The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Continuing his descent, he occupied himself with a closer analysis of his environment, not undertaken with any hope of bettering his condition but only for lack of other diversions. The walls and ceilings were hard, smooth, and off-white. The escalator steps were a dull nickel color, the treads being somewhat shinier, the crevices darker. Did that mean that the treads were polished from use? Or were they designed in that fashion? The treads were half an inch wide and spaced apart from each other by the same width. They projected slightly over the edge of each step, resembling somewhat the head of a barber’s shears. Whenever he stopped at a landing, his attention would become fixed on the illusory “disappearance” of the steps, as they sank flush to the floor and slid, tread in groove, into the grilled base plate.

  Less and less would he run, or even walk, down the stairs, content merely to ride his chosen step from top to bottom of each flight and, at the landing, step (left foot, right, and left again) onto the escalator that would transport him to the floor below. The stairwell now had tunneled, by his calculations, miles beneath the department store—so many miles that he began to congratulate himself upon his unsought adventure, wondering if he had established some sort of record. Just so, a criminal will stand in awe of his own baseness and be most proud of his vilest crime, which he believes unparalleled.

  * * * *

  In the days that followed, when his only nourishment was the water from the fountains provided at every tenth landing, he thought frequently of food, preparing imaginary meals from the store of groceries he had left behind, savoring the ideal sweetness of the honey, the richness of the soup which he would prepare by soaking the powder in the emptied cookie tin, licking the film of gelatin lining the opened can of corned beef. When he thought of the six cans of tuna fish, his anxiety became intolerable, for he had (would have had) no way to open them. Merely to stamp on them would not be enough. What, then? He turned the question over and over in his head, like a squirrel spinning the wheel in its cage, to no avail.

  Then a curious thing happened. He quickened again the speed of his descent, faster now than when first he had done this, eagerly, headlong, absolutely heedless. The several landings seemed to flash by like a montage of Flight, each scarcely perceived before the next was before him. A demonic, pointless race—and why? He was running, so he thought, toward his store of groceries, either believing that they had been left below or thinking that he was running up. Clearly, he was delirious.

  It did not last. His weakened body could not maintain the frantic pace, and he woke from his delirium confused and utterly spent. Now began another, more rational delirium, a madness fired by logic. Lying on the landing, rubbing a torn muscle in his ankle, he speculated on the nature, origin and purpose of the escalators. Reasoned thought was of no more use to him, however, than unreasoning action. Ingenuity was helpless to solve a riddle that had no answer, which was it own reason, self-contained and whole. He—not the escalators—needed an answer.

  Perhaps his most interesting theory was the notion that these escalators were a kind of exercise wheel, like those found in a squirrel cage, from which, because it was a closed system, there could be no escape. This theory required some minor alterations in his conception of the physical universe, which had always appeared highly Euclidean to him before, a universe in which his descent seemingly along a plumb line was, in fact, describing a loop. This theory cheered him, for he might hope, coming full circle, to return to his store of groceries again, if not to Underwood’s. Perhaps in his abstracted state he had passed one or the other already several times without observing.

  There was another, and related, theory concerning the measures taken by Underwood’s Credit Department against delinquent accounts. This was mere paranoia.

  —Theories! I don’t need theories. I must get on with it.

  So, favoring his good leg, he continued his descent, although his speculations did not immediately cease. They became, if anything, more metaphysical. They became vague. Eventually, he could regard the escalators as being entirely matter-of-fact, requiring no more explanation than, by their sheer existence, they offered him.

  He discovered that he was losing weight. Being so long without food (by the evidence of his beard, he estimated that more than a week had gone by), this was only to be expected. Yet, there was another possibility that he could not exclude: that he was approaching the center of the earth where, as he understood, all things were weightless.

  —Now that, he thought, is something worth striving for.

  He had discovered a goal. On the other hand, he was dying, a process he did not give all the attention it deserved. Unwilling to admit this eventuality and yet not so foolish as to admit any other, he sidestepped the issue by pretending to hope.

  —Maybe someone will rescue me, he hoped.

  But his hope was as mechanical as the escalators he rode—and tended, in much the same way, to sink.

  Waking and sleeping were no longer distinct states of which he could say: “Now I am sleeping,” or “Now I am awake.” Sometimes he would discover himself descending and be unable to tell whether he had been woken from sleep or roused from inattention.

  He hallucinated.

  A woman, loaded with packages from Underwood’s and wearing a trim pillbox-style hat, came down the escalator toward him, turned around on the landing, high heels clicking smartly, and rode away without even nodding to him.

  More and more, when he awoke or was roused from his stupor, he found himself, instead of hurrying to his goal, lying on a landing, weak, dazed, and beyond hunger. Then, he would crawl to the down-going escalator and pull himself onto one of the steps, which he would ride to the bottom, sprawled head foremost, hands and shoulders braced against the treads to keep from skittering bumpily down.

  —At the bottom, he thought,—at the bottom. ... I will . . . when I get there. . . .

