Echo Round His Bones

by Thomas Disch

  Worsaw -- the same Worsaw that Hansard had seen enter the manmitter with the last squad that morning -- struggled to his feet and shouted, "Don't kill that bastard -- you hear me? Don't touch him. I want him for myself!"

  Lesh, who had been raising his rifle to take aim at Hansard, seemed uncertain whether to heed his prisoner's request or kick him back into the heap. His doubt was resolved by the other Worsaw -- the Worsaw with the revolver -- who commanded Lesh to do as his double (or would it be triple in this case?) had ordered. "If the fourteen of us can't take care of a goddamn fairy officer, then he deserves to get away."

  Hansard was encircled, and each moment the circle narrowed. He stood with his back to the wall of the transmitter (upon which the Christmas-tree lights were festively a-burble once more), and considered whether to make a dash to the right or to the left -- then realized that his encirclement was only apparent, that there was a clear path to the rear.

  He turned and leaped once more through the steel wall of the vault. Forgetting that the floor of the inner chamber was raised two feet above the floor level of the hall, he found himself standing knee-deep in steel again.

  Like a wading pool, he thought, and the thought saved his life. For, if he could wade in it, should he not be equally able to swim in it?

  Filling his lungs, he bent double and plunged his whole body into the yielding floor. With his eyes closed and the handle of the attaché case clenched between his teeth (Priority-A was, after all, the ultimate security rating), he went through the motions of swimming underwater. His limbs moved through the metamorphosed steel more easily than through water, but he had no way of knowing if these motions were propelling him forward.

  There was no sensation, as there would be for a swimmer, of water flowing over his skin; only a feeling through his entire body, internally as well as externally, of tingling -- as though he had been dipped into a mild solution of pure electricity, if such a thing could be.

  He "swam" until he was sure that, if his swimming was having any effect at all, he was out of the hall. Then he changed direction, angling to the right. At last, starved for oxygen, he had to "surface." He came up inside a broom closet. It was as good a place as any to catch his breath and gather his wits.

  He rested there, only his head projecting out of the floor (his body, cradled in its substance, showed no tendencies either to rise or sink), fearful that his labored breathing might betray his presence to the . . . What were they -- mutineers? Phantoms?

  Or phantasms, the product of his own paranoia?

  But he knew perfectly well that he was not mad, and if he were ever to become mad he would not have inclined in the direction of paranoia. He had taken an MMPL only last December, and Pittmann had shown him the results. It was scarcely possible to be more sane than Nathan Hansard.

  In the dim light that filtered into the closet through the crack under the door Hansard could see motes of dust riding in the air. He blew at them, but his breath did not affect their demure Brownian movement. Yet he could feel the movement of that same air against his fingertip.

  Conclusion? That he, and the crew that had come baying after his blood, were of another substance than the physical world they moved in. That he was, in short, a spirit. A ghost.

  Was he, then, dead? No -- for death, he had long ago decided, was mere insentience. Or, if he had died inside the transmitter and this were some sort of afterlife, the system of Dante's Inferno was evidently not going to be of any use as a guide.

  Whatever had happened, happened during the time Hansard was in the transmitter. Instead of going to Mars at the moment of the jump there had been a malfunction, and his new immaterial condition (for it was simpler to assume that it was he who had changed and not the world about him) was its result.

  And all the other wraiths -- the three separate Worsaws, the two Leshes, the pile of corpses -- were all of them the result of similar malfunctions? The bearded Worsaw, he who had first stepped into the vault and would now step out of it no more, was probably, by this theory, the product of some earlier transmission breakdown. But what then of the two other Worsaws? Where had they come from? From subsequent breakdowns, presumably.

  But this would mean that the original Worsaw who had gone through the machine, the real Worsaw, had continued the course of his own life in the real world, served his term of duty on Mars and returned to earth -- and made the Mars jump again. Twice again, counting today's jump. And this real Worsaw went on with his life in complete ignorance of the existence of the Doppelgangers splitting off from him. And if all this were true . . .

  Then there would also be another Nathan Hansard on the Mars Command Post, of whom he -- the Nathan Hansard resting in the concrete floor of the broom closet -- was a mere carbon copy resulting from the imperfect operating of the transmitter.

  Though for all he knew, this was its normal function.

  In support of his theory, Hansard recollected that there had been a moment within the transmitter when he had thought he'd seen the word EARTH flicker to MARS. Had he made the jump to Mars and then bounced back like a rubber ball in that briefest of moments when the operating switch was flicked on?

  Like a rubber ball, or like . . . an echo . . .

  But this was not the time or the place to elaborate ingenious theories. Worsaw and his confederates were undoubtedly searching the building and the grounds for him at this moment. He ducked back beneath the floor and "swam" on through the foundations, surfacing only for air or to get his bearings; now bobbing up into an office full of silent, industrious clerks (for there were no noises in this dream-world except the sound of his own breathing), then into an empty corridor or an unfurnished room (with which the building seemed to abound, like some gigantic coral reef). It was several minutes before he was outside the labyrinth of the security complex and in the sunlight of the April noonday where he saw, but was not seen by, two of Worsaw's bearded friends.

