Killdozer!
Page 13
I got her a little under me and stuck it out till the wind had done its work and was gone, and with it all the deafening noise—all but the rush of the bayou and Séleen’s low chuckle.
“Daddy—” She was cut and battered. “I brought my little boat!” She held it up weakly.
“Yes, butch. Sure. That’s dandy. Patty—what happened to mother?”
“She’s back there,” whimpered Patty. “The cabin sagged, like, an’ began m-movin’, an’ then it just fell apart an’ the bits all flew away. I couldn’ find her so I came after you.”
I lay still, not breathing. I think even my heart stopped for a little while.
Patty’s whisper sounded almost happy. “Daddy—I—hurt—all—over—”
Anjy was gone then. I took my hatred instead, embraced it and let it warm me and give me life and hope and strength the way she used to. I crawled up the rock and looked over. I could barely see the hag, but she was there. Something out in the bayou was following the rhythmic movement of her arms. Something evil, tentacled, black. Her twisted claws clutched a tiny canoe like the one she had left in the tree for Patty. And she sang:
River Spider, black and strong,
Folks ’bout here have done me wrong.
Here’s a gif’ I send to you,
Got some work for you to do.
If Anjy-woman miss the flood,
River Spider, drink her blood.
Little one was good to me,
Drown her quick and let her be.
River Spider, Jon you know,
Kill that man, and—kill—him—slow!
And Séleen bent and set the canoe on the foaming brown water. Our hair was tied inside it.
Everything happened fast then. I dived from my hiding place behind and above her, and as I did so I sensed that Patty had crept up beside me, and that she had seen and heard it all. And some strange sense warned Séleen, for she looked over her crooked shoulder, saw me in midair, and leaped into the bayou. I had the terrified, malevolent gleam of her single eye full in my face, but I struck only hard rock, and for me even that baleful glow went out.
Patty sat cross-legged with my poor old head in her lap. It was such a gray morning that the wounds on her face and head looked black to me. I wasn’t comfortable, because the dear child was rolling my head back and forth frantically in an effort to rouse me. The bones in my neck creaked as she did it and I knew they could hear it in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I transmitted a cautionary syllable but what she received was a regular houn’-dawg howl.
“Owoo! Pat—”
“Daddy! Oh, you’re awake!” She mercifully stopped gyrating the world about my tattered ears.
“What happened?” I moaned, half sitting up. She was so delighted to see my head move that she scrambled out from under so that when the ache inside it pounded it back down, it landed stunningly on the rock.
“Daddy darling, I’m sorry. But you got to stop layin’ around like that. It’s time to get up!”
“Uh. How you know?”
“I’m hungry, that’s how, so there.”
I managed to sit up this time. I began to remember things and they hurt so much that the physical pain didn’t matter any more. “Patty! We’ve got to get back to the cabin!”
She puckered up. I tried to grin at her and she tried to grin back, and there is no more tragedy left in the world for me after having seen that. I did a sort of upward totter and got what was left of my feet and legs under me. Both of us were a mess, but we could navigate.
We threaded our way back over a new, wrecked landscape. It was mostly climbing and crawling and once when Patty slipped and I reached for her I knocked the little canoe out of her hand. She actually broke and ran to pick it up. “Daddy! You got to be careful of this!”
I groaned. It was the last thing in the world I ever wanted to see. But then—Anjy had said that she should have it. And when she next dropped it I picked it up and handed it back to her. And then snatched it again.
“Patty! What’s this?” I pointed to the little craft’s cargo: a tiny bundle of hair.
“That’s the little bag from the tree, silly.”
“But how … where … I thought—”
“I made a magic,” she said with finality. “Now please, daddy, don’t stand here and talk. We have to get back to … y-you know.”
If you don’t mind, I won’t go into detail about how we dragged trees and rubbish away to find what was left of our cabin, and how we came upon the pathetic little heap of shingles and screening and furniture and how, wedged in the firm angle of two mortised two-by-fours, we found Anjy. What I felt when I when I lifted her limp body away from the rubble, when I kissed her pale lips—that is mine to remember. And what I felt when those lips returned my kiss—oh, so faintly and so tenderly—that, too, is mine.
