by Fritz Leiber
The pupils of her eyes expanded to stars—black spidery stars in a violet sky.
“Why, Paul,” she said gravely, “ever since you forced me to treat you as an intelligent being—primitive but intelligent, bearing a little living universe inside—it has no longer been a simple thing for me to go deep into your mind. It’s more than a matter of having to ask your permission now. But I have gathered some notions about you, and if you want I will tell them to you.”
He nodded. “Go on.”
“Paul,” she said, “you resent being treated like a pet, yet that is how you treat the people around you. You stand back and watch their antics with tolerant understanding and you nurse and guard and cajole the ones you love: Margo, Don, your mother, several others. You call this friendship, but it’s nursemaiding and devouring. A decent cat wouldn’t do it to her own kittens.
“You stand back and watch yourself more than is healthy. You live too much in the self watching you and in the third self watching the second, and so on. Look!” She switched the windows to mirror. Her foreclaw placed itself between his right eye and his own stacked reflections and somehow ticked off the edges of the first six of them exactly.
“See?” she said. “Each watching the one in front I know—all intelligent animals are self-observing. But you live too much in the reflections, Paul. Best to live mostly in front of the mirror and just a little in the watchers. That way courage comes. Don’t live in Watcher Number Six!
“Also, you think other people same as your watchers. You cringe from them, then criticize. But they not. They got watchers too, watching just them.
“Also, love yourself more, or you can’t like anybody.
“’Nother thing ’bout you,” she finished, dropping wholly back into monkey-talk, “fight-reflexes pretty poor. Likewise dance. Likewise sex. Not ’nough practice. That’s all.”
“I know you’re right,” Paul said haltingly in a small, tight voice. “I try to change, but—”
“’Nough thinking ’bout self! Look! See one our big saucers save one your towns.”
Ceiling and floor were transparent again. They were descending at a rapid slant toward a dark branchwork merged with a pale checkerboard mesh, from the center of which brown rings were expanding outward toward a circular brown rim that merged into bluish gray. High above the center of the circles hung a golden and violet saucer which he judged had to be huge from the cloud-arm between them.
The mesh grew larger—it was streets. And the squares were blocks of buildings.
The brown rings were humpings of silt-laden water being driven out of the city.
He recognized, from remembered pictures, the great buildings of Elektrosila and the Institute of Energetics, the blue-green of the Kirov Theater, the Square of the Decembrists. The branchwork must be the streams of the Neva delta, and the city itself, Leningrad.
“See? We save your beloved cities,” Tigerishka said complacently. “Momentum engine of big saucer move only water. Very smart machine.”
Suddenly the saucer dipped so close he saw the cobblestones, a mud-buried gutter, and the sprawled, silt-drifted, water-grayed bodies of a woman and a little girl. Then a low brown wave surged over them, a gray arm and a gray, bearded face lifelessly flinging out of the dirty foam.
“Save?” Paul demanded incredulously. “Yes, after killing your millions—and if the rescue isn’t worse than the disaster! Tigerishka, how could you bring yourself to wreck our world just to get fuel a little faster? What frightened you into it?”
She hissed: “Stay off that subject, Paul!”
RICHARD HILLARY limped along swiftly—a dimentionless point in the atlas-page England Paul had been viewing, but a living, breathing, frightened man for all that. He was sweating profusely; the sun beat in his face. He was panting and at every other step he winced.
The pedestrian equivalent of a fast car on a big highway, Richard had outdistanced the pack behind but yet had not caught up with the pack ahead, if there was one. The last signpost he had seen had pointed, quite appropriately, he was certain, to “Lower Slaughter.”
Squinting ahead, he could see that after some hundred yards the road began leisurely to wind up a high, forest-capped hill.
But, looking behind, his sun-dazzled eyes could see only a crazy scattering of sheets and serpents of water.
The fattest serpent was the road he was traveling, and now it suddenly began to fill where he was, brimming over from the ditch to the left. Hardly an inch, yet it unnerved him.
