A Specter Is Haunting Texas

by Fritz Leiber

  Meanwhile Elmo was calling to my vest-pocket Carmen, “Well, it’s about time, Kookie. You better have those reefers, or I’ll turn you up and tan your Persian-rose-petal hide. Oh Scully, this is La Cucaracha, one of my sociable secretaries. Kookie, this is my bosom friend Scully from outer space. Treat him as you would the President of Texas before he went crackers.”

  Ignoring these rude and boisterous, though apparently well meant remarks, I stepped out swiftly and reached my dark lovely one in three long strides and bowed until my hooded face was level with hers. Considering I had no knees at the time, it was a remarkable performance, putting my black-shrouded butt a couple of feet higher than my head. My myoelectricity was tuning my stiff-kneed exoskeleton to perfection. It was truly a grand gesture, executed with ultimate poise and panache.

  Thrusting a hand from my cloak, I plucked hold of her dainty one as if it were a dark orchid — and it was, ah velvet-surfaced, manipulative multi-wand!

  “Senorita Cockroach sublima,” I rumbled throatily (and even the muted thunder of my rumble didn’t faze her). “I am Christopher Crockett La Cruz, totally at your service!” And I drew the captured bloom into my hood and showered kisses on it.

  She, in the intervals of a flattered laugh and with much rippling of long black eyelashes, whispered toward my ear in a voice very fast and businesslike, though tender, “At moonrise tonight, amado. At the bandstand corner of the cemetery, querido mio. Until then — silencio!”

  It is the proper function of woman to attend to the practical details of affairs of the heart.

  Assured by her words that I was not only loved but desired, I put into my obediently whispered, Si, si, si! the hiss of a love-struck micrometeorite whizzing through the self-sealing duraplast of one of the eggs forming the Sack.

  Then I returned her hand to her with a flourish, un-jackknifed to normal height and turned toward the others.

  I felt as if I had just magnificently rendered one of Hamlet’s soliloquies or Cyrano’s tirades and the applause was about to break from the doubly-curving walls of our free-fall theater-in-the-sphere in the largest bubble of the Sack. An inner voice said, “Stop your skulking masquerade, Scully-Christopher. Show yourself fully to these miserable earthlings and your dainty beloved.”

  With a Dracula batwing swirl, I threw back my black cloak and hood, flashing their scarlet linings, and waited for the gasps of admiration.

  Suzy wailed, “Holy Halloween!”, vanished her large blue irises upward and fainted. As he caught her, Bill yelled, “What’d I tell you? — he’s got power-armor!” While the three dwarfs jumped backward and, I do believe, would have dashed in terror from the room except that Elmo readied behind him and neatly collared them, meanwhile scowling at me incredulously. One of the captured dwarfs quavered, “La Muerte Alto!” Another gasped, “El Espectro!” While the third stuttered, “El Esqueleto!”

  Being called a tall death, a specter and a skeleton irked me greatly. To have people scared of one (unless the part calls for it) when one is a fine, loving chap and for lagniappe a great actor is most irritating.

  But before saying anything cutting, anything with acid in it, I put myself in their places and rapidly looked at me.

  They were looking, I discovered, at a handsome, shapely, dramatic-featured man 8 feet 8 inches tall and massing 147 pounds with and 97 pounds without his exoskeleton. Except for relaxed tiny bulges of muscle in forearms and calves (latter to work lengthy toes, useful in gripping), this man was composed of skin, bones, ligaments, fasciae, narrow arteries and veins, nerves, small-size assorted inner organs, ghost muscles and a big-domed skull with two bumps of jaw muscle. He was wearing a skin-tight black suit that left bare only his sunkencheeked, deep-eyed, beautiful tragic face and big, heavy-tendoned hands.

  This truly magnificent, romantically handsome, rather lean man was standing on two corrugated-soled titanium footplates. From the outer edge of each rose a narrow titanium beam that followed the line of his leg, with a joint (locked now) at the knee, up to another joint with a titanium pelvic girdle and shallow belly support. From the back of this girdle a T spine rose to support a shoulder yoke and rib cage, all of the same metal. The rib cage was artistically slotted to save weight, so that curving strips followed the line of each of his very prominent ribs.

