A for Anything

by Damon Knight

  They turned. Down the opposite slope, it was another world: naked, burned-out mountain valleys, rolling away one behind another, looking as if a drop of water would hiss into steam anywhere it touched them. Straight to the horizon, there was no sign of man.

  “Now there,” said Platt breathlessly. “That’s it. There you have it. Thousands of square miles, Dave, mostly up and down, but right next to our own back yards, and most of the time we forget it’s here. Huh. You walk down a street with houses on both sides, and you say to yourself, look how we’ve civilized this continent in a lousy three hundred years. But, hell! We haven’t scratched the surface! Dave, just think—if you can make your own water supply, wherever you want it, what’s to keep you from going out there, and planting grass all over those goddamn mountains, if you feel like it? Why, hell, there’s room enough to make every man a king!”

  “Uh-huh,” said Ewing, abstractedly.

  “Of course, people being the sons of bitches they are—What’s the matter?”

  Ewing was staring off into the northern sky, shading his eyes. “I hear it, but I don’t see it,” he said.

  “What?” Platt listened and stared. “A chopper,” he said. A faint, distant rumble blurred over his words.

  “What?” said Ewing. “Shut up a minute, Leroy.”

  The rumbling came rolling distantly down out of the sky. It was a voice speaking, but they could not make out the words, only a vast blurred echo.

  “There it is,” said Ewing, after a moment. The tiny speck was hanging over the valley floor to northward, slowly drifting closer. The rumbling words grew almost clear enough to be understood.

  “Army copter,” said Platt. He fell silent, and they both listened.

  “Rrrr rrr rmrm,” said the brassy voice in the sky. It paused and began again: “Rrr attention plrrse. (rse.) Your attention please. (ease.) This area has been placed under martial law. (law.) All citizens are ordered to remain in their homes, (omes) and refrain from causing disturbances. (urbances.) Stay in your homes. (in your homes.) Normal services will be restored shortly. (ored shortly.) Law-breakers will be severely punished. (verely punished.)” The voice grew to an ear-offending shout as the copter drifted leisurely closer. Now it was almost overhead, and Ewing could see the blades whirling shiny in the sunlight, and the transparent bubble with two dark figures in it. The drab-painted machine turned as it drifted, the long curved body like an insect’s abdomen. The huge voice stopped and began again. “YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE. (EASE.) YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE. (EASE.)—”

  Ewing had his hands over his ears. Platt’s jaws were working. He took his hands away for a moment and said, “What?”

  Platt shouted, “Martial law!” He said something else, about “desertions,” but Ewing couldn’t make it out. The copter overhead, still shouting, drifted down toward the highway. Following it with his eyes, Ewing saw something strange. He saw what looked like a line of cars and trucks, spaced almost bumper to bumper, climbing the mountain road. There was a wrecker, followed by a red convertible, two moving vans with dusty red sides, three panel trucks, two late-model sedans with glossy aluminum trailers, and a small gasoline tank truck.

  He grabbed Platt by the arm, pointed. Then he was buck-jumping down the mountainside, with his heart in his mouth, catching a glimpse of the lead car turning in at the top of the road.

  A round man stood up in the back seat of the convertible and aimed a gun at him. “Hold it!”

  Ewing skidded, arms flailing. The irrigation canal was coming up like a fast elevator; he could see the hard white cement border, and the half-transparent minnows darting in the shadow. He couldn’t stop himself, he was going in … He plunged back with a violent effort, and the mountain hit him hard. His ears rang. Dust rose around him. He sneezed and struggled to his feet.

  The man in the convertible looked up at him without speaking. The gun was a double-barreled shotgun, sawed off short. He held it with the stock tucked under his arm. His dusty blue polo shirt was dark with sweat; his face and his heavy arms were burnt brick-color, but he wore only a shabby polo cap against the sun. A deer rifle was propped against the seat near his hand, and the butts of two revolvers stuck out of his waistband. His round face, eyes slitted against the glare, was placid and expressionless. He was chewing the ragged cold stump of a cigar.

  “Stay right where ya are,” he said finally. Ewing glanced to his left, and saw Platt standing there, hatless, with a bloody nose. “What was you guys running for?” the round man asked them.

