THE JUNGLE
* * *
Suddenly it was there. On foxfeet, invisibly, it had crept, past all the fences and traps he had laid, past all the barriers. And now it sat inside his mind, a part of him, like his pulse, like the steady beat of his heart.
Richard Austin became rigid in the chair. He closed his eyes and strained the muscles in his body until they were silent and unmoving as granite; and he listened to the thing that had come again, taking him by surprise even while he had been waiting. He listened to it grow--it seemed to grow; he couldn't be sure: perhaps he was merely bringing it into sharper focus by filtering out the other constant sounds: the winds that whispered through the foliage of balloon-topped trees the murmurous insect-drone of all the machines that produced this wind and pumped blood through the city from their stations far beneath the night-heavy streets. Or, perhaps, it was because he was searching, trying to lay hands on it that the thing seemed to be different tonight, stronger, surer. Or--what did it matter?
He sat in the darkened room and listened to the drum; to the even, steady throb that really neither rose nor diminished, but held to that slow dignified tempo with which he'd become so familiar.
Then, quickly he rose from the chair and shook his head. The sounds died and became an indistinguishable part of the silence. It was only concentration, he thought, and the desire to hear them that gave them life . . .
Richard Austin released a jagged breath from his swollen lungs, painfully. He walked to the bar and poured some whiskey into a glass and drank most of it in a single swallow: it went down his dry throat like knives, forcing the salivary glands back into action.
He shook his head again, turned and walked back across the living room to the far door. It swung out noiselessly as his hand touched the ornamented circle of hammered brass.
The figure of his wife lay perfectly still under the black light, still and pale, as she had lain three hours before. He walked toward her, feeling his nostrils dilate at the acrid medicine smells, harshly bitter and new to his senses. He blinked away the hot tears that had rushed, stinging, to his eyes; and stood for a time, quietly, trying not to think of the drums.
Then he whispered: "Mag . . . Mag, don't die tonight!" Imbecile words! He clenched his fists and stared down at the face that was so full of pain, so twisted with defeat, that now you could not believe it had once been different, a young face, full of laughter and innocence and courage.
The color had gone completely. From the burning splotchy scarlet of last week to this stiff white mask, lifeless, brittle as dry paste. And covered over with perspiration that glistened above her mouth in cold wet buttons and over her face like oil on white stone. The bedding under and around her was drenched gray.
Austin looked at the bandage that covered his wife's head, and forced away the memory, brutally. The memory of her long silver hair and how it had fallen away in clumps in his hands within a week after she had been stricken . ..
But the thoughts danced out of control, and he found himself remembering all the terrible steps in this nightmare.
The scientists had thought it malaria, judging from the symptoms, which were identical. But that was difficult to accept, for malaria had been effectively conquered--powerful new discoveries in vaccines having been administered first, and then the primary cause of the disease itself--the Anopheles mosquitoe--destroyed completely. And the liquid alloys which formed the foundations for this new city eliminated all the likely breeding places, the bogs and marshlands and rivers. No instance of reoccurrence of the disease had been reported for half a century. Yet--malarial parasites were discovered in the bloodstreams of those first victims, unmistakable parasites that multiplied at a swift rate and worked their destruction of the red corpuscles. And the chemists immediately had to go about the business of mixing medicines from now ancient prescriptions, frantically working against time. A disquieting, even a frightening thing; but without terror for the builders of the new city; not sufficient to make them abandon their work or to spark mass evacuations. Panic was by now so forgotten by most that it had become a new emotion, to be learned all over again.
It had not taken very long to relearn, Austin recalled. Terror had come soon enough. The stricken--some thirty husky workmen, engineers, planners--had rallied under the drugs and seemed to be out of critical condition when, one night, they had all suffered relapses, fallen into fevered comas and proceeded to alternate between unconsciousness and delirium. The scientists were baffled. They tried frenziedly to arrest the parasites, but without success. Their medicines were useless, their drugs and radium treatments and inoculations--all, useless. Finally, they could only look on as the disease took new turns, developed strange characteristics, changed altogether from what they had taken to be malaria to something utterly foreign. It began to assume a horrible regular pattern: from prolonged delirium to catatonia, whereby the victim's respiratory system and heartbeat diminished to a condition only barely distinguishable from death. And then, the most hideous part: the swift decomposition of the body cells, the destruction of the tissues . . -
Richard Austin carefully controlled a shudder as he thought of those weeks that had been the beginning. He fingered out a cigarette from his pocekt, started to strike it, then broke the cylinder and ground its bright red flakes into his palms.
No other real hint had been given then: only the disease. Someone had nicknamed it "Jungle Rot"--cruel, but apt. The victims were rotting alive, the flesh falling from them like rain-soaked rags; and they did not die wholly, ever, until they had been transformed into almost unrecognizable mounds of putrescence . . .
He put out a hand and laid it gently against his wife's cheek. The perspiration was chill and greasy to his touch, like the stagnant water of slew banks. Instinctively his fingers recoiled and balled back into fists. He forced them open again and stared at the tiny dottles of flesh that clung to them.
