The Killers were milling around outside, and the air was full of sullen electricity. There was fear and anger like soot in the air. Bot-flies were spluttering and roaring about the slippery blood in the roadway outside and in the common room itself. There had been carnage, and the atmosphere spoke of more to come.
“Just what is my status?” Thomas asked. “Why should they try so persistently to kill you and me, Paul? What are these curious killers?”
“They’re the guardians of the Astrobe Dream,” Paul said with sad irony.
“They believe you’ll see our side of the thing,” one of the ragged men said. “We’re not so sure that you will.”
“Are these killers human beings?” Thomas asked.
“They are not,” said the weariest of the men sitting there. “They are devils dressed in tin cans.”
“Was the ansel who talked to you without words a human being, Thomas?” Paul asked. “Would you call Rimrock a human? —But you haven’t seen him yet.”
“I don’t need to see him, Paul. He is composed of body and spirit. He has intellect. That makes him human.”
“But the killers look much more human than he does. They have a calculated shrewdness that passes for intellect, and they have a human form.”
There was a clatter, a crash, a moan that was only half human, and a bleating scream that was dying animal. A poor man scampered in with three goats, a crazy man with unfocused eyes. He sat down on the floor sobbing and coughing together, and his goats gathered around him.
“Is he human, Thomas?” Paul asked.
“Certainly, though he’s demented. He is a judgment upon everyone on this planet. Aren’t there mad-houses for such as he?”
“In civilized Astrobe they say that all Cathead and the Barrio is a mad-house. There are two million men as mad as he, one in twelve. He isn’t bad. He slavers, and he cannot speak coherently, but he gets about. He has even avoided the killers till now. But I doubt that he’ll be able to avoid them much longer, the way they are ravening about today. We may none of us avoid them. You don’t like what you’ve seen of Cathead, what you now see and hear and smell?” Paul asked.
“No. I had no idea that such ancient vestiges of poverty and misery could still survive on the advanced world of Astrobe. Why weren’t such things swept away long ago?”
The mad goat-man was crooning a little song. The killers were thronging and gnashing in the roads like the iron dogs they were.
“It isn’t an ancient vestige,” Paul said. “This is all new. Twenty years ago Astrobe was completely beautiful and civilized. Then these places appeared, like a blight, as the great ones say. I do not call them that.”
“Paul, I walked for many squares through these neighborhoods in my three sorties out. There are blind children with their eye-sockets matted with insects. There are people starving to death, falling and being unable to arise. There are men driving themselves at labor in small fetid shops. There was never whip-slavery so harsh. There are men and women working in atmospheres so foul that they turn them purple in a few moments, and they come out spouting blood—and go back in to the labor before they have rested. There are human people eating the filth in the gutters, and drinking the gutter runs. They are like this in their millions. I saw a large building fall down. There are women offering children for sale. There are old-clothes men who strip the corpses and leave them naked in the streets. Is there no compassion in the civilized sections of Astrobe? Can they do nothing to alleviate the misery here?”
“But, Thomas, everybody in Cathead and the Barrio is here by choice. They left civilized Astrobe of their free will to set up these giant shambles. They can return to civilized Astrobe today, within the hour, and be cared for and endowed with property, and settled in ease. And they would be free of the mechanical murderers also.”
“God over my head! Why don’t they do it, then?”
“Somebody go with him!” Paul shouted, for the demented goat-man had started out into the roadway once more just when a din of killers had risen. Several of the weary men had risen to it, and then fallen back.
Too late.
He had gone out in his distraction, and his small goats had followed him out. Perhaps he was more addled than usual. Perhaps he was not used to such concentrations of killers as were smelling around the presence of Thomas. The whipped crazy man knew how to dodge through one or two killers, scooting like a low whippet. There were too many to dodge.
The striding killers struck him down dead just outside the door. Passersby withdrew to their own safety, and the little goats bleated in lonesomeness. Then, as the killers clashed along looking for new entrance, quick hungry people caught the little animals, fought over them, tore them apart, and began to eat hunks of them raw and bleeding.