To the right was a forbiddingly fenced field of young barley, a bit higher than the road and mounting directly toward the hilltop. He climbed the fence, unmindful of the tearing of the barbed wire, and set on again through the swishing green. With a startling sudden beat of wings, a crow emerged just ahead and took off, cawing with hoarse disapproval. Although Richard’s legs were cramping now, he increased his pace.
He heard a rumble of low, distant thunder. Only this was the sort of thunder that doesn’t die away muttering, but gets louder, louder, louder. Richard didn’t think he could do it, but he began to run, run at his top speed uphill. There was a rush of rabbits from behind him. At one point he could see a dozen white bounding forms.
From the sides of his eyes he began to glimpse brown-frothy, whirling, pursuing walls. The thunder became that of a dozen express trains. At one moment there was yellow foam around his feet, at another it looked as though a swinging, dust-raising surge would cut him off.
Yet he did make it to the hilltop, and the waters didn’t get quite that far, and the thundering began slowly to fade.
As he swayed there panting, his lower chest feeling as if it had been kicked, there stepped out of the trees just ahead a straight-backed, small, elderly man with a shotgun.
“Stand, sir!” this apparition cried, directing the weapon at Richard. “Or I’ll fire.”
The apparition was dressed in brown gaiters, gray knickerbockers, and a lilac pullover. His narrow, wrinkled, watery-eyed face was set in lines of grimmest disapproval.
Richard stood, if only because he was so utterly and painfully winded. The thundering died away completely as the turbid water leveled a little way down the hill.
“Speak up!” the apparition cried. “What lets you think you have the right to trample my barley? And how did you let in all that water?”
Finally getting some of his breath, Richard shaped his lips in a grave smile and said: “It wasn’t deliberate on my part, believe me.”
SALLY HARRIS, the midmorning sun glowing from the solid gold threads in her bikini, peered down over the balustrade and called back a running commentary.
Jake Lesher sat by a cup of black coffee flaming almost invisibly with Irish whiskey and puffed a long greenish cigar. Occasionally he frowned. A notebook stood open at two blank pages beside the coffee cup.
Sally called, “The water’s ten stories higher than last time. The roofs are packed with people and there’s two or three at every window I can see. Some are standing on the ledges. We’re lucky our skyscraper had a fire and the elevator’s stuck. Somebody’s shaking his fist—why me, what have I done to you? Somebody else just took a high dive—ouch, bellywhopper! The current’s fierce—it’s pushing a police launch backwards. You there, quit pointin’ your cane at me! There’s mothers and kids and—”
There was a zing and a crack and the tubular chrome rang along its length. Sally flipped her hands off it as if she’d been stung and turned around.
“Somebody just shot at me!” she announced indignantly.
“Move back, baby,” Jake instructed her. “People are always jealous of the guy at the top. Or the gal.”
Chapter
Thirty-one
THE SAUCER STUDENTS heard four rapid horn-beeps which came winging back through air heavy with the sour, acrid fumes of burnt-over land—and reeking more than ever since a hot, damp wind had set in from the southeast. Overhead the sun was hot but there was a big black cloudbank to the south.
&n
bsp; Hunter brought the sedan to a stop behind the Corvette, which had just topped a rise, the road passing between two natural rock gateposts some fifteen feet high.
Doc was standing in the seat, studying the terrain ahead. He looked just a little like a pirate, with the brim of his black hat pulled down in back but turned up sharply in front. He reached out his right hand, and Rama Joan put the field glasses into it. He resumed his scanning, using the seven-power instrument. Rama Joan and Ann stood up, too.
Hunter stopped the sedan’s motor, set the brake, and as the school bus drew up behind them third in line, he and Margo got out and hurried forward until they could see, too.
In front of them a slope stretched downward for a quarter of a mile in gentle undulations to a broad-ditched flat, then rose again, though not so high.
The slope was black to the left, dusty greenish-brown to the right. Monica Mountainway went down it in swinging curves, crossing and recrossing the demarcation line between the burned and the unburned.
Toward the bottom, almost on the demarcation line, it passed three white buildings surrounded by a wide graveled space and a high, wire-mesh fence. Then the road joined the broad-ditched fiat which led off in either direction, almost level but gently curving, until the hills hid it each way.
