by Fritz Leiber
Taking advantage of the dope I’d got from Kookie, I pantomimed a bill collector walking up to the tall door of White Texas, rapping on it authoritatively (footplate stamps, hidden by my cloak, providing the noise), pounding on it when that got no answer, and finally telling the one who opened it, “Senor Gringo, I intend to stand here, to your great shame, until you have made payment in full — aye, and in double measure, running over — to each and every noble Mexican, noble Indian, and noble Negro alive or dead!”
As the applause for that act faded, I turned slowly on my audience with a great pointing finger that took them all in. The red of my cloak had entirely vanished, I was all black and silver again. Leaning toward them confidentially, with the effect of elbow on knee and chin in palm, and driving home my points with slow forefinger-shakes of my other hand, I said in my deepest voice, “You laugh. You enjoy yourselves. That is well . . . now. But you and I, comrades, know we will never get anywhere at all by standing at the door and asking, or even demanding. Never did even a husband get his wife by such behavior. You and I know we must burst down that door and seize what is ours by right. You and I, old comrades of the Revolution, know we must fight, that we must risk death and if necessary deal death for our aims.”
Suddenly I was no longer Christopher Crockett La Cruz, juvenile leading man of the Theater of the Sphere. I was no longer a gangling and sexstruck spaceling caught up in a perilous but ridiculous Terran bru-haha. No, I was Cassius working on the noble Brutus. I was Sam Adams inciting puritanic rowdies called Sons of Liberty to perpetrate the famous floating tea party. I was Camille Desmoulins demanding the storming of the Bastille. I was Danton roaring for the head of Louis XVI. I was John Brown forging the sword of Abolition. I was Lenin telling the wavering Congress of Soviets, “We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!” I was Comrade Mao beginning the Long March. I was Malcolm X founding Black Nationalism. I was Senator Whatshisname rising to demand a vote of censure against that administration’a war policy in Vietnam —
What I said was, “Comrade, you outnumber your oppressors ten to one, and now you have my help from beyond the grave. True, your oppressors are bigger than you, taller than you, and they possess engines of infinite power. But they are big with the soft bigness of men whose bodies have outgrown their untried, unforged courage and conscience. Outside they are tall, but within they are pygmies, moved only by vanity and greed, knowing nothing of true want, which is the mother of all true feeling. While no engine is as powerful as the man who seizes and controls it.
“Have you never seen a man sweating and writhing, struck down by bite of scorpion or spider smaller far than he? Mighty armies have been conquered by invisible bacteria. Comrades, your foes are few, and they have been weakened by sloth, greed, and corruption. Be you as scorpions and spiders! Now is the time to strike!”
There was a hiss of surprise behind me. So I was startling my colleagues too? So much the better!
I stood tall again, eerie and distant, yet my comrades friend. Now I was Frankenstein’s monster, I was Danton on trial, I was Lazarus returned, I was Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, I was the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, dismounted.
“Comrades,” I pronounced, “only you and I know the great gap between talking and action, between words and deeds. Only minutes ago, I amused you by pretending to eat the heads of some of the puny great ones of Texas. That was funny, I trust — good theater, as we say — and also, I hope, a prophecy now for something that is not theater.”
“But only short hours ago I laid my hand on the shoulder of President Austin of-Texas, and he died. The Longhorn dictator is dead! I ate him. That is a fact — fact like the death of a child or of a cockroach crushed underfoot.”
Now I heard footsteps behind me, but I ignored them, determined to finish my serious pitch, driving it home as forcefully as I had my comedy.
“Comrades, it is one of my qualities that I can eat — and eat and eat — without ever becoming less hungry or growing a grain fatter. Death is never sated. Be you like me! Arise, destroy, feast. If in doing this you die yourselves, you only cross to my side of the fence and from there continue the battle. So you are invulnerable. My hand is forever over you — in comradeship and love. Let our watchword be: Vengeance and Death!”
I liked that so much I repeated it, this time with a falling, rumbling inflection like lights being turned off. “Vengenza e Muerta!”
