Ten Tomorrows

by Roger Elwood

  It had become very quiet on the battlefield. Except for an occasional echoing cough as a gas tank exploded in the dark, and the constant, sinister chuckle and hiss of flames, all was still. He swam through suffocating silence. They’re all dead now, he thought, everything’s dead now, even the machines. Even the machines are dead now. He felt a sudden unexplainable pity for the machines, and a sorrow, and gnawing shame that he had pity enough to spare for them when he hadn’t even cried for his friends in his deserted unit. But it wasn’t the machines’ fault. Was it fair to create something solely to kill, and then try to tell it not to? But whose fault was it then? Someone had to take the blame, someone must be responsible for it, someone must suffer for this ultimate sin. But of course; that was what he must be looking for: the one who was responsible for it, the one who would have to pay.

  Ahead, something moved suddenly through the smoke, coming closer and closer, moaning mournfully. He found himself screaming without sound, beyond sound. The thing moved closer through the hushed, smothering dark. It was the ghost of a machine, he knew it. An iron ghost, a grinning skull all of rubber and wires and printed circuits, with waving cables like smoke and an evil red glow behind its quartz-and-glass eyes. It was the ghost of a dead man, walking with eyes open and fire in its hair. It was Death, a slobbering, groping Death personified out of the slime of its own field.

  It was a man. It was a man, staggering, reeling, with the tattered remnants of a familiar uniform floating around him. It was the enemy.

  He clawed at his crutch and stared, his fear ebbing to be replaced by an uncomfortable, confused vacuum. The enemy floundered backwards, trying to get away; he was covered with blood and breathed in racking sobs. They stared at each other, unconsciously circling slowly while their filmed eyes locked, like mad wounded dogs too sick even to fight.

  But gradually, as they circled, the enemy began to grow larger, his steps became firmer, the bloodstains melted away from his uniform, the jagged tears in the fabric reknitted themselves smoothly. Immaculate and frightful now, the enemy circled arrogantly, his shoulders hunching predatorily, his step becoming a stalk. Even the enemy’s outlines had altered subtly, flattening and broadening out, turning him to a gross juggernaut of inhuman strength. The enemy circled closer, his back humping, his legs bowing grotesquely into crooked toadlike pillars of bunched muscle.

  The enemy snarled at him—lips riding back to reveal long, yellowed fangs, razor-sharp and flecked with fresh blood—snatched at his belt and drew a heavy weapon from a battered holster. The enemy swung the weapon up to bear and took steady aim, the churning red highlights of the fog glinting murkily from blued steel. The muzzle yawned blackly at him, pulling his eyes down and down, swallowing them, gobbling his vision. The enemy pulled the trigger.

  He awoke screaming, bathed in cold sweat. And in spite of exhaustion, it was a long time before he slept again.

  The birds are singing as I stir, long and clear and liquid. It is morning. I writhe on the dirt floor of the cave as they sing. I open an eye slowly, slowly, peeling back the eyelid with ultimate care. A shaft of bright sunlight stabs the eye, thrusts a blazing spearhead deep into my brain. I scream matter-of-factly, try to move. My shattered leg scrapes against a rock. I scream from the gut this time, every part of my being in the scream, which lashes out through my throat, taking the top of my head with it. The world is yanked out from under me like a rug.

  When I wake up again it is raining, a long, gray drizzle. It’s impossible to tell if it’s day or night. I lie listening to the soft pockata-pockata, pitter-pat of the rain until the cold begins to creep up through my body, gnawing at the marrow of my bones. I worm to the very back of the cave and curl up into a ball as best as I can without hurting my leg. Tiny riverlets are winding snakelike through the gravel and pebbles of the cave floor and are touching me, patting at me like soft, intimate hands. The water begins to pool and soak into my clothes, to soak into my shivering skin. It feels like blood, seeping in instead of seeping out. I clutch my coat tightly around me. I listen numbly to the rain bouncing and ricocheting off the rocks, gurgling down the hillside, dribbling and sliding down along the walls and plopping softly as it splashes against my body. I don’t remember falling into unconsciousness again, but suddenly the sun is shining, and the birds are singing, and it is morning. I moan softly as the sun burns my flesh.

