When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

  By the time they completed their work schedules, they were sure it would take between thirty-five and forty-two normal days to get the sails stiffened and re-hung. The robots did the outside work, but the sails were seventy thousand miles long by twenty thousand miles wide.

  Forty-two days!

  The work was not forty-two days at all.

  It was one year and three days before they finished.

  The relationships in the cabin had not changed much. Talatashar left her alone except to make ugly remarks. Nothing he had found in the medicine cabinet had made him look any better, but some of the things drugged him so that he slept long and well.

  Trece had long since become her sweetheart, but it was such an innocent romance that it might have been conducted on grass, under elms, at the edge of an Earthside silky river.

  Once she had found them fighting and had exclaimed:

  "Stop it! Stop it! You can't!"

  When they did stop hitting each other, she said wonderingly:

  "I thought you couldn't. Those boxes. Those safeguards. Those things they put in with us."

  And Talatashar said, in a voice of infinite ugliness and finality, "That's what they thought. I threw those things out of the ship months ago. Don't want them around."

  The effect on Trece was dramatic, as bad as if he had walked into one of the Ancient Unselfing Grounds unaware. He stood utterly still, his eyes wide and his voice filled with fear when, at last, he did speak.

  "So—that's—why—we—fought!"

  "You mean the boxes? They're gone, all right."

  "But," gasped Trece, "each was protected by each one's box. We were all protected—from ourselves. God help us all!"

  "What is God?" said Talatashar.

  "Never mind. It's an old word. I heard it from a robot. But what are we going to do? What are you going to do?" said he accusingly to Talatashar.

  "Me," said Talatashar, "I'm doing nothing. Nothing has happened." The working side of his face twisted in a hideous smile.

  Veesey watched both of them.

  She did not understand it, but she feared it, that unspecific danger.

  Talatashar gave them his ugly, masculine laugh, but this time Trece did not join him. He stared open-mouthed at the other man.

  Talatashar put on a show of courage and indifference. "Shift's up," he said, "and I'm turning in."

  Veesey nodded and tried to say good night but no words came. She was frightened and inquisitive. Of the two, feeling inquisitive was worse. There were thirty-odd thousand people all around her, but only these two were alive and present. They knew something which she did not know.

  Talatashar made a brave show of it by bidding her, "Mix up something special for the big eating tomorrow. Mind you do it, girl."

  He climbed into the wall.

  When Veesey turned toward Trece, it was he who fell into her arms.

  "I'm frightened," he said. "We can face anything in space, but we can't face us. I'm beginning to think that the sailor killed himself. His psychological guard broke down too. And now we're all alone with just us."

  Veesey looked instinctively around the cabin. "It's all the same as before. Just the three of us, and this little room, and the Up-and-Out outside."

  "Don't you see it, darling?" He grabbed her by the shoulders. "The little boxes protected us from ourselves. And now there aren't any. We are helpless. There isn't anything here to protect us from us. What hurts man like man? What kills people like people? What danger to us could be more terrible than ourselves?"

  She tried to pull away. "It's not that bad."

  Without answering he pulled her to him. He began tearing at her clothes. The jacket and shorts, like his own, were omni-textile and fitted tight. She fought him off but she was not the least bit frightened. She was sorry for him, and at this moment the only thing that worried her was that Talatashar might wake up and try to help her. That would be too much.

  Trece was not hard to stop.

  She got him to sit down and they drifted into the big chair together.

  His face was as tear-stained as her own.

  That night, they did not make love.

  In whispers, in gasps, he told her the story of Old Twenty-two. He told her that people poured out among the stars and that the ancient things inside people woke up, so that the deeps of their minds were more terrible than the blackest depth of space. Space never committed crimes. It just killed. Nature could transmit death, but only man could carry crime from world to world. Without the boxes, they looked into the bottomless depths of their own unknown selves.

  She did not really understand, but she tried as well as she possibly could.

  He went to sleep—it was long after his shift should have ended—murmuring over and over again:

  "Veesey, Veesey, protect me from me! What can I do now, now, now, so that I won't do something terrible later on? What can I do? Now I'm afraid of me, Veesey, and afraid of Old Twenty-two. Veesey, Veesey, you've got to save me from me. What can I do now, now, now . . . ?"

  She had no answer and after he slept, she slept. The yellow lights burned brightly on them both. The robot-board, reading that no human being was in the "on" position, assumed complete control of the ship and sails.

  Talatashar woke them in the morning.

  No one that day, nor any of the succeeding days, said anything about the boxes. There was nothing to say.

  But the two men watched each other like unrelated beasts and Veesey herself began watching them in turn. Something wrong and vital had come into the room, some exuberance of life which she had never known existed. It did not smell; she could not see it; she could not reach it with her fingers. It was something real, nevertheless. Perhaps it was what people once called danger.

  She tried to be particularly friendly to both the men. It made the feeling diminish within her. But Trece became surly and jealous and Talatashar smiled his untruthful lopsided smile.

  IV

  Danger came to them by surprise.

  Talatashar's hands were on her, pulling her out of her own sleeping-box.

  She tried to fight but he was as remorseless as an engine.

