A for Anything

by Damon Knight

  The gargoyle pointed silently. On the far side of the room was another narrow bed. She lay on it, pale, eyes closed.

  Dick made a sound and tried to get up, but Frankie pressed him back down. “She all right, misser—just you lay down and rest. She come out of it any minute.”

  Dick lay back, feeling too dizzy to argue. Frankie clicked his tongue sorrowfully, looking down at him. “What you doing down here anyway, misser? You look like a nice boy. What for you want to come a-sneaking down upon us thisaway?”

  Dick stared at him. “What do you mean, sneaking down on you?”

  “Nev’ mind. I’m asking the questions here, not you. What’s your name, misser?”

  Dick’s puzzlement grew. “Frankie, don’t you know me? I’m Dick Jones.”

  “Dick Jones,” said the gargoyle, licking the stub of a pencil. He scrawled laboriously on a scrap of paper held on his knee. “That’s righ’, I guess it mus’ of slip my mind. And what’s her name, Misser Jones?”

  Dick said nothing. Glancing down, he had seen something incredible: Frankie was wearing a revolver on his hip.

  … sneaking down upon us … We never bothered to plug it up …

  “Her name is Clorinda Jones,” he said, improvising. “Uh, she’s my cousin.” He watched the gargoyle painfully writing. “Frankie, you haven’t been upstairs lately, have you?”

  “Not for a good long time,” said Frankie, shaking his head. “Going to go up pretty soon, though. Now what was you and the lady doing down here anyway?”

  “Running away from the turnover.” He waited again. “What were you doing in that drugstore?”

  “Medicine,” Frankie grunted. “We had to git medicine. Which side was you on, in the turnover?”

  “Neither side,” said Dick prudently. “There was a lot of shooting and, uh, Clorinda was frightened, so I took her belowstairs. Then we got lost.”

  “M-hm,” said Frankie. He finished writing and put his paper away. “Well we see if the Old Man believe that. Come awn.”

  Dick got up. “The Old Man?” He wavered for a moment, and caught himself; he was a little dizzy.

  “That righ’. Come awn, don’t keep him waitin’.”

  As they passed the other cot, Dick bent over. Elaine’s head moved; her pale lids flickered open.

  He was down on one knee, cradling her head in his arms. “Are you all right?”

  Her eyes focused; she seemed to recognize him. “Feel so funny,” she said. Her arms went around him weakly.

  “All righ’, all righ’, we take her too,” said Frankie behind him. “See can she wawk; git her up.”

  Dick shot him a glance of resentment, then turned and helped Elaine to sit up. She stood, with his arm around her. “What happened?” she asked, looking around. “Ooh, I have such a headache.”

  “You’ll be all right. Come on, somebody wants to see us.”

  With Frankie behind them, they walked out into a bare, drafty corridor. “Turn righ’,” said the gargoyle. They passed rows of stacked cartons, then an open doorway with massive machinery behind it; then a wide open space where a dozen Frankies sat at typewriters, all industriously clicking away. Then they turned again, and were stopped by a Frankie with an Army rifle.

  “For the Old Man,” said their Frankie, and the other one stepped aside.

  They passed on into another room where two Frankies sat at desks with telephones, and were stopped again. Elaine seemed to be fully awake now, and was looking around with surprise and apprehension. While the Frankies’ attention was on each other, Dick whispered in her ear. “They don’t know who you are—I told them you’re my cousin, Clorinda Jones. Play up.”

  As they moved on again, she glanced at him and nodded. Then they were in still another room, a big room lined with what looked like enlarged floor plans. There were desks here and there, with Frankies quietly working; in the middle, at a desk with a telescreen, sat someone who was obviously the Old Man.

  He looked up as they approached, and Dick’s breath caught sharply. It was a Frankie, but a Frankie twenty years older—heavy-set, grizzled, with the grotesque ugliness of his features turned to something like dignity. He glanced up incuriously at them, then went on talking into the instrument in his hand.

  After a moment, he looked up again. “Yes?”

