Tomorrow's Crimes

by Donald E. Westlake

  “No one tries it twice.”

  “I’ll never stop leaving. Don’t you know that? I’ll never stop leaving, I’ll never stop being. I’ll not stop believing I’m who I must be. You had to know that.”

  Wordman stared at him. “You’ll go through it again?”

  “Ever and ever,” Revell said.

  “It’s a bluff.” Wordman pointed an angry finger at Revell, saying, “If you want to die, I’ll let you die. Do you know if we don’t bring you back you’ll die out there?”

  “That’s escape, too,” Revell said.

  “Is that what you want? All right. Go out there again, and I won’t send anyone after you, that’s a promise.”

  “Then you lose,” Revell said. He looked at Wordman finally, seeing the blunt angry face. “They’re your rules,” Revell told him, “and by your own rules you’re going to lose. You say your black box will make me stay, and that means the black box will make me stop being me. I say you’re wrong. I say as long as I’m leaving you’re losing, and if the black box kills me you’ve lost forever.”

  Spreading his arms, Wordman shouted, “Do you think this is a game?”

  “Of course,” said Revell. “That’s why you invented it.”

  “You’re insane,” Wordman said. He started for the door. “You shouldn’t be here, you should be in an asylum.”

  “That’s losing, too,” Revell shouted after him, but Wordman had slammed the door and gone.

  Revell lay back on the pillow. Alone again, he could dwell once more on his terrors. He was afraid of the black box, much more now that he knew what it could do to him, afraid to the point where his fear made him sick to his stomach. But he was afraid of losing himself, too, this a more abstract and intellectual fear but just as strong. No, it was even stronger, because it was driving him to go out again.

  “But I didn’t know it would be as bad as that,” he whispered. He painted it once more on the ceiling, this time in red.

  Wordman had been told when Revell would be released from the infirmary, and he made a point of being at the door when Revell came out. Revell seemed somewhat leaner, perhaps a little older. He shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand, looked at Wordman, and said, “Good-bye, Wordman.” He started walking east.

  Wordman didn’t believe it. He said, “You’re bluffing, Revell.”

  Revell kept walking.

  Wordman couldn’t remember when he’d ever felt such anger. He wanted to run after Revell and kill him with his bare hands. He clenched his hands into fists and told himself he was a reasonable man. a rational man, a merciful man. As the Guardian was reasonable, was rational, was merciful. It required only obedience, and so did he. It punished only such purposeless defiance as Revell’s, and so did he. Revell was antisocial, self-destructive, he had to learn. For his own sake, as well as for the sake of society, Revell had to be taught.

  Wordman shouted, “What are you trying to get out of this?” He glared at Revell’s moving back, listened to Revell’s silence.

  He shouted, “I won’t send anyone after you! You’ll crawl back yourself!”

  He kept watching until Revell was far out from the compound, staggering across the field toward the trees, his arms folded across his stomach, his legs stumbling, his head bent forward. Wordman watched, and then gritted his teeth, and turned his back, and returned to his office to work on the monthly report. Only two attempted escapes last month.

  Two or three times in the course of the afternoon he looked out the window. The first time, he saw Revell far across the field, on hands and knees, crawling toward the trees. The last time, Revell was out of sight, but he could be heard screaming. Wordman had a great deal of trouble concentrating his attention on the report.

  Toward evening he went outside again. Revell’s screams sounded from the woods, faint but continuous. Wordman stood listening, his fists clenching and relaxing at his sides. Grimly he forced himself not to feel pity. For Revell’s own good he had to be taught.

  A staff doctor came to him a while later and said, “Mr. Wordman, we’ve got to bring him in.”

  Wordman nodded. “I know. Bur I want to be sure he’s learned.”

  “For God’s sake,” said the doctor, “Listen to him.”

  Wordman looked bleak. “All right, bring him in.”

  As the doctor started away, the screaming stopped. Wordman and the doctor both turned their heads, listened—silence. The doctor ran for the infirmary.