  Ewing said nothing. The young Negro in the front seat of the convertible was staring straight ahead, not looking up or appearing to listen. He was manacled to the wheel. So were the drivers of the wrecker and the first moving van. All three of them had the same vacant, faintly surprised expression.

  The round man blinked and shifted his cigar. He nodded at the battered Lincoln up ahead. “That your heap?”

  “It’s mine,” said Platt, starting forward. “I’ll get it out—”

  The shotgun came up sharply, and Platt stopped. “Just stand still,” the round man said. “Okay, Percy.”

  The young Negro punched the drive button with his free hand, and the convertible inched ahead. Ahead of it, the links of a heavy chain rattled on the ground, while behind it a similar chain tightened with a clank and groan. After a moment, the other vehicles began to move. There were crashings and roaring engines as the motion transmitted itself down the line.

  The wrecker crawled ahead. Its broad wooden bumper butted up against the rear of the Lincoln, and began to shove. The Lincoln budged, trembled and bucked nearer the side of the road. Its right front wheel ran off the edge. The wrecker pushed, grinding in low gear. The Lincoln tipped downward, toward the narrow canyon between the road and the house. It hung, swayed reluctantly, and then went over with a grand smash against the side of the house. There was a startled shriek from inside. A tile fell off the roof and slid down the exposed side of the Lincoln. The dust cloud rose. The wheels spun quietly to a halt.

  The cavalcade stopped, a little at a time. The round man turned his full attention back to Ewing and Platt. He did it deliberately, as if massive gears were turning somewhere inside him. He blinked, shifted the cigar butt in his mouth, and spoke. “Why did ya park ya car inna road?”

  Ewing thought he had seen a face at the bedroom window. He said unwillingly, “Nobody uses this road. It doesn’t go anywhere, except a ranch around the other side. They don’t use it any more, there’s a barrier.”

  The round man digested this in silence. He shifted the cigar again. “Yaa?” He chewed the cigar with an expression of distaste, removed it, spat, and put it back. “How big of a place would ya say that is?”

  “The ranch? I have no idea,” Ewing said stiffly. Platt was looking mournfully down at the way his car was wedged in between the slope and the house.

  The round man stared at Ewing. “Ya seen it?”

  “From a distance—I mean the house. I told you. I don’t know anything about the ranch itself.”

  The round man thought about this. “Just one house?”

  “That’s all I saw.”

  After another pause, the round man nodded. He balanced the shotgun on his knee, took a soiled piece of paper and a stub of pencil out of his shirt pocket, and carefully drew a heavy line across the paper. “Okay,” he said. “The heck with it.” He put the paper and pencil away with the same deliberation, picked up the shotgun again, and stared at Ewing. “You live here?”

  Ewing nodded.

  “Who else?”

  “Nobody else,” said Ewing, tightly. “Just my friend and me.”

  “Don’t tell me no fairy tales. Whatja do for a living?”

  Ewing said, biting the words, “I’m an experimental physicist.”

  Instead of grunting and looking baffled, as Ewing had expected, the round man merely nodded. “Him too?”

  “Yes.”

  The round man breathed quietly through his nose for a while, staring a
t the ground somewhere near Ewing’s feet, shifting the cigar from time to time. Eventually he said, “Come on down here—climb the chain and cross over.” When they had done so, he got out of the car and stood beside them in the road. “March.” They started down the driveway. “Your wife know how to shoot a gun?” he asked Ewing as they went.

  “No,” said Ewing heavily. It was the truth.

  They walked in silence down to the shaded front porch and opened the door. In the living room, Fay and the children were waiting.

  “My name is Krasnow,” said the round man. “Herb Krasnow. I was a shipfitter in San Diego for seven years. I was in the Marines, too, before that, so don’t make the mistake of thinking I’ll be afraid to use this thing.”