  I stir and sit up slowly, stopping every so often to put my head between my knees. For a long while I just sit there, leaning against the stone and just breathing: breathing great hungry gulps, breathing tiny gourmet sips. The people in Pittsburgh don’t breathe anymore. I breathe more slowly, thinking of the time I watched dawn wrap its web of golden haze around a white church steeple on Easter morning, and a bell had moaned far away and I had nudged a flat pebble gently out of the sheltering earth with the scratched brown toe of my shoe. After a while I can think of other things besides breathing. I stir again and move around some more, squirming cautiously. How long since the battle? Christ only knows, if He’s still up there; I don’t. A day maybe? Two? But I’m sitting in my own filth and I am very weak. Three days? My time sense is shot. It can’t be three days. My bones feel like they’re made out of chalk. I drag myself to my feet, using the crutch as a lever. I feel the fierce pull of the earth on every atom of my body, up through the soles of my feet and along my sagging spinal column to my swaying head, trying to drag me back down with bonds like iron glue. I stagger, catch myself with the crutch and push myself erect again. I breathe carefully for a moment, trying to regulate my thudding pulse, and then I start to inch slowly and determinedly toward the cave-mouth, blinking in the gloom and halfshadows. I reach the cave-mouth, rest for a second, and then thrust myself outside.

  My world explodes like a magnesium flare.

  Reeling, I slam blindly back against the hot, sundrenched stone and cover my eyes with my hands. Too bright. Almost undetectably, I inch my fingers apart, just a hair. The dazzling white fight of a clear summer’s morning crackles at me. I wince and flinch back instinctively but keep spreading my fingers slowly wider until my eyes gradually adjust to the kaleidoscope glare. The world swims into focus. Green, green dancing and swirling and shimmering all around me as the tree-covered hillslopes toss and ripple in the wind. And the blue bowl of sky arching godlike above the gabled hills, so bright that it seems to sear my retinas. After days of gray semidarkness in the cave, the sudden explosion of light and color that is the world sears me emotionally and leaves me trembling. The colors can almost be felt; I can sense their shifting patterns on my eyelids even when I screw my eyes shut in sudden panic.

  I open my eyes again and let the colors rave at me, drinking them, touching and tasting their subtle, oscillating textures. I am afraid that the world will absorb me, drown me in its intensity until I become just another fight wave spinning and vibrating along the color spectrum, or at best a single leaf nodding its head among the vast sea of living green.

  Quivering, totally open, totally vulnerable, I struggle to ride out the emotion-storm. Slowly—the rate at which my starved nerves and shriveled senses try to swallow—the world slackens, becomes less ravenous. The intense, almost sexual, flood of emotion that had possessed me and buffeted me helpless begins to drain away, and a tree is once again a tree instead of a flaming emerald fountain.

  I look out across the serene hill country, across the marching miles of trees, and tremble reflexively. Above the gnarled crest of a faraway hill, a hawk circles high, wings on fire. It is the only thing that moves in all of this bright empty land. The silent country gibbers at me, and each tree across all the lonely miles has its own whispering, sighing voice; but they are not human voices, and I am alone. But alive. But I am still alive. My hands caress the hot stone softly, almost defiantly. I am alive.

  As he rested against the stone, the empty land was split by a cruel scream of triumph. Above, the hawk wheeled, swimming the rolling blue river of the air, skimming the suddenly virgin sky with burning wings
. He watched the hawk in fascination, seeing it as an avatar of mindless tenacity. It was once again king of the air; Idlewild was dust. All it had had to do was wait a few generations until the fiercer clockwork cousins had gobbled themselves up. I had won by evolution. Was intelligence a survival trait? Megalopolis was as dead as the Pyramids, but the hawk continued to hunt according to a million-year habit. That kind of blind, racial patience frightened him. Was there an equation to balance intelligence and suicide? Was Armageddon the inevitable price of penicillin and the Unified Field Theory? If men were hawks, then no Homer, no Michelangelo, no Beethoven, no Aristotle, no Shakespeare. But there was a 150-mile smoking hole from Boston to New York. How do you argue with a hole? How do you argue with a hawk?