  From the bottom, which he conceived of as the center of the earth, there would be literally nowhere to go but up. Probably by another chain of escalators, ascending escalators, but preferably by an elevator. It was important to believe in a bottom.

  Thought was becoming as difficult, as demanding and painful, as once his struggle to ascend had been. His perceptions were fuzzy. He did not know what was real and what imaginary. He thought he was eating and discovered he was gnawing at his hands.

  He thought he had come to the bottom. It was a large, high-ceilinged room. Signs pointed to another escalator: Ascending. But there was a chain across it and a small typed announcement.

  “Out of order. Please bear with us while the escalators are being repaired. Thank you. The Management.”

  He laughed weakly.

  He devised a way to open the tuna fish cans. He would slip the can sideways beneath the projecting treads of the escalator, just at the point where the steps were sinking flush to the floor. Either the escalator would split the can open or the can would jam the escalator. Perhaps if one escalator were jammed the whole chain of them would stop. He should have thought of that before, but he was, nevertheless, quite pleased to have thought of it at all. —I might have escaped.

  His body seemed to weigh so little now. He must have come hundreds of miles. Thousands. Again, he descended.

  Then, he was lying at the foot of the escalator. His head rested on the cold metal of the base plate and he was looking at his hand, the fingers of which were pressed into the creviced grill. One after another, in perfect order, the steps of the escalator slipped into these crevices, tread in groove, rasping at his fingertips, occasionally tearing away a sliver of his flesh.

  That was the last thing he remembered.

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  * * * *

  “While I was writing ‘Descending,’ my icebox was in appropriately the same shape as my hero’s and I was living on my Macy’s credit card,” writes Tom Disch. “After ‘Descending,’ things picked up. ... I got hired by Doyle Dane Bernbach and found, rather to my dismay, that I enjoyed advertising and a living w
age.”

  DDB, you know, is the agency that does those readable Avis and VW ads. Makes it easier to understand why a writer like Tom Disch should have enjoyed it. That way, maybe you can think of it as “the ad game.”

  There was something of a “game” feeling about that endless escalator, too—as if you only had to know the rules to be able to get off. I remembered that feeling too vividly when I came across (ex-Harvard’s) Timothy Leary’s article, “How To Change Behavior,” in LSD, The Consciousness Expanding Drug, (Putnam, 1964).

  “Baseball and basketball have clearly definable roles, rules, rituals, goals, languages, and values. Psychology, religion, politics, are games, too, learned cultural sequences with clearly defined roles, rules, goals, jargons, values. . . .

  “All behavior involves learned games. But only that rare Westerner we call ‘mystic’ or who has had a visionary experience of some sort sees clearly the game structure of behavior. Most of the rest of us spend our time struggling with roles and rules and goals and concepts of games which are implicit, and confusedly not seen as games, trying to apply the roles and rules and rituals of one game to other games. . . .

  “Culturally, stability is maintained by keeping the members of any cultural group from seeing that the roles, rules, goals, rituals, language, and values are game structures.”

  Are diplomats mystics? Or are they culturally unstable? I do not believe it is possible to carry on the absurdities of international intercourse without a clear knowledge of the game (the Great Game, as it has been called), not just its rules and goals and penalties—but the essential gaminess of it.

  Romain Gary is a Frenchman of Russian origin, a distinguished novelist, a well-decorated soldier, and a career diplomat. He writes fluently in four languages and (I am certain) is a skilled gamesman in at least that many. He has, at least, a terribly clear view of the Syndicate Game and the Art Game, in this story from his recent collection Hissing Tales (Harper & Row).

  * * * *

  DECADENCE

  Romain Gary

  We had already been over the Atlantic five hours and Carlos had been talking all the time. I’m not even sure he knew he was speaking to us: at times I had the feeling he was merely thinking aloud, under the influence of a deep emotion that was becoming more and more evident as the plane neared Rome.

  The imminence of the coming reunion had us all pretty nervous, but with Carlos you could feel something deeper, something that often sounded like a mixture of awe and love. For all of us who knew him well—one of the toughest men around—it was truly impressive to hear the accents of reverence and almost of humility in his voice as he evoked for us the legendary figure of Mike Sarfatti, the Hoboken giant who rose one day on the New York waterfront and scared the hell out of every union boss there, and no one can say that they were men who scared easy.

  You should have heard Carlos pronounce that name. He lowered his voice and an almost tender smile softened the heavy face that 40 years in the thick of the social struggle had turned to stone.

  “It was a crucial period—crucial, that’s the word for it. The Syndicate was at a turning point: we were going social. We were stepping into the longshoremen’s union fight and it was rough; nobody had ever given us much trouble before. It often looked as if we weren’t going to make it, as if the unions on the New York waterfront were strong enough to look after themselves and didn’t feel like being protected by us. The press was dragging us in the mud, the federal authorities were sniffing around and the dockers themselves were sore as hell; dues had just been set at 20 percent of their pay, and everyone was trying to get control of the cashbox and milk the unions for himself.

