by Kris Neville
Here and there are the new ones. There are the young girls who are not yet old and mechanical but in the process of being passed downward through the hands of the pushers. Soon, for them, love will become another word no more real or meaningful than truth, beauty, and justice. There are the young men, still with the dream behind their eyes. But it will pass.
So, on East Fifth Street, in Los Angeles, the young and old spin their destinies against the harsh background of the sounds of the city.
At noon there is almost hope. There is a brief infusion of office workers, clad in bright new suits and clean white shirts or in colourful skirts and starched blouses.
But even then the air does not change. The air is permeated with the smell of automobile exhausts and warm bodies and fried foods and alcohol and the sweet smell of drugs.
The sun is hidden by eye-stinging fumes.
At noon, the sounds increase in tempo—the clatter of high-heeled shoes, the roar and cough of automobiles and the whisper and cry of human voices. These sounds intermingle. Listen for a while and they become not many sounds but one great, sad sound that fears to roar too loud in protest.
An hour later, the sounds will sigh away to a weary whimper; the heat will slowly increase; and the acrid fumes coming in from the industrial districts and the refineries to the southeast will become more penetrating.
The apparition did not arrive at a quiet time. He arrived at high noon, amid the growing bitterness in the air and amid the beginning of the weary heat. He touched first the sounds. Around him as he walked there fell a cone of silence. It was as though a cold breath had come that froze voices and halted movement.
His pace was neither fast nor slow. It was evident that he need not hurry, for he was no nearer the end of his journey than when he had started. It was evident, too, that he need not slacken his pace: for those things which he saw he had seen before and there was no novelty to arrest his attention.
Drivers turned frozen faces toward him and looked away in horror. Pedestrians were transfixed, mouths twisted and agape. Heads turned to follow his progress, and eyes filled with hatred and loathing.
He was indifferent to this—indifferent to the cone of silence, indifferent to the city, indifferent to the reaction with which he was greeted. He walked down the middle of East Fifth Street. Cars halted as he approached. He weaved between them without varying his stride. He walked as though it were merely necessary to consume a given distance before the fall of night.
After he passed on, life resumed again, slowly at first and then more and more quickly. Automobiles moved. Horns blared impatiently against the sudden, inexplicable congestion. Conversations resumed. The veil lifted.
The man walked on.
New spectators shuddered and hid behind their hands or sucked in their breaths and turned away to flee a few steps in nameless terror.
On he came, down the middle of East Fifth Street, his eyes fixed ahead, his pace steady.
The girl stepped out of the Tip Top Bar. It was one of the bars on East Fifth that was off limits to service personnel. She was greeted by the oppressive heat and the moist congestion.
Her hair was blonde, out of a bottle of peroxide, and turning dark at the roots. Her cheeks were rouged and her lips were painted. Her body stood in the doorway and stretched mechanically. Her eyes surveyed the street. They saw what a stranger’s could not: a plainclothed policeman, another prostitute, a teenage girl looking for a fix, a pimp, a bookmaker, the man the teenager was searching for, a fat woman who sold marajuana cigarettes, a thief, a sexual psychopath, and a young man who preyed upon homosexuals. This was her hard, mechanical world. It was set in motion by an unknown force and jangled along endlessly in accord with an obscure and repetitious logic she could not comprehend. Tomorrow, the faces might change, but the world would not.
Her hard eyes acknowledged it, and leisurely standing in the doorway of the bar, she lighted a cigarette and blew smoke gratefully into the quiet air. She showed her legs and hips to an advantage out of habit rather than hope. The signs at noon were never propitious.
Her veiled eyes accepted open stares of sensuous curiosity from the men and blunted hostility from the women. She accepted them alike with an inward shrug:
Yeah, Buster? So what, baby? She thought mechanical obscenities at them.
