Kulongo held on to Ryan as the redness in his face slowly faded. The female subway dweller began to wander away. Lumumba backed off a few paces, then turned his back, walked a bit further away, and pretended to study a group of seated subway dwellers.
Finally, Kulongo released his grip on Ryan. “Yeah, you’re right, pal,” Ryan said. “That crud would like nothing better than to be able to report that I bashed his face in. I guess I should apologize to the rest of you folks…”
“I think Mr. Lumumba should apologize as well,” I said.
“I don’t apologize to animals,” Lumumba muttered. Really, the man was disgusting!
God, what I really wanted to do was to bury that Lumumba right there, knock him senseless and let him try to get back to Milford by himself, or, better yet, take him back to that crazy “Cosmic-All” thing, jam a helmet on his head, and find out how the thing kills in the pleasantest way possible.
But of course I couldn’t kill him or maroon him in front of eight witnesses. So instead of giving that black brother what he deserved, I decided to just let them all walk around for about another ten minutes, gawking at the animals, and then call it a day. Seemed to me that all of them but Lumumba and maybe the professor had had their fill of the subway dwellers anyway. Mostly, the subway dwellers just sit around chewing algae-cake. Some of them just stare at nothing for hours. Let’s face it, the subway dwellers are animals. They’ve degenerated all the way. I figured just about now the Africans would’ve had their nasty thrill…
But I figured without that stinking Lumumba. Just when the whole bunch of them were standing around in a mob looking thoroughly bored and disgusted, he started another “conversation” with the professor, real loud. Real subtle, that black brother.
“You’re a professor of American history, aren’t you, Dr. Balewa?”
Got to give Balewa credit. He didn’t seem to want any part of Lumumba’s little game. “Uh… Space-Age history is my major field,” he muttered, and then tried to turn away.
But Lumumba would just as soon have run his mouth at a subway dweller; he didn’t care if Balewa was really listening to him as long as I was.
“Well, then maybe you can tell me whether or not the honkies could really have built all that Space-Age technology on their own. After all, look at these brainless animals, the direct descendants of the Space-Age honkies. Sure, they’ve degenerated since the first of them locked themselves up down here, but degenerated from what? Didn’t they have to be pretty stupid to seal themselves up in a tomb like this in the first place? And they did have twenty or thirty million black men to do their thinking for them before the Panic. Take a look around you, professor—did these slugs really have ancestors capable of creating the Space Age on their own?”
He stared dead at me, and I saw his slimy game. If I didn’t cream him, I’d be a coward, and if I did, I’d lose my license. “Take a look at the modern example of the race, professor,” he said. “Could a nation of Ryans have built anything more than a few junk heaps on their own? With captive blacks to do the thinking for them, they went to the moon, and then they choked themselves in their own waste. Hardly the mark of a great civilized race.”
“Your kind quaked in their boots every time one of my ancestors walked by them, and you know it,” I told the crud.
Lumumba would’ve gone white if he could have. In more ways than one, I’ll bet. “You calling me a coward, honkie?”
“I’m calling you a yellow coward, boy.”
“No honkie calls me a coward.”
“This honkie does… nigger.”
Ah, that got him! There’re one or two words these Amero-Africans just can’t take, brings up frightening memories. Lumumba went for me, the professor tried to grab him and missed, and then that big ape Kulongo had him in one of those bear-hugs of his. And suddenly I had an idea how to fix Mr. Michael Lumumba real good, without laying a finger on him, without giving him anything he could complain to the government about.
“You ever hear about a machine that’s supposed to ‘merge you with the Cosmic All,’ professor?” I said.
“Why… that would be the ECA—the Electronic Consciousness Augmenter. It was never clear whether more than a few prototypes were built or not. The device was developed shortly before the Panic, Some sort of scientific religion built the ECA—the Brotherhood ol the Cosmic All, or some such group. The claim was that the machine produced a transcendental experience of some sort electronically. No one has ever proved whether or not there was any truth to it, since none of the devices have ever been found…”
Kulongo relaxed his grip on Lumumba. I had them now. I had Mr. Michael Lumumba real good. “Well, I think I found one of them, right here in this station, a couple of years ago. It’s still working. Maybe the subway dwellers keep it going—probably it was built to keep itself going; it looks like real late Space-Age stuff. I could take you all to it.”
