The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

by Gene Wolfe

  Peters became aware that the soldier’s voice was fading, and with it his image on the screen.

  “ … all of us know …” It was barely audible. The screen went white, dazzlingly bright

  “What is this?” a new voice asked. The voice was young, unpolished and unprofessional, the muttering of the new tenant next door to himself, heard through the walls at 11 P.M.

  Lewis said, “I’m afraid we’re having some communications problems here, gentlemen; you’ll have to bear with us.” Addressing the disembodied voice: “Is this Grizzly Bear?”

  “Ken!”

  “Grizzly Bear One—General Virdon—come in, please.”

  As though drawn long ago in invisible ink, and only now called up by heat or the ammoniacal fumes of blood, a face materialized. Peters had expected a beard and the conventional, exotic, vaguely erotic, jewelry, but the boy was too young for the first and had removed—if he ever wore it—the second, save for the rhinestoned frames (each weeping a crystal acrylic tear) of thick glasses. “Well,” he said, and then, “ken.” He moved toward his screen, appearing to lean out of the illusion, his thin, unlined face suspended above them as it might have been over a cage of white rats. Then his eyes left them and he looked toward the window that was the west wall of the room, and the tossing Atlantic.

  “Who are you?” Lewis asked.

  “Philadelphia,” the boy answered simply. Peters saw Lewis wince; Philadelphia was in radical hands.

  From the floor someone called, “We were watching the attack on Detroit.”

  “Oh,” the boy said. And then, “I can get you Detroit. Wait a minute.”

  The screen flashed, and was filled with a young man whose forehead was painted with hieroglyphics. He said, “This is Free Michigan Five with uninterrupted battle coverage, music and macrobiotic diet tips, except when we are interrupted. Did everyone get to see the pig plane that crashed in Dearborn Heights?”

  Someone called, “No!” but the young man appeared not to have heard. “I guess you’ve got the news that six kenkins are going to donate their bodies to Peace, and we’re going to give you that live right now. Hold on.”

  A bigger man, with a bushy beard, his hair held back by a beaded band. Behind him four men and two women sat cross-legged on ground littered with rubble, their heads bent. “No Roman circus,” the bearded man said. “If you’re not considering doing this yourself, please tune out.”

  “This is a television picture,” Lewis said at the front of the room. “That’s what’s giving the streaky effect. Vidlink does not do this.”

  “Over there”—the bushy-bearded man waved an arm—“is what they call Cougar—that’s the big pig force attacking us from the south. I think you can hear the shooting.”

  They could. The distant whine of ricocheting bullets, the nervous chattering of assault rifles and machine guns; and below all this (like the bass section of an orchestra, in which iron-souled strings, and horns, and wild kettledrums inherited from Ottoman cavalry, speak of the death of spring and heroes) the double-toned pounding of the quad-fifties—four fifty-caliber machine guns mounted together on a combat car and controlled by a single trigger—as they chewed down stone and brick and sandbags to splash the blood and brains of lonely snipers across the debris.

  “It’s strictly voluntary whether you talk or not,” the man with the beard said. “We’ve asked everyone who isn’t actually thinking about doing this themselves to tune out, but probably there are a lot of them still on. You know how it is. Anybody want to talk?”

  For a moment no one moved, then a thin young man with a curly beard stood up. He was wearing only undershorts, boxer shorts dotted with a pattern of acorns. The interviewer said, “This is great, man. In the last two batches nobody would talk.” He smiled. He had bad teeth and a good smile.

  The curly-bearded young man in shorts said, “What do you want to know?”

  The bearded man said, “I guess most of all why.”

  “If you don’t know I can’t tell you. Yes, I can; because I want to turn things around. Like, everybody all the time only does it for himself or something he sees being part of him only bigger, an empire or a church, like that. I’m doing it for ants, to set us loose.”

  The bearded man said, “You stoned?”

  “Sure I’m stoned. Ken, I’m stoned blind.”

  “You don’t look stoned, man.”

  “Trust me.”

  “You believe in more life after you die?”