I calculated there would be five seconds of stunned silence, then ragged cheers growing to a roar.
I got exactly three of those first seconds — genuine stunned silence, all right.
Then great searchlights trumpeted on from all around, shaking us with high-pitched violet-white light that pulsed in an A-wave rhythm, disordering the brains, scanning mechanism and fragmenting vision.
Bullhorns and sirens glared on blindingly, shaking us with dazzling white noise which raced up and down from the scream of a billion billion bats to gut-loosening, fear-enforcing subsonics.
Only my theatrical training kept us from being incapacitated by this synthetic assault, which lasted ten seconds. I hit the floor and closed eyes and ears for that period.
The sixth-of-a-minute pandemonium hid the ponderous tread of huge horses closing in on my audience saddle-to-saddle on three sides, leaving open only the way back to Greaser town.
Then the darkly hooded Texans riding those horses cracked out simultaneously their long electric whips. In a great semicircle flashed the blue sparks of high voltage, low amperage. The fringes of my audience shrieked and writhed.
I turned around. Except for one figure besides myself, the bandstand was empty. The footsteps I had earlier heard had been my comrades of the Revolution taking a powder; El Toro, Father Francisco, Guchu, who had cried me on, La Cucaracha, who had proclaimed herself my eternal beloved, and all the other loyal ones whose names I hadn’t had time to learn.
The one exception was Rachel Vachel. She was sitting in her chair, arms folded across her chest, gazing at me a cold question which I could not decipher.
I was glad that at least one had not fled. But why, I had to ask myself, wasn’t she using her lightning pistols, or at least standing at my side?
Beyond her, more horsemen and at least one large vehicle were closing in on the bandstand.
Shouts and screams behind me made me turn again. What I saw paralyzed most of me, so I could only stand there, moving eyes and head.
They say actors are always playing parts, even in private life, that they can never truly feel. This one can. Now, expressing it in no fashion at all and so for no one’s benefit but my own, I was simultaneously racked by exultation, horror and shame.
My audience was attacking the Texans. They were scrabbling about for rocks — fragments of aged-cracked tombstones, I suppose — and occasionally finding and hurling one. A few had managed to get past the whips and were clubbing at horses’ legs and snatching at stirruped ankles. I watched while two of them were cut sizzlingly in half by the red beams of laser pistols. Three of them got hold of a whip by its insulated sectien and yanked on it while another Mex pushed upward the booted foot of the rider, toppling him from his saddle. They raced screeching to stomp him.
Yes, my audience was mounting an attack. And it was clear from my first glimpse of it that it had no chance whatever of success. Only two Rangers were in trouble, while over their hooded heads, the mouths of large weapons quested forward like swaying snakes.
And all this while members and groups of my audience — no of this mad revolutionary mob — were shouting, sometimes with hand outstretched toward me, my dreadful, melodramatic watchword. “Vengenza e Muerta!”
Believe me, each utterance of that idiot phrase struck me like a lash. I, and I alone, had caused these dark-faced, dwarfish fools to fight, to suffer real wounds, even to die, instead of running off safe — for it had been shown that the Texans’ whips, at first at least, had been set only to shock and pain, not to kill or even stun.
/> I could no more have cried them on now than I could kill my father. Yet my mere motionless presence was causing them to keep up the hopeless battle, was sending more of them to their deaths. And my presence was in no way due to courage, but only shock and sheer stupidity. Yet so long as I stood there, I was their black flag, driving them on, forbidding retreat. Why, I had even promised the poor fools deathlessness, as the Old Man of the Mountains had the Hashishin. Oh, why hadn’t my comrades told me that the play was over and I must run with them? Why had they left the ignorant actor to suffer or at least view the consequences of his vaunting performance? Perhaps even now I should try to call off the little morons dying and suffering agonies around me.
I might have tried it, but at that moment several actual lashes struck me, and I was enveloped in a cloud of blue sparks and ozone.
