Far Out

by Damon Knight

  The little man could be anywhere on the planet by now. But he’d expressed interest in objects in Cavanaugh’s apartment that came variously from the Philippines, Mexico, Malaya, Sweden, India—and Greenwich Village. If, improbably, he hadn’t got around to the Village yet, then Cavanaugh might be able to catch him there; it was the only hope he had.

  On Eighth Avenue south of Forty-first, he came upon a yellow cab parked at the kerb. The driver was leaning against the wall under a Zyzi-Zyni sign, talking to himself, with gestures.

  Cavanaugh clutched him by the sleeve and made urgent motions southward. The driver looked at him vaguely, cleared his throat, moved two feet farther down the wall and resumed his interrupted discourse.

  Fuming, Cavanaugh hesitated for a moment, then fumbled in his pockets for pen and paper. He found the envelope with his world-saving alphabet on it, tore it open to get a blank space, and sketched rapidly:

  The driver looked at it boredly, then with a faint gleam of intelligence. Cavanaugh pointed to the first picture and looked at him interrogatively.

  “Oweh?” said the driver.

  “That’s right,” said Cavanaugh, nodding violently. “Now the next—”

  The driver hesitated. “Mtshell?”

  That couldn’t be right, with a consonant at the end of it. Cavanaugh shook his head and pointed to the blacked-in circle.

  “Vcode,” said the driver.

  Cavanaugh moved his finger to the white circle.

  “Mah.”

  “Right!” said Cavanaugh. “Oweh mah—” He pointed to the third picture.

  That was the tough one; the driver couldn’t get it. “Vnakjaw?” he hazarded.

  Not enough syllables. Cavanaugh shook his head and passed on to the fourth picture.

  “Vbzyetch.”

  Cavanaugh nodded, and they started through the sequence again.

  “Oweh—mah—vbzyetch.” A look of enlightenment spread over the driver’s face. “Jickagl! Jickagl! Vbzyetch!”

  “You’ve got it,” Cavanaugh told him: “Sheridan Square. Jickagl Vbzyetch.” .

  Halfway to the cab, the driver stopped short, with a remembering look on his face, and held out his hand insinuatingly.

  Cavanaugh took the bills out of his wallet and fanned them at him. The driver shook his head. “Ngup-joke,” he said sadly, and turned back toward his wall.

  Twenty minutes later Cavanaugh was poorer by one thirty-carat diamond, and the cab-driver, with a smile on his honest face, was opening the door for him at the western comer of Sheridan Square (which is triangular), a few yards from the bullet-coloured statue of the General.

  Cavanaugh made signs to him to wait, and got a happy grin and a nod in reply, and ran down the block.

  He passed Janigian’s shop once without recognizing it, and for an excellent reason: there was not a shoe or a slipper visible anywhere in the big, bare work—and sales-room.

  The door was ajar. Cavanaugh went in, stared suspiciously at the empty shelves and then at the door to the back room, which was closed by a hasp and the largest, heaviest padlock he had ever seen in his life. This was odd (a) because Janigian did not believe in locking his doors, and this one, in fact, had never even had a latch, and (b) because Janigian never went anywhere—having been permanently startled, some years ago, by E. B. White’s commentary on the way the pavement comes up to meet your foot when you lift it.

  Cavanaugh stepped forward, got his fingernails into the crack between the door and the jamb, and pulled.

  The hasp, being attached to the jamb only by the sawed-off heads of two screws, came free; the door swung open.

  Inside was Janigian.

  He was sitting cross-legged on a small wooden chest, looking moderately wild-eyed. He had a rusty shotgun across his thighs, and two ten-inch butcher knives were stuck into the floor in front of him.

  When he saw Cavanaugh he raised the gun, then lowered it a trifle. “Odeh!” he said. Cavanaugh translated this as “Aha!” which was Janigian’s standard greeting.

  “Odeh yourself,” he said. He took out his wallet, removed his other diamond—the big one—and held it up.

  Janigian nodded solemnly. He stood up, holding the shotgun carefully under one arm, and with the other, without looking down, opened the lid of the chest. He pulled aside a half-dozen dirty shirts, probed deeper, and scrabbled up a handful of something.

