by Fritz Leiber
—African America by Booker T. Nkramah,
Tuskegee Institut do la Vudu et Technologic Librairie
The climbing moon silhouetted a spire and highlighted several others and also the three towers and slate roof of a vast building some 200 meters ahead. It looked to my scenery-trained eyes like a Gothic manse of old, specifically one of those fanciful carpenter’s Gothic edifices of the late nineteenth century in America, abristle with balconies, columns and fretwork of Moorish, Baroque and other manners too numerous to list.
Not a single window of the place showed light.
There were no lights between me and it, only a low, pale wall with an arch of triumph for admittance to the driveway.
The limousines had all doused their headlamps.
It struck me that the stage had been set, not for a president’s reception, but for a ghost story.
All it would have taken was one lighted window and a terrified beautiful girl in the foreground to make it the greatest of camp art.
As if he had caught my first thought, I heard Elmo, as he came up behind me, boom out with a little of his earlier free-and-easy, “That old miser Longhorn Elijah! He’ll whup half to death a maid who leaves on a 25-watter over an escalator or in a johh the instant someone has wiped himself. But soon as we pass the arch, Scully, the whole shebang'll light up like a veritable fairyland, I can tell you that.”
A discreet chuckle I recognized as Governor Lamar’s came from the figure approaching beside Elmo. He said, “Elmo puts it crudely, but it is true that President Austin is a thrifty old soul, providing a Simon-simple answer to those who accuse our officialdom of private prodigality. Well, sir, do you feel able to proceed afoot? I shouldn’t like for the sake of your dignity to see you make a Horizontal approach in a cat-wagon or stretcher, unless you feel it medically mandatory.”
“We’d drive you straight to the door,” Commander Hunt assured me, “but immemorial custom dictates that the prexy’s mansion be approached afoot by all and sundry.”
“Two of us’ll walk close beside you and support you, of course,” Sheriff Chase added. “hlmo, you take his right arm.”
“Nonsense, gentlemen, I am quite able to navigate ungrasped and erect on my trusty exo-legs,” I replied lightly, keeping out of my voice the gust of indignation I felt at this further evidence that they considered me a hospital patient.
And with that I stepped out toward the dark mansion. Elmo stayed beside me, but fortunately for his ribs, which would have got a titanium dig, he did not attempt to touch me.
Professor Fanninowicz came hurrying up on my other side, fumbling with wires and chattering, “Sir, for the sake of science may I attach electrodes to — ”
“No!” I rapped out.
“But may I not at least accompany you and observe—”
“Yes, but hands off!”
The dark figures which had emerged from the leading limousines parted for us. I noted that they wore dark uniforms which included knee-boots and black slouch hats and that they were armed with heavy laser-carbines. Ancient shell rifles or even antique powder-and-ball muskets would have seemed more appropriate ceremonial weapons to match Hunt’s and Chase’s swords. But then I remembered what Rachel had told me of her father's efforts to introduce an actual glacier into Wilder’s Japanese-delicate Skin of Our Teeth. Hunt’s rangers, I decided as we passed them, were lucky they had not been made to tote ceremonial atomic bombs.
Then Governor Lamar, stepping uncomfortably close behind me, almost on my heels, called out softly but carryingly, “Everyone move very slowly now! We don’t want to hurry Senor La Cruz or cause him to strain his satellite-enfeebled Heart.”
That did it. As if hearts did not have to work well and efficiently in free fall merely to supply tissues with oxygen and other nutriment! Tissues such as the cerebrum, of which I now bet we spacefolk had twice the volume of these bumbling Texans! All butt and no brain, like dinosaurs!
I stepped out at my fastest, taking giant strides, my hood and cloak flapping behind me. In almost no time Elmo and Fanninowicz were panting. Such was my rage that I ignored my surroundings, not pausing to ponder the function of the trenches we were now passing, nor of the slitted walls of thick metal on their mansion-side edges, nor even of the dim figures crouched behind those walls.