  Sun splashed and glinted from the hawk’s steel talons, its iron beak. The land turned slowly beneath the feathery belly, spun by whistling wings. The hawk’s bloody eye had decided on a field mouse, binocular vision riffling the menu of the forest. The hollow death banked, climbed for altitude, hovered. For a moment it hung, held by hunger, then it swooped.

  He tried to follow the hawk as it dived, and found that the world was blurred and faded around the edges of his eyes; he was still weak from loss of blood. As he turned his head, a bird sang in a nearby tree. He froze, the wind lightly rippling his hair. Instantly, as if a switch had been thrown, the world was gone, and the only thing that remained, the only focus for his attention, was that warbling, liquid singing. Hunger flattened his stomach against his ribcage, fluttered it like a sick butterfly up and down his spine. The bird sang again. He searched desperately, straining his eyes until they watered, and finally saw it hopping along a low branch, shaking its bill from side to side in the dappled sunlight.

  Saliva filled his mouth, nearly choking him as it trickled down his throat like bitter, oily glue. His hand went to the pistol he still wore at his belt, a response so automatic it didn’t even touch the surface of his mind. Clumsily, he tried to unbutton the heavy flap that kept the weapon in its holster. His fingers fumbled and slid helplessly over the glossy leather of the holster. He was too weak to unbutton the flap. He slumped against the stone and clawed weak at his hip, hot needles jabbing his stomach and brain. H numb fingers bumped against the tiny metal catch of the flap, once, twice—On the sixth try he grasped the catch, held onto it as desperately as if it were a woman, twisted it as violently as if it were the neck of the enemy.

  Taking a rattling breath, he touched the cool handle of the pistol, drew it. The bird hopped another foot out along the branch, rustling the cool leaves. Hardly breathing, he shoved off the safety and raised the gun with both hands, steadying himself by leaning back against the sloping rock. The bird chattered and scolded at the morning, preening its feathers. His aim wavered, then steadied. Gently, gently, almost lovingly, he caressed the trigger.

  The pistol roared, tearing itself from his weak fingers and clattering to the ground near his feet. The bird exploded like a small feathered bomb. A sudden, shocked silence roared across the hills. A singed feather floated briefly above the branch and then settled toward the ground. For a second, the world seemed to hold its breath, waiting motionlessly while the sun circled high above, and then the trees began to sigh and whisper again down the mountain slopes, louder and more fiercely than before.

  Nobody can make me do this, he thought automatically. He shuddered, muttered a weak obscenity, and turned away. He retrieved his pistol, jammed it into his holster, and lurched across to the tree, trying not to fall.

  Blood and matted feathers were strewn along the ground under the branch for a considerable distance; a high-velocity slug at that range had not left very much. He fell to his good knee and probed into the mess, rustling feathers with his stirring fingers. Goddamnit, there must be something left. A fat, black fly circled, settled contentedly onto a pool of blood, rippling its scarlet surface. He vomited, bringing up nothing but a trickle of bitter bile.

  When his retching had shuddered into sobs, he crawled painfully away from the dead bird and sat hugging his knees, trying to unsnarl his nerves. There were other ways to hunt, other things to hunt. He would survive. His eyes instinctively rose to the low crest of the next hill. Beyond was the valley battlefield; very possibly there were valuable supplies that had survived the fire-storm and that he could salvage, supplies that might make all the difference between survival and death. He shuddered, feeling his teeth clash and grind together in nervous reaction. Oh God, were there any of them left out there, waiting for him, waiting to punish—

  He jerked his thoughts harshly away, struggling to control his trembling. He would survive. He had not sinned. He had survived: they hadn’t. Survival was not a sin. And he would survive. For a while he would rest, and when he was able, he would return to the valley under cover of darkness to scavenge. He faced the thought with reluctance and with a strange terror. He didn’t want to go back there. The terror was illogical, and he tried to drive it away, shaking his head. There was no danger. He would be safe. He had not sinned.

  He crawled to his feet and limped aimlessly away to search the nearby scrub for something to eat. He had little luck. That night he slept fitfully, the add knife of hunger beginning to twist under his ribs.

