by Fritz Leiber
Spoken in the manner of someone who announces a change of rendezvous or a place to get together in case of separation, the repeated message was simply: "Cortlandt Street. Tower Two. The Deck."
Now that wasn't cryptic at all, I told myself, now that I'd hopefully got it down straight. Cortlandt Street was simply a subway address of the World Trade Center, Tower Two was the southern-most of the lofty twins, and the 107th floor was the observation deck with the open-air promenade on the 110th, the roof, to which you could go by a long three-story escalator – I knew all about that. I'd been up there myself only two days ago to enjoy the magnificent view of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the East River and the Hudson, Staten Island, the Jersey shore. It lay on the same subway line (only a few stations farther along) I'd be taking myself in a bit to get back to where I was visiting with my son in Greenwich Village.
For I wasn't going aboveground in this locality again today – that much I was sure of. I was no longer so sure of exactly what had happened up there, how much had been due to a weird weather change or a confusion about time (though a wall clock told me just then that it was still more than an hour until sunset) and how much had been subjective, a matter of my mood and the strange directions my imagination had taken. There are people who get panicky in crowds and narrow places, such as big city streets, they actually go crazy. I'd never had any trouble that way that I knew of, but there's always a first time. In fact, there are all sorts of strange things that happen to you and you find out about yourself as you grow older. Such as playing a game with yourself or pretending to be attracted to younger and younger women and following them in the street. All sorts of nonsense. (Another part of my mind was reminding me that her message to me had been real and that she had touched the library lion and skated with a sick lion-man and been carrying a long-haired cat of the same color when last seen. What was to be made of that?) But however much nonsense or no, nonsense and vivid daydreams, I wasn't going to go up to Rockefeller Plaza again today and look down into the Pool of Planets or the skating rink. No, I wasn't going to do that.
As my thoughts reached that point, the underground lights flickered again, shadows racing across the white tile, and dimmed down another notch. "What's the matter with the lights?" I involuntarily demanded aloud, fighting to keep the note of panic out of my voice.
The man who happened to be shuffling past me at that moment was quite short. He was wearing a black overcoat worn smooth in spots with a dusty-looking astrakhan collar. His head was bowed under the weight of a black derby, also worn shiny in spots, and he had it pulled down to his jutting ears, making them jut out still farther.
He halted and lifted his face toward mine (it took quite a swing of his head) and I got a considerable minor shock, for covering his entire face below his eyes was a white gauze mask such as the Japanese favor during cold epidemics. But it wasn't altogether white by any means. Centered on it were two coal-black spots where his nostrils would be underneath. Each was surrounded by a wide grey border fading up to white at a distance of about two inches from the dull jet centers. They overlapped, of course. While below them was a horizontal grey-bordered line only less black marking his mouth. I wondered in what atmosphere he could have been all day to have accumulated so much pollution. Or had he worn the same mask for several days?
Then, keeping his fierce dark eyes fixed on mine, he growled somewhat muffledly (the mask) but in the measured tones of an originally mild man grown truculent, even recklessly so, with the years and repeated disillusion, "So what's the matter with the lights? Nothing's the matter with the lights. They're always like that – only sometimes worse. This is a little above average. Where have you been all your life?"
"I'm just visiting New York," I told him. "My son."
"So who visits New York?" he demanded, continuing to eye me suspiciously. "We should be so lucky as to be somewhere else. Your son hasn't gotten away yet? That's terrible. My condolences."
I didn't quite know how to answer that one, so I just continued to look at him sideways. Somehow while talking we'd begun to walk on slowly together toward the subway.
"So what's with this, you're asking maybe?" he said challengingly, indicating his mask. "The old schmuck has got the crazies about germs, they're trying to assassinate him? That's what my wife thought, and my brother-in-law the druggist, when I started to wear it." He shook his head slowly and emphatically. "No, my friend, I'm not afraid of germs. Germs and me, we get on all right, we got an understanding, things in common. Because germs are alive. No, it's the dead Dreck I don't want none of, the Guck (that's the goyish word for it), the black foam."
