by Jerry
A gasping, gibbering little man grabbed Stonecypher’s arm and yelped, “Illard is the clumsiest killer, he ran the sword in three times, and the kid with the dagger had to stick twice before they finished, Big Dependence Day Bullfight my jet! This is the worst in years, Fergus made the only clean kill all afternoon, and I flew every one of eighteen hundred miles myself to see it, this last bull better be good!” The little man waved his bag of rotten eggs.
Although the bullfight followed the basic procedures established by Francisco Romero in the Spain of 1700, changes had occurred, including the elimination of all Spanish words from the vocabulary of the spectacle since the unpleasant dispute with the Spanish Empire twenty years before. The gaudy costumes worn by participants had been replaced by trunks and sneakers.
A purring grader smoothed the sand. The crowd quieted, except for those near the box of Ringmaster Oswell. They suggested in obscene terms that their money be refunded. A trumpet recording blared. A scarlet door, inscribed, “Moe of Bays Mountain Farm,” opened. The crowd awaited the first wild rush of the bull. It failed to materialize.
GRAND FINALE
SLOWLY, Moe came through the doorway. Above, on a platform inside the barrier, stood a gray-haired man who stuck identifying, streamered darts into bovine shoulders. His hand swept down, carrying Stonecypher’s chosen colors, black.
Moe’s walk upset the man’s timing. His arm moved too soon. Moe’s front hooves left the ground. Horns hooked. The gray-haired man screamed and dropped the dart. With a spike of horn through his arm, between bone and biceps, he gyrated across the barrier. He screamed a second time before cloven hooves slashed across his body.
The crowd inhaled, then cheered the unprecedented entrance. Killer Fergus’s team stood rigid, not comprehending. Then men dashed through shielded openings in the barrier, yelling and waving pink and yellow capes to draw the bull from his victim.
Moe ignored the distraction, trotted nonchalantly to the center of the ring, and turned his bulging head to examine the spectators jabbering at his strange appearance. The short horns, the round skull, the white-banded eyes, the mane that seemed slightly purple under the cloudy sky, and the exaggerated slope from neck to rump that made the hind legs too short—together they amounted to a ton of muscle almost like a bull. “Where’d you trap it, Oswell?” someone near the ringmaster’s box yelled.
Forgetting the mess Illard had made with the previous bull, the crowd commented. “It’s the last of the bison!”
“He’s poiple! Lookit! Poiple!”
“The bull of the woods!”
“Howya like ‘im, Fergus?”
Killer Fergus posed behind the barrier and studied his specialty, an odd bull. Two stickers, Neel and Tomas, flourished capes to test the bull’s charge, with Neel chanting, “Come on, bull! Come on, bull! Come on! Bull, bull, bull!”
Moe did not charge. He moved, in a speculative walk, toward the chanting Neel who tantalized with the cape and retreated with shuffling steps. The charge, when it came, occurred almost too fast for sight. Neel wriggled on the horns, struck the sand, and the horns lifted him again. He smashed against the barrier. Tomas threw his cape over the bull’s face. The left horn pinned the cape to Tomas’s naked chest over the heart.
Moe retired to the center of the ring and bellowed at the crowd, which, delirious from seeing human blood, applauded. Blood covered Moe’s horns, dripped through the long hair on his neck, and trickled down between his eyes.
Quavering helpers removed the bodies. The first lancer, livid and trembling, rode a blindfolded horse into the ring. “He’ll fix this horse!” the crowd slavered. “We’ll see guts this time!”
Moe charged. The lancer backed his mount against the barrier and gripped his weapon, a stout pike. Sand sprayed like water as Moe swerved. On the left side of the horse, away from the menacing pike, Moe reared. The lancer left the saddle. A tangle of naked limbs thrashed across the wooden fence and thudded against the wall of the stands.
Twenty-five thousand people held their breaths. The blindfolded horse waited with dilated nostrils and every muscle vibrating in terror. Moe produced a long red tongue and licked the horse’s jaw.
