No Direction Home

by Norman Spinrad

  The chamber was filled with six rows of strange chairs, six of them to a row. They were like giant red eggs standing on end, hollowed out, and fitted inside with reclining padded seats. Inside the red eggs, metal helmets designed to fit over the entire head dangled from cables at head-level. Most of the eggs contained human skeletons. The floor was littered with bones.

  Ryan and Lumumba seemed to have been somewhat deeper in trance; it took them a few seconds longer to come out of it. Lumumba’s eyes flashed sudden fear as he saw the bones. But Ryan grinned knowingly as he saw the fear on Lumumba’s face.

  “Scares you a bit, doesn’t it, boy?” Ryan said, “Still game to put on one of those helmets?” The wall seemed to pick up the sparkle of his laugh.

  “What killed them?” was all Lumumba said.

  “How should I know?”

  “But you said you’d tried it!”

  “So, I’m a liar. And you’re a coward.”

  I walked forward as they argued, and read a small metal plaque that was affixed to the outer shell of each red egg:

  Two tokens—MERGE WITH THE COSMIC ALL—Two tokens. Drop tokens in slot. Place helmet over head. Pull lever and experience MERGER WITH THE COSMIC ALL. Automatic timer will limit all MERGERS to two-minute duration, in compliance with federal law.

  “I’m no more a coward than you are, Ryan. You had no intention of putting on one of those things.”

  “I’d do it if you’d do it,” Ryan insisted.

  “No you wouldn’t! You’re not that crazy and neither am I, Why would you risk your life for something as stupid as that?”

  “Because I’d be willing to bet my life any day that a black brother like you would never have the guts to put on a helmet.”

  “You stinking honkie!”

  “Why don’t we end this crap, Lumumba? You’re not going to put on one of these helmets and neither am I. The big difference between us is that I won’t have to because you can’t ”

  Lumumba seemed like a carven idol of rage in that fantastic cube of light. “Just a minute, honkie,” he said. “Professor, you have any idea why they died when they put the helmets on?”

  It was starting to make sense to me. What if the claims made for the device were true? What if two tokens could buy a man total transcendental bliss? “I don’t think they died when, they put the helmets on,” I said. “I think they starved to death days later. According to this plaque, whatever happens is supposed to last no longer than two minutes before an automatic circuit shuts it off. What if this device involves electronic stimulation of the pleasure center? No one has yet unearthed such a device, but the Space-Age literature was full of it. Pleasure-center stimulation was supposed to be harmless in itself, but what if the timer circuit went out? A man could be paralyzed in total bliss while he starved to death. I think that’s what happened here.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Lumumba said, his rage seeming to collapse in upon itself, becoming a manic shrewdness. “The helmets themselves are harmless? Even if we couldn’t take them off ourselves, one of the others could take them off… We wouldn’t be in any real danger?”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him. “According to the inscription, one paid two tokens for the experience. I doubt that even the Space-Agers would’ve been willing to pay money for something that would harm them, certainly not en masse. And the Space-Agers were very conscious of profit.”

  “Would you be willing to stake your life on it, Dr. Balewa? Would you be willing to try it, too?”

  Try it? Actually put on a helmet, give myself over to a piece of Space-Age wizardry, an electronic device that was supposed to produce a mystical experience at the flick of a switch? A less stable man might say that if it really worked, there was a god inside the helmets, a god that the Space-Agers had created out of electronic components. If this were actually true, it surely must represent the very pinnacle of Space-Age civilization—who but the Space-Agers would even contemplate the fabrication of an actual god?

  Yes, of course I would try it! I had to try it; what kind of scholar would I be if I passed by an opportunity to understand the Space-Agers as no modern man has understood them before? Neither Ryan nor Lumumba had the background to make the most of such an experience. It was my duty to put on a helmet as well as my pleasure.

  “Yes, Mr. Lumumba,” I said. “I intend to try it, too.”

  “Then we’ll all try it,” Lumumba said, “Or will we, Mr. Ryan? I’m ready to put on a helmet and so is the professor; are you?”

