Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  He stared at the dot on the map, hypnotized. It was like being plopped down on Mars and suddenly coming across all the faces one had left down home at the corner drug store.

  “O.K.,” he said to himself, starting up the motor. “So I’m a sentimental slob. I’ll go and visit the old homestead.”

  Driving was comfortable, even at a clip well over one hundred and fifty. The car was marvelously smooth; besides, it was not so much a matter of driving as of being driven. Now, following the clerk’s instructions, he had switched to robo-drive; the car was actually driving itself and he had nothing to do but peer out the window and try to make some split-second sense out of the jumbled black masses that hurtled past in an avalanche of landscape.

  He marveled at the electronic brain—actually, he suspected, a quite simple device—which kept the car unswervingly on its path and regulated its speed at every turn. As the clerk had explained, and as he could now see for himself, the whole system of robo-drive depended on clusters of slim, needlelike beams of light which cut across the highway at regular intervals just a few inches from the pavement, emanating from squat mounds of concrete placed alongside the road. On the right-hand side of the car there was a photoelectric-cell mechanism which intercepted these rays and transmitted their messages to the robot brain, so that actually the robot was receiving instructions on how to guide the car every few hundred feet. It was these rays which told the automatic driver when it was deviating a few inches to the left or right; when it was slacking off a couple of miles or infinitesimally picking up speed; when there was another car in the same lane up ahead, or when there was a curve coming and what the speed should be reduced to to negotiate it safely; when it was safe to accelerate again.

  It was ironic, Martine thought, that as a result of technology one of the last refuges of the frontiering ego in America—the automobile, the jalopy, streamlined Old Paint—had been all but abolished. Early in the century, once the venerable horse had disappeared, all the conveyances developed for speedier transportation seemed calculated to give men a feeling of complete helplessness and passivity, a sense that they were mere bundles of freight to be lugged from one place to another: the trolley, the bus, the train, the plane. Paralleling what had happened in other areas of life, travel too had become uterine. Only in his own automobile, at the hydromatic reins, could a man still recapture some of the old frontiersman’s thrill of domineering his trusty old pinto, of being in control, of doing rather than bing done to: he pushed the buttons. But now, with robo-drive, the motorist too had become passive baggage; the mechanism had taken over and turned its electronic back on him. You could turn it off or on—that was the limit of human intervention.

  Just now, however, Martine was grateful for the car’s self-sufficiency; he was dog-tired, and groggy from the rota and anti-rota, and driving at any speed would have been a considerable strain. Besides, his left arm hurt where Vishinu had jabbed it with the pin. From time to time he curled his arms around the steering wheel, let his head drop, and dozed off. He had no idea how long he slept in these cat naps, but awakening from one of them he found that it was daylight and that he had come close to a thousand miles.

  He had a strong desire, suddenly, to see Salt Lake; his eyes were starved for the sight of water. It was out of his way, since he was approaching from the southeast and the city was this side of the lake, but he took over control for a moment and turned into a roundabout route which would allow him to indulge his whim. The country he was heading into now, being headed into, took on a more familiar aspect: occasionally snow-sprinkled mountain peaks loomed up over to the west, the vegetation was getting scraggly and thinning out into increasingly barren stretches. The feel of what had been Utah was beginning to haunt him again, stirring old memories of hunting and fishing trips with his father—youthful explorations which had brought him closer to a feeling of oneness with the world about him, probably, than anything before or since.

  Now, finally, he was speeding into the flats of the lake country. And there, at last, was the lake itself, that briny expanse of feminine yieldingness which, as his muscles could still remember, possessed such sturdy resistance that it would refuse to let a man break its resilient skin and sink into its ambience: breast that became springier with each reluctant inch of giving, breast that gave not like molasses but like foam rubber, within the deceptively flaccid flesh a fist.

