Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  He was insane with rage. They didn’t give him a chance. They couldn’t be bothered to find out whether this unauthorized flight indicated desertion or—oh, shit, absent-mindedness, vertigo, nausea, a cramp in the fingers from too much writing in notebooks, a shudder in the eardrums from too much snoring in the bunk above, a feeling of being smothered, a need to get out in the open and breathe, a need to sleep, anything. They didn’t inquire as to his intentions. They didn’t ask whether he’d intended to go away or just get a breath of fresh air. Unauthorized flight meant desertion meant court-martial meant a dozen slugs in the bread basket. They didn’t even stop to consider that, no matter how he had happened to get into the air, now he was in it and down below everybody was going up in a boil of radioactive dust and it was more important to save him and the ship than to yell discipline and send him back to be vaporized too. They didn’t care, the fucks. Whoever “they” were. The “they” that was the “It” that was EMSIAC.

  In a blind panic he ran back to the communications room and began to pound the EMSIAC casing wildly with his fists.

  “—for court-martial,” the voice droned. “You are on unauthorized flight. We are returning you to base. Report—”

  There was a fireman’s axe hanging on the corridor wall just outside. He noticed it now. He ran into the hall and yanked it away from its supports. Back in the communications room he began to hack at the EMSIAC container savagely, screaming with each blow.

  “Resistance is useless,” the voice boomed. “Do not try to resist. Do not touch the EMSIAC box. We are returning you—”

  Finally the casing gave way and the blade of the axe sank into the innards of the mechanism. Glass flew as he chopped through the banks of electronic tubes.

  “Do not touch the EMSIAC box. Resistance is useless. Do not tryeeeeeeeeeee—”

  There was a rattle, a violent hum, some incredible smothered grumble. He chopped, he hacked, sweat poured down his face. He was still screaming like a stuck pig.

  Now in abrupt choked sound, an eerie gurgle. The hum grew and grew, became a crazy reverberating roar—

  and stopped.

  Just like that.

  Dead silence.

  He kept on swinging the axe, kept on until he had chopped through all the cables and tangles of multicolored wires. As he sliced through the last of them the plane gave a violent lurch, then shot up at a sharp angle, sending him sprawling on the floor.

  Good, good. He had cut EMSIAC’S connection with the automatic pilot. The plane was on its own now, resuming the course he had set for it.

  He lifted his hand wearily, gasping, and looked at his watch. It was exactly 3:39.

  He seemed to hear a metallic hum deep in his rumbling stomach. The hum turned into a snore turned into a clanging whistling screeching electrovox which said, “Do not go berserk, it is unauthorized, stop screaming, it is unauthorized.”

  High-tailing off into the emptiness southeast, thinking that no doubt Babyface and his tantalum plate, Helder, his fountain pen, his notebook, his Wiener, his Rimbaud were back there now in a boiling mutuality, blended in an ooze of brotherhood.

  Fleeing from the wars in Africa, his plane catapulting unerringly and all unknowing toward a speck of an island far off in the Indian Ocean—island that miraculously had never been charted on any map by any cartographer—where a handful of serious dark-skinned men were busy eating tapioca and chasing the devils from each other’s heads. It had taken the Mandunji at least four centuries to flee the wars in Africa and get to the island, it was to take his plane at the very most four hours. . . .

  He remembered it all now, almost all. When he could control the shake in his fingers he tried to write it all down as he remembered it. He wrote:

  October 19, 1972.

  Did it finally. I, my unrobotized side, said no.

  I said no to “It.”

  I said NO.

  I said

  October 19, 1972. Jerry’s birthday? Hell, no. Mine. Day I became a hobo in a jet. Day I was born, started to get born. . . .

  But what was I getting born as?

  No name for it yet, after eighteen years. Hard to recognize it, it’s been smothered with incognitos.

  Hard to write. Head was like a yoyo, eyes filled with swirling fog, but after resting for a minute he was able to focus on the notebook again and make his final entry for the day:

  Mystery of Theo solved. I might have known—if that scarred brachycephalic head made my fingers curl and tremble so it was because they’d once been inside it. Of course. Got a good look at his face a few minutes ago and remembered, finally. To be sure, he’s older, there’s a suggestion of jowls and a touch of gray at the temples and the moustache threw me off too, but essentially it’s still Babyface, the eraser of cities. Under the Theo there’s the old Teddy: humanist with a tantalum skull.

