Gladiator-At-Law

by Frederik Pohl

  The Old Tuner’s Battle Royal was on. They saw Ryan laid out by a vicious swipe to the groin by a lady of eighty or more. The clubs were padded, but there was a lot hi knowing how to use them. He was carried past the wall, groaning, to the infirmary. Mundin and Norma glanced at each other with masked eyes; there simply was no time for sympathy.

  It was a responsive audience, Norvell noted with dull technical interest, laughing, howling, and throwing things at the right time. He heard the familiar chant of the vendors, “Gitcha rocks, gitcha brickbats, ya ca-a-an’t hit the artists without a brickbat——”

  It would be a good show, all of it, even if they had to louse up the feature spectacle a little. Norvell shivered and took his mind away from the feature spectacle. He glanced at the others. He felt queerly alert, as though he were ready for something big and new——

  But he wasn’t, precisely, happy. Because he knew what he very probably might have to do.

  Click, click, and the Scandinavian knife-fighters were on, and snip-snap, the knives Sashed and the blood flowed; there were two double-kills out of the six pairs and the band blared from Grieg to Gershwin for the Roller Derby, which would last a good ten minutes… .

  It was gory. Time after time, the skaters shot off the banked boards into the “audience” of old stew-bums and thrill seekers rather than get a razor-sharp elbow spike. And their own spikes worked havoc. Almost us, Norvell thought numbly. At a hundred bucks a lapful, almost us.

  For the first time hi his life, he found himself wondering when and where it all had started. Bone-crushing football? Those hockey games featured by concussions? Impatient sidewalk crowds that roared “Go-go-go” to a poor crazed ledge-sitter? Those somewhat partisan Chicago fans who flipped lighted firecrackers at the visiting team outfielders as they raced for a fly? “We don’t take no prisoners in this outfit, kid”? White phosphorus grenades? Buchenwald? Napalm?

  And then before he knew it Kemp was shaking his shoulder and growling, “All right, ya yella punk. You an’ yer frenns, yer on. Take yer basket.” Numbly he took the basket and looked at the noisemakers and the “gravel”—three-inch rocks, some of them. He followed the section as it moved out onto the field. He became aware that Hubble and Mundin were half-carrying him. Shep was staring open-mouthed.

  “Don’t flake out on us, damn it,” Mundin was begging. “We need every man, Norvie!”

  He gave Mundin a pale grin and thought, Maybe I won’t have to, anyway. Maybe I won’t have to. That’s the thing to stick with. Maybe I won’t have to…. But if I do——

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” the M.C. was roaring as they assumed their places around the tank, as the riggers hastily finished setting up the two towers and stringing the wire. “Ladies and gentlemen, Monmouth Stadium is proud and happy to present to you for the first time in this arena’s distinguished history a novel and breath-taking feat of courage and dexterity. This young man——”

  Don had been hustled atop one of the towers. Norma was

  weeping uncontrollably. Hubble and Mundin were passing among the hecklers handing out bills, Shep looming ominously behind. “No heckling, understand? Shut your lip. I said no heckling. Just keep quiet. You’ll get this much more after it’s over—if the kid makes it. Anybody crosses us up, we’ll throw him to the fish. Understand? It’s your life if he goes. No heckling, understand?”

  “—this young man, utterly without previous experience in tne gymnastic art, will essay to cross the fifteen feet from tower to tower against the simultaneous opposition of these sixteen energetic hecklers. They will be permitted to jeer, threaten, sound horns, and cast gravel but not to shake the towers——”

  Audience identification, thought Norvell. The sixteen “opponents” would be there to do exactly what the audience wanted to do but was too far away to do. Still, a good strong arm with a favoring wind and a brick—or a zip gun, if someone besides the Wabbits had smuggled one in——

  “The special feature, ladies and -gentlemen, of this performance lies now hi the tank above which this young daredevil will essay to cross. At enormous expense, Monmouth Stadium has imported from the headquarters of the Amazon River in far South America a school of the deadliest killers, the most vicious fish known to man, the piranha. Your binoculars, ladies and gentlemen! Don’t miss a single second of this! I am about to drop a fifty-pound sheep into the tank alive, and what will ensue you shall see!”

