Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel

by Rucker, Rudy

  “We call it teep,” said Alan.

  “Yeah,” said Gill, squinting up at the pink sky. “Still getting up to speed. I can teep your three friends upstairs. Neddie’s asleep, Susan’s singing in the shower, and Vassar’s spying on us. Comb your hair, Vassar. Grease it real good.” Agent Gill looked back at Alan. “There’s another problem we gotta face.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We got a government lab on the case, and they using Norvell’s remains to culture an anti-skug vaccine. Should be rolling in production right about now. They inoculating the FBI strike force that’s going after decoy crew you sent up US 51. They still think that’s gonna be you. You lucky you got an agent on the inside.”

  “Quite,” said Alan. “Do you have a secure line where I can phone you, Mr. Gill? It would aid us immensely to know how the hunt’s progressing.”

  “Here’s my office number,” said Gill, teeping it to him. “But why not use telepathy?”

  “The teep only reaches half a mile,” said Alan.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Gill. “I did know that. The Bureau’s milked a lot of intel from Landers by now.” Agent Gill chuckled. “Might say Landers is spineless. Packed into that jar like a pudding.”

  “Canned pig meat,” put in Vassar, who’d appeared at their side. “Crap in a can.”

  “Screw you, boho,” said Agent Gill in a level tone. “Breaks my heart to be on the same side as a guy like you.”

  “I’m sorry, we’re all a bit on edge,” said Alan. “But don’t forget the higher cause. And now, Mr. Gill, please go back to New Orleans and follow the hunt. And here’s the technique for setting up a teep block so the skugsniffer can’t suss you.” Quickly Alan teeped Gill the info.

  “Right,” said Gill. “And I’ll wait to hear from you. Meanwhile I’ll tell the Bureau that nobody’s seen Rupert’s car out this way. And you’ll be going—”

  “The less you know the better.”

  “A foot soldier,” said Gill, flexing his arms and making his biceps grow. And now, as if on a whim, he punched Vassar in the stomach. Smiling, he got in his car and left.

  Meanwhile, Oscar, the motel owner, had stepped outside, obviously curious about what was going on.

  “Ya’ll boys in trouble?”

  “All is in order,” said Alan. “Correct, Vassar?”

  “Might as well be,” said Vassar, slowly straightening up. “I’m damn near indestructible.”

  Vassar went upstairs to round up the others, while Alan went into the lobby to settle accounts with Oscar. And then of course Alan skugged the motel-owner—and asked for his car.

  “And you want to stick me with that whipped old Hudson?” griped Oscar, more concerned with the vehicles than with his new state of symbiosis.

  “I’d advise you to repaint it and change the plates.”

  “Anyone with a lick of sense is gonna paint a gray car,” said Oscar, tossing his head to get his lank, dangling hair out of his face. “Shit. And you’re getting a 1951 Buick Roadmaster with those foxy little portholes in the side. Dynaflow.”

  “Is it two-tone?”

  “Yeah, bo. White and green. And the roof’s white, too. You care about cars? A limey like you?”

  “My friend Susan cares. She’s artistic.”

  “Ooo la la,” said Oscar.

  The four made their way through Port Arthur, through Austin, and into the heart of Texas. Alan and Susan rode in back and Vassar and Ned in front. Whatever had happened in the bedroom last night must not have been entirely satisfactory, as today Susan seemed to be on the outs with both Ned and her husband. Be that as it may, Alan was fully enjoying the randomness and oddity of this trip. The fact that he might very well be doomed gave it the more spice.

  Lord, but Texas was big. They drove all day through a landscape like unfinished sketches for a world. Arid trails led up through stark, immense valleys into the red mountains. Unfinished, but lovely.

  “There’s so much more beauty than I can take in,” Alan remarked to Susan. “I’m like a wineglass in a waterfall. I wish I could somehow merge with the flow. To become the landscape instead of making mental models of it.”

  “At least let’s stop and take a better look,” said Susan. “How about it, Vassar? Let’s pull over.”

  Vassar drove them well off the road, a few dozen yards down a dirt track.

  “You could drop the British Isles into this landscape and they’d hardly make a splash,” said Alan, turning in a full circle. His attention fastened upon a huge single red rock, fluted on the sides. Such a mass of quanta. He felt a rush of ontological wonder sickness. Why did anything exist?

