Book Read Free

Limbo

Page 31

by Bernard Wolfe


  “I swear I’ll do it. The whole works. Right down your throat.”

  “Immob symbolic castration quadruple castration. Women all basket cases only solution better amputate clitoris let man be little Commissar in bed doesn’t have to play big Commissar on battlefield finally peace in our time.”

  “Tell me,” Neen said. “Tell me this. Why are the pencils different colors? Are there different solutions in them?”

  Thought managed to make lips say yes, own voice inaudible hers still filtering through faintly. Seemed she heard nothing saw no movement.

  “Tell me! Can’t you hear me? Are they different solutions?”

  Yes, yes, yes, screamed.

  Om, Om, Om.

  Nothing happened.

  Leaned over him now, blob of face inches from his eyes. “You’ve stopped talking. Maybe you can’t talk any more. But your eyelids are still blinking. I want to know if that’s automatic or if you can control it. If you can make your eyelids move at will, blink right now. Blink twice. Fast.”

  Concentrated, poured all dwindling thought into lids. Please God, prayed, make them blink. Take steamrollers off eyelids.

  “Very good. So you can blink when you want to. That means you can hear me. Good. Now listen carefully—I’m going to ask some questions. You answer yes or no: one blink yes, two blinks no. Blink once if you understand what I just said.”

  One blink.

  “Fine. Now tell me: do the different colors on the pencils stand for different drugs?”

  One blink.

  “Is one of them an antidote?”

  One blink.

  “Which one, the blue?”

  Two blinks.

  “The green?”

  One blink.

  “How fast does the antidote work? Is it a matter of minutes?”

  Two blinks.

  “Hours?”

  One blink.

  “How many hours? Blink the number.”

  One blink.

  “One hour? You’re sure you’re not lying to me?”

  One blink.

  “If I give you the antidote, will you promise not to make any trouble when you come to?”

  One blink.

  “It doesn’t make any difference of course. Vishinu and Dai should be here long before that. Even if they’re not I’ve got this revolver—” Aware of faint movement near his nose, “—and I won’t hesitate to use it. All right. Shall I give you the whole pencilful?”

  One blink.

  “Here it is. I’m pouring it between your lips. Try to swallow.”

  Tried to remember where throat was, concentrated on memory of process called swallowing felt nothing, remembered nothing.

  “O.K.,” Neen said. “I think I got most of it down. Now we’ll wait.”

  Alienation syrup administered. Body restorer swigged. Five minutes to restoration. In five minutes would be back in skin, antidote real knockout powderful but mustn’t let it knock him out. To sleep meant perchance to twitch upon awakening, five minutes hence, invitation to truncheons. Fight it. Remember what Ouspensky wrote on pad beside bed when he took heroin then tried write down essence of mystic experience. Scribbled four words before pencil fell out of hand: “Think in other categories.” Very well. Think in these categories. Russian bear never reigns but it paws. Move so much as little finger they break every bone in your body you confess you are old jokester Dr. Martine then curtains. Before antidote slugs you into anti-dotage write yourself note a la Ouspensky, write out prescription for staying alive, write out post-hypnotic suggestion: Don’t move. Auto-hypnosis possible, why not auto-post-hypnotic suggestion? In words of Immob lady, don’t move. Don’t move when you wake up. Dodge blackjack. Under no circumstances are you to move when your skin comes back. . . .

  Flares in eyeballs.

  Soft kettledrumming in ears.

  Itch, somewhere. Vague itch somewhere around right shoulder blade.

  More. He was no longer free-wheeling thought. Aware of being a thing of mass now, felt body pressing down against the mattress and mattress fighting back. Knew himself subject to the laws of gravity again.

  Heaviness in shoulders, legs, arms, even tongue and lips and eyelids. Pressure in the groin. Bodied forth and unsaintly again, capsuled once more in tonus. He could feel. Back from ataxia. Be down to get you in ataxia, Norbert.

  Terror: if he could feel maybe he could move. Now that itch is here can spring be far behind? Mustn’t move. Must only ascertain whether, and to precisely what extent, he was capable of moving. Springing.

