Orbit 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  A goose-girl was herding her white honking charges as they gobbled weeds out of fields of morning onions. Flowering kale was shining green-purple, and okra plants were standing. Jersey cows grazed along the roadway, and the patterned plastic (almost as patterned as the grasses) filled the roadway itself.

  There were clouds like yellow dust in the air. Bees! Stingless bees they were. But dust itself was not. That there never be dust again!

  “They will have to find out and kill the sly klunker makers,” said old man Charles Archer. “Stop the poison at its source.”

  “There’s too many of them, and too much money in it,” said Peter Brady. “Yes, we kill them. One of them was found and killed Thursday, and three nearly finished klunkers were destroyed. But we can’t kill them all. They seem to come out of the ground like snakes.”

  “I wish we didn’t have to kill them,” Angela said.

  There were brightly colored firkins of milk standing on loading stoas, for this was a milk shed. There were chickens squawking in nine-story-high coops as they waited the pickups, but they never had to wait long. Here were a thousand dozen eggs on a refrigeration porch; there a clutch of piglings, or of red steers.

  Tomato plants were staked two meters high. Sweet corn stood, not yet come to tassel. They passed cucumber vines and canteloupe vines, and the potato hills rising up blue-green. Ah, there were grapevines in their tight acres, deep alfalfa meadows, living fences of Osage orange and whitethorn. Carrot tops zephyred like green lace. Cattle were grazing fields of red clover and of peanuts—that most magic of all clovers. Men mowed hay.

  “I hear him now!” Peter Brady said suddenly.

  “You couldn’t. Not in the daytime. Don’t even think of such a thing,” Angela protested.

  Farm ducks were grazing with their heads under water in the roadway ponds and farm ponds. Bower oaks grew high in the roadway parks. Sheep fed in hay grazer that was higher than their heads; they were small white islands in it. There was local wine and choc beer and cider for sale at small booths, along with limestone sculpture and painted fruitwood carvings. Kids danced on loading stoas to little post-mounted music canisters, and goats licked slate outcroppings in search of some new mineral.

  The Saturday riders passed a roadway restaurant with its tables out under the leaves and under a little rock overhang. A one-meter-high waterfall gushed through the middle of the establishment, and a two-meter-long bridge of set shale stone led to the kitchen. Then they broke onto view after never-tiring view of the rich and varied quasiurbia. The roadway forms, the fringe farms, the berry patches! In their seasons: Juneberries, huckleberries, blueberries, dewberries, elderberries, highbush cranberries, red raspberries, boysenberries, loganberries, nine kinds of blackberries, strawberries, greenberries.

  Orchards! Can there ever be enough orchards? Plum, peach, sand plum and chokecherry, black cherry, apple and crab apple, pear, blue-fruited pawpaw, persimmon, crooked quince. Melon patches, congregations of beehives, pickle patches, cheese farms, flax farms, close clustered towns (twenty houses in each, twenty persons in a house, twenty of the little settlements along every mile of roadway, country honkey-tonks, as well as high-dog clubs already open and hopping with action in the early morning; roadway chapels with local statuary and with their rich-box-poor-boxes (one dropped money in the top if one had it and the spirit to give it, one tripped it out the bottom if one needed it), and the little refrigeration niches with bread, cheese, beef rolls, and always the broached cask of country wine: that there be no more hunger on the roadways forever!

  “I hear it too!” old Charles Archer cried out suddenly. “High-pitched and off to the left. And there’s the smell of monoxide and—gah—rubber. Conductor, conductor!”

  The conductor heard it, as did others in the car. The conductor stopped the cars to listen. Then he phoned the report and gave the location as well as he might, consulting with the passengers. There was rough country over to the left, rocks and hills, and someone was driving there in broad daylight.

  The conductor broke out rifles from the locker, passing them out to Peter Brady and two other young men in the car, and to three men in each of the other two cars, A competent-seeming man took over the communication, talking to men on a line further to the left, beyond the mad driver, and they had him boxed into a box no more than half a mile square.

  “You stay, Angela, and you stay, Grandfather Archer,” Peter Brady said. “Here is a little thirty carbine. Use it if he comes in range at all. We hunt him down now.” Then Peter Brady followed the conductor and the rifle-bearing men, ten men on a death hunt. And there were now four other groups out on the hunt, converging on their whining, coughing target.

  * * * *

  “Why do they have to kill them, Great-grandfather? Why not turn them over to the courts?”

  “The courts are too lenient. All they give them is life in prison.”

  “But surely that should be enough. It will keep them from driving the things, and some of the unfortunate men might even be rehabilitated.”

  “Angela, they are the greatest prison breakers ever. Only ten days ago, Mad Man Gudge killed three guards, went over the wall at State Prison, evaded all pursuit, robbed the cheesemakers’ cooperative of fifteen thousand dollars, got to a sly klunker maker, and was driving one of the things in a wild area within thirty hours of his breakout. It was four days before they found him and killed him. They are insane, Angela, and the mental hospitals are already full of them. Not one of them has ever been rehabilitated.”

