Echo Round His Bones

by Thomas Disch

  "Now," Bridie said briskly, "we shall just have to hope that we can discover to which of the Posts they're transmitting at any given moment. Follow the technicians about and see what they do. Meanwhile, I'll look over the equipment."

  Within five minutes they had found the switch mark CJ that controlled air transmissions. They observed two full cycles of transmission as the stream of air was routed to each of the Command Posts in turn; there was an interval between transmissions averaging five seconds. Only during this time would it be safe for Hansard to enter the transmitting chamber; a little earlier or a little later, and he would be transmitted piecemeal to Mars, as Worsaw had been.

  "It's not enough time," Bridie said unhappily.

  "It's enough time," Hansard said.

  They took turns blowing up the air mattress that was to serve as his cushion inside the transmission chamber. The cushion was not for the sake of comfort but to prevent, as much as possible, any part of Hansard from projecting through the "floor" of the chamber and being left behind.

  Hansard began to strap on the breathing equipment that had been stored on the underside of Panofsky's wheel chair. There would not be sub-two air on Mars, so he would have to bring his own supply. He pulled the flimsy-looking clear plastic mask down over his head, sealed it about his neck, and opened the valve controlling oxygen input.

  "Ready or not," he said, "here I come." Only after the words had left his lips did he realize that they had been an unconscious echo of his games of hide-and-seek with Bridgetta.

  Bridie said something, but with the mask sealed over his head he could not hear her. She stepped directly before him and repeated the words, with exaggerated movements of her lips and appropriate gestures: "We LoVe . . . You."

  Hansard nodded curtly. "Ditto," he whispered.

  Bridie stood on tiptoe so she might kiss him. Their lips pressed against each other's through the thin film of plastic.

  "Be . . . LucKy . . . CoMe . . . BacK."

  He positioned himself before the transmitting chamber, and Bridie watched over the shoulder of the technician throwing switches. She nodded to Hansard, who carefully laid the rubber mattress on the bottom of the chamber, then, sliding in through the thin metal wall, spread himself out flat on it in the darkness. In almost the same instant the mattress popped and the air rushed out. "Hell!" Hansard said aloud, but it was too late to turn back now. At almost any moment the switch would be thrown that would send him to Mars.

  It was taking too long. He remembered the last time he had gone through a transmitter -- the long wait, the hand coming through the door of the vault. . . .

  Then he realized that he was there, that the mattress had popped at the moment of transmission. Some part of it had been pushed down through the floor of the chamber, outside the field of transmission. It was fortunate for Hansard that it had been the mattress that had thus inadvertently punctured and not his gas mask.

  He rose to his feet and walked forward in the darkness of the receiving chamber. He came to a wall, passed through it. There, not ten feet away, drinking coffee with General Pittmann, was Nathan Hansard, Captain in the United States Army. No man had ever seemed more strange to Hansard than he.

  The mattress popped and the air rushed out. "Hell!" Hansard said aloud, but it was too late to turn back now. Then his sub-three flesh, too insubstantial to be supported by the "skin" of energy of the sub-one world (Mars, not earth, since this transmitter, unlike the Camp Jackson manmitter, transmitted continuously, re-echoing endlessly the echoes thrown back by transmission), began to sink slowly into the ground. Realizing the hopelessness of his situation, Hansard-Sub-Three turned off the oxygen input valve.

  An infinite series of Nathan Hansards -- echoes of echoes -- made the same decision, and each died clinging to the same hope: "I hope he makes it."

  SIXTEEN

  THE CHORD

  "You're not looking well, Nathan. Small wonder. I don't suppose I look very thriving myself."

  As a matter of fact, though, that was just how one would have described General Pittmann at that moment: thriving. While Hansard had seemed to age a decade in these last weeks, the General's features had assumed a strange and unbecoming youthfulness, an effect exaggerated by an unaccustomed looseness in his manner.

  His tie was knotted lopsidedly, and his collar unbuttoned. His hair needed trimming, and his shoes were scuffed. There was a lightness in his step, a nervousness in his gestures, a quickness in his speech, that had not been customary to him these many years. Just so, the weather of an October afternoon can sometimes be mistaken for spring.

  Hansard looked down at the rainbow-banded swirls of oil coating his coffee. With great effort he moved his lips to say, "No, sir."

  "Perhaps you're not getting enough vitamins. I notice that you've been missing meals. We should always take care of our health. Good health is our most precious possession."

  Hansard couldn't decide if the General was taunting him with these banalities, or if he really did have so little sense of their inappropriateness.

  "Now if I were Julius Caesar, I would be wary of someone with that 'lean and hungry look' of yours."

  A joke seemed to be called for, so Hansard roused himself to make an attempt. "I'd lose that look fast enough, if you could get us something to eat besides these everlasting frozen dinners."

  Pittmann's laughter was out of proportion to the joke. He indulged himself in a short diatribe against Army food. It was quite funny, and despite himself Hansard had to smile. Since it had become evident, two weeks before, that the orders were not going to be countermanded, neither man had mentioned the bombs.