  Revell lay screaming. All he could think of was the pain, and the need to scream. But sometimes, when he managed a scream of the very loudest, it was possible for him to have a fraction of a second for himself, and in those fractions of seconds he still kept moving away from the prison, inching along the ground, so that in the last hour he had moved approximately seven feet. His head and right arm were now visible from the country road that passed through these woods.

  On one level, he was conscious of nothing but the pain and his own screaming. On another level, he was totally, even insistently, aware of everything around him, the blades of grass near his eyes, the stillness of the woods, the tree branches high overhead. And the small pickup truck, when it stopped on the road beyond him.

  The man who came over from the truck and squatted beside Revell had a lined and weathered face and the rough clothing of a farmer. He touched Revell’s shoulder and said, “You hurt, fella?”

  “Eeeeast!” screamed Revell. “Eeeeast!”

  “Is it okay to move you?” asked the man.

  “Yesssss!” shrieked Revell. “Eeeeast!”

  “I’d best take you to a doctor.”

  There was no change in the pain when the man lifted him and carried him to the truck and lay him down on the floor in back. He was already at optimum distance from the transmitter; the pain now was as bad as it could get.

  The farmer tucked a rolled-up wad of cloth into Revell’s open mouth. “Bile on this,” he said. “It’ll make it easier.”

  It made nothing easier, but it muffled his screams. He was grateful for that; the screams embarrassed him.

  He was aware of it all, the drive through increasing darkness, the farmer carrying him into a building that was of colonial design on the outside but looked like the infirmary on the inside, and a doctor who looked down at him and touched his forehead and then went to one side to thank the farmer for bringing him. They spoke briefly over there, and then the farmer went away and the doctor came back to look at Revell again. He was young, dressed in laboratory white, with a pudgy face and red hair. He seemed sick and angry. He said. “You’re from that prison, aren’t you?”

  Revell was still screaming through the cloth. He managed a head-spasm which he meant to be a nod. His armpits felt as though they were being cut open with knives of ice. The sides of his neck were being scraped by sandpaper. All of his joints were being ground back and forth, back and forth, the way a man at dinner separates the bones of a chicken wing. The interior of his stomach was full of acid. His body was stuck with needles, sprayed with fire. His skin was being peeled off, his nerves cut with razor blades, his muscles pounded with hammers. Thumbs were pushing his eyes out from inside his head. And yet, the genius of this pain, the brilliance that had gone into its construction, it permitted his mind to work, to remain constantly aware. There was no unconsciousness for him, no oblivion.

  The doctor said, “What beasts some men are. I’ll try to get it out of you. I don’t know what will happen, we aren’t supposed to know how it works, but III try to take the box out of you.”

  He went away, and came back with a needle. “Here. This will put you to sleep.”

  Ahhhhh.

  “He isn’t there. He just isn’t anywhere in the woods.”

  Wordman glared at the doctor, but knew he had to accept what the man reported. “All right.” he said. “Someone took him away. He had a confederate out there, someone who helped him get away.”

  “No one would dare,” said the doctor. “Anyone who helped him w
ould wind up here themselves.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Wordman. “I’ll call the State Police,” he said, and went on into his office.

  Two hours later the Sate Police called back. They’d checked the normal users of that road, local people who might have seen or heard something, and had found a farmer who’d picked up an injured man near the prison and taken him to a Dr. Allyn in Boonetown. The State Police were convinced the farmer had acted innocently.

  “But not the doctor,” Wordman said grimly. “He’d have to know the truth almost immediately.”

  “Yes, sir, I should think so.”

  “And he hasn’t reported Revell.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you gone to pick him up yet?”

  “Not yet. We just got the report.”

  “I’ll want to come with you. Wait for me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wordman traveled in the ambulance in which they’d bring Revell back. They arrived without siren at Dr. Allvn’s with two cars of state troopers, marched into the tiny operating room, and found Allyn washing instruments at the sink.

  Allyn looked at them all calmly and said, “I thought you might be along.”

  Wordman pointed at the man who lay, unconscious, on the table in the middle of the room. “There’s Revell,” he said.

