Six months later he was walking through the cavernous, ornate lobby of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo when he saw a Marianne standing in front of a huge stack of suitcases against a marble pillar no more than twenty feet from him. He was inured to Mariannes by this time and at first the sight of her had no impact; but then he noticed the familiar monogram on the luggage, and recognized the intricate little bows of red plush cord with which the baggage tags were tied on, and he realized that this was the true Marianne at last. Nor was this any hallucination like the Connaught one. She was visibly older, with a vertical line in her left cheek that he had never seen before. Her hair was a darker shade and somehow more ordinary in its cut, and she was dressed simply, no radiance at all. Even so, people were staring at her and whispering. Frazier swayed, gripped a nearby pillar with his suddenly clammy hand, fought back the impulse to run. He took a deep breath and went toward her, walking slowly, impressively, his carefully cultivated distinguished-looking-Swiss-businessman walk.
“Marianne?” he said.
She turned her head slightly and stared at him without any show of recognition.
“I do look different, yes,” he said, smiling. “I’m sorry, but I don’t—”
A slender, agile-looking man five or six years younger than she, wearing sunglasses, appeared from somewhere as though conjured out of the floor. Smoothly he interpolated himself between Frazier and Marianne. A lover? A bodyguard? Simply part of her entourage? Pleasantly but forcefully he presented himself to Frazier as though saying, Let’s not have any trouble now, shall we?
“Listen to my voice,” Frazier said. “You haven’t forgotten my voice. Only the face is different.”
Sunglasses came a little closer. Looked a little less pleasant.
Marianne stared.
“You haven’t forgotten, have you, Marianne?” Frazier said.
Sunglasses began to look definitely menacing.
“Wait a minute,” Marianne said, as he glided into a nose-to-nose with Frazier. “Step back, Aurelio.” She peered through the shadows. “Loren?” she said.
Frazier nodded. He went toward her. At a gesture from Marianne, Sunglasses faded away like a genie going back into the bottle. Frazier felt strangely calm now. He could see Marianne’s upper lip trembling, her nostrils flickering a little. “I thought I never wanted to see you again,” he said. “But I was wrong about that. The moment I saw you and knew it was really you, I realized that I had never stopped thinking about you, never stopped wanting you. Wanting to put it all back together.”
Her eyes widened. “And you think you can?”
“Maybe.”
“What a damned fool you are,” she said, gently, almost lovingly, after a long moment.
“I know. I really messed myself up, doing what I did.”
“I don’t mean that,” she said. “You messed us both up with that. Not to mention him, the poor bastard. But that can’t be undone, can it? If you only knew how often I prayed to have it not have happened.” She shook her head. “It was nothing, what he and I were doing. Nothing. Just a silly fling, for Christ’s sake. How could you possibly have cared so much?”
“What?”
“To kill a man, for something like that? To wreck three lives in half a second? For that?”
“What?” he said again. “What are you telling me?”
Sunglasses suddenly was in the picture again. “We’re going to miss the car to the airport, Marianne.”
“Yes. Yes. All right, let’s go.”
Frazier watched, numb, immobile. Sunglasses beckoned and a swarm of porters materialized to carry the luggage outside. As she reached the vast doorway Marianne turned abruptly and looked back, and in the dimness of the great lobby her eyes suddenly seemed to shift in color, to take on the same strange topaz glint that he had imagined he had seen in Hurwitt’s. Then she swung around and was gone.
An hour later he went down to the Consulate to turn himself in. They had a little trouble locating him in the list of wanted fugitives, but he told them to keep looking, going back a few years, and finally they came upon his entry. He was allowed half a day to clear up his business affairs, but he said he had none to clear up, so they set about the procedure of arranging his passage to the States, while he watched like a tourist who is trying to replace a lost passport.
Coming home was like returning to a foreign country that he had visited a long time before. Everything was familiar, but in an unfamiliar way. There were endless hearings, conferences, psychological examinations. His lawyers were excessively polite, as if they feared that one wrong word would cause him to detonate, but behind their silkiness he saw the contempt that the orderly have for the self-destructive. Still, they did their job well. Eventually he drew a suspended sentence and two years of rehabilitation, after which, they told him, he’d need to move to some other city, find some appropriate line of work, and establish a stable new existence for himself. The rehabilitation people would help him. There would be a probation period of five years when he’d have to report for progress conferences every week.
At the very end one of the rehab officers came to him and told him that his lawyers had filed a petition asking the court to let him have his original face back. That startled him. For a moment Frazier felt like a fugitive again, wearily stumbling from airport to airport, from hotel to hotel.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all. The man who had that face, he’s somebody else. I think I’m better off keeping this one. What do you say?”
“I think so too,” said the rehab man.