  They were both nuts, Lumumba and the professor! Those helmets had killed people. How the hell could Balewa know what had happened from reading some silly plaque? These goddamned Africans always think they can understand the Space-Agers from crap other Africans have put in books. What the hell do they know? What do they really know?

  “Well, Ryan, what about it? Are you going to admit you don’t have the guts to do it, so we can all forget it and go home?”

  “All right, pal, you’re on!” I heard myself telling him. Damn, what was I getting myself into? But I couldn’t let that slime Lumumba call my bluff; no African’s gonna bluff down an American! Besides, Balewa was probably right; what he said made sense. Sure, it had to make sense. That stinking black brother!

  “Mr. Kulongo, would you come in here and take the helmets off our heads in two minutes?” I asked. I’d trust that Kulongo further than the rest of the creeps.

  “I will not go in there,” Kulongo said. “There is juju in there, powerful and evil. I am ashamed before you because I say these words, but my fear of what is in this place is greater than my shame.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Koyinka said, pushing past Kulongo. “Evil spirits! Come on, will you, this is the twenty-second century! I’ll do it, if you want to go through with this nonsense.”

  “All right, pal, let’s get on with it.”

  I handed out the tokens and the three of us went to the nearest three stalls. I cleared a skeleton out of mine, sent it clattering to the floor, and so what, what’s to be scared of in a pile of old dead bones? But I noticed that Lumumba seemed a little green as he cleared the bones out for himself.

  I pulled myself up into the hollowed-out egg and sat down on the padded conch inside. Some kind of plastic covering made the thing still clean and comfortable, not even dusty, after hundreds of years. Those Space-Agers were really something. I dropped the tokens into a little slot in the arm of the couch. Nest to the slot was a lever. The room sparkled blue all around me; somehow that made me feel real good. The couch was comfortable. Koyinka was standing by. I was actually beginning to enjoy it. What was there to be afraid of? Jeez, the professor thought this gave you pure pleasure or something. If he was right, this was really going to be something. If I lived through it.

  I put my right hand on the lever. I saw that the professor and Lumumba were already under their helmets. I fitted the helmet down over my head. Some kind of pad inside it fitted down on my skull all around my head, down to the eyebrows; it seemed almost alive, molding itself to my head like a second skin. It was very dark inside the helmet. Couldn’t see a thing.

  I took a deep breath and pulled the lever.

  The tips of my fingers began to tingle, throbbing with pleasure, not pain! My feet started to tingle, too, and shapes that had no shape, that were more black inside the black, seemed to be floating around inside my head. The tingling moved up my fingers to my hands, up my feet to my knees. Now my arms were tingling. Oh, man, it felt so good! No woman ever felt this good! This felt better than kicking in Lumumba’s face!

  The whirling things in my head, weren’t really in my head, my head was in them, or they were my head, all whirling around some deep dark hole that wasn’t a hole but was something to whirl off into, fall off into, sucking me in and up. My whole body was tingling now. Man, I was the tingling now, my body was nothing but the tingling now.

  And it was getting stronger, getting better all the time; I wasn’t a tingle, I was a glow, a warm
th, a throbbing, a fire of pure pleasure, a roaring, burning, whirling fire, sucking, spinning up toward a deep black hole inside me blowing up in a blast of pure feeling so good so good so good—

  Oh, forever whirling, whirling, a fire so good so good so good, and on through into the black hole fire I was burning up in my own orgasm. I was my own orgasm of body-mind-sex-taste-smell-touch-feel, I went on forever forever forever forever in pure blinding burning so good so good so good nothingness blackness dying orgasm forever forever forever spurting out of myself in sweet moment of total pain-pleasure so good so good so good moment of dying pain burning sex forever forever forever so good so good forever so good forever so good forever—

  I pulled the lever and waited in my private darkness. The first thing I felt was a tingling of my fingertips, as if with some mild electric charge; not at all an unpleasant feeling. A similar pleasurable tingle began in my feet. Strange vague patterns seemed to swirl around inside my eyes.

