Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  During momentary lulls, they talked. At cross purposes. Theo, his mind full of Martine’s last mocking words, had been concerned with columbium—Helder, for some reason, had stuck doggedly to one subject: Mandunga. He indicated an extraordinary interest in Martine’s references to Mandunga.

  Martine, Helder suggested, had been a remarkably gifted lobotomist—if he had spent twenty years at that kind of research, he must have come up with some incredible discoveries. Martine himself had hinted as much: he claimed that he had hit upon an infallible surgical procedure for removing the aggressive centers from the prefrontal areas and destroying all the tonus which is mobilized in aggression. That would be exciting to know about. There were many volumes of technical information back there on the island, according to Martine. What did Theo know about this fantastic cache of scientific literature? What did he know about this whole Mandunga thing—he had had many friendly and informative talks with that old chief—what was his name?—Ubu. On and on.

  Theo did not answer. Not simply because he did not care to: he had no more answers. Over and over again he parried Helder’s questions with one of his own: What about columbium? At first Helder was indifferent; then annoyed; then so exasperated that he turned to Theo furiously and told him the whole story, bluntly.

  Of course there was a race for the limited sources of columbium, it had been going on for years. Never mind who started it—Vishinu’s men had taken the first sly steps, no time to go into the proofs now. The race had gotten under way very soon after the invention of the atom-powered pro. Actually it had been borne home to Helder and a few of his most intimate advisers—Theo didn’t have to bother with these vexing details of running a government, oh, no, he was a full-time hero—that it might be a good idea, operating in an entirely confidential way, to place some expert metallurgists on the Olympic Team. Just to pick up a little helpful data on their travels: it would hurt nobody and it would allow the Strip to bargain more intelligently at international conferences. The move had been extremely wise. For soon, at the conferences, it became clear that the Union had at its fingertips far more information than it was conceivable for anybody to have without some very elaborate undercover exploration.

  Helder’s agents checked. They learned that for some time the Union had been staffing its Olympic Team almost exclusively with metallurgists and mining engineers, and sending the Team on systematic expeditions disguised as training cruises. The race was intensified. In the last couple of years it had reached the point where hardly any traveler of any description whatsoever, whether Unioneer or Stripper, was concerned with anything but columbium–everybody was looking for columbium. . . . Now, what was Theo’s question: Had any members of this year’s Team been looking for columbium around the Indian Ocean?

  The answer was very simple: practically all the members of this year’s Team had been looking for columbium in the Indian Ocean. Except Theo, of course. There had been no reason to bother his inspirational, glowing mind about such mundane matters—might dim his charisma. So the captain of the cruising yacht, and a few key members of the Team, had been instructed to keep the charismatic Theo charismatically occupied while the metallurgists went about their job. Did that answer Theo’s question?

  It did. It told him all he wanted to know: that he had been used. But by this time Helder was so overwrought and bitter that he proceeded to give Theo the answers to a few other questions he had not asked, questions he didn’t even know existed. The members of the Olympic Team hadn’t only been looking for columbium. They had also been planting stores of weapons everywhere they went, weapons flown in quietly from the hush-hush armories of the Strip. Because the Union Team was doing precisely the same thing, and the Strip could not ignore it.

  This was the point: if another war did break out over the question of columbium, it would hardly be an all-out H-bomb and RW dust war. No, after the holocaust of the Third, nobody would dare to initiate full-scale atomic warfare again—because both sides had about equal atomic-pile and breeder-reactor facilities, and each knew that if it started any real area-wide hell-bombing and dusting the other could promptly retaliate with at least equal effectiveness. Whatever atomic bombing might be done would be limited in character, confined to specific targets, and neither side would dare to go very far beyond the limits which the other imposed on itself. So it was entirely likely that there would be other types of combat, with less deadly and more primitive weapons. The war could be pretty well visualized: for the most part individual combatants, rigged up as human helicopters, would come flying at each other in a kind of aerial joust, hurling flame or bullets from their arms or trying to carve each other up with their rotary saws and drills. . . . It might interest Theo to know that quite impressive quantites of arms had been deposited in a few safe places on the Mandunji island too. Against the day when Strip soldiers might be stranded in that area, cut off from home bases. This, Helder trusted, would drive home to Theo the very uncharismatic facts of political life. Helder was exceedingly sorry that he had to force a hero like Theo to grow up in such a rush—but there it was. Tough titty, he knew. Nothing to be done. And now, please—what about this Mandunga?

