Orbit 14

by Damon Knight

  And there were other persons restored and reyouthified in those crisp late winter days. But if all that happened was told, there’d not be paper enough in the world to record it all.

  2

  For both, the year bloomed pulsy red:

  Contraries and compliants.

  A springtime of the ghosts, they said;

  A springtime of the giants.

  Boomer Flats Ballads

  The wonder colt Red Licorice seemed ready to sweep the big four that year, from his bruited reputation. And this was when the public had not yet seen him run. There was a big noise about him from the men who knew these things. No unknown was ever so widely known so quickly.

  He was possibly the last colt ever sired by that grand old champion Black Red. And Black Red, full of years and honors, had died only a short time before this, according to his owner. He had been buried at a private ceremony, very private; but an imposing stone, red granite with black obsidian inset, had been erected over the grave. There were now several hundred visitors a day who came to that grave, and these visitors were told that the horse buried there now lived again in his son.

  Red Licorice was the absolute image of his great sire. Early films of Black Red as a colt were run, and you would almost swear that this was the same animal that now trained daily at the Red Hills Farm. The long low gallop, the laid-back ears, the rhythmic hooved thunder, the snorting that sounded half horse and half wolf, the red-black mahogany gleam, the bowed neck that was almost bulllike, the very long and large (and, some said, empty) head, the flowing tail and streaming mane, these were all identical in the father and the son.

  But Red Licorice had sheared three seconds off the mile-and-a-half time of Black Red, on the same practice track, under the same almost-perfect conditions.

  Then Red Licorice won four warmup mile-and-a-quarter races, and he won them easily—this against the best colts in the world in what was billed as the Year of the Great Colts. Red Licorice set four new track records in doing this, and three of them had been held by his father.

  Derby time came, too soon, too soon. The steep interest in the affair was still climbing. But it would be a Derby to be remembered as long as Men and Derbies last. Red Licorice took the Derby in really sensational fashion, and now this magic colt had taken the fancy of all racedom. As rock-headed as his father had been, he also had his father’s outrageous talent as a ham actor. How that big colt could cavort about a track!

  Here were memories being made as one watched. Big bluestem grass of the pastures where the colts were raised; black loam and red clay mixed and mingled and managed into the fine straightaways; smell of hot horses in the springtime and the summer (smell compounded of clover and green oats and manure); weathered grandstands and the blue-green infields at the tracks; winged money flying with the winged horses; the sign of Equus and the summer solstice: these were ever the hinges of the year for millions of fine folks. And one magic colt could always turn it into a magic year.

  Cyrus X. Slocum the Third had shown up in training camp at Phoenix, unsolicited, uncontracted, unknown.

  Yes, he was the grandson of the original Cy Slocum, he said. “You can’t trade on even a great name,” the manager told him. “You would have to make it entirely on your own.”

  “I know it, I know it,” young Cy said. “Just let me pitch. Let me pitch and I’ll show everyone.” Well, he did look and move like an athlete. He did look very much like those old pictures of his grandfather. He had a strong personality, a strong arm, and outrageous confidence. “And it never hurts things for a player to have a great name,” the club’s publicity man said. So young Cy was given a tryout in the training camp.

  They always kept the wraps on the pitchers for a couple of days at first, but Cy was ready to blast loose.

  “Shape up my arm slowly?” he asked. “Man, my arm is always in shape. Haven’t we any heftier catchers than those? I’d blow them clear out of the park. You don’t have a steel backstop here? I like to warm up with a sixteen-pound shot at regulation distance, but hard as I throw it, it’d go right through anything here.”

  Cy was scolded somewhat for standing against the centerfield fence and throwing half a dozen balls clear over the grandstand, very high above home plate and still rising till they went out of sight.

  “Not only will you throw your arm away with that showboating,” one of the coaches told him, “but balls are too expensive to toss half a dozen of them away like that.”

  “Nah,” Cy said. “The balls aren’t gone. I was throwing my famous return ball then. I put a little twist on it when I throw it, and it comes back to me.”