  My hands began to feel the pleasant sensation now, and the lower portions of my legs. The feeling was getting stronger and stronger as it moved up my limbs. It felt physically pleasurable in a peculiarly abstract way, but there was something frightening about it, something vaguely unclean.

  The swirling patterns seemed to be spinning around a bottomless vortex now; they weren’t exactly inside my eyes or my head; my head was inside of them, or they were me. The experience was somehow visual-yet-non-visual, my being spinning downward and inward in a vertiginous spiral toward a black, black hole that seemed inside my self. And my whole body felt that electric tingling now; I felt nothing but the strange, forcefully pleasurable sensation. It filled my entire sensorium, became me.

  And it kept getting stronger and stronger, no longer a tingle, but a pulsing of cold electric pleasure, stronger and stronger, wilder and wilder, the voltage increasing, the amperage increasing, whirling me down and around and down and around toward that terrible deep black hole inside me burning with hunger to swallow myself up, becoming a pure black fire vortex pain of pleasure down and down and around and around…

  Sucking myself up through the terrible black vortex of my own pure pleasure-pain, compressed against the interface of my own being, squeezed against the instant of my own death. Oh! Oh! Death death death. No No pleasure pain death sex orgasm everything that was me popping No! No! On through! becoming moment of death senses flashing pure pleasure pain terror black hole forever forever in this terrible universe was timeless moment of orgasm death total electric pleasure no! no! delicious horrible moment of pure death pain orgasm black hole vortex no! no! no! no—

  Suddenly I was seated on a couch inside a red egg in a room filled with blue sparkles, and I was looking up at Koyinka’s silly face.

  “You all right?” he said. Now, there was a question!

  “Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled. Man, those Space-Agers! I wanted to puke. I wanted to jam that helmet back on my head. I wanted to get the hell out of there! I wanted to live forever in that fantastic perfect feeling until I rotted into the bone pile.

  I was scared out of my head.

  I mean, what happened inside that helmet was the best and the worst thing in the world. You could stay there with that thing on your head and die in pure pleasure thinking you were living forever. Man, you talk about temptation! Those Space-Agers had put a god or a devil in there, and who could tell which? Did they even know which? Man, that crazy jungle-bunny Kulongo was right, after all: there were demons in here that would drink your soul. But maybe the demons were you. Sucking up your own soul in pure pleasure till it choked you to death. But wasn’t it maybe worth it?

  As soon as he saw I was okay, Koyinka ran over to the professor, who was still sitting there with the helmet over his head. That crud Lumumba was out of it already. He was staring at me; he wasn’t mad, he wasn’t exactly afraid, he was just trying to look into my eyes. I guess because I felt what he felt, too.

  I stared back into Lumumba’s big eyes as Koyinka took the helmet off the professor’s head. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t like the black brother one bit more, but there was something between us now, God knows what. The professor looked real green. He didn’t seem to notice us much. Lumumba and I just kept staring at each other, nodding a little bit. Yeah, we had both been someplace no living man should go. The Space-Agers had been gods or demons or maybe something that would drive both gods and demons screaming straight up the wall. When we call them men we don’t mean the same thing we do when we call us men. When they died off, something we’ll never understand went out of the world. I don’t know whether to thank God or to cry.

  It seemed to me that I could read exactly what was going on inside Lumumba’s head; his thoughts were my thoughts.

  “They were a great and terrible people,” Lumumba finally said. “And they were out of their minds.”

  “Pal, they were something we can never be. Or want to.”

  “You know, honkie, I think for once you’ve got a point.”

  There was a strange feeling hovering in the air between Ryan and Lumumba as we made our way back through the subway station and up into the sparkly blue unreal world of the Fuller Dome. Not comradeship, not even grudging respect, but some subtle change I could not fathom. Their eyes keep meeting, almost furtively. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand it at all.

  Had they experienced what I had? Coldly, I could now say that it had been nothing but electronic stimulation of some cerebral centers; but the horror of it, the horror of being forced to experience a moment of death and pain and total pleasure all bound up together and extended toward infinity, had been realer than real. It had indeed been a genuine mystical experience, created electronically.