  He recalled how, when he swam here as a child, it had always been a challenge to him to pierce the gravitysnubbing armor of these falsely gentle waters, so acquiescent on the surface, so defiant underneath; how he had always tried desperately, with wily dives and wrigglings, to pierce their stand-offishness; how he had always failed, and been left at the end with a vague unnamable sense of defeat and frustration. He had wanted somehow to be bold, firm, arrowlike, remorselessly heavy and compact, like the incorruptible stern alps over in the mountain ranges, but always the lapping passive waters, seemingly without effort, had made a fool of him. Mother Nature! No wonder a sort of momism had always been attributed to Nature by men (while the paternal principle was generally located in the temporal: Father Time). Inside all Nature’s cushions was a spine of steel. One reclined on her breast only to be buffeted and stung—if one chose to take it personally.

  Mother Nature yielded and clutched, gave way and snarled, parted and overwhelmed—there were two mothers in Nature, as there were in every man’s infantile memories: one that was all haughty omnipotent willful strength, another that was all softness and quiescence: alp and ocean—hardly surprising that Nature’s most peculiar children should do the same and that out of this built-in contradictoriness, this chronic all-at-onceness, should create finally that living death, that furious ultimate interpenetration of aggression and passivity, of push and pull, of Eros and Thanatos, known as Immob. . . . He remembered how, as a kid, he had often given up his struggles to breach the lake’s rejection and had simply turned on his back and floated, face turned to the warming sun, eyes closed and will jettisoned. In the defeat there had been a quiet exhilaration, as of a quest ended and some hit-or-miss jejune Brahman achieved merely through abandonment of effort. Oh, the seeds of Immob had been in him too. His own being was drenched with ample dosages of both rota and ganja. Immob was a macaronic melt of East and West—so was he.

  He was plunging, being plunged, through the flat stretches of salt licks and alkali wastes now: the blanched dead landscape was good to see. Here in his youth he had always had a feeling of respite and peace, but now he could put into faltering words what had been utterly beyond articulation in those days. Here the skin of protoplasm, foliage and teeming soil, had been stripped from the earth and the underlying hard unassailable skeleton exposed to be bleached by the sun—there was about this eerie petrified whiteness an air of the ultimate, of finality, of having hit bottom; kaleidescope of rigor mortis. In expanses of trees and plants and jumbled greenery, the earth’s squirming epidermis, there was always the suggestion of struggle and strife (the old Notoa); here nothing stirred, nothing thirsted to be other than itself, to become; petrified pre-nativity everywhere, nothing but immutable dead-weight being (the new, lobotomized Notoa)—the core of steel had sprung nakedly from the flesh. It was somehow momentarily comforting to be in a place where life had turned to a stone, crusty mass which chips and crumbles when hit but never yields and parts and falsely flows—where matter is so completely drained of its disgusting juices that its tissues have hardened to undeviating calcium and salt.

  And he saw that there was a parable in the scene—if you wanted to take it personally. This was the answer to the contradictoriness in Nature and its wild protoplasmic excess called man—death, petrifaction. Short of the final achievement of inertness there was to be no real inertness, no untainted ease, no indivisible peace. It could be lamented, if you wanted to waste the time—it couldn’t be changed. There was this way, and only this way, to resolve the tension between mountain and ocean, and within each mountain and ocean: to strip down to
skeleton. For it was this wracking polarity which infused the teeming skin of the earth and the flesh of the living creature, breathed life into soil and flesh, motored their pulsations. Every cell contained a seething mixture of Eros and Thanatos; ambivalence was its glue and tension its spark. And Immob, like Mandunga, had come about because people had forgotten that all the warring pairs were indissolubly linked—they’d developed too much of a taste for consistency. Yes, the two-way stretch between heaven and hell so abominated by the Manichees existed in every turbulent cell. And the Manichees had been right: the only way to avoid this tension was to commit suicide. It was clear enough, Mandunga was one of the oldest, and Immob the newest, Manichean technique for committing mass suicide—in the name of consistency. Men would reduce themselves to mounds of tapioca, and eventually to spatters of bleached alkali, to avoid being caught in a contradiction. And fight another war, a thumpingly pacifist war, along the way.

  It was an idea at once revelatory and absurd—it seemed to explain much, but any effort to explain so much was downright preposterous: only paranoiacs want to encompass everything. But there was no more time for musing, he was approaching the suburbs of Martinesburg.

  With a grunt of relief he switched over to manual operation, as his fingers gripped the wheel he thrilled to the feel of pulsing power once more subservient to his will. He’d had too much of passive thought, good to be doing something with his hands again.

