by C. L. Moore
It hadn't changed much, Ted Nye's office. At first glance you think you've walked into a picture gallery, and then you see all the pictures are live action. Ted's desk is in the middle with all the banks of buttons on it that connect him with their nerve endings of the nation. There's a small bar against one wall, a lot of deep chairs around, a glass tank full of tropical fish, and hanging from the ceiling a round brass cage with a round pale yellow canary inside.
A small man stood at the bar with his back to me. He wore knee-length shorts and a striped shirt. He was clinking glasses. Above him in heavy, ornate gold frames the United States unrolled itself across the walls. Clouds floated lazily in one frame over blue mountains marbled with snow. Next to that San Francisco stood dazzling against her green bay, tiny boats moving slowly over the water. Next to that a doll-sized tractor dragged a broad swath of harrows across a stretch of farmland, scoring the brown earth into patterns. And all of it merely the outward and visible background for the inward, invisible webs of Comus, drawn taut and singing with tension as Prowlers policed the roads of the nation, sifting the population man by man through psycho-polling research. They kept the electronic computers humming day and night, straight around the clock. I could imagine I felt them now, vibrating under my feet, for here was the heart of the Comus administration. And here before me in a striped shirt was the man who controlled Comus.
I was surprised at the sudden surge of bitter resentment that rose in me at the sight of him. We started out level. Look at us now. A wave of the intolerable itching which all Croppers are heir to swept over me and for an instant I could smell the sweat and disinfectant that halo all Croppers like a cloud. I probably carried it with me now, but mostly I was too used to it to notice. Resentment said, "What right has Ted Nye to stand here clean and happy and powerful, while I——" But reason broke in, "You asked for it, Rohan. Calm down."
Without turning, Ted Nye said, "Come on in, Howard."
I walked fast across the flowered carpet and reached past his hands at the bar. I grabbed the first bottle within striking distance and tipped it up to my mouth, hearing the gurgle, feeling the bottle jump in my hands a little as the whiskey poured down my throat. It was strange to taste good scotch again. Ted pulled the bottle away after a moment.
"That's enough for now, Howard." He looked up at me searchingly. 'It's been a long time," he said.
I tried to return his gaze objectively. He was clean, all right, but this little dark wizened face had heavy shadows under the eyes and something was badly wrong somewhere in back of his face. Trouble. Ted Nye had his problems too.
I said coldly, "I don't know you."
His deep-set eyes darted anxiously at mine, the focus shifting rapidly from left eye to right in a ridiculous little dance. I felt better after the whiskey. I felt better than he looked.
"Having trouble with your memory?" he asked.
"No trouble. I like it this way." Again the itching swept me, more a ghostly itch than a real one since my clothes at least were clean now. I held every muscle tense until it passed.
Still looking closely at me, Nye walked over to his desk and punched one of the shiny-faceted buttons under the little intercom screen. A greenish office with a greenish-tinged girl about two inches high came into focus in the greenish glass of the intercom. It occurred to me very briefly that every living thing here was scaled down to smallness to match Nye's.
"Give me the file on Howard Rohan, Trudy," he said to the minuscule girl. A musical humming and then a faint pop sounded, and from a slot on the desk a red folder came out like a tongue from a thin mouth. The canary moved uneasily on his perch, looking sidewise at the source of the musical sound. He tried a tentative chirp and then gave up and settled down into himself, closing his eyes.
Nye flipped the folder open, handed me the single sheet lying on top of the stack inside. I took it without much interest, glancing down casually. Then I shook my head to make my eyes come into focus, and my hand shook too. I couldn't quite believe what I saw, but there it was—the staggering "Howard Rohan" scrawled on a dotted line, and the ironclad Cropper contract above it, the contract that said five years and meant the rest of my life.
Ted Nye twitched it neatly out of my hand as I stood there gaping. I made a futile grab. "Not so fast," he said. "I've got a job for you. Howard. Do it and you can have this back."
I said warily, "What kind of a job?"
Watching me, he said, "Theater. We're setting up something new. Maybe a little bit dangerous. I need you, Howard."
