A Specter Is Haunting Texas

by Fritz Leiber

  After our flop in Cincinnati, the Committee had seen reason and given me a free hand with my new script and the cast, making me director.

  Results: Father Francisco, wearing chest mike, was audible at last as he spoke his modernized, punchy prayers.

  Guchu stayed in the spotlight, and his psychedelic ravings all led to good revolutionary conclusions. He was an impressive figure, symbolically bringing to the Revolution the mighty support of Africa (his race) and Asia (his religion).

  Rachel had at last a short but effective part as Wife of Death, reminding me as I go off to work on Earth to take good care of my health, avoid chills, get enough to eat and so on. She wore a skintight black suit with wide silver seams on the outside of her arms and legs to indicate bones. Other silver fines followed exactly her lower ribs, but went into whorls around her breasts. She had a narrow silver spine, girdle and collar bones. Over this she wore a black cloak, while her platinum hair was tightly braided and coiled to suggest a helmet.

  El Toro’s oration was topped by a shorter but snappier one by Rosa. I knew that girl had talent! She wore a red Phrygian freedom cap, from under which her dark hair flowed; red boots; and a short red dress on which were scattered in black the Isis cross and a symbol I did not know: a circle with a three-armed Y in it.

  Then, while El Toro sang the old version of La Cucaracha with its homely references to cockroaches, marijuana and the Mexican revolutionary tradition, Rosa did a still snappier dance. Next: El Toro went into La Muerta Alta. I returned to stage with Rachel, and soon we had the whole audience standing and singing with us.

  If our audience didn’t rush out to riot, at least they departed in a cocky mood, suffused with revolutionary enthusiasm, ready to assert themselves and use their wits, determined to take no crap from anyone.

  Later El Toro, who has a good if untrained singing voice, asked me to give him lessons in grand opera. Why not?

  Of course, I was careful to make Rosa’s and Rachel’s parts equal and keep my relationship with them coolly professional.

  Father Francisco and El Toro rationalized the girls being in the show by explaining to me that this far north there is a weakening of the Latin prejudices. True enough, there were as many short Texans and “stay-behind” blacks in the audience as Mexes.

  There were reports by A.M. revolutionary radio of big Ranger raids in Columbus, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. We had dodged back west just in time.

  Next night we had another smasheroo. It was in Chicago, a largely new yet big city situated west of Chicago Bay, where devastation bombing let in the waters of Lake Michigan and where rust-boned, melted, still-radioactive skyscrapers dream deep below.

  Flying up to Chicago in our kack, I noted, in its transparent plastic, small stamped medalilons, the print on which had been obliterated. I found one the file had missed and saw the familiar Cyrillio characters spelling out “Novy Moskva, C.C.C.P.” For a moment I thought I was back in Circumluna, which remains stubbornly bi-lingual.

  Guchu readily admitted the kack had been manufactured in Russia and only passed along by the Black Republic to the Revolution. “We’re not up to those technologies, and neither is the Florida Democracy,” He told me. “And we don’t want to be. Outside of atoms to desalt our water and give us electricity, we operate by flower-power. We don’t have a big population. The unfit die young. What protects us from the Texans is the deserts and mountains, the free Injuns and Afro-Russian aid, chiefly in atoms, which are getting hard to come by — the fissionable and fusionable ones, I mean.”

  Novy Moskva — New Moscow — is near Lake Baikal, he tells me. Siberia has become the Russian “Texas.”

  I was lying down at the time and also downwind of the other passengers, so far as the uncertain drafts inside the kack permitted.

  I log as much horizontal time as I can. I am troubled by heart palpitations, splitting headaches, diarrhea and varicose veins. Lying down distributes the gravity strain which abets, I believe, all these symptoms. The last time I unzipped my tights from calf and ankle, I was sickened by the purple varicosities, which grew larger as I watched. Since then I have not opened my tights except minimally for sanitary reasons, and even then I glimpse a varicosity of the superficial femoral vein.

  To tell the truth, I have not been out of my carefully-mended sack suit and also my exo-skele-ton — Rosa guessed right — since they raided us in Kansas City. So I have not had a complete bath for well over a week. So I stink and keep away from people, or at least downwind, when I can.