  They wandered about, with little lizards lifting up their striped tails to run away. Alan admired the clumps of prickly pear cactus—the lobes with buds along their rims, and with yellow and red flowers sprouting amid the thorns. The cacti seemed so perfectly placed amid the grasses and the dry red rocks. All hail nature’s unpredictable computations.

  “It’s like another planet out West,” said Vassar.

  “Do you ever feel that our language is too feeble?” said Susan, looking up from her tape recorder. She was capturing the faint sounds of the wind amid the rocks. “We have such a puny stock of words.”

  “And yet one imagines that human language is universal,” said Alan, shifting into professor mode. “G. K. Chesterton remarks upon our presumption in supposing that we can represent the subtleties of nature and the mind with an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals.”

  Wanting attention, Vassar launched into a disturbingly lifelike imitation of a pig, starting with comfortable grunts and rising to frantic wheenking—and then, to top it off, using his shapeshifting skills to grow a disked snout and triangular, flopping pig ears.

  “You’re too much,” said Susan, weakly laughing.

  “Squeals about squeals,” said Vassar, reverting to human mode. “That was meta, you dig? Art about art.” Alan could never quite decide whether Vassar was stupid or smart. But at some level Alan loved him, even though he was all Susan’s now.

  When the sun began once more to set, they stopped in a roadside strip of a town called Gormly—gritty, sun-blasted, wind-blown, positioned between a butte and a long hill leading up to some mountains. The weather had turned colder, with low wet clouds.

  Now that they were skuggers, the four fugitives were always hungry. They made for the local diner. Alan was impressed by a mounted steer’s head on the back wall; it was the size of a wood-burning stove, with immense horns protruding on either side. The waitress informed him that this particular longhorn’s name was Old Gib, which was in fact the name of the diner as well. Old Gib had led numerous cattle drives from these parts to Dodge City—and in recognition of his service, his owners had mounted his head.

  “That’s tight,” said Vassar. “What if our herders treat us like that, Alan? Once they’ve stampeded us wherever the hell we’re supposed to go.”

  Despite their empathy for Old Gib, they all ordered steaks, in fact filet mignons, which cost little more than hamburgers here.

  “This is is the first steak I’ve had in years,” said Susan, as if proud of herself for eating one. She leaned back in her banquette, sticking out her stomach and patting it, gleeful as an eleven-year-old. “A skugger can eat anything!”

  While the others were downing multiple orders of pie a la mode, Alan went to the phone booth outside the diner and phoned up Roland Gill. Instead of Roland, he got a woman who said she was Gill’s assistant. Alan was a little leery of trying the alternate number that she gave him, but he steeled himself and went ahead. A strange man answered, but he passed the phone to Roland. Excited voices were in the background. A door closed, and now Gill was alone.

  “Some bad news,” said Gill, speaking very softly. “Our tactics squad caught up with Rupert and his pals today. The new vaccine works good—none of the tactics team got skugged. Landers did a bang-up job at picking Rupert’s mind before our boys killed him. So now they fixin to chase
you across Texas.”

  “Right now?” said Alan, a break in his voice.

  “Leaving in ten minutes,” whispered Gill. “We flew the team straight to Austin. We’ve got Landers in a long white ambulance car with a monster V-8. Police escort, sirens—we’ll be coming up behind you, doing a hundred and ten. We got a whirlybird, too. Watch for it.”

  “And you’re with the group in Austin?”

  “Roger. I faked getting the vaccine and I’ve got my teep block. So far everyone thinks I’m on the up and up. It’s thin ice, but the skug won’t let me slack off. You know how it is. Maybe I’ll save your life.”

  “Can I call you again?”

  “That first number is secure. The girl you talked to, she’s my assistant, and she’s one of us too. We can pass messages through her. Tell her you’re, uh—”

  “Old Gib,” said Alan. “I’ll say I’m Old Gib.”

  “That works. All hail the skugs.” Gill said this wearily, but without irony.

  Rejoining his three partners in the quiet booth at the Old Gib Chuckwagon, Alan told them what Gill had said.

  “We need teep blocks too!” exclaimed Susan. “Do they involve sound?”