  My God, my God, what’s happened to his arms?

  chapter eight

  MIAMI WAS part shambles, part ghost town. Through Jerry’s high-powered binoculars Martine could see that the town had suffered a relatively light and haphazard bombing, not a merciless earth-scorching one: while many of the flimsier buildings had been razed, others, maybe because they had been built to stand off hurricane winds, had only been gouged and nipped at and made to buckle at the joints, not demolished.

  He scanned the implausible vista from end to end. Here and there along the ragged skyline, jutting up senselessly from the rubble like an oversight, he could make out a lopsided villa, an upended hot-dog stand, the corkscrewed framework of a beach-front luxury hotel, a sagging night club with a fragment of neon tubing on its façade to remind the seagulls that its name had once been LA TROPI something or other—the rest of the letters were missing.

  Martine rubbed his eyes and looked again. The thing he had seen was still there, it was moving: it was a giraffe and it seemed to be nibbling at the neon letters on top of the night club.

  The place was not quite deserted. Now he became aware of other movements in and around the debris—an undeniable camel here, an indisputable llama there, what could only be an okapi sprinting improbably down the avenue just beyond. Chewing its cud idiotically alongside a tiled swimming pool, a yak. Further on, standing guard outside a tilted real-estate office, a zebra.

  Flashes of violent color. Flamingos, pink and preenful, were waddling on erector-set legs along the pock-marked pavements, poking their aristocratic beaks into the piles of—what?—one could only guess—sandals and sun-lotion bottles, contraceptives and cash registers.

  Needing some point of orientation in the jumble, Martine began to search for the skyscraper hotel in which, right after his internship, he had spent a month’s honeymoon—month (for Irene) of pouting, tearful unacknowledged frigidity, and much histrionic love-making in between by way of camouflage. Farcical month of pretending to himself and to Irene that a sham Eros was both the genuine article and superior to the genuine article—the thankless assignment handed to all inwardly fuming and martyr-complexed husbands by their glacial wives. There it was, on the beach down to the left, walls caved in and girders warped but still standing: THE BREEZEWAYS. By counting the cross pieces, memorials to vanished floors, he was even able to locate the corner suite in which the month-long charade of eroticism had been played out. (I love a charade, the beat of the gums. . . .) Something stirred on the steel beam: a spider monkey doing handsprings. . . .

  Jerry came in to get the lunch tray.

  “This is crazy,” Martine said. “It looks like a menagerie out there. I just saw a giraffe.”

  “They’re all over the place,” Jerry said. “The circus was stationed at its winter quarters near here when the attack came, and most of the animals escaped. Later on, when we opened up the port again, we shot all the dangerous ones, but there wasn’t any reason to bother about the others.”

  “I see Miami hasn’t been rebuilt much.”

  “Question just never came up, I guess. The new cities in the Strip are more than enough
for the people we have.”

  “Hasn’t anything been done to the coasts at all?” Martine asked.

  “Not much, outside of getting a few docks back in shape and laying out a few airfields.”

  “What about seaside resorts and all that? We used to be a nation of bathers and sun worshippers—is that all gone?”

  “Pretty much-they don’t have water sports in the Olympics any more, for instance. We’ve got plenty of sports and hobbies to keep us busy where we are.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well,” Jerry said, combing through his shock of red hair for the answer, “there’re all kinds of evening classes for adults in the various schools. In Yoga breathing, panic control, auto-suggestion, moral equivalents, neuro-loco co-ordination, dianetics, semantics, and all that. Besides, for the younger amps there’s Olympic training, we have special clubs for that, just the training in the d-and-d’s takes up a lot of time. Oh, there are lots of things.”

  Something “clicked” in Martine’s mind: a universal snared a particular. From Jerry he had gleaned all sort of information—about ways and means of transportation, the biggest cities in the Strip, hotel accommodations to be had—and he knew that the biggest city of all, the one he had made up his mind to visit himself, was called New Jamestown. Now Jerry had mentioned something called “moral equivalents,” and abruptly his cortical nets began to put two and two together. William James, a philosopher and psychologist back in the nineteenth century, founder of pragmatism, had written an essay called The Moral Equivalent of War—Martine remembered it well from his college days. Was it possible that New Jamestown was named after him, not the historic Virginia settlement? If so, old James might be wishing that he could eat his words.