  One thing I'll say for labour (the British Labor Party), and that is that it isn't as offensive as the corresponding mutatory force which now threatens culture in America. I refer to the force of business as a dominating motive in life, and a persistent absorber of the strongest creative energies of the American people. This intensive commercialism is a force more basically dangerous and anti-cultural than labour ever has been, and threatens to build up an arrogant fabric which it will be very hard to overthrow or modify with Civilized ideas.

  — H. P. Lovecraft, 1929

  I also have taken to rum, with which El Tacito, my bodyguard, supplies me. I intentionally spill some of the rum on me, but I drink as much as I can carry too. It is a good analgesic as well as an acceptable male perfume.

  I refuse to take off my exoskeleton partly from resentment at the girls, Fanninowicz, all of them — but chiefly from sheer panic fear. I know the support bands are producing rashes and small hemorrhages, chiefly subcutaneous. But I cannot bear the thought of the helplessness I experienced in the patio. I am haunted by dreams of the Rangers finding me away from my lively titanium bones.

  Or perhaps it is simpler. Perhaps I am just afraid of gravity, as men once were of “empty space”.

  I have also developed — from the soupy atmosphere, I should think — a deep, hacking cough, which I can barely control on stage. The rum helps that a little, too.

  Thinking such thoughts as we took off from Chicago, I drifted into a horror dream. I was trapped amidst the crushed and dying in a crumpled subway car in a collapsed tunnel in Old Chicago. I struggled helpless for an eternity. Then the boiling water rushed in and seared me awake. A dream? A gravity nightmare? I know nothing of subways, but I suppose I may have run across them in history study-materials. But how could I see crumpled advertisements so clearly? Atomin, the Pain-Reliever that Penetrates Your Every Molecule. Coca-Cola. Kurb Kinky Kurls. Prepare Yourself for the Future with LaSalle Extension Courses. Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun, With Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum.

  Moonlight showed choppy whitecaps in black water below as we raced north across Chicago Bay.

  Later I had chills and thought I was getting a fever. The explanation was much simpler, one I knew but had not kept in mind.

  On Terra it gets colder as one moves toward either pole.

  After we played Milwaukee and Minneapolis, where we camped in an old hotel, it became clear that I must change to my winter clothes. I swore El Toro and El Tacito to secrecy and had them give me a bath. I did not permit them to remove my sack suit until I was in the hot water, with thought that its pressure might work somewhat as that of the suit, controlling varicosities. Being out of my exo produced in me spasms of fear hard to conceal.

  When they saw the shape I was in, El Toro exclaimed, “Madre de Dios!” El Tacito, true to his name, permitted himself only a grudgingly sympathetic grunt.

  I directed my gentle but thorough soaping, rinsing and drying. El Toro wanted to call in a doctor — and also Fanninowicz! — but I reminded him of his oath. After my various surfaces had been powdered, salved antiseptically and analgesically, and most smoothly bandaged, they eased me into my cold-weather suit, which is black and very like the other, but thicker, and containing a spiderweb of heating elements working off my batteries. Also it has a hood snugly covering my skull, neck and chin. Mask and gloves are available. The two Mexes Helped me into my exoskeleton, and I lay down to rest.

  I thanked and dismis
sed them. But El Toro persuaded me to take a slug of rum, poured a glass for himself, and stayed behind.

  “What do you think of our Revolution?” he asked me.

  “I am earning my ticket to Amarillo Cuchillo,” I replied, not at all inclined to bandy either platitudes or deep thoughts. I was relieved that I stank no more and that I felt less surface pain, but the bath had exhausted me.

  He nodded. “There have been risings everywhere, even to the north. The news of El Esqueleto has gone ahead of us.” Yet he did not sound enthusiastic.

  “Many dead bent-backs?” I asked.

  He grimaced.

  “And in Texas, Texas, the Revolution has been crushed?”

  He said, “Badly battered, though not extinct. It has not been conquered, but it has been countered. The Texans have pacified many of my people with shorter working hours for the cyborged, with more fiestas and bullfights, with free rum and Coca-Cola and with free reefers. But I asked you what you thought of our Revolution?”

