The American Zone

by L. Neil Smith

  Looking up from my sandwich this time, I spoke again. “Anyway, ‘Deep Throat’ has been done. Twice if you count the X-Files. Three times if you count the original porno movie—and you definitely should. On the other hand, from now on, I believe I’ll refer to our unknown correspondent as ‘High Colonic.’”

  “Moved and seconded.” Will laughed again. He seemed to be doing a lot of that lately. Could it have been the prospect of fatherhood, or just the fact that he was living in a free country? He took another bite of his own sandwich.

  “An’ unanimously passed,” Lucy agreed. “If you’ll pardon the expression in the present context. So whatta we do now?”

  I shrugged. “I thought you had that all figured out for us, Lucy. I’ll tell you one thing, though: I’m not going through any garbage cans tonight, and I don’t plan to wait around until nine o’clock to go back to work. I came down here to the Zone again to talk to some people.”

  “Then,” Lucy answered, “that’s the plan! Before or after I have another sandwich?”

  “Oh, after, by all means.” Lucy could put more food away than any three men I knew. I suspected it was the secret to her longevity. “And I’ll have a second one, too, with parsnip fries and an extra dill pickle. How about you, Will?”

  THE OLD MAN lifted a knobby, wrinkled hand and greeted us. “If it isn’t Will Sanders and Win Bear—the Husky and Starch of the North American Confederacy!” He laughed heartily at his own joke. He’d probably been waiting to make it since we’d called him to set up this appointment.

  I didn’t laugh. It was way too late in the day, and I wouldn’t be finished living through it until well after nine. Will said, “R. A. Paulchinsky? We’d like to have a word with you, if we might, sir.”

  “So you said. Don’t you ‘sir’ me, sonny. Come right on in! It’s good to put a voice to all these stories I’ve been hearing lately. Knew your faces from the’Com before you called. And it’s good to know somebody’s investigating all these hideously criminal acts that are being blamed on us bluebacks!”

  Technically, he was a “bluefinger.” Sixty-eight-year-old former “Congressbeing,” R. A. Paulchinsky (Demopublican, E. Montana) called himself a “Constitutionalist of the Ancient Right,” according to the’Com. We’d been directed here by people who had a lot to say about the old man, mostly good, and some of it pretty funny.

  When we saw him first, he was sitting in the open door of his rather narrow and antiquated garage (this was the Zone, after all), using a laser pen to burn serial numbers into the plastic backside of a small figure he’d just finished painting or dyeing in a coffee can—hence the blue fingers. It was a relatively strange thing to do, I thought, but I assumed he had his reasons. When he’d finished, he put the figure into a carton that already held several dozen other figures like it.

  But not identical, which, it turned out, was the point.

  A bit like Papa Karl LeMat, Paulchinsky was considered something of a social leader in the American Zone. One source referred to him as an “elder statelessman.” At one time, in the world he’d come from, he’d even been a presidential candidate, or so we were told, for the now-defunct Fascio-Conservative Party. It had been one of the top two at the time.

  “That’s right,” Paulchinsky confirmed the story when we asked him about it. “Damned stupid name for a political party, but we were stuck with it from the 1930s—that’s the 150s, here—when fascism was all the rage. Sometimes a tradition can be carried too far.”

  He was sitting in a badly worn straight-backed kitchen chair—vinyl plastic and chromed tubing—behind a worktable made from a pair of sawhorses and a paint-splashed sheet of plywood. He picked up another little doll by a hank of acrylic hair sprouting from its head. The hair was almost as long as the doll itself. “I got thirty-five percent of the vote—at least that’s what was publicly reported. Our exit polls said something else altogether. Something that sounded a lot like, ‘Hail to the Chief.’” Holding it by the hair, he dipped the doll in a different can, brown this time. “Say, wouldn’t you boys like to sit down and have a glass of lemonade?” He raised his voice. “Agnes! Would you please bring these boys some lemonade?””

  In a couple minutes Agnes appeared, a plain, plump, careworn woman about the congressbeing’s age. She looked a lot like Mary Lincoln to me. She set the glasses on the table, looked at Will and me as if she’d found us in her garden—under a rock—and went back into the house without a word.