  In the days that followed, hunger grew worse, grew sharper, grew more stabbing, until he felt its knife swell into a swallowed swordblade intent on hacking its way out from inside. Hunger robbed him of his sleep, drove him aimlessly into the night, deprived him even of the luxury of exhaustion. Though he beat the area around his cave in widening circles, somehow he never went near the valley battlefield; even hunger was not yet strong enough to break his unreasonable, horror-tinged reluctance.

  One afternoon, he came across a scuffled trail in the dirt that could have been human footprints. Or it could have been deer sign; the track was blurred, and his skimpy woodcraft was insufficient to tell. He stared dully at the scuff marks, wondering what would happen if there were another human at large in the area that he was already beginning to think of as his. He tried to figure possibilities and consequences but was too fuzzy-minded to concentrate. Intelligent thought was becoming more and more impossible; the inescapable pressure of starvation shattered abstract association-trains as quickly as they were formed. He tried to calculate the number of days he had gone without food and found that he couldn’t remember how long ago he had awakened in the cave. He thought maybe he should be more worried about his inability to remember, but he was too wrapped in numbing lethargy to care. Time had ceased to exist, except as a measurement for increasing hunger.

  Later that evening, he found a large earthworm under a rock and swallowed it, still alive and wiggling, without even tasting it. This gave him a glimmering of an idea, and he began to search a little more logically, overturning rocks and ripping strips of bark from dead trees and stumps. He gobbled beetles, snails, caterpillars, worms, even flies if he could catch them. He came upon a small bush dotted with berries and stripped it clean without caring if they were poisonous or not. Another time, a gobbled root made him vomit helplessly for hours. Once he caught a grass snake and wept in thankfulness, caressing the supple, leather-dry body. He skinned it as best he could with his military knife and ate it raw, licking blood from his fingertips. With the dulling of the sharpest razor-edge of hunger, he began to think about traps and snares for the first time, wondering if he could make them out of strips of his clothing, wondering how to use them and where.

  A few days later, he noticed that his teeth were rotting out.

  Dead men visited him that night, naked and bloated, with pale liquid fire dripping like pus from their hollow, empty eyes. They hissed at him in voices like lapping flame and tried to speak to him, but he could not hear their words.

  At last, as I knew I would, I return to the valley. I come creeping over the low hills, a sly, furtive shadow melting through the waiting darkness. The night presses down on me like a thumb, wrapping me in soothing, satin blackness. The only sound is the slight squee
-swish of my metal crutch and the off-key keening of a tumbling night wind. A dark cloud-bank looms and contorts above like a tortured elastic mountain, eccentrically lit by a pale moon that occasionally burrows into it and snaps shadows by their tails across the sky. I am invisible as I climb the hill, and I am afraid of my invisibility. If the rock falls in a desert where there are no ears to hear, does it make a sound? Can a man be invisible when there are no eyes to see him?

  But there are eyes. I realize this with a shock, my mind stumbling out of the mesmerized groove it has been wearing for itself. Two red eyes float momentarily to the side of the path, like smouldering cigarette butts burning through the black fabric of the darkness; they disappear as the night sweeps them off. A faint, musky reek bites into the soft flesh of my nostrils. It is an animal, I think; it is only an animal. I shudder, rubbing a hand along my arm, feeling prickly gooseflesh. I will not believe in demons. A nightbird moans among the trees, falling away from hearing. There are no demons. Please. Don’t let there be any demons.

  I creep forward again, feeling the soft weight of eyes. I fear the pressure of the eyes, yet I fear invisibility more because it implies that there is no one to see, that I have been singled out, that I am alone. Something locked within my skull whimpers hysterically and scratches to get out; I try to ignore it, trembling. If there is never anyone in the desert to hear the rock falling, then how can you ever be sure that there is a rock to fall? Or a desert, for that matter? Doesn’t the observed phenomenon take place precisely because there is someone there to observe it? How do you know the tide comes in if you’re not there to see it? Maybe it gurgles off to play cards with the boys every once in a while when it knows there’s nobody checking up on it. Why should the sun bother to rise in the morning when nobody’s around? It could sleep late and nobody’d be the wiser, especially not that bastard first sergeant. I begin to laugh and choke it back down. It is not a good laughter.