"Mag!" It had started already! Wildly, he touched her arm, applying very slight pressure. The outer skin crumbled away, leaving a small wet gray patch. Austin's heart raced; an involuntary movement caused his fingers to pinch his own wrists, hard. A wrinkled spot appeared and disappeared, a small, fading red line.
She's dying, he thought. Very surely, very slowly, she's begun to die--Mag. Soon her body will turn gray and then it will come loose; the weight of the sheet will be enough to tear big strips of it away. . . She'll begin to rot, and her brain will know it-- they had discovered that much: the victims were never completely comatose, could not be adequately drugged--she will know that she is mouldering even while she lives and thinks . . .
And why? His head ached, throbbed. Why?
The years, these past months, the room with its stink of decay--everything rushed up, suddenly, filling Austin's mind.
If I had agreed to leave with the rest, he thought, to run away, then Mag would be well and full of life. But--I didn't agree . . .
He had stayed on to fight. And Mag would would not leave without him. Now she was dying and that was the end of it.
Or--he turned slowly--was it? He walked out to the balcony. The forced air was soft and cool; it moved in little patches through the streets of the city. Mbarara, his city; the one he'd dreamed about and then planned and designed and pushed into existence; the place built to pamper five hundred thousand people.
Empty now, and deserted as a gigantic churchyard . . .
Dimly he recognized the sound of the drums with their slow muffled rhythm, directionless as always, seeming to come from everywhere and from nowhere. Speaking to him. Whispering.
Austin lit a cigarette and sucked the calming smoke into his lungs. He remained motionless until the cigarette was down to the cork.
Then he walked back into the bedroom, opened a cabinet and took a heavy silver pistol.
He loaded it carefully.
Mag was still; almost, it seemed to Austin, expectant, waiting, so very still and pale.
He pointed the barrel of the pistol at his w
ife's forehead and curled his finger around the trigger. Another slight pressure and it would be over. Her suffering would be over. Just a slight pressure!
The drums droned louder until they were exploding in the quiet room.
Austin tensed and fought the trembling, gripped the pistol with his other hand to steady it.
But his finger refused to move on the curved trigger.
After a long moment, he lowered his arm and dropped the gun into his pocket.
"No." He said it quietly, undramatically. The word hit a barrier of mucus and came out high-pitched and child-like.
He coughed.
That was what they wanted him to do--he could tell, from the drums. That's what so many of the others had done. Panicked.
"No."
He walked quickly out of the room, through the hall, to the elevator. It lowered instantly but he did not wait for it to reach bottom before he leapt off and ran across the floor to the barricaded front door.
He tore at the locks. Then the door swung open and he was outside; for the first time in three weeks--outside, alone, in the city.
He paused, fascinated by the strangeness of it. Impossible to believe that he was the only white man left in the entire city.
He strode to a high-speed walkway, halted it and stepped on. Setting the power at half with his pass key, he pressed the control button and sagged against the rail as the belt whispered into movement.
He knew where he was going. Perhaps he even knew why. But he didn't think about that; instead, he looked at the buildings that slid by silently, the vast rolling spheres and columns of colored stone, the balanced shapes that existed now and that had once existed only in his mind. And he listened to the drums, wondering why the sound of them seemed natural and his buildings suddenly so unnatural, so strange and disjointed.
Like green balloons on yellow stocks, the cultured Grant Wood trees slipped by, uniform and straight, arranged in aesthetically pleasing designs on the stone islands between belts. Austin smiled: The touch of nature. Toy trees, ruffling in artificial winds . . . It all looked, now, like the model he had presented to the Senators. About as real and lifelike.
Austin moved like a carefully carved and painted figurine, incredibly small and lonely-looking on the empty walkway. He thought about the years of preparation; the endless red tape and paper work that had preceded the actual job. Then of the natives, how they had protested and petitioned to influence the Five-Power governments and how that had slowed them down. The problem of money, whipped only by pounding at the point of over-populaton, again and again, never letting up for a moment. The problems, problems . . .
He could not recall when the work itself had actually begun--it was all so joined. Laying the first railroad could certainly not have been a particle as beset with difficulty. Because the tribes of the Kenya territory numbered into the millions; and they were all filled with hatred and fury, opposing the city at every turn.
No explanation had satisfied them. They saw it as the destruction of their world and so they fought. With guns and spears and arrows and darts, with every resource at their disposal, refusing to capitulate, hunting like an army of mad ants scattered over the land.
And, since they could not be controlled, they had to be destroyed. Like their forests and rivers and mountains, destroyed, to make room for the city.
Though not, Austin remembered grimly, without loss. The white men had fine weapons, but none more fatal than machetes biting deep into neck flesh or sharp wooden shafts coated with strange poisons. And they did not all escape. Some would wander too far, unused to this green world where a white man could become hopelessly lost within three minutes. Others would forget their weapons. And a few were too brave.
Austin thought of Joseph Fava, the engineer, who had been reported missing. And of how Fava had come running back to the camp after two days, running and screaming, a bright crimson nearly dead creature out of the worst dreams. He had been cleanly stripped of all his skin, except for the face, hands, and feet .