  He showed it to Cavanaugh.

  Diamonds.

  He let them pour back into the chest, dropped the shirts back on top, closed the lid and sat down again. “Odeh!” he said.

  This time it meant “Good-bye.” Cavanaugh went away.

  His headache, which had left him imperceptibly somewhere on Forty-second Street, was making itself felt again. Cursing without inspiration, Cavanaugh walked back up to the corner.

  Now what? Was he supposed to pursue the Hooligan to the Philippines, or Sweden, or Mexico?

  Well, why not?

  If I don’t get him, Cavanaugh told himself, I’ll be living in a cave a year from now. I’ll make a lousy caveman. Grubs for dinner again…

  The cabman was still waiting on the corner. Cavanaugh snarled at him and went into the cigar store across the street. From an ankle-deep layer of neckties, pocketbooks and mashed candy bars he picked out a five-borough map. He trudged back across the street and got into the cab.

  The driver looked at him expectantly. “Your mother has hairy ears,” Cavanaugh told him.

  “Zee kwa?” said the driver.

  “Three of them,” Cavanaugh said. He opened the map to the Queens-Long Island section, managed to locate Flushing Bay, and drew an X—which, on second thought, he scribbled into a dot—where La Guardia Field ought to be.

  The driver looked at it, nodded—and held out his meaty hand.

  Cavanaugh controlled an impulse to spit. Indignantly, he drew a picture of the diamond he had already given the man, pointed to it, then to the cabman, then to the map.

  The driver shrugged and gestured outside with his thumb.

  Cavanagh gritted his teeth, shut his eyes tight, and counted to twenty. Eventually, when he thought he could trust himself to hold anything with a sharp point, he picked up the pen, found the Manhattan section of the map, and made a dot at Fiftieth and Second Avenue. He drew another picture of a diamond, with an arrow pointing to the dot.

  The driver studied it. He leaned farther over the seat and put a stubby finger on the dot. “Fa mack alaha gur’l hih?” he demanded suspiciously.

  ,Your father comes from a long line of orang-utans with loathsome diseases,” said Cavanaugh, crossing his heart.

  Reassured by the polysyllables, the driver put his machine into motion.

  At the apartment, while the driver lurked heavily in the living room, Cavanaugh picked out the very smallest diamond to pay his fare, and twelve others, from middling to big, for further emergencies. He also took two cans of hash, a can of tamales, an opener, a spoon, and a bottle of tomato juice in a paper bag; the thought of food revolted him at the moment, but he would have to eat some time. Better than grubs, anyway…

  All the main arteries out of New York, Cavanaugh discovered, were choked—everybody who was on the island was apparently trying to get off, and vice versa. Nobody was paying much attention to traffic signals, and the battered results were visible at nearly every intersection.

  It took them two hours to get to La Guardia.

  Some sort of a struggle was going on around a car parked in front of the terminal building. As Cavanaugh’s cab pulled up, the crowd broke and surged toward them; Cavanaugh had barely time to open the door and leap out. When he had bounced off the hood, tripped over somebody’s feet, butted someone else in the stomach, and finally regained his balance a few seconds later, he saw the cab turning on two wheels, with one rear door hanging open, and a packed mass of passengers bulging out like a bee swarm. The cab’s taillights wavered off down the road, a few stragglers running frantically after it.

  Cavanaugh
walked carefully around the diminished mob, still focused on the remaining car, and went into the building. He fought his way through the waiting room, losing his paper bag, several buttons from his shirt and nine-tenths of his temper, and found an open gate onto the field.

  The huge, floodlighted area was one inextricable confusion of people, dogs and airplanes—more planes than Cavanaugh had ever seen in one place before; forests of them—liners, transports, private planes of every size and shape.

  The dogs were harder to account for. There seemed to be several dozen of them in his immediate vicinity, all large and vociferous. One especially active Dalmatian, about the size of a cougar, circled Cavanaugh twice and then reared up to put two tremendous forepaws on his chest. Cavanaugh fell like a tree. Man and dog stared at each other, eye to eye, for one poignant moment; then the beast whirled, thumping Cavanaugh soundly in the ribs, and was gone.