I gave Lumumba a nice smile. “How about it, pal?” I said. “Let’s see if you’re a coward or not. Let’s see you walk in there and put a working Space-Age gizmo on your head and ‘merge with the Cosmic All.’ ”
“Have you ever done it, Ryan?” Lumumba sneered.
“Sure, pal,” I lied. “I do it all the time. It’s fun.”
“I think you’re a liar.”
“I know you’re a coward.”
Lumumba gave me a look like a snake. “All right, honkie,” he said. “I’ll try it if you try it with me.”
Christ, what was I getting myself into? That thing killed people, all those bones… Yeah, but I knew that and Lumumba didn’t. When he saw the bones, he wouldn’t dare put a helmet on his head. Yeah, I knew that he wouldn’t, and he didn’t, so that still put me one up on him.
“You’re afraid, aren’t you, Ryan? You’ve never really done it yourself. You’re afraid to do it, and I’m not. Who does that make the coward?”
Oh, you crud, I got you right where I want you! “Okay, boy,” I said, “you’re on. You do it and I’ll do it. We’ll see who’s the coward. The rest of you folks can come along for the ride. A free extra added attraction, courtesy of Little Old New York Tours.”
Ryan led us deeper into a more shadowed part of the station, where the still-functioning bulbs in the ceiling were further and further apart, and where, perhaps because of the darkness, the subway dwellers were fewer and fewer. As we went further and further into the deepening darkness, the floor of the subway station was filled with small bits of rubble, then larger and larger pieces, till finally, dimly outlined by a single bulb a few yards ahead of us, we could see a place where the ceiling had fallen in. A huge dam of rubble which filled the station from floor to ceiling cut off a corner much like the one into which we had originally come from the rest of the station.
Ryan led us out of the pool of light and into the blackness. “In here,” he called back. “Everyone touch the one ahead of you.”
I touched Michael Lumumba’s back with some distaste, but also with a kind of gratitude. Because of him, I was getting to see a working wonder of the Space Age, a device whose very existence was a matter of academic dispute. My reputation would be made!
I felt Kulongo’s somehow reassuring hand on my shoulder as we groped our way through the darkness. Then I felt Lumumba stoop, and I was passing through a narrow opening in the pile of rubble, where two broken girders wedged against each other held up the crumbled fragments of ceiling.
Beyond, I could see by a strange flickering light just around a bend that we had emerged in a place very much like the subway entrance. The ceiling had fallen on a let of turnstiles and grillwork barriers, crushing them, but clearing a way for us. We picked our way past the ruined barriers and entered a side tunnel, which was filled with the strange flickering light, a light which seemed to cut each moment off from the next, like a faulty piece of antique motion-picture film, such as the specimens of Chaplin I’ve seen in Nairobi. It made me feel as if I were moving inside such a film. Time seemed to be compo
sed of separate discrete bursts of duration.
Ryan led us up the tunnel, both sides of which were composed of the ruins of recessed shops, like some underground market arcade. Then I saw that one shop in the arcade was not ruined. It stood out from the rubble, a gleaming anachronism. Even a layman would’ve recognized it as a specimen of very late Space-Age technology. And it was a working specimen.
It had that classic late Space-Age style. The entire front of the shop was made of some plastic substance that flickered luminescently, that was the source of the strange pale light. There has been some literature on this material, but a specimen had never been examined, as far as I knew. The substance itself is woven of fibers called light guides—modern science has been able to produce such fibers, but to weave a kind of cloth of them by known methods would be hideously expensive. But Space-Age light guide cloth, however it was made, enabled a single light source to cast its illumination evenly over a very wide area. So the flickering was probably produced simply by using a stroboscope as a light source for the wall. Very minor Space-Age wizardry, but very effective: it made the entire shopfront a psychologically powerful attention-getting device, such as the Space-Agers commonly employed in their incredibly sophisticated science of advertising.