We rested, the three of us, for five days. I found part of our store of canned goods and a fishing line, though I’m sorry now that we ate any of the fish, after what happened. And when the delirium was over, I got Patty’s part of the story. I got it piecemeal, out of sequence, and only after the most profound cross-questioning. But the general drift was this:
She had indeed seen that strange performance in the rocky cleft by the bayou; but what is more, by her childish mysticism, she understood it. At least, her explanation is better than anything I could give. Patty was sure that the River Spider that had attacked us that time in the bayou was sent by Séleen, to whom she always referred as the Witch of Endor. “She did it before, daddy, I jus’ betcha. But she didn’t have anythin’ strong enough for to put on the canoe.” I have no idea what she did use—flies, perhaps, or frogs or crayfish. “She hadda have some part of us to make the magic, an’ she made me get it for her. She was goin’ to put that li’l ol’ hair ball in a canoe, an’ if a River Spider caught it then the Spider would get us, too.”
When I made that crazed leap for the old woman she had nowhere to go but into the bayou. Pat watched neither of us. She watched the canoe. She always claimed that she hooked it to shore with a stick, but I have a hunch that the little idiot plunged in after it. “They was one o’ those big black sawyer things right there,” she said, “an’ it almos’ catched the canoe. I had a lot of trouble.” I’ll bet she did.
“You know,” she said pensively, “I was mad at that ol’ Witch of Endor. That was a mean thing she tried to do to us. So I did the same thing to her. I catched the ugliest thing I could find—all crawly and nasty an’ bad like the Witch of Endor. I found a nice horrid one, too, you betcha. An’ I tied him into my canoe with your shoelaces, daddy. You di’n’ say not to. An’ I singed to it:
Ol’ Witch of Endor is your name,
An’ you an’ Witchie is the same;
Don’t think it’s a game.
She showed me later what sort of creature she had caught for her little voodoo boat. Some call it a mud puppy and some call it a hellbender, but it is without doubt the homeliest thing ever created. It is a sort of aquatic salamander, anywhere from three inches to a foot and a half in length. It has a porous, tubercular skin with two lateral streamers of skin on each side; and these are always ragged and torn. The creature always looks as if it is badly hurt. It has almost infinitesimal fingered legs, and its black shoe-button eyes are smaller than the head of a hatpin. For the hag Séleen there could be no better substitute.
“Then,” said Patty complacently, “I singed that song the way the Witch of Endor did:
River Spider, black an’ strong,
Folks ’bout here have done me wrong.
Here’s a gif’ I send to you,
Got some work for you to do.
“The rest of the verse was silly,” said Pat, “but I had to think real fast for a rhyme for ‘Witch of Endor’ an’ I used the first thing that I could think of quicklike. It was somepin I read on your letters, daddy, an’ it was silly.”
And that’s all she would say for the time being. But I do remember the time she called me quietly down to th
e bayou and pointed out a sawyer to me, because it was the day before Carson came in a power launch from Minette to see if we had survived the hurricane; and Carson came six days after the big blow. Patty made absolutely sure that her mother was out of hearing, and then drew me by the hand down to the water’s edge. “Daddy,” she said, “we got to keep this from mother on account of it would upset her,” and she pointed.
Three or four black twisted branches showed on the water, and as I watched they began to rise. A huge sawyer, the biggest I’d ever seen, reared up and up—and tangled in its coils was a … a something.
Séleen had not fared well, tangled in the whips of the River Spider under water for five days, in the company of all those little minnows and crawfish.
Patty regarded it critically while my stomach looped itself around violently and finally lodged between my spine and the skin of my back. “She ain’t pretty a-tall!” said my darling daughter. “She’s even homelier’n a mud puppy, I betcha.”
As we walked back toward the lean-to we had built, she prattled on in this fashion: “Y’know, daddy, that was a real magic. I thought my verse was a silly one but I guess it worked out right after all. Will you laugh if I tell you what it was?”