But I was neither killed, paralyzed, pained, or set awrithing. I felt only a slight tingling.
Since my skeleton was exo, the chances were at least four in five that a lash would land first on it, grounding out neatly through my titanium footplates and the aluminum handstand, rather than shock my flesh.
With the further realization that my seeming immunity to the whips would increase my imbecile followers’ trust in me, I laughed wildly.
The bandstand was bumped, and it rocked. I heard a familiar voice growl loudly, “Cut those whips!”
I turned once more and saw mashed up against the bandstand, almost like an extension of it, the aluminum flatbed of a big truck. From it strode Sheriff Chase and Ranger Hunt, drawing their ceremonial swords. Possibly they had figured out that my power was of a mythic or legendary sort, lying in my impersonation of El Esqueleto or the Tall Death, and that therefore it would be highly appropriate and also impressive to the Mexicans if they cowed me or cut me down with anachronistic weapons.
Possibly — yet by this perhaps shrewd action of theirs, they changed the whole situation for me and created for themselves a danger they could hardly have foreseen. Suddenly, for me, everything was theater again — theater in deadly earnest, perhaps, but still theater.
As those two big, gleaming, exceedingly sharp-looking rapiers came toward me, I crossed hands to touch three buttons on my wristplates.
One of them simply doubled the speed and strength of my exoskeletal movements. It put my exo-motors in high. This was dangerous to me: a motor, meeting sudden resistance, might burn out; I might smash myself in a powered fall or collision. But it was also necessary, especially if Chase or Hunt were even moderately skilled swordsmen. The other two buttons untelescoped my slim canes — and this time I continued button-pressure until the final needle-tipped sections were extruded. I tossed off my cloak.
Then with a stamp that bounced me a foot in the air and with an uncalled for but most enheartening, “On guard!” I was upon them.
There were two basic ways in which two swordsmen can engage a single opponent armed with two swords. They can try to take him from opposite sides, forcing him to keep turning his head 180 degrees, cutting off his fastest line of retreat, and aiming to pi a him between them.
Or they can attack him side by side. To engage both their swords, he must face them chest on, presenting them with a wider and closer target than either of them present to him.
In both cases the doubly armed lone swordsman has available to him tactics which partially compensate him. To begin with, he always has the advantage of a single command opposing a shared command: Hannibal versus Paulus and Varro at Cannae, etc.
Attacked on opposite sides, he can seek to overwhelm and kill one of his opponents with a very fast attack before the other can get at him.
Facing opponents who attack him side by side, he can concentrate his attention and tactics, particularly if he has good and well trained peripheral vision and is ambidexterous, in both which abilities I rank high. By swift enough circling he can put one of his adversaries temporarily out of the fight.
In short, according to the tactic his opponents adopt, he has two basic tactics: the fast attack and swift circling.
In my first engagement with Hunt and Chase, I chose a third tactic. In fact, I invented it on this occasion. It has nothing whatever to recommend it, except that it will startle the enemy, though without harming them.
After a slow, one-two advance, I launched myself in a great and very rapid lunge at Chase, my right-hand adversary, seeking to catch his blade in a bind in high seconde and skewer him, meanwhile fending off Hunt’s sword with the hanging guard. It was a great mistake.
One: I had not allowed for the actor’s ingrained habit of always missing his opponent rather than hitting him. Two: I had not really allowed for the speed-up in my motors, with no corresponding speed-up in my nervous system. I took off so fast on my left foot that I couldn’t get my right foot ahead to catch my weight.
There seemed only one thing to do. Parrying both their swords in seconde — simply shoving them aside the easiest way, that is — I doubled sharply at waist and shoulders, turning my lunge into a forward somersault, straight between my adversaries. For a Thin, I am an excellent freefall acrobat. The feat I intended was exactly like a forward somersault in free fall, but with one slight difference: midway I would have to take a tremendous bump on the head; I could only try to get spun far enough around so that it would be a crash of headbasket rather than a crunch of frontal bone; I could also pray that the Longhairs had forged my exo-spine exceeding strong.