  “That giraffe out there,” Martine said, “could use a little coaching in semantics. He thinks words were meant to be eaten. He seemed to be eating words off old neon signs.”

  “The glass’ll do terrible things to his stomach,” Jerry said seriously. . . .

  Martine waited until he saw Theo go down the gangplank, let another hour pass, then shook hands warmly with Jerry and went off in a cocoon-shaped transparent-shelled bus to the airport. The plane was a triple-deck jet, with room for a hundred people on each deck; it took off from a vertical position, resting on its tail, the seats swiveling so that the passengers were always upright regardless of the angle of flight.

  Two men preceded Martine up through the entry hatch and took seats directly in front of him. They were obviously foreigners: the heavy-shouldered, swarthy one looked like some sort of East European, something of the Balkans in him, something of the Slavic; the other, a short dumpy man with an Oriental cast to his features, seemed to be a Eurasian. Both were duo-amps, only their legs were artificial. The other passengers kept looking over in their direction and whispering, the airline personnel scraped and bowed. East Union bigwigs, Martine gathered; names were Vishinu and Dai.

  When the craft ramped off from Miami Beach Martine pressed his forehead against the window and took a last look at the wrecked town. Directly below, munching on the grass around the remains of an orange-juice stand—VITALIZE WITH VITAMINS said the faded letters on the roof—was a herd of docile buffalo: in the end as in the beginning. Down Lincoln Road, at a point where a stuccoed beefburger basilica poked up through the ruins, a mother kangaroo was loping along, self-propelled pogo stick. From her pouch a baby kangaroo peered out at the sun-kissed havoc on both sides, wide-eyed and interested in everything, like a tourist in a boardwalk wheelchair.

  Tampa was a sprawling junk heap; ditto Tallahassee; ditto Mobile, New Orleans, Houston and San Antonio. The sequence of mauled cities was so monotonous, so unrelieved, that after a while Martine hardly bothered to look down: one’s senses were easily stunned, the cortex could encompass the fact of an individual’s annihilation but not that of a hemisphere’s.

  Somewhere between the Panhandle and the Rockies the plane began to go down. He looked out and spied New Jamestown; he was electrified. He had been briefed on what not to expect; he remembered that even before the war most basic industry had gone underground, and Jerry had explained that when the rebuilding began these underground installations were kept and new cities were laid out over and around them. So he was not surprised to see no belching smokestacks and open hearths, none of the fume and grit of manufactures. But he was not prepared for the sheer geometric beauty of this glass-and-concrete diorama: it was as though the reverie of some city-planning visionary had been peeled from a drawing board, blown up and pasted life-size over the countryside.

  He gawked. Spacious parkways fanned out from one enormous central hub, which seemed to contain all the commercial and institutional buildings; and in easy concentric arcs between these spokes, along tree-dotted and garden-lined streets and boulevards, great meandering stretches of streamlined skyscraper apartments, interspersed with sprinklings of smaller individual family living units. No neo-colonial or neo-gothic horrors, no aping of the squat cubism of a vanished frontier or the gingerbread of an equally vanished, or at least irrelevant, European mother culture. A whole cosmopolis designed from scratch as a machine à vivre, without umbilicals or the pretense of umbilicals. And the old puritanical taboo on the spectrum, on chromatic playfulness, had at last been broken through: everywhere pleasant pastel shades and some richer still, lemony and carroty colors, colors of lobster and copper and absinthe, of plum, xanthite, the crocus, cinnamon. Apparently the H-bomb had in one great continental sizzle accomplished what the reformers and uplifters had never been able to: with a spurt of social-engineering efficiency it had cleared the slums from America overnight. It took Martine’s breath away.

