The Berserkers

by Roger Elwood

  Outer shapes and sizes became indistinct, but oddly, skeletons, inner devices, and diseases became perfectly easy for him to see.

  He found a girl once crying in the forest, crouched on dead leaves in the round gray roots of a beech tree. He left the long-dropping images in his mind for long enough to look at her, and say, “No. Come.” He pulled her to her feet and led her home, but he could feel her hand only as a fuzzy warmth. The door of the house she went into seemed to him a dim rectangle, leading to absolute nothingness.

  Later, when her child was bom, she said it was Adam’s, and though the village boy who had fathered it was a very ordinary lad, the child had respect for the rest of its life.

  Once he passed a derelict cottage, in an overgrown garden. The gate leaned crazily at him, and he stopped, with vague memories. As he stood there, a woman came around the hedge and stopped suddenly, looking at him fearfully.

  “Adam!” she breathed. It seemed to him that he had heard that word before, and he smiled at her and went on. Beth wept; but in a few days, or weeks, or months, she had almost forgotten him. Adam went on through the seasons of the country; and the cottage sagged sadly into min.

  And once he went to Old Sad’s shack. Sad was there, out of prison now. He stumbled indoors, shutting himself decisively away from his creation, and peered out of the dark window, panting. Adam looked back calmly, but already he had forgotten why he had come here. He had no knowledge at all of who Old Sad was.

  There was now no connection in his mind between anything he knew or felt and the knowledge or feeling of that humanity of which he had once been part. The white wall of fire within which he moved was a boundary between himself and other beings on earth; but it was a direct connection to mysteries of which he had never dreamed when he was human himself.

  He heard the deep grunting of stones as they heaved shoulders against the heavy earth, the sibilants of trees communicating in the wind.

  Streams of ions bounced visibly past him, irritated into brilliance by their struggles with obstructions; the delicate dust thrown up by battling viruses perfumed his lungs and made him sneeze.

  Winter passed over his head as if he were growing heedlessly in it; and one wet night in May, he climbed a small hill and turned his face at last to the sky.

  For the first time he saw naked stars, without disguise or loss of time. He felt their light thread his bones and heard their plaintive song. For the first time also, since he had changed, he felt a pang of longing and utter desire piercing him.

  It took the place of an old inner pain, so long forgotten that it might never have existed.

  The flame flicked around him and finally closed him in its sheath, perfect from head to foot. All space and time seemed open to him now, and he ran shouting up the paths of the sky, as a cured man takes a path familiar to him before his sickness. He soared on a trail of fire, out and up, and his meteor passage rekindled ancient lights on the Milky Way.

  A Freeway for Draculas

  Richard A. Lupoff

  Reality suddenly begins to split apart, everything

  upside-down. You can’t possibly be seeing what you

  are seeing. Imagination? Insanity? The terrifying fact

  is that it’s neither. All this is really happening.

  How it started David Starke never knew. He rose and shaved, Bertha brought him coffee in her plump hands and he drank it, he pulled on his white broadcloth shirt, knotted his maroon J. Press tie, tugged once at the bottom of his gray suit jacket and left the house.

  It was no different from any other morning, five mornings each week, forty-nine weeks each year.

  He bent his stocky body and picked up the newspaper from his lawn. Without removing the rubber band that held it furled, he glanced at a few headlines: war, scandal, repression. He tossed the paper over his shoulder so it landed at the front door for Bertha to read later.

  No different from other mornings.

  At the end of the driveway he stopped, glanced at his watch to see how long before Roily Poletsky’s little electric Fiat would roll up for him. It was Roily’s turn to drive. Starke’s watch said 8:24—Roily would arrive in two minutes, as he did every alternate morning, regular as clockwork.

  As Starke dropped his hand the crystal of his watch seemed to catch the sun at an odd angle, reflecting the light into Starke’s eyes. For a moment he staggered at the brightness, then stood blinking at the oddly colored afterimage that quivered momentarily on his retinas, seeming to expand and contract as it slowly faded.