Down the center of the flat, following its contours, stretched what looked for a long moment exactly like a miles-long, flattish, scaly serpent thirty yards wide. The individual scales, which ran in glitter-bordered rows eight or nine across, were mostly blue, brown, cream and black, though here and there was a green or red one. Judging by its glittering sides, the serpent had a silver belly.
Wojtowicz, coming up behind them, said, “Cripes, we’re there. That’s it. Wow!”
The scaly serpent was inland Route 101, jammed with cars bumper to bumper. The glitter-border was the freeway’s wire-mesh fence.
Doc said hoarsely, “I want to talk to Doddsy and McHeath.”
Rama Joan said, “Ann, you can get them.” The little girl climbed past her mother and hopped out.
As soon as Hunter’s and Margo’s eyes stopped swinging and started to linger, details began to destroy the serpent illusion. At many spots cars had been driven wide on the shoulder, up against the fence. Some of these had their hoods up and dabs of white at their sides—Hunter realized these last must be towels, shirts, scarves, and large handkerchiefs: pitifully obedient “askings for assistance” set up before the jam got impossible.
At several points the serpent scales were twisted and whorled: accidents never cleaned up and attempts of whole groups of cars to turn and go back the way they’d come, either by crossing the median strip or by using the shoulder.
At three places the wire-mesh fence bulged acutely outward, each bulge filled with cars nose-on: these must have been trying to ram their way out. One of these attempts had been limitedly successful: the fence was down, but the way out beyond it blocked by a mess of cars ditch-overturned and crushed together, two half-climbed onto the others’ backs.
Here and there a few cars still moved in senseless-seeming, backward and forward jerks of a few feet each way. Stale exhaust-stench mixed with the burnt reek coming on the moist southeast wind.
Hunter thought of what it must have looked like at night in the last stages of general movement: five thousand cars in sight from here, ten thousand headlights swinging and blinking, ten thousand bumpers to clash and snag and rip, a few police speeding up and down trying to keep open lanes that relentlessly shortened and narrowed, five thousand motors, belching exhaust pipes, horns…And about a hundred thousand more cars between here and L.A.
He heard the Ramrod saying, “It is the valley of dry bones. Lord of the Saucers, succor them.” From the car beside him Rama Joan said softly: “Even an evildoer sees happiness so long as his evil deed does not ripen; but when his evil deed ripens…”
The biggest and worst car-crush of all was where Monica Mountainway entered 101 just beyond the three white buildings: a hundred or so cars slewed every which way, several overset, others ditch-jammed sideways, and the nearest three dozen burnt black—it occurred to Hunter that he was very possibly looking at the source of the brush fire.
Only after he and Margo had studied the cars for quite a while (or for an interminable, incredulous, eye-darting moment) did they begin to see the people. It was as if some universal law forced vision to descend by size-stages.
People!—three or four to each car, at least. Many of them still sitting in them, by God. Others standing or walking between them, a few standing or sitting on fabric-or-cushion-spread car roofs. Off to the left, beyond the burnt swathe, many people had climbed the fence and set up blanket-and-beach-towel-shaded bivouacs, yet few if any of them seemed to have gone far from the freeway that penned their vehicles; perhaps they figured the jam would be cleaned up somehow in a few hours or a day. And there wasn’t much walking around—they were sticking to the shade.
It was a stale old joke, Hunter recalled, that Angelenos, using cars even to visit the people across the street, had forgotten how to walk—one of those jokes that are little more than the unretouched truth.
Just to the left of the Monica Mountainway outlet and car-crush, a clutch of black and white police cars was drawn up on a cleared stretch of shoulder, in a semicircle reminiscent of a wagon-train camp. This “laager” guarded a car-wide break in the fence, looking as if it had been done with heavy wire-clippers. A half-dozen police were inside it, and right now one of them took off on a motorcycle through the break, immediately turning and gunning along north on the flat outside the fence. A few people came out of their bivouacs and seemed to hail him, but he kept on, and they stood there as his dust-wake broadened and billowed around them.