  A small dot appeared in the sky far above and beyond the grandstand. The dot grew, it came as fast as a bullet, it grew to baseball size and it zanged into Cy’s glove there by the centerfield fence. And the other five balls followed it quickly.

  “A long time ago I—uh, I mean my grandfather—used to lob the ball up to the batters,” Cy said. “It would come almost all the way to a batsman, near enough to draw his swing most of the time. Then it would zoom back to my glove, I mean to my grandfather’s glove. I finally quit throwing it though. The umpires got together and decided to call them balks instead of strikes whenever I threw my return ball even if the batter took a full swing at it.”

  “The old-timers say that your grandfather told tall stories too,” the coach commented.

  Cy pitched in intersquad games, three innings one day, six the next, nine the day after that. The batters couldn’t even touch him. He pitched about fifty intersquad innings and never gave up a hit. The reporters were making a great to-do about this bright new rookie with the bright old name.

  The team played the Giants, who also trained in Phoenix then. They threw Cy at them in the first game and he no-hit them. Three days later he did it again.

  He burned his way through all those exhibition games. He had a great collection of pitches of his own; and every good pitch that he saw he mastered instantly and added to his repertoire. He had the strength and speed of youth. He also had, from somewhere, such maturity and wisdom and judgment as could hardly be acquired in less than a lifetime.

  The regular season began.

  “Now we’ll see what this early-blooming crocus can really do,” a few of the unsold critics muttered.

  Young Cy Slocum, pitching every third day, won his first thirteen games without a loss. There would be no limits at all to such a career as was opening up before him.

  “How old are you anyhow, Cy?” a reporter asked him one day.

  “Eighty-one,” Cy said promptly. Then he corrected himself. “No, no, I mean eighteen. I have a speech affliction: I sometimes get my numbers transposed.”

  Flambeau La Flesche the zoom-zoom girl had zoomed to the top of everything with electronic swiftness. She was on live; she was on 2D, 3D, and 4D (you have to be smarter than hell even to know how to watch 4D; only Mensa members are allowed to apply for tickets); she was on Voxo; she was in five simultaneous musical comedies; she was on Vodvil and Sound in the Round; she was in the Old Time Electric Theatre; and she was big in Metranome. Already she looked like a shoo-in to take the Nobel Prize in' the Centerfold Division. Few were the media in which she had not quickly become outstanding.

  But had there not been a Flambeau La Flesche a long time ago? Had that other young girl not been identical to this both in name and appearance? Yes, even in voice.

  “I suspect that I’m the same kid, only refleshed,” Flambeau told an interviewer. “I’m reincarnated, that’s what I am, and you have to have the right kind of flesh to do that. That’s what it means. I’m very carnal. That’s why I reincarnate so easy.”

  Really, what else can you say of Flambeau? She did have the flesh, she did have a spirit as torchy as her name. She did have all the forms and resonances. She was everything, just as her preincarnation had been everything so many years before.

  And she found, as had the previous she, that there were only twenty-four or twenty-six h
ours in the day; she could never remember which, but there weren’t enough. Then she had a hot idea to save everyone money and to save herself drudgery and time.

  “You, moguls, why don’t you just dig out the old movies that I made in my previous life,” she said. “I haven’t changed any since then. When you have class you don’t have to change. Just get them out and fill in the scratches and cracks and run them again. Nobody can know that it isn’t me, because it will be me.”

  They did it. It worked. They ran all those old ones and they were explosive hits.

  Oh, the names of those two-timing great movies are like music: Louisiana Haystack, Popsie, The Cremation of Betty Lou, Zephyr Jones, The Day the Lilac Bush Burned Down, Nine Dollar Dog, Three Fish Out, Little Audrey, Crabgrass Street, Slippery Elm, Spider Spider Down Inside Her, Lady Bug Bongo, Accolade, and Accolade Revisited. (This last had been titled Son of Accolade the first time around.)

  What drama, what comedy, what music, what memories!

