The Shadow People

by Margaret St. Clair

I began to retrace my downward path in reverse order. Since I was barefooted now, there were often strange textures under my feet. The first in the series of cellars was the place where I had found Merlin's sword. I went through it quickly, but I did notice there was no sign a sword had ever hung against its walls.

  Cellars, basements, and cellars. I followed the gradient against its grain. Once the way upward surfaced, at the spot where I had found Carol's earring before, and I stood for the first time in weeks under the open sky. It was a very dark night, but how good—how inexpressibly good!—it was to breathe free air again!

  I thought of staying aboveground and getting back to Berkeley by bus. But I didn't know what time it was—buses stop running during the small hours—and I was barefoot and carrying a naked sword. In the end, I reluctantly decided to go below once more. As I picked my way across the junk-filled backyard toward the cellar window, I heard a faint popping in the distance, like firecrackers.

  I didn't pay much attention to it. I was absorbed in planning what I'd do when I got back to the Shasta Inn. My things should still be in my room, since the rent was paid to the end of the month. I'd have a quick hot bath, change my clothes, put on some shoes, and go looking for Carol. She was very unlikely to be in the basement apartment. It would have too many painful associations for her. But she might have left word with the landlady as to where she had gone. I didn't think I'd have much trouble finding her.

  I came to a cellar I didn't recognize. Well, I might have forgotten what any particular cellar or basement was like. But after that there was a newish cellar, completely unlike anything in my mind. And the gradient stopped here. This was the end of the line. I groped about for a door, found it, went up some stairs. I was out in the street.

  The street? Yes, but where was I? Berkeley, probably, but in a part of Berkeley that I didn't recognize, though the terrain was vaguely familiar. The street lights seemed dazzlingly brilliant and hurt my eyes.

  I was standing on the edge of a huge parking lot or, at any rate, of a large paved area. No cars were parked in it. There was a service station across the street, but it wasn't lit up. The building from which I had come was unlighted, too; it seemed to be a sort of shopping arcade, but the shops were empty and the windows had no glass. Across the street there was a partly constructed apartment house. It looked as if work on it had been stopped several months ago.

  Down the street, about a block and a half away, there was a big, square, somber building, very brightly lighted, with odd-looking humps at intervals around the roof. It was hard to be sure what the humps were; the lights made my eyes blur, and I saw colored halos around them. But I thought the humps looked like gun emplacements. Except for myself, there was nobody at all on the street.

  Gun emplacements? I'd look for a street sign and find out where I was.

  The sign on the lamp post said "Telegraph." And the sign at right angles to it read "Haste."

  Telegraph and Haste? Impossible! Where was the Shasta Inn, the Coffee House, the big bookstore, the shops, the crowd? Some sort of clearance project might have been undertaken during my absence, but the big building down Telegraph would have taken months to build. How long had I been gone?

  I was still standing under the street light, blinking and wondering what to do, when I heard footsteps coming from the direction of the campus. A woman was walking toward me.

  She was a small woman, peculiarly dressed. There was a helmet with a plastic visor-bubble on her head, and a secret-agent type trench coat was belted tightly around her slender waist. Her legs were sheathed in high, soft leather boots, and there was a carbine slung over her right shoulder. The whole effect was of military chic, like a female Maquis in a World War II movie. She turned her head alertly from side to side as she walked.

  I suppose I was in the shadow of the street light. At any rate, she didn't see me until she was almost up with me. She gave a nervous jump. "Don't come near me," she said in a high, alarmed voice. "I've got a permit. I warn you, I'm armed." She was leveling the carbine at me.

  As soon as she spoke, I recognized her voice. "Fay! For God's sake," I said.

  She peered at me uncertainly. "Dick! Dick Aldridge! Where've you been? I thought you were dead! Where did you get Merlin's sword?"

  "I found it on a wall," I answered absently. "Why should you think I was dead? I don't understand what's been happening."

  "I thought you were dead because you were gone so long," she replied. "What else could I think? You weren't with your girl when she came back."