Perhaps Diana, almost overhead and smiling through clear sky, decided to be kind and worked a miracle. At any rate, there were simultaneous great bongs, bass and treble, of titanium and aluminum. My sworded arms thrown backward gave my upper body forward impetus. The weight of my footplates drew me down to a landing on them. There was bandstand left to land on. Though reverberating and groggy from head to foot, I managed to keep my balance and turn around and get both swords up and engage Hunt and Chase as they came at me side by side.
At that point I resolutely turned my brain off, especially its schemy sector, and let reflex and training take over. I defended only. I fought no habit of mine, including the actor’s habit of never laying sword point or edge on his adversary. In fact now for me, at least, the duel had become rather like that fabled one in the American Civil War, where an actor on the Union side meets in battle an old fellow-actor on the Confederate side and yells, “Primes, cully, primes,” whereupon they most spiritedly fight the duel of Macbeth to the great edification of their fellow soldiers on both sides.
As my body and nerves recovered, I automatically went on the attack, cautiously this time. Hunt and Chase proved to be mediocre duellists. I drove them back across the bandstand. Yet I scrupulously avoided pricking or scratching them with my point — actor’s habit completely in the ascendancy, or perhaps by now I was beginning to realize that my only chance of surviving this first and thoroughly lost battle of the Bent-Back Revolution lay in my not killing or hurting anyone.
Nevertheless, I took advantage of a pause in the duel to cry, “Fight, cowards, fight! There’d never have been an Alamo if the place had had a back door!”
Hunt resting his sword-hand on his knee, retorted, “You’re worse than dirt, Crockett La Cruz, putting dirt on the name you bear of one of the great Texan military martyrs.”
“Davy Crockett never died at the Alamo,” I countered. “he had too much brains — brains enough to solve the no-backdoor problem. That early longhair — or proto-hippie — pulled a sneak and married a senorita, from which union I am descended.”
These insults made Hunt and Chase fence more furiously and worse. With a sudden bind in tierce followed by a heavy beat in seconde, I sent Hunt’s sword flying out of his hand. Then, having both cane-swords to use on Chase, I disarmed him too.
I stood menacing both men, whom I had almost driven off the front edge of the bandstand.
Between them, I saw the last of my audience-army running madly toward Greasertown, away from the pursuing whips. My little assassins, drugged like the Old Man
’s with hemp, had at last admitted defeat. Here and there lay a few unmoving bent-back bodies. A few others struggled, pinned down and to each other by a sticky white foam which lay in swaths.
At that moment, the last half-dozen Mexes in flight — my pitiable rearguard — paused to raise clenched fists and shout toward me, Ole, El Esqueleto! Vengenza e Muerta!” Then they were running again, and the pursuing Texan calvary cut them off from my view.
Perhaps it was that little cheer, perhaps it was hearing Governor Lamar’s voice from the flatbed that roused my idiot optimism again. Suddenly my brain was back with me, full of melodramatic plans. I would seize Lamar and menacing him with a sword, demand my release. I would —
As I turned, full of wild speculations, Rachel Vachel, risen at last and come forward, was facing me.
“My hero I” she cried as she lifted her arms toward me. “Oh Captain Skull, that was most brilliantly dueled! I doubt another man in the universe could have — her face was radiant. I lowered my cane-swords to either side. What I did not notice until too late was that in one of her hands she held her black crop. With it she touched me neatly on my naked neck, like a fairy godmother enacting an enchantment.
Pain shot through me, followed by paralysis of all parts below my head. I heard myself sit down with a clank on the aluminum. My upper body would have sprawled forward, doubled over, except that my useless out-flung arms kept me propped up, while my eyes first stared hurt, then glared hatred at my betrayer.
There were loud sighs of satisfaction from Chase and Hunt behind me.
Meanwhile Lamar came Hurrying from the flatbed, followed by Mayor Burleson and Professor Fanninowicz.