  “Sure,” said Ned. “Listen here.” He leaned back in his chair, tall and calm, looking like a Texan himself. “You imagine that your skull’s a lead nutshell. And you occupy your mind with complex bullshit. Like math or sports records or musical scores. Down lower, you wallpaper your emotions with a chant—acousmatics would be perfect for this, Susan. And then you wrap the whole package in an imaginary wire chicken coop.”

  “What a load of crap,” said Vassar dismissively. He wasn’t fond of Ned. To clear things up, Alan simply teeped Susan and Vassar a simple, holistic sense of how to make the block.

  “I’m covered now,” said Susan, ever so slowly drumming her fingers on the tabletop. “With Bulldozer At The Dump on my mind. In case that ugly parade arrives. Do you know what they’ll look like, Alan?”

  It was dark outside now, with headlights whizzing by. A fine rain was falling, making the highway shine.

  “They’ll have Landers in a white ambulance with a siren and a light,” said Alan. He paused, thinking. “The odd thing is that, day before yesterday, I dreamed about a vehicle of this type chasing me. But it was black instead of white. A hearse.”

  “This restaurant wants to close,” said Vassar. “The lady at the counter keeps looking us. Like, why are you still here. But it’d be wack to get back on the main highway. We’d be like rabbits hippity-hopping down a railroad track, thinking we can outrun the locomotive. We gotta head off on a side road.”

  “Can’t we go to a motel?” said Ned. “We need sleep.”

  “Dangerous,” said Alan. “We lose our teep blocks when we sleep. Don’t you remember how the police surprised us on the beach, Ned?”

  “So let’s bop way out into the range land and sleep in our car,” said Vassar. “Ready to roll?”

  “Do be careful,” said Alan. “The driving will be dodgy in the rain.”

  He felt terribly uneasy. In his mind, the hearse and the ambulance had merged into a furiously puffing engine of doom, with a single blazing headlamp trained upon his pale face.

  Chapter 12: Coyotes

  On the way out to the car, feeling sick with fear and loneliness, Alan nipped into the phone booth again.

  “Oh, what now?” snapped Vassar.

  “Leave him be,” said Ned, who’d already teeped what Alan was up to.

  Alan had decided to phone the Burroughs home. Perhaps he was about to die. He needed to talk to Bill one last time. Grumbling but basically patient, Ned, Vassar and Susan stood beneath the entrance overhang outside the Old Gib, smoking cigarettes and watching the rain.

  Lacking any large amount of coins to pump into the phone, Alan recklessly made it a collect call. He told the operator to say the call was from “Bill’s friend Abby.”

  Fortunately it was Laura Burroughs who answered. Although it was nearly bedtime in Palm Beach by now, she was willing to take the call.

  “Oh hello,” said Alan. “You remember me from the chat at your store?”

  “Yes I do,” said Laura Burroughs. “The Abby who’s an Alan. Lucky you, Bill is here. He turned up yesterday evening. I’ll see if I can rouse him.”

  A moment of charged not-quite-silence ensued, with fifteen hundred miles of ticks and whispers chiming in. Perhaps some extra listeners were on the line? Alan didn’t care. Nothing mattered more than speaking with Bill. Laura Burroughs’s low heels clicked down a hall, a door opened, low voices murmured, heavier footsteps returned.

  “Hello?” said Bill.

  “It’s me,” said Alan, a bit of reproach creeping into his tone. “The friend you’ve been persecuting.” The next words hopped out of his mouth unbidden. “I love you, Bill.”

  Alan heard Bill slowly clearing his throat. And then Bill spoke. “Pleasant words. Quite welcome. I got your message here. It crawled up my leg. I’ll come where you said?”

  “I’m still on the road,” said Alan. “We’re having difficulties.”

  “The heat?”

  “Indeed,” said Alan. “With luck I’ll finish my trip tomorrow. You know the area.” From having teeped and conjugated so intensely with the man during their Tangier interlude, Alan knew that Bill had attended the Los Alamos Ranch School as a boy.

  “Right,” said Burroughs tersely. “This line sounds tapped.” Suddenly his voice took on an unexpectedly tender sound. “Sweet dreams, brave prince. I’ll wing to your side.” He cleared his throat and rang off.

