Echo Round His Bones

by Thomas Disch

Within the barrier, the grounds sloping up to the concrete pumphouse were attractively landscaped -- apparently for the benefit of the inner guards, since the barrier prevented anyone else from seeing them. Hansard lowered himself into the earth and swam slowly up the hill through lawn and flowerbeds.

  Reaching the pumphouse and having satisfied himself that he was alone, Hansard again assumed a standing posture and walked through the concrete wall of the building.

  And found himself drowning.

  The entire pumphouse was filled with water -- real liquid water, or rather, unreal water of the sort that an unreal Hansard might either drink or drown in. Instead of floundering back through the wall, Hansard swam upward. The water rose to a height of fourteen feet, which was yet a few feet less than the high ceiling of the building. Surfacing, Hansard's ears popped.

  The surface of the water was brightly lighted by the illuminated panels of the ceiling, and Hansard could see that the water in the center of this strange reservoir was bubbling furiously. Remarkable as these phenomena were, Hansard's first consideration was to quench his thirst and be gone. He could fit these facts to his theories at his leisure.

  Regretful that he could carry back no water to the city, except what was sloshing about in the toes of his shoes, Hansard returned on the bus -- this time without mischance. He got off outside the New St. George, a hotel which, in the ordinary scheme of things, he would have never been able to afford. At the reception desk he informed himself of the number of an unoccupied suite, and found his way to it up the stairs (he suspected that the hotel's elevators would start and stop too quickly for him to be able to keep from popping out through the floor).

  Once in possession of his rooms he realized that he might just as well have gone to a flophouse, for he was unable to turn on the light switch. Shivering in his damp clothes, he went to sleep in the midst of the suite's undoubtable, but darkened, luxury. He slept on a canopied bed, but he would have been just as comfortable, after all, on the floor.

  He woke with a bad head-cold and screaming.

  It had been so many years since he had had the dream that he had been able to convince himself that he had rid himself of it. The dream always concluded with the same image, but it might begin in a variety of ways. For instance:

  He was there. Drenched. Mud up to his thighs. A buzzing somewhere, always a buzzing. Always wet. Always knowing that the enveloping greenness was made green by wishing for his death. Always bodies, scrap-heaps of bodies along the muddy road. He was very young. He didn't always want to look. "I won't look," he said. Whenever he was there, in that country in his dreams, he knew how young he was. But you could look at anything if you had to. And diseases, lots of diseases. And always something that buzzed.

  The people of that country were very little. Little adults, like the children in the paintings of the Colonial period. Their faces were children's faces. He could see long rows of their faces pressed up against the wire. He was carrying pots of cooked rice. When they spoke it sounded more like screaming than speech. The compound always got fuller. Every part of the fence was filled with their faces. They asked for "incendigel," which seemed to be the word for rice in their country.

  This part of the dream could never have happened, he knew, except in the unreal world of dreaming, because an officer would not have carried the pots of rice himself. A private would have done that. But in the dream it was always Hansard who carried the pots of incendigel and the little people stared at him hungrily, wishing for his death.

  It was not a credible world; not in the sense that, for instance, Milwaukee or Los Angeles was real and credible. It was a dream-world of little half-people who could not speak unless they screamed.

  And there was a lady in the middle of the road with most of her head missing. The medic cut open her belly and took out the baby. "It's going to live," he said.

  "Thank God," said Hansard.

  "Burn it all down," said the captain. The little men behind the wire fence began screaming when the interpreter told them what the captain was saying. They tried to get out, and the captain had to use tear gas, though he didn't want to, since supplies were limited this far inland.

  He was there, in the fields. It was a hot and windless noonday. The grains were swollen with their ripeness. The flame throwers made a buzzing sound. Far across the blackened field a small figure waved at Hansard as though in greeting. "Welcome, welcome," he was screaming in his strange language.

  He was screaming. He found that he had fallen through the bed. He was looking up into the bedsprings. He stopped screaming and clambered up through the mattress into daylight.

  "I've stopped dreaming," he said aloud. "That was all a dream, it never happened." Though this was not strictly true, it helped him to hear himself say it. "And now it's all over, and I'm back in the Real World."

  But despite these reassurances, and the good advice implicit in them that he should turn to daylight matters now, he could not keep from remembering that one moment of the dream -- when he had been looking out through the wire fence at Captain Hansard carrying that big pot of rice. His mouth watered. He was hungry. He was so hungry -- and he had no food.

  FIVE

  THE VOYEUR

  One of the minor provisions of the Emergency Allocation of Resources Act had been that the various transmitters built by the government were to be situated in different states. As soon as the first receiver had made the long rocket journey to Mars and landed, materials for the construction of the Command Posts (of which there were six) were transmitted from Texas, California, and Ohio. Camp Jackson/Virginia, because it was under the D.C. Dome, was an obvious choice for the location of the one transmitter through which the personnel staffing the Command Posts was provided. Food, nonperishable goods, and artillery, however, were still supplied through the California and Ohio transmitters.