A small doorless portal big enough for one man at a time was all that marred the flickering luminescence of the wall of shopfront. Above the shop a smaller strobe panel—but this one composed of blue-and-red fibers which flashed independently—proclaimed MERGE WITH THE COSMIC ALL red on blue for half of every second, a powerful hypnotic that drew me toward the shop despite my abstract knowledge of its workings.
That the device was working at all in this area of the station where all other power seemed cut off was proof enough of its very late Space-Age dating: only in the decade before the Panic had the Space-Agers developed a miniaturized isotopic power source cheap enough to warrant installation of self-contained five-hundred-year generators in something like this.
The very fact that we were staring into the flickering light of a Space-Age device whose self-contained power source had kept it going totally untended for centuries was enough to overwhelm us. I’m sure the rest of them felt what I felt; even Lumumba just stood there and gaped. On Ryan’s face, even beneath the tight lines of his anger, was something akin to awe. Or was it some kind of superstitious dread?
“Well, here it is, Lumumba,” Ryan said softly, the strobe-wall making the movements of his mouth appear to be mechanical. “Shall we step inside?”
“After you, Ryan. You’re the… native guide.” Fear flickered in the strobe flashes off Lumumba’s eyes, but, like all of us, he found it impossible to look away from the entrance for long. There seemed to be subtle and complex waves in the strobe flashes drawing us to the doorway; perhaps there were several stroboscopes activating the wall in a psychologically calculated sequence. In this area, the Space-Age Americans had been capable of any subtlety a modern mind could imagine, and infinitely more.
“And you’re the… tourist,” Ryan said softly. “A tourist who thinks he knows what the Space-Agers were all about. Step inside, sucker!”
And with a grim, knowing grin, Ryan stepped through the doorway. Without hesitation, Lumumba followed after him. And without hesitation, drawn by the flickering light and so much more, I entered the chamber behind them.
The inside of the chamber was a cube of some incredible hyper-real desert night as seen through the eyes of a prophet or a madman. The walls and ceiling of the room were light: mosaics of millions of tiny deep-blue twinkling pinpoints of brilliance, here and there leavened with intermittent prickles of red and green and yellow, all flashing in seemingly random sequences of a tenth of a second or so each. Beneath this preternatural electronic sky, we stood transfixed. The dazzling universe of winking light filled our brains; before it we were as subway dwellers chewing their cud.
Behind me, I dimly heard Kulongo’s deep voice saying, “There are demons in there that would drink a man’s soul. We will not go in there.” How foolish those faraway words sounded…
“There’s nothing to be afraid of…” I heard my own voice saying. The sound of my own voice broke my light trance almost as I realized that I had been in a trance. Then I saw the bones.
The chamber was filled with six rows of strange chairs, six of them to a row. They were like giant red eggs standing on end, hollowed out, and fitted inside with reclining padded seats. Inside the red eggs, metal helmets designed to fit over the entire head dangled from cables at head-level. Most of the eggs contained human skeletons. The floor was littered with bones.
Ryan and Lumumba seemed to have been somewhat deeper in trance; it took them a few seconds longer to come out of it. Lumumba’s eyes flashed sudden fear as he saw the bones. But Ryan grinned knowingly as he saw the fear on Lumumba’s face.
“Scares you a bit, doesn’t it, boy?” Ryan said, “Still game to put on one of those helmets?” The wall seemed to pick up the sparkle of his laugh.
“What killed them?” was all Lumumba said.
“How should I know?”
“But you said you’d tried it!”
“So, I’m a liar. And you’re a coward.”