  In went the bleating, terrified animal—shaved and with a few nicks hi its side for the scent of blood. Then they pulled on the rope and hauled out—bloody bones. There were still ghastly little things flopping and wriggling, dangling remorselessly from the skeleton. The stagehands beat them off into the water as the crowd shrieked in delight.

  Just like you, you bastards, Norvell thought. But maybe I won’t have to do it——

  Shep was looking at him curiously again, and Norvell instinctively moved away. He glanced up at Don Lavin, waiting immobile for the signal, unmoved—at least outwardly unmoved—by the spectacle below. Twenty-two years old, thought Norvell. A moment of absent-minded passion, between bouts at the drawing board and the stockholders’ meet- *

  ings, and he was conceived. Nine months of Ťaausea and stretching pains and clumsiness climaxed with agony, an<} he was born. Two A.M. feedings. Changing diapers. Fondling and loving and dreaming over him; planning for the great things he would do. And the foetus becomes an infant, and the infant a child, and the child a man.

  And the man—here and now—a scrap of bloody bone, unless someone pays a Mosaic price. But perhaps I won’t have to do it, Norvell told himself desperately.

  The earpiece of his hearing aid had slipped a bit. He looked around, still shyly, and prepared to readjust it. Then he didn’t readjust it.

  He didn’t need it.

  The shrieking crowd, the gloating, smacking voice of the M.C., the faint creak in the wind of the tower guys, even—it all, all came through.

  He could hear.

  For a moment he was almost terrified. It was the decision, he told himself, not quite knowing what he meant. He hadn’t wanted to hear any of it. He hadn’t dared hear any of it. ‘He punished himself by not letting himself hear any of it—as long as he was a part of the horror.

  But his resignation had been turned in.

  Had he ever, really, been deaf? he puzzled. It felt the same as always. But now he could hear; and before he couldn’t. He went to Norma Lavin and put his thin arm around the shaking shoulders. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. She cowered against him wordlessly.

  “I’ve got a boy coming, you know,” he told her. She gave him a distracted nod, her eyes on the tower. “And if anything happens,” he went on, “it’s only fair that they should be taken care of. Isn’t it? Sandy and Virginia, and the boy. You’ll remember?” She nodded without hearing. “There was this Field Day I heard about in Bay City,” he chattered. “There was a high wire with piranhas, just like this. There was a judge up on the ladder to one of the perches, a little drunk, I guess, and he missed his footing; or something——” She wasn’t paying attention.

  He got up and joined Mundin. “If anything happens,” he said, “it’s only fair that Sandy and Virginia and the boy should be taken care of.”

  “What?”

  “Just remember,”

  Shep was looking suspicious again. Norvell walked away.

  The drumroll began and the M.C. fired the platform on which Don Lavin stood like a stone man. The crowd howled as the flames licked up and the boy hopped convulsively forward, his balance pole swaying.

  The M.C. yelled furiously at the hecklers, “What the hell’s the matter with you people? Toot! Chuck gravel! What are you getting paid for?”

  One of the young toughs at the far end of the pool began to swing his rattle, glancing nervously at Shep. Hubble, beside him, snapped, “A hundred more, buster. Now calm down!” The tough calmed down and gasped at the wire-walker.

  A foot, two feet, the pole swaying.

  He has specia
l slippers, Norvell thought. Maybe it’ll be all right, maybe I won’t have to do anything. And then I can go back to being comfortably deaf again, buying batteries for an act of contrition, turning this nausea, these people molded from blood-streaked slime, off at will.

  Three feet, four feet, and the M.C. howling with rage. “Get in there and fight, you bastards! Blow your horns! Plaster him!”

  Five feet, six feet, and the crowd noise was ugly, ugly and threatening. In one section a chant bad started, one of those foot-stomping, hand-clapping things.

  Six feet, seven, and the M.C. was breaking down into sobs. “We paid you to heckle and this is the way you treat us,” he blubbered. “Those fine people hi the stand. The reputation of the Stadium. Aren’t you ashamed?”

  Eight feet, nine feet, ten feet. Two-thirds of the way to the second tower.

