“And the other orders?”
“To close the door upon you when you enter and to think of you no more in this life, because you will be very happy.”
“Are you crazy?” cried Casher.
“I am a forgetty,” said Gosigo, with some dignity, “but I am not insane.”
“Whose orders are you going to obey, then?”
Gosigo smiled a warmly human smile at him. “Doesn’t that depend on you, sir, and not on me? Do I look like a man who is going to kill you soon?”
“No, you don’t,” said Casher.
“Do you know what you look like to me?” went on Gosigo, with a purr. “Do you really think that I would help you if I thought that you would kill a small girl?”
“You know it!” cried Casher, feeling his face go white.
“Who doesn’t?” said Gosigo. “What else have we got to talk about, here on Henriada? Let me help you on with these clothes, so that you will at least survive the ride.” With this he handed shoulder padding and padded helmet to Casher, who began to put on the garments, very clumsily.
Gosigo helped him.
When Casher was fully dressed, he thought that he had never dressed this elaborately for space itself. The world of Henriada must be a tumultuous place if people needed this kind of clothing to make a short trip.
Gosigo had put on the same kind of clothes.
He looked at Casher in a friendly manner, with an arch smile which came close to humor. “Look at me, honorable visitor. Do I remind you of anybody?”
Casher looked honestly and carefully, and then said, “No, you don’t.”
The man’s face fell. “It’s a game,” he said. “I can’t help trying to find out who I really am. Am I a Lord of the Instrumentality who has betrayed his trust? Am I a scientist who twisted knowledge into unimaginable wrong? Am I a dictator so foul that even the Instrumentality, which usually leaves things alone, had to step in and wipe me out? Here I am, healthy, wise, alert. I have the name Gosigo on this planet. Perhaps I am a mere native of this planet, who has committed a local crime. I am triggered. If anyone ever did tell me my true name or my actual past, I have been conditioned to shriek loud, fall unconscious and forget anything which might be said on such an occasion. People told me that I must have chosen this instead of death. Maybe. Death sometimes looks tidy to a forgetty.”
“Have you ever screamed and fainted?”
“I don’t even know that,” said Gosigo, “no more than you know where you are going this very day.”
Casher was tied to the man’s mystifications, so he did not let himself be provoked into a useless show of curiosity. Inquisitive about the forgetty himself, he asked:
“Does it hurt—does it hurt to be a forgetty?”
“No,” said Gosigo, “it doesn’t hurt, no more than you will.”
Gosigo stared suddenly at Casher. His voice changed tone and became at least one octave higher. He clapped his hands to his face and panted through his hands as if he would never speak again.
“But—oh! The fear—the eerie, dreary fear of being me!”
He still stared at Casher.
Quieting down at last, he pulled his hands away from his face, as if by sheer force, and said in an almost normal voice, “Shall we get on with our trip?”
Gosigo led the way out into the bare bleak corridor. A perceptible wind was blowing through it, though there was no sign of an open window or door. They followed a majestic staircase, with steps so broad that Casher had to keep changing pace on them, all the way down to the bottom of the building. This must, at some time, have been a formal reception hall. Now it was full of cars.
Curious cars.
Land vehicles of a kind which Casher had never seen before. They looked a little bit like the ancient “fighting tanks” which he had seen in pictures. They also looked a little like submarines of a singularly short and ugly shape. They had high spiked wheels, but their most complicated feature was a set of giant corkscrews, four on each side, attached to the car by intricate yet operational apparatus. Since Casher had been landed right into the palace by planoform, he had never had occasion to go outside among the tornadoes of Henriada.
The Administrator was waiting, wearing a coverall on which was stenciled his insignia of rank.
Casher gave him a polite bow. He glanced down at the handsome metric wristwatch which Gosigo had strapped on his wrist, outside the coverall. It read 3:95.
Casher bowed to Rankin Meiklejohn and said, “I’m ready, sir, if you are.”
“Watch him!” whispered Gosigo, half a step behind Casher. The Administrator said, “Might as well be going.” The man’s voice trembled.
Casher stood polite, alert, immobile. Was this danger? Was this foolishness? Could the Administrator already be drunk again?
Casher watched the Administrator carefully but quietly, waiting for the older man to precede him into the nearest groundcar, which had its door standing open.
Nothing happened, except that the Administrator began to turn pale.
There must have been six or eight people present. The others must have seen the same sort of thing before, because they showed no sign of curiosity or bewilderment. The Administrator began to tremble. Casher could see it, even through the bulk of the travelwear. The man’s hands shook.
The Administrator said, in a high nervous voice, “Your knife. You have it with you?”
Casher nodded.
“Let me see it,” said the Administrator.
Casher reached down to his boot and brought out the beautiful, superbly balanced knife. Before he could stand erect, he felt the clamp of Gosigo’s heavy fingers on his shoulder.
“Master,” said Gosigo to Meiklejohn, “tell your visitor to put his weapon away. It is not allowed for any of us to show weapons in your presence.”
