The Deadly Sky

by Doris Piserchia

  He wore a black shirt and trousers. About forty-five, he was a tall, spare man who spoke as if he were mostly in some other world. His teeth were big and White and his light eyes were keen and wise.

  “That wasn’t the reason,” he said. “Among other things I’m the game warden for Emera.”

  “The what?”

  “There is some game out there in the wilds, you know. Do you hang out there a lot?”

  “Sometimes more than others.” Walking away from the Counter where we stood, I entered the stacks and examined some book titles. Falloway followed me.

  “Are you interested in genealogy?”

  “My drell has several generations stuffed in his brain. No, I can’t say I’m really interested in the subject.”

  “That’s too bad.” He didn’t sound sorry.

  “It reminds me a bit of mythology, now that I think about it. So and so begat so and so who invented such and such who begat so and so who spent twenty years in the wilderness studying this and that who begat, and so on. Names and dates and a smattering of information.”

  “Did you know that genealogy is one of the best ways to eradicate diseases and defects?”

  “Only if people are willing to allow such things to get in the way of romance.”

  “Don’t touch the books,” he said. “The acid on your fingers eats through the preservative.”

  “What if I want to borrow one? This is a library, isn’t it?”

  “You can’t borrow any of these volumes. They’re only for show. I can give you a copy of anything you like.”

  “No, thanks. About the jinga, people do ride them, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. If such a thing happened, everyone would be talking about it. If you want my opinion your life lacks excitement. Take my advice and leave this part of the country. Subdue your curiosity. Strike up an acquaintance with some pretty girl. Take her out. Talk to her. Share secrets.”

  “How about a girl nineteen years old with long blonde hair bound in a flat disc on top of her head? She wears loosely fitting gray trousers and a white blouse.”

  As I walked out of the library I had to admit that Falloway looked strange. Like an owl he stared after me, not moving from the aisle but scrutinizing me as if I were something unpleasant, like one of the extinct diseases of which he was so fond.

  Chapter 3

  I went to bed that night expecting to have a peaceful sleep. No sooner did I nod off than a terrible nightmare began, one so real that I couldn’t believe it was a dream. I turned over in my bed only to discover that I lay on the mountain staring up at the stars.

  It was a part of the escarpment I had never seen before, completely shrouded in a skirt of fog while the spires jutted up like irregular teeth. As I glanced behind me I thought I saw something shiny disappear around a clump of rocks.

  Knowing the experience couldn’t be genuine, I sat up and felt myself all over. The mist lay heavily on my face, cool and substantial enough for me to taste it. Getting to my feet, I walked to what I thought was the edge of an abyss and prepared to look down. Instead I leaped backward and then fell down.

  I stared up at two tall spires. Between them was a dark area with a crack of utter blackness running down the center, not yet open but plainly threatening. The portion around the crack didn’t look like normal sky but was wrinkled and bumpy as if something beyond was striking it in an attempt to get through to my side.

  Being there looking at the darkness had a strange effect on my mind. I felt as if something sinister were reaching out of the crack to prowl inside my head. There was fear and more blackness, animal sounds and grunts, an attempt to find a handhold somewhere inside me, a myriad of impressions flashing past my view, all of them lightless and unfriendly. It wasn’t a piece of ordinary sky stretched up there between the mountain peaks but a fabric of space that threatened to tear open. Something behind it tried to get in, and though it hadn’t succeeded, it had forced a small bit of black light into my world.

  Shrill cries came to me, gasps, frantic signals emanating from the dark region. Thumps and bumps, scrapings, gnawing, the beat of wings, dragging of feet or other appendages filled my ears but there was no way I could get away. Not that I really wanted to. There was about the fantastic panorama above my head a dread fascination that made me instigate no more than a cursory search for a way down the mountain. It seemed that I was trapped up here with sheer walls on all sides and a black sky that wanted to fall on my head.

  There seemed to be no way that this could be happening to me but I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I had gone to bed in my own room and now I was up here looking aghast at an astonishing piece of sky that appeared to be an entrance into another world. Or an exit from one. I could feel it with fingers in my head that reached out to probe the bumpy black places. In fact I could detect minuscule openings from my environment into the hidden one, so faint and narrow that my ordinary eyes would never find them. Yet I knew they were there. I also knew that I could penetrate them if I wished.

  Impulse made me do it. I rose up off the ground like a jinga and soared straight up toward the jagged crack in the sky. At first the opening I approached resisted me but then it gave way so that I went through it and came out on the dark side.

  I opened my eyes to look just as everything went totally black, not only without but also inside my mind and body. A more complete darkness I couldn’t imagine, and as I raised my hands to ward it off I discovered that I was in my room and sitting up in my own bed.

  It was unthinkable. To prove to myself that I was still up on the mountain, I arose and walked around. It was my room, with nothing out of the ordinary in or about it. I was dressed in pajamas, my feet were cold, the air around me was dimly dark but not so much that I couldn’t see. The time flashed in green numbers above the door, telling me it was just past midnight.