  He pulled her free, turned her around, and let her float in the air. She would not touch the floor for a minute or two, and he obviously counted on getting control of her again. As she twisted in the air, wondering what had happened, she saw Trece's eyes rolling as they followed her movement. Only a fraction of a second later did she realize that she saw Trece too. He was tied up with emergency wire, and the wire which bound him was tied to one of the stanchions in the wall. He was more helpless than she.

  A cold deep fear came upon her.

  "Is this a crime?" she whispered to the empty air. "Is this what crime is, what you are doing to me?"

  Talatashar did not answer her, but his hands took a firm terrible grip on her shoulders. He turned her around. She slapped at him. He slapped her back, hitting so hard that her jaw felt like a wound.

  She had hurt herself accidentally a few times; the doctor-robots had always hurried to her aid. But no other human being had ever hurt her. Hurting people—why, that wasn't done, except for the games of men! It wasn't done. It couldn't happen. It did.

  All in a rush she remembered what Trece had told her about Old Twenty-two, and about what happened to people when they lost their own outsides in space and began making up evil from the people-insides which, after a million and more years of becoming human, still followed them everywhere—even into space itself.

  This was crime come back to man.

  She managed to say it to Talatashar. "You are going to commit crimes? On this ship? With me?"

  His expression was hard to read, with half of his face frozen in a perpetual rictus of unfulfilled laughter. They were facing each other now. Her face was feverish from the pain of his slap, but the good side of his face showed no corresponding imprint of pain from having been struck by her. It showed nothing but strength, alertness, and a kind of attunement
which was utterly and unimaginably wrong.

  At last he answered her, and it was as if he wandered among the wonders of his own soul.

  "I'm going to do what I please. What I please. Do you understand?"

  "Why don't you just ask us?" she managed to say. "Trece and I will do anything you want. We're all alone in this little ship, millions of miles from nowhere. Why shouldn't we do what you want? Let him go. And talk to me. We'll do what you want. Anything. You have rights too."

  His laugh was close to a crazy scream.

  He put his face close to her and hissed at her so sharply that droplets of his spittle sprayed against her cheek and ear.

  "I don't want rights!" he shouted at her. "I don't want what's mine. I don't want to do right. Do you think I haven't heard the two of you, night after night, making soft loving sounds when the cabin has gone dark? Why do you think I threw the cubes out of the ship? Why do you think I needed power?"

  "I don't know," she said, sadly and meekly. She had not given up hope. As long as he was talking he might talk himself out and become reasonable again. She had heard of robots blowing their circuits, so that they had to be hunted down by other robots. But she had never thought that it might happen to people too.

  Talatashar groaned. The history of man was in his groan—the anger at life, which promises so much and gives so little, and despair about time, which tricks man while it shapes him. He sat back on the air and let himself drift toward the floor of the cabin, where the magnetic carpeting drew the silky iron filaments in their clothing.

  "You're thinking he'll get over this, aren't you?" said he, speaking of himself.

  She nodded.

  "You're thinking he'll get reasonable and let both of us alone, aren't you?"

  She nodded again.

  "You're thinking—Talatashar, he'll get well when we arrive at Wereld Schemering, and the doctors will fix his face, and then we'll all be happy again. That's what you're thinking, isn't it?"

  She still nodded. Behind her she heard Trece give a loud groan against his gag, but she did not dare take her eyes off Talatashar and his spoiled, horrible face.

  "Well, it won't be that way, Veesey," he said. The finality in his voice was almost calm.

  "Veesey, you're not going to get there. I'm going to do what I have to do. I'm going to do things to you that no one ever did in space before, and then I'm going to throw your body out the disposal door. But I'll let Trece watch it all before I kill him too. And then, do you know what I'll do?"

  Some strange emotion—it was probably fear—began tightening the muscles in her throat. Her mouth had become dry. She barely managed to croak, "No, I don't know what you'll do then . . ."

  Talatashar looked as though he were staring inward.

  "I don't either," said he, "except that it's not something I want to do. I don't want to do it at all. It's cruel and messy and when I get through I won't have you and him to talk to. But this is something I have to do. It's justice, in a strange way. You've got to die because you're bad. And I'm bad too; but if you die, I won't be so bad."

  He looked up at her brightly, almost as though he were normal. "Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you understand any of it?"

  "No. No. No," Veesey stammered, but she could not help it.

  Talatashar stared not at her but at the invisible face of his crime-to-come and said, almost cheerfully:

  "You might as well understand. It's you who will die for it, and then him. Long ago you did me a wrong, a dirty, intolerable wrong. It wasn't the you who's sitting here. You're not big enough or smart enough to do anything as awful as the things that were done to me. It wasn't this you who did it, it was the real, true you instead. And now you are going to be cut and burned and choked and brought back with medicines and cut and choked and hurt again, as long as your body can stand it. And when your body stops, I'm going to put on an emergency suit and shove your dead body out into space with him. He can go out alive, for all I care. Without a suit, he'll last two gasps. And then part of my justice will be done. That's what people have called crime. It's just justice, private justice that comes out of the deep insides of man. Do you understand, Veesey?"

