by Fritz Leiber
I wondered if it was now pumping hard enough to keep alive my toes, which were so high above me. Oh well, better gangrene of the toes than gangrene of the brain, my Consciousness informed me.
Where did I get the idea I was alive when I knew I was dead? Better suppress it. Cool it, Consciousness!
I worked hard on keeping myself dead. I concentrated on stilling every part of myself, beginning with the toes. This worked very well on my muscles, since most of them were ghosts to begin with, non-functional in six lunagravs. There was the bonus that as I stilled each area of my body, the pain stopped coming from it.
I worked at suppressing my thoughts too, especially any effort to remember what had happened to me.
I also held onto the sneaky point that if only I were patient, if only I remained passive while enough time passed — not very much — then I would surely be dead of freezing, dehydration, heart failure, starvation or gangrene of the toes. In approximately that order.
I do believe I would have completed the operation successfully except for one very nasty circumstance.
Two large and sturdy spiders appeared on either side of me and began determinedly to explore the floor of my cubical coffin.
When I say “appeared,” I do not mean I saw them. But I became aware of them. I felt them. However, I had started to get a glow in my eyes that seemed not so much the random shooting-off of rods and cones as light coming through my immovable lids. In fact, I was working to suppress that glow when the two spiders turned up.
It happens that I have an irrational dread of spiders, though there are few in the Sack and those chiefly in arachnidariums, where they get along as well in freefall as insects and all other tiny beasts to whom gravity or its absence are matters of small moment.
So that when these turned up in my coffin, I was pretty thoroughly terrorized.
A peculiarly horrible particular was that these spiders were cripples. Each had had three legs amputated, but the operations had been completely successful and they got around very well on their remaining five legs.
How I could know so much about the spiders without being able to see into their minds also troubled me. Not, as I have said, that I have any psi talents, or that spiders are known to be open to telepathy. Still, I was troubled.
Finally, the spiders seemed tauch too much interested in my wrists, persistently nuzzling them and even pushing and pulling them around. I waited each moment for the stab of a poison fang. Go on, spiders, get it over with, I found myself thinking — it only is a sixth way of dying.
Then the two spiders approacheded my sides and began to crawl up onto my body, dragging my arms behind them.
It was at this point I realized the spiders were my two hands.
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar
Death lies dead.
“A Forsaken Garden,”
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Though it may seem strange to some, this was no great improvement. Lying helpless in the dark while one’s two hands begin to operate completely on their own, schizophrenically, is almost as bad as spiders would have been, believe me.
Pinching first my suit and then cruelly pinching the skin of my chest, which was to my surprise smooth and hairless, they crawled up side by side to my neck, where they parted, each making for an ear.
By Pluto, I thought, they are planning to strangle me!
Why the idea of being strangled, or even self-strangled, should have terrified me so, when I was exerting every atom of willpower to kill myself and/or keep myself dead, is pretty mysterious. Perhaps by now I was becoming luxury-minded and wanted to die in comfort, with ever-diminishing pains.
But then I noticed that neither of my hands had left a thumb behind on my windpipe, as they would surely have done if their purpose had been strangulation and they had any sense at all.
I relaxed a bit and waited with some curiosity to, see what they were up to.
You see, I was already crediting them with sense and purpose. They say a man is essentially two hands and a brain. I was pretty sure by now that my hands were cooperating with a section or self of my brain below the conscious level, which last level had been wanting only to die and/or stay dead — until this moment, when curiosity had begun to motivate it.
Meanwhile my crawling hands had each gripped an earlobe very tightly with thumb and trigger finger. From this secure base, and with each digging little finger into cheek, they dug middle finger and ring finger into my upper and lower eyelids, and then spread.
This caused me even more pain than I expected, because it turned out that my eyelids were extremely badly swollen. Also, my eyeballs were unusually sensitive. I got the impression that this area of my face at least had undergone a severe allergic reaction, or else received repeated blows.
But no matter how hard I willed them to stop and despite the joarse little screams that now began to issue from my dry throat, my fingers went cruelly and re-morsely about their business.
Bright gray light lanced into my eyes and tormented my retinas and the visual corners of my brain — a third and not to be under-rated pain.
Finally tears came, and at first they were a pain too. For a while I saw only their glimmer and the yellow blurs of matter floating in them.
Gradually the pains diminished. My swollen lids became able to blink with my fingers’ help and even assume most of the work of keeping themselves open. My tears washed the grainy, gluey stuff away, and I was able to see.
I was in the mortised stone cell with a door of bars and a small barred window. Its dimensions were those of the height of a Mexican door, so I assumed it had originally been built by Texans for bent-backs.
The light came through the window and another like it in the corridor beyond the door of bars.
Through the nearer window I could see a high sign which carried, white on black, the ten Cyrillic characters spelling out “Zhawlty Nawsh” (желтый нож)
So I was not in the hands of the Rangers, but the Russians.
Horrible memories began to rise.
I kept them submerged while I traveled my gaze down my body from my catercornered toes.