  It would have been a simple enough matter to stow away in the back of a Real World truck or train bound from Washington to Cincinnati. But it was certain that if he did, he would arrive in a severe, not to say fatal, state of anoxic anoxemia. For the air that Hansard breathed here in the city was not the air of the Real World, but the dematerialized air created by the transmitters and kept from dispersing by the dome above the city. Outside the dome, on the open highway or in another city, his store of dematerialized oxygen would be quickly dissipated. The dome kept him alive -- but it also kept him a prisoner.

  Yet there had to be food of some sort coming through the transmitters, for the men of Camp Jackson were surely sustained by more than air and water. And since the greatest aid to solving a problem is knowing that it can be solved, Hansard need not and did not panic.

  Whatever food they were eating had to be going through the Camp Jackson transmitter; and as only personnel went through the transmitters it must be that the men were bringing food with them to Mars, probably concealed in their duffels. Though this was against regulations, it was commonplace practice, since the Command Post lacked a PX. But how could they know to bring enough ?

  Unless there was a way, which Hansard had yet to discover, of communicating with the inhabitants of the Real World. . . .

  Reluctant to return to Camp Jackson during the day, Hansard thought of some other way to put the day to good use. He remembered that the State Department had been provided with a small manmitter by which they were able to transport personnel to overseas embassies. If anyone were to go through this manmitter today, it would be well for Hansard to be on hand: Hansard could gain an ally for himself, and the new ghost would be spared considerable anguish in learning to cope with his changed condition.

  It would be too much to hope that the possible State Department traveller would be bringing food with him. Nevertheless, Hansard hoped just that.

  As he went out of the New St. George, Hansard stepped at the cashier's box and made out a personal check in the amount of $50.00, which he placed in the hotel's locked safe. It was not a wholly whimsical gesture, for Hansard had a highly developed
conscience and he would have suffered a pang of guilt if he skipped out on a hotel bill.

  He did not know in which of the several State Department buildings the small manmitter would be located, but it was a simple matter to find it by searching through the various corridors for heavy concentrations of armed guards. When he did find it, at four in the afternoon, it was immediately apparent that he had not been the first to search it out.

  The walls and floor of the small anteroom adjoining the manmitter were covered with delicate traceries of dried blood, which no cleaning woman would ever remove, for they were not of the Real World. When Hansard touched a fingertip to one of these stains, the thin film crumbled into a fine powder, like ancient lace. There had been murders here, and Hansard was certain that he knew the identity of the murderers.

  And the victims? He hesitated to think of what distinguished men had used the State Department's manmitter during recent months. Had not even the then Vice-President Madigan traveled to King Charles III's Coronation via this manmitter?

  Hansard, absorbed in these somber considerations, was startled by the sudden flash of red above the door of the manmitter's receiver compartment, indicating that a reception had just been completed. There was a flurry of activity among the guards in the anteroom, of whose presence Hansard had been scarcely aware till then.

  The door of the manmitter opened and a strange couple came out: an old man in a power wheel chair, and an attractive black-haired woman in her early thirties. Both wore heavy fur coats and caps that were matted with rain. A guardsman approached the old man and seemed to engage him in an argument.

  If only I knew how to lip-read, Hansard thought, not for the first time.

  His attention had been so caught up by this scene that he was not at once aware of the voices approaching the anteroom in the outer corridor. Voices . . . it could only be . . .

  Hansard dodged first behind the couple in fur coats, then surveyed the room for a vantage point from which he could eavesdrop without being seen. The guard who was addressing the man in the wheel chair had been sitting at a desk, and by this desk stood a wastebasket. From the center of the room the contents of the wastebasket would be invisible.

  Hansard lowered himself into the floor, careful not to allow his body to slip through the ceiling of the room immediately below, for it was only so, immersed in the "material" of the Real World, that gravity seemed to lose its hold on him. At last he was totally enveloped except for his head, which was out of sight in the wastebasket. And none too soon, for by the sudden clarity of the intruders' voices Hansard knew he was no longer alone in the room.

  "I told you this would be a waste of time," said a voice that seemed tantalizingly familiar. Worsaw's? No, though it had something of the same southern softness to it.

  A second voice that could have belonged only to the Arkansan Lesh whined a torpid stream of obscenities in reply to the first speaker, to the general effect that he, being of a wholly inferior nature, should shut up.

  A third speaker agreed with this estimate and expanded on it; he suggested that the first speaker owed himself and Lesh an apology.

  "I apologize, I apologize."

  "You apologize, sir ."

  "I apologize, sir," the first voice echoed miserably.

  "You're goddamn right, and you'd just better remember it too. We don't have to keep you alive, you know. Any time I like I can just saw your fat head off, you son of a bitch, and if it wasn't for Worsaw I'd of done it long ago. I should smash your face in right now, that's what I should do."