  A continuation of his T spine up the back of his neck in turn supported a snug, gleaming head-basket that rose behind to curve over his shaven cranium, but in front was little more than a jaw-shelf and two inward-curving cheek-plates stopping just short of his somewhat rudimentary nose. The nose is not needed in Circumluna to warm or cool air.)

  Slightly lighter T beams than those for his legs reinforced his arms and housed in their terminal inches his telescoping canes. Numerous black, foam-padded bands attached this whole framework to him.

  A most beautiful prosthetic, one had to admit. While to expect a Thin, or even more a Fat, from a free-fall environment to function without one on a gravity planet or in a centrifuge would be the ultimate in cornball ignorance.

  Eight small electric motors at the principle joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables riding in the angles of the T beams, much like antique dentists’ drills were worked, I’ve read. The motors were controlled by myoelectric impulses from his ghost-muscles, transmitted by sensitive pick-ups buried in the foam-padded bands. They were powered by an assortment of isotopic and lithium-gold batteries nesting in his pelvic and pectoral girdles.

  Did this fine man look in the least like a walking skeleton? — I demanded of myself outragedly! Well, yes, very much so, I had to admit now that I had considered the matter from the viewpoint of strangers. A very handsome and stylish skeleton, all silver and black, but a skeleton none the less and one eight feet eight inches tall, able to look down a little even at the giant Texans around him.

  I realized now that my anger and my inability to see myself as others see me had been because Father and Mother had found nothing morbid or eerie about me in my new, silvery anti-grav prosthetic — nor had the Longhairs who had constructed it for me in return for free performances of Hamlet, Macbeth and Manhattan Project, two jam-sessions and one “Dance of the Seven Veils” by Idris McIllwraith, the Sack’s perennial sex star, who is a Thin like me and looks like the ancient High-fashion model Teeny (Twilly? Twiggy?) drastically slimmed down, yet has much appeal. I ask her once a month to marry me, but although granting occasional favors, she refuses me always on the silly grounds that she is thrice my age. Who dies in free fall?

  I glanced down at my newer love, the sublime La Cucaracha, and she was gazing up at me and my exoskeleton with as fond approval as my parents and with something spicy added. But when I made to bow to her again and perhaps hear more exciting whispers about our coming rendezvous, she twinkle-toed away, drawing from a fancy pack a long, very thin, pale brownish cigarette.

  “Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz,” Elmo meanwhile hailed me from where he stood talking with Bill, while still collaring the three dwarfs. Suzy had sat up from her faint and was looking at me with a thin-lipped disapproval, which I connected with the attentions I had showered on La Cucaracha.

  “That Crockett’s a good Texas handle,” Elmo continued. “Deepens my friendship for you, boy. Anyhow, Scully, I been considering your problems. There’s a northbound cargo jet loading might lift you to Amarillo Cuchillo, but she mayn’t take off for a week — we Texans conduct our commerce in a relaxed fashion. So Bill Here has agreed to release you into my custody, and you and I are going to pay a little visit on the Governor of Texas, Texas — and what he can’t expedite, nobody else can even budge.

  “Besides, it ain’t every day we get a spaceman. Governor bound to want to hear the gossip about the long-interdicted lands in the sky. Who can tell, they might turn out to be far-flung fragments of Texas.

  “Scully, you can’t refuse — you’re going to experience Texas hospitality if I have to tie you up and have my greasers lug you.

  “Now jump for
his baggage, you black-hearted little conquistadores, or I’ll sell you for cyborgs!” He released the three bent-backs, while to my darling he called, “Light me that stick now, Kookie, pronto, or I’ll return your wardrobe to the theater man for refund, all but one Medieval onion sack.”

  I hate to be pushed around, especially by big-brotherly shoves, nor did I care for the language Elmo directed at my new nymph, but his proposition seemed the best for me. Especially since I did not intend to leave Dallas before getting my gravity legs and — Eros ensure! — keeping my moon-cued rendezvous. For even now as the little one grasped Elmo’s wide belt, nimbly vaulted onto his slightly-bent, huge thigh and hung the smoldering slim cigarette on his long loose lip, she gave a quick conspiratorial smile and eyelash-ripple, telling of impending raptures.