But I did catch the gasping Fanninowicz attaching an electrode to my pelvic girdle. He already had one affixed to my shoulder yoke. The fine insulated wires faintly rattled against the drive behind us. Since he couldn’t measure my body electricity, he was evidentally hoping to find some in my exoskeleton. I jerked the attachments loose and struck his hands away with a blow of my wrist-plate that got out of him an, “Aiii! Teufel! Gottverdammter Knochen-Mensch!”
“For Weedin’ Jesus’ sake, take it easy, Scully,” Elmo pled between puffs. “We’re gonna get there soon enough. And you know, even he didn't exactly race up Golgotha.”
Deaf to the cannotative and allusive significance in his words, I was busy planning my entrance speech, which began something like, “I'm sorry to have outdistanced my Texas escort, Your Sublime Excellency, but such was my eagerness and such their excess of adipose tissue — well, one must admit, Prexy, that some of them sweat a mite easy. I submit in all humility that at least the Texas Rangers ought to keep in a little better physical trim. Of course with someone as courtly and delicate as Governor Lamar . .
I was darkly pleased to note that there were no longer footsteps behind us, even distant ones. The three of us were entering the shadow of the manse now. And as we passed under the great arch-way with its ghostly bas-reliefs of guns, snorting horses, dead Indians and the like, even Fanninowicz began to fall back, was gone.
Elmo panted, “One thing I want to tell you, Scully, and I really mean it this time, you’re a true Texan of the Raven-Alama breed. I’m proud to have known you.” He grasped my hand with such obvious spontaneity and sincerity that I had no impulse to strike it aside. Then he too was gone.
I took two furious strides more, then began to slow down halfway through the third. My brain was starting to work again, just a corner of it.
Two scarlet beams sprang from the dark grounds, sizzling past me to either side. I smelt the reek of ions. I heard spluttering, crackling splashes behind me.
Turning, I saw the two laser beams scattering gouts of white-hot molten stone from the bases of the triumphal arch. Dimly I saw Fanninowicz rolling away, wrapped by his wires, behind the shelter of the pale wall. At least he had temporarily escaped the laser's light-stiletto. Of Elmo I saw no sign.
Then from corners of the manse and grounds a dozen lights blazed on me — white lights so bright and hot I thought for a moment I was being disintegrated. If I hadn’t had practice from childhood in avoiding looking directly at spotlights I’d have been blinded.
The lights didn’t reveal a fairyland, unless you count toy soldiers four and a half feet high as such.
The grounds were crowded with the shielded emplacements of laser and lightning-guns and other heavy weaponry. They were manned by barefoot Mexicans wearing brass cuirasses and brass helmets with colorful horsehair plumes. And all the guns were pointed straight at me.
The natural thing, especially for me, would have been to run like hell. It was pure rage that held me titanium-rooted — rage at Lamar and the rest for having maneuvered me into this sitting-duck position, for using me as some sort of stalking horse in their war against President Austin, rage at myself for having dismissed them as bumblers and letting them convince me so easily of the untruth of Elmo’s earlier tales.
I’d be damned if I’d let those bulky bastards — by now all safely crouched in the outside trenches, their trenches — see me run.
And still I wasn’t shot down, though both Elmo and Fanninowicz had been fired on. Like their guns, the Mexican soldiers were staring wide-eyed at me — my tall and thin black form, my doubtless dazzling exoskeleton.
It was then I got the glimmer of inspiration and acted
on it instantly. Raising my arms wide and high, so that all of my cloak was thrown back and my exoskeleton completely in view, I thundered at my loudest, “I am Death! Yo soy la Muerta! Soy el Esqueleto! Vamoose!” Then I brought my arms together and waved them horizontally apart, as if brushing all the brass-armored bent-backs off the stage.
They wavered. One ran. A silver-helmeted officer drew a bead on him with a pistol and was himself zizzlingly transfixed on the red laser beam of one of his own soldiers.
Then they were all in flight, and I was tramping straight forward again, straight up the stairs leading to the spacious porch and the manse’s double doors. These slowly opened outward at my approach, revealing that they were backed by great thicknesses of steel.
