Orbit 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “My mind just snapped,” Dordogne said woozily. “I won’t bother to keep up appearances any longer. Now I will be crazy with a clear conscience.”

  * * * *

  The little dorg was near grown within one month and was impregnated. In another month she produced a litter of ten. In another five weeks another, and in another five weeks still an­other. And the young ones produced at two months, and again in five weeks, and again in another five weeks. Quite soon there were a million of them, and then one hundred million, shipped all over the world now. These were big cow-sized animals of ex­cellent meat, and they ate only the rocks and waste hills where nothing had ever grown, turning it into fertile soil incidentally.

  Soon there were a billion dorgs in the world ready for butcher­ing, and the numbers of them could be tapered off as soon as it seemed wise, and there was enough meat for everybody in the world.

  * * * *

  “I have only one worry,” the trilobal psychologist James Rid­dle said as he met with Adrian Durchbruch and Annalouise Krug in a self-congratulatory session. J. P. Dordogne the mad cartoonist was in a sanitarium now and was really mad. “I keep remembering a part of those cave paintings at Lascaux.”

  “What were they, James?” Annalouise Krug asked. Annalouise was not so much in the fashion as she had once been. Well-fed nations somehow set their ideals on more svelte types.

  “They were the crossed-out animals, the chiseled-over animals, the funny-looking animals. They are funny-looking to us only because we have never seen them in the flesh. They are the ani­mals that did not survive. We don’t know why they did not. They were drawn originally with the same boldness as the rest of them.”

  “We don’t know what the odds are,” Adrian said worriedly, forgetting to bounce. “We have no way at all to calculate them. It is so hard to take a census of things that aren’t. We will keep our fingers crossed and all fetishes working full time. Without primordial fetish there wouldn’t have been any animals or people at all.”

  * * * *

  It went on smoothly for a year and a day after the dorgs had struck their proper world balance. There was plenty of meat for everyone in the world, there were plenty of dorgs, and they had to be segregated to prevent their being too many.

  Then the index of dorg fertility fell. The numbers of them were raised up past the safe level again only by unsegregating all flocks. The index fell again and continued to fall. It disappeared.

  The last dorgs were born. There was breathless waiting to see if some of them might not be fertile. They weren’t. It was all over with, and the world wailing raised higher than it had ever been.

  “What we need is fresh insights, youthful impetus, not the woe­ful stutterings of aged minds,” Annalouise Krug was saying. “Aren’t there any other animals that can live on rocks?”

  “No,” Adrian Durchbruch said sadly.

  “Where does the species male come from in the first place?” she asked.

  “It appears for the first time on a Monday morning in a comic strip or on a cave murus,” James Riddle said. “I believe it is something about the syndication that new formats in cartoons al­ways appear on Monday mornings.”

  “Before that, I mean. Where does the male come from?” Anna­louise said.

  “I don’t know,” Riddle groused.

  “Well, somebody had better remember something right now,” Annalouise stated with a curious menace. “Riddle, what good does an extra lobe do you if you can’t remember something special? Come up with something, I say.”

  “I can’t. There is nothing else to come up with,” Riddle said. But Annalouise picked the psychologist up and shook him till he near fell apart.

  “Now remember something else,” she ordered.

  “I can’t, Annalouise, there is nothing else to remember.”

  “You have no idea how hard I will shake you if you don’t come up with something.” She gave him an idea of just how hard she could shake him.

  “Now!” she ordered.

  “Oh, yes, since my life is on the line, I will remember something else,” Riddle moaned, with not much wind left in him. “There are others of those cave paintings that are most curious. Some of them are painted and carved over and over and over again, always in the same region. Most of them are of the common animals of today. Did it come that close, do you think, with even the common ones of them? One at least (and this gives me some hope) was a common animal of today that had been crossed out as having failed. But someone was not content to let it remain crossed out. It was redrawn with great emphasis. And then redrawn and ex­panded again and again, always in the same region.”

  “Let’s go to Dordogne right now with plenty of drawing materials,” Adrian snapped.

  “But Dordogne is crazy,” Annalouise cried. “Always in what same region, Adrian?”

  “We’re crazy, too, to think of it,” Adrian hooted, “but let’s go to him right now.”

  “What region, James?” Annalouise insisted. “Always drawn over and over again in what same region?”

  “The belly. Let’s go to Dordogne.”

  * * * *

  They had Dordogne on his feet and drawing dorgs so pregnant that their bellies drug the ground. He was dazed, though, and sniffing.

  “When you’ve drawn one pregnant dorg you’ve drawn them all,” he whimpered.

  But they kept him at it. He collapsed, but they jerked him back to the task again. Who knows which may be the quickening stroke? “On your feet, Dordogne,” they yelled, “do it one more time!”