I said I did not feel like laughing.
“Well,” said Patty shyly, “I said:
Spider, kill the Witch of Endor
If five days lapse, return to sender.
That’s my daughter.
Killdozer!
Before the race was the deluge, and before the deluge another race, whose nature it is not for mankind to understand. Not unearthly, not alien, for this was their earth and their home.
There was a war between this race, which was a great one, and another. The other was truly alien, a sentient cloudform, an intelligent grouping of tangible electrons. It was spawned in mighty machines by some accident of a science beyond our aboriginal conception of technology. And then the machines, servants of the people, became the people’s masters, and great were the battles that followed. The electron-beings had the power to warp the delicate balances of atom-structure, and their life-medium was metal, which they permeated and used to their own ends. Each weapon the people developed was possessed and turned against them, until a time when the remnants of that vast civilization found a defense—
An insulator. The terminal product or by-product of all energy research—neutronium.
In its shelter they developed a weapon. What it was we shall never know, and our race will live—or we shall know, and our race will perish as theirs perished. Sent to destroy the enemy, it got out of hand and its measureless power destroyed them with it, and their cities, and their possessed machines. The very earth dissolved in flame, the crust writhed and shook and the oceans boiled. Nothing escaped it, nothing that we know as life, and nothing of the pseudo-life that had evolved within the mysterious force-fields of their incomprehensible machines, save one hardy mutant.
Mutant it was, and ironically this one alone could have been killed by the first simple measures used against its kind—but it was past time for simple expediences. It was an organized electron-field possessing intelligence and mobility and a will to destroy, and little else. Stunned by the holocaust, it drifted over the grumbling globe, and in a lull in the violence of the forces gone wild on Earth, sank to the steaming ground in its half-conscious exhaustion. There it found shelter—shelter built by and for its dead enemies. An envelope of neutronium. It drifted in, and its consciousness at last fell to its lowest ebb. And there it lay while the neutronium, with its strange constant flux, its interminable striving for perfect balance, extended itself and closed the opening. And thereafter in the turbulent eons that followed, the envelope tossed like a gray bubble on the surface of the roiling sphere, for no substance on Earth would have it or combine with it.
The ages came and went, and chemical action and reaction did their mysterious work, and once again there was life and evolution. And a tribe found the mass of neutronium, which is not a substance but a static force, and were awed by its aura of indescribable chill, and they worshiped it and built a temple around it and made sacrifices to it. And ice and fire and the seas came and went, and the land rose and fell as the years went by, until the ruined temple was on a knoll, and the knoll was an island. Islanders came and went, lived and built and died, and races forgot. So now, somewhere in the Pacific to the west of the archipelago called Islas Revillagigeda, there was an uninhabited island. And one day—
CHUB HORTON AND Tom Jaeger stood watching the Sprite and her squat tow of three cargo lighters dwindle over the glassy sea. The big ocean-going towboat and her charges seemed to be moving out of focus rather than traveling away. Chub spat cleanly around the cigar that grew out of the corner of his mouth.
“That’s that for three weeks. How’s it feel to be a guinea pig?”
“We’ll get it done.” Tom had little crinkles all around the outer ends of his eyes. He was a head taller than Chub and rangy, and not so tough, and he was a real operator. Choosing him as a foreman for the experiment had been wise, for he was competent and he commanded respect. The theory of airfield construction that they were testing appealed vastly to him, for here were no officers-in-charge, no government inspectors, no time-keeping or reports. The government had allowed the company a temporary land grant, and the idea was to put production-line techniques into the layout and grading of the project. There were six operators and two mechanics and more than a million dollars’ worth of the best equipment that money could buy. Government acceptance was to be on a partially completed basis, and contingent on government standards. The theory obviated both goldbricking and graft, and neatly sidestepped the man-power problem. “When that black-topping crew gets here, I reckon we’ll be ready for ’em,” said Tom.