“Enough,” Thomas moaned. “I was never an advocate of wealth and fineness. I believe fully in holy poverty. But I say that poverty is like drink: a little of it is stimulating and creative; too much of it is depraved and horrifying. I must be about my work on this world, and I must get to the center of things before I can solve the mystery of degradation here. How can I get in touch with the men who sent for me? I have seen enough of the underside of this world for this day.”
“A communication center is approaching, on two feet or on four,” Paul said. “He can put anybody into contact with anybody.”
“Aye, I feel him. He’s talked to me, and I had but a short glimpse of him at our ambushing. It is Rimrock, the oceanic man! He at least will talk sense.”
And Rimrock, the oceanic man, came in, on no legs at all, then on four legs, then on two. And he shook hands with Thomas with great friendship.
An ansel is in appearance a little like a seal of old earth. It can slither with great speed along the land, just as though it were swimming in water. It can walk passably, as a man or as an animal. And it has curious mental powers.
“My friend from the green ocean,” Thomas boomed. “You of the rubbery black hide and the tufted ears! You bound or you walk, and you talk inside men’s minds and make appearances. Read me the meaning of this damnable world, Rimrock.”
“They sent for you and you come. I and others thought you should see a little of the sanity of Cathead and the Barrio before you are plunged into the madness of civilized Astrobe. But the great men are waiting for you impatiently, a day and a night and half a day now. They are frenzied that someone has stolen their prize and may somehow turn it against them. And I had to settle with another—a false ansel who spoke in the Paul’s mind and tried to lure you to your death. It’s fresh blood on me. I hope you don’t mind.”
Rimrock the ansel was much larger than any earth seal, and the slicing mouth on him was a meter long.
“It comes down on this place!” all the weary men with the red-rimmed eyes shouted, and they stormed up from their sitting on the floor. “We go! We go.” They all rushed off, some to the interior rooms of the building, some as a battling wedge with flailing staves and pokers through the killers in the roadway.
“What ails the fellows?” Thomas demanded. “What comes down on this place?”
“The bleak blackness,” Rimrock said. “We have a visitation. He is curious about your being here. I know you have met him before in bits and snatches on your own world. I am sure that you encountered fragments of him in the passage here. Now it is himself.”
The girl-woman Evita came in. She was like a wraith, of a sudden beauty and mystery, and a depth of depravity that took the breath away. The short glimpse of her set Thomas to shaking. She was something not completely of nature.
“I wanted to see him and talk to him,” the Evita said. “But the old monster comes instead. I will talk to the Thomas in another place and hour.”
She vanished out again. Paul and Thomas and Rimrock the ansel were left alone. Then the monster Ouden came and sat in the middle of them and encircled them.
The short account that follows is necessarily mystic. We cannot be sure that Paul and Thomas held the same congress with Ouden. We cannot hear at all the exchange between Ouden and Rimrock, but we can sense it. We cannot be sure whether it was Paul or Thomas forming the words in the man-Ouden conversation. It was a confrontation and a presence.
But the Paul-Thomas host knew who Ouden was. They shriveled together in his presence, and their bones grew hollow.
“You are like ghosts,” said the Paul-Thomas. “Are you here only because we see you here? Which was first, you, or the belief in you?”
“I was always, and the belief in me comes and goes,” Ouden said. “Ask the ansel: was I not of the Ocean from the beginning?”
“What have you done to Rimrock?” the Paul-Thomas asked. “He diminishes.”
“Yes, he turns back into an animal in my presence,” said Ouden. “So will you, and all your kind. You will turn further back, and further. I will annihilate you.”
“I deny you completely,” said the Paul-Thomas. “You are nothing at all.”
“Yes, I am that. But all who encounter me make the mistake of misunderstanding my nothingness. It is a vortex. There is no quiet or static aspect to it. Consider me topologically. Do I not envelop all the universes? Consider them as turned inside out. Now everything is on the inside of my nothingness. Many consider the Nothing a mere negative, and they consider it so to their death and obliteration.”