  Allyn glanced at the operating table in surprise. “Revell? The poet?”

  “You didn’t know? Then why help him?”

  Instead of answering, Allyn studied his face and said, “Would you be Wordman himself?”

  Wordman said, “Yes, I am.”

  “Then I believe this is yours,” Allyn said, and put into Wordman’s hands a small and bloody black box.

  The ceiling was persistently bare. Revell’s eyes wrote on it words that should have singed the paint away, but nothing ever happened He shut his eyes against the white at last and wrote in spidery letters on the inside of his lids the single word oblivion.

  He heard someone come into the room, but the effort of making a change was so great that for a moment longer he permitted his eyes to remain closed. When he did open them he saw Wordman there, standing grim and mundane at the foot of the bed.

  Wordman said, “How are you, Revell?”

  “I was thinking about oblivion,” Revell told him. “Writing a poem on the subject.” He looked up at the ceiling, but it was empty.

  Wordman said, “You asked, one time, you asked for pencil and paper. We’ve decided you can have them.”

  Revell looked at him in sudden hope, but then understood. “Oh.” he said. “Oh, that.”

  Wordman frowned and said. “What’s wrong? I said you can have pencil and paper.”

  “If I promise not to leave anymore.”

  Wordman’s hands gripped the foot of the bed. He said, “What’s the matter with you? You can’t get away, you have to know that by now.”

  “You mean I can’t win. But I won’t lose. It’s your game, your rules, your home ground, your equipment; if I can manage a stalemate, that’s pretty good.”

  Wordman said, “You still think it’s a game. You think none of it matters. Do you want to see what you’ve done?” He stepped back to the door, opened it, made a motion, and Dr. Allyn was led in. Wordman said to Revell, “You remember this man?”

  “I remember,” said Revell.

  Wordman said, “He just arrived. They’ll be putting the Guardian in him in about an hour. Does it make you proud, Revell?”

  Looking at Allyn, Revell said, “I’m sorry.”

  Allyn smiled and shook his head. “Don’t be. I had the idea the publicity of a trial might help rid the world of things like the Guardian.” His smile turned sour. “There wasn’t very much publicity.”

  Wordman said, “You two arc cut out of the same cloth. The emotions of the mob. that’s all you can think of. Revell in those so-called poems of his, and you in that speech you made in court.”

  Revell, smiling, said, “Oh? You made a speech? I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear it.”

  “It wasn’t very good,” Allyn said. “I hadn’t known the trial would only be one day long, so I didn’t have much time to prepare it.”

  Wordman said, “All right, that’s enough. You two can talk later, you’ll have years.”

  At the door Allyn turned back and said, “Don’t go anywhere till I’m up and around, will you? After my operation.”

  Revell said, “You want to come along next time?”

  “Naturally,” said Allyn.

  DREAM A DREAM

  “I’m dreaming, Nora thought, and she was right, but it didn’t matter.

  The dream was very realistic, even to the glitter on the knife in the hand of the tall Mayan priest. He faced Nora in a small chamber she knew to be at the base of the temple, and even while her attention was on the stone knife she was aware of the rightness of every detail, both in his costume and the room itself, a narrow stone-walled space with a dry-smelling thatch roof. Stylized hummingbirds and vultures flowed on the priest’s robes as he gestured, saying, “Well? Are you ready?”

  Of course be isn’t speaking English, and of count I understand him. “Ready for what?”

  “After the rains,” the priest said, “we must sacrifice a virgin to ensure fertility in the new fields.”

  Astonished, almost offended, not yet scared, Nora said, “I’m not a virgin!”

  His free hand extended toward her, “Come, you keep everybody waiting.”

  A great crowd could be faintly heard outside. Nora shrank away, feeling the rough wall against her back through the thin white cotton tunic. “I’m a married woman,” she said. Safe in that other world, beyond the edge of the dream, Ray was now asleep in the cot next to hers, the two of them peaceful and at rest in the Central American night. “I’m twenty-seven years old,” Nora said. “I’ve been married nearly three years. I am not a virgin!”