  But why would people do a thing like that to themselves? Why would they willingly plunge themselves into a moment of pure horror that went on and on and on?

  Yet as we finally boarded the helicopter, I somehow sensed that what Lumumba and Ryan had shared was not what I felt at all.

  As I flew the copter through the dead tombstone skyscrapers toward the outer edge of the Fuller Dome, I knew that I had to get out of this damned tourist business, and fast. Now I knew what was really buried here, under the crazy spooky blue light, under all the concrete, under the stinking saturation smog, under a hole inside a hole in the ground: the bones of a people that men like us had better let lie.

  Our ancestors were gods or demons or both. If we get too close to the places where what they really were is buried, they’ll drink our souls yet.

  No more tours to the subways anyway; what good is the Amazon if I don’t live to get there? If I had me an atom bomb, I’d drop it right smack on top of this place to make sure I never go back.

  As we headed into a fantastic blazing orange-and-purple sunset, toward Milford and modern America—a pallid replica of African civilization huddling in the interstices of a continent of incredible ruins—I looked back across the wide river, a flaming sea below and behind us ignited by the setting sun. The Fuller Dome flashed in the sunlight, a giant diamond set in the tombstone of a race that had soared to the moon, that had turned the atmosphere to a beautiful and terrible poison, that had covered a continent with ruins that overawed the modern world, that had conjured up a demon out of electronic circuitry, that had torn themselves to pieces in the end.

  A terrible pang of sadness went through me as the rest of my trip turned to ashes in my mouth, as my future career became a cadaver covered with dust. I could crawl over these ruins and exhaust the literature for the rest of my life, and I would never understand what the Space-Age Americans had been. Not a man alive ever would. Whatever they had been, such things lived on the face of the earth no more.

  In his simple way, Kulongo had said all that could be said: “Their souls were not as ours.”

  HEROES DIE BUT ONCE

  The blackness closed in slowly, languidly, almost sensuously, a thick, deadening, irresistible tide lapping at the shores of my consciousness. I struggled, tried t
o move, but my arms and legs were someplace else, someplace very far away, fading, numbing, sloughing away. I felt myself losing my senses: vision trailing off into blackness, hearing becoming an empty cave, smell, touch, taste becoming fading old memories…

  I was dying.

  I was dying. My consciousness, my awareness, my entire being, all I ever was or might be was collapsing inexorably inward, toward that imaginary point two inches behind my eyes where the essential me had always dwelt. I was dying. I was a bodyless point of ego in a sea of final nothingness, a mote beating frantically against the night.

  I was dying. Never to breathe the air of Earth again, never to feel Loy’s body against me, never to know pain, never even to drift in the private world behind my own eyelids. I was dying. This was death, that-than-which-there-is-no-fate-worse. I would have borne an eternity of torment, screamed and shrieked in hellfire forever, gladly, joyously, if it would only mean that I would somehow, in some state, continue to exist.

  I was dying, and as all men do when they have time to contemplate the moment, I was dying badly, a crazed whimpering thing crying futilely against the dark. I was me, me, me. I was me-ness, and I felt myself fading, losing, slipping, drifting away from myself into the soft, soft arms of night, toward the tenderest of all moments.

  I shrieked once in my fading mind, had time to think briefly of Loy, to say good-bye forever to the image of her in my mind, and I was not.

  I was! I lived! I lived!

  I had gone, I had been not, and now I was. For a long moment, I could think of nothing else. To have not existed and then to be! What could be sweeter? What more of heaven could anyone ask?

  I opened my eyes, and then I knew that this was not heaven.

  It was a cave, a cave whose walls gave off a pale blue light. I was lying on my back on the hard damp rock, and I could not move. In a circle around me were things like bloated naked brains, pulsing and squirming hideously, brains supported by slimy green bodies like dog-sized slugs. This was not heaven. This was the fifth planet of a yellow sun far, far from Earth. I was alive and I began to remember.