  Hansard[2] regarded himself with something approaching horror. That wan smile, those furtive eyes returning ever and again to the coffee cup, the pallor and inertness of his flesh and, overwhelmingly, his falseness . For though he could not understand what words Hansard[1] was speaking, he knew, beyond all doubt, that they were lies.

  At twenty-one-hundred-thirty hours Hansard[1] finished his coffee and went out into the corridor, Hansard[2] following, where he strolled idly and ill-at-ease. Hansard[2] experienced another moment of uncanniness when on his way out of the toilet he passed Worsaw, who, when he saw that Hansard[1] could no more see him, sneered and muttered a silent obscenity that did not need a lip reader to interpret.

  How strange it seemed that this man, resenting him as deeply as he did, should yet be subservient to him here. How had society so been ordered that all mankind should accept the invisible restraints of custom -- Hansard no less than Worsaw? For it was evident that Hansard[1], for no more compelling reason than because it was expected of him, was prepared to assist at the annihilation of humanity in violation of everything he knew to be moral. It was a paltry consolation to realize that a million others could have been found as pliable as he.

  Eventually Hansard[1] went into his own small room which, despite some few shards of blond wool tentatively posing as furniture, seemed less a habitation than a branch of the corridor that came to a dead end here. Instead of preparing for sleep, Hansard[1] took a book from the wall locker and began to read.

  It was the Bible. Hansard had not looked into a Bible since he'd prepared for Confirmation a quarter of a century before. This nervous, morose stranger seemed to bear less and less relationship with anyone Hansard[2] could recognize as himself.

  It had seemed worth a try. Wasn't religion intended for just such times as this, when all reasonable hopes were daunted? "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death -- " and all that.

  But it wasn't working. For one thing, there was just so much of it, and none that he had found -- neither prophets nor apostles nor yet the faded image of Christ, who seemed to live, for Hansard, in a landscape of calendar art -- seemed quite to the purpose. Here on death's brink he found it as hard to believe in the Resurrection and the Life as he had at the age of fourteen when, for his parents' sake (and had they really cared so much themselves?), he had been confirmed.

>   No, he had found no consolation here, but he did -- as one will torment oneself by probing at a rotten tooth -- take a kind of perverse pleasure in reading just those passages in Job, in Ecclesiastes, in Jeremiah, that strengthened and confirmed his unbelief:

  Then said I in my heart: As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity.

  For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? As the fool.

  Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me; for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

  In sleep the complex melodies of conscious thought would be dampened; there would be only the simple C of Hansard[1]'s sleeping mind and, an octave below, the C of Hansard[2]. Such, at least, had been his hope. But he was impatient.

  Now, he thought, it may be possible. . . .

  Carefully he lowered his frame into the seated body of Hansard[1]. A curious and not quite pleasant sensation to feel his two legs, real and ghostly, slipping into alignment, to feel his breath stop for a moment and then return, synchronized with the breathing of Hansard[1]. His vision blurred, and then, when it was restored, he found his eyes moving over the printed page, not reading, only seeing the print skitter past.

  He concentrated on the meaning of the text and tried to bend his mind to the emotional state that he supposed must be Hansard[1]'s. But though he could feel his larynx vibrating with the same subvocalized sound patterns, the two minds maintained their distinct identities. Sometimes he would feel a memory stirring with strange autonomy, or he would feel, fleetingly, the most inexpressible sadness. But it was with these moments, as with night-vision, that whenever lie tried to concentrate on them they would retire into the obscurity whence they had come.

  Reluctantly he disengaged himself from Hansard[1]. It was no good. He would have to wait till he went to sleep.

  Hansard could not sleep. Since he had made the Mars jump, he had been taking heavier and heavier dosages of barbiturates, but they no longer helped. He lay on his bunk in the darkness, remembering how, as a child, in another darkness, he had lain awake so, trying by sheer power of imagination to place himself outside his slum-suburban bedroom and far far off -- on Mars, perhaps -- whispering -- If I pretend hard enough it will come true .

  And so it had; so it had.

  Now where? Now what worlds could he wish himself away to? Madness, perhaps; such madness as seemed to have possessed Pittmann. Or sleep? But he remembered a line from Shakespeare: "To sleep, perchance to dream -- aye, there's the rub."

  He elbowed himself out of bed, smoothed the wrinkles out of his shirt, and went out into the corridor. Now where?

  In the observatory he looked at the dead rocks of Mars. In his youth, he had been so sure that Mars was teeming with life. Even when the first Mariner pictures came back (he had been thirteen) he refused to believe them. Nobody believes, at that age, that there can be such a thing as death.

  Though the clocks inside the Command Post gave the time as only a bit after midnight it was a bright, chiaroscuro morning outside. It hurt one's eyes to look too long upon it.