My black winter suit was open wide from my crotch to my neck, revealing my hairless front covered by upsidedown lines of legal writing.
I remembered everything — in particular, every last stupidity.
It only made me want to die.
But even as I felt that, I noted that my fingers had left my eyes, which stayed open a fair slit without manual aid, and were crawling down my torso toward my crotch, where I was intuitively sure they intended to start zipping me up.
This indication that the survival urge was once again in control had the effect of steadying if not cheering me. While my hands worked, I began the unpleasant business of assessing my situation.
Fortunately in such a case one need not begin by facing the worst, but can work up to it by easy stages. For instance, the first healthy reaction to a feeling of extreme guilt is the attempt to shift as much of that guilt as possible to other people.
So it was not unnatural that my first thoughts were about my father, not angry so much as gently pitying thoughts, very sentimental.
The poor old boob, I thought, running his theater in space, not knowing a damn thing about Terra, but dreaming his idiot dream about the mining claim that would one day make us all rich.
Did it occur to him that the claim was only provisional? That the country in which it was registered had changed hands at least once and now two times? That the Terrans have millions of laws to stop boobs like himself from asserting their rights and claiming cash due them, and that without exception the Terrans are a planet of swindlers and roughnecks, intent only on money and power and ready on the slightest provocation to substitute violence for legal procedure? Oh, no!
And then he had got the superidiot
idea of sending me, his only son, down to terrible Terra to cash in on the mining claim.
He did get the Longhairs to build me a remarkable exoskeleton. I granted him that. But did he otherwise enlist their aid in his project? At least they knew a hell of a lot more about Terra than he did.
No and double no! Instead He supplied me with a cloak, cane-swords and an idiotically secret document.
And I, super-boob that I was, had accepted this ridiculous role, even gloried in it. For a whole terrible month on Terra, I had not lived, I had acted my way through everything.
First I had been tempted by a mysterious role in a Texan palace revolution.
Next I had eagerly plunged into the role of Death, leader of a grotesque adobe-hut revolution.
Finally I had been unable to resist putting on a brief show of surprises for some talking bears — an ultimate in wrong-way animal acts.
Had even my love for Rosa and Rachel been anything but theater? Probably not. Everybody is always telling us actors that because we feel or seem to feel so much in the theater, we can’t feel anything in real life.
Well then, face it, Scully, I told myself. For you, the great themes of Love and Death can be nothing but melodrama. You’re playing a small role in a vast thriller with an unknown finish.
Except that your role, bar last-minute rescues, seems just about ready to finish in death in an unheated Russian prison cell.
So start playing that role and quit bawling!
At that moment I heard a familiar voice roaring in the corridor. The language was Russian, but the import was pure Texan.
“Quit fussing at me, you furry little fools! I want to see comrade La Cruz instanter. As consular agent of Texas in Zhawlty Nawsh, I got the right. Besides, can’t you get the fur out of your eyes long enough to recognize General Kan’s seal and signature? If you keep hindering me, I’ll report you to Him. I’ll report you to Number One in Novy Moscow. I’ll hold up on those chess sets from the Black Republic. I’ll even stop that shipment of firewater and fisheggs I got coming in from Quebec! There, fellas, that’s more like it now.”
Then a great familiar bulk filled the barred, Mexican-short doorway.
“Wal, partner,” the bulk said, “you sure have got yourself in the goldumedest, most miserablest, hopelessest fix since Sam Houston got his army backed against the San Jacinto River just before the like-named battle.”
I never would have thought that a time would ever come when the person I was most Happy to see of all the hombres in the ripsnortin’, melodramatic universe was Elmo Oilfield Earp. But that time had comet
Table of Contents
- XVI -
FIXING
By the next day, 24th Spindletop, Elmo had got me in quite rapid succession, the following comforts: soup, a mattress, a battery to heat my winter suit, a larger cell and — at last! — my exoskeleton. The Russians have removed its swords and all batteries but two, so that it operates at about quarter power. Sometimes I feel I am carrying it around, rather than it me. And when I plug in my suit heater, it stops moving altogether. Still, it is wonderful wearing it again.
At first I had been so happy to see Elmo that it had not occurred to me to wonder how he came to be there.
Later, thinking it over, I realized he must have been planning everything from our first meeting at Spaceport Dallas, possibly even earlier. I have not asked him straight out if he is a Russian secret agent, and he has certainly not volunteered that information.
The war is over, he tells me. Russia says she is planning no further advances, Texas no reprisals, and a truce has been agreed to. Elmo’s story is that he is a loyal Texan who just happened to be in the neighborhood when Texas sorely needed a consular agent in Zhawlty Nawsh. Just happened to be! But perhaps I had best pretend to believe this tall tale. As the big rascal says, “Scully, most people in this imperfect world are so set on what they got to have, come hell or high water, and on what they won’t take under no circumstances, that there just got to be a few fixers around — broadminded hombres willing to sacrifice their personal integrity, or even on rare occasions their sacred honor, just to get life moving again, or keep it barely turning over like a wore-out engine.”