But, the city had grown, implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wider every day over the dark and feral country. Nothing could stop it. Mountains were stamped flat. Rivers were damned off or drained or put elsewhere. The marshes were filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. And the big gray machines moved forward, gobbling up the jungle with their iron teeth, chewing it clean of its life and all its living things.
Until it was no more.
Leveled, smoothed as a highway is smoothed, its centuries choked beneath millions and millions of tons of hardened stone.
The birth of a city . . . It had become the death of a world.
And Richard Austin was its murderer.
As he traveled, he thought of the shaman, the half-naked toothless Bantu medicine man who had spoken for most of the tribes. "You have killed us, and we could not stop you. So now we will wait, until you have made your city and others come to live here, Then YOU will know what it is to die." Bokawah, who lived in superstition and fear, whom civilization had passed, along with the rest of his people. Who never spoke again after those words, and allowed himself to be moved to the wide iron plateau that had been built for the surviving natives.
Bokawah, the ignorant shaman, with his eternal smile. . . How distinct that smile was now!
The walkway shuddered, suddenly, and jarred to a noisy grinding stop. Austin pitched forward and grasped the railing in order to break his fall,
Awareness of the silence came first. The eerie dead silence that hung like a pall. It meant that the central machines had ceased functioning. They had been designed to operate automatically and perpetually; it was unthinkable that these power sources could break down!
As unthinkable as the drums that murmured to life again beyond the stainless towers, so loud now in the silence, so real.
Austin gripped his pistol tightly and shook away the panic that had bubbled up like acid in his chest. It was merely that the power had gone off. Strike out impossible, insert improbable. Improbabilities happen. The evil spirits do not summon them, they happen. Like strange diseases.
I am fighting, he thought, a statistical paradox. That's all. A storage pike of coincidences. If I wait--he walked close to the sides of the buildings--and fight, the graph will change. The curve will . . .
The drums roared out a wave of scattered sound, stopped, began again . . .
He thought a bit further of charts; then the picture of Mag materialized, blocking out the thick ink lines, ascending and descending on their giant graphs.
Thinking wasn't going to help . . .
He walked on.
Presently, at the end of a curve in the city maze, the "village" came into view, suspended overhead like a gigantic jeweled spider. It thrust out cold light. It was silent.
Austin breathed deeply. By belt, his destination was only minutes away. But the minutes grew as he walked through the city, and when he had reached the lift, hot pains wrenched at his muscles. He stood by the crystal platform, working action back into numbed limbs.
Then he remembered the silence, the dead machines. If they were not functioning, then the elevator--.
His finger touched a button, experimentally.
A glass door slid open with a pneumatic hiss.
He walked inside, and tried not to think as the door closed and the bullet-shaped lift began to rise.
Below, Mbarara grew small. The treated metals glowed in a dimming lace of light. And the city looked even more like the little clay model he had built with his hands.
At last, movement ceased. Austin waited for the door to slide open again, then he strode out onto the smooth floor.
It was very dark. The artificial torches did not even smolder: their stubs, he noticed, were blackened and cold.
But the gates to the village lay open.
He looked past the entrance into the frozen shadows.
He heard the drums, throbbing from within, loud and distinct. But--ordin
ary drums, whose sound-waves would dissipate before ever reaching the city below,
He walked into the village.
The huts like glass blisters on smooth flesh, sat silent. Somehow, they were obscene in the dark, to Austin. Built to incorporate the feel and the atmosphere of their originals and yet to include the civilized conveniences; planned from an artistic as well as a scientific standpoint--they were suddenly obscene.
Perhaps, Austin thought, as he walked, perhaps there was something to what Barney had been saying . . - No--these people had elected to stay of their own free will. It would have been impossible to duplicate exactly the montrous conditions under which they had lived. If not impossible, certainly wrong.
Let them wallow in their backward filth? In their disease and corruption, let them die--merely because their culture had failed to absorb scientific progress? No. You do not permit a man to leap off the top of a hundred-story building just because he has been trained to believe it is the only way to get to the ground floor--even though you insult him and blaspheme against his gods through your intervention. You restrain him, at any cost. Then, much later, you show him the elevator, And because he is a man, with a brain no smaller than yours, he will understand. He will understand that a crushed superstition is better than a crushed head. And he will thank you, eventually.
That is logic.
Austin walked, letting these thoughts form a thick crust. He felt the slap of the pistol against his thigh and this, also, was comforting.
Where were they now? Inside the huts, asleep? All of them? Or had they, too, contracted the disease and begun to die of it? . - -
Far ahead, at the clearing which represented the tip of the design, a glow of light appeared. As he approached, the drums grew louder, and other sounds--voices. How many voices? The air was at once murmurous and alive.
He stopped before the clearing and leaned on the darkness and watched,
Nearby a young woman was dancing. Her eyes were closed, tightly, and her arms were straight at her sides like black roots. She was in a state of possession, dancing in rhythm to the nearest drum. Her feet moved so fast they had become a blur, and her naked body wore a slick coat of perspiration.
The Howling Man Page 28
