the thirst.
That was three weeks ago. And I still don't want to remember. I listen for the fan shuttle, for the thumpa-thumpa of its blades. I lie awake until five or six in the morning, thinking that surely it must just be late. Sometimes, like now, I force myself to remember. I am too old for delusion. I am sixty-five. I was twenty-four when the operation failed. I am sixty-five. My hands are liver-spotted. My hair is very white. White as the snow outside, you might say. So I am remembering now, and the room is quiet. The snow falls against the pane, quietly. I snap my fingers to break the quiet, but it seems as if there is no noise. I snap again. There is no noise. And now I think I will have to scream for Belias and the second one without a name . . .
Afterword
The most common civilian reaction to the discovery that you are a writer is to be asked, usually in a tone of fatuous condescension (after all, you don't have a regular job, do you; you don't follow the Great American Tradition of the nine-to-five existence, do you?) something quite like, "Where do you get all your ideas?" To answer this in depth would require seven or eight hours of the questioner's time. Considering his attention span is usually one minute and forty-eight seconds and that he has never read a book in his life (recent studies show that fifty-eight per cent of the American public is willing to admit just that), a seven hour response would not be fitting. So you shrug and say, "From life," or some other equally vague and pointless generality.
But since this is labeled as an afterword, and since you are reading it, a complete answer is obviously in order this time. Not seven or eight hours' worth, but just a few minutes on this story alone.
A writer of any genre of fiction—aside from the Western and the historical novel—must keep abreast of developments in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, social science, and philosophy. This is especially so for writers of science fiction. It is with one, beady eye open for possible plots, therefore, that I devour magazines and books in many different fields. When I first discovered Marshall McLuhan's philosophic mutterings in The Medium is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village, I realized that here was a veritable gold mine of story ideas.
McLuhan theorizes, among other things, that the world has and will continue to become, due to electronics—telstar in particular—a Global Village. He foresees the day when national boundaries might disappear, all men might become as citizens of a single town, increased swiftness and completeness of communication bringing an understanding between men heretofore impossible. For my first extr
apolation on McLuhan, I wrote a novel, The Fall of the Dream Machine, which tried to depict what would happen to the power cencentration in such a drastically shrunken world. Logically, the power structure would be managed by fewer hands than at any time in history. It might very well be possible, then, to have our first global dictator, though he would have to be a businessman rather than a politician. A second attempt at this extrapolation produced a short story, "A Dragon in the Land", that dealt with the growth of understanding between people due to a world-shrinking war. The story dealt more with human relationships than had the novel. I liked it better, but it still did not sum up all I felt about the Global Village concept. Next came a mainstream novel titled Hung (from the catchphrase "hung-up") set in the present in the hippie subculture of a small university. I was trying to show that our world was already being compressed and what it was meaning to us. A war in Asia, for example, something we would once have been able to sweep under the rug (considering the country is a minor one), was setting moral reverberations around the world. This is a sign that McLuhan is on the right track. When Hung was finished, however, I knew I had still not said exactly what I felt about McLuhan's prophecy-philosophy. Yes, it would require another story. A science fiction story. Thus came the piece you have just read.
Again, Dangerous Visions Page 84