The Road to Nightfall
I was in my late teens, an undergraduate at Columbia University, when I began sketching out this story in the fall of 1953. I had, I remember, been reading a story by the French writer Marcel Ayme called “Crossing Paris,” in the July-August 1950 issue of Partisan Review—a literary magazine that I followed avidly in those days. This was how it opened:
“The victim, already dismembered, lay in a corner of the cellar under wrappings of stained canvas. Jamblier, a little man with graying hair, a sharp profile, and feverish eyes, his belly girded with a kitchen apron which came down to his feet, was shuffling across the concrete floor. At times he stopped short in his tracks to gaze with faintly flushed cheeks and uneasy eyes at the latch of the door. To relieve the tension of waiting, he took a mop which was soaking in an enamelled bucket, and for the third time he washed the damp surface of the concrete to efface from it any last traces of blood which his butchery might have left there. …”
It sounds like the beginning of a murder mystery, or a horror story. But in fact “Crossing Paris” dealt with the complicated problem of transporting black-market pork by suitcase through the Nazi-occupied city. The grim, bleak wartime atmosphere and the situational-ethics anguish of the characters affected me profoundly; almost at once I found myself translating the story’s mood into science-fictional terms. What if, I asked myself, I were to take Ayme’s trick opening paragraph literally? Assume that the “victim” is not a pig but a man, as I had thought until the second page of the story, and the city is suffering privations far more intense even than those of the war, so that cannibalism is being practiced and the illicit meat being smuggled by night through the streets is the most illicit meat of all.
I wrote it in odd moments stolen from class work over the next couple of months, intending to submit it to a contest one of the science fiction magazines was running that year, and finished it during my Christmas break from college. A thousand-dollar prize (the equivalent of at least ten thousand in today’s money) was being offered for the best story of life in twenty-first-century America written by a college undergraduate. For some reason I never entered the contest—missed the deadline, perhaps—but in the spring of 1954 I started sending my manuscript around to the science fiction magazines. I was nobody at all, then, an unpublished writer (though to
my own amazement I had just had my first novel, Revolt on Alpha C, accepted for hardcover publication in 1955). Back the story came with great speed, just as all the fifteen or twenty other stories I had sent out over the previous five years had done. (I had been thirteen or fourteen when I first began sending my stories to the magazines.) When it had been to all seven or eight of the magazines that existed then, and every editor had told me how depressing, morbid, negative, and impossible to publish it was, I put it aside and wrote it off as a mistake.
A couple of years went by. By then I was selling my stories at a rapid clip and had become, before I was twenty-one, a well-known science fiction writer. I was earning a nice living from my writing while still an undergraduate at Columbia.
Meanwhile a kid from Cleveland had come to New York, moved in next door to me, and set up shop as a writer as well. His name was Harlan Ellison. One day in 1956 I told him that I had been able to sell all my stories except one, which no editor would touch, and he demanded to see it. He read it on the spot. “Brilliant!” he said. “Magnificent!” Or words to that effect. Harlan was indignant that such a dark masterpiece would have met with universal rejection, and he vowed to find a publisher for it. Just about then, the kindly and unworldly Hans Stefan Santesson took over the editorship of a struggling magazine called Fantastic Universe, and Harlan told him I had written a story too daring for any of his rivals to print—virtually defying him not to buy it. Hans asked for the manuscript, commented in his mild way that the story was pretty strong stuff, and, after hesitating over it for nearly two years, ran it in the July 1958 issue of his magazine.
After more than half a century I find it hard to see what was so hot to handle about “Road to Nightfall.” Its theme—that the stress of life in a post-atomic society could lead even to cannibalism—seemed to upset many of the editors who turned it down, but there was no taboo per se against that theme. (Cf. Damon Knight’s 1950 classic, “To Serve Man,” just to name one.) Most likely the protagonist’s moral collapse at the end was the problem, for most sf editors of the time preferred stories in which the central figure transcends all challenges and arrives at a triumphant conclusion to his travail. That I had never published anything at the time was a further drawback. Theodore Sturgeon or Fritz Leiber, say, might have persuaded an editor to buy a story about cannibalism, or one with a downbeat ending—but a downbeat cannibal story by an unknown author simply had too much going against it, and even after my name had become established it still needed the full force of the Harlan Ellison juggernaut to win it a home. To me it still seems like a pretty good job, especially for a writer who was still a considerable distance short of his twentieth birthday. It moves along, it creates character and action and something of a plot, it gets its point across effectively. If I had been an editor looking at this manuscript back then, I would certainly have thought its writer showed some promise.
The dog snarled, and ran on. Katterson watched the two lean, fiery-eyed men speeding in pursuit, while a mounting horror grew in him and rooted him to the spot. The dog suddenly bounded over a heap of rubble and was gone; its pursuers sank limply down, leaning on their clubs, and tried to catch their breath.
“It’s going to get much worse than this,” said a small, grubby-looking man who appeared from nowhere next to Katterson. “I’ve heard the official announcement’s coming today, but the rumor’s been around for a long time.”