  He concentrated on his feet and without taking his eyes from the ceiling he felt that his shoes were on. Good. He could wriggle his toes, at least, without being observed.

  He moved his big toes up and down, right one, left, pressing against the inner soles and then against the canvas lining in the caps.

  They moved without trouble.

  He tried retracting his tongue into his throat. Then he pressed it against his teeth, making sure the throat muscles did not move with it.

  Tongue in good working order. Hurt, from the pin.

  One hand, he became aware, was lying under his body, which was twisted in an S-shape on the bed. He tried moving the fingers on the bedclothes. They moved.

  Generally and motorically speaking, he seemed to be in pretty good shape. If he undertook some broad, complicated movement or series of movements there was a fair chance he could carry them out more or less efficiently.

  Excellent. So now he knew where he stood, lay.

  Now without his eyes wavering he began to concentrate on Neen, on the presence of Neen. Immediately he knew from the mass of colors off to the right, on the very edge of his vision, that she was still sitting there and that she still had the gun in her hand. Any sign of Vishinu or Dai in the room? As nearly as he could sense, no sign of Vishinu or Dai in the room.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Neen’s voice. He froze inside, fighting the impulse to turn his head and look at her. Fighting especially the impulse to blink. Better to let her think he was unconscious, at least completely insensate. Might arouse her suspicion—she might come closer to investigate.

  “I’ll give you one more chance. If you hear me, blink.”

  Silence; then a movement to the right told him she was standing up and coming toward the bed. He concentrated on the perforations in the laminated squares of the lumiceiling: must not look at her, must not look at her.

  “All right,” she said. “Maybe you’re lying and maybe you’re not. I don’t believe you about its taking a whole hour and I’m going to find out.” She was standing next to the bed now: must not blink. “If you can hear me, listen. I’ve got the pin in my hand. I’m going to stick it into you as hard as I can. If you don’t scream and hit the ceiling, O.K., I’ll admit I was wrong. When you wake up I’ll apologize.”

  All a question of split-second timing now. Everything depended on the niceties of co-ordination now. O.K.: tense, the inward crouch, ready-set—

  He didn’t move, didn’t blink, as the arm rose to the level of her head and poised there for a moment and then plunged downward. When the pin tore into the flesh of his thigh he yelled with the pain of it and something else that was not the pain of it and even as the sound burst from his mouth his free hand was coming down hard, edgewise and palm held stiff, down on that other olive-tinted hand with the gun in it.

  The gun went off—no sound but a soft ping: flange must be a silencer—the bullet burrowed through the bedclothes without touching him, even before the smothered sound died away the gun had dropped to the floor with a thud and he was up beside her and twisting her arm behind her back. Pressing so hard she was forced to bend over double, he stooped and picked up the gun.

  Twisting, twisting the arm brutally until she whimpered. In a rage—wondering all the while he was hurting her why the image of the pin in her plunging hand still clung to his eyeballs, why it made him want to kill this woman.

  “If you want to stay healthy,�
� he said, lips still heavy and inert as though numbed by novocaine, “don’t try anything. I’m a little wobbly but I can move fast. And I’ve got the gun.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Sticks and stones,” he said. “You’ll never get a rise out of Lazarus that way.”

  He pushed her into a chair, backed over to the bureau and felt around in the top drawer, found a scarf. Then he pulled her to her feet again and fastened her hands behind her with several tight loops. Only now did he become aware of the sharp pain in his leg, he reached down and pulled the pin out. He looked around and in a moment saw what he wanted—the collection of pencils, they were lying on the coffee table next to the bed. He scooped them up.

  “Listen, kiddo,” he said. “You go for this equal rights kick. Well, I’m going to give you some equal rights—seven cc’s of the oceanic, the real cosmic McCoy, exactly what I’ve just had. Prepare to mingle. Think in other categories.”

  He shoved her down into the chair again, tilted her head back, forced her mouth open and emptied one of the pencils into her throat. When she choked and tried to spit the fluid out he squeezed the muscles of her neck until she had to relax and swallow.