For a moment a shock of excitement flickered like lightning through my mind. I was back very briefly in the old, bright, shining days when Miranda was alive and Rohan was himself and all the lights were dazzling. But then I remembered. Rohan was washed up a long time ago. I thought of all the times since Miranda died when I'd blown up in my lines and had the curtain rung down on me. I remembered the times I'd gone on stage too drunk to be sure what play I was in. I thought of all the friends who'd lent me money until I couldn't seem to find them any more.
I glanced around the office. "How do I get out of here?"
"Don't act like this, Howard," Nye said.
"It's not acting."
"You still hold a grudge, don't you? I did everything I could for you when you cracked up, Howard. You must know that. At the end it wasn't I who revoked your license. It was Comus. Maybe you think I control Comus. I don't."
I felt like laughing. Ten years Secretary of Communications, and he didn't control Comus? But all I said was, "I'm not holding any grudges. I get along fine."
"The hell you do."
"Do I make trouble? Have I pulled any reports?"
He rubbed his face nervously. "Howard—we used to be friends. I'd like to help you if I can. And you could help me."
I turned my back on him and looked up at San Francisco and the little boats streaking the bay on the other side of the continent. Yes, we'd been friends once. Very good friends. We'd shared an apartment a long time ago, when he was only an assistant to an undersecretary and I was still haunting the Comus offices for a license to walk the boards. Even in those days the worm had been eating at Ted Nye. Maybe because he was so small. But he'd always been a man to grab tigers by the tail. He looked now like somebody hanging on to too big a tiger, afraid to let go. But that was his problem, not mine.
I said with my back to him, "Why can't you leave me alone, Ted?" I shut my eyes and focused on the faint buzzing the scotch I'd drunk was setting up around me. "You've got what you want." I said. "Can't you let me have what I want too?"
He said gently, "What's that, Howard?"
"To be let alone, damn you." The words came out firmly, but they didn't quite ring true. Not quite. I made a frantic clutch at the walls of my buzzing room, in terror because they might stop buzzing. I could hear the sound grow thin, and it was Ted Nye's fault. He had breached my only bulwark, and I wanted suddenly to kill him.
I thought, Maybe you don't know it, but the world is dead. Everything's dusty and still out there beyond the buzzing walls. The people aren't real. They're clockwork. You're clockwork too. There are clockwork birds in the trees and clockwork mice in the walls, but nothing has been breathing flesh since Miranda stopped abruptly, glared at me, and then turned to slap at the green, and ail voices terrify me because they sound that single monotone keynote of despair.
Nye said, his voice shaking a little, "Don't try me too far, Howard." He was under a lot of tension, holding it down with an effort. "Maybe I know what you want better than you do." He slapped the red folder with my name on it. "I've got your psychograph here, every damned thing in it right up to date. Up to last night, when you spilled your guts under Pentothal. I know what makes you tick. I know more about you than you know yourself. If you don't——"
The intercom on the desk burst into its musical hum. He stopped abruptly, glared at me, and then turned to slap at the button as if he were slapping my face. He was very near some kind of breaking point.
"I don't care what the hell they say," Nye broke in sharply. "I'll be busy another ten minutes. If Morris can't wait, give him another appointment. I've got enough to worry about." He struck the button again and the green protesting face dwindled to a dot and vanished. Nye swung around to me.
"Look," he said. "You used to be a good actor once. Maybe even a great one. Right now you're a drunken bum with nothing ahead of you but hard labor in Cropper camps until you get too beat to carry. Then they'll dump you. I'm offering a chance to pull out of it. I've bought up your contract. I've got a job you may be able to do. I need you. I'd like to help you if I can. But it's all up to you, Howard."
I said desperately, "I'm washed up in the theater, Ted. Remember?"
"You think you are. Suppose we give it another try. I need actors, Howard. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. There aren't enough qualified men in the country for the work I have in mind. Once we get the alcohol soaked out of you and the medication you need pumped in, you can do the job. I'm not asking you, Howard. I'm telling you."