She lived in a cheap rooming house a few blocks away. She paid fifty dollars a month rent and always prefaced any fleeting thought of her landlord with the phrase, “that bastard.” She did most of her work in cheap hotel rooms and sometimes she managed to get a kickback from the bellhop if the tip were large enough.
At the moment, she had twenty six dollars and change.
She was hungry. She wanted a drink. Maybe if she ate something, she could sit in as a B-girl for an hour or so in the afternoon and pick up some drinks at Joe’s Cosmo Grill, for kicks, down the street. Maybe she even could find a trick for the afternoon if she were lucky.
Her rent was due.
She stood, encased in an abrasive indifference, considering alternatives. She thought a few more obscenities at the passers-by. She sized up the men, out of habit. That young buck, with the long, easy stride, was the hot-handed, eager type, fast, savage, and then it would be over with.
Not too bad. The old goat passing, dressed like a million dollars, would be a romantic reformer with his gentle fumbling and stale smell and ultimate perversion. There were worse. And this one: a man . . . but so what? Happily married, probably. The type you sometimes get at conventions.
She wondered when in the hell they were going to have another convention downtown. Those were good times.
She thought it would be just her luck to get busted again, trying too hard to make the rent. The last time had been nearly four months ago. She was overdue.
She thought she ought to eat.
She looked around and winked the tears of smoke from her eyes. The misty sun seemed loud and bright after the murky darkness of the bar.
Depression came. This was not her day. She felt a fleeting moment of insecurity. The people around her were suddenly unreal. The world was no longer her home. She was a permanent transient. She responded to the thought with a monotonous string of obscenities. The obscenities extended themselves until they assumed for her a fascination. The blunt, dead world of vulgarity contained infinite combinations.
She silently asked a passing office girl: What would you think, deary, if you knew what I was thinking? The girl in her stiff, clean blouse was propelled along on hurrying feet nowhere.
Then she glanced to her left and saw the man walking in silence down the middle of East Fifth Street.
The man, since he cannot be remembered, cannot be described. But since he cannot, really, ever be forgotten, description is unnecessary.
Tall, short, slim or stout, these are matters of conjecture. Think about it for a moment, draw up your own picture. What is the colour of the eyes, the hair, the skin? What is the shape of the hands? What is the sound of the voice? And what is the colour and the texture of the ageless dusty clothing and the footwear?
He had come a long way, through rain and snow and bitter sunshine. He had walked down highways shimmering with summer heat, across fields sprinkled with spring flowers, through piled drifts of white winter snow and among the dying leaves of uncounted autumns. He had crossed and recrossed deserts and mountains, from cold into heat and then into cold again. The seasons and the endless weary miles had not aged the traveler. And inside that skull, there was a brain, a living, pulsing organ traced with the delicate lines of other times and other tongues and other faces.
Think for a moment.
What of the face? And remember the expression in the eyes?
Perhaps you have seen the figure on a crowded street at noon, walking in the cone of silence? or perhaps worse—
Out of the blackness that surrounds the house, there is a hollow, hesitant knock. Fresh with thoughts of the world, you open the door to the night. The face peers at you out o
f the darkness; the tongue speaks. There is an indescribable chill of pure terror and disgust that freezes in your blood. You gasp, cry out, stumble back, look away . . . The traveler has gone? the night has swallowed him. Your heart races, then flutters in confusion, and then is once more quiet. And he . . . was no more. You stand for a moment, puzzled, at the door. Why are you here? A shiver comes.
You know not what has happened.
But would you not, this minute, cry out if you were suddenly again confronted with the face?
And the voice. The phone rings. You hear the voice pleading out of an endless silence and you are numb with a great sickness. There is a sigh as old and weary as time itself, a click, and only the line is dead.
What if, this very moment, out of the silence of your room, you should hear that voice again, softly, at your elbow?
The girl gave a cry and tried to hide from him behind her hands. She was transfixed and immobile.
He was now nearly abreast of her. His measured pace faltered. He turned, eyes into eyes.
Her lips trembled.