He turned and scanned the island with an operator’s vision and saw it as it was, and in all the stages it would pass through, and as it would look when they had finished, with five thousand feet of clean-draining runway, hard-packed shoulders, four acres of planepark, the access road and the short taxiway. He saw the lay of each lift that the power shovel would cut as it brought down the marl bluff, and the ruins on top of it that would give them stone to haul down the salt-flat to the little swamp at the other end, there to be walked in by the dozers.
“We got time to run the shovel up there to the bluff before dark.”
They walked down the beach toward the outcropping where the equipment stood surrounded by crates and drums of supplies. The three tractors were ticking over quietly, the two-cycle Diesel chuckling through their mufflers and the big D-7 whacking away its metronomic compression knock on every easy revolution. The Dumptors were lined up and silent, for they would not be ready to work until the shovel was ready to load them. They looked like a mechanical interpretation of Dr. Dolittle’s “Pushme-pullyou,” the fantastic animal with two front ends. They had two large driving wheels and two small steerable wheels. The motor and the driver’s seat were side by side over the front—or smaller—wheels; but the driver faced the dump body between the big rear wheels, exactly the opposite of the way he would sit in a dump truck. Hence, in traveling from shovel to dumping-ground, the operator drove backwards, looking over his shoulder, and in dumping he backed the machine up but he himself traveled forward—quite a trick for fourteen hours a day! The shovel squatted in the midst of all the others, its great hulk looming over them, humped there with its boom low and its iron chin on the ground, like some great tired dinosaur.
Rivera, the Puerto Rican mechanic, looked up grinning as Tom and Chub approached, and stuck a bleeder wrench into the top pocket of his coveralls.
“She says ‘Sigalo,’ ” he said, his white teeth flashlighting out of the smear of grease across his mouth. “She says she wan’ to get dirt on dis paint.” He kicked the blade of the Seven with his heel.
Tom sent the grin back—always a surprising thing in his grave face.
“That Seven’ll do that, and she’ll take a good d
eal off her bitin’ edge along with the paint before we’re through. Get in the saddle, Goony. Build a ramp off the rocks down to the flat there, and blade us off some humps from here to the bluff yonder. We’re walking the dipper up there.”
The Puerto Rican was in the seat before Tom had finished, and with a roar the Seven spun in its length and moved back along the outcropping to the inland edge. Rivera dropped his blade and the sandy marl curled and piled up in front of the dozer, loading the blade and running off in two even rolls at the ends. He shoved the load toward the rocky edge, the Seven revving down as it took the load, blat blat blatting and pulling like a supercharged ox as it fired slowly enough for them to count the revolutions.
“She’s a hunk of machine,” said Tom.
“A hunk of operator, too,” gruffed Chub, and added, “for a mechanic.”
“The boy’s all right,” said Kelly. He was standing there with them, watching the Puerto Rican operate the dozer, as if he had been there all along, which was the way Kelly always arrived places. He was tall, slim, with green eyes too long and an easy stretch to the way he moved, like an attenuated cat. He said, “Never thought I’d see the day when equipment was shipped set up ready to run like this. Guess no one ever thought of it before.”
“There’s times when heavy equipment has to be unloaded in a hurry these days,” Tom said. “If they can do it with tanks, they can do it with construction equipment. We’re doin’ it to build something instead, is all. Kelly, crank up the shovel. It’s oiled. We’re walking it over to the bluff.”
Kelly swung up into the cab of the big dipper-stick and, diddling the governor control, pulled up the starting handle. The Murphy Diesel snorted and settled down into a thudding idle. Kelly got into the saddle, set up the throttle a little, and began to boom up.
“I still can’t get over it,” said Chub. “Not more’n a year ago we’d a had two hundred men on a job like this.”
Tom smiled. “Yeah, and the first thing we’d have done would be to build an office building, and then quarters. Me, I’ll take this way. No timekeepers, no equipment-use reports, no progress and yardage summaries, no nothin’ but eight men, a million bucks worth of equipment, an’ three weeks. A shovel an’ a mess of tool crates’ll keep the rain off us, an’ army field rations’ll keep our bellies full. We’ll get it done, we’ll get out and we’ll get paid.”