Something of his urgency vibrated a little through the thin drawn walls that protected me from the world. I knew I shouldn't listen. But somewhere in one of those back rooms of the mind a wild, irrational Rohan who could still believe the impossible began to stir. Maybe there still was a chance for me. To get free of the contract, to be my own man again, to try once more for the old, wonderful, glittering life ...
For a moment the protective wall ceased vibrating. In that moment there came flooding back over me in one enormous wave the memory of the past. Miranda. The life we lived together. All the things we had known and shared in that vivid world there was so much to buy, so much to enjoy. I let the parties we went to swirl around in my mind like smoke. The wonderful parties. The music by the finest orchestras in the country. The magnificent gowns the women wore, the jewels like big drops of fire, the perfume, the glow. The dazzling talk, because the finest wits of the nation congregated right where we all did, around Andrew Raleigh. The old man himself, tall, ruddy-faced, in those wonderful, spotless, creaseless uniforms he wore once and then gave away. His air of majesty. That whole tremendous feel of being alive and functioning in the very center of the world while the universe revolved around us because we were ourselves, making it turn.
"You can do the job. I'm not asking, I'm telling you." Nye's words echoed themselves in my mind. Tremulously, in hope and terror, I thought, Maybe he's right. Maybe I still have a chance.
"What—what kind of a job is it?" I asked, my voice sounding thin and distant. "What kind of theater, Ted?"
And I heard his answer remotely, too, filtered through swirls of doubt and hope. "I want you to handle a traveling theater troupe. I'm sending out several to—to one of the areas. Open-air, ring performances they'll be. I need somebody who can act, manage, direct, every damn thing they need."
I said doubtfully. "I've never done theater-in-the-round, Ted. And—traveling? Like the old-time circuses? You know that won't pull. Nobody's interested in legit any more except in the biggest cities. I don't get it. I——"
"Let me worry about that, Howard. Will you do it, or do you want to go back where I found you?"
While I hesitated the intercom sang musically again and Nye slipped it on to receiving so hard the image in the screen jiggled as it dawned. The greenish secretary was already talking, throwing all her biggest names in first to catch Nye's attention before he cut her off.
"—Vice-President," she was saying, "and he's got to talk to President Raleigh before——"
Nye shot me a quick glance and then punched the earphone button hard. The little voice went silent. Nye snatched up the earcup and pressed it to his ear, his eyes going unfocused as he listened. When he stopped looking at me and his face was unguarded, somehow the fullness and the color under his skin seemed to drain away, leaving him just a little withered, just a little like the way he might look the day after he died.
"Trouble," I said to myself. "Bad trouble. At least, in the Croppers I'm safe. Do I want to stick my neck out this far?"
A motion in the round cage where the canary hung caught my eye. Roused by the rival music of the intercom, the canary shook himself and then dived suddenly under one wing and began tousling his feathers fiercely in search of mites. The sight of him sent a ferocious wave of the old itching in surges over me. I could smell the sweat and disinfectant again, feel the weariness and the stupor and the itching like ghostly fire so strong that sweat broke out on my forehead with the violence of my effort not to scratch.
I looked at Nye's face and his thin, tense shoulders under the striped shirt. I looked around me at the rich, hushed office. I felt the vibrations under my feet of the vast activities below us that cupped the whole nation in the hollow of one man's hand.
And suddenly I hated Ted Nye, and envied him fiercely, and in a way felt love and pity for the driven little man I had once known so well. A sudden, furious storm of feeling swept through me like cold sleet. I knew I had to live again. Act again. Move and feel power and make the world turn. No matter how hard the work might be, no matter how much it cost me, no matter what the dangers—I had to do it. My safe little magic room built out of alcohol wasn't my room any more. Ted Nye had shattered it from the first moment he called me back to life.
I hated him for that. I hated him for his success and power. I felt a deep, continuous tremor of sheer terror start to vibrate inside me high up under the rib cage, where the seat of emotion is. Scared, resentful, hating Ted and the world and myself, I drew a breath as deep as my chest would hold and said in a flat voice, without any emotion at all,
"Okay, Ted. I'll take your job."