  Oh, there was something seriously wrong with all this, of course, it wasn’t really to his taste. It was all too hygienic and prissy, a bit too meticulously scrubbed behind the ears, too well-groomed, too goddamned aseptic. Wielding their compasses and T-squares, the planners had throttled the landscape with geometry, forced Nature’s essential anarchy too severely into the perfections of circle and right angle, imposed the discipline of symmetry on what would be more reassuring with a touch of primordial chanciness, of riot and accident. So beautifully balanced mathematically, the city was, in another sense, unbalanced—all rota and no ganja. Still, it was a belated leap several centuries long. And besides, for those who cared to be reminded of Nature’s penchant for the disheveled and the unkempt, there were, far off in the sunny haze to the west, the delectably disordered mountains: swooping, soaring, all random zigs and zags like a fever chart, the spatter of snow over their peaks unplanned as dandruff. It would do. There were compensations. From ten thousand feet up (the plane was losing altitude rapidly now, plummeting down for an upright tail-point landing), squinting through puffs of cumulus, he could be uncritical enough—his evaluative centers momentarily hoodwinked by the flood of perceptions—to feel a twinge of pride in such a sculpture, the pride of one manual worker in another’s superb handiwork. . . .

  The two men in front of Martine were looking down at New Jamestown now and talking in a precise, clipped English which bore traces of some polyglot cosmopolitan accent.

  “Nice,” said the short one. “Laid out very good.”

  “Façade is not unimposing,” the other man said. “But underneath, phuh, you will see, all the old garbage. Same old exploiting mentality, Anglo-Saxons stick the noses up, Negroes segregated, the class struggle in a different form.”

  “Understood. I meant only the laying-out.”

  “Not so good as in New Tolstoygrad. Or New Singapore. Even New Saigon or New Pyongyang or, yes, New Surabaya.”

  “Naturally.”

  The stewardess, a provocative bit with swashbuckling bosoms, imminent strip tease in her swaying walk, came down the aisle and stopped opposite the two men. Her attiude was at once deferential and come-onish. She was wearing an extremely low-cut blouse; when she leaned over to talk with the taller man, who was in the near seat, her breasts were half-exposed.

 
; “Excuse me,” she said, husky voice full of the promise of prompt and unreluctant intimacies. “Are you gentlemen being met at the airport or would you care to use the copter shuttle service into town?”

  “The transportation is entirely arranged,” the heavy-set man said stiffly. The tips of her breasts brushed against his shoulder; he pulled away from the chesty overture. “We are to be met by a limousine of the Olympics Arrangements Committee.”

  The girl knew that she was dealing with dignitaries; she was all eyes, haunches and mammary glands.

  “You—you’re Brother Vishinu, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. And,” the man added, “we need no advice on how to get around New Jamestown, thank you very much. I have been here many times before.”

  The girl looked hurt and angry as she moved down to Martine’s seat. The Eurasian said softly, “They become worse and worse, the women. Absolutely without shame.”

  “With the fists out, like prizefighters,” Brother Vishinu said loudly and distinctly. “Everywhere it is like that, but here they are the worst, they were with fists to begin with. It is all garbage, phuh.”

  The girl’s face was flushed, she hardly noticed Martine as she rattled off the routine question.

  “I’d like the copter service, I think,” he said. “I want to go to the Gandhiji Hotel.”

  “Gate Three,” she said mechanically. “The copter there will take you directly to the Gandhiji roof.”

  “Thank you.” He wanted to add, “And here’s a friendly tip: a real woman doesn’t have to be a tout for herself,” but he contented himself with thinking it. Was this the female that had come out of all the decades of much publicized and much denounced “momism,” coyness dethroned by clamorousness? That was all very well, but when the old trappings of modesty were ripped off something still more suspect came into sight: a too blatant boasting about one’s erotic prowess. Case of protesting too much. Because the rock-bottom truism about feminine sexuality (as indeed about male sexuality) remained: genuine potency and warmth requires no gusty salesmanship, no hullaballoo and hoopla—it’s simply there, all phony modesty aside, and it will be sensed and savored and sought out by those whose emotional antennae are attuned to its subtle wave lengths. No sign-posts needed. Toss out the pudibund air, the downcast eye and easy blush; take all the “equal rights” and suffrage and sexual parity; still, why the showiness, the exaggerated undulation of the hips, the cosmetic over-eroticizing of the lips—the Hollywood flimflam that had always been taken by the gullible for real eroticism? It was a giveaway: torch on the surface, icicle underneath. There was about this girl the quality of an infant who had cleverly picked up certain gestures and mannerisms from her elders without knowing what they meant, the smell of the perpetual clitoridean type mired forever in the adolescent preliminaries to real sex, pelvis locked and erotic depths anesthetized. Shades of Irene. . . .