“We laugh you off the scene,” said Paul-Thomas. “You lose.”
“No. I am winning easily on Astrobe,” Ouden said. “I have my own creatures going for me. Your own mind and its imagery weakens; it is myself putting out the flame. Every dull thing you do, every cliché you utter, you come closer to me. Every lie you tell, I win. But it is in the tired lies you tell that I win most toweringly.”
“Old nothingness who sucks out the flames, I have known flames to be lighted again,” said the Paul-Thomas.
“It will not kindle,” said the Ouden. “I eat you up. I devour your substance. There was only one kindling. I was overwhelmed only once. But I gain on it. I have put it out almost everywhere. It will be put out forever here.”
“I piloted once to a world of deformed little animals of a certain stench,” said the Paul-Thomas. “They ran in and out of old buildings that had been built by a cogent race. The experts to whom I brought some of the deformed little animals said that they were the fallen remnant of that cogent race. They were abominable little creatures whose only interest was to defile, and the experts said that they had fallen from something very like man.”
“I know the folk you mean,” said the Ouden. “They are a particular triumph of mine.”
“Leave me now!” the Paul-Thomas ordered sharply. “You are a nothingness, a ghost. One may order a ghost to leave.”
“Never will I leave. Not ever in your life will you sit down that I do not sit down with you. And finally it will happen that only one of us is left to get up, and that will be myself. I suck you dry.”
“I have one juice left that you do not know,” said the Paul-Thomas.
“You have it less than you believe.”
The Ouden monster had disappeared from them. Paul and Thomas More and Rimrock the ansel dozed. It had been a mere passage dream, one that was somehow left over.
“Look at them sleep!” giant Battersea cried in derision. “On your feet, the three of you. We mount battle array to convoy you back, and Rimrock must gather his wits to set up the communication.”
“Whether your work on Astrobe be good or bad, you have to get on with it,” said Shanty. “One doesn’t save a world by napping away the noontime. Come, we’ll take you through the killers, and to the Important Men who wait for you. Then let you shrivel! Let you turn into things like them!”
It was really a battle array that Battersea and Shanty and Copperhead and others led. There was weaponry and vehicles, and the killers backed away from them frustrated. Paul and Thomas and the ansel rode out of vile Cathead and the Barrio, away from the Naked Sailor and ten thousand places like it, skirted giant Wu Town, and came into colossal Cosmopolis the Capital of Astrobe.
Misery forgot, here was opulence and ease, beauty and dignity of building and persons, the real golden world, the ideal achievement. It was the most beautiful and most highly civilized world ever built, the most peaceful, the most free from any sort of want. It dazzled.
And in the heart of Cosmopolis the three big men, along with the fourth member of the big three, all now in communication with the ansel and knowing of their coming, awaited their prize from the past that had escaped them for the two days since the landing.
THE RICHES of civilized Astrobe were almost beyond comprehending. Thomas had a quick eye and a rapid mind, but he was dazzled by the wonders he rode through. Here were the homes and buildings of many millions of people, grand city after grand city, all in luxury and beauty and ease. Nor was it only the buildings and the perfected land and parks. It was the people. They were elegant and large and incredibly urbane, full of tolerant amusement for the rolling spectacle, of a superior mien, of a shattering superiority. They were the true Kings of Astrobe. Every man was a king, every woman was at least queenly.
“It is Rome arisen again a hundred times over,” Thomas said. “It is the power and the majesty. For good or bad, this is what all folks have wanted from the beginning. Here are all dreams come true; here is the treasure at the end of Iris, the Pearl of Great Price, here is the fat land and the mighty City; it’s the Land beyond the Hills of the Irish pipers, the Great Brasil, the Hesperides.”
“Easy, good Thomas. It is a whited sepulcher. But do they not keep it neat and shined?” Evita mocked. Who was the Evita, and what did she here? Thomas asked as much.