  <>

  * * * *

  Richard E. Peck

  GANTLET

  JACK BRENS thumbed the ID sensor and waited for the sealed car doors to open. He had stayed too long in his office, hoping to avoid any conversation with the other commuters, and had been forced to trot through the fetid station. The doors split open; he put his head in and sucked gratefully at the cool air inside, then scrubbed his moist palms along his thighs and stepped quickly into the car. Rivulets of sweat ran down the small of his back. He stretched his lips into the parody of a confident smile.

  Most of the passengers sat strapped in, a few feigning sleep, others trying to concentrate on the stiff-dried facsheets which rat­tled in their hands. Lances of light fell diagonally through the gloom; some of the boiler plate welded over the windows had apparently cracked under the twice-daily barrage.

  Brens bit the tip of his tongue to remind himself to call Co-op Maintenance when he got home. Today the train was his responsi­bility—one day out of one hundred; one day out of twenty work weeks. If he didn’t correct the flaws he noticed, he might suffer because of them tomorrow, though the responsibility would by then have shifted to someone else. To whom? Karras. Tomorrow Karras had window seat.

  Brens nodded to several of the gray-haired passengers who greeted him.

  “Hey, Brens. How’s it going?”

  “Hello, Mr. Brens.”

  “Go get ‘em, Jack.”

  He strode down the aisle through the aura of acrid fear rising from the ninety-odd men huddled in their seats.A few of the commuters had already pulled their individual smoking bells down from the overhead rack. Although the rules forbade smok­ing till the train got underway, Brens understood their feelings too well to make a point of it.

  Only Karras sat at the front. The seats beside and behind him were empty.

  “Thought you weren’t coming and I might have to take her out myself,” Karras said. “But my turn tomorrow.”

  Brens nodded and slipped into the engineer’s seat. While he familiarized himself with the instrument console, he felt Karras peering avidly past him at the window. Lights in the station tunnel faded and the darkness outside made the window a temporary mirror. Brens glanced at it once to see the split image of Karras reflected in the inner and outer layers of the bulletproof glass: four bulging eyes, a pair of glistening bald scalps wobbling in and out of focus.

  The start buzzer sounded.
/>   He checked the interior mirror. Only two empty seats, at the front of course. He’d heard of no resignations from the Co-op and therefore assumed that the men who should have occupied those seats were ill; it took something serious to make a man miss his scheduled car and incur the fine of a full day’s salary.

  The train thrummed to life. Lights flared, the fans whined to­ward full thrust, and the car danced unsteadily forward as it climbed onto its cushion of air. Brens concentrated on keeping his hovering hands near the throttle override.

  “You really sweat this thing, don’t you?” Karras said. “Relax. You’ve got nothing to do but enjoy the view, unless you think you’re really playing engineer.”

  Brens tried to ignore him. It was true that the train was almost totally automatic. Yet the man who drew window seat did have certain responsibilities, functions to perform, and no time to waste. No time until the train was safely beyond the third circle—past Cityend, past Opensky, past Workring. And after that, an easy thirty miles home.

  Brens pictured the city above them as the train bored its way through the subterranean darkness, pushing it back with a fan of brilliant light. City stretched for thirty blocks from center in this direction and then met the wall of defenses separating it from Opensky. The whole area of City was unified now, finally—build­ings joined and sealed against the filth of the air outside that massive, nearly self-sufficient hive. Escalators up and down, beltways back and forth, interior temperature and pollution kept at an acceptable level—it was all rather pleasant.

  It was heaven, compared to Opensky. Surrounding and con­tinually threatening City lay the ring of Opensky and its in­credible masses of people. Brens hadn’t been there for years, not since driving through on his way to work had become impossibly time-consuming and dangerous. Twenty years ago he had been one of the last lucky ones, picked out by Welfare Control as “salvageable”; these days, no one left Opensky. For that matter, no one with any common sense entered.

  He could vaguely recall seeing single-family dwellings there, whether his wife, Hazel, believed that claim or not, and more vividly the single-family room he had shared with his parents and grandfather. He could even remember the first O-peddlers to appear on Sheridan Street. Huge, brawny men with green O-tanks strapped to their backs, they joked with the clamoring children who tugged at their sleeves and tried to beg a lungful of straight O for the high it was rumored to induce. But the peddlers dealt at first only with asthmatics and early-stage emphysemics who gathered on muggy afternoons to suck their metered dollar’s worth from the grimy rubber face mask looped over the peddler’s arm. All that was before each family had a private bubble hooked di­rectly to the City metering system.

  He had no idea what life in Opensky was like now, except what he could gather from the statistics that crossed his desk in Welfare Control. Those figures meant little enough: so many schools to maintain, dole centers to keep stocked and guarded, restraint aides needed for various playgrounds—he merely con­verted City budget figures to percentages corresponding to the requests of fieldmen in Opensky. And he hadn’t spoken to a fieldman in nearly a year. But he assumed it couldn’t be pleasant there. Welfare Control had recently disbanded and reassigned to wall duty all Riot Suppression teams; the object now was not to sup­press, but to contain. What went on in Opensky was the skyers’ own business, so long as they didn’t try to enter City.