To the right, where the big black cloudbank was growing rapidly higher, there were fewer bivouacs but more people in the open—slim people moving around fast, mostly, waving and leaping, gathering in clumps, dispersing, regathering. And it seemed to be from this direction that there, was coming, quite tinny and faint, the squawk and squeal and drumbeat of jazz.
Between the two groups of people behaving so differently, there was a hundred-yard stretch, including the Mountainway outlet, that had no people at all in it, even sitting in the cars—except for ten or so stretched here and there on the ground. Hunter wondered for a moment why they chose to rest in the baking sun, before it occurred to him they were dead.
He was fringe-aware of his comrades from the school bus and the truck gathered around the Corvette, too. Now he beard more footsteps coming and the Little Man saying, “Look at that cloudbank. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of a wet southeast wind like this in Southern Cal,” and McHeath replying, “Maybe the ocean’s broke through and filled the Salton Sea and other low spots, Mr. Dodd. And with—gee!—maybe a hundred miles of tidewater, there’d be lots of evaporation.” Hunter continued to scan the overpowering scene ahead.
Three of the slim, active ones came into the no-man’s land along the shoulder, moving in a cavorting, dancing run. One of them, by his gestures, might be carrying and swigging from a bottle. They’d come sixty yards when there was a crackle of gunfire from the police-car camp. One of the three fell—hard to tell at this distance whether he lay quiet or writhed. The other two vaulted over the nearest line of stalled cars and hid.
Hunter put his arm around Margo tight. “My God, Doc, what goes on?” he demanded.
“Yeah, for crissakes, Doc, tell us what you can see through the glasses,” Wojtowicz put in. “It looks like war.”
“It is,” Doc reported crisply. “Now listen to what I say, everybody that wants to,” he went on loudly, continuing to scan through the glasses, “because I’m not going to tell it twice and there’ll be no time for anybody else to sight-see with these. It’s a war, or a big skirmish, anyhow, between a lot of young people and the older people—or I should say the police helped by a few older people, but most of the rest of those neutral or at any rate useless. Big kids versus police p
rotecting families. It’s the Day of the Children.
“Those slim ones are teenagers, mostly. They’re drinking—I can see a liquor truck bust open and kids handing out bottles. They got a live jazz band going in a cleared space. There are fights—knife and fist. A gang with sledges is smashing car windows and beating in car bodies for no sane reason.”
Doc censored from his account the acts of stark love-making he noted inside the cars—for shade rather than privacy, it seemed—the two girls dancing naked near the jazz band, the wanton beatings-up and terrorizings, and—in the other direction—the group draining a car radiator and eagerly drinking the…well, he hoped there weren’t too many additives in the water.
“But not all their violence is against cars or each other,” be went on. “There’s a bunch of them sneaking up right now between the empty cars towards the police camp. A few of them have guns, the rest bottles.
“I think the police have set up a little ambush on their side. At any rate I can see two or three of them crouched behind cars in the middle of the jam.
“But before the battle starts, we’re going to be out of here, heading back for Mulholland,” he went on in a louder voice, handing the glasses to Rama Joan and turning to face his crowd. “Doddsy! McHeath! Have Pop and Hixon turn their cars—there’s room to do it—and…”
“You mean you’re asking us to turn tail and run?” Hixon himself demanded loudly from where he was standing, rifle in hand, just beyond the Ramrod. “When there’s decent folks down there about to be swamped? When we could turn the tables easy with that gravity gun? Look, I been a cop myself. We got to help them.”
“No!” Doc rasped back at him. “We’ve got to protect ourselves and get the momentum pistol to some responsible science group—and while it’s still got power in it. How much charge is there left in the thing, Margo?”
“About one-third,” she told him, checking the violet line.
“See?” Doc continued to Hixon, “the thing has only four or five big shots left in it, at most. There are miles of those maniacs down there on 101. If we mix in, we’ll only turn a little battle into a big one. What’s down there is dreadful, I’ll admit, but it’s something that’s going on all over the world right now and we can’t afford to lose ourselves in it—one bucket of water tossed on a burning city! No, we backtrack! Go back and turn your truck around, Hixon—”