  "Ah, Lesh," said the third speaker, "don't you ever get tired of that crap? What time is it, anyhow?"

  The first voice, which Hansard could still not place, said, "The clock over the desk says four-fifteen. And that means that Greenwich Mean Time is ten-fifteen, and so all the embassies in Europe are shutting down. There may still be a few people left, like that old cripple and the piece, coming back here . But that isn't going to do us any good."

  "You think you're pretty goddamn smart, don't you?" Lesh whined.

  "There's probably something to what he says though," the third voice put in. "There ain't any point sitting around here if nobody else is going through. Leastwise, I got better things to do."

  Lesh, after more obscenities, agreed. Their voices faded as they left the room.

  Hansard decided to follow them. He risked little in doing so, for in his present state concealment took little effort and escape perhaps less. He dropped through the floor into the room below, and the momentum took him through the floor of that room in turn, and so on into the basement. This method of descent allowed him time to be outside the building and hidden from sight before the three men had exited from the front door.

  The man whose voice had seemed familiar to Hansard walked behind the other two (who carried rifles), and was bent under the weight of a field pack so that it was not possible to see his face. The two armed men mounted a Camp Jackson-bound bus, leaving their companion to continue the journey on foot, for with the added weight of the pack and the consequent increase in momentum he would probably not have been able to stay inside the vehicle.

  When the bus was out of sight, however, this figure removed his back pack and laid it in the middle of a shrub, then turned down a street in a direction that carried him away from Camp Jackson.

  A canteen swung from his cartridge belt. Hansard needed that canteen for himself. He removed the field pack from the shrubbery and "buried" it hastily in the sidewalk, then set off after the vanishing figure in a soundless pantomime of pursuit: a lion padding after an inaudible quarry through a silent jungle.

  After several turnings, they entered an area of luxury apartment buildings. The figure turned in at the main entrance of one of these buildings. Hansard, reluctant to follow him inside (for he might have joined more of his confederates within), waited in the doorway of the building opposite. An hour passed.

  With misgivings -- for he had never till now intruded upon the private lives of dwellers in the Real World -- Hansard began his own exploration of the building, starting at the top floor and working his way down through the ceilings. He encountered families at dinner, or stupefied before the television; witnessed soundless quarrels, and surprised people in yet more private moments: A suspicion of his quarry's intent in coming here grew in Hansard's mind, and in Apartment 4-E this suspicion was confirmed.

  Hansard found him in the apartment of an attractive and evidently newlywed couple. In the twilit room, the man was sitting upon their bed and pretending to guide, with his intangible touch, the most intimate motions of their love. While the voyeur's attention was thus directed toward the lovers Hansard approached him from behind, slipped his tie around the man's throat and tightened the slip-knot. The voyeur fell backward off the bed, and Hansard saw now for the first time who his enemy had been -- Colonel Willard Ives.

  Hansard dragged Ives, choking, out of the bedroom. He wrested away the man's canteen and drank greedily from it. He had been all day without water.

  While Hansard was drinking from the canteen the colonel attempted to escape. Two evenings ago, in Ives's office, it would have been unthinkable that he should ever have occasion to assault his superior officer. But now the circumstances were exceptional, and Hansard performed that unthinkable action with scarcely a scruple. Afterward he gave Ives his handkerchief to stop the bleeding of his nose.

  "I'll have you court-marshaled for this," Ives snuffled, without much conviction. "I'll see that you -- I'll teach you to -- "

  Hansard, whose character had been made somewhat unpliable by fourteen years of military life, was not without retroactive qualms. "Accept my apologies, Colonel. But I can hardly be expected to regard you in the light of my superior at the moment -- when I see you obeying the orders of a corporal."

  Ives looked up, eyes wide with emotion. "You called me Colonel . Then, you know me. . . back there?"

  "I was talking with you in your office only two nights ago, Colonel. Surely you r
emember?"

  "No. No, not with me." Ives bit his lower lip, and Hansard realized that this was not, in fact, the same man. This Ives was a good seventy-five pounds lighter than his double in the Real World, and there were innumerable other details -- the shaggy hair, the darker complexion, the cringing manner -- that showed him to be much changed from his old (or would it be his other?) self. "I was never a colonel. I was only a major when I went through the manmitter two years ago. Sometimes he brings me to my office -- to the Colonel's office -- and humiliates me there, in front of him. That's the only reason he wants me alive -- so he can humiliate me. Starve me and humiliate me. If I had any courage, I'd . . . I'd . . . kill myself. I would. I'd go outside the dome . . . and . . ." Choking with pity for himself, he was obliged to stop speaking.

  "He?" Hansard asked.

  "Worsaw. The one you killed in the manmitter. I wish you'd killed all three of him, instead of just the one."

  "How many men -- of our sort -- are there in Camp Jackson?"