-
CHAPTER IV
THEY HAD THIS marble slab in the steam room, with white clouds hissing out all around it. The nurse said to stretch out my back and relax for a while. I shrouded myself decently in the sheet and did as I was told. It felt good. You can feel the vertebrae relaxing and all the bones and muscles along the rib cage readjust when you lie out flat on a hard surface.
A figure loomed up over me in the fog. Ted Nye's voice said, "Awake, Howard?" and I peered up to see him larger than life among the clouds and togaed like a Roman in his sheet.
"Here comes poor Brutus, with himself at war," I said. I'd had twenty-four hours of treatment, and I was feeling much better now. "This is a surprise. I didn't expect to rate any more of your valuable time."
"What do you mean, with myself at war?" he asked, looking down at me suspiciously.
"Something's eating you," I said. "Anybody can see that. Maybe I should have started off with, 'Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?' It's obvious."
He rubbed a hand over his face and looked at it vacantly, as if he hoped the expression would come off so he could inspect it on his palm, like dirt. "Yes, I've got plenty eating me. The whole country has. When Raleigh dies all hell is going to break loose, or try to. Don't tell me you haven't heard rumors."
"In my social circles," I told him, "we haven't kept up with the news."
He sighed, let himself down stiffly on the adjoining slab, and then grunted with satisfaction as his vertebrae went through the same procedure mine had. He rolled his head sidewise to look at me.
"I don't need to see my face," he said. "I know I've got problems. I want to talk to you, Howard. I've briefed the other theater managers myself. I'll give you the same, and a little more." But he paused there, looking up into the steam. Abruptly he said, "Do you ever think about the old days, Howard?"
"It was a long time ago," I said noncommittally. "Why?"
"No reason, no reason." He paused again. "I'm glad you're going to work with us, Howard. We need all the good men we can get."
Well, that wasn't the way I'd been hearing it, but I didn't say anything. H
e was right on one question, anyhow. After Raleigh died all hell would break loose unless a lot of changes got made. The yoke of Comus was getting pretty heavy. And Comus, according to the rumors I'd heard, was frightened by the prospect of change. New values, new concepts that might supersede the old ones. To hold the country safe, Raleigh had had to hold it rigid. The ferment of new ideas might so easily undermine our hard-won stability.
So Comus maybe needed good men more than it really knew, but it wasn't trying very hard to find them. Comus was trying instead to stop all change, all time. The young men and women with new ideas had to be controlled. No matter how high they might test on the school creativity scale, if they could threaten even latently, the social order Raleigh and Comus were founded on, then they must never receive training or acquire skills. Sooner or later the psychographs would click through the big computers and directives would emerge.
John Smith has failed his entrance exams at Cal Tech.
Mary Jones is ineligible for training at John Hopkins.
And even if John and Mary knew they hadn't failed, what could they do about it? Well, I thought, nobody ever claimed the system is perfect. On the other hand, let's not pretend we're trying very hard to get the men and women we need into the jobs they do best.
'Tell me the worst," I said. "You mentioned this theater work might be a little bit dangerous. How?"
He cleared his throat, and something in my mind began to tighten. I thought. This is the old familiar Ted. He isn't going to tell the truth now, but a part of what he says will be true. I may be able to winnow out the truth from the falsehood if I listen close. Oddly, it didn't make me angry. This was Ted Nye, the bad mixed right in there with the good, as it is all of us.
"This theater project is a big operation," he said. "Important. A lot may depend on it. We're having a—a little trouble in the place where you'll be going."
"All right. Name the place."
He hesitated. Then, almost wincingly, as if the word hurt him, he said, "California."
I said, "All right, California it is." Then I did a quick mental double-take and said, "What? California!" For at the back of my mind a sudden door seemed to swing wide and then shut with a slam. Through it I had the briefest of glimpses of—something I couldn't remember. Something in a dream. A man named Comus stooping over my bed and telling me I was headed for California. How could I have known that, even in a dream? Or had it been a dream at all?