  Norvell hoped. But somebody in the stands, somebody with a mighty arm and a following wind, had found the range. The half-brick at the end of its journey sailed feebly plop into the tank, and white-bellied little things tore at it and bled themselves and tore at one another. The water boiled.

  Suddenly ice-cold, all business, Norvie said briskly to Mundin, “They’ll have him in a minute. Be ready to haul him out, fast Remember what I said.”

  He strolled over to Willkie, who was watching the stubbornly silent hecklers in numb despair.

  Another half-brick. This one hit the tower. Much flailing of the balance pole and a shriek from Norma.

  “No nervous breakdown this year, Willkie,” Norvell said chattily to the M.C.

  “What? Bligh? Bligh, they won’t listen to me,” Willkie sobbed.

  Twelve feet, almost there, and then the brick, unseen, that tapped Don Lavin between the shoulder blades and made him flail the pole, too hard; and the hecklers were out of control. Hubble and Mundin shouted and screamed and pleaded, but the “gravel” was in their hands, and they weren’t listening; it was not only the piranha that were maddened at the first taste of blood.

  Norvell took one last agonized look around the arena. But there was nothing. No chair, no table, no cushion, nothing to throw to the fish, but——

  “NO!” bellowed Shep from behind him, and Norvell, startled, half-turned. Just for a moment. But the moment meant that it was Shep, not Norvell, who wrapped the sobbing Willkie in his arms; Shep, not Norvell, who lunged into the tank for an eternal instant; Shep—who had an “inpounding debt worry.” And who paid his debts.

  First the water was cool. And then boiling.

  At the far end, the quiet end, of the tank, Mundin and Hubble yanked Don out in one heave.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “I wanted to do it,” Norvell Bligh was saying in a cracked voice. “I was willing to do it.”

  Norma had her arms around him, in the cab going back to Belly Rave. “Of course you were,” she soothed him.

  Mundin, riding dazedly beside them, tried to rest his brain. That was a pretty good little man, he thought. Good thing

  Shep took the play away from him. Well need him. But of course he can’t Lee it that way, not yet.

  Hubble was chattering vivaciously away. “Really an adventure. But the big adventure’s coming up, eh, Mundin? After the piranha, Green, Charlesworth. They’ll make us wish we were back with the piranha, wouldn’t you say?”

  Don Lavin advised him, “Shut up.” Something had happened to Don Lavin. He might have learned something on the wire, Mundin thought. Funny, how you grow up after a while—after a very long while, for some people.

  Reminded, he picked up the phone and asked information for a number.

  Hubble, eavesdropping and irrepressible, said, “Oh, of course. The Stadium infirmary. We plain forgot about old Ryan, didn’t we? And we’ll need him for the big doings— when are you going to let us in on the plan, by the way? Now that we’ve got Don back we’ve got the stock. But we’ll never votelt. You know that; they’ll tie us up hi injunctions from here to hell. I suppose——” He broke off, warned by Mun-din’s expression as he slowly hung up the phone. “Ryan?” Hubble demanded in a completely different tone.

  Mundin nodded. “Hemorrhage,” he said. “He died on the operating table.” He sighed.

  War was never cheap, he thought. Shep—almost Bligh— and now Ryan. Give me one more victory such as this, and I am undone, he quoted to himself, as he began to plot the final struggle that Ryan had helped to shape, and would not see.

  “You’d think,” grumbled Don Lavin, “that ten hours’ sleep would fix a person up.”

  Mundin said worriedly, “It’s almost time for the bell. Do you see Norvie?” They were in the Stock Exchange, waiting for the start of business. The enormous hall was packed with its customary seething, excitable throng—but not quite the customary feeling of tension, Mundin thought, putting out psychic feelers into the crowd. It was a more somber mass of speculators than the last tune he had been here, a worried bunch, fretful and disturbed. Their own publicity campaign, Mundin thought with a touch of satisfaction. There had been trading in G.M.L.; it was off a few points, over the last weeks.

  Not much, but enough to shake, ever so slightly, the ironclad conviction of its stability. And if G.M.L. wasn’t totally sound, the investors were wondering, almost aloud, what was?

  They saw Norvie at last, inconspicuous against the far wall. He looked at them without visible recognition, then deliberately looked away. They followed his look; and there was Hubble, at a hundred-dollar window, chatting gaily with the investor at the window next to him. And then the bell rang for the first movement of the day.