Casher tried to squirm out of the heavy grip without losing his balance or his dignity. He found that Gosigo was knowledgeable about karate too. The forgetty held ground, even when the two men waged an immobile, invisible sort of wrestling match, the leverage of Casher’s shoulder working its way hither and yon against the strong grip of Gosigo’s powerful hand.
The Administrator ended it. He said, “Put away your knife . . .” in that high funny voice of his.
The watch had almost reached 4:00, but no one had yet got into the car.
Gosigo spoke again, and when he did there was a contemptuous laugh from the Deputy Administrator, who had stood by in ordinary indoor clothes.
“Master, isn’t it time for one for the road’?”
“Of course, of course,” chattered the Administrator. He began breathing almost normally again.
“Join me,” he said to Casher. “It’s a local custom.”
Casher had let his knife slip back into his bootsheath. When the knife dropped out of sight, Gosigo released his shoulder; he now stood facing the Administrator and rubbed his bruised shoulder. He said nothing, but shook his head gently, showing that he did not want a drink.
One of the robots brought the Administrator a glass, which appeared to contain at least a liter and a half of water. The Administrator said, very politely, “Sure you won’t share it?”
This close, Casher could smell the reek of it. It was pure byegarr, and at least 160 proof. He shook his head again, firmly but also politely.
The Administrator lifted the glass.
Casher could see the muscles of the man’s throat work as the liquid went down. He could hear the man breathing heavily between swallows. The white liquid went lower and lower in the gigantic glass.
At last it was all gone.
The Administrator cocked his head sidewise and said to Casher in a parrotlike voice, “Well, toodle-oo!”
“What do you mean, sir?” asked Casher.
The Administrator had a pleasant glow on his face. Casher was surprised that the man was not dead after that big and sudden a drink.
“I just mean g’bye. I’m—not—feeling—well.”
Wit
h that he fell straight forward, as stiff as a rock tower. One of the servants, perhaps another forgetty, caught him before he hit the ground.
“Does he always do this?” asked Casher of the miserable and contemptuous Deputy Administrator.
“Oh, no,” said the Deputy. “Only at times like these.” “What do you mean, ‘like these’?”
“When he sends one more armed man against the girl at Beauregard. They never come back. You won’t come back, either. You could have left earlier, but you can’t now. Go along and try to kill the girl. I’ll see you here about five twenty-five if you succeed. As a matter of fact, if you come back at all, I’ll try to wake him up. But you won’t come back. Good luck. I suppose that’s what you need. Good luck.”
Casher shook hands with the man without removing his gloves. Gosigo had already climbed into the driver’s seat of the machine and was testing the electric engines. The big corkscrews began to plunge down, but before they touched the floor, Gosigo had reversed them and thrown them back into the up position.
The people in the room ran for cover as Casher entered the machine, though there was no immediate danger in sight. Two of the human servants dragged the Administrator up the stairs, the Deputy Administrator following them rapidly.
“Seat belt,” said Gosigo.
Casher found it and snapped it closed.
“Head belt,” said Gosigo.
Casher stared at him. He had never heard of a head belt. “Pull it down from the roof, sir. Put the net under your chin.”
Casher glanced up.
There was a net fitted snugly against the roof of the vehicle, just above his head. He started to pull it down, but it did not yield. Angrily, he pulled harder, and it moved slowly downward. By the Bell and Bank, do they want to hang me in this! he thought to himself as he dragged the net down. There was a strong fiber belt attached to each end of the net, while the net itself was only fifteen to twenty centimeters wide. He ended up in a foolish position, holding the head belt with both hands lest it snap back into the ceiling and not knowing what to do with it. Gosigo leaned over and, half impatiently, helped him adjust the web under his chin. It pinched for a moment and Casher felt as though his head were being dragged by a heavy weight.
“Don’t fight it,” said Gosigo. “Relax.”
Casher did. His head was lifted several centimeters into a foam pocket, which he had not previously noticed, in the back of the seat. After a second or two, he realized that the position was odd but comfortable.
Gosigo had adjusted his own head belt and had turned on the lights of the vehicle. They blazed so bright that Casher almost thought they might be a laser, capable of charring the inner doors of the big room.
The lights must have keyed the door.
V
Two panels slid open and a wild uproar of wind and vegetation rushed in. It was rough and stormy but far below hurricane velocity.
The machine rolled forward clumsily and was out of the house and on the road very quickly.
The sky was brown, bright luminous brown, shot through with streaks of yellow. Casher had never seen a sky of that color on any other world he had visited, and in his long exile he had seen many planets.
Gosigo, staring straight ahead, was preoccupied with keeping the vehicle right in the middle of the black, soft, tarry road. “Watch it!” said a voice speaking right into his head.
It was Gosigo, using an intercom which must have been built into the helmets.
Casher watched, though there was nothing to see except for the rush of mad wind. Suddenly the groundcar turned dark, spun upside down, and was violently shaken. An oily, pungent stench of pure fetor immediately drenched the whole car.
Gosigo pulled out a panel with a console of buttons. Light and fire, intolerably bright, burned in on them through the windshield and the portholes on the side.
The battle was over before it began.
The groundcar lay in a sort of swamp. The road was visible thirty or thirty-five meters away.