  It would not do to remain in Camp Jackson. He had lost the cap of his uniform in the transmitter, or in his flight from the hall, so that he would be conspicuously out of uniform here. Among the throngs of the city, however, he would be as good as invisible, because if he refrained from walking through walls there would be no visual evidence of his dematerialized state.

  He considered how he could travel the ten miles to downtown D.C. most quickly. Not by swimming. Ordinarily he would have taken the bus. . . .

  It felt strange to pass out the gate of Camp Jackson without showing a pass or I-D. The city-bound bus was waiting at the curb. Mansard got on, careful to walk lightly so that his feet would not pass through the floor, and took an empty seat by a window. A moment later a private sat down in the same seat -- and in Hansard. Mansard, much shaken, moved to the seat across the aisle.

  The bus started up slowly, and Hansard was able to keep from sinking all the way through his seat. Each time the bus accelerated or decelerated, Mansard was in danger of slipping out of the vehicle altogether. At a traffic light just before the bridge over the Potomac the bus braked suddenly and Mansard somersaulted through the seat in front of him, down through the floor of the bus and the transmission, and deep into the roadway itself.

  After that he decided to hike the rest of the way into the city.

  FOUR THE REAL WORLD

  In witnessing the foregoing remarkable events, it may have occurred to the reader to wonder how he would have reacted in Hansard's circumstances, and if this reader were of a skeptical temperament he might very well question the plausibility of Mansard's so-sudden and so-apt adjustment to the enormous changes in the world about him. Yet this hypothetical skeptic shows the same ready adaptibility every night in his dreams.

  Hansard, in those first perilous minutes, was living in a dream, and his actions showed the directness and simplicity of the actions of a dreamer. What had he done, after all, but flee from the face of danger? It can be objected that Mansard was not dreaming; but can we be so sure of that yet? When else, in the usual course of exper
ience, does one walk through steel walls?

  So it is not really so wonderful that Mansard should have fallen into a half-dreaming state and been able to act so naturally amid so much that was unnatural. Perhaps our skeptical reader might even allow that, with the wind in the right direction, he might not have acted entirely differently himself -- at least he should not discount the possibility.

  Mansard did not shake off this sense of unreality at once. Indeed, with the occasion for action past, with nothing to do but explore and reflect, this sense grew, and with its growth he felt the beginnings of dread -- of a subtle terror worse than anything he had experienced in the hall outside the transmitter. For it is possible to flee the figures of a nightmare, but there is no escape from the nightmare itself, but waking.

  The worst of it was that none of the people that he passed on the city streets, the drivers of cars and buses, the clerks in stores, no one would look at him. They disregarded Hansard with an indifference worthy of gods. Hansard stood between the jeweler and his lamp, but the wraith's shadow was as imperceptible to the jeweler as was the wraith himself. Hansard grasped the diamond in his own hand; the jeweler continued his careful cutting. Once, when he was crossing a street, a truck turned the corner and without even ruffling Hansard's hair drove straight through him.

  It was as though he were a beggar or deformed, but in that case they would at least have looked away, which was some sort of recognition. No, it was as though each one of them had said to him: You do not exist , and it became increasingly difficult not to believe them.

  So that Hansard walked through this unheeding, intangible city as through a dream-landscape, observing but not understanding it, not even endeavoring as yet to understand it. He walked past the immemorial, unmemorable white stoneheaps of the capital buildings: the unfenestrated mausoleum that housed the National Gallery; the monumental Yawn of the Supreme Court; the Capitol's Great White Wart; and that supreme dullness, the Washington Monument.

  Though he had lived in the District of Columbia for the last eight years, though he had passed these buildings almost daily, though he even supposed that he admired them, he had never seen them before. He had always regarded them with the same unseeing, reverential eyes with which he would have regarded, for instance, his nation's flag.

  But now, curiously (for architecture was far from being his immediate concern), he saw them as they were, with the veil of the commonplace ripped away. Why, he wondered, did the capitals of the columns burst into those Corinthian bouquets? Why, for that matter, were the columns there? Everything about these buildings seemed arbitrary, puzzling. Presumably they had been built for human purposes -- but what purpose can be served by a five-hundred-fifty-five-foot obelisk?

  He stood beneath the blossoming, odorless cherry trees and tried to argue against the horror mounting within him.

  At those rare moments when the skin of the world is peeled away and its substance laid bare before us, the world may assume either of two aspects -- benign or malignant. There are those sublime, Wordsworthian moments when Nature apparels herself in celestial light; but there are other moments too, when, with the same trembling sensibility and the same incontrovertible sureness, we see that the fair surface of things -- all flesh, these white and scentless blossoms, the rippled surface of the reflecting pool, even the proud sun itself -- are but the whiting on the sepulchre within which . . . it were best not to look.