  "How long have I been gone?" I asked. "Carol's O.K.?"

  "I suppose she is. I haven't seen her for months."

  "Listen, how long have I been gone?" I was getting scared.

  "Almost three years."

  "No! It's impossible." I thought of my bare feet and the rate at which my shoes had worn out. It was to fight a growing conviction in myself that I said, "I've only been gone a few weeks."

  "No, it's almost three years." She fumbled in the musette bag that hung from her belt and produced a newspaper. It was small and thin, about the size of a high-school weekly. "Look at the date," she said.

  I looked. Unless Fay had had a newspaper printed especially to deceive me, there was no doubt that very nearly three years had elapsed since I had gone in search of my missing girl.

  My jaw must have dropped. Fay said. "Did you eat atter-corn?"

  "Yes. There was nothing else to eat."

  "That accounts for it. It disturbs the perception of time."

  I made an effort to get a grip on my wits. "You say you've seen Carol?"

  "Your girl? Yes, several times. She was always with Hood."

  "How did she look? I don't understand why she was with Hood."

  Fay shrugged. "She looked sad, I thought. I tried to speak to her several times. I wanted to find out what had happened to you. Hood always had her get up and leave when he saw me coming. He obviously didn't want me to talk to her."

  "When did you last see her?"

  "Two or three months ago. Listen, Dick, I can't stand here talking to you. I'm on my way to work. The patrol will be around any minute. We'll both be picked up."

  "But—where shall I go?"

  "I don't know." She sounded irritated and unfriendly. "That's your problem, I guess."

  I looked at her in silence. I felt dazed. Carol with Hood, the Avenue so changed as to be unrecognizable, three years gone out of my life—it was hard to accept. Even Fay had withdrawn her rather bossy sympathy.

  I looked down at the blade of the sword. It had been faithful to me through all perils, and guided me back to the Bright World at last. I had escaped from Underearth physically. But at this moment, standing under the street light with Fay eying me impatiently, I felt that I had brought some of its coldness and detestability back with me.

  Chapter Eleven

  I dreamed of the Gray Dwarf a good deal at this time. I suppose it was because the world I had come back to resembled Otherworld in its unmotivated violence. The buzzing of mosquitoes would waken me several times during the night; I would rouse a little, look at the sword gleaming on the wall where I had hung it, and roll over on the couch and go back to sleep. Once I remember hearing the little monster tell me that there were two kinds of Astilbe—Astilbe givrigum and Astilbe gatherum. "Astilbe givrigum's arsenic," he told me in the dream. "It makes people turn black and die. Gatherum's different. Gatherum we use to envenom a ring."

  I was staying with Fay. She had relented at the last moment and given me directions for getting to her apartment. I had taken a zigzag course through the night, hiding in shadows, listening for the patrol, and trying to avoid the sensors of the robfuzz.

  The machine caught up with me on Durant. In quite a pleasant mechanical voice, it told me to halt. Then it sprayed me with a paralyzing nerve gas and felt around my neck with its prostheses for the Id disk that ought to have been hanging there.

  For some reason, perhaps that I had eaten so much atter-corn, the
paralysant had no effect on me. I shoved Merlin's sword through the grid that covered the thing's viewer and shorted it out in a shower of sparks. I got quite an electric jolt, but the sword hilt was some protection. Except for a tiny eroded spot on the blade, the sword did not suffer. By the time the human fuzz could come to the rescue of their mechanical colleague, I was safe in Fay's apartment.

  The incident made me realize that an Id disk was a desirable thing to have, and when Fay came back from work—she was working at the computer center, from three to eight—I asked her about it.

  "Yes, you'll have to have an identity disk," she said, unsmiling. She sipped her coffee slowly. "Nobody's allowed on the street without one. It's a part of the safe-streets campaign."

  "How do I go about getting one?"

  She chewed her lip. "It's not going to be easy. You see, the first thing the examiner will want to know is where you spent the last three years."

  "I could say I've been in a federal prison."