He confirmed my belated suspicion that all the rank-and-file Russians and most of the officer and beaurocrat class firmly believe that the Russians of Circumluna are the ultimate devils, the Super-Trotskyites, worse than Chinese, Texans or the blackest-dyed fascists or inkiest Blacks. Well, why shouldn’t they, after a century of propaganda attributing every evil from meteorite showers to anti-Soviet dreams to the malignant intervention of intellectual Russians in the sky?
But, Elmo says, the Russian inner elite, her real rulers, have come to realize that their country desperately needs certain items which only Circumluna can furnish them: fine instruments, computer circuits, new higher maths. They are seeking a rapprochement with Circumluna which will permit trade without scandalizing or even driving into revolt the rank-and-file.
General Kan, I gather, is the sole member of the elite. He has been able to prevent attacks on the Tsiolkovsky, but he must keep her crew in quarantine to satisfy military prejudice. He also was the one who halted my torture, though not daring to go so far as to command special care for me. That had to be left to Elmo the Fixer, so he could be blamed if necessary.
We had beet borsch for dinner.
Next day Elmo procured me the unheard-of amenity of a hot bath. I was unwilling until I learned El Tacito and Mendoza would give it to me, in guise of Elmo’s greaser servants. I was considerably refreshed, though my varicosities, etc., had worsened dismally. I quit prison-pacing, got a maximum of horizontal.
Tas slipped me twin notes from Rosa and Rachel. Both hoping for my swift recovery and wishing me good fortune. Both signed, “Affectionately.” I wondered if either or both of them would come to the moon with me. By their ultimatum to me, I would have to choose between them. It would be a very hard choice. I decided to play the scenes as they came.
That evening Elmo brought such good news I could hardly believe it. It set my imagination racing. Through General Kan, he has learned that the Russian inner elite is considering a deal whereby I, as hero of the bent-back revolution, would be presented as “reward” with materials needed by Circumluna. Later, still as hero, not Circumlunan or Sackabond, I would make “party contribution” of stuff Russia needs from Circumluna.
As part of the deal, I would also have formally to give up my family’s claim to the Lost Crazy-Cree (new name) Pitchblende Mine. I asked him, “Why so much’ fuss by pirates over paper proprieties?”
He replied, “Scully, you don’t understand these Russians. If their fur were as all tied up as their nerves are inside them, they’d be kinky as blacks. They’re not relaxed like Texans. They don’t think broad and easy about moral and legal issues. When they pull a fast one, they want every detail that reflects a bit of good on them pinned down tight.”
I then asked him worriedly that if the “gift” to me were automatically supposed to go to the Circumlunans, would I also be able to use it to get from the Circumlunans the concessions I wanted for the La Cruz Theater and all sackabonds? He told me, “Look, Scully, you hang onto that gift and you bargain with it until you get what you want. I guarantee you the Longhairs will play ball. I’m sorry to say it, Scully, but I sometimes think you weren’t born with the business sense of a squirrel — what am I saying, squirrel? I mean lemming.”
On reconsideration, this makes me wonder if Elmo weren’t in on the whole deal to bring me down to Terra — the building of my exoskeleton, even father’s idiot notion ... I don’t know where to stop.
Next day, Spindletop 26th, there was a hideous development. We got meat soup, but I couldn’t touch it. Elmo brought news that Russians demand the facsimile mining claim, flayed from my chest, before they will play ball. They insist on their “pound of flesh',” as bad as Shylock. They’ve promised to make repair skin-graft on me, but that would take more weeks, months
on Terra with chances of survival very slim. Elmo said, “Don’t worry, Scully. I’ll argue my best with them, though they’re stub-borner critters than President Austin was, bless him, the pig-head. When a bear decides to claw you, it’s hard to change his mind by appealing to his logic and common sense.”
To get my mind off this horrible possibility, I gave it the tough task of figuring out which of the two girls to ask to marry me. After long listings of their good and bad qualities, my feelings, etc., I decided on Rosa Morales. The chief point is that, under all fieriness, she has basic Latin submissiveness, I think. While Rachel would try to run me. I was not happy about my decision.
Elmo also reported that Fanninowicz has formally defected to the Russians. When and if he recovers from the dose of radioactivity he got at the gusher, he will go to Novy Tech as full professor of engineering and design power-armor for Russian soldiers, borrowing many details from my exoskeleton, I’m sure. It figures. If all Terra felt peaceful except one destruction-bent farm-boy, a German would build him a slingshot.
On Spindletop 27th, the Russians were still after my hide. Yet life must go on, no matter what horrors loom, so when Rosa visited me in jail, I proposed marriage to her. She kept me in suspense for a long time, made me really argue.
Clincher was when I told her she would be top free-fall dancing girl and star acrobat in La Cruz Theater. I added, “Besides — but don’t tell anyone this — I have always had a terrific yen for short girls.”
She yielded then and immediately demanded we summon “the Honorable Miss Lamar,” and tell her about my decision in Rosa’s presence.