  Hansard stood at such a brink that first afternoon, and then he drew back. Once already in his life, long ago and in another country, he had stepped beyond that threshold and let himself see what lay there, so that this time he was able to foresee well in advance that such a moment threatened again. (The symptoms were clear. A minacious cold seemed to settle over him, followed by a feeling of hollowness that, originating in the pit of his stomach, spread slowly to all his limbs; his thoughts, like the music on a record placed off-center on a turntable, moved through his consciousness at eccentric tempi -- now too fast and now too slow.)

  He foresaw what was to be, and resisted it. This is not an easy thing to do. Most of us are passive before our strongest emotions, as before one of the Olympian gods. Even Medusa-headed horror has an allure, though we won't often admit it; and when we do surrender ourselves to her, it is with averted eyes and the pretence that we are not helping out.

  The same reader who may at first have tended to overvalue Hansard's quick reflexes in the face of immediate danger may now be inclined to value his struggle with the "Medusa" too lightly, or not at all. Let such a reader be assured of the reality of this peril. Had Hansard succumbed to these feelings -- had he, slipping into solipsism, let himself believe that the Real World was not any longer as real as it had been, then we would either have a much shorter and sadder tale to tell, or we would have had to find another hero for it.

  But for all that, it is true that a man in good health can bear a few hours of supernatural terror without lasting ill effect. The worst fear, after all, is of the known rather than of the unknown -- a truth that Hansard became aware of as soon as he realized, about sunset, that the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach was a symptom of more than malaise; it was simply hunger pangs. And worse than the hunger pangs was his thirst.

  In restaurants he could see people eating, but their food -- like all matter that belonged exclusively to the Real World -- sifted through his fingers like vapor. He could not turn on a water faucet or lift a glass, and if he could have it would have availed him nothing, for the water of the Real World was as insubstantial as its solid matter. Hansard stood in a public fountain and let the water cascade though his body without dampening his clothes, or his thirst. It began to seem that his sojourn in the dream-world might not be of much longer duration than a dream. How long could one go without food or water? Three days? Four?

  But what then of Worsaw and the others in Camp Jackson? To judge only by the length of their beards these men were veterans of the dream-world, from which it was only reasonable to suppose that some place in this city there was ghostly food and drink to satisfy his most unghostly appetites. He had only to find it.

  If the theory he had developed earlier that day concerning the cause of his changed condition were correct, there could be but one source of the food that sustained Worsaw and Co.: -- it had to originate from a transmitter, just as they themselves had. The "ghost" of food that had been transmitted to Mars would logically be the only food a ghost could eat; the "ghost" of water would be the only water a ghost could drink.

  And would not the same hold true of air as well? Did Hansard breathe the same air that the residents of the Real World breathed -- or another air, the "ghost" of theirs? If the latter were the case, it would explain the strange silence of the dream-world in which the only noises audible to Hansard were the noises he made himself; and these, in turn, were inaudible in the Real World. The air that bore, the sound waves Hansard produced was a different medium from the air of the Real World.

  It was a theory easily confirmed or disproved. The transmitters that supplied the Mars Command Post with a constant fresh supply of both air and water were located beneath the D.C. Dome, just outside the eastern perimeter of Camp Jackson itself.

  As the simulated daylight of the domed city modulated from dusk to darkness, Hansard walked back toward Camp Jackson on the delicate snowcrust of the sidewalks, occasionally popping his toes through the thin membrane of the surface. He had discarded his military hat and jacket, depositing them with his attaché case inside the thick walls of the Lincoln Memorial where, invisible to all eyes, Hansard was certain a Top-Priority secrecy could be preserved indefinitely. His tie was loosened, and his shirt open at the collar, despite the discomfort this caused him. Except for the officer's stripe down his pants' leg, he should pass for a pedestrian of the Real World -- or so he hoped.

  Hansard arrived at the barricade about the Mars "pipelines" an hour after the false twilight of the domed city had dimmed to extinction. The D.C. Dome was composed of two
shells: the inner was an energy-screen, designed late in the 1970's as a defense against the neutron bombs. Had it ever been put to the test, the unhappy residents of the city would have found it no more effective a defense than a magic pentagram drawn with the fat of a hanged man -- an awesome but empty symbol. Subsequent to its erection, however, this energy dome was found to have the pragmatic property of supporting a second outer dome, or skin, of plastic. Soon, from this single phenomenon, an entire technology had developed, and now it was possible to build outer domes substantial enough to act as a weather shield over areas twelve miles in diameter and able to support a complex of lighting and ventilation systems as well.

  The Mars pumps stood just outside Camp Jackson, since they were officially administered by NASA, though in fact by the Army. Accordingly, Army guards patrolled the barrier built about the pumping stations. Hansard need take no heed of either guards or barrier, but he did. If his theory was correct, he would have to be wary not to encounter any other men of "A" Company, for this would be their only source of water as well as Hansard's.