  He steadied himself against the mailbox, rubbed one hand against his eyes, then ran it through his’ thick wavy hair and laughed at himself over the incident. He glanced up the street, saw the light green of the Fiat and began to step forward.

  Then he blinked. The Fiat was gone.

  No explosion, no blinding flash—the pulsing afterimage of the odd glare in Starke’s eyes did not recur. He stepped out into the little-used residential street to see if Poletsky had made a sudden and unexpected turn into one of the driveways feeding from the street, and as he did so the green Fiat drove into view, rounding the gentle curve a few hundred yards from Starke’s house.

  Starke shook his head and studied the little car as it purred smoothly to a stop a few feet from him. He leaned over as Poletsky reached across the cockpit and unlatched the passenger’s door from the inside.

  “Strangest thing,” Starke said as he eased himself into the black leather bucket. He slammed the door shut.

  “What’s that?” Poletsky asked.

  Starke laughed uneasily. “Strangest thing,” he repeated. “I was standing next to the mailbox waiting for you the way I always do and I could have sworn I saw your car driving up.”

  Poletsky snorted. “I don’t see what’s strange about that. I was arriving. No?”

  “Well, that’s not quite it, Roily. I’d looked at my watch and you weren’t due for a couple of minutes. Then I saw your car, and then it was gone.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “No. I mean, not in a puff of smoke or anything, it just wasn’t there any more. And then—just a couple of seconds later it was back again, just coming around the curve.” Starke felt himself pressed back into the bucket seat as Poletsky pressed down on the accelerator and the little car moved quickly forward.

  “Upset about it?” Poletsky asked. He shot a concerned glance sideways at Starke, lines appearing in his slim, pale face.

  Starke said, “I guess not.” For a moment there was only the gentle hum of the little car, the crunch of its tires rolling along on the cold gravel of the bare winter street. “I just don’t understand it,” Starke said, “it was so odd. But I feel all right now.” He stared through the windshield, took off his thick-framed glasses and looked at them as if they might contain an explanation, put them back on and gazed, distracted, at the gray overcast sky.

  They rolled through the little shopping center and Poletsky swung the Fiat onto the freeway service road, ready to head for 909 and the run toward the computer works.

  “Come on, David,” Poletsky said, “don’t let it get you down. Here—” He reached past David’s knee and punched the on button of the sports car’s Blaupunkt FM receiver. As the radio snapped to instant life he said, “See what you can get, will you? It’s been as bad as AM lately. I think I’m going to throw it out altogether and get a tape rig for the car.”

  “Oh, sure, Roily,” Starke said, called back to the reality of the Fiat. The car’s quad speakers were blaring the strains of Bach’s seventh Brandenburg concerto as performed on an ARP synthesizer. Starke punched a news button and the synthesizer gave way to a low-interest-loan commercial. He punched again and a network news broadcast replaced the ad.

  “Okay,” Poletsky said.

  They were stopped at the freeway entrance, waiting for a break in the morning rush-hour traffic. Starke used the momentary halt of the car to fine up the turning of the FM set. The news was a standard Pentagon spokesman tape: so many mission
s by American aircraft against aggressive guerrilla forces designed to assure the survival of a peaceloving democratic regime, etc., etc.

  “I’ll be pleased when they get that automatic traffic channel on the air,” David said. “Morning news is too much for me to take some days.”

  “You take it too seriously,” Poletsky said. “There’s nothing you can do about it, is there? So why let it get you down?”

  The announcer had finished the war bulletins and was turning to other topics, mostly more government handouts on improvements in environmental regulations. A high administration spokesman, the smooth voice was assuring its listeners, had told industrial leaders that the President would not let idealistic concerns for a few bugs and weeds interfere with the economic well-being of the nation.