  Switching the bed out from the wall, I climbed into it. I had retired at eleven o’clock, gone up to the mountain and back again all in the space of an hour! Impossible! It had been a dream.

  In the bathroom I checked to see if my feet were dirty. They were dean. My hair was normally untidy, my pajamas were not unduly wrinkled, but on the back of the top, just below the collar, was a smear that looked like a grass stain.

  It was only after I went back to bed to calmly think it over that I realized how tired I was. Instead of arriving at profound and meaningful conclusions regarding my recent experience, I fell dead asleep.

  In the morning a violent thunderstorm awakened me. That and the racket someone was making at the front door. Sargoth and I arrived at the same time to open it. There stood my father with a look of bewilderment on his face as rain fell to soak his already wet head.

  Having found me sound asleep earlier, he had eaten alone in preparation for going to the office. No sooner had he reached the train station in front of the house than the sky turned dark and a deluge dropped from it. Not only that, streets and basements within a four-square-mile area were flooded.

  Something had gone wrong with my experiment. Instead of my antenna capturing the light and sounds of a storm miles away, it had interfered with the weather shield orbiting five thousand miles skyward.

  Later I said to Sargoth, “They’re accusing me because they need someone to blame.”

  “And because you’re probably guilty.”

  “But how is it possible? How could my antenna affect a satellite?”

  “You’ll have to describe its properties more fully to me. Perhaps you included some material of your father’s that you didn’t understand.”

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  Meanwhile I was forced to climb upon the roof in view of the entire neighborhood who, in my opinion, were more interested in the rain than in me. The police came by to ask me to put a stop to the storm. I explained that clouds had to be given time to drift away on their own.

  Father went on to his office, leaving me to face up to the opposition by myself. Old man Terris watched me through th
e process of antenna-removing, remarking now and then that dangerous inventors and disrespectful kids should be isolated from civilized communities. Personally I believed he loved the feel of the warm rain pelting him and I interpreted as one of regret his expression when the sky eventually cleared.

  I was down in the lab when Willmett came by to tell me he had made his decision to become a drell.

  “It’s too soon,” I said. “You haven’t given it enough thought.”

  “All my life is enough time.”

  “Your judgment is affected by dope.”

  “If it is, they’ll discover it when they give me a physical. I hear they’re very exacting.” He was by far too cheerful for a man who had made up his mind to become a brain encased in a glass body. I suspected that bourbon or weed was the root cause of his amiability, or at least I hoped so.

  Willmett was a dark-haired, rangy person near to my own height, with a slightly decadent outlook and a dependent personality. Whatever there was that one could become addicted to, my friend endeavored to search it out. When we were younger I had tried to keep him away from alcohol and dope but that was before I learned I was wasting my time. Some things are meant to be just as some people are destined only to learn by their own bitter experience.

  It angered me to think that cults such as the drells were allowed to exist in an intelligent society. How dare one person tell another that it was all right for him to give up his all to the butcher’s block?

  “You’re crazy,” I said to Willmett. “I’m not going with you.”

  “Sure you are. Don’t I know how curious you are about everything? I doubt if I could keep you away.”

  “Sometimes my esthetic and righteous senses drown out my curiosity.”

  “Come on, now, it isn’t as bad as all that. You’ve lived half your life with a drell.”

  “Sargoth is different,” I said.

  “As I want to be different.”

  “You’re soft in the head.”

  I had never seen an unctuous smile until I met the receptionist who worked in the front office of the drell’s establishment.

  “Mr. Somely,” he said without interest. He looked from me to Willmett and back again, smiled in his sickening way and settled his gaze upon me.

  “All we want is literature,” I said.

  “I’ve already read it,” said Willmett. “I’m ready for the first step.”

  “That isn’t enough.” Somely looked bored. “Unless you’re ready for the last step you shouldn’t be here.”

  “Can’t we go in the back?” said my friend. “To surgery?”

  I elbowed him without making myself too obvious. It seemed in gross bad taste to express a desire to see people having their arms, legs, heads and whatever disconnected. In fact I was so disgusted by the mere idea that I wanted to kick Willmett and stalk out of the place.

  “You have my permission to leave,” he said to me in cold tones, obviously having read my mind.

  I would have done so, but hanging around trying to haul his chestnuts from the fire had almost become habit. I merely stepped aside and waited to see what Somely was going to do. Perhaps he would cart my friend away and that would be the last I would ever see of him. Surely I wouldn’t be interested in continuing our friendship if he ended up like Sargoth. One glass-covered personality was enough for me, and besides it wouldn’t be Willmett anymore. A person was flesh and bones, eyes, nose, hair and physical mannerisms. He was a sniffle, flash of teeth, dirty fingernails, hairy knuckles, a whisper, glance of recognition, glowing soul endowed with shortcomings. Take those away and what did you have left?

  “Come back at nine o’clock Thursday morning for your examination,” said Somely.

  “Why?” I said. “Does his body have to be healthy before you’ll begin to take it away from him?”

  “Mental tests. Do you mind?”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Willmett said of me. “He’s an idealist and a substance worshiper. Nothing is any good unless it needs a deodorant.”