His muffled, muttering voice was indescribably odd. There was nothing wrong about my hearing now, incidentally. I searched for a relationship between the visual and auditory dimmings I'd been experiencing, but there didn't seem to be any, their cycles didn't jibe.
I was going to ask him what industry or business the black foam figured in, though it didn't sound like a very specific thing, but by then we were at the subway. I half expected him to head uptown for the Bronx, but he stuck with me and changed with me a station or two later to the IRT.
"I'm getting off at Fourteenth Street," I volunteered, adding after a moment, "Or maybe I'll go on to the Cortlandt. You were saying something about black–"
"So why shouldn't you?" he demanded, interrupting. "Or change your mind as much as you want? Myself, I change at Chambers and keep on to Brooklyn. You're thinking it's maybe queer I live in Brooklyn? That's where my brother-in-law's got his drugstore. He's very ambitious – wants to be a chemist. Now about the black foam, the Dreck, I'm the expert on that, believe me, I'm your rabbi there, because I foresaw its coming before anyone else." And he turned toward me and laid a hand on my forearm and gripped it, and he fixed on me his dark eyes above the filthy mask.
We were sitting side by side on one of the long seats in a car that was more than three-quarters empty, the windows and walls crawling with graffiti that were hard to read because the lights were dimming and flickering so. The other passengers paid us no heed, locked in their thoughts or stupefactions. As the train set off with a lurch and a low screech, he began.
"You remember when detergents first started getting in sewage and mounding up in rivers and lakes, killing the fishes – mountains of white foam that wouldn't go away? The Guck, the Dreck began like that, only black, and it came from the air and crawling along the ground and working up from under the ground. The street-washing trucks couldn't pick it up, not all of it, brooms and hoses couldn't move it, it built up in corners and cracks and angles. And people ignored it, pretended it wasn't there, like they always do at first with muggings and thrashings and riots and war and death. But I could see it. Sometimes I was sure I was the only one, but sometimes I thought my niece Chana could see it too and admit it to herself – Chana, a very nice, delicate girl, refined and plays the piano – from the way she looked quick out the window and then away and washed her hands over and over. Chana and her cat, who stopped going out. I watched the Dreck getting thicker and thicker, building up higher and higher, blacker and blacker – the black foam."
"But why a foam?" I asked him. "Why not just dirt or dust?"
"Because it clings and smears and creeps, don't blow like dust. Comes through the air, but once it lands, don't blow no more. You know those foams the firemen got that shut in fire, strangle it to death? The Guck works the same with life, you should believe me.
"When I started wearing this mask and making my wife stop opening windows ever and never open an inside door without shutting the outside one, she decides I'm getting sensitive (her nice word for the crazies, maybe) and wants her brother recommend a doctor should give me shots. 'So now I'm sensitive, am I?' I say to her." (He lifted a finger to his mask's center.) "Then what's this?" I ask her. 'Poppy seeds? You maybe want to try filling a blintz with it?'"
We ground to a stop at the Fourteenth Street platform and after a while the doors slid shut with hollow thuds a
nd we humped out of it, and I'd had no thought of getting off. I was spellbound by the way this man's grotesque tale of his paranoia, or whatever, fitted with my own experiences and fantasies this afternoon, as if it were the same story (a black story!) told in a different language or as if it were perhaps a contagious insanity manifesting itself differently, but with one basic theme, in each victim.
My Ancient Mariner of the Subway continued, still fixing me with his glittering dark eye. "When the Dreck got so bad everyone had to admit it, then my brother-in-law was the first comes to me, you should expect it, with all sorts of explanations of what it was and why it wasn't so bad as it looked, we should love it maybe.
"'The scientists understand it and are learning to control it,' he tells me, like we should celebrate.