  “Why is it so bad that they should drive? They usually drive only in the very wild places, and for a few hours in the middle of the night.”

  “Their madness is infectious, Angela. Their arrogance would leave no room for anything else in the world. Our country is now in balance, our communication and travel is minute and near perfect, thanks to the wonderful trolleys and the people of the trolleys. We are all one neighborhood, we are all one family! We live in love and compassion, with few rich and few poor, and arrogance and hatred have all gone out from us. We are the people with roots, and with trolleys. We are one with our earth.”

  “Would it hurt that the drivers should have their own limited place to do what they wanted, if they did not bother sane people?”

  “Would it hurt if disease and madness and evil were given their own limited place? But they will not stay in their place, Angela. There is the diabolical arrogance in them, the rampant individualism, the hatred of order. There can be nothing more dangerous to society than the man in the automobile. Were they allowed to thrive, there would be poverty and want again, Angela, and wealth and accumulation. And cities.”

  “But cities are the most wonderful things of all! I love to go to them.”

  “I do not mean the wonderful Excursion Cities, Angela. There would be cities of another and blacker sort. They were almost upon us once when a limitation was set on them. Uniqueness is lost in them; there would be mere accumulation of rootless people, of arrogant people, of duplicated people, of people who have lost their humanity. Let them never rob us of our involuted countryside, or our quasiurbia. We are not perfect; but what we have, we will not give away for the sake of wild men.”

  “The smell! I cannot stand it!”

  “Monoxide. How would you like to be born in the smell of it, to live every moment of your life in the smell of it, to die in the smell of it?”

  “No, no, not that.”

  The rifleshots were scattered but serious. The howling and coughing of the illicit klunker automobile were nearer. Then it was in sight, bouncing and bounding weirdly out of the rough rock area and into the tomato patches straight toward the trolley interurban.

  The klunker automobile was on fire, giving off ghastly stench of burning leather and rubber and noxious monoxide and seared human flesh. The man, standing up at the broken wheel, was a madman, howling, out of his head. He was a young man, but sunken-eyed and unshaven, bloodied on the left side of his head and the left side of his
breast, foaming with hatred and arrogance.

  “Kill me! Kill me!” he croaked like clattering broken thunder. “There will be others! We will not leave off driving so long as there is one desolate place left, so long as there is one sly klunker maker left!”

  He went rigid. He quivered. He was shot again. But he would die howling.

  “Damn you all to trolley haven! A man in an automobile is worth a thousand men on foot! He is worth a million men in a trolley car! You never felt your black heart rise up in you when you took control of one of the monsters! You never felt the lively hate choke you off in rapture as you sneered down the whole world from your bouncing center of the universe! Damn all decent folks! I’d rather go to hell in an automobile than to heaven in a trolley car!”

  A spoked wheel broke, sounding like one of the muted volleys of rifle fire coming from behind him. The klunker automobile pitched onto its nose, upended, turned over, and exploded in blasting flames. And still in the middle of the fire could be seen the two hypnotic eyes with their darker flame, could be heard the demented voice:

  “The crankshaft will still be good, the differential will still be good, a sly klunker maker can use part of it, part of it will drive again—ahhhiii.”

  * * * *

  Some of them sang as they rode away from the site in the trolley cars, and some of them were silent and thoughtful. It had been an unnerving thing.

  “It curdles me to remember that I once put my entire fortune into that future,” Great-grandfather Charles Archer moaned. “Well, that is better than to have lived in such a future.”

  * * * *

  A young couple had happily loaded all their belongings onto a baggage trolley and were moving from one of the Excursion Cities to live with kindred in quasiurbia. The population of that Excursion City (with its wonderful theaters and music halls and distinguished restaurants and literary coffeehouses and alcoholic oases and amusement centers) had now reached seven thousand persons, the legal limit for any city: Oh, there were a thousand Excursion Cities and all of them delightful! But a limit must be kept on size. A limit must be kept on everything.

  It was a wonderful Saturday afternoon. Fowlers caught birds with collapsible kite-cornered nets. Kids rode free out to the diamonds to play Trolley League ball. Old gaffers rode out with pigeons in pigeon boxes, to turn them loose and watch them race home. Shore netters took shrimp from the semisaline Little Shrimp Lake. Banjo players serenaded their girls in grassy lanes.

  The world was one single bronze gong song with the melodious clang of trolley cars threading the country on their green-iron rails, with the sparky fire following them overhead and their copper gleaming in the sun. By law there must be a trolley line every mile, but they were oftener. By law no one trolley line might run for more than twenty-five miles. This was to give a sense of locality. But transfers between the lines were worked out perfectly. If one wished to cross the nation, one rode on some one hundred and twenty different lines. There were no more longdistance railroads. They also had had their arrogance, and they also had had to go.

  Carp in the ponds, pigs in the clover, a unique barn-factory in every hamlet and every hamlet unique, bees in the air, pepper plants in the lanes, and the whole land as sparky as trolley fire and right as rails.