I faced another curve of muzzles and of silver-armored, staring, bent-back soldiery. I scattered them as I had those outside and I followed them, still at my remorseless steady stride. I was beginning thoroughly to enjoy my role of Death, the Disperser of Armies. Then I realized I was doing exactly what Lamar and Company had wanted me to, winning them a bloodless battle. Even that didn’t at once destroy my delight.
Then I saw ahead of me a semicircle of glass cases ten feet high. There were at least twenty of them.
I halted. Striking with all his fabled cunning and genius for the unexpected, Death had after a fashion stopped me.
Each of the cases contained a life-size human figure in natural flesh tones and with Terran clothing that ranged in style over the last 150 years. The earliest or oldest were about six feet tall. Then as the eye ranged around the semicircle, they grew in height to eight feet and more.
I recognized the Americans Kennedy and Johnson from my history prints. I realized I was looking at the presidents of Texas.
They looked grimly back at me — some old, some middle-aged, some almost young. There were handsome faces, harsh faces, faces jowled and tiny-eyed with dissipation and greed.
In the dimness they seemed alive. I felt sure the earliest were wax. I was not so sure about the latter. I recalled how the early Russians had mummified the bodies or at least stuffed the hides of their early illustrious dead.
Then I heard a rasping voice and looked up.
Four or five stories above me was a magnificent domed skylight of stained glass, made darkly colorful by the moonlight it transmitted. Curving down from beneath it in a wide and graceful spiral came a stairway railed with dark, delicate metal tracery. Here at least was a glimpse of fairyland.
And also an ogre from same. An ogre from whose quilted bathrobe a jowled and purplish face protruded, inset with pig eyes and topped by tousled white hair and wearing askew a golden wreath. He leaned over the stair railing about a floor and a half above me, cradling in one be-blanketed arm an antique double-barreled shotgun.
“Whar are my Mexican houseboys?” he roared. “Wh'ar are you, you little skunks? They’s an attack? Shoot down every Ranger or other rebellious bein’ sets foot inside mah’ walls! Get the man with the base bullhorn! Whar’s my praetorian guard? Sound the trumpet! Ah, thar’s one of the assassins sent against me, skinny bastard in a black minji suit, but it don’t hide him from mah' all-seein’ eyes!”
I lunged rapidly sideways under the stairs. The parquetted spot on which I’d been standing was blasted. Two ricochets stung my forehead and side while at least one more plinked off my exoskeleton. A glass case rang.
I raced toward the back of the manse, taking the avenue of retreat the silver-cuirassed Mexicans had used. Soon I had plunged into a dark, rather narrow, blessedly protective corridor. Behind me, President Austin’s voice ranted, “Dead as a doornail, dead! Come on, you traitors all and taste the Old Man’s wrath. Sound the alarum bell!”
Then a younger voice cut in. “There he is! Burn him down! But don’t spoil his face! Get the other!”
There was another shotgun blast, a scream, then even my corridor was red as hell with leaked laser light — just in time to show me, before collision did, that the corridor abruptly changed from a height of about fourteen feet to four and a half. The head space carried a moral so simple and carved so large that I had read it before the red light faded:
WATCH OUT,
ANYONE WHO’S TALL!
MEXES, AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU’RE SMALL?
I was on my hands and exoknees as fast as I could fall and scuttling forward. True, the “Get the other!” might not mean me, and even if it did, the “get” might not mean “burn down,” but then again it might — and I had already in the past two minutes learned something of Texas political acumen.
I heard a dull crash behind — Austin’s body falling? Don’t ask useless questions. Crawl faster, you idiot Thin!
I do not know how long my quadruped scramble through the darkness lasted, surely much less time than it seemed then. I do know that I made an even number of right-angle turns and, by exercising choice at forks, managed to make as many left as right-hand turns, ensuring that I was headed at the end in the same direction I had been at the beginning. Twice I half crawled, half tumbled down short stairs and once climbed up. More than once I gave thanks to Diana that my hands were horny palmed, that knee-plates covered my kneecaps and that my motors kept purring happily. I thanked her too that I had practiced crawling as well as walking, up in the centrifuge. I also gained a certain respect for the maze-running abilities of the Mexicans, who, surely often carrying trays of drinks and food, had presumably regularly treaded these inky corridors in the manse of the light-penurious Austin. Or had they used flashlights? Somehow that seemed unlikely, but I wished I had one now.