  But Flambeau wasn’t quite so happy with it that second time around. “I knew that the competition nowadays was nothing,” she said once, “but, after all, what is there to compete for? The Accolades aren’t what they used to be. And Accolade Revisited has an emptiness and irony that wasn’t, at first, intended. The thing about us excelling types is that when we ascend to great heights it is the same as if we stood still and the world went downhill. We must have excelled too much; the world sure has gone down.”

  “Miss Flambeau,” another interviewer asked her, “we know that you are an old-car fancier, but many of the big-time restorers are puzzled and jealous about the restoration job you’ve had done on that old Dusenberg. It’s almost as if it were new. What’s the secret?”

  “It is new,” Flambeau said. “The secret is to buy a dollar jug. A fifty-cent jug is all right for people, but it just isn’t enough for a snazzy speedster like that.”

  But the interviewer didn’t seem to understand.

  “Why don’t we produce The World Under Louisiana Haystack again?” she asked her producer. “That was a movie a girl could really put herself into.”

  “But, Flambeau, The World Under Louisiana Haystack was never finished,” the producer said. “There were difficulties with it.”

  “Let’s finish it then,” she said. “The difficulties are the best part.”

  They set about the task of finishing it. There were real difficulties. The resolution of these difficulties might take all things to the end of this account, or to the end of the world, whichever came first.

  “This is a job that calls for another jug,” Flambeau said. “It may even call for a dollar jug this time.”

  Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson (great-nephew of Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson) had won the first of the Presidential primaries, that of Massachusetts and Connecticut Plantations. So he was off and running ahead.

  He took Florida State Conglomerate. That was expected. He took Los Angeles State, and that had not been expected. It was a big one.

  Johnson was speaking well, often nine times a day. It was the Golden Guff itself, and no one could do it like young Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson. In this, he reminded old-timers and historians of his own great-uncle Hiram Andrew Clayborne Johnson. That Ex-President, by the bye, was unavailable for comment or for appearance.

  But the young Johnson campaigned energetically and wantonly, if not always well. He wore a serape and grass sandals when he campaigned in Chicano districts, though the Chicanos did not wear these things and many had never seen them before. He was decked out in Navajo beadwork and a Sioux war bonnet when he spoke at a supermarket in Indianapolis. Indianapolis really meant Indian City, didn’t it? Johnson went equipped with skullcap and nine phrases of Yiddish into the affluent Jewish suburbs. He wore a miter and alb and carried a crosier when he went into Irish Catholic neighborhoods, and he offered what he said was holy water from Exendine Creek. “Nine doctors out of ten state that it is more efficacious than Lourdes water,” he declared, “and it contains eleven more additives.” He wore a zebra-hide cape and crocodile-tooth necklace when he entered the black suburbs. “For our common African heritage,” he would say. “One of my ancestors was Postmaster General for the Pharaoh Ro-ta-ta.”

  He opened a wild but calculated bloodletting against the other candidates of his own party. “They have turned the House of our Fathers into the Outhouse of our Fathers,” he would roar in his golden roar. There was nothing gingerly about his attacks: he left no stone unthrown in his assaults. What matter? He could always unlet the blood, he could always unthrow the stones again when there might come the proper time for it. Often he hummed to himself that old healing melody, “Will you love me in September as you hated me in May?” Of course they’d all love him in September, if he won the nomination. Their heads would roll else.

  He won the primary in Chicago Metropolitan, a high-number delegate state. He won it narrowly by means of a little over a million votes that came in or were discovered very late, the morning after the voting. They had been unaccountably overlooked in the tabulations of the evening before.

  He most handily won the primary in Missouri Valley, that grand old state with its capital at Omaha. He had lost a few along the way, but we will not mention those. He was leading, it was believed, and he would increase his lead in what was still a close race.

  Then it came, a threatening and chilling storm out of a cloud no bigger than a man’s thorax. While yodeling at Swiss Colony Wisconsin, Johnson’s golden voice broke; it broke in a cavernous old-man cough. Several rude persons laughed. This could go badly. There is nothing so contagious or epidemic as laughter. Johnson got his broken voice temporarily fixed at nearby Koffkoff, Wisconsin, the cough-drop capital of the world. But he knew that the fixing was only temporary.