  “It’s been nice,” he said. “In case I don’t run into you again—don’t take any wooden legs.” He pulled all the sheets from the beds, rolled them into a ball and walked to the door leading out to the sun deck. “Incidentally,” he said, turning, “in case you’re interested, I am a doctor, and I think Martine’s jokes about masochism were pretty damned good, even if they were a little obscure. Ta-ta, Rosemary. Sweet oceanic dreams. I’ll send you a postcard from the Taj Mahal, lamb chop.”

  His hands were shaking so badly that he had trouble turning the knob on the door.

  Shaking—with intention tremor? He knew why they were shaking. It was because, incredibly, he had called her Rosemary.

  chapter eighteen

  HE WAS ON the forty-third floor, two floors above his own. With the aid of two sheets knotted together and secured to a cylindrical concrete column, he was able to slide down to the sun deck below; then, with the remaining sheets, he repeated the operation. He now had to cross three terraces to the left—easy enough, since the doors connecting them were unlocked. Thanks to the hour, no one was home in any of the rooms he passed. The first light he came upon was in his own room; inside he saw Vishinu and Dai moving around.

  Squeezed against the wall to one side of the window, he watched as the two men searched through his belongings. The contents of his valises and bureau drawers were strewn over the floor; the shaving-lotion and toilet-water bottles in which he carried his supplies of rotabunga lay unnoticed on the bureau; stacks of bills were lying on the carpet near the armchair, apparently even large sums of money did not interest the Unioneers. His notebook, concealed within the dust jacket of The Moral Equvalent of War, was still where he had put it on the night table.

  Vishinu pulled a flannel suit from the closet and began to go through its pockets. The London label did not impress him: he could not know that the suit had come from the wardrobe of the last Russian trade representative stationed in Johannesburg, a gentleman who had preferred to have his clothes made on Bond Street rather than on the Nevski Prospekt.

  Dai walked across the room to the night table and picked up the volume lying there. Martine froze, crammed the knuckle of his forefinger into his mouth: this could conceivably be the turning point in Immob history, its Waterloo, the sacking of its Rome, its Gettysburg. Then Vishinu apparently said something to his associate—the Eurasian shrugged, put the book down, and followed his superior from the room.

  Martine took his finger out of his mouth and looked at it: there were drops of blood on the knuckle, the whole hand was quivering. Blood: he’d called the girl Rosemary, it was crazy.

  They would discover he was gone in a matter of minutes, no time to lose. Best to dispense with luggage altogether, he might have to move fast. Inside the room he hurriedly filled some more pencils with the rotabunga mixtures, then poured what remained in the bottles down the sink. He stuffed his pockets with bills, grabbed his notebook, slipped out as soon as he had made sure there was nobody in the hall. In a moment he reached the emergency stairwell and began the laborious climb down.

  By the time he reached the ground floor his legs were aching and he was dizzy with the turnings, but he did not stop to rest. He hurried out of the hotel through the rear exit. The next step, obviously, was to get out of town—but how? Busses, trains and planes were out: no telling where he might run into one of Vishinu’s ubiquitous “tourists.” Best to play it safe and pick up a car. He needed a car. As soon as he had posed the problem he knew the solution: earlier, in his wandering around town, he had noticed several rental agencies.

  Two blocks from the hub, on Henry Adams Street, filled with flickering thoughts about virgins and dynamos, he found an agency that was open: TOM MURRAY’S ROBO-RENT. With the help of a clerk he quickly picked out a fast touring car, a duraluminum dewdrop mounted on three wheels. The clerk prepared the necessary papers and gave them to Martine to sign. He wrote out the first name that came to mind: “Brigham Rimbaud.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rimbaud,” the clerk said. “Ah, do you have some means of identification with you? It’s just a formality, of course, but these machines are pretty expensive and—”

  “I’m in a hurry,” Martine interrupted, “I haven’t had time to go home and pick up my papers. Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” Before the man’s astonished eyes he counted out several bills of large denominations and handed them over. “Five thousand,” he said. “That’ll cover the cost of the car, won’t it? I’ll leave this as a deposit, so you won’t have to worry about my papers.”