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  * * * *

  KATE WILHELM

  THE ENCOUNTER

  The bus slid to an uneasy stop, two hours late. Snow was eight inches deep, and the white sky met the white ground in a strange world where the grubby black bus station floated free. It was a world where up and down had become meaningless, where the snow fell horizontally. Crane, supported by the wind and the snow, could have entered the station by walking up the wall, or across the ceiling. His mind seemed adrift, out of touch with the reality of his body. He stamped, scattering snow, bringing some feeling back to his legs, making himself feel the floor beneath his feet. He tried to feel his cheek, to see if he was feverish, but his hands were too numb, his cheek too numb. The heating system of the bus had failed over an hour ago.

  The trouble was that he had not dressed for such weather. An overcoat, but no boots, no fur-lined gloves, no woolen scarf to wind and wind about his throat. He stamped and clapped his hands. Others were doing the same.

  There had been only nine or ten people on the bus, and some of them were being greeted by others or were slipping out into the storm, home finally or near enough now. The bus driver was talking to an old man who had been in the station when they arrived, the ticket agent, probably. He was wearing two sweaters, one a heavy, hip-length green that looked home-knit; under it, a turtleneck gray wool with too-long sleeves that hung from beneath the green sleeves. He had on furry boots that came to his knees, with his sagging pants tucked tightly into them. Beyond him, tossed over one of the wooden benches, was a greatcoat, fleece-lined, long enough to hang to his boot tops. Fleecy gloves bulged from one of the pockets.

  “Folks,” he said, turning away from the bus driver, “there won’t be another bus until sometime in the morning, when they get the roads plowed out some. There’s an all-night diner down the road, three, four blocks. Not much else in town’s open this time of night.”

  “Is there a hotel?” A woman, fur coat, shiny patent boots, kid gloves. She had got on at the same station that Crane had; he remembered the whiff of expensive perfume as she had passed him.

  “There’s the Laughton Inn, ma’am, but it’s two miles outside town and there’s no way to get there.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! You mean this crummy burg doesn’t even have a hotel of its own?”

  “Four of them, in fact, but they’re closed, open again in April. Don’t get many people to stay overnight in the winter times.”

  “Okay, okay. Which way’s the diner?” She swept a disapproving glance over the bleak station and went to the door, carrying an overnight bag with her.

  “Come on, honey, I’m going there, too,” the driver said. He pulled on gloves and turned up his collar. He took her arm firmly, transferred the bag to his other hand, then turned to look at the other three or four people in the station. “Anyone else?”

  Diner. Glaring lights, jukebox noise without end, the smell of hamburgers and onions, rank coffee and doughnuts saturated with grease. Everyone smoking. Someone would have cards probably, someone a bottle. The woman would sing or cry, or get a fight going. She was a nasty one, he could tell. She’d be bored within an hour. She’d have the guys groping her under the table, in the end booth. The man half turned, his back shielding her from view, his hand slipping between her buttons, under the blouse, under the slip, the slippery smooth nylon, the tightness of the bra, unfastening it with his other hand. Her low laugh, busy hands. The hard nipple between his fingers now, his own responsive hardness. She had turned to look at the stranded passengers when the driver spoke, and she caught Crane’s glance.

  “It’s a long wait for a Scranton bus, honey,” she said.

  “I’d just get soaked going to the diner,” Crane said, and turned his back on her. His hand hurt, and he opened his clenched fingers and rubbed his hands together hard.

  “I sure as hell don’t want to wait all night in this rat hole,” someone else said. “Do you have lockers? I can’t carry all this gear.”

  “Lock them up in the office for you,” the ticket agent said.

  He pulled out a bunch of keys and opened a door at the end of the room. A heavy-set man followed him, carrying three suitcases. They returned; the door squeaked. The agent locked it again.

  “Now, you boys will hold me up, won’t you? I don’t want to fall down in all that snow.”

  “Doll, if you fall on your pretty little ass, I’ll dry you off personally,” the driver said.

  “Oh, you will, will you?”

  Crane tightened his jaw, trying not to hear them. The outside door opened and a blast of frigid air shook the room. A curtain of snow swept across the floor before the door banged again, and the laughing voices were gone.r />
  “You sure you want to wait here?” the ticket agent asked. “Not very warm in here. And I’m going home in a minute, you know.”

  “I’m not dressed to walk across the street in this weather, much less four blocks,” Crane said.

  The agent still hesitated, one hand on his coat. He looked around, as if checking on loose valuables. There was a woman on one of the benches. She was sitting with her head lowered, hands in her lap, legs crossed at the ankles. She wore a dark cloth coat, and her shoes were skimpier than Crane’s, three crossing strips of leather attached to paper-thin soles. Black cloth gloves hid her hands. She didn’t look up, in the silence that followed, while the two men scrutinized her. It was impossible to guess her age in that pose, with only the dark clothes to go by.

  “Ma’am, are you all right?” the agent asked finally.

  “Yes, of course. Like the gentleman, I didn’t care to wade through the snow. I can wait here.”