  “Of course you are.” His impatience made him draw quick cutting motions in the air with the blade. “There is no passion in your life,” he said, “—not for anything with juice in it. You married your husband not for love of him but of archaeology,” the word dripping with contempt. “You’ve never loved anything but dust. You’re a virgin, no question. Come along.” Eyes determined, his wiry hand closed around her arm.

  “No!” She sat up straight in the dark, disturbing the mosquitoes, staring at the night. On the other cot, Ray turned heavily in his sleep, smacking his lips, a fiftyish man who slept profoundly after the hard physical days in the field.

  “I’m not,” she whispered. The pressure of that bony hand could still be felt, a tight band around her upper arm. The glassless screened rectangle of the window let in air and the tiny night sounds of the jungle. Nora slowly lay back, hands holding the sheet under her chin, eyes very wide in the dark.

  During breakfast, at one of the long tables in the dining shed, Nora pensively picked at her eggs and beans while Ray talked with the oil company man.

  His name was Stafford, and he had come to this remote jungle camp five days ago for a stay of about a month. By day he wandered the high land to the west, and in the evenings after dinner he sat here in the dining shed in the circle of light, where he drew his tiny maps and made notes in a small, neat hand. Now he was saying something about tall mounds he had seen in the jungle, similar to those concealing the structures here in the main pan of Actun Ek, the Mayan city whose excavation Ray was directing, “Thanks, Bill,” Ray said. “We’ll have a look.”

  Nora was relieved when breakfast was done and they could tramp on out to the site, where the workers already crawled over the high-stepped sides of Building B-l, the primary temple of Actun Elk. I was here last night, Nora thought.

  The workers, Indian tribesmen who made their living from archaeological sites, had nearly finished the first task, clearing away the centuries of growth and decay, the earth and brush and trees that covered the cunningly nested old stones, the steep lines of stairs. Unlike the Egyptian pyramids, Mayan
temples were built solid, without rooms or corridors, just the steps and walls and sculptures reaching upward. Only at the base had there originally been the small thatch-roofed rooms built out from the temple’s side.

  Nora and Ray worked behind the Indians, collecting shards, filling in site maps. This was Nora’s third year at Actun Ek, her eighth year since she had fallen in love with the dignity, strength, and confidence of the Mayan civilization, the impervious mystery of their individual persons. Who had they been? When they awoke in the morning, what had they thought of themselves and the jungle around them and the high temples to which they devoted their lives?

  Human sacrifice: yes, that was part of it but hardly everything. Something was known of their agriculture, their trade, their religion, even their sports, but never very much. Never enough to hamper Nora’s imagination.

  Every day, in her mind, as she gleaned her way across the uneven steps, Nora was a Mayan priestess. Not even Ray knew of this game, this fantasy she had lived and elaborated for eight years. She imagined her clothing, her food, the understated drama of her days. Little was known of the place of women among the Mayan upper class, so her invention could float unimpeded.

  At dinner. Bill Stafford showed them, on his neat maps, the location of the mounds he’d seen. This earnest geologist seemed even younger than Nora, which from the beginning had pleased her. She’d married a man much older than herself, was mostly around people of his generation, and resented their usual assumption that she was too young to be serious. Stafford was barely out of engineering college, but there could be no doubt of his seriousness. He had a square-jawed, handsome face, softened by a faint vagueness of expression. His eyeglasses were square-lensed, with plastic frames just a bit darker than his tanned skin. His hair was blond but already very thin, sunlight reflecting from his scalp through his widow’s peak. He wore hiking shoes, khaki slacks, a short-sleeved white dress shirt; in a white hard-plastic pouch in the shin pocket, his pens and pencils were neatly arrayed. He shaved every day.

  She didn’t dream that night, but she barely slept either. Every time she dozed off, the fear of the dream startled her awake. She spent the night remembering her life, seeing herself as Dr. Helm’s promising student, then as Mr. Helm’s gifted graduate student, then as Raymond Helm’s assistant, and now as Ray’s wife. She had not slept with him until after his divorce from Joanna. He was Nora’s first husband.