  Krasnow’s face was round and unemphatic, the nose short and wide, mouth and chin blending into his full cheeks. His eyes seemed to belong to someone else; steady, under untidy black brows. He showed his teeth rarely when he spoke; when he did, momentarily, Ewing saw that they were yellow-brown stumps, widely separated. The black hair on his arms and hands was luxuriant; his fingers were the thick, spatulate fingers, with black-rimmed nails cut back almost to the quick, of a man used to working with his hands. In his shabby polo cap and stained shirt, heavy-bellied, he might have been any workman on a street repair job, or loading a truck, or driving one. Ewing realized that he had seen thousands of men like this one in his life, but had never looked closely at one before.

  Krasnow pushed his cap back, and immediately looked older; wet strands of hair straggled over his brown, bald scalp. Sitting in the straight chair beside the window, he faced the Ewings and Platt, all crowded together in a row on the couch. He held the shotgun balanced on one thigh, in a way that suggested he could aim and fire it from that position, one-handed. “See, my wife died a coupla years ago,” he said. “I’m all alone inna world, so I figure, what the hell? Why shouldn’ I get mine?”

  Ewing swallowed and said angrily, “That’s a hell of a philosophy. What about those people up there on the road—why shouldn’t they get theirs?”

  “You have an awful nerve,” Fay said. “Who do you think you are, God? You can’t do a thing like that to people!”

  Krasnow shook his head. “They’d do the same to me. I take my chances, just like they took theirs. You might even knock me over and take the whole works. I’m just one guy.”

  Platt leaned forward over his crossed knees; he was folded up like a jackknife on the couch, all joints and bony hands. The cigarette in his fingers trembled and spilled ash. “When are you going to sleep, Krasnow?” he asked.

  Krasnow pantomimed a bark of laughter. “Yaa,” he said. “You hit it there. We been on the road a day and a half already, and all I got was cat-naps. That colored boy, Percy, he’d as soon kill me as look at me. I figure I got to get through two more nights, maybe three before I can sleep. I’m getting old; ten years ago I coulda done it easy.”

  “You must be out of your mind,” Ewing said. “What you’re talking about just isn’t possible. You can’t keep all those people under control forever—you have to sleep sometime.”

  Krasnow shook his head. “Ya gotta have slaves now,” he said. He used the word matter-of-factly. “Nothing else is worth anything. Ya can’t get people to work for ya any other way. How’s the work gonna get done?”

  “What work?” Ewing demanded. “Don’t you understand, everything’s free now—power, machinery, anything a Gismo will carry. Later on there’ll be bigger Gismos, for things like automobiles and prefab houses. What are you going to do, build a pyramid or something? Take your Gismo, why don’t you, and let those people go.”

  “Naa. You’re talking fairy tales. Every guy goes off with his own Gismo, and that’s it? Not on your sweet life, mister. There’s just two ways, and you’ll find that out—ya gotta own slaves, or ya gotta be a slave.”

  “Power hates a vacuum,” said Platt. His voice was curiously subdued; he was looking with close attention at the burning tip of his cigarette. “Trouble is, though, how you going to keep them down on the farm? First chance they get, they’ll cut your throat and go over the wall. Then what?”

  Krasnow looked at him directly and, it seemed, curiously. “That’s something I gotta work out,” he said. “Like now, I got them cars chained together, and I got demolition bombs I can set off by short wave. Live bombs, one in every car. That could be better, but it works. But later on I gotta think of something else. You’re supposed to be smart, you got any ideas?”

  “I might,” said Platt, thin-lipped. His gaze and Krasnow’s met.

  “Yeah. Well, meantime, I gotta find a place like you said. With a wall.” Krasnow sighed. “I heard something about this place around the bend here, so I thought I’d take a look—a long shot. But I can tell from the way you talk, it’s no good. I’ll head up the coast, like I thought at first. There’s plenty of rich guys’ places up north, outa the way. Halfa them big shots are away all year. Either there’ll be just a caretaker, some old geezer, or else some punks that’ve moved in lately. Either way, I know how to handle it.”

  He stood up. “Ewing, you love ya wife and kids?”

  Ewing’s jaw knotted with anger and fear. He said, “What’s that to you?”