"'Which means they can't do anything about it right now?' I say. 'Is that news?'
"'It is the ultimate para-terminal waste product,' he says, holding up a finger like a professor (the words he's got! like he's a Doctor of Dreck! and he repeats himself until I've learned them by heart, Zeeser Gottenyu!), 'created by a catalytic action of various industrial wastes on each other under conditions of extreme congestion. As a result it has maximum stasis–'
"'It stays, all right,' I say, 'if that's what you're getting at.'
"'–and is the ultimate in unbiodegradable paraplastics,' he keeps on with.
"'It's degrading to us,' I agree. 'And it's making us all into paraplegics, nu?'
"He tries again with, 'In a very general way, simplifying it for the layman, it is as if the organic, under unprecedented pressures, were trying to return to the inorganic, and succeeding only too well.'
"'If you mean it's black death spreading itself like sour cream, covering everything, I knew it already. Tell me, was it invented at Dachau or Belsen?'"
Christopher Street went by, Houston, Canal. Sluggish passengers braved the dim stations. The car emptied. The masked man kept on, quoting his brother-in-law.
"'In structure,' he says, making with the finger again, 'it is a congeries' – Oy, Gottenyu, his words! – 'of microscopic bubbles that are monomolecular, hence black–'
"'Ah-ha! Like poppy seeds! I was just telling Rivke', I say.
"'–and in many ways it behaves like a para-liquid, a gas of fixed volume–'
"'It's fixes us,' I tell him, 'and it's keeping on fixing.'
"'–but it has been proven by scientists,' he keeps up, so I can't get a word in, 'to be absolutely noncarcinogenic, completely inert, and therefore utterly harmless!'
"'So why won't Chana's cat go out in it?' I ask him."
The train slowed. My companion stood up. "Chambers Street, I should change," he explained. He placed his hands on my shoulders. "You should stay on. Your stop is next, Cortlandt. But, pardon me, you should get yourself a mask if you don't mind me telling you. They've started to carry them at cigar stores, so you shouldn't get Dreck in your tobacco smoke. Goodbye, it's been a pleasure listening to you."
I heard the sliding doors thud shut. I looked around. The car was empty. I wasn't exactly frightened, but I stood up and continued to look around as we surged along, and when the doors opened at the next stop, after having seemed to hesitate deliberately for a long moment, I felt a gust of relief and I slid out quickly.
As I did so, a somewhat silly mood of nervous, high-spirited excitement boiled up in me without warning. The afternoon's happenings would make a great vaudeville act, I told myself, for the young woman in green to tour in – and I'd tell her so if I ever caught up with her, and maybe be her manager. She'd have herself – a graceful girl's always an attraction – and her clumsy lion man, and the little Jewish comedian from the bad old days of broad racial humor. We'd put him on skates too. Would he be afraid of the lion? Of course. But his dirty mask would have to go. On him it might make people think of concentration camps and suffocation. We'd have to do something about that.
The white tile underworld was loftier and cleaner here and brighter too (no dimming or muting, at least at the moment – my eyes and ears seemed working okay.) The only thing I wondered about was the absence of hurrying crowds at rush hour – until I remembered it was Saturday.
I wandered with the other solitary movers across those fantastically large underground pleasances, not hurrying particularly but taking long strides, relishing the exercise. We were like ants in a giant's bathroom, each on our separate linear course.
My companions grew fewer as I progressed, and by the time I had purchased my ticket and reached the massive underpinnings of Tower Two, unobtrusive in a vast gleaming, science-fictional, multi-storied hall hung with great panels of aluminum and plates of glass, I was alone. And I alone was lofted on the endlessly mounting steps of the silvery escalator to the high mezzanine, so that I had a comically grandiose vision of myself as Ludwig the Mad King of Bavaria on my way to a performance at the royal theatre that had only one seat in it. On the mezzanine I quickened my stride, thinking of how frustrating it would be to move more slowly and just miss a trip and have to wait, so that by the time I rounded a corner into the alcove of the express elevator I was almost running.