He came to her side, and still she could not move.
“Please,” he said. That one word, no more; but with what expression it was said and what dark agony, none remembers.
He held out his hand, beseeching.
The scream came and blossomed into the cone of silence around him and crackled in it like audible lightning.
She fell away, sobbing.
“Go away! Let me alone!”
Are the eyes too weary for hope too weary, now, for tears? You have seen, you know.
The ageless sigh; the traveler turns; after a lost moment of hopeless hesitation, the heavy way is resumed.
The girl’s hands fell from her face.
The figure was retreating, taking along with him his silence; slowly her hands rose. They were leaden, and the arms were leaden, and her body was without feeling, as though dead. The hands stretched toward him. She saw herself reflected in his shimmering reflection down through time. Reality dissolved: and she saw herself and more than herself.
Her mouth was choked and dry with the centuries, and she tried to cry out to him. Tears entered her eyes and ran shamelessly down across the rouge on her cheeks.
She wanted to stumble after him, mechanically, since her body was still frozen. She wanted to crawl, stagger, stumble, however was necessary to move, to follow him down all those other lonely, silent streets to his own, or to her own, eternity, and she wanted to lose her lostness in this greater lostness.
Other sounds came again. The memory was fading. She tried to cling to the memory.
There was a man—
There was—
There—
But it was gone; or perhaps not gone but just not remembered. Something strange had happened to her but it defied analysis. Wonderingly, she put a hand to the cheek, and wonderingly looked down at the unfamiliar moisture on her fingertips.
She sobbed, and her voice could not rise beyond a sob nor reach out and call back something lost forever.
Not knowing whom she meant, she whispered, “He understands,” and the whisper was a hollow sound in a cavern of dry tears.
1966
THE PRICE OF SIMERYL
Sometimes very desperate battles involve no guns, nor even angry words—yet the penalty of loss is a personal death!
Raleigh was a third Secretary of State with forty years service. Past normal retirement age, he continued, not from any hope of further advancement or any real desire for it, but because of the satisfactions the job gave him. Basically, there were two: the one, the satisfaction he obtained from knowing he was doing a job as well as could be done and that he was, while not indispensable, highly valued. The other was this: power over the lives of men, power to shape the destiny of civilizations.
The central government, as always, was concerned with large designs rather than details. Raleigh was the detail man. The president of the Secretariat knew his name and respected his reputation. The first secretary of state knew Raleigh well in an official capacity and had dined alone with him on occasion. The first secretary trusted his judgment to a greater degree than the judgment of younger, more energetic and perhaps more imaginative employees of higher rank. Thus, when Raleigh was on field assignment, he spoke not only with the voice of the first secretary but also with the voice of the President, which is to say, Raleigh, cast upon his own judgment, spoke with the authority of the Federation of the Star Systems—a not inconsiderable authority when compared with that of a single planetary government.
On planet-fall, which required almost eight hours to keep G-loads on passenger shuttles below 1.2, Raleigh reviewed the official briefing documents. They contained details in excess of his requirements, yet he felt obligated to force himself to read them through for a second time—like a child studying the hour before a history examination, anxious to retain a wealth of trivia. It was expected of him to know these details if for no other reason than that they were unimportant and uninteresting. A man who knew them obviously knew much more.
But his thoughts did not follow his eyes. They concerned themselves with the character of Elanth’s president, President Lyon S. Houston.
President Houston was informed that Raleigh had boarded the passenger shuttle. The long descent would be tiring, particularly to a man sixty-four who had probably rested badly the whole of the flight. The president, fifty-six, had already been awake for three hours—sleep leaving early and refusing to return, since five that morning. He was at his desk. “Can we cancel any of these?” he asked his appointment secretary.
“The Secretary of Agriculture has to see you at 10:30.”
“Let him pass for a day. What’s this man, Hanson?”
“He’s one of Senator Farley’s constituents.”