  “Your honor, sir,” Mundin said formally to Don Lavin. Don acknowledged with an ironic bow and light-heartedly tapped out his first “sell” order:

  333, 100 shares, market

  The Big Board flickered and hummed, and the pari-mutuel computers totaled, subtracted, divided, and spat out their results. Mundin and Don had their glasses fixed to line 333; it

  flashed:

  333, off Ľ2

  “Congratulations,” said Mundin. “You have just thrown away a thousand bucks.”

  “My privilege,” said Don, grinning. “Your turn, I believe.”

  The thirty-second warning bell sounded, and Mundin tapped out his own order—a hundred shares of Old 333, G.M.L. Homes, at the market. And they lopped off another half-point.

  Don had been computing with a pencil and paper, thoughtfully. “At one movement every three minutes,” he said, “and three hundred trading minutes in the day, at the present rate of progress we will bust G.M.L. right off the board in forty working days.” They gravely shook hands.

  A somberly dressed school teacher, showing her young civics class a first-rate example of The American Way in action, shepherded the kids past the line of betting windows where Don and Mundin were sitting. The investors on either side of the two conspirators were getting curious; the one next to Don leaned over and hissed, “Say buster—why pay the Exchange commission? You want to unload G.M.L. I can take you to a guy who’ll make a private deal.

  “Beat it,” said Don, and punched out his order. 333, off Vi •

  “Slow and steady,” Mundin said philosophically.

  A petulant little man, escorted by a grim guard, came stamping down the aisle. “K-81, K-82, K-83—oh, you must be the one,” he counted. “You there, window K-85. And you. Are you aware of the penalties for non-delivery of stock sold through the pari-mutuel——”

  “Take a look,” said Mundin, shoving the stock certificates into his hands.

  The petulant man looked, and giggled weakly. “Oh,” he said fussily. “Well, of course—— Come along, Haynes. There certainly wasn’t anything to that complaint, was there? Terrible how these stories get started… .”

  Haynes paused and leaned over Mundin. “I’m watching you,” he said. “The exit door is right over there—next to the cashier’s area. I’ll be there, when you deposit that stock.” He lumbered, casually threatening, away.

  “Green, Charlesworth,” whispered Mund
in, and Don nodded. What else? Green, Charlesworth themselves, or one of their satellites; just checking, so far.

  And once they had checked, they would know.

  The thirty-second bell was ringing. Mundin started to punch out his order; then pressed the cancel plate. “Better step it up,” he said over his shoulder to Don:

  333, 500 shares, market

  They lopped off a full point that time….

  The Exchange had been going for half an hour, and already the buzz of whispers was louder than the calls of the speculators. Somebody was dumping G.M.L.

  After the first drop, the market had firmed. Mundin, sweating doggedly over his punch keys, guessed that Green, Charlesworth’s buying pool had orders to let the price drop a hah1 point or a point at a time—no more. They could afford to watch and wait. They had plenty of time. And plenty of money. And plenty of resources.

  And if the time and the money and the resources weren’t enough—they had plenty of other ways to handle trouble.

  Don Lavin was whispering something. Irritably Mundia looked up. “What?”

  “I said, take a look at Belt Transport.”

  Mundin flicked his glasses over the Big Board. Belt Transport was off ten points, and he hadn’t even noticed it. This was

  a hefl of a time to get foggy-brained, he cursed himself. But he hadn’t expected anything like that so soon; it had to be hunch players, two-bit investors getting worried and getting out. If that kept up, the big boys would be at the windows before long.

  “You’re right,” Mundin told Don. “Give Norvie the nod.”

  Across the room, Norvie acknowledged the signal and began placing inconspicuous “buy” orders on the faltering stocks— all but G.M.L. He punched the keys as though he were punching Green, Charlesworth themselves, with a controlled, joyous rage. It had taken him a long time to realize that he was, after all, alive; and a longer time to get over the first wretched resentment that Shep had stolen his big scene, and died thf death that Norvell had reserved for himself. But he was all over it now—and exulting at the chance to fight, however weakly, however ineffectually… .