  “Don’t mind Agnes,” Paulchinsky said. “She doesn’t like it here, and probably never will. She doesn’t understand or care what makes it so desirable to live in a free country. She thought she was going to be the First Lady.”

  Will nodded, doing his Jack Webb number again. I suppose I really should have been the one asking the questions, but it had worked out this way and you have to respect that, sometimes. Lucy and Clarissa had stayed in the car, punching’Com buttons, seeing what they could find out about our other prospects.

  My partner cleared his throat. He hadn’t lifted his glass or sat down—there were two other beat-up kitchen chairs in the garage, bearing no resemblance to each other or the one Paulchinsky occupied. I’d chosen the cleaner of the two and picked up a glass of lemonade. “Sir,” Will said, “we were told kind of a strange story about the reason you left your version of America …”

  “And now you’re embarrassed to repeat it? Well, I don’t blame you, son—sit down, will you? You’re giving my neck a cramp! That’s another reason Agnes is mad at me. We had to refugee out on account of trumped-up charges of ‘animal sexual abuse.’”

  “What?” We said it at the same time; I couldn’t help myself.

  “Sure.” He laughed. “Somebody thoughtfully manufactured messages from me on alt.sex.bestiality.hamsters.ducttape. It’s exactly like backing the wrong prayerbook during the reign of Cromwell. Or patting the wrong fannies in the universes you boys came from: Tailhook, Bob Packwood, John Tower—I do my homework, too, you know.”

  “I guess you do.” Somehow, we’d all managed, lately, to absorb the histories of a thousand different worlds. It was probably good for us, but it hurt our heads sometimes.

  Paulchinsky laughed again. Here was a guy who could obviously appreciate a joke, even one on himself. It probably helped a lot that he was here, instead of wherever it was he came from. “Understand, gents, that ‘animal sexual abuse’ is currently the most convenient transgression in my culture to accuse your political enemies of. Used to be children before they formed their own union. Nobody really gives a damn about the animals, mind you, any more than they gave a damn about the patted fannies or the prayerbooks. The criminal charges were brought by my antagonists, the Socio-Liberal Party, as soon as the election was over. Hell, most of them keep sheep and other barnyard critters around, themselves, for purposes I always found suspicious. But they didn’t want any questions asked about the outcome of the election.”

  “I see,” I said. I didn’t know if I’d ever get used to being recognized this way. “And your wife is mad because—”

  “Oh, hell, Agnes knows perfectly well that I didn’t do it. For one thing, I’m allergic to wool. And for another, I had a personal problem back there and then that couldn’t be cured because Viagra was illegal. Not to mention the fact that we lived in an apartment in the capital city—Philadelphia—and didn’t have room for a goldfish, let alone a sheep or a llama. She’s just mad because I got accused, is all, and on account of that, she never got to cut the ribbon on a bridge or break a bottle of champagne across the bow of a ship. I figure she’ll get over it in a couple of decades.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Will said. “So what’s with all these little figurines?” I could tell from his voice that he thought they could be a lot weirder than making love to a llama.

  Paulchinsky laughed again. “Man’s gotta earn a living, Captain. Could be you’re too young, or from the wrong world. You remember the craze, back in the sixties—the late one hundred and eighties�
��over these little plastic dolls with hair they called trolls?”

  It clicked in my head. “Sure I do! About the same time you could buy greeting cards and posters of sad little orphan kids with tears in their gigantic eyes!”

  “There y’go, Lieutenant, you’ve got a Keane memory on you! Well, I managed t’stumble onto a whole warehouse full of these damned things and broached ‘em over here. Nobody ever saw’em here before, so they’re fresh and popular as hell. I dye their hair, braid it or sprinkle sparkles in it, paint ‘em different colors, put stars or hearts or circles around their little plastic bellybuttons—I keep careful track of all the combinations so I won’t repeat’em—burn serial numbers into their little asses, and sell’em for a thousand times what they cost me!”

  And here I’d wasted all this time becoming a private detective. Oh, well.

  19: IT’S SISTER JENNIE’S TURN TO THROW THE BOMB

  If the backside pockets of your jeans are your “hip” pockets, does that make the ones in front “un-hip”? Then why is it that it’s the ones in back that are square?