  Outside in the street he drew a breath of fresh air and patted himself on the chest. “I can’t make it through life in the normal manner. Maybe I’ll do better as a glass man.”

  “I’m warning you,” I said. “If you show up here Thursday, that’s the end of our acquaintanceship. It will prove you’re totally crazy and unfit to be around.”

  He looked at me in angry amusement. “You have a lot of nerve questioning my sanity. Between you and the old boy there isn’t a full brain to be found anywhere. He’s senile and you’re a mad scientist.”

  “I mean it. If I see you anywhere near this place Thursday—”

  “You might for a minute or two, before I pass my mentals. Then it’s the glass jar for me.”

  On the way home alone I stopped at an astrologer’s booth on the boulevard to have my bad dream interpreted. For three dollars I was fed a great deal of nonsense about my harboring a secret desire to try my wings and fly away to another life-style, thoughts of which supposedly scared the daylights out of me.

  The fact was that I lived the way I wanted. Having run away from home and civilization at age twelve, I knew how the other half lived and I possessed the sense to realize that hedonism combined with poverty wasn’t for me. Some sort of maturing effect had imparted to me at least a partial understanding of my father and what it was he expected of me. I was more aware of the kind of existence he wanted for me than he. It would be all right with him if I turned out to be decent and happy, and it didn’t matter that he wasn’t the gushing sort with his affections. Intent and meaning, though often silent, were all too audible in the world. For instance, I knew that Willmett was filled with self-hatred. He was no more a fit candidate for drelldom than a cadaver, and if Mr. Somely accepted him it would be because Somely was a gangster.

  “It won’t do you any good to take your displeasure out on me,” said Sargoth after I went home.

  I went down into the lab and studied my antenna to see why it would bother with something as far away as a satellite.

  “I’ve never asked you this,” I said, “but how could you willingly give up your body parts?”

  It wasn’t the truth. I had been asking him that very same question once a week for as long as I had known him.

  “The idea appealed to me,” he said.

  “Certainly it didn’t appeal to your sense of humanity since you’re no longer human.”

  “Anything born of woman is human no matter what is done to it later.”

  “There’s a purpose in being human and that is to follow the same path everybody follows. You play, grow, love, reproduce, age and die. If you don’t do any of those things your being is purposeless.”

  Sargoth made a clicking sound while he intensified the greenness of his eye. “What about spiritual and mental growth? Is a mind incapable of those?”

  “For what reason? If you were born to be happy as a complete soul, you destroy your purpose when you become less than a complete soul. Besides,” I continued, growing emotional, “getting your arms and then your legs and then your torso and finally your head cut away like so much beef is a sin, a crime and a moral disaster. And why is it done that way, anyhow? Why do they cut off your arms first and then the rest a piece at a time? Why don’t they just take out your brain and put it in that glass?”

  He wouldn’t talk to me when I got upset. Now he turned and walked away, and I watched him go and thought about having my legs severed. Was my society really all that holy if it permitted its members to maim themselves?

  “I don’t believe any of it!” I called after him. “I don’t care how hard you try to convince me, I think there’s something you aren’t telling me!”

  On Thursday Mr. Somely refused to tell Willmett whether he had passed the personality tests or not.

  “There’s more than one series, you know,” he said.

  Willmett was peeved. “I took more than one series. I took ten altogether.”

  “If you tak
e ten times that amount, will you consider it to be excessive? We aren’t dealing with hamburger in this institution.”

  “He’s gross,” I said to my friend outside. “Can’t you see that you’ve already been disqualified?”

  “I see nothing of the sort! He’s being a pain in the backside.”

  “He’s trying to let you down gently.”

  “Ha! Listen to me, I’ve taken more personality tests than a guinea pig. These were no different. In fact they were simple.”

  “Simpleminded?” I said.

  He pulled away from me. “A lot you care! If they accept me I’ll get rid of my suffering. I can have most of the good things in life without any of the negatives.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said, but he wasn’t having any of it, turned his back on me and strode away.

  On an impulse I went into the building again and approached Somely. “I want to take the tests.”

  He smiled. He said,. “Really?”

  After I sat for three hours filling out forms and answering questions concerning everything from the impressions of my remotest daydreams to the present state of my viscera, he wouldn’t tell me my scores.

  “Come back next Thursday,” he said, seemingly entertained by my annoyance. “Though if you want my opinion I think you passed.” He was one person I thoroughly disliked. No matter what he said I wouldn’t believe him.

  “You what?” Sargoth said when I told him.

  “It’s strictly to expose that bunch. They’re destroying lives and I think it’s past time to put them out of business.”

  “What an extraordinary intention!”

  In my younger days I had vented some of my frustrations by calling him a tinkling buzzard. I longed to call him that now but refrained with effort. It would do me no good anyway. I was convinced that with his arms and legs he had also turned over a unique something that had made him important and worth listening to.

  “I don’t mean to be insulting,” I said.

  “Yes, you do. You hate the fact that I’m an abomination who seems to get some satisfaction out of existing.”