  “I’m glad I had this talk with you,” Theo said. “It’s opened my eyes. . . . Look, if this information about Mandunga is so important I think I know how to get it.”

  “How?”

  “From Martine himself, Whether he wants to talk or not. He’s got volumes of information on the thing with him, I saw them myself when I went out to the motel to get him.”

  Helder jumped up. “Well!” he said. “Fine! Fine! I’ll send some of the boys out right now. Nothing to it if he’s still there, and if he’s not, a general alarm—”

  “That won’t do,” Theo said as Helder was reaching for the intercom. “The books aren’t there now and Martine hasn’t got them with him no matter where he is. He packed a valise and brought it along when I took him into town. All the volumes are in the valise.”

  “Well? Where’s the valise?”

  “He hid it down in the Slot. He insisted. He told me he wouldn’t come any farther unless I stopped and let him get out and hide the valise—without following him. I drove off to a parking strip, at a place where the Slot seemed to be completely deserted. I showed him where the elevator was and he went down. He was gone for about twenty minutes—he couldn’t have gone very far from the elevator, we can cover the area in no time. When he came back he didn’t have the suitcase.”

  “But that’s no good,” Helder said, frowning. “Good God, man, he’s been gone for hours. He’s had time to pick up the suitcase and get hundreds of miles from L.A.”

  “Wrong,” Theo said. “He may be hundreds of miles from L.A., but he hasn’t got the suitcase with him.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Well, while you’ve been busy on the intercom I’ve been reading the details of the bombings as they came in over the ticker tape. Here’s one tape I saved.” He handed the crumpled ribbon to Helder. “You see. Passage through the Slot’s been blocked off in several places—he couldn’t have gotten through. The alternative, of course, is that he went straight down in the capitol building, all the way down on Drop Number One, got his suitcase, then came back up the same way. Well, that’s out too. There’s considerable damage close by the Number One elevator entrances below—the way from the elevators to the Slot itself has collapsed. There’s just one chance—the emergency footpaths may still be open—we could investigate—but you know how tough they are to find, even for people familiar with the layout. No. He may still be down there, but it’s practically impossible that he’s found it and gotten away. . . .”

  “What do you propose?”

  “I’ll go down and look for it. If you’ll come with me.”

  Helder looked at Theo queerly. “Why me?”

  “There’s been too much already that you’ve had to shoulder without me—I see that now and I’m sorry. It’s time we acted as a team again, especially
in something as important as this.”

  Helder paced up and down the room a couple of times, rubbing his forefinger down his long majestic nose, sniffing. Theo guessed what he was thinking: it would be safe, so long as the men watching him knew where he was going and could follow. Finally he sat down at his desk, looking at Theo with a friendly smile: slouched elaborately.

  “All right, Theo,” he said. “I’m glad you feel that way about it. Sure, let’s go and grab a Slot elevator right now. We’ll take the elevator down to the Slot.”

  “Wait—the Geiger count might be pretty high down there. We’d better not go in unprotected.”

  “Right.” Helder went to a closet door and opened it. “All the gear we need’s in here.” He took out two plastic anti-radiation suits and two pairs of goggles. Then he opened a can of anti-gamma skin protectant, motioned to Theo to help himself, applied the bright blue grease liberally to his hands, his face, his scalp and neck. In three or four minutes they were ready.