From time to time an action insulated corner of my mind thought thoughts: such as that the morale of the Rangers must be zero that they hadn’t overwhelmed the manse by themselves, but waited for the accident of my aid. But maybe it had been essential to keep the political war secret and not destroy this Texas White House.
As I right-angled right after a particularly long stretch of Mexican corridor, I heard a thumping scuttling behind me. A thin blue beam narrowly missed my withdrawing foot, and there was the faint smell of singed plastic where it struck the wall.
A voice rebuked, “Cut your power, you dumb-headed lightning plumber! Order is to paralyze him, not fry him — less we have to.”
I was not greatly reassured.
Thereafter I kept hearing the sounds of my pursuit. It did not gain on me. I was grimly pleased that my motored titanium was performing as well as their flesh.
Suddenly the ceiling rose. I was in a large room dimly lit by moon light coming through windows and open Texan and Mexican doors. Food-smell and round hanging shapes suggested a kitchen. I lifted to my feet, feeling a surge of dizziness and weakness, but I mastered them, tonguing down pills and water. I made for the Texan door in great strides, crashing down pots and cutlery. I heard angry calls from the crawl space behind, but I was out of line with it.
I stepped outside. I was on a narrow porch and at the head of a steep flight of stairs. I heard an equine snort and a low chilling laugh — and I stopped.
A few yards beyond the foot of the stairs stood a huge white horse with black harness and silver-looking bit and harness rings. Astride it was a figure all in black, from under whose black slouch hat silvery hair cascaded.
Then Rachel Vachel’s face lifted out of shadow and in a blur of movement her black-gauntleted hands drew lightning pistols from the black holsters at her side and directed them toward me.
I had never faced, it seemed to me, anything icy as their needle muzzles and her gaze. Of course, I told myself bitterly, she had been in on my betrayal from the start, casually using her seemingly naive wiles to brainwash me and soften me up for her father. I ought to have known you couldn’t ever trust a society pinko. I tasted bitterness, and not only from an anti gray pill that had been slow in going down.
I heard rapid steps behind me — two sets of them — and cries of, “There’s the black bastard!” “We got him! — don’t move a muscle, Skinnyf” My arms were grasped from behind,
and a sharp muzzle pressed against my temple.
Then with only the faintest whisper of ionization and only its most ghostly acid perfume, two tenuous needle-beams sprang from the tips of Rachel Vachel’s pistols and bypassed my cheeks inches to either side.
The grip on my arms relaxed: the muzzle ceased to prick my temple, and there were soft yet ponderous thuds on the porch to either side of me.
“Greetings, Captain Skull,” she called up to me. “Now hustle down fast and hop up behind me. Those two Rangers are out for a half hour, but even with the morons opposing us, it’s a sin to waste time.”
Suppressing surprise and other emotions for the moment, I took the stairs two steps at a time, watching my feet narrowly, but calling back, “You mean we can escape? The Rangers haven’t the manse encircled?”
“Hell, no. Like all Texas wars, this little scuffle’s been all false front. Kick up your leg now and give a jump with the other. I’ll yank your shoulder.”
“But Rachel,” I asked as I complied and found myself astride quivering horseflesh and my exo-sternum pressed to girl, “How did you know you’d find me here? How did you guess your father would use me to —”
“Easy as guessin’ a rat’ll bite,” she answered scornfully. “Now wrap your arms around me. All you got to do is figure out the sneakiest, safest course, and you got Daddy's mind read to the base of his spinal chord. See, I even stole your luggage and got it at my saddlebow. How's that for service?”
She turned in her saddle. Her pale, thinly, smiling face was close to mine. “Now confess, Scully,” she said. “Aren’t you just a mite surprised to discover that the silly little theater gal and giggly Governor’s daughter is in actuality Our Lady of Sudden Death, the Black Madonna of the Bent-Back Underground?”