  The clerk gave him a briefing on the operation of the machine—the dashboard was loaded with gadgets he had never seen but he had a quick mechanical mind and he got the idea fast. Minutes later he was speeding out along Tolstoy Boulevard, palms sliming sweat onto the wheel.

  He drove for over an hour, mind a turnip; then he checked the mileage indicator and saw with a start that he had come almost 150 miles. Time to pull up and figure out where he was going—bulleting along aimlessly like this, without knowing where the Strip began or ended, he might find himself in deserted country or in some devastated area which hadn’t been rebuilt after the war, and he had with him no food whatsoever and no weapon but the automatic he had taken from Neen. What was indicated, obviously, was at least one quick trip into a fair-sized town to pick up some clothes, some rifles and ammunition, and other vital supplies. After that he could hide out almost anywhere.

  Lights up ahead: a wayside eating place called ROYALL SMITH’S AUTO-EAT, the “auto” apparently standing for “automatic” as well as “automobile.” From the lumi-walled central building of the establishment there fanned out in every direction a series of belt-conveyors; the customer simply drove up to the terminal point of a belt-line, studied the menu, inserted the indicated number of coins in the slots opposite the desired items (if he didn’t have change he could get it from a separate machine), pressed a button to register the order, and waited for a couple of minutes until a tray came riding out from the kitchen.

  There were only two other cars on the grounds when Martine turned in, their occupants paid no attention to him. He studied the menu, burst out laughing when he noticed tapioca pudding listed among the choices. No, he thought. No. This was no time for tapioca. He decided on coffee and doughnuts, and while waiting for his order unfolded the large map of the Strip which the Robo-Rent clerk had given him. It was devoutly to be hoped that in this non-Aristotelian society the map to some extent resembled the territory.

  He was startled to see the physical dimensions of the Strip. It could hardly amount to more than one-twelfth or one-fifteenth of the overall territory of the old States. Even more striking than its size was its location: the Strip ran roughly north and south, its southernmost tip hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Mexico and the western boundary
almost a thousand miles from the Pacific. Dedicated to the oceanic, this society seemed to shrink from the oceans; huddled in the protective shadow of the mountains, those fugitives from marine flabbiness.

  The States which had existed before World War III were not indicated on the map. But it would be a fair guess, he thought, that the new, dehumidified America, less than four hundred miles across at its widest point, started somewhere in the vicinity of the Texas Panhandle and eastern New Mexico and ran almost due north through parts of Colorado and Kansas, Wyoming and Nebraska, up into Montana and South Dakota. The picture was complicated, though, by the skinny irregular arms which stretched out more or less laterally from each side of the Strip, rather like the pseudopods of an amoeba. On the west these bands cut separately into Arizona, Utah and the mountainous areas of Montana, petering out in the foothills of the Rockies; on the east, into Oklahoma and Arkansas, Iowa, and Minnesota, each arm stopping short of the Mississippi in true Immob hydrophobia. On the bottommost western arm was the capital, and he saw now why it had been referred to as L.A.—it was Los Alamos, the old atomic-energy center above the bomb-testing grounds at Alamogordo and White Sands. Alamogordo was not indicated; White Sands was a national park.

  Where to go? His eye wandered idly up the map, spotting here and there a name that was familiar—Santa Fe, Pueblo, Denver, Oklahoma City, Omaha, Des Moines, Helena—among others which were new, Agassiz, Burbanksville, Schweitzer Falls, Thoreaupolis, Veblentown, Groddeck, Helderfort, Theo City. Then he realized something: he had automatically headed north, northwest, when he started out from New Jamestown, he must have had some destination dimly in mind.

  Salt Lake City! He had been pointing toward Salt Lake City like a homing pigeon. Without even knowing whether it was there.

  He began to look for it, suddenly excited. There was Salt Lake, just beyond one of the western arms, but—no Salt Lake City. Then he stiffened: the city was there, all right, but the name had been changed. It was called Martinesburg.

 

‹ Prev