  The curly-bearded young man in boxer shorts shook his head. “That isn’t what it means. When there’s no more, that’s Death.”

  “Just the big dark?”

  He nodded. “The big dark.”

  One of the girls stood. She was a thin and rather flat-chested girl, with straggling brown hair and the large, trusting eyes of a fawn. “I don’t agree with that,” she said. “If Death is Nothing, why have another name for it?”

  “That’s nominalism,” the curly-bearded young man said. “That’s camp.” After he had said it he seemed sorry he had spoken.

  “And I’m not killing myself,” the girl continued. “That’s up to them—whether I die or not. I don’t think this I is going to live afterward if they kill me—of course not. But something will continue in existence, and there are a lot of things here”—oddly, she touched her shoulders, each hand against its own so that for a moment her doubled arms seemed wings, small and thin and featherless—“we could do without.”

  The bushy-bearded man said, “You’re going to let them be your judges?”

  “My Lord let Pilate be his.” She sat down. The curly-bearded young man had turned his back to the screen.

  “Anyone else,” the bearded man said. “Anybody at all.”

  No one looked toward him. A girl wearing a motorcycle helmet came trotting up and announced, “Ready.” The six stood. The bearded man said, “This is it. We’ll follow them as long as we can.” In point of fact the six were already off screen, though the bearded man was, presumably, looking toward them. “We get all kinds, I suppose you could say—you just talked to two of them. Truth seekers, Jesus freaks, activists, pacifists, about twice as many boys as girls. No one has to come, and anyone can turn back at any time. The people you just talked to could turn back now if they wanted, although it doesn’t look like any of them are going to.”

  A shot of the six showed them following the girl in the motorcycle helmet. The buildings to either side of them had been largely destroyed by air strikes, and they might have been tourists trailing a guide through some older ruined city.

  “Some of you will be thinking you would like to do what they are doing,” the bushy-bearded man said. “You can sign up at most Buddhist and Christian spiritual centers, and also at the temple of Kali just off the Edsel Ford Expressway. Also in the basement————” -he named a well-known department store—“where the travel office used to be. Of course nothing is final right up to the bullets.”

  The camera jumped, and the men Lowell Lewis had gathered together saw the six emerging from an alley choked with rubble. The girl in the motorcycle helmet was no longer visible. Awkwardly they spread to form a single straggling line, three young men on one end, then the two girls, then an older, balding man. Two had contrived, or perhaps been given, white rags on sticks; they waved them. The remaining four advanced with lifted hands.

  At Peter’s ear Solomos whispered, “How near are they now? To the fighting?” As if to answer him a bullet kicked up dust before one of the young men’s feet. He hesitated for a moment, then trotted to catch up.

  “Please,” the bushy-bearded man’s voice said, “if you aren’t a potential volunteer we ask you to tune out.”

  Someone called to Lewis, “Switch it off.”

  Lewis said, “As you have seen, they have taken control of our channel.”

  Solomos asked, “He could still deactivate this receiver, could he not?” and Peters answered, “Sure.” He felt that he was going to be sick, and was surp
rised to see one of Tredgold’s Portuguese girls still circulating with a tray of drinks and canapés. He took a martini and drained it; when his eyes returned to the screen three of the six were gone. The remaining three, seen now from behind, still advanced. The young man with the curly beard had removed his acorn-printed shorts and walked naked. Whether from a remote mike or by some sound-gathering device, voices came suddenly into the Lisbon hotel room. The naked boy was saying, “Peace! Peace! Don’t shoot, look at us!” A girl crooned wordlessly, and the bald man recited the Lord’s Prayer. Distantly someone called, “Hey, cease fire. They’re giving up. Squad! Hold it!”