  “Take it seriously?” Starke reacted. “We both work for the same outfit, Roily. Don’t you think that all the talent that goes into our products could do something to help this situation? Don’t we have a responsibility for what we create? Couldn’t you grow those integrated circuit crystals for something better than weapons-control systems? Couldn’t I design programs for something more constructive than government surveillance files? I mean—” He let his sentence fade out as the highway condition report finally began.

  Freeways all the way from their present location to the computer works were crowded but flowing smoothly. Starke let the droning, surrounding voice fill the car while his eyes, bored with the sight of freeway traffic through the Fiat’s windscreen, slowly rose to gaze, distracted, at the dully glowing sky.

  Far ahead, over the downtown area, formations of long silvery shapes with huge tailfins swept silently across the sky. They came in herringbone rows, bright sweptback wings defining the relationship of one to another. High, high they were, barely distinguishable against the silver overcast.

  The radio voice droned in the Fiat’s cockpit; the hum of its mechanism and the gentle shushing of its tires against the freeway surface made a hypnotic wall of background noise.

  The aerial titans seemed almost to be standing stationary over the city, their arrangement in sweptback triangles led Starke’s eyes through a dull iteration of their geometry: three aircraft placed at the apexes of an equilateral formation, and three groups of aircraft arranged to state the angles of a metaformation. Three threes of three forming a meta-metaformation.

  The Fiat sped ahead, Poletsky intent on the freeway and the cars around his own, Starke staring distracted at the aircraft. Tiny specks of black seemed to be dropping from their bellies.

  “Roily,” Starke heard himself saying, “they don’t use those old B-52s any more, do they?”

  “Huh?” Poletsky responded. “No, I think they junked the last few a couple of years ago. Why?”

  Starke turned to face Poletsky for a moment. “Because there are some—” He looked back, trying to get a fix on the formation above the city.

  “I thought—I could have sworn—” He leaned forward, bracing both his hands against the dashboard over the FM radio dial.

  Poletsky’s voice broke into his examination of the sky. “Are you sure you’re all right, David?”

  “Yes. I mean—” He stared at the sky, trying to see anything beside the gray wintry overcast. His neck felt very stiff and he leaned back in his seat, rubbed his neck with one hand.

  “I could have sworn I saw a formation of B-52s over the city.”

  “Were they doing anything?”

  Starke took off his glasses again, rubbed the bridge of his nose, between thumb and forefinger. With his eyes still shut, the pressure of his fingers making vague red patterns swirl inside his eyelids, he answered. “It looked as if—as if they were dropping bombs on the city,” he whispered.

  Poletsky was silent. He reached in front of Starke again and punched the music button on the RM receiver. A recording of a Vaughan Williams symphony, its tones a tapestry of restraint, came from the speakers.

  “Sounds like the Antarctica,” Poletsky said. “Only two channels, they must really have an ancient recording.”

  They drove along unspeaking, the notes of the orchestra filling the Fiat. “Yeah,” Poletsky resumed, “that’s the seventh okay. But it’s the old Adrian Boult recording.”

  “They wouldn’t be bombing the city, would they?” Starke said. “I mean, there are no more B-52s anyway, and if there were they wouldn’t be bombing us.”

  Poletsky said, “It’s worth having only two channels to hear real instruments instead of synthesizers, don’t you think?”

  “Besides they’d have a bulletin on the radio.”

  “Some of those old performers have never been equaled. We’re lucky they still exist, even in simple stereo.”

  Poletsky hit the turn signal and edged the Fiat over into the freeway’s exit lane.

  Starke took a last look ahead of the car, toward the city, just before the Fiat rolled onto the exit ramp and down toward the service road. There was a moment of dazzling brilliance ahead, then a series of secondary flashes and a huge glowing cloud began to rise rapidly over the city.

  The Fiat dived onto the service road, Poletsky pulling it skillfully into an opening between a huge Ford station wagon and a snappy Volvo 1800. Starke gripped the little courtesy handhold over the Blaupunkt. The afterimage of the flashes pulsed and faded in double exposure with the square tailgate of the Ford wagon. His ears rang, a muffled roar rising from somewhere inside his chest. Steadying himself on the handhold he twisted in his seat to look at Poletsky.