  “I’ll have to get hold of that Licorice Man,” C. H. A. Johnson told himself. “I’d better get another big jug of it. That’ll come to seventy-one cents, taking the exemption for excise tax. I’ll have to find a way to afford it.”

  3

  Deprived of elixir, a horse,

  A pitch, a Pres, a lassie:

  And three erupted crass and coarse,

  And one was kind of classy.

  Boomer Flats Ballads

  There would have to be confrontation. And just how does one go about arranging a confrontation with a vagabond peddler like the Licorice Man who has no regular residence except the misty, muddy, half-mythical place named Boomer Flats?

  One uses intuition; one uses deduction; one uses that other thought process whose name is at the moment forgotten. And' one does not eschew luck. (Is eschew a real word? It sure does sound funny, and it sure does look funny.)

  Young Cy Slocum had pitched in Dallas the day before, and he had lost three to nothing. Never before in his young career had he allowed three runs in one game. He had tired. And new gray hairs had been peppering his youthful head for several days now. He heeded another jug of the Royal Licorice and he needed it quickly. He got permission to drive up to his ranch in the gypsum hills. He borrowed a car and drove. He stopped at his ranch only an hour or so. Then he drove at random. His receptors were open to any kind of signal.

  Half a dozen miles from his own ranch, on the fringe of the Big Bluestem Country, by the side of a little country road where the gypsum begins to merge with honest limestone, Slocum saw an angry young colt who seemed not quite so young as he should be. This colt was widely known, and his name was Red Licorice.

  With the colt was his owner, a man whom Slocum had known casually for a dozen years.

  “Are we looking for the same thing, Cy?” the owner asked.

  “I think so,” said the young, but not quite so young as he should have been, Cy Slocum.

  “Red got a package from that devilish old codger,” the colt owner said. “It was full of either pills or dung-beetle rollings. Red took a few of them. They didn’t have the same restoring effect on him as the original elixir had. They had an effect quite otherwise, unique, a
nd unpleasant. I can’t stand a horse when he gets too smart.”

  Red Licorice snorted his contempt for his owner, for the old codger who had sent him either pills or dung-beetle rollings, and for the woozy world itself.

  Eleven new, beautiful, turreted, bulletproof cars approached in caravan. They stopped by the pitcher, the colt owner, and the angry young colt. Out of the cars boiled Presidential candidate Clayborne Hiram Andrew Johnson, a speechwriter, a lawyer who was also bodyguard, a chauffeur, and twenty-one security men.

  “Disperse, all of you!” the head security man ordered. “We are commandeering this area. An important meeting will take place here soon.”

  “I think so too,” the colt owner said, “but I’ll not be commandeered into or out of anything.”

  “You are standing in a public roadway,” that head security man said. “And the road was built with mixed funds that included five percent Federal monies. Therefore, we as Federal men can commandeer this region.”

  The colt owner took one step backward.

  “I’m on my own land now,” he said. “Let’s see you commandeer me.”

  “It is all right,” Candidate C. H. A. Johnson said. “I know the colt and both the men. All three are solid citizens.”

  “Careful, careful,” the speechwriter said. “You’ll put your foot in it some way.” (Johnson wasn’t supposed even to say good morning unless he read it off a piece of paper handed to him by his speechwriter.)

  A golden-haired young, or almost young, lady came over the hill in a Dusenberg car. The Dusenberg also was almost young, but it had developed a bad cough. It stopped and died there.

  “So, that’s the way it is,” said the almost-young lady. “A sharp young pitcher (but not quite as sharp as he was for a while) who is his own grandfather; a rock-headed colt who’s had to run on his father’s hoofs; a Presidential candidate trying to stand out of his great-uncle’s shadow, but those shadows grow longer when evening comes and they will swallow a man. Who are we kidding? We are all second-timers. We are all in the same barkentine. But the Licorice Man will be along in a moment. I heard the hoofbeats of the horse Peegosh: the hoofs never quite touch the road, you know.”