  I finally answered, “I believe it is necessary, but that does not mean I enjoy it.”

  “Yo comprendo, camarada,” He said and left me alone.

  With Winnipeg, Texas, we arrived in an area where tall Texans are a tiny elite: managers, engineers, foremen, the police, the Rangers, and their wives and sometimes their children. The few short Texans are all embittered Canadians — they remember and use that name, though it is forbidden.

  The numerous Mexes there are all cyborged workers — miners and farmhands and lumberjacks — shipped north with their cooks and women.

  Our meeting — I can hardly call it a show — was held in a supposedly forgotten atomic shelter, which the Mexes reached by a short tunnel from one of their compounds and which we entered by a longer tunnel, part of a disused drainage system. I had to go stooping, looking I suppose like a huge black bug. At the meeting there was little laughter. There was much Hate. Midway there was a raid, and all but one of us actors escaped because our entrance tunnel had not been known to the Rangers. I do not know what casualties our audience suffered.

  Now our chief is Carlos Mendoza, whom I hardly know. And I am no longer giving grand opera lessons. Next time I shall not be the first man to run — at least, such is my present boast. El Toro bought it.

  Our next stop, on Spindletop 17th, was Victory, Texas, once Saskatoon, but renamed when the Rangers routed an Anglo-Russian army in the Battle of Saskatchewan. We held our meeting by a windbreak in the wheat fields.

  Here the Mexes live in a shack city. No need for fenced compounds. Where could they run?

  Tall Texan elite smaller, but tougher. No women or children. The deeply-hated engineers and cyborg foremen. The Rangers.

  Almost no short Texans, but some Indians, who do not cyborg well. They generally take their lives after their first experience of the yoke.

  Mendoza, who is something of a book-man, told me that one reason this area has remained uncolonized and unexploited, except for wheat and wood and ores, is the growing world shortage of high-grade radioactives. Earth’s oil is almost gone, her remaining coal hard to come by, while the Atomic War actually increased Terran man’s dependency on nuclear power. Even our kack, for example, is powered by atomic batteries.

  Fanninowicz heard Mendoza’s little lecture and favored him with a contemptuous and knowing grin. Typical German arrogance only?

  Two days after Victory, we arrived at Fort Johnson, Alberta, Texas. Once Ft. Murray. Much like Victory, except timbering again replaces wheat-farming, and the Indians are more numerous. Here, I was told, is stationed a company of Rangers with a red dress uniform, survival from the fabulous Canadian Mounties.

  The only uniforms, however, which I saw — from a safe distance, using electro-binoculars — were white fatigues. Toward evening I discovered the reason for them — camouflage. Snow fell and everything turned bright white.

  Terra’s weird natural phenomena still rouse in me a sense of wonder, despite my punished body and wearying mind. In the long silvery twilight, the flakes were like a ghostly Milky Way falling past a wheeling spaceship.

  I donned my gloves and mask. The latter, with its silver arabesques, makes me look like Death the Witchdoctor.

  Through the electro-binox I watched another of the huge towers, in which cyborged Mexes do their mysterious work. I recalled Federico’s pantomime and the “dig and delve” chant, and I found myself shivering at being near a 40-kilometer hole up which my childish imagination insisted — the dragon of gravity might crawl and come to hunt me down, suck me from any hiding place and crush me flat against him.

  Not that I believed in such a hole. My mind shrank from the idea, and Fanninowicz’s arguments had been telling. Still, it seemed unlikely that the Texans would be drilling for oil here, where Mendoza tells me the sedimentary layers are thin and the last glaciation has often exposed the underlying igneous rock: basalt, obsidian, feldspar, tufa, pumice, granite, pitchstone and their hideous confreres.

  But if not for oil, what?

  Whatever work is done in the towers, I could see that it produced much heat. This one steamed amidst the fallings snow and remained stubbornly black, like a giant finger protruding from inner earth.