  “These here the two we found in the drugstore, misser.”

  Dick caught his breath again. Hearing one slob address another as “mister” was a shock, even when it only confirmed what he had already seen.

  Down here, burrowing like moles in the subterranean parts of Eagles, the Frankies had created a world of their own. Like all the servants at Eagles, they were supposed to be “ro-tated” at forty or earlier: sent away to other establishments, in theory; actually, killed and disposed of. But here was a Frankie who had obviously lived at least a decade past his span; and here were others who had not been upstairs for years. Surplus Frankies, probably, duped for some special job and then, instead of being destroyed, smuggled down here. He could only guess at how long it had been going on.

  The telescreen speaker clattered briefly. The Old Man studied the screen, then said into the mike in his hand: “Let me see Level Two again.” The bluish light from the screen flickered. The Old Man said, “Send the heavies aroun’ by the Oval Corridor.” He watched a moment longer, then looked up at Dick and Elaine.

  He said, “Where else besides Eagles did Melker plan a turnover?”

  Dick answered carefully. “That would be something known to the conspirators, not to me.” His tone was neutral; he couldn’t treat the Old Man as an equal, but there was no point in antagonizing him by unnecessary stiffness.

  The Old Man said, “I let you lie to me once. Don’t try it again.” He turned his attention to the screen once more. “Level One.” A confused roaring came from the speaker.

  After a moment the Old Man looked up. “Where else besides Eagles did Melker plan a turnover?”

  Dick began to sweat. Slob though he was, there was something intimidating about the fellow. Unwillingly, he said, “Melker had connections in Indian Springs and Mont Blanc and a few other places—people he was sure would take the lead in acknowledging him. But he didn’t plan any real turnover anywhere but here—he didn’t think it was necessary.”

  There was a pause. Dick stared in frustration at the TV on the desk. What was going on up there?

  The Old Man said. “Did any of them escape besides yourself, that you know of?”

  Dick shook his head numbly. “I saw Melker dead … and Oliver … a lot of others.”

  “Where was that?”

  “On the TV—I wasn’t there myself.” He added, “I wasn’t in the fighting at all… . I came away as soon as I could.”

  The sound of a heavy concussion came from the TV speaker. Dick braced himself instinctively, tightening his hold on Elaine’s waist, but nothing: they were too deep here to feel the shock.

  “Do you know what went wrong with the plan?”

  “No,” said Dick. “Somebody must have gone to the Boss. It could have been anybody, any time. We knew that could happen all along.”

  “It’s inconvenient,” said the Old Man unemotionally. “We had our plan, too—we were going to hit during the wedding.” He glanced up at Elaine. “Your wedding, Miss Elaine.”

  Dick felt her body stiffen. He stood still and said nothing; there was nothing to say. Of course the Old Man knew who she was … he was old enough; he must have been in his twenties when the last Elaine was alive.

  Elaine was breathing quickly, her lips half-open. A few fine tendrils of her hair tickled his cheek. Dick was watching the Old Man’s intent face and speculating furiously on the meaning of what he said; he was listening to the muffled sounds that came from the TV and trying to interpret them; and all the time he was half dizzy from having her so near.

  A Frankie came over from the wall and showed the Old Man a paper, murmuring a few words. The Old Man answered shortly, and the Frankie went aw
ay.

  Another concussion came from the TV. The Old Man’s face contorted briefly in an expression Dick could not read.

  “As it was,” he said, “we had to hit early. Communications was our most serious problem; you can understand that. Melker could count on some outside support—we could not.” He was talking with a curious persuasiveness, looking from one to the other as if to make sure he was understood. “The change in timing hurt our plans very much. But at least we seem to have succeeded in Eagles …” He nodded toward the TV. “That was the last pocket of resistance, the arsenal over the Rose Court, and it has just been taken.”

  They looked at him in a stunned silence.

  “You’ve taken Eagles?” said Dick. It seemed monstrous, unbelievable.

  The Old Man nodded slowly, “There’s over three hundred slaves to every freeman in Eagles,” he said. “We only had to put out our hand.”