  By the entrance to the Old Gib, a dotty old man was talking with the others. “Yew ain’t from around here,” he rasped. “Are yew from East Texas?”

  “Very far east Texas,” said Susan. “Ultra super far east.”

  “Have yew visited the Gormly caves?” the geezer asked Alan. “If yew got time tomorrow, yew should see em. They a world wonder. Just head up that road right across the street. It winds up to where they is.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” said Alan. “Good night.”

  The old man doddered off. To Alan he seemed sinister, a minion from the underworld. But Vassar liked his proposal.

  “The Gormly caves!” said Vassar. “I dig it.”

  They were sitting in the car now, Vassar at the wheel, the rain running down the windshield. “I love caves,” continued Vassar. “We can sleep way down deep, like in a bomb shelter. Nobody can teep us there. Let’s do it.”

  “It’s night,” objected Susan. “They’ll be closed.”

  “I bet some kind of guard lives up there,” said Ned, taking to the idea. “A ranger. We’ll skug him, and he’ll let us in.”

  As it happened, the caves were atop a fairly long rise, at the base of some stubby peaks. They did indeed find a ranger living in a cabin near the caves’ locked entrance. He was Cornelius Twiste, a gawky young bachelor with a prominent Adam’s apple. Alan instantly, joyously, pegged him as a fellow exponent of the love that dares not speak its name. And a single shared glance confirmed this.

  As gently as possible, Alan skugged Cornelius, and the young man readily agreed to lead them down into the caverns for the night. He rustled up five foam mats and sleeping bags for them—apparently it wasn’t unheard of to have sleepovers in the cave.

  As if by reflex, Cornelius gave them a bit of a tour along the way, turning the subterranean lights on and off as they passed. Alan was charmed by the names of the mineral formations: the striped beige draperies were cave bacon, the knobbly translucent growths were popcorn, the wrinkled, doughy slumps were flowstone.

  They halted their progress beside a creamy, motionless cascade known as Moon Milk Falls.

  “This is the perfect spot to camp,” said Cornelius, laying his mat beside Alan’s. “Dry and with sweet ventilation.” Shortly thereafter he turned out the lights.

  In the intense, velvety dark, Cornelius and Alan deliciously made love—ignoring the others’ ability to hear
them and to teep them. The others, as it happened, were not having sex tonight. Eventually Alan slept, falling into dreams of flight—with the ghost of boyhood flame Chris Morcom flitting along ahead of him.

  In the morning Cornelius led them back the way they’d come, shyly holding Alan’s hand. As a precaution, they put up their teep blocks well before they reached the surface.

  “Some of those bulges look bigger now than on the way in,” said Susan, merrily rolling her eyes at Alan

  “A stalagmite could take a hundred thousand years to grow,” said Ned, who was a bit slow this morning.

  Alan briefly let himself imagine that the tingling dark night by the Moon Milk Falls had indeed lasted for a hundred thousand years. What brave new world might they encounter when they emerged?

  But outside the cave, it was still raining, still 1955. Eight in the morning, wet and gloomy. As a parting kindness, Cornelius brushed Alan’s cheek with his lips. A sweet goodbye. The low, dripping clouds seemed close enough to touch.

  Soaked to the skin, Ned, Vassar, Alan and Susan motored down the hill to Gormly. The plan was to get breakfast at the Old Gib, and ask around about whether the police had passed through during the night. Perhaps Alan would phone Roland Gill’s office to check for messages. And, depending what they learned, they might strike out along the back roads—not that any of them other than Ned knew of Alan’s secret goal to reach Los Alamos, New Mexico.

  Things felt wrong as soon as they coasted into Gormly. There was absolutely no traffic in either direction—and no people on the wet streets. They pulled up by the Old Gib diner. The place was deserted, with a CLOSED sign on the door.

  “I’ll try the phone again,” said Alan, hopping out of the car.

  Upon ringing Agent Gill’s New Orleans number, Alan heard a new voice, cruel and mocking, not at all the same as before.

  “Is this ‘Old Gib’?” said the stranger, before Alan could even speak. “I’m Dick Hosty. You’ve reached the end of your trail, professor. Just like Roland Gill.” The sound of the phone line was false, echoing, empty. A local tap?