There was a grinding sound inside the machine and the groundcar righted itself. A singular sucking noise followed, then the grinding sound stopped. Casher could glimpse the big corkscrews on the side of the car eating their way into the ground.
At last the machine was steady, pelted only by branches, leaves and what seemed like kelp.
A small tornado was passing over them.
Gosigo took time to twist his head sidewise and to talk to Casher.
“An air whale swallowed us and I had to burn our way out.”
“A what?” cried Casher.
“An air whale,” repeated Gosigo calmly on the intercom. “There are no indigenous forms of life on this planet, but the imported Earth forms have changed wildly since we brought them in. The tornadoes lifted the whales around enough so that some of them got adapted to flying. They were the meat-eating kind, so they like to crack our groundcars open and eat the goodies inside. We’re safe enough from them for the time being, provided we can make it back to the road. There are a few wild men who live in the wind, but they would not become dangerous to us unless we found ourselves really helpless. Pretty soon I can unscrew us from the ground and try to get back on the road. It’s not really too far from here to Ambiloxi.”
The trip to the road was a long one, even though they could see the road itself all the time that they tried various approaches.
The first time, the groundcar tipped ominously forward. Red lights showed on the panel and buzzers buzzed. The great spiked wheels spun in vain as they chewed their way into a bottomless quagmire.
Gosigo, calling back to his passenger, cried, “Hold steady! We’re going to have to shoot ourselves out of this one backward!”
Casher did not know how he could be any steadier, belted, hooded and strapped as he was, but he clutched the arms of his seat.
The world went red with fire as the front of the car spat flame in rocketlike quantities. The swamp ahead of them boiled into steam, so that they could see nothing. Gosigo changed the windshield over from visual to radar, and even with radar there was not much to be seen—nothing but a gray swirl of formless wraiths, and the weird lurching sensation as the machine fought its way back to solid ground. The console suddenly showed green and Gosigo cut the controls. They were back where they had been, with the repulsive burnt entrails of the air whale scattered among the coral trees.
“Try again,” said Gosigo, as though Casher had something to do with the matter.
He fiddled with the controls and the groundcar rose several feet. The spikes on the wheels had been hydraulically extended until they were each at least one hundred fifty centimeters long. The car felt like a large enclosed bicycle as it teetered on its big wheels. The wind was strong and capricious but there was no tornado in sight.
“Here we go,” said Gosigo redundantly. The groundcar pressed forward in a mad rush, hastening obliquely through the vegetation and making for the highway on Casher’s right.
A bone-jarring crash told them that they had not made it. For a moment Casher was too dizzy to see where they were.
He was glad of his helmet and happy about the web brace which held his neck. That crash would have killed him if he had not had full protection.
Gosigo seemed to think the trip normal. His classic Hindu features relaxed in a wise smile as he said, “Hit a boulder. Fell on our side. Try again.”
Casher managed to gasp, “Is the machine unbreakable?”
There was a laugh in Gosigo’s voice when he answered, “Almost. We’re the most vulnerable items in it.”
Again fire spat at the ground, this time from the side of the groundcar. It balanced itself precariously on the four high wheels. Gosigo turned on the radar screen to look through the steam which their own jets had called up.
There the road was, plain and near.
“Try again!” he shouted, as the machine lunged forward and then performed a veritable ballet on the surface of the marsh. It rushed, slowed, turned around on a hummock
, gave itself an assist with the jets and then scrambled through the water.
Casher saw the inverted cone of a tornado, half a kilometer or less away, veering toward them.
Gosigo sensed his unspoken thought, because he answered, “Problem: who gets to the road first, that or we?”
The machine bucked, lurched, twisted, spun.
Casher could see nothing anymore from the windshield in front, but it was obvious that Gosigo knew what he was doing.
There was the sickening, stomach-wrenching twist of a big drop and then a new sound was heard—a grinding as of knives.
Gosigo, unworried, took his head out of the headnet and looked over at Casher with a smile. “The twister will probably hit us in a minute or two, but it doesn’t matter now. We’re on the road and I’ve bolted us to the surface.”
“Bolted?” gasped Casher.
“You know, those big screws on the outside of the car. They were made to go right into the road. All the roads here are neo-asphaltum and self-repairing. There will be traces of them here when the last known person on the last known planet is dead. These are good roads.” He stopped for the sudden hush. “Storm’s going over us—“
It began again before he could finish his sentence. Wild raving winds tore at the machine, which sat so solid that it seemed bedded in permastone.
Gosigo pushed two buttons and calibrated a dial. He squinted at his instruments, then pressed a button mounted on the edge of his navigator’s seat. There was a sharp explosion, like a blasting of rock by chemical methods.
Casher started to speak but Gosigo held out a warning hand for silence.
He tuned his dials quickly. The windshield faded out, radar came on and then went off, and at last a bright map—bright red in background with sharp gold lines—appeared across the whole width of the screen. There were a dozen or more bright points on the map. Gosigo watched these intently.
The map blurred, faded, dissolved into red chaos.
A Day in the Life Page 23