  But why, a few hours ago, had his hands wanted to kill Neen? And trembled when, unaccountably, he had called her—Rosemary?

  The city had not been so much overhauled as filled in and expanded: there were many buldings and even whole blocks that were substantially as he remembered them but they were interlarded with skyscrapers, Immob recruiting centers, branches of the M. E. University, all plastered with the usual Immob slogans—the archaic sandwiched with the unprecedented, as always in America. There, for example, was the University of Utah, were his father had been a professor at the world’s first atomic medical school and where he himself had completed his undergraduate studies before going on to study brain surgery in New York: many new buildings had been added, the entire institution was now called RADIATION RESEARCH LABS. And there was the old Mormon tabernacle, it was now the MUSEUM OF IMMOB CULTURE.

  He parked in the shopping center, and for the next two hours was busy with his purchases. At CHAMP BROSSARD’S ROD AND GUN CENTER he bought several rifles and cartons of shells, plus a full wardrobe of warm camping clothes, a camp stove, oil lamps, eating utensils; at AL ERSKINE’S ELECTRONIC APPLIANCES, a portable television set; at ANNE WINTER’S FOOD MART, several cases of canned foods; at FRANK SCHWARTZ’S SUPERIOR STATIONERY, a half-dozen notebooks in which to continue his jottings; at LINN JONES’ FINE LIQUOR SHOP, a few bottles of sour mash, once his favorite whiskey; at BOBBIE REITZ’S FOUR SEASONS BOOKSTORE, all the Immob pocketbooks and texts he could find, everything from Tolstoy down to Helder; at DOTTIE CLARK’S BAKE SHOP, a case of vacuum-packed chocolate layer cakes, the pièce de resistance of his childhood gormandizing; at JIM MAHER’S SERVICE STATION, some spare energy capsules for his car; finally, at JOHN MUNDY’S SNACK CORNER, two hamburgers which he consumed on the spot. Now he could go into hiding for months, if necessary. Five or six months, anyhow. He remembered Vishinu’s deadline: the world had been given a suspended sentence for a few months, five or six.

  Where to now? Where did one go to dodge the Martine ocean? The mountains, of course. But first—he thought, with sudden apprehension—it wouldn’t hurt to play the nostalgic prodigal for a few minutes and take a look at the old homestead. Assuring himself that it was a silly whim, he climbed back in the car and drove out toward the University.

  For a moment after he parked the car he was sure he had come to the wrong place: the houses on either side seemed as he remembered them but his own house was not there. When he looked more closely he saw what the trouble was. The original house was not gone, it had only been swallowed up by several new wings and glass-enclosed sun porches and heavy landscaping which hid it from the street. In addition, a high brick wall had been put up just back of the sidewalk, terminating in an elaborate iron grillework gateway; on the gate itself was a metal plaque.

  Martine went over and read the inscription:

  The Martine House.

  Home of

  DR. MARTINE

  (1945-1972)

  “He is not gone; he has but become the ocean; let us humbly drink.”—HELDER

  Over the gate was an arch decorated with iron flutings and curlicues, many of them wound around little triskelions filled with running pros, and in the center of it a large bronze bas-relief: a steamroller, with a man perched proudly on top of it rather like a gunner emerging from a tank, man triumphant over the machine, the rider with raised fist indomitable and the machine helplessly couchant, brought to its knees. But the man’s fist was an Immob fist, the arm was a mesh of tubing and coils, so were all his limbs—he had subdued the machine by making himself into the machine. Peculiar sort of victory, won by incorporating the enemy into oneself. If imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, the overwhelmed machine had won the fight hands down: the master had become the mirror image of the slave.

  Martine’s hand jerked uneasily, went up to his beard. He had just noticed the face of the man who straddled the metal dragon: it was his own, his face of twenty-odd years ago, sans whiskers and irony. Well, he was safe in his disguise.

  There was more lettering, done in twisted iron, under the sculpture: THIS HISTORICAL SITE HAS BEEN PRESERVED AS A NATIONAL SHRINE AND REST HOME BY THE DAUGHTERS OF IMMOB HISTORICAL SOCIETY. Leave it to the girls.

