When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

  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 opened.

  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 gotten 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 clear 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 parrot-like 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."

  With 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 5:25 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 snug 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 fibre 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 rocket-like 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 150 centimeters long. In sensation, 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 he 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 any more from the wind screen 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 then calibrated a dial. He squinted at his instruments and 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 windscreen 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.

  Gosigo pushed another button and then could see out of the front glass screen again.

  "What was that?" asked Casher.

  "Miniaturized radar rocket. I sent it up twelve kilometers for a look around. It transmitted a map of what it saw and I put it on our radar screen. The tornadoes are heavier than usual, but I think we can make it. Did you notice the top right of the map?"

  "The top right?" asked Casher.

  "Yes, the top right. Did you see what was there?"

  "Why, nothing," said Casher. "Nothing was there."

  "You're utterly right," said Gosigo. "What does that mean to you?"

  "I don't understand you," said Casher. "I suppose it means that there is nothing there."

  "Right again. But let me tell you something. There never is."

  "Never is what?"

  "Anything," said Gosigo. "There never is anything on the maps at that point. That's east of Ambiloxi. That's Beauregard. It never shows on the maps. Nothing happens there."

  "No bad weather—ever?" asked Casher.

  "Never," said Gosigo.

  "Why not?" asked Casher.

  "She will not permit it," said Gosigo firmly, as though his words made sense.

  "You mean, her weather machines work?" said Casher, grasping for the only rational explanation possible.

  "Yes," said Gosigo.

  "Why?"

  "She pays for them."

  "How can she?" exclaimed Casher. "Your whole world of Henriada is bankrupt!"

  "Her part isn't."

  "Stop mystifying me," said Casher. "Tell me who she is and what this is all about."

  "Put your head in the net," said Gosigo. "I'm not making puzzles because I want to do so. I have been commanded not to talk."

  "Because you are a forgetty?"

  "What's that got to do with it? Don't talk to me that way. Remember, I am not an animal or an underperson. I may be your servant for a few hours, but I am a man. You'll find out, soon enough. Hold tight!"

  The groundcar came to a panic stop, the spiked teeth eating into the resilient firm neo-asphaltum of the road. At the instant they stopped, the outside corkscrews began chewing their way into the ground. First Casher felt as though his eyes were popping out, because of the suddenness of the deceleration; now he felt like holding the arms of his seat as the tornado reached direct
ly for their car, plucking at it again and again. The enormous outside screws held and he could feel the car straining to meet the gigantic suction of the storm.

  "Don't worry," shouted Gosigo over the noise of the storm. "I always pin us down a little bit more by firing the quick-rockets straight up. These cars don't often go off the road."

  Casher tried to relax.

  The funnel of the tornado, which seemed almost like a living being, plucked after them once or twice more and then was gone.

  This time, Casher had seen no sign of the air-whales which rode the storms. He had seen nothing but rain and wind and desolation.

  The tornado was gone in a moment. Ghostlike shapes trailed after it in enormous prancing leaps.

  "Wind-men," said Gosigo, glancing at them incuriously. "Wild people who have learned to live on Henriada. They aren't much more than animals. We are close to the territory of the lady. They would not dare attack us here."

  Casher O'Neill was too stunned to query the man or to challenge him.

  Once more the car picked itself up and coursed along the smooth, narrow, winding neo-asphaltum road, almost as though the machine itself were glad to function and to function well.

  VI

  Casher could never quite remember when they went from the howling wildness of Henriada into the stillness and beauty of the domains of Mister Murray Madigan. He could recall the feeling but not the facts.

  The town of Ambiloxi eluded him completely. It was so normal a town, so old-fashioned a little town that he could not think of it very much. Old people sat on the wooden boardwalk taking their afternoon look at the strangers who passed through. Horses were tethered in a row along the main street, between the parked machines. It looked like a peaceful picture from the ancient ages.

  Of tornadoes there was no sign, nor of the hurt and ruin which showed around the house of Rankin Meiklejohn. There were few underpeople or robots about, unless they were so cleverly contrived as to look almost exactly like real people. How can you remember something which is pleasant and non-memorable? Even the buildings did not show signs of being fortified against the frightful storms which had brought the prosperous planet of Henriada to a condition of abandonment and ruin.