I walked forward as they argued, and read a small metal plaque that was affixed to the outer shell of each red egg:
Two tokens—MERGE WITH THE COSMIC ALL—Two tokens. Drop tokens in slot. Place helmet over head. Pull lever and experience MERGER WITH THE COSMIC ALL. Automatic timer will limit all MERGERS to two-minute duration, in compliance with federal law.
“I’m no more a coward than you are, Ryan. You had no intention of putting on one of those things.”
“I’d do it if you’d do it,” Ryan insisted.
“No you wouldn’t! You’re not that crazy and neither am I, Why would you risk your life for something as stupid as that?”
“Because I’d be willing to bet my life any day that a black brother like you would never have the guts to put on a helmet.”
“You stinking honkie!”
“Why don’t we end this crap, Lumumba? You’re not going to put on one of these helmets and neither am I. The big difference between us is that I won’t have to because you can’t ”
Lumumba seemed like a carven idol of rage in that fantastic cube of light. “Just a minute, honkie,” he said. “Professor, you have any idea why they died when they put the helmets on?”
It was starting to make sense to me. What if the claims made for the device were true? What if two tokens could buy a man total transcendental bliss? “I don’t think they died when, they put the helmets on,” I said. “I think they starved to death days later. According to this plaque, whatever happens is supposed to last no longer than two minutes before an automatic circuit shuts it off. What if this device involves electronic stimulation of the pleasure center? No one has yet unearthed such a device, but the Space-Age literature was full of it. Pleasure-center stimulation was supposed to be harmless in itself, but what if the timer circuit went out? A man could be paralyzed in total bliss while he starved to death. I think that’s what happened here.”
“Let me get this straight,” Lumumba said, his rage seeming to collapse in upon itself, becoming a manic shrewdness. “The helmets themselves are harmless? Even if we couldn’t take them off ourselves, one of the others could take them off… We wouldn’t be in any real danger?”
“I don’t think so,” I told him. “According to the inscription, one paid two tokens for the experience. I doubt that even the Space-Agers would’ve been willing to pay money for something that would harm them, certainly not en masse. And the Space-Agers were very conscious of profit.”
“Would you be willing to stake your life on it, Dr. Balewa? Would you be willing to try it, too?”
Try it? Actually put on a helmet, give myself over to a piece of Space-Age wizardry, an electronic device that was supposed to produce a mystical experience at the flick of a switch? A less stable man might say that if it really worked, there
was a god inside the helmets, a god that the Space-Agers had created out of electronic components. If this were actually true, it surely must represent the very pinnacle of Space-Age civilization—who but the Space-Agers would even contemplate the fabrication of an actual god?
Yes, of course I would try it! I had to try it; what kind of scholar would I be if I passed by an opportunity to understand the Space-Agers as no modern man has understood them before? Neither Ryan nor Lumumba had the background to make the most of such an experience. It was my duty to put on a helmet as well as my pleasure.
“Yes, Mr. Lumumba,” I said. “I intend to try it, too.”
“Then we’ll all try it,” Lumumba said, “Or will we, Mr. Ryan? I’m ready to put on a helmet and so is the professor; are you?”
They were both nuts, Lumumba and the professor! Those helmets had killed people. How the hell could Balewa know what had happened from reading some silly plaque? These goddamned Africans always think they can understand the Space-Agers from crap other Africans have put in books. What the hell do they know? What do they really know?
“Well, Ryan, what about it? Are you going to admit you don’t have the guts to do it, so we can all forget it and go home?”
“All right, pal, you’re on!” I heard myself telling him. Damn, what was I getting myself into? But I couldn’t let that slime Lumumba call my bluff; no African’s gonna bluff down an American! Besides, Balewa was probably right; what he said made sense. Sure, it had to make sense. That stinking black brother!
“Mr. Kulongo, would you come in here and take the helmets off our heads in two minutes?” I asked. I’d trust that Kulongo further than the rest of the creeps.
“I will not go in there,” Kulongo said. “There is juju in there, powerful and evil. I am ashamed before you because I say these words, but my fear of what is in this place is greater than my shame.”
The Star-Spangled Future Page 29