  They left the office, went through the outer rooms, emerged on the corridor and headed for the elevators. Nobody in sight yet: good. Theo had a pretty good idea of what Helder had done. Sitting down at his desk that way, he must have pressed a switch with his knee or his foot that turned on the audio circuits for his bodyguards. He was going to chance a trip down in the elevator alone with Theo because he knew his bodyguards would be covering him at both ends, up here and down below too—and he knew Theo knew it. So the point was not to take the passenger elevator. Now—if only the passenger elevator wasn’t there.

  It wasn’t. No doubt there was a lot of traffic in the building as a result of the bombings: Theo had been counting on it.

  “Oh, the hell with it,” Theo said, after they’d waited for a minute. “The passenger elevators are probably all tied up. Let’s take my car, it’s right here—we’ll have better luck getting one of the freight elevators on a lower floor.”

  He made the suggestion casually, trying to conceal his tension. Maybe, because he was so used to being chauffeured about, Helder wouldn’t remember one all-important fact: that down below, the freight cars and the passenger cars opened up on opposite sides of the great elevator shaft. If Helder’s guards had heard him and were down there, they would expect him to come out on the passenger side.

  “Well. . . .” Helder said. “That makes sense. . . . Oh, all right.”

  They got into Theo’s car and started down the motor ramp which snaked in and out of the building, spiraling downward a floor at a time. Some fifteen floors below, Theo drove off the ramp, stopped in front of a freight elevator, and flashed his headlights three times. In a matter of seconds the doors yawned open.

  “Just as I thought,” Theo said carelessly. “Not many people using their cars now.”

  “Right,” Helder said.

  In less than a minute they were down to the Slot exit. The elevator ground to a smooth halt. Now: if only none of the guards had wandered over to this side. . . .

  The doors sprang open. Theo took a deep breath. There was nobody in sight.

  Helder peered out on both sides as they drove off, puzzled. After a couple of minutes of winding through the maze, Theo stopped the car: there was a cave-in some fifty yards ahead.

  “Good,” he said. “That block’s some distance beyond the footpath. Here’s a clear entrance, let’s try it.”

  They got out and approached the doorway—hardly noticeable, covered with a sheet of steel that ran flush with the wall. Helder looked up and down uneasily: nobody in sight.

  “Come on,” Theo said, opening the door. “No sense wasting time—he did have a big head start, there’s just an outside chance he may have found a way through.”

  Helder followed him into the low arched tunnel. They went a long distance, descended by a flight of stairs; then more turns, two more stairways, footsteps echoing in the cramped cavern. Finally they passed through another door and were out in the Slot’s great hollow, down on its floor.

  “Just look at that,” Helder whispered.

  They had entered the Slot at a point almost midway between two power-plant bombings; to the right was the smoking ruin of one breeder reactor, a tremendous hole blasted in the floor, machinery lying in melted and twisted heaps for hundreds of feet around—to the left, where another explosion had occurred, there was a mountainous rock pile reaching up some two or three hundred feet, composed of boulders and rubble which had been blasted loose from the walls and from the roof far above. The area in which they were standing had contained an enormous prosthetics manufacturing plant: on all sides were furnaces and cauldrons, plastic mixers, some of them still steaming; extruders with their nozzles still dripping gooey plastic; machines for stamping out and winding and assembling the solenoid coils and cores; on a belt line nearby, not moving now, a long row of hollow plastic fingers ready for final assembly.

  “It’s not far from here,” Theo said. “To the right—this way.”

  They set off, picking their way between the silent, steaming machines.

  “Here,” Theo said. “Right about here, I’d say.”

  Directly in front of them, at their feet, was a round hole some ten feet across. Thick yellowish vapors were rising from the hole, the odor sharp and noxious.

  “What?” Helder said. “You’re—that’s crazy, man, this is a vat. There’s nothing down there but plastic—look at that steam, it’s still cooking.”

  They looked around carefully: still no sign of another human being. “Weren’t you looking for the rest of Martine?” he said: his voice was hollow and choked. “There’s the rest of him. He is not dead, he has but become an ocean of plastic. Now you’re going to drink. Humbly. This is your Lake Victoria.”