  This flippancy annoyed Fay. "No, you couldn't," she answered. "They check up on statements. I suppose the only thing for me to do is to try to forge a record for you. Then I can apply for the disk."

  "Wouldn't that be a lot of work?"

  "Not really. Computers are the biggest fools! People flummox them all the time. Anybody who works with them can think of a dozen ways to foul them up. They're high-toned, technical, and stupid. But it will take me a while, I expect about a week."

  "This is awfully good of you, Fay."

  "Not good at all," she snapped. She seemed to be in a contrary mood. "It's the only way I can get you out of my hair. I'm not heartless enough to turn you over to the fuzz, and I can't have any social life as long as you're here. Stay away from the windows, Dick, and don't make any noise. There are heavy penalties for harboring a diskless man."

  I would have liked to thank her again, but I didn't want to get snapped at. "What will you do?" I asked. "What's the technique of forging a record for someone?"

  "Well, you've probably got a card in the center already—credit ratings were used as the base for the system when it was first set up. But it would be so hard for me to get hold of your card that I think it would be simpler for us to start out with a whole new one. It takes a court order to pull a card, but it's no great trick to add one to the master file.

  "What kind of a record would you like?"

  "You mean I can select any past I like?"

  "Just about. Of course, it shouldn't be something so odd that they'll check up on it. An ordinary sort of record is best. Remember, your future will depend on the past you select."

  I reflected. It was a unique opportunity, but I felt a certain lack of imagination when it came to taking advantage of it. Finally, it was decided that I should be Richard Eldridge, B.A. from the university in Poly Sci—(actually, I had been in the English department), who had migrated to Washington when the first of the big hippie crackdowns came. I had been drifting around in the Pacific Northwest for the last three years, working at almost anything that didn't require a union card. My credit rating was fair—C minus—and Fay planned to include several anonymous complaints against me "because you always get stuff like that."

  After several tries, she got a passable Polaroid picture of me. "I'll get Gerda to encode it," she said, "and put the info on your card. I've done enough favors for her that she won't mind. And you've got to have a coded picture that looks somewhat like you."

  "I really do appreciate your doing—"

  "You can show your appreciation by washing the breakfast dishes," she interrupted rudely. "I'm going out to get some groceries, and buy you some clothes and a pair of shoes. Nobody goes barefoot now."

  "For Christsake, if I'm not welcome—"

  "Oh, shut up and do the dishes! I'll be back in about an hour."

  The situation between me and Fay at this time was a curious one. She seemed to resent my presence; I certainly resented my dependency on her. We were always snapping at each other. Yet once she said that she was glad to have a man staying with her, she felt so much safer, and she shopped carefully and thoughtfully for my clothing. There was an odd, half-antagonistic attraction, almost an affection, between us.

  My confinement in her apartment was not so irksome as it might have been, partly because I was exhausted physically and welcomed the opportunity to rest, and partly because I was getting caught up on all that had happened while I had been wandering through Underearth. I read old magazines, watched TV with the sound turned low, and tanned myself discreetly with Fay's sunlamp. Even so, Fay was always surprising me with references to things that, as far as I was concerned, hadn't happened yet. I had time-traveled three years into the future. On the whole, I didn't care for it.

  The safe-streets bit was a good example. The Id disk system had been begun under the prodding of a newly elected president, and people had been inclined to accept it, despite the warnings of civil-libertarians, because they wanted an end to violence. Yet the streets were not safe; Fay, when she went to work, equipped herself with a small arsenal, and she had had to take a course in judo before she could even apply for a permit to be out during the curfewed hours.

  The paradoxes of American life had augmented. Berkeley—"civil, dog-barking Berkeley"—had been occupied twice by the National Guard, and legislators generally, caught in a cross-fire of violence, had been able to contrive no better answer to it than to appropriate more money for computers and arms for the police. Yet this country, torn by inner strife, with a wrecked educational system and a blackout of Constitutional guarantees, had been able to land six men on the moon and bring back five of them in safety. It was an achievement, but of what kind?