  Raging, Cavanaugh arose and stalked forth onto the field. Somebody grabbed his sleeve and shouted in his ear; Cavanaugh swung at him, whirled completely around, and cannoned into somebody else, who hit him with a valise. Some time later, confused in mind and bruised of body, he found himself approaching a small, fragile-looking monoplane on whose wing sat an expressionless man in a leather jacket.

  Cavanaugh climbed up beside him, panting. The other looked at him thoughtfully and raised his left hand, previously concealed by his body. There was a spanner in it.

  Cavanaugh sighed. Raising one hand for attention, he opened his wallet and took out one of the larger gems.

  The other man lowered the spanner a trifle.

  Cavanaugh felt for his fountain pen; it was gone. Dipping one finger in the blood that was tnckling from his nose, he drew a wobbly outline map of North America on the surface of the wing.

  The other winced slightly, but watched with interest.

  Cavanaugh drew the United States-Mexico border, and put a large dot,or blob, south of it. He pointed to the plane, to the dot, and held up the diamond.

  The man shook his head.

  Cavanaugh added a second.

  The man shook his head again. He pointed to the plane, made motions as if putting earphones on his head, cocked his head in a listening attitude, and shook his head once more. No radio.

  With one flattened hand, he made a zooming motion upward; with the other, he drew a swift line across his throat. Suicide.

  Then he sketched an unmilitary salute. Thanks just the same.

  Cavanaugh climbed down from the wing. The next pilot he found gave him the same answer; and the next; and the next. There wasn’t any fifth, because, in taking a shortcut under a low wing, he tripped over two silently struggling gentlemen who promptly transferred their quarrel to him.

  When he recovered from a momentary inattention, they were gone, and so was the wallet with the diamonds.

  Cavanaugh walked back to Manhattan.

  Counting the time he spent asleep under a trestle somewhere in Queens, it took him twelve hours. Even an Oregonian can find his way around in Manhattan, but a Manhattanite gets lost anywhere away from his island. Cavanaugh missed the Queensborough Bridge somehow, wandered south into Brooklyn without realizing it (he would rather have died), and wound up some sixty blocks off his course at the Williamsburg Bridge; this led him via Delancey Street into the Lower East Side, which was not much improvement.

  Following the line of least resistance, and yearning for civilization (i.e., midtown New York), Cavanaugh moved northwestward along that erstwhile cowpath variously named the Bowery, Fourth Avenue and Broadway. Pausing only to rummage in a Union Square fruit-drink stand for cold frankfurters, he reached Forty-second Street at half-past ten, twenty-three and one half hours after his introduction to the Hooligan.

  Times Square, never a very inspiring sight in the morning, was very sad and strange. Traffic, a thin trickle, was moving spasmodically. Every car had its windows closed tight, and Cavanaugh saw more than one passenger holding a rifle. The crowds on the littered sidewalks did not seem to be going anywhere, or even thinking about going anywhere. They were huddling.

  Bookstores were empty and their contents, scattered over the pavement; novelty shops, cafeterias, drug-stores… the astonishing thing was that, here and there, trade was still going on. Money would still buy you a bottle of liquor, or a pack of cigarettes, or a can of food—the necessities. Pricing was a problem, but it was being solved in a forthright manner: above each counter, the main items of the store’s stock-in-trade were displayed, each with one or two bills pasted to it.

  Cigarettes—George Washington. A fifth of whisky—Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. A can of ersatzized meat—Andrew Jackson.

  There was even one movie house open for business. It was showing a Charlie Chaplin Festival.

  Cavanaugh was feeling extremely lightheaded and unsubstantial. Babylon, that great city! he thought; and Somewhere, parently, in the ginnandgo gap between antediluvious and annadominant the copyist must have fled with his scroll…

  The human race had now, in effect, Had It. New York was no longer a city; it was simply the raw material for an archaeologist’s puzzle—a midden heap. And thinking of Finnegan again, he remembered, What a mnice old mness it all mnakes!

  He looked at the faces around him, blank with a new misery, the misery of silence. That’s what hits them the hardest, he thought. The speechlessness, They don’t care about not being able to read—it’s a minor annoyance. But they like to talk.