  Elmo took a long fluttering inhalation of marijuana vapor, his eyes going first glassy, then fever-bright as he called out, “Now forward hop, you greasers all! Come on, Scully, let’s skedaddle.”

  The three dwarfs now each carried a black, silver-banded cushion-case containing chiefly my food concentrates and spare batteries, my winter clothing and wigs. They still snatched fearful glances at me. As I followed Elmo toward the ten-foot door, they marched throug the shorter door, each of the three barely missing bumping his head on the lintel, while my brunette darling scampered through behind them, her head held high.

  Why their backs were variously bent, and hers not at all, was instantly clear to me.

  The enormity of the revelation, plus my hunting for vector-changes in the centrifuge’s floor and still not finding them, must have caused mo to take short, shuffling steps with my temporarily kneeless five-foot legs, for Elmo looked back and exclaimed, “Scully son, you’re walking like the first time on stilts, or like you got paresis. Maybe our Mexican door sort of startled you. It’s one of those charming, deeply-mused Texan customs that make our glorious way of life possible. You see, Scully, a man can’t feel really free unless he’s got a lot of underfolk to boss around. That’s one of the great paradoxes of liberty, first discovered by those proto-Texans, the ancient Greeks, who had slaves to burn, though I don’t think they actually burnt them much until Nero’s day or maybe till the discovery of gasoline, which permitted deep-south lynching bees and Buddhist immolations alike.

  “Incidentally, Scully, I’d appreciate it if you’d button up that cloak of yours and resume your hood. Mexes are superstitious little buggers. Even when cyborged, their odd primitive fears short-circuit through. I got my three boys calmed temporarily — and La Kook’s a cool little bitc’ — but I wouldn’t want you causing a riot in Dallas. History proves that the first time a man goes down the streets of Dallas, anything can happen to him, frequently bad.”

  I complied with his suggestion, but made no verbal retort, contenting myself with giving him a grim look, sucking in my cheeks to increase the skull-like appearance of my head and stepping out after him recklessly.

  “A vigorous paresis, I got to admit,” He commented.

  Ahead of him another pair of doors began to slide open, letting in sunny brightness and flashes of movement; and I braced myself for transition from centrifugal force to gravity.

  Table of Contents

  - II -

  DALLAS, TEXAS, TEXAS

  I teetered into blazing sunlight and a huge scene that was whirling around with me twenty times a minute, one full revolution every three seconds for the dozens of Texas giants I now saw, the hundreds of glass-and-metal living volumes, the thousands of rapidly moving Mexicans — most of these with massive metal collars from which rose small antennas — and even the blue sky, the marshmallow clouds and the blinding sun.

  The entire universe had become a vast centrifuge, and I one mote spinning near its center, an axis a dozen yards above my head. I staggered and reeled on my stilt-legs, waiting for the sky to burst and the cosmos to rip apart from the incredible centrifugal forces.

  When the scientific, engineering and paramilitary communites of the international mega-satellite Circumluna were ordered to carry World War 3 into space, they refused, relying on their charters from the United Nations. In desperation and reprisal, the warring powers below repudiated the United Nations, clapped embargoes on all shipments of food, fuels, metals, medicines and other supplies to Circumluna and outlawed their rebellious nationals there. The Circumlunans, who effectually controlled the space fleets end were on the verge of achieving a self-sufficient economy based on raw materials from the Moon, declared their independence. This action of “the Longhairs” was enthusiastically received by the even longer-haired space-vagabonds — originally hippies, beatniks, mods, dropouts, stilyagi, actors, writers, pachukos, apaches, gypsies and other quaintly styled rebels—parasitic on (or symbiotic with; accounts differ) the respectable Circumlunans and living in their hive of duraplastio bubble homes pendant on Circumluna and known as the Sack. For five generations there was no commerce and little communication between Terra and Circumluna, due to the latter’s focus on survival and to the cultural upheavals and impoverished economy below after World War 3 killed its billion and fizzled out. When the Interdict, as it came to be called, was lifted one hundred years later, the first Circumlunans and "Sackabonds" to plumb the gyavity well and visit Earth were a surprise to its inhabitants, but the centuries-alienated space-folk found Terra a still greater shock.