  “You’ll never hold it,” said Dick.

  The other inclined his big head. “I am afraid you may be right. That’s what I wish to tawk to you about.” He turned, murmured a few words into the mike, then set it down and rose from his chair. With a courteous hand on Dick’s elbow and the other on Elaine’s, he urged them toward the door. Three young Frankies fell in alertly behind them. “We’ll go up to the Concourse and tawk,” the Old Man said.

  “Who’s going to take over here?”

  “One of my doubles. Being duped has its advantages, you see.”

  They moved out along bare corridors, along routes that looked recently cleared through the jungle of storerooms, and finally reached an elevator.

  Up above, the corridors were almost deserted. Slobs stood in little groups here and there, most of them wearing white armbands: many were soldiers in uniform, with their insignia ripped off. The signs of battle were everywhere—heaps of rubble and debris, torn garments, an occasional sprawled body. As they passed a cross corridor, Dick heard a single, distant shot.

  The Old Man and the Frankies glanced that way, but said nothing.

  In the main corridor they passed a servant with a broom and a loaded trash cart. He was a shriveled, wild-eyed fellow of fifty or more, not the type you expect to meet abovestairs at all. When he saw the Old Man, he dropped his broom and tried to hug the Old Man around the knees. One of the Frankies held him off. He was babbling something in a choked voice; Dick caught the words, “see this day come.” Tears were running down his cheeks.

  The Old Man said, “All right. That’s all right,” and passed by. As they moved on, he said to Dick, “Some of them have been waiting a long time for this. That particular fellow saw his wife rotated, and his two sons—the Boss dropped them down the Tower.”

  They were on a short, narrow stair that led to a glassed-in balcony overlooking the Concourse. Dick had seen the place many times but had never been inside. The door had the Boss’s personal seal painted on it; the door was dented, half off its hinges, and someone had drawn a ragged “X” in red chalk over the seal.

  Inside, the Old Man motioned them to chairs. Through the glass wall they could look out across the wide Plaza, cool in the water-colored light that fell from overhead, with the bright worms of fluorescents marking the various levels. The great tessellated floor was empty, as it was when the Plaza was cleared for theatricals or a circus. This was the Boss’s private box.

  Across the Plaza, a few figures moved methodically on the stairways and balconies. They stopped at each doorway, entered, disappeared for a while and returned. It was a room-to-room search for weapons and fugitives, Dick supposed. Only when it was completed could the victors openly take power.

  This was the thing that everybody had been silently afraid of for fifty years—a slave revolt—and now it had actually happened. Dick felt incredulous, staring out over the Plaza that had so recently been full of life and color. As for Buckhill—there was no use thinking about that yet.

  The Old Man was saying, “I wanted to tawk to you two privately because you realize our gravest problem. There aren’t many that do.”

  “How’s that?” said Dick. He saw that the Frankies had gone away, leaving them alone. There was a TV at the Old Man’s elbow, flickering silently with a succession of images, but the Old Man was not looking at it. He was staring heavily at Dick and Elaine.

  “Why, how to live with the world after we’ve won,” he said. “It isn’t enough just to take Eagles, now we have to run it. We wawnted to stop being slaves: but what does that mean? What are we going to do—try to be men and ladies, while we make our misters slave for us?”

  Dick felt himself flushing with anger.

  “I know,” said the Old Man. “And yet most of my people haven’t thought any farther than that. We could make slaves out of freemen, but that wouldn’t solve anything. That would be the old system all over again, only worse. Because we’d be poor freemen, and they’d be worse slaves.”

  That was sensible enough. “Well, what then?” said Dick curiously. Beside him, he was aware of Elaine sitting, bent forward, listening intently. She put out her hand, and he took it in his.

  “First,” said the Old Man, “we must end the injustice of slavery. That comes before anything else—if we can’t do that, we lose.”

  Dick shrugged.