  “My God,” Martine said to himself, “I used to pick my nose in this place, now it’s a shrine. You can’t be too careful.”

  The sky was overcast, everything gray, he saw the lights go on in one of the long sun parlors on the ground floor. The gate was open. He slipped inside, quickly hid himself among the bushes, and approached the glassed-in room. Long drapes hung from the ceiling on all sides, but at several points they had been pulled apart a bit to allow for ventilation through open window panels. Standing on the grass to one side of an aperture he could see slantwise into the room and hear the voices inside.

  At first glance the room looked like a nursery: there were some eighteen or twenty baby carriages standing in a row along the long wall of the porch. In a moment he realized that the occupants of the carriages (some of them lying in pairs, their heads at opposite ends of their double baskets) were all quadros, covered with fluffy baby blankets like the Antis he had seen in Marcy’s window. Two women were standing near Martine with their backs turned, bending over one of the carriages; he judged that the dumpy gray-haired one was quite old, the tall lean one considerably younger, they could be mother and daughter. Inside the house, he could see, several Pros were grouped around a ping-pong table: apparently this was a rest home for Pros and Antis alike.

  As the women talked and fussed over the one boy, Martine studied the faces of the others. They seemed to be paying no attention to the conversation, most of them were awake but their eyes were blank, fixed on the ceiling. Except for the women’s murmurous voices and the clicking from the ping-pong table inside, the place seemed as hushed as a doll’s house. Only the blinking of the unfocused eyes in the carriages provided a touch of animation. Somebody inside turned on a radio: Bessie Smith’s voice, singing “Empty Bed Blues.”

  Old Ubu should see the scene on this porch, Martine thought; he’d go green with envy. Here was the graveyard of tonus. These young warriors had given up their spears and bolos for good. They might raise their voices, never their fists.

  At this moment, though, the amp hidden by the women was raising his voice, and emphatically. “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “I told you I’m going and I’m going.”

  “Why you?” the younger woman said bitterly. “Why must it always be you?”

  At the sound of her voice, Martine’s shoulders hunche
d, the carping tone set his teeth on edge.

  “You know perfectly well why,” the amp said, with the infinite condescension of a teacher explaining sums to a backward child. “You know I have responsibilities the others don’t have. I must be the first.”

  “What good does it do?” the woman went on. “Lying around in department store windows, mercy sakes, it’s undignified.”

  “If people want to see you,” the old woman added, “they can come here.”

  Her voice was niggling and sad, Martine’s throat tightened.

  “That’s not the point,” the boy said petulantly, “and you know it. It’s not a question of their wanting to see me. It’s my duty to go to them.”

  “But what can you do?” the first woman said. “You’re just a baby.”

  “I may be a baby to you,” the amp said icily, “but it just so happens that to the rest of the country I’m president of the Anti-Pro League. And this is a critical moment, morale has been badly shaken by Vishinu’s speech. I can’t just lie here and do nothing.”

  “Vishinu was talking about Theo,” the younger woman insisted. “If Theo doesn’t like it, why, let him—”

  “Let him nothing. It’s people like Theo who’ve gotten us into this mess. Look, apparently you don’t understand how serious this is. It’s a crisis.”

  “All right,” the younger woman said. “All right. But if you have to make a display of yourself, why not do it in some store window right here in Martinesburg? Why go hundreds of miles to Los Alamos? Nobody in Los Alamos sent for you.”

  “Naturally they haven’t sent for me. They’re afraid of me. You can see, even the Pros around here in the Home have been avoiding me lately. They’re all scared.”

  “Then why go? Why bother at all?”

  “Can’t you understand anything? L.A. is the center of the panic. That’s where all the hysteria starts. What’s needed is a special demonstration, some unusually striking gesture, right at the national capital, to shock our leaders and win them back to true Immob before it’s too late. We’re trying to contact our brothers in the East Union to do the same thing at New Tolstoygrad, maybe we’ll be able to synchronize our demonstrations, but in any case we’ve got to go ahead. There’s going to be a special concentration of our forces at the capital and I’ve got to lead it—it’s as simple as that.”