  Krasnow nodded slowly. “Sure ya do. Okay, buster, now you listen. If ya don’t want to see them killed right here, you do like I tell ya. Understand?” Ewing’s throat went dry, and he could not answer. “You’re coming along with me,” Krasnow went on after a moment. “I like the look of ya, and I like ya family, and I can use a scientist like you. So get used to the idea. Now come on outside—yaa, you too, everybody. I got something to show ya.”

  He herded them through the door. Out in the yard, blinking in the white glare, Krasnow and Platt looked sorrowfully at each other. The shadow of Krasnow’s gun was a short black line on the baked ground between them. “I can’t use ya, and I can’t trust ya,” said Krasnow. “So start runnin’.”

  Ewing looked on unbelievingly. He saw Platt, staring into Krasnow’s eyes, shudder and stiffen. Then the tall man was whirling, all knees and elbows, diving down the slope to the terrace below—zigzagging as he made for the shelter of the nearest pepper tree—

  The gun went off with a noise like the end of the world. Deafened, uncomprehending, Ewing saw his friend’s body hurl itself thrashing into the weeds. The children screamed. The bitter scent of powder filled the air. Through the leaves Ewing could see what was left of Platt’s head, a gray and red tatter. The legs went on kicking, and kicking… .

  Fay’s skin had turned paper-gray. She looked at him, and the pupils of her eyes began to slide up out of sight. Ewing caught her as her knees buckled.

  “Soon as she comes to,” said Krasnow quietly, “you and her can start loading whatever ya want on ya trailer. I’ll give ya half an hour. And meantime, you can be thinking about why I done that.” He jerked his head toward the body in the weeds below.

  Up on the road, in the cabs and front seats of all the parked vehicles, the faces of the drivers had turned to look down on them. Their expressions had not changed, but was as if a common string had pulled them all around, like so many puppets.

  At nightfall, the caravan was winding northward along the ridge highway toward Tejon Pass. The air was cool. Off to Ewing’s left the sun went down behind the mountains in great tattered scarlet and orange streamers; the riding lights of the van ahead glowed in the deepening twilight.

  Fay and the girls were in one of the house trailers, sharing it with some other poor devil’s family. Ewing was alone with the oncoming night, in the steady drone of the engine, with his wrist manacled to the steering wheel.

  A slave …

  And the father of slaves.

  He’d had more than enough time to think about what Krasnow had meant back there at the mountain house. Krasnow had murdered Platt for an object lesson, and because he knew Platt would never make a good slave … too reckless and unstable. Besides, Platt was unmarried. Platt was not the slave
type.

  The slave type …

  Funny to think that there were physicist types even among the natives of the Congo, who had never heard of physics … and slave types, even among the physicists of America, who had forgotten there was such a thing as slavery.

  And it was curious, how easy it was to accept the truth about himself. Tomorrow, after he had slept and the sun was high, he might fill up with anger again—the brittle anger, so easily broken—and swear to himself, futilely, that he would escape, kill Krasnow, rescue his family… . But now, alone, he knew he never would. Krasnow was wise enough to be “a good master.” Ewing’s lips moved: the phrase was bitter.

  What about fifty, a hundred years from now? Wouldn’t the slave society break down—wouldn’t the Gismo become at last what Ewing had thought it would be, an emancipator? Wouldn’t men learn to respect each other and live in peace?

  Would it be worth all the misery and death, then? Ewing felt the earth breathe under him, the long slow swell of the sleeping giant… . On that scale, had he done good or evil?

  He did not know. The car droned onward, following the tail lights of the van ahead. From the west, slowly, darkness scythed out across the land.

  Chapter Four

  Dick Jones opened his eyes lazily to a green-and-gold morning, knowing as he awakened that there was something special about this day. Comfortably asprawl, giving himself to the cool breeze as sensuously as a cat, he wondered what it might be: a hunt today? visitors? or a trip somewhere?

  Then he remembered, and sat up suddenly. This was the day he was leaving Buckhill to go to Eagles.

  He stretched and swung himself out of the big circular bed, lithe, tanned, and big for his sixteen years. His body was proportioned like a man’s, broad in the shoulders and chest, but all his muscles were buried under a layer of boyish fat. There was a subtly unfinished look about him, a bluntness.