  “What choices does that leave us?” the Old Man asked, beginning to count on his fingers. “One, we could expel all the freemen and live here by ourselves. But that would not be a stable situation, especially if it only happened here. The freemen everywhere would wawnt to recover Eagles. Furthermore, they could recover Eagles, or destroy it, very easily, if we were to expel our freemen—whereas, if we keep them, they might hesitate. Now, second: this is a plan that we considered very seriously—now that we have the Gismos in our hands, within a short time we could make up thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of little kits, about this size—” He held his palms about a foot and a half apart.

  “In each one there would be two Gismos, and a box of protes to make the basic things that everybody would need to survive by himself. There would be weapons, and ammunition. Water, of course, and basic foods. Medicines. Tools, and electrical equipment. Each Gismo would have an arrestor of course, and an inhibitor, so that new protes could be made on it, of anything you might wawnt to dupe. Now we could take those kits and load them into planes, and drop them just everywhere, with a little parachute on each one. Many of them would be destroyed or seized by the freemen, naturally, but any slave, you see, who did get one of the kits would have in his hands the potential of being a freeman.”

  He sat back. “Now we believe this could be done, and once it got started, the freemen would never be able to put a stop to it. We could float those kits from balloons and just let them loose. We could even make the process automatic—set up a big Gismo, in some place in the mountains that would be hard to locate, and just put it to work automatically turning out those kits and floating them away on the wind.”

  He paused.

  Dick could see the picture in his mind; it was vicious and clever, and he knew instinctively that the Old Man was right—once started, you could never stop it, never in the world.

  “But we decided against that, too,” said the Old Man. “Our reason was this. If you study your history you’ll see that the whole set of injustices, and awl the bloodshed of the first twenty years after Turnover, came from just such a plan as that. Somebody, we don’t know who, distributed Gismo through the government mails they had then. What happened? If one man took advantage of the anarchic conditions to get himself a slave army, you couldn’t defend yourself against him unless you had an army too. Now we believe that a similar process would inevitably take place if we were to follow that plan again. The slave-holding big houses we have at present would break up, and that would be desirable from our point of view, but at the same time we would create such conditions of anarchy again, that there would have to be a time of bloodshed, and then of little wars, and then big wars all over, before things would settle down into a new patt
ern of mister and slave.

  “Now you remember I said that first of awl the injustice of slavery must be ended. That is our aim. We want to see the time come when nobody will be a slave, anywhere, to any man. So we can’t drive out our freemen, and we can’t disseminate Gismos at random. What does that leave?”

  He held up a third finger. “It leaves just one way: for us to learn to live peacefully together, to get along and respect each other as equals—those who were freemen, and those who were slaves.”

  Dick tried to keep his expression impassive, but some of his revulsion and contempt must have shown in his face. The Old Man said, “You think that could never happen. Why not? Is there an intrinsic difference between a freeman and a slave?”

  Dick said, “Certainly.”

  “Then what about the lady beside you now? Is she slave or free?”

  He said thickly, “She’s free. She was married to the Boss—that is—” He stopped in confusion.

  Elaine’s hand tightened on his arm. “Dick, that isn’t right.”

  She thought he meant Oliver, he realized; she still didn’t understand that she was not the original Elaine.

  “I know, you mean she has free status. That’s true. But she was bought and sold, both her parents were slaves, and moreover, she is a dupe. Now isn’t it true, that, according to your way of thinking, a dupe must be a slave?”

  Dick shot a glance at Elaine’s face; she was bewildered and uncomprehending—it hadn’t soaked in yet: but it would. He turned back to the Old Man with a look of resentment. “It’s a different case,” he said shortly. “Things were different then—they hadn’t settled down.”

  “But now they have?” said the Old Man. “All right: now just suppose that while you were sleeping, I had you taken to the Gismo Room and duped. That could have happened, couldn’t it? … And suppose I then had your own body destroyed—suppose I killed the original Dick Jones, and let the dupe live on… . Now I wawnt you to look at me and tell me: do you have any way of knowing, inside yourself, whether I did that or not?

  His grim face stared into Dick’s. Suddenly it seemed like a very real possibility.