The elevator was in, but its big silvery doors had just begun to close.
I am a man who almost never acts on impulse, but this time I did. I sprinted forward and managed to get aboard, encountering at the last moment an odd physical resistance I had to force my way through, with an extra effort, though I was in the clear and didn't have to squeeze past persons or the closing doors – it was something invisible, more like a science-fictional field.
Then the doors closed and the car began to mount and I realized that it was completely dark inside and that I couldn't remember seeing any people in it; my eyes had been only on the closing doors.
No, not completely dark. High on the back wall a small ghostly white light was moving from left to right behind the numbers of the floors. But it wasn't enough light to show anything else, at least not to my unadjusted vision.
I asked myself what the devil could have happened. Was I the only passenger, going up on automatic? But this express elevator always carried an operator, didn't it? Also I recalled there had been a spiel (live or recorded?) about the more-than-quarter-mile nonstop vertical trip lasting less than a minute, the more-than-twenty-mile-per-hour vertical speed, and so on. There wasn't now.
I listened intently. After a bit I began to hear, from the point to my left where I'd recalled the operator standing, a very faint strange croaking and breathy whining, the sort of sound a deaf-and-dumb person makes when he's trying hard to communicate – perhaps as if such a person were thinking hard to himself.
I moved involuntarily to my right and forward without encountering anyone – or thing. I remembered the door at the top was the back of the elevator, opposite to what it was at the bottom. Was the trip going to last forever? The ghost light was hardly halfway across the wall. Would the door at the top open?
I could no longer hear the "deaf-and-dumb" breathing. Was that because of the distance I'd moved or the blood pounding in my ears? Or had the breather stopped thinking and begun to take action? How did one pass time like this while holding still? Playing a routine chess opening in one's head? Reciting the prime numbers under one hundred? Counting the coins in one's pocket by feel? No, they might chink.
The cage stopped. A vertical crack of dull light appeared ahead of me and I squeezed through as soon as it was wide enough. I took a dozen forward steps measuredly, started to turn around, but didn't. I listened uneasily for footsteps behind me.
There was a sound. I turned. The silver doors had closed and the space between me and them was empty.
Then I noticed that the doors themselves were blotched and corroded, the floor under my shoes was faintly gritty, there was an oily, coaly stench in my nostrils, though the air felt dry as a desert's and was blowing (indoors!), the place was unnaturally silent except for the air's windy sighing, and there was something very strange about the light.
I tu
rned again and moved cautiously out of the elevator's alcove.
The layout of the enclosed observation deck is very simple. A broad corridor made up of continuous windows on the outside runs all the way around, making a great square. Along the inner wall are murals, displays, booths for attendants, that sort of thing. I was in the corridor on the building's east side.
I looked both ways and didn't see a soul, neither visitors nor the deck's personnel. But I did see trails of footprints and of at least one wheeled vehicle in the dull dust coating the floor.
I couldn't see much of anything out of the windows, at least from where I stood back from them in the middle of the corridor. They seemed to be very dusty, too, and through the dust there wasn't anything visible outside but a dark expanse lightening toward the top and streaked with a dull sunset red. There were no inside lights on.
I didn't approach the windows any closer but walked quietly north in search of an explanation for the incredible transformation that had occurred – or the weird hallucination from which I was suffering. Can one walk through a hallucination one is having? For some reason that question didn't seem nonsensical to me then. Exactly how are inner and outer space related?
The dry, insect-wailing wind brushed my face with its feathery touch. It seemed icy now on my forehead and cheeks because of its rapid evaporation of my sweat of fear. And now, through it, I could hear other noises from ahead: faint rutchings, creakings, and gratings, as if some heavy object were with difficulty being moved. I myself moved more slowly then, in the end hardly at all as, holding my breath, I peered sidewise down the north corridor.