  The three continued to advance, but diverged as they came; first six, then twelve, then twenty-four or more yards separating each from his or her companions, as though each were determined to die alone. The screen could not longer encompass all three, and began to move nervously from one to the next as though afraid to miss the death of any. A soldier stood and motioned to the curly-bearded young man, indicating the midden of smashed concrete which had sheltered him. As he did so he was shot, and fell backward. The curly-bearded young man turned toward his own lines shouting, “Stop! Stop!” and was shot in the back. For a moment the camera showed him writhing on the dusty pavement, then switched to the girl, now remote and fuzzy with distance but still large in the picture provided by the telephoto lens. Four soldiers surrounded her, and as they watched one put his arms about her and kissed her. Another jerked them apart, shoved the first aside and tore away the girl’s thin shirt; as he did she exploded in a sheet of flame that embraced them all.

  The bald man was walking rapidly toward a half-tracked combat car mounting quad-fifties; faintly they could hear him saying, “Hey, listen, the Giants won twenty-six straight in 1916, and the biggest gate in baseball was more than eighty-four thousand for a Yankees-Browns game in New York. The youngest big leaguer ever was Hamilton Joe Nuxhall—he pitched for Cincinnati when he was fifteen. Don’t you guys care about anything?” The crew of the half-track stared at him until an officer drew a pistol and fired. The bald man leaped to one side (Peters could not tell whether he had been hit or not) and ran toward him shouting something about the Boston Braves. The officer fired again and the bald man’s body detonated like a bomb. The voice of the young man with hieroglyphics on his forehead said, “I think we’re going to catch the Zen Banzai charge over on the west side now.” There was a sudden shift in picture and they saw a horde of ragged people with red cloths knotted around their heads and waists streaming toward a line of soldiers supported by two tanks. Some of them had firearms; more were armed with spears and gasoline bombs. For a moment they were falling everywhere—then the survivors had overwhelmed the tanks. Peters saw a soldier’s head still wearing its steel helmet, open-eyed in death and livid with the loss of blood, held aloft on a homemade spear. The picture closed on it as it turned and swayed above the crowd; it became the head of General Virdon, who said, “Now we’ve got you again. My communications people tell me we lost you for a few minutes, Mr. Lewis.” He sounded relieved.

  Lewis said, “We had technical difficulties.”

  The voice of the boy in Philadelphia announced, “I did that fade with the faces—it was pretty good, wasn’t it?” Solomos asked Peters, “Why are you attacking? You should be defending. You have lost most of your country already.”

  “We don’t think so,” Peters said.

  “You have a few army camps and airdromes and some factories remote from centers of population; that is not the country. You survive thus far because they do not know how to fight, but they are learning, they are drilling armies everywhere, and you do not know how to fight either, and are not learning; after the defeat of the Germans and your small war in Korea you allowed your army to become only a consumer of your industrial production. What will this general do if they march from Chicago while his front is entangled in this street fighting?”

  Donovan, appearing drink in hand from some remote part of the room, said, “I’m glad you asked that, Colonel Solomos. You see, that’s part of our plan—to get these people out into the open where our planes can get at them.”

  Solomos made a disgusted sound. “Virdon has no reserve to cover his rear?”

  “Certainly he does,” Donovan said. “Naturally I can’t tell you how many.” A moment afterward, when Solomos was talking to someone else, he warned Peters, “Be nice to that guy; he represents the Greek army—its business interests. Lou is trying to contract for some Greeks to stiffen things along the coast.”

  Peters said, “I’d think they’d be worrying about being nice to us, then. They ought to be glad to get the money.”

  “There’s not a lot of real money around. Mostly we’re talking trade agreements after the war, stuff like that.”

  A familiar voice asked, “Suppose one wished to get down a bit of a flier on this row; what’s the old firm offering?” It was Tredgold.

  Donovan, a little puzzled to see someone he did not recognize, said, “I’m afraid I’ve already laid out as much as I can afford.” Peters asked, “You’re betting against us?”

  “Only for sport. The fact is, I’d back either, but I shouldn’t expect you to turn against your own chaps. Ten thousand escudos?”

  “You’re on.” By a simultaneous operation of instinct both looked up at the screen, where General Virdon, looking much as though he were giving the weather, was outlining his battle plan in chalk.