  Sleep, you bastard, sleep! Hansard[2] thought angrily. He did not dare cease pacing the floor of the observatory, for he was himself so tired (having kept himself awake throughout the previous night just so he would not be insomniac himself) as to be in danger of dropping off to sleep if he let himself sit down anywhere. Hansard[1], meanwhile, sat staring at the Mars noonday. What in that barren waste absorbed him so?

  At length Hansard[1] returned to his room and lay down again, without undressing. In the utter darkness Hansard[2] had no way to know if his double had fallen asleep, except by entering his body.

  This time Hansard[1]'s eyes were closed. His jaw relaxed, his mouth opened slightly, his lungs drew deeper breaths of air.

  His fist unclenched, and he accepted the case of ammunition that was handed to him. They were going hunting. "For what?" he asked, but the grownups went on chattering in their shrill buzzsaw voices, ignoring him. He walked through fields of sharp black rocks, stirring up swarms of buzzing flies with every step. The ammunition case was so heavy, and he was so little, it wasn't fair! It was surprising how few people there were on Mars. He supposed they must all be locked up underground or somewhere. Why couldn't he carry the gun instead? But he was. He was all alone with the gun, in that burnt-over landscape. The ashes got into his eyes so that he almost had to cry.

  He walked toward the flame that burned at the horizon, holding the rifle on the ready. The man was shooting fire from a plastic garden hose, burning the rice; so he planted the butt of the rifle into the ground, because he was too little to shoot it any other way. He looked at the man with the garden hose, in his strange uniform. No man had ever seemed more hateful to Hansard than this one. The man Hansard turned the flame thrower on the boy Hansard, and they woke, both of them, screaming a single scream.

  "It wasn't right," he said, astonished that it had taken himself so long to learn what, as soon as it had been spoken, seemed so self-evident.

  And then, from another and not quite familiar part of his mind (as though, waking, he continued to dream), "It isn't right."

  He shook his head sadly. Right or wrong, there was nothing he could do about it.

  "But there is," the dream-voice insisted. The voice was his own and not his own. He relaxed and let himself smile. It was such a relief to have gone mad. It would be interesting to see what he did now. "Listen . . ." said the voice -- his own and not his own -- and he listened. . . .

  SEVENTEEN

  THE CATACLYSM

  "Good-morning, Nathan! You seem to have recovered your appetite."

  "Yes, and then some. No matter how much I seem to eat this morning, my stomach still feels hollow as a drum. Can you beat that?"

  "And your good humor too. Welcome back to civilization. We've missed you."

  "Just in the nick of time, eh?"

  Pittmann regarded his subordinate uncertainly. Had this been said in jest? He decided it had been, but limited his show of appreciation to the barest smile.

  "And you already have the coffee perking."

  "I'm afraid I made it a little strong."

  General Pittmann poured himself a cupful from the electric percolator and sipped the hot coffee appraisingly. "Yes, just a bit." It was a choice between making do with this, and waiting for another pot. He made do.

  "I've been thinking . . ." Hansard said.

  "We try to discourage thinking in the Army," Pittmann said placidly, as he pried apart two slices of frozen bread and put them into the toaster.

  ". . . about what you said the day I arrived here. I think you were right."

  "I wouldn't be surprised." He grimaced over a second mouthful of the coffee. "But you'll have to refresh my memory, Nathan. I say so many right things."

  "That it's genocidal to use the bombs."

  "Did I say that? Surely only in the most hypothetical way -- if I did. For my own part, I have little but contempt for people who warm their consciences over such words, and over that word especially. You can't win a war, you know, without making omelettes." Pleased with his timing, Pittmann cracked two eggs neatly into the electric skillet. "So I hope you're not taking such talk too seriously. At your age it isn't becoming to be that deadly earnest."

  "But if the word has any meaning at all -- "

  "Exactly, Nathan. It has none. It's a red flag to wave at Liberals."

  "There is the classic example."

  "Yes?" General Pittmann looked up, inviting -- or daring -- Hansard to continue. An impish grin played at the corner of his lips. "The example of Germany, you mean? Why do you bring up a subject if you then refuse to talk about it? Auschwitz was ill-advised, certainly. A terrible waste of manpower, not to mention the prejudice involved; that is what I find most offensive. But
nowadays prejudice doesn't enter into it. The bomb is the most democratic weapon man has ever devised. It draws absolutely no distinctions . . . . You make lousy coffee, Nathan."

  "You make filthy jokes, General."

  "That borders on impertinence, you know. But I'll overlook it for the sake of having you making conversation again."

  "Your coffee will taste better if you put milk and sugar in it."

  "A barbaric custom," Pittmann complained, but he followed Hansard's advice.

  "Since when have you let considerations like that stand in your way?"

  Pittmann laughed in good earnest. "Better, much better. You see, it's all in having a delicate touch. Would you like a piece of toast? Isn't life . . ." he scarcely seemed to pay attention to the knife that slipped out of his fingers and clattered on the floor, ". . . a terrible waste of manpower?" He laughed weakly.