Fergus dispersed the tableau. Red-haired, lean, and scarred with many past gorings, the popular killer stalked across the sand dragging his cape and roaring incomprehensible challenges. In the stands, the cheer leaders of the Fergus Fanclub lead a welcoming yell. “Yeaaaa, Fergus! Fergus! Fergus! Rah, rah, rah!”
Moe wandered through the helpers trying to distract him from the horse and looked at the killer. Fergus stamped his foot, shook his cape, and called, “Bull! Come on! Charge!” Moe completely circled the killer, who retired in disgust when another lancer rode into the ring. “Stick him good!” Fergus directed.
The pike pointed at the great muscles of Moe’s back, as the bull charged. Moe’s head twisted in a blur of violence. Teeth clamped on the shaft behind the point. Too surprised to let go, the lancer followed his weapon from the saddle. He released his hold when Moe walked on him.
Like some fantastic dog stealing a fresh bone, the bull trotted around the ring, tail high and pike in mouth. The crowd laughed. Wild-eyed men carried out the trampled lancer.
A third, and extremely reluctant, lancer reined his horse through the gate. A pike in the mouth of a ton of beef utterly unnerved the man. He stood in the saddle and jumped over the barrier where a rain of rotten eggs from the booing fans spattered him thoroughly.
AN UNINJURED bull pawed alone in the sand when the trumpet recording announced the end of the lancers’ period. The crowd noises softened to a buzz of speculation, questions, and comment, as the realization that weird events had been witnessed slowly penetrated that collective mind. The bull had not touched a horse, no pike had jabbed the bull, and five men had been killed or injured.
“Great Government!” a clear voice swore. “That ain’t no bull, it’s a monster!” This opinion came from a sticker in Illard’s team. Fergus attempted to persuade the man to help, since both of Fergus’s stickers were dead. Part of the crowd agreed with the sticker’s thought, for people began moving furtively to the exits with cautious glances at the animal in the ring. They, of course, could not know that the bull had been trained, with rubber-tipped pikes and dummies, in every phase of the bullfight; that he knew the first, and only, law of staying alive in the ring, “Charge the man and not the cloth.”
The clouds that had obscured the sky all day formed darker masses tinted with pink to the east, and the black dot of a turkey buzzard wheeled soaring in the gloom. Carrying, in either hand, a barbed stick sparkling with plastic streamers, Fergus walked into the ring. His assistants cautiously flanked him with capes.
Moe dropped the pike and charged in the approved manner of a bull. Fergus raised the sticks high and brought them down on the humped back, although the back was not there. The sticks dropped in the sand.
As the killer leaped aside in the completion of a reflex action, a horn penetrated the seat of his trunks. The Fergus Fanclub screamed while their hero dangled in ignominy from the horn. Moe ignored the flapping, frantic capes. The killer gingerly gripped a horn in either hand and tried to lift himself off. Gently, Moe lowered his head and deposited the man beside an opening. Fergus scrabbled to safety like a rat to a hole.
Four helpers with capes occupied the ring. When they saw death approaching on cloven hooves, two of them cleared the fence. The third received a horn beside his backbone and tumbled into the fourth. A dual scream, terrible enough to insure future nightmares, echoed above the screeching of the crowd. Moe tossed the bodies again and again across the bloody sand.
Silence slithered over the Highland Bullring and over a scene reminiscent of the ring’s bloody parent, the Roman Arena. Men sprawled gored, crushed, and dead across the sand. A section of the blood-specked barrier leaned splintered and cracked, almost touching the concrete wall. Unharmed, Fergus stood on one side of the battleground, Illard on the other.
Fergu
s reached over the wooden fence for red flag and sword. Turning his back on the heaving Moe, who stood but ten feet behind, the killer faced the quaking flesh that was Ringmaster Oswell, high up in the official box. The killer’s voice shook, but the bitter satire came through the sound of departing boats and aircraft. Fergus said, “I dedicate this bull to Ringmaster Oswell who has provided for us this great Dependence Day Bullfight in honor of the Great Government on which we all depend.” He turned and faced the bull.