  “Even so, we were moving in, but it was rough, as I said, and getting rougher. In the port of New York alone, there were seven different headquarters fighting over the cake, and the union old-timers would rather have police protection than us. Yes, that’s the point it had reached. They were getting quite hysterical.

  “Well, it took Mike only a year to straighten things out, and he didn’t work like the other bosses in the protection racket, the Guziks, the Musicas, who paid their men to do the work. No, Mike was always the first in the front line; he always took a hand himself. The day someone gets the idea of raking the bottom of the Hudson around Hoboken, they’ll find about a hundred tons of cement down there in the slime, and Mike was always around in person when they put the guys in the cast.

  “More often than not they were still alive and kicking. Mike liked it that way; he liked to give them a chance to express themselves. He liked it if they argued when they poured the cement over them—it made them look interesting when the stuff set. They would be caught in all sorts of attitudes. Mike said one day it would be like the people in Pompeii when they found them in lava 2,000 years later; he used to call it ‘working for posterity.’ When one of the guys got too noisy, Mike always tried to reason with him. ‘What have you got to bellyache about, sonny?’ he would say. ‘You’re going to be part of our cultural heritage.’

  “At the end, Mike even got very fussy. He had to have special cement, more like plaster, the kind that set right away, so that he could see what he was doing, while the work was in progress. In Hoboken we usually just stick the guy in the cement when he’s ready, nail on the top of the barrel, roll it into the river, and forget about it. But not Mike. With him it was something else, something artistic. He wanted to see the expression of the face and the position of the body, and he wanted him to look like a statue.

  “Sometimes, as I told you, the guy would twist and turn a little during the job, and then the results would often be quite striking. But usually he would just have one hand on his head and his mouth open, pleading and swearing that he hadn’t tried to fight the Syndicate, or split the unions, that he was all for workers’ unity and innocent as a lamb, and Mike didn’t like that, because then they all looked just the same, same faces, same gestures, and that wasn’t what he wanted. ‘Pig work,’ he called it.

  “All we cared about was getting the guy into the barrel as fast as we could, drop the barrel into the river and think of something else. Not that there was much danger; the docks were covered by guys from headquarters, the police never stuck their noses into anything—they were not supposed to know about it, and it was only dog eating dog, anyway, but we didn’t like the job: a guy covered with cement from head to foot and screaming while he was already all white and turning hard, with only the black hole of the mouth still broadcasting—you really had to be artistic to like it.

  “Quite frankly, none of us cared for art that much. That was long before everybody got stinking rich and became art- and culture-conscious. Yes, ‘culture’ they began to call it. You had to have it, if you wanted to prove you had gone respectable and social. But Mike has always been a pioneer in everything, and he was the first in the Syndicate to go social and to realize that culture and art made you look good. So sometimes he took a hammer and chisel and touched up a few details himself. The guy I remember best of all was Big Bill Sugar, the Greek from San Francisco who wanted to keep the West Coast independent and refused to affiliate—the same thing Lou Dybic tried the year before in Chicago, with the slot machines; you all know what happened to him.

  “Only the difference between Lou and Big Bill was that Big Bill Sugar was very strong on his home ground, backed by all the grass roots. Also, he claimed he was strictly non-political. And he knew all the smart shit talk all right. He claimed he was for unity and all that. He didn’t want to split the workers, but neither did he want the movement to be dictated to by the East Coast waterfront. Oh well, you know the line. And he was very careful. Before he would come east and talk the situation over with Mike, he wanted hostages; he asked for Mike’s brother who was on the accounting side, and a couple of other Syndicate workers. They went, and Big Bill came to Hoboken. Only when they got together, it was easy to see that Mike wasn’t interested in the discussion at all. He kept looking at Big Bill Sugar like he was dreaming, and you cou
ld tell he wasn’t listening. You know, the Greek was quite a guy, over six feet tall and good-looking—the girls were all crazy about him, that’s how he got his nickname, Sugar. Even so, they talked right through for about seven hours, and they went into the whole thing—labor unity and getting rid of the political shysters who wouldn’t just defend the professional interests of the workers but were trying to make the movement into an election platform, and all that time Mike never took his eyes off Big Bill Sugar. When they had a coffee break, he came over to me and all he said was: ‘Okay, there’s no use arguing with this bastard, let’s give him a bath.’

  “I was about to remind him of his brother and the other two who were being held as hostages in San Francisco, but I kept my mouth shut. Mike always knew what he was doing and besides, the higher interests of the Syndicate were at stake. You have got to forget your personal feelings sometimes. They went on arguing, for form’s sake, and after closing time, when Big Bill left the shed with his party, we shot them all—him, his lawyer and the two blokes from the Oakland headquarters. That night, Mike supervised the job in person, and when the Greek was all nicely set in concrete, instead of rolling him into the Hudson, he stopped and looked at him sort of dreamily. Then he smiled and said: ‘Leave him here for a while. He has to dry out, and that’ll take a good day.’