  I thought about Carol a good deal. Presumably, she was with Hood voluntarily, but there was no way of being certain until I asked her about it myself. Neither her name nor Hood's was in the phone directory. I resolved to go looking for her as soon as I could legally be on the streets.

  The great day came. Fay hung the identity disk ceremoniously around my neck. "It was a lot more trouble to get than I had thought it would be," she said, "but all's well that ends well. You're a free man, Dick. What are you going to do first?"

  "Empty the garbage," I said. I'd washed the dishes and done some cooking during Fay's absences, but the garbage had had to wait to be emptied until she came back. She had been afraid that somebody might see me outside, even at night.

  I went out on the back steps. The air felt wonderful. I looked toward the bay, but we were, I supposed, too low for me to see the water. I turned toward the hills.—What? Could it—?

  The Berkeley hills were gone.

  Gone. I wasn't imagining it. From where I was standing, I ought to have been able to see the big C on the hills behind the campus, the university's constructions on the hills, and especially the thousands of houses on the Berkeley, Albany and El Cerrito hills. They were all gone. The hills were gone. There were no more hills to be seen than if I had been standing on the back steps of an apartment in Santa Ana. Only far to the right, in Oakland, did the natural terrain seem to have been spared.

  I was still goggling when Fay came out after me, a coffee cup in her hand. "What's the trouble, Dick? You look upset."

  "The hills!" I made a sweeping gesture. "What's happened to the hills?"

  "Oh. I forgot to tell you. It was a computer foul-up."

  "Computers did that?"

  "Un-hunh. There was a city-owned fleet of bulldozers that was sent out to do a small leveling job for a park. They were supposed to be programmed for that, anyhow. Somebody coded the card wrong, or maybe the coding machine went wrong by itself. Anyhow, the 'dozers started taking down the hills."

  "But—wasn't there any human being in charge of them?"

  "There was a foreman, but he left after he saw them nicely started on the leveling job for the park. It was Friday afternoon, you see, and he wanted to get started on his weekend."

  "Didn't anybody try to stop the bulldozers?"

 
"Of course. But the foreman couldn't be located, the computer center was closed, and the mayor was out of town. There was no way of stopping the 'dozers except by dynamiting them, which was what they finally did."

  I must have blinked. "It wasn't the only time the computers have caused a big mess," Fay said. "Two or three blocks in the Telly area were razed and paved before plans for a mall were approved. But the mistakes often seem to be to somebody's advantage. That's what people say, anyhow."

  "Did leveling the Berkeley hills benefit anybody?"

  "In a way. A fleet of automated dump trucks removed the earth the 'dozers tore loose. Guess where they dumped it."

  "I give up," I said grimly.

  "In San Francisco Bay."

  "You mean—they used it to fill in the bay?"

  "That's right. Now there are eight or ten high-rise apartment buildings going up on the fill."

  "Yes, but—what happened to the people whose homes were razed? Didn't they sue the city?"

  "Of course they did. Millions and millions of dollars' worth of damage suits. The city had to get loans from Washington to pay the judgments against it. But the hills are gone. And the bay is partly filled in."

  There was a silence. I said, "I think I'll go for a walk."

  "O.K." As I started down the steps, I thought I heard her say, "You didn't empty the garbage," but I couldn't be sure.

  It was a beautiful day. Glum as I was feeling, my spirits rose slightly when I got out into the sunshine. It was good to stretch my legs. I decided to walk over to the computer center and see if they would tell me where Miss Carol Jennings was to be found. The stories Fay had been telling me about the failings of computers were probably exaggerated. Even if they weren't, asking at the computer center about Carol was the easiest way of beginning the search for her.

  There were few people on the streets. The women's dresses were dowdily long, in dull colors, but the men's clothing had changed little from how I remembered it. There were lots of black leather jackets. When I met somebody on the sidewalk, he or she would wince away from me, as if he wanted a safe distance between us. Even at the bus stops, people stayed apart from each other.