  Tredgold called loudly, “I say, there! Those marks show where you are now, eh? But where shall you be in an hour?” The general began laboriously sketching phantom positions across the heart of Detroit. “Well, we’ll see, eh?” Tredgold whispered to Peters.

  Peters asked, “Have you had a drink?”

  “Well, no, I haven’t, actually. Just arrived a moment or so ago, to tell the truth. Are my birds behaving?”

  “Yes, they’ve been fine.” Peters waved over a tall dark girl whose hair, gathered behind her head in a cascade of curls, suggested a Greece not represented by Solomos. She smiled at each of them in turn, and they each took a drink—Peters was conscious that it was his third or fourth, he could not be sure which. “Listen,” he said to Tredgold when the girl had gone. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  They found chairs at the back of the room, next to the window, and Peters said, “Can you set me up with that girl?”

  “You didn’t need me, old boy; just ask her. Your chief is paying, after all.”

  They talked of something else, Peters conscious that it was impossible—equally impossible to explain the impossibility. Time passed, and he knew that he would despise himself later for having missed this opportunity; though it was an opportunity that would only exist when it was too late. A few feet away Donovan was taking his wallet from his pocket, making a bet with a tall German; for some reason Peters thought of the recording company which, ultimately, employed Tredgold, and their trademark, a cluster of instruments stamped in gold, recalling the slow way it had turned round and round on the old-fashioned 33 1/3 disk player in his grandmother’s house in Palmerton, Pennsylvania. Tredgold was recounting some story about a badger that had hidden from dogs in the cellar of a church, and Peters interrupted him to say, “What’s it like in England now?”

  Tredgold said, “And so you see the poor blighters couldn’t explain what they were doing there,” and Peters realized that he had not spoken aloud at all and had to say again, “But what is it like in England now?”

  Tredgold smiled. “I daresay we’re fifteen years behind you.”

  “You’re expecting all this?” Peters waved a hand at the distant screen. “I mean, are you expecting it?”

  “Seems likely enough, I should think. Same problems in both countries, much. Same sort of chaps in authority. And ours look to yours—of course, it won’t last nearly so long on our side; we haven’t the space.”

  “If we win,” Peters said, “I doubt that it will ever break out in England.”

  “Oh, but y
ou won’t, you know,” Tredgold said. “I’ve money on it.”

  Peters sipped his drink, trying to decide what kind of whiskey was in it; everything tasted the same. Probably Canadian, he thought. He had checked the supplies sent up by the hotel before the party began, and had noticed how much Canadian whiskey there was; the war had dried up the American market. “You could change things,” he told Tredgold suddenly, “before this happens.”

  “I could change things? I bloody well could not.”

  “You English could, I mean.”

  “Could have done the same sort of thing yourselves,” Tredgold said. “All your big corporations, owning everything and running everyone, everything decided by the economic test when it was forty or more years out of date. One firm’s economies only good because of prices set by another to encourage or discourage something else altogether, and your chemical works ruining your fishing, turning the sea into a dustbin, then selling their chemical foods. Why didn’t you change things yourselves, eh?”

  Peters shook his head. “I don’t know. Everybody was talking about it for years—I remember even when I was in grade school. But nothing was ever done. Maybe it was more complicated than it looked.”

  “Britain’s the same. These chaps everyone’s been shouting at to change things, they’re the very chaps that do so well as things are. Think they’re going to make new rules for a game they always win? Not ruddy likely.” Tredgold stood up. “Your crowd’s thinning out a bit, I fancy. I say”—he took a passing stranger by the arm—“pardon me, sir, but where’s everyone off to?”

  “The cabaret downstairs,” the man said in an accent Peters could not identify. “The last show there—it is ten minutes. Then we come here again and watch again the battle. You wish to come?”

  Tredgold glanced at Peters, then shook his head. “Some other time, and thank you very much. You come to Lisbon often? Wait a bit, I’ve card here somewhere.” He walked as far as the corridor door with the stranger, then returned to Peters. “Nice chap. Hungarian or something. Hope he fancies dark women.”