“Send in his file, I’ll have to see him. Any other really important ones? Let’s see. Cancel Robertson: I know what he wants. Tell him I’ll have something for him in about a week, and make a note for me to call him then. I suppose I’ll have to attend the tea for Union Wives, but pass the word I want to cut it short. I’d say cancel the rest, unless I’m overlooking something.”
When the appointment secretary had gone, the president looked at his desk clock: Hanson would be in at 9:30, give him five minutes, ten at the outside. The tea was at 2:00—twenty minutes there, say. This would allow him plenty of rest. He intended, from the first, to dominate the man eight years his senior; he would exhaust Raleigh, wear the man down physically the first two days, bring him to the point where he would be tractable on the matter of Coelanth guns.
The president removed the file on Raleigh from his desk drawer; a career man, but a good one. Shame there weren’t more than two pages on him. An idle thought crossed his mind and was hastily suppressed; it was beneath the dignity of a president to hire call girls for visitors. Also, Raleigh was too important a man for that approach, and one of unknown predilections, so that the proper introduction of the subject, delicate under the best of circumstances, could not be undertaken without the possibility, and perhaps the strong possibility of creating the opposite of the desired impression.
Nothing in the file but age gave the president a clue. He would make do with what he had. Yet, something about the file was definitely wrong. This annoyed him. Something was wrong with this file. He started to call in his private secretary and demand an explanation, but for what he could not say.
Let it pass. It would come to him. Back to Raleigh. The visit would be tiring for Raleigh, but it would be a physical ordeal for himself, too, and his body protested the prospect. Glancing at the mirror across the room for reassurance, he saw the heaviness at his eyes, the increased lines in his face. A man’s insane, he told himself, without believing it, to take a job like this.
He remembered what was wrong with the file. “Damn it!” he said aloud. “Percy!” he snapped into the intercom. “Get in here! What do you mean by using this expensive stationery on these interoffice reports? You know
damned well I’m trying to save money!”
Hanson came at the appointed time. He represented Farm Zone D, outside Lephong: the second colony city on the planet, two hundred land miles, roughly, from the capital, York. Lephong had two of the seven senators, neither of whom was favorable to the administration.
President Houston greeted him warmly by his first name and drew him physically to the chair before the president’s desk. “Sit yourself, Larry. Care for a smoke? No? I quit, myself, filthy, expensive habit. Visitors have ruined more than one rug for me. It runs to an expense. I hate to see a good rug with a hole in it. Hate it. Completely unnecessary waste—which I oppose.” The president seated himself on the corner of the desk, towering over the seated farm representative.
“I’ve only been able to squeeze in five minutes for you this morning. I’d like to explain the policy briefly, so we can have some common basis for discussion. See if you agree. I think first, we must remember this: Elanth is legally obligated to pay for the Simeryl. It’s an intergovernment, not a commercial, transfer. It was synthesized especially for us. The very integrity of the government of Elanth rests on this point. No matter how the purchase came about in the first place, whether it was right or wrong, is not the question—we are obligated to pay. I’ll grant you the minimum quantity order was high, but the government agreed to the terms. It’s a legitimate debt, and we can’t escape it.”
“The main problem, as I see it,” Hanson began.
“I’ll just take another second or two,” the president said. “I want us to agree on at least one thing: our legal obligation to pay for the Simeryl. Now that we’ve agreed on that, the question becomes, simply, how? On this point, I welcome your advice. I think it can be fairly said that I have explored all the possible alternatives. There’s no other known use for it. What would you suggest?”
“Bury the stuff somewhere,” said Hanson.
“You know that’s not practical,” said the president. “I’m with you, Larry, I wish we could do that. There’s nothing I, personally, would like more than to do that. It’s just not practical.” Glancing at the clock, the president said, “I’m afraid our time is up.” Rising, he extended his hand and when Hanson took it, lifted him partly from the chair so that he had no alternative but to stand. The hand went to his shoulder to turn him toward the door.