“So they say,” answered Katterson slowly. The chase he had just witnessed still held him paralyzed. “We’re all pretty hungry.”
The two men who had chased the dog got up, still winded, and wandered off. Katterson and the little man watched their slow retreat.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever seen people doing that,” said Katterson. “Out in the open like that—”
“It won’t be the last time,” said the grubby man. “Better get used to it, now that the food’s gone.”
Katterson’s stomach twinged. It was empty, and would stay that way till the evening’s food dole. Without the doles, he would have no idea of where his next bite of food would come from. He and the small man walked on through the quiet street, stepping over the rubble, walking aimlessly with no particular goal in mind.
“My name’s Paul Katterson,” he said finally. “I live on 47th Street. I was discharged from the Army last year.”
“Oh, one of those,” said the little man. They turned down 15th Street. It was a street of complete desolation; not one pre-war house was standing, and a few shabby tents were pitched at the far end of the street. “Have you had any work since your discharge?”
Katterson laughed. “Good joke. Try another.”
“I know. Things are tough. My name is Malory; I’m a merchandizer.”
“What do you merchandize?”
“Oh … useful products.”
Katterson nodded. Obviously Malory didn’t want him to pursue the topic, and he dropped it. They walked on silently, the big man and the little one, and Katterson could think of nothing but the emptiness in his stomach. Then his thoughts drifted to the scene of a few minutes before, the two hungry men chasing a dog. Had it come to that so soon? Katterson asked himself. What was going to happen, he wondered, as food became scarcer and scarcer and finally there was none at all?
But the little man was pointing ahead. “Look,” he said. “Meeting at Union Square.”
Katterson squinted and saw a crowd starting to form around the platform reserved for public announcements. He quickened his pace, forcing Malory to struggle to keep up with him.
A young man in military uniform had mounted the platform and was impassively facing the crowd. Katterson looked at the jeep nearby, automatically noting it was the 2036 model, the most recent one, eighteen years old. After a minute or so the soldier raised his hand for silence, and spoke in a quiet, restrained voice.
“Fellow New Yorkers, I have an official announcement from the Government. Word has just been received from Trenton Oasis—”
The crowd began to murmur. They seemed to know what was coming.
“Word has just been received from Trenton Oasis that, due to recent emergency conditions there, all food supplies for New York City and environs will be temporarily cut off. Repeat: due to recent emergency in the Trenton Oasis, all food supplies for New York and environs will temporarily be cut off.”
The murmuring in the crowd grew to an angry, biting whisper as each man discussed this latest turn of events with the man next to him. This was hardly unexpected news; Trenton had long protested the burden of feeding helpless, bombed-out New York, and the recent flood there had given them ample opportunity to squirm out of their responsibility. Katterson stood silent, towering over the people around him, finding himself unable to believe what he was hearing. He seemed aloof, almost detached, objectively criticizing the posture of the soldier on the platform, counting his insignia, thinking of everything but the implications of the announcement, and trying to fight back the growing hunger.
The uniformed man was speaking again. “I also have this message from the Governor of New York, General Holloway: he says that attempts at restoring New York’s food supply are being made, and that messengers have been dispatched to the Baltimore Oasis to request food supplies. In the meantime the Government food doles are to be discontinued effective tonight, until further notice. That is all.”
The soldier gingerly dismounted from the platform and made his way through the crowd to his jeep. He climbed quickly in and drove off. Obviously he was an important man, Katterson decided, because jeeps and fuel were scarce items, not used lightly by anyone and everyone.
Katterson remained where he was and turned his head slowly, looking at the people round him—thin, half-starved little skeletons, most of them, who secretly begrudged him his giant frame. An emaciated man with burning eyes and a beak of a nose had gathered a small group around himself and was shouting some sort of harangue. Katte
rson knew of him—his name was Emerich, and he was the leader of the colony living in the abandoned subway at 14th Street. Katterson instinctively moved closer to hear him, and Malory followed.
“It’s all a plot!” the emaciated man was shouting. “They talk of an emergency in Trenton. What emergency? I ask you, what emergency? That flood didn’t hurt them. They just want to get us off their necks by starving us out, that’s all! And what can we do about it? Nothing. Trenton knows we’ll never be able to rebuild New York, and they want to get rid of us, so they cut off our food.”
By now the crowd had gathered round him. Emerich was popular; people were shouting their agreement, punctuating his speech with applause.
“But will we starve to death? We will not!”
“That’s right, Emerich!” yelled a burly man with a beard.
“No,” Emerich continued, “we’ll show them what we can do. We’ll scrape up every bit of food we can find, every blade of grass, every wild animal, every bit of shoe-leather. And we’ll survive, just the way we survived the blockade and the famine of ’47 and everything else. And one of these days we’ll go out to Trenton and—and—roast them alive!”
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