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin.

  It started as we headed down the walk from Paulchinsky’s house. All he’d ever imported were the little plastic trolls. If we’d been after him for the other thing, all the deadly sabotage, he’d have had the best alibi of anybody so far. He was being treated by a Healer friend of Clarissa’s for severe arthritis in his hips and lower back and wouldn’t be able to get up from the chair he was sitting in, without grudging help from Agnes, for another several months.

  Back home, he could have been expected to die that way. I wondered how they’d managed to get him here.

  Even in this relatively impecunious neighborhood, homes were large by Stateside standards I was used to, if not in number of rooms, then in size. The yards in front of them were huge and it was a long walk to the street. Halfway between Paulchinsky’s open garage door and Lucy’s Thornycroft, I suddenly heard something whizz by me, amazingly like the big “bumblebee” in Peril at End House. I’d been shot at before, more than once, and I knew that sound. So did Will.

  “Down!” we advised each other at the top of our lungs, as two more high-velocity bullets whizzed by overhead, and at the same time, a finger-sized smoking hole suddenly appeared in the trunk of a juniper tree beside me. The first thing that crossed my mind, perversely, was how good it smelled: Xmas in July, whaddya know! Somebody was using a laser on us, and a respectably powerful one, at that. By the time I hit the ground I had my sixgun out and Will had his big silver Witness in his hand, looking for somebody to shoot back at. We were both trying to hide behind the same two-foot plaster garden gnome—probably Paulchinsky’s way of advertising—looking for whoever was shooting at us.

  “Ffffffft!” This time both of us saw the brilliant flash of what had to be a suppressor-equipped weapon. My .41 Magnum slapped me hard in the palm as it bellowed and went off, a basketball-sized cloud of blue-pink flame dazzling me for an instant, even in broad daylight. It’s a damned difficult gun to shoot one-handed—painful, too.

  At the same time, I heard a sharp double crack as Will sent a pair of his 175-grain, 10-millimeter Winchester Silvertips in the same direction, at a big gray Studebaker RoadCruiser parked at the end of the block.

  At the moment I fired, I heard glass-shattering noises as the RoadCruiser’s side windows disappeared in a glittery shower. They’d be a while growing those back. No screaming or anything, though. How disappointing. The enormous road machine rose slowly on its skirt and began crab-walking toward us gradually, more gunfire coming from just over the bottom edges of its side windows. Abruptly, the gnome’s plaster head exploded as something hit it, I don’t know what, bullet or laser. Somehow, I managed to keep the shower of gravel out of my eyes, but I knew I’d be spitting sand the rest of the week.

  I fired again, and so did Will, at the car doors behind which the shooters had to be crouching. My big .41 went Boom!, destroying the Studebaker’s left headlight. Will’s 10 millimeter went Bamm!, tearing a ragged furrow across its roof. We both needed to relax and shoot straighter.

  KABOMMMMM! I jumped three feet, nearly getting plugged by the jokers in the Studebaker in the process. Bullets fizzed and whistled all around me. The ungodly noise had come from Paulchinsky’s garage workshop, where, thanks no doubt to recoil, he was now pointing an enormous, smoking revolver at the ceiling.

  “Four-fifty-four Cassull!” the former congressbeing shouted at us, clearly enjoying himself, “Sorry!”

  Will responded, “Shit!”

  By now, there was gunfire coming from Lucy’s car, too, as she and Clarissa got into the act, big booms from the Gabbett-Fairfax, sound-barrier shattering cracks from the .11 Webley. We all kept firing and the Studebaker kept coming, slowly, until its skirt bumped against another car parked at the curb. Both its sideways-forward motion and the gunfire coming from it had stopped.

  Nevertheless, I counted a careful ten. Then Will and I stood up, my knees making noises like breaking a handful of celery stalks. We approached the RoadCruiser carefully, from behind as much cover as we could manage. Climbing onto the skirt, we found lots of blood inside, all over the seats, floor, and windows, and four injured individuals, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, and two humans. The gorilla had been driving. He wasn’t only merely dead, as the song goes, he was really quite sincerely dead. A heavy .41 Magnum slug from ear to ear through the skull is bound to have that effect. The endangered species crazies back home would have had a conniption fit.