  —Mother. Earth, Father Space: A Short History of Circumluna, by John Washington and Ivan Alapin.

  Then I realized my error, and the scene stopped spinning with a suddenness that almost knocked me down.

  What I had been interpreting as centrifugal force back in the room muraled with Indians and Texans had been only normal Earth gravity.

  I learned in that instant that you can endlessly explain to a person who’s lived all his life in free fall that human senses cannot distinguish between the effects of acceleration, with which he’s familiar, and gravity, of which he’s had no experience. You can tell him that until your voice fails. No matter, he’ll still go on believing that gravity will feel different, that it will grab him with invisible gluey fingers, that it will have in it the taint of unimaginable cubic miles of soil, rock, magma, incandescent core-material, and other dirty planetary horrors.

  I no sooner had been experience-educated out of one illusion than I became the victim of another: I felt I had returned to airless space.

  When a man who has lived all his life in a null-grav satellite, a large but limited homeland of many rooms, steps outdoors for the first time on a planet, one of his strongest immediate reactions is to hold his breath. Not from wonder and amazement, though they are there, but because the only comparable situation he knows is that of a man plunged into the vastness of space without an air supply. Ignoring the ground under his feet and the gravs pressing him to it, he will automatically see the unbounded sky as vacuum and any building around him as pressurized volumes to which he must win his way in seconds, or die. I held my breath.

  But I did not run, or — the actual impulse, to follow which would have resulted in my barking my nose on Texas — launch myself in an intended straight-line trajectory at the nearest window or door. Perhaps my first bit of experience-education made the second come quicker. Though still staggering about, I exhaled violently and forced myself to draw a lungful of the soupy air, stinkier now that we were outside. Besides discovering that I was in anything but vacuum, I also realized the explanation for my deep voice. All my life, even in the Tsiolkovsky, I had been breathing a light oxygen-helium mix with small amounts of carbon dioxide and water vapor. Now I was subsisting on a thick witch’s brew of the same oxygen, but stewed in gravity’s pressure-cooker with nitrogen and assorted taints. A heavier atmosphere, a deeper voice. As obvious as that — but only after it’s happened to you.

  I looked around and down, to see that under La Cucaracha’s directions Elmo’s three servants had dropped my bags and were circling me as I reeled, ready to break my fall when I finally toppled.

  El
mo called back cheerily, “You drunk, partner? Didn’t know the super-refreshing open air of Texas was that intoxicating to the uninitiated. I forget you’re a Sackabond, reared on a little denatured oxygen and perfume.” As I steadied myself, a whole gaggle of new little Mexicans came scurrying all around me, a couple of the tiniest ones even tugging at my cloak, and most of them calling up to me, “Benediga nosotros, padre!” They were a raggedy, colorful lot, chiefly women and children, and none of them, praise Diana, wore those disgusting metal neck-and-shoulder pieces.

  I’m enough of an actor to adlib any role I’m thrust into, so I stuck two fingers out of my cloak, made a squiggle with them, and rumbled benignly, “Benedicite, mis ninos y ninas,” adding for good measure, “Bless you, my children.”

  It seemed natural enough for them to mistake me with my robe and hood for a tall priest or monk, maybe a Black Franciscan.

  My ready response to their request seemed to satisfy them fully, for they were already scampering off when Elmo boomed, “Get away from the Godman before you trip him with your rosaries, you church-struck little greasers! Scully, you’re a card, but we got to make tracks for the Governor’s ranch house. Are you over your dizziness enough to ride a horse?”

  I was about to respond, “Yes, of course. You think I’m a sissy, hombre?” when a feeling of dizziness and weakness did strike me. A steady six lunagravs and assorted startlements had been getting in their licks on my somewhat delicate physiology. My heart was pounding as it pumped blood to my brain — no small job, considering my height and the gravs. I also was glad I was wearing an extra-snug Sack-suit, to help my leg veins from going varicose and maybe even popping as they pushed blood up that weary distance from my toes.