Moe, for once, rushed the red flag, the only thing that made bullfights possible. His great shoulders presented a fair target for the sword.
Fergus, perhaps the only bullfighter ever to be gored in the brain, died silently. The sword raked a shallow gash long Moe’s loin.
In the sixth tier of the stands, saliva drooled from the slack mouth of the little man seated beside Stonecypher. “Now’s your chance, Illard!” the man squalled. “Be a hero! The last of the bullfighters! Kill him, Illard!”
Illard walked on shaking legs over bodies he did not see. He was short, for a killer, and growing bald. He picked up the sword Fergus had dropped, looked into the gory face of the bull, and toppled in the sticky sand. The sword quivered point-first beside his body.
RECESSIONAL
A WIND whipped down into Highland Bullring. Riding the wind, blacker than the clouds, the inquisitive turkey buzzard glided over the rim of the stands with air whistling through the spatulate feathers of rigid wings. The buzzard swooped a foot above Moe’s horns and soared swiftly over the opposite side of the ring.
That started the panic, although Moe’s charge accentuated it. He crashed into the sagging section of the barrier. Cloven hooves scraped the wooden inclined plane, and Moe stopped with front feet in the first tier of the stands. He bellowed.
The bull killed only one spectator, a man on whom he stepped. The hundreds who died killed themselves or each other. They leaped from the towering rim of the ring, and they jammed the exits in writhing heaps.
Moe’s precarious stance slipped. Slowly, he slid back into the ring, where Ringmaster Oswell, quivering in a red toga, gestured from the darkness under the stands. The fat man squeaked and waved. Moe’s charge embodied the genuine fighting rage of a maddened bull. The scarlet door closed behind him.
Stonecypher, with fists bloody and a heap of unconscious fear-crazed spectators piled before him, sat down. “Well, Moe,” he whispered, “I reckon you got even for a few of the bulls that’s been tortured to death to amuse a bunch of nuts. Maybe it wasn’t the right way to do it. I don’t know. If I’d only had the gun—”
Catriona turned a white mask of a face up to Stonecypher. “They killed him, in theah?”
“Sure. Bullfightin’ never was a sport. The bull can’t win. If he’s not killed in the ring, he’s slaughtered under the stands.
“You have moah smart-bulls, Stony.”
The black copter came in with the sunset and hovered over the sand. The face of Duelmaster Smith peered out under his black tam, while a hooded man, with pistols tattooed on his hand, aimed an automatic rifle. The duelmaster smiled at Stonecypher and cried, “You really should have waited until you were farther out in the Lake, before you dropped that little buzzer in the water.”
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2083 A.D.
William Morrison
Lending libraries have been known to make mistakes—but never one so potentially explosive as the time they sent Carrie the wrong volume.
IT SEEMED INCREDIBLE, thought Carrie Samason, that a simple postcard like that could have involved her in so much trouble. If it had been something important, like her getting a new hairdo, or rearranging the living room, or buying a new evening gown, she might have expected all sorts of perfectly amazing results to follow. But from the postcard and the fact that she had sent James instead of going herself, she expected nothing at all.
It had come, she remembered, that morning when she was so busy getting Barbara ready to go back to college. All those clothes to try on, and hems to let out and shoes to fit, and right in the middle of everything, “Dear Madam,” she was informed, “The Perfect Hostess by Wilhelmina Hoskins, which you reserved, is now being held for you. Please call for it within the next 48 hours.”
At first Mrs. Samason was annoyed. She had reserved the book three months before and her feeling of need for it had long since died away. Nevertheless, it occurred to her, a book which was in such demand that you had to wait three months for it must be pretty good. It wouldn’t hurt to take a look at it. She spoke to James about it, but he was only eleven and there was a baseball game in which he had to pitch and he didn’t have any time, and honest, Mom—
“Either you get that book for me or you don’t receive your allowance for next week,” she said firmly.
James got the book for her. But on the way home he stopped off to play baseball and when he finally arrived, she recalled, she hadn’t asked him about it.