  So. Six miles through Opensky to Workring, three miles of Workring itself, where the skyers kept the furnaces bellowing and City industry alive. But that part of the trip wouldn’t be too bad. Only responsible skyers were allowed to enter Workring, and most stuck to their jobs for fear of having their thumbprints erased from the sensors at each Opensky exit gate. Such strict con­trol had seemed harsh, at first, but Brens now knew it to be nec­essary. Rampant sabotage in Workring had made it so. The skyers who chose to work had nearly free access to and from Workring. And those who chose not to work—well, that was their choice. They could occupy themselves somehow. Each year Welfare Con­trol authorized more and more playgrounds in Opensky, and the public schools were open to anyone under fifty with no worse than a moderate arrest record.

  Beyond Workring lay the commuter residential area. A few miles of high-rise suburbs, for secretaries and apprentice managerial staff, merging suddenly with the sprawling redevelop­ment apartment blocks, and then real country. To Brens the com­muter line seemed a barometer of social responsibility: the greater one’s worth to City, the farther away he could afford to live. Brens and his wife had moved for the last time only a year ago, to the end of the trainpad, thirty miles out. They had a small square of yellowed grass and two dwarf apple trees that would not bear. It was . . .

  He shook off his daydreaming and tried to focus on the dark­ness rushing toward them. As their speed increased, he para­doxically lost the sense of motion conveyed by the lurching start and lumbering underground passage. Greater speed increased the amount of compression below as air entered the train’s howling scoops and whooshed through the ducts down the car sides. Cityend lay moments ahead.

  Brens concentrated on one of the few tasks not yet automated: at Cityend, and on the train’s emergence from the tunnel, his real duty would begin. Three times in the past month skyers had sought to breach City defenses through the tunnel itself.

  “Hey! You didn’t check defense systems,” Karras said.

  “Thanks,” Brens muttered through clenched teeth. “But they’re okay.” Then, because he knew Karras was right, he flipped the arming switch for the roof-mounted fifties and checked diverted- power availability for the nose lasers. The dials read in the green, as always.

  Only Karras, who now sat hunched forward in anticipation, would have noticed the omission. Because Karras was sick. The man actually seemed to look forward to his turn in the window seat, not only for the sights all the other commuters in the Co-op tried to avoid, but also for the possible opportunity of turning loose the train’s newly installed firepower.

  “One of these days they’re going to make a big try. They’d all give an arm to break into City, just to camp in the corridors. Now, if it was me out there, I’d be figuring a way to get out into Suburbs. But them? All they know is destroy. Besides, you think they’ll take it lying down that we raised the O-tax? Forget it! They’re out there waiting, and we both know it. That’s why you ought to check all the gear we’ve got. Never know when . . .”

  “Later, Karras! There it is.” Brens felt his chest tighten as the distant circle of light swept toward them—tunnel exit, Cityend. His forearms tensed and he glared at the instruments, waiting for the possibility that he might have to override the controls and slam the train to a stop. But a green light flashed; ahead, the circle of sky brightened as the approaching train tripped the switch that cut off the spray of mist at the tunnel exist. And with that mist fading, the barrier of twenty thousand volts which ordinarily crackled between the exit uprights faded also. For the next few moments, while the train snaked its way into Opensky, City was potentially vulnerable.

  Brens stared even harder at the opening, but saw nothing. The car flashed out into gray twilight, and he relaxed. But instinct, or a random impulse, drew his eyes to the train’s exterior mirrors. And then he saw them: a shapeless huddle of bodies pouring into the tunnel back toward City. He hit a series of studs on the con­sole and braced himself for the jolt.

  There it was.

  A murmur swept the crowded car behind him, but he ignored it and stared straight ahead.

  “What the hell was it?” Karras asked. “I didn’t see a thing.”

  “Skyers. They were waiting, I guess till the first car passed. They must have figured no one would see them that way.”

  “I don’t mean who. I mean, what did you use? I didn’t hear the fifties.”

  “For a man who’s taking the run tomorrow, you don’t keep up very well. Nothing fancy, none of the noise and flash some people get their kicks from. I just popped speedbreaks on the last t
hree cars.”

  “In the tunnel? My God! Must have wiped them all the way out the tunnel walls, like a squeegee. Who figured that one?”

  “This morning’s Co-op bulletin suggested it, remember?”

  Karras sulked. “I’ve got better things to do than pay attention to every word those guys put out. They must spend all day dic­tating memos. We got a real bunch of clods running things this quarter.”

  “Why don’t you volunteer?”

  “I give them my four days’ pay a month. Who needs that mishmash?”

  Brens silently agreed. No one enjoyed keeping the Co-op alive. No one really knew how. And that was one of the major problems associated with having amateurs in charge: it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad. But the only way, since the line itself had declared bankruptcy, and both city and state governments refused to take over. If it hadn’t been for the Co-op, City would have died, a festering ulcer in the midst of the cancer of Opensky.