  There was incredulity in Helder’s eyes, burning bright now. “Listen here,” he said, sniffing rapidly. “You’re mad. . . .”

  He stepped back, Theo reached out and took hold of his neck with both hands.

  “Don’t struggle,” Theo said. “You know, I’m quite an athlete, I haven’t spent the last fifteen years going soft at a desk. I co-ordinate beautifully.”

  “Theo!” Helder cried. “What are you thinking of! Let go before—”

  “Besides,” Theo said, “you’ve only got super-legs. I’ve got super-arms as well, thanks to you. You can’t get away from these hands. They were made to fit around your neck—I could snap it like a toothpick right now, without even trying. Thank you for these wonderful hands. They’re about to send you onward and upward.”

  Helder was fighting desperately, making strangled sounds; Theo stood there quietly, holding him in the vise like a boy holding a caterpillar gingerly in a pair of tweezers.

  “I’d like to tell you why,” he said. “In the name of the Twenty-third Amendment. For the hands you took from me. For Rosemary. To make sure you stay immobilized this time. To teach you how to be irrevocable. You shit. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

  He heaved, the bulbs in his arms jittered. “Aaaaaaahhhhh,” Helder said—his legs flew up over his head. With a quick fling Theo catapulted him into the cauldron, head first. . . .

  “That’s all,” Theo said. “Nobody saw. I stood there for a while—the steam changed from pale yellow to a bright orange, there were puffs of bright orange and it smelled bad. He went down slowly, his legs were half melted before they went under the surface, they started to droop. For a long time after he disappeared there were lots of bubbles on the surface. I watched them.” A shudder ran through him. “Then I found these workmen’s clothes. I put them on and got out on the streets and came here. By the back roads. Walked all the way.” He shuddered again.

  “Don’t take on so,” Martine said. “How many people did you kill in the last war: twenty million? This only makes twenty million and one. Of course, it’s not such a neat figure.”

  “What am I to do now.” It was constructed as a question, sounded like a statement of irreparable fact.

  “You ask me that?” Martine brandished the tutorial forefinger a
gain, furiously. “What the hell did you come here for, anyway? Now that you’ve run out of limbs to offer to the Helders, run out of Helders too, you come knocking on my door—what for? Maybe you want me to gouge out your prefrontal lobes, since that’s about all you can spare?”

  “I came. . . . I had no place else to go.”

  “You came because you want approval for what you’ve done, isn’t that so? That’s another form of lobotomy. Sorry, Brother Theo, I won’t be your conscience. Look behind your eyeballs for the answer. Where it aches the most.”

  “I did right. I’m sure I did right.”

  “I won’t tell you whether it was right or wrong!” Martine exploded.

  “Tell me where to go now.” Theo was back to his old game: wiggling his fingers in slow motion, watching them intently.

  “I do know one place you could go,” Martine said. “There’s a ranch up north a ways. . . . Wait a minute. There’s one thing you didn’t tell me: Why was Helder so interested in finding out about Mandunga?”

  “He didn’t say,”

  “Of course, he would be interested. He was such an inveterate whittler—he’d perk up at the first sign of any new whittling technique. But he must have had something in mind. . . .”

  “I don’t know. I pretended I understood just to get him down to the Slot.”

  Martine crossed the room and planted himself in front of Theo. “Look—maybe it was a good idea, your coming here. You might be able to help me. I’ve got to go home.”

  “Home?”

  “To the Mandunji island. I must get there, right away. Can you help me?”

  Theo was stunned: he began to think: his eyes opened wide with excitement. “Sure!” he said. “Of course I can—at least I think so. Out at Helder’s ranch, just thirty miles north of here—there’s an airfield on the grounds, there’re always ten or twelve fast planes there. Maybe I could get you into one. . . .” He rose to his feet, raised his hands prayerfully toward Martine. “Take me with you, Martine! These new planes are pretty damned complicated, I’m still one of the best pilots in the Strip. Take me with you!”