  The Ford wagon pulled up at a stop sign where the freeway service road fed back into a commercial street; Poletsky braked the Fiat to a halt behind the Ford. Poletsky turned toward Starke. “What’s the matter, David?”

  Starke said, “Didn’t you see it—see the sky?”

  “I’ve been concentrating on the road. What was it?”

  He leaned forward, craned his neck to look straight up. “I don’t see anything.”

  The Ford pulled away, turning into heavy street traffic. Poletsky followed, heading toward the computer works.

  Starke punched the news button on the radio. A woman’s voice was describing an international conference on abortion. He punched another button, got a commercial for a home air filtration system, tried the news again, then gave up and tuned back to the Williams symphony.

  “Y-you didn’t,” he stammered, “you didn’t see anything. And there’s no bulletin on the radio.”

  “David, what is it?”

  “I must be—there must really be something the matter with me. If I see things that nobody else can see, I mean.”

  “Oh, come on. This isn’t a horror movie.”

  Starke removed his grip from the handhold in the Fiat, forced himself to lean back in his seat Poletsky said nothing more. Starke closed his eyes and let the flowing texture of the Williams symphony fill his mind. A horror movie, he was acting foolish. Next thing he’d be seeing monsters.

  He felt himself sway sideways as Poletsky pulled the Fiat out of the last traffic lane and up to the gate of the computer works. Starke watched him as he braked the little car at the guard station, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his identification badge. Starke did the same and leaned across the car to show the badge to the security guard.

  The face of the guard, leaning down to peer at the badges through the car window, was a pale, cold white tinged slightly with a funguslike green. Black shaggy hair was chopped off in a crude bang over his forehead, partially covering the terrible scar that ran from scalp to eyebrow. The guard’s eyes glimmered with a terrible animal redness; a thin line of spittle hung from his narrow lips.

  Pulling away from the car to stand upright again, the guard waved with one hand and said, “Pass right in, sir.”

  As the Fiat pulled away from the guard station Starke glanced back at the guard. Two small electrodes, their metallic finish shimmering in the brightly overcast morning, protruded from his neck.

  In the reserved parking lot Poletsky pulled th
e little Fiat into a narrow space between two Detroit sedans and climbed out. Starke followed suit, slamming the door shut behind him. He stood still for a moment, the bright electrodes pulsing in afterimage. He steadied himself with a hand on the car’s roof.

  “David?” Poletsky said.

  “Oh, uh, thanks for the ride, Roily. I’ll see you back here after closing, okay?”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  David shook his head. “Something odd but I’ll be all right. Thanks.”

  He watched Poletsky stride across the parking lot and disappear into the engineering development wing of the building. Starke took a deep breath and walked toward the entrance of the programming center. Just outside the building he checked his wristwatch against the clock in the commercial tower across the street. There was no peculiar reflection this time and he pushed the twin glass doors open and walked in.

  On the second floor of the programming center he stopped at the automatic vending machine, bought a cup of coffee, nodded a good morning to Angie Turner at her central secretarial station and walked into his own two-man office. He closed the door behind him, put his coffee carefully on his desk blotter and hung his coat on the corner rack.

  He looked at the worker at the other desk, already immersed in stacks of computer printouts, felt-marker-scrawl-covered manuals, typewritten sheets and electrostatic copies. The other man looked slowly at Starke, pulled at his beard with his dirty fingernails and drawled, “Hi there, Starke. How goes it?”

  At least Marston looked normal! But then so had Roily and so had Angie, hugely overweight, stuffed into clothes that might have looked chic on a woman sixty pounds lighter and fifteen years younger. And Marston—slovenly, unkempt, the only employee Starke knew who didn’t at least come near to the image of the bright professionals climbing through the hierarchy of the computer works—Marston looked no different than usual. Why had the security guard looked like a—Starke almost let go an incoherent exclamation—like a Hollywood horror film monster?