  She nodded. She shook her head. She nodded again. She didn't know how to respond.

  "And then there are more things which I'll have to do," he went on, with a sort of purr. "Do you know what there is outside this ship, waiting for my crime?"

  She shook her head, and so he answered himself.

  "There are thirty thousand people following in their pods behind this ship. I'll pull them in by two and two and I will get young girls. The others I'll throw loose in space. And with the girls I'll find out what it is—what it is I've always had to do, and never knew. Never knew, Veesey, till I found myself out in space with you."

  His voice almost went dreamy as he lost himself in his own thoughts. The twisted side of his face showed its endless laugh, but the mobile side looked thoughtful and melancholy, so that she felt there was something inside him which might be understood, if only she had the quickness and the imagination to think of it.

  Her throat still dry, she managed to half-whisper at him:

  "Do you hate me? Why do you want to hurt me? Do you hate girls?"

  "I don't hate girls," he blazed, "I hate me. Out here in space I found it out. You're not a person. Girls aren't people. They are soft and pretty and cute and cuddly and warm, but they have no feelings. I was handsome before my face spoiled, but that didn't matter. I always knew that girls weren't people. They're something like robots. They have all the power in the world and none of the worry. Men have to obey, men have to beg, men have to suffer, because they are built to suffer and to be sorry and to obey. All a girl has to do is to smile her pretty smile or to cross her pretty legs, and the man gives up everything he has ever wanted and fought for, just to be her slave. And then the girl"—and at this point he got to screaming again, in a high shrill shout—"and then the girl gets to be a woman and she has children, more girls to pester men, more men to be the victims of girls, more cruelty and more slaves. You're so cruel to me, Veesey! You're so cruel that you don't even know you're cruel. If you'd known how I wanted you, you'd have suffered like a person. But you didn't suffer. You're a girl. Well, you're going to find out now. You will suffer and then you will die. But you won't die until you know how men feel about women."

  "Tala," she said, using the nickname they had so rarely used to him, "Tala, that's not so. I never meant you to suffer."

  "Of course you didn't," he snapped. "Girls don't know what they do. That's what makes them girls. They're worse than snakes, worse than machines." He was mad, crazy-mad, in the outer deep of space. He stood up so suddenly that he shot through the air and had to catch himself on the ceiling.

  A noise in the side of the cabin made them both turn for a moment. Trece was trying to break loose from his bonds. It did no good. Veesey flung herself toward Trece, but Talatashar caught her by the shoulder. He twisted her around. His eyes blazed at her out of his poor, misshapen face.

  Veesey had sometime wondered what death would be like. She thought:

  This is it.

  Her body still fought Talatashar, there in the spaceboat cabin. Trece groaned behind his shackles and his gag. She tried to scratch at Talatashar's eyes, but the thought of death made her seem far away. Far away, inside herself.

  Inside herself, where other people could not reach, ever—no matter what happened.

  Out of that deep nearby remoteness, words came into her head:

  Lady if a man

  Tries to bother you, you can

  Think blue,

  Count two,

  And look for a red shoe . . .

  Thinking blue was not hard. She just imagined the yellow cabin lights turning blue. Counting "one-two" was the simplest thing in the world. And even with Talatashar straining to catch her free hand, she managed to remember the beautiful, beautiful red shoes which she had seen in Marcia and the Moon Men.
/>   The lights dimmed momentarily and a huge voice roared at them from the control board.

  "Emergency, top emergency! People! People out of repair!"

  Talatashar was so astonished that he let her go.

  The board whined at them like a siren. It sounded as though the computer had become flooded with weeping.

  In an utterly different voice from his impassioned talkative rage, Talatashar looked directly at her and asked, very soberly, "Your cube. Didn't I get your cube too?"

  There was a knocking on the wall. A knocking from the millions of miles of emptiness outside. A knocking out of nowhere.

  A person they had never seen before stepped into the ship, walking through the double wall as though it had been nothing more than a streamer of mist.

  It was a man. A middle-aged man, sharp of face, strong in torso and limbs, clad in very old-style clothes. In his belt he had a whole collection of weapons, and in his hand a whip.

  "You there," said the stranger to Talatashar, "untie that man."

  He gestured with the whip-butt toward Trece, still bound and gagged.

  Talatashar got over his surprise.

  "You're a cube-ghost. You're not real!"

  The whip hissed in the air and a long red welt appeared on Talatashar's wrist. The drops of blood began to float beside him in the air before he could speak again.

  Veesey could say nothing; her mind and body seemed to be blanking out.

  As she sank to the floor, she saw Talatashar shake himself, walk over to Trece, and begin untying the knots.

  When Talatashar got the gag out of Trece's mouth, Trece spoke—not to him, but to the stranger:

  "Who are you?"

  "I do not exist," said the stranger, "but I can kill you, any of you, if I wish. You had better do as I say. Listen carefully. You too," he added, turning halfway around and looking at Veesey. "You listen too, because it's you who called me."

  All three listened. The fight was gone out of them. Trece rubbed his wrists and shook his hands to get the circulation going in them again.

  The stranger turned, in courtly and elegant fashion, so that he spoke most directly to Talatashar.