  Table of Contents

  - XIII -

  THE GUSHER

  After twilight had darkened into night we took off on what I hoped would be the last lap of my Terran hegira. Our company was reduced to one kack and its occupants. Besides Guchu and myself, there were Carlos Mendoza, El Tacito, Father Francisco, Fanninowicz and Rachel and Rosa. The other two kacks were headed south, their ultimate destination Denver. Our tour was breaking up.

  The snow had stopped falling. It lay in a blanket a half meter thick on the stunted evergreen forest below.

  The night was very clear, but the twinkling stars were dimmed by Luna riding low in the east and waxing again toward full. I had spent almost a month on Terra. I looked with tired longing at my mother satellite, tethering point of the Sack and Circumluna, cosmically so near and yet so far.

  Luna was not the only rival to the stars. Ahead, ghostly green flames burned up toward the zenith — the northern lights, another remarkable Terran sight.

  After about a half hour, Rosa noted that the stars had a third rival, a purple glow on the southern horizon, directly astern. It was not so much a point of light as a small hemispherical shining.

  It appeared to originate near or at Fort Johnson. We speculated unsatisfactorily as to what it might be. A fire? Some part of the search for us? Even an atomic bomb was suggested, though that was contradicted by the steadiness of the glow. Besides, no sound or shock-wave caught up with us.

  Fanninowicz contributed to this interchange a knowing sneer.

  I said, “I wonder if the glow has anything to do with the drilling tower at Fort Johnson?”

  The German’s sneer wavered toward a scowl.

  “Grand Emperor of Mechanics,” I addressed him, “are you merely contemptuous of us? Or are you carrying a secret about the great towers?”

  “Secrets!” he said, the sneer back in full. “I am forced to carry thousands in this company, simply because my mind holds a vast number of matters beyond your understanding. Especially in the intellectually inclined Teuton, the directional hormone produces taller bodies. I feel no more contempt for you all than I do for chattering apes, I assure you.”

  I gave him up as a bad German job. I tucked away in my memory the point that the Texas growth-hormone was directional, whatever that jargon might mean. Then I incuriously watched the purple glow until our steady northward flight put it under the horizon.

  My earlier symptoms of gravity sickness had been replaced with a general lassitude which could not merge unaided into rest because of the pains of my deep bruises, rashes, and varicosities.

  The other passengers went to sleep. With the aid of rum, I followed them there — and found only nightmares of cyborged fiery dragons pursuing me through red-hot tunnels which by degrees melted my titanium.
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  When I awoke unrefreshed, sunrise was reddening the eastern Horizon. El Tacito had replaced Guchu at the controls.

  The snow-roofed forest below had become dwarfier.

  The ground below was without any but the smallest hills. There was no sign of human occupation. Our largely transparent kack made the situation seem like a nothingness crossing a desolation. Except for my pains, I would have felt disembodied.

  After we had breakfasted, each meagerly yet according to his taste, Rosa said, “May this one address you, Senor La Cruz?”

  So it has come to Senor, I thought. “Most certainly, Senorita Morales,” I replied.

  “How do you propose to depart into the sky after we reach Amarillo Cuchillo?”

  “By the way of the spaceport there,” I told her. “If one of Circumluna’s ships is not in, I will have to wait.”

  “Ah yes, the spaceport,” she answered with a dubious nod. “But how do you propose to wait in Amarillo Cuchillo, which is little more than a Texan working-encampment?”

  “I have counted on the help of the Revolution in this matter,” I told her anxiously. “That was my understanding from our talks in Dallas.”

  When the Twentieth Century was only ten days old, Texas ushered in with a black skyward sweep the Age of Petroleum, the era of fast cars and the big trucks that would lick the railroads, the mighty tanks and lets that would dominate subsequent wars. With a roar that was heard around the Industrial world, a tumult mighty as Krakatoa's but meaningful, at the sleepy town of Beaumont, near the coast where De Soto's men had noted oil seepage three hundred and thirty-eight years before, the Discovery Well at Spindletop blew in. Within six months, the price of Beaumont land had risen a thousandfold. Oil was three cents a cask, water five cents a cup. Within sixty years, one Texan in eight was with an oil company, and one out of every seven barrels of world-oil came from Texas.