“A blinking brat with a charisma on you!” Thomas exclaimed. “Who are you, girl, and what are you doing in my party? How are you a known person to all on this world, and you only a grubby child?”
But Evita did not answer. Thomas would never know for sure who she was, nor would others.
“Where do we go?” Thomas asked. “This is my dance and I should be calling the tunes. I will not be led by the hand like a boy. I will make my own arrangements.”
“You have been doing so,” said Walter Copperhead the necromancer. “We do but proclaim it for you. We carry out every detail that you have ordered.”
“But I have ordered nothing,” Thomas said. “It runs too fast for me.”
“In your own mind you order it,” said Rimrock the ansel. “You vision it in a Roman or English context, and we transfer it to an Astrobian. It is a Triumph you require for yourself; not for pride or vanity, but for the solid establishment of a burgeoning regime. I have been transmitting your orders to the Anxious Powers, to the Great Men of Astrobe, and the Copperhead has been transmitting also. We call them and they are amazed. We order them to assemble. They will not, they say, and they do. They are startled, they are full of wonder even before they see you.”
“Rimrock, Rimrock, you’d grow rich as a fawney man at a county fair in old England. No Gypsy ever set a spell so fine. But where do we go?”
“To the Convocation Hall, as you yourself have decided, good Thomas; to take it all swiftly while the tide is running for us. You will be the Sudden Apparition. You will accept the accolade and the mystic station of Past Master.”
“I’m not even knowing what the Convocation Hall is,” said Thomas as they rolled through the magnificent city of Cosmopolis in Battersea’s armored wagon. “Who will be assembled there?”
“Those you have ordered to assemble will have assembled,” said the oceanic Rimrock. “And the details work themselves out as we roll on, and always to our advantage. There’s a small bloody battle going on now over the Exultation Trumpets, actually twelve small battles in the twelve steep towers around the Hall. The Trumpets haven’t blown for twenty years, but you have d
ecided wisely that they will blow for you. Happily your men win those small bloody battles now.”
“I didn’t know that I had any men,” said Thomas.
The party rolled to the head of the Concourse. They stopped and dismounted. They walked the long Concourse between the rows of heavenly aspens. Then the whole sky broke open! The Exultation Trumpets blasted a deafening golden blare like twelve Gabriels announcing the second coming. The electrum doors of the Convocation Hall swung open to the soaring sound. This was a striking effect that had been devised two hundred years before. This was their moment, and the shabby incandescent party entered.
All the great ones of Astrobe sat in the high circle. They sat there in amazement, some willingly, some not. Many of them had been drawn there protesting that they would not go. The compulsion puzzled them, and they knew much about the management of minds.
And the Thomas More party stood in the Arena below them, but it was not at all as if the great ones were looking down on the party below.
Then all the great ones stood. And they hadn’t intended to. The great ones of Astrobe stand only in the presence of a Superior. All were assembled, and all were on their feet now: Kingmaker, Proctor, Foreman, Pottscamp, Northprophet, Dobowski, Quickcrafter, Haddad, Chezem, Treva, Goldgopher, Chu, Sykes, Fabelo, Dulldoggle, Potter, Landmaster, Salver, Stoimenof, all the high dukes of Astrobe, half a dozen former world presidents, the tall scientists and the mind-men, the world designers.
In the arena was Thomas More, dirty and in disarray, with a shattered jaw wired up by a Cathead knacker, a long-nosed, almost comical middle-aged man of short stature; the Paul Person who had lost his surname and his citizenship for irregular doings, and who now had bone splinters in his brain that affected his vision and his wits; Rimrock the oceanic man who communicated by means unknown and who was in appearance a grotesque rubber-nosed animal; Evita the legend girl-woman whose existence was doubted by all rationalists; Walter Copperhead the necromancer who was no better than an astrologer: all of them with the smell and trappings of black Cathead still on them.
Past Master Page 6