  Slumped in the backseat, one of the humans was in pretty much the same condition as the gorilla, with a hole in his torso you could have thrown a hadrosaur through. You couldn’t just see daylight through it, you could read the newspaper. The former congressbeing’s contribution to the fracas, I figured. Even Lucy’s antique handcannon couldn’t do something like that.

  The other human stirred and moaned. It was hard to see how badly he was injured; he was covered with the gorilla’s blood and brains. I reached through the front window to take a big enameled weapon from his hand. It was a White-Westinghouse VURT21GRB LaserMatic, according to the label. The conventional silenced autopistol used to start the fight lay on the rear seat floor where the chimpanzee had apparently dropped it. He was conscious, but not feeling very well.

  “Toldja!” The human in the front seat was apparently addressing the chimpanzee. “Toldja!”

  “You … blagzerk! … told me … frumpiltch!?” Either the chimpanzee’s wrist synthesizer had taken some damage, or his wrist had.

  “Oh, it’s you, dickhead,” sighed the human, disappointed. “It was my partner Smedley I told. We usta hit banks together in the Alaskan S.S.R., see? I told him stuff like that was too risky here. Back home the cops have rules they gotta follow—but here, the civilians’ll fucking kill you!”

  “Damn straight!” Will agreed with some enthusiasm. “Look at this!” He was sitting with me on the top of the Studebaker’s skirt. Clarissa and Lucy were running toward us from the Thornycroft, the former with her little black bag in hand. Will lifted up his cowboy-booted left foot and showed me a half-inch hole burned from one side of the rebated riding heel to the other. Burned leather smells horrible.

  “WELL,” THE MAN said, “I think we’re just about done, here.”

  There were two of them, a husband and a wife. They had nylon badge flippers hanging from their tunic pockets, but they weren’t wearing uniforms and they weren’t cops. They had no power of any kind to detain anybody for anything—but it was a pretty good idea to stick around until they said you could go. It was their job to see that things had been done according to long-established Confederate custom and the Covenant of Unanimous Consent—and to make sure the right person or persons had gotten themselves shot.

  They were the Civil Liberties Association of Greater LaPorte.

  Long may they wave.

  He was tall and thin, with a pair of electric needle-shooters like Clarissa’s at his waist, carried
butt-forward like Wild Bill Hickcock. I couldn’t tell whether his hair was blond or white. He wore glasses—the mark of a newcomer, since vision problems are dealt with here using drugs, gene therapy, and particle-beam surgery—and had a voice that would have worked well on the radio. She called him, “Van.” He called her, “Dear.” She was shorter, a shapely redhead with a pageboy hairdo and a constantly quizzical expression. Her voice was surprisingly deep. She wore a plasma pistol just like Lucy’s, in a shoulder holster, and a slim dagger in one of her boots.

  “Then we can go?” I asked, trying to get Will’s attention. He was calling his wives, letting them know what had happend, before our friends in the so-called news media got it all wrong and sent them both into premature labor.

  The bodies, living and otherwise, were about to be hauled off, the latter to Griswold’s, which had pretty good cold storage facilities, the former to one of the many small infirmaries that people in the Confederacy support instead of hospitals, the general view being that hospitals are great places to catch diseases that you’d never even hear of, otherwise. The surviving human and his simian coconspirator would do their recuperating in handcuffs and leg-irons at the Badguy Motel (which they would pay for themselves), until they were deemed fit, not to face criminal trial, but to get their bald and furry asses sued off, respectively, by any and all of those who felt they’d been damaged by this botched-up little raid. Paulchinsky would probably get a new gnome out of it, and a tree surgeon to take a look through the peephole in his juniper.

  The CLA people both nodded. “I’ve talked with two dozen neighbors who saw the whole thing go down,” said the CLA man. “It’s perfectly clear what happened here—the first drive-by in Confederate history—and I intend to say so in my report. The only question that remains is why they did it, and that’s outside my proper area of concern. You must have made somebody pretty mad, Lieutenant.”