  And yet, the human race could have survived if only the spoken word had been bollixed up, not the written word. It would have been easy enough to work out universal sound symbols for the few situations where speech was really vital. Nothing could replace the textbooks, the records, the libraries, the business letters.

  By now, Cavanaugh thought bitterly, the Hooligan was trading shiny beads for grass skirts in Honolulu, or carved walrus tusks in Alaska, or…

  Or was he? Cavanaugh stopped short. He had, he realized, been thinking of the Hooligan popping into view all over the globe the way he had appeared in his apartment—and, when he was through, popping back to where he belonged from wherever he happened to be.

  But, if he could travel that way, why had he left Cavanaugh’s place on a Second Avenue bus?

  Cavanaugh scrabbled frantically through his memory. His knees sagged.

  The Hooligan had showed him, in the disk, that the two—universes, call them—came together rarely, and when they did, touched at one point only. Last time, the plain of Shinar. This time, Cavanagh’s living room.

  And that one flicker, light-dark-light, before the pictured Hooligan moved back to its own sphere…

  Twenty-four hours.

  Cavanaugh looked at his watch. It was 10:37.

  He ran.

  Lead—footed, three quarters dead, and cursing himself, the Hooligan, the human race, God the Creator and the entire imaginable cosmos with the last breath in his body, Cavanaugh reached the corner of Forty-ninth and Second just in time to see the Hooligan pedalling briskly up the avenue on a bicycle.

  He shouted, or tried to; nothing but a wheeze came out.

  Whistling with agony, he lurched around the corner and ran to keep from falling on his face. He almost caught up with the Hooligan at the entrance to the building, but he couldn’t stop to get the breath to make a noise. The Hooligan darted inside and up the stairs; Cavanaugh followed.

  He can’t open the door, he thought, halfway up. But when he reached the third-floor landing, the door was open.

  Cavanaugh made one last effort, leaped like a salmon, tripped over the doorsill, and spread-eagled himself on the floor in the middle of the room.

  The Hooligan, one step away from the drawing table, turned with a startled “Chaya-dnih?”

  Seeing Cavanaugh, he came forward with an expression of pop-eyed concern. Cavanaugh couldn’t move.

  Muttering excitedly to himself, the Hooligan produced the green-and-white doodad from somewhere—much, presumably, as a human bein
g might have gone for the medicinal brandy—and set it on the floor near Cavanaugh’s head.

  “Urgh!” said Cavanaugh. With one hand, he clutched the Hooligan’s disk.

  The pictures formed without any conscious planning: the doodad, the lights flashing off and on in a skull—dozens, hundreds of skulls—then buildings falling, trains crashing, volcanoes erupting…

  The Hooligan’s eyes bulged half out oftheirsockets. “Hakdaz!” he said, clapping his hands to his ears. He seized the disk and made conciliatory pictures—the doodad and a glass of wine melting into each other.

  “I know that,” said Cavanaugh hoarsely, struggling up to one elbow. “But can you fix it?” He made a picture of the Hooligan gesturing at the flashing lights, which promptly vanished.

  “Deech, deech,” said the Hooligan, nodding violently. He picked up the doodad and somehow broke the green base of it into dozens of tiny cubes, which he began to reassemble, apparently in a different order, with great care.

  Cavanaugh hauled himself up into an armchair and let himself go limp as a glove. He watched the Hooligan, telling himself drowsily that if he wasn’t careful, he’d be asleep in another minute. There was something odd about the room, something extraordinarily soothing… After a moment he realized what it was.

  The silence.

  The two fishwives who infested the floor below were not screaming pleasantries across the courtyard at each other. Nobody was playing moron music on a radio tuned six times too loud for normal hearing.

  The landlady was not shouting instructions from the top floor to the janitor in the basement.

  Silence. Peace.

  For some reason, Cavanaugh’s mind turned to the subject of silent films: Chaplin, the Keystone Cops, Douglas Fairbanks, Garbo… they would have to bring them out of the cans again, he thought, for everybody, not just the patrons of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library…

  Congress would have to rig up some sort of Telautograph system, with a screen above the Speaker’s desk, perhaps.