The next morning she remembered it just as he was leaving for school. “I put it in the parlor, Mom,” said James and departed.
But she couldn’t find it in the parlor and there were so many things to do, like cleaning up the mess Barbara had left in her room and fixing the rips in James’ pants—she wondered if any other eleven-year-old on earth could rip so much so often—that she forgot all about it for a while.
It was as if there had been no postcard, no book. At least that was the way it was for a time.
Two days later, when Bill came home from work, he dumped himself into an easy chair and said, “Saw a funny thing today.”
“I had a letter at last from Barbara,” said Carrie absently, patting her hair into place and wondering what her husband would think of her if now, at the age of forty, she dyed her hair red.
Bill always told her that as a brunette she was both young-looking and pretty. The question was, would he tell her the same thing if she were a redhead? Probably not. Men were foolishly conservative about such things.
“Barbara said school supplies are very expensive this year,” she went on. “She wants more money.”
“It was really funny.” If she could ignore his conversation he could ignore hers right back. That was one of the unfortunate things, she realized, that marriage taught a man. “You know that vacant lot with the broken fence, where the kids play? Know who I saw playing baseball there today?”
“James, of course. But, Bill, Barbara said—”
“James was pitching. But you’ll never guess who was catching.”
Bill was being silly, just like the big baby he was. At his age, to think that a children’s baseball game was important! But she didn’t mind humoring him. She guessed, “That big puffy-faced boy from down the street, with the hair so blond it’s almost invisible?”
“No.” He leaned back, waiting for her to guess again.
“I’m sure I haven’t any idea who it was,” she said. “But does it matter? According to Barbara—”
“It was Reardon, the cop. You know, the one with the stomach.”
“Reardon?” She stared at him. “Why, he’s been chasing them off that lot every day. He hates kids. You must be mistaken.”
“I’m not mistaken. He was catching there, acting like a kid himself, when who should come along out of a police car but Lieutenant Puffinger from the local precinct.
Well, you should have heard him when he saw what Reardon was doing. I’ll bet those kids learned a few words they didn’t know before. It seems that Reardon hadn’t made his call from the street box and the cars were scouting around trying to find out what had become of him. And here he was playing baseball!”
“Imagine that!” said Carrie. But her heart was still elsewhere. She said, “Barbara says . . .”
So they talked of how much money to send’ Barbara. And Carrie thought that nobody could tell her how to manage a husband. You pretended to listen to him and whatever he said you let go in one ear and out the other, while you kept your mind on the really important thing. But she was to
remember Reardon later.
The next day there was a rumpus at the school. What happened there was even more incredible than the doings of Reardon. The local Superintendent was proud of his neatly operated educational system, and had set that date for showing around a group of distinguished visitors.
Neither the newspapers nor Carrie ever managed to get straight at exactly what point things had begun to go wrong. When they tried to trace the events of that day practically all the distinguished visitors, including two college presidents, the president of the Board of Education, a Professor of Educational Psychology and two heads of Normal Schools gave different and conflicting stories.
What did come out, however, was that all six visitors had distinguished themselves in a quite unexpected way. They had run around the school madly waving torches and yelling, “Down with school! Down with school! Burn the place down!”
The firemen had arrived in time to prevent much damage but the incendiaries had been rounded up only with great difficulty after school had been dismissed. The President of the Board of Education had beaten up the Superintendent and the two college presidents had ganged up on one of the hastily summoned policemen. Later on they could give no reason for why they had done so.
“It’s a crazy world,” thought Carrie wisely. “You never know what sort of lunatic you’ll run into next.” And then she put it out of her mind and turned to a more important problem. What could she have for dinner that night that would please Bill and not make him say, “You know I never eat spinach,”—or broccoli or her new sauce or whatever it was he was never eating that week?
All the same it didn’t surprise her greatly when Bill came home the day after and said, “You’ll never guess what happened at the office.”
“Somebody else went crazy.”
“Nobody went crazy. We all slept.”
