“When do you think we’ll be in range?” I asked.
“Heaven knows,” he said testily. “Too many variables. Maybe it’s different when she sleeps, maybe it grows at different rates varying as the number of people affected. I feel nothing yet.”
“Neither do I.”
And when we felt something specifically, when we felt Miss Phoebe Bancroft practicing the Twelve Rules of “How to be in Utter Harmony with Your Environment” we would do something completely idiotic, something that had got us thrown --literally thrown-- out of the office of the Secretary of Defense.
He had thundered at us: “Are you two trying to make a fool of me? Are you proposing that soldiers of the United States Army undergo a three-month training course in sticking out their tongues and thumbing their noses?” He was quivering with elevated blood pressure. Two M.P. lieutenants collared us under his personal orders and tossed us down the Pentagon steps when we were unable to deny that he had stated our proposal more or less correctly.
And so squads, platoons, companies, battalions and regiments marched into the Plague Area and never marched out again.
Some soldiers stumbled out as zombies. After a few days spent at a sufficient distance from the Plague Area their minds cleared and they told their confused stories. Something came over them, they said. A mental fuzziness almost impossible to describe. They liked it where they were, for instance; they left the Plague Area only by accident. They were wrapped in a vague, silly contentment even when they were hungry, which was usually. What was life like in the Plague Area? Well, not much happened. You wandered around looking for food. A lot of people looked sick but seemed to be contented. Farmers in the area gave you food with the universal silly smile, but their crops were very poor. Animal pests got most of them. Nobody seemed to eat meat. Nobody quarreled or fought or ever said a harsh word in the Plague Area. Add it was hell on earth. Nothing conceivable could induce any of them to return.
The Duchess of Carbondale? Yes, sometimes she came driving by in her chariot, wearing fluttery robes and a golden crown. Everybody bowed down to her. She was a big, fat middle-aged woman with rimless glasses and a pinched look of righteous triumph on her face.
The recovered zombies at first were quarantined and doctors made their wills before going to examine them. This proved to be unnecessary and the examinations proved to be fruitless. No bacteria, no Rickettsia, no viruses. Nothing. Which didn’t stop them from continuing in the assumption embodied in the official name of the affected counties.
Professor Leuten and I knew better, of course. For knowing better we were thrown out of offices, declined interviews and once almost locked up as lunatics. That was when we tried to get through to the President direct. The Secret Service, I am able to testify, guards our Chief Executive with a zeal that borders on ferocity.
“How goes the book?” Professor Leuten asked abruptly.
“Third hundred thousand. Why? Want an advance?”
I don’t understand German, but I can recognize deep, heartfelt profanity in any language. He spluttered and crackled for almost a full minute before he snarled in English: “Idiots! Dolts! Out of almost one third of a million readers, exactly one had read the book!”
I wanted to defer comment on that, “There’s a car,” I said.
“Obviously it stalled and was abandoned by a refugee from Scranton.”
“Let’s have a look anyway.” It was a battered old Ford sedan halfway off the pavement. The rear was full of canned goods and liquor. Somebody had been looting. I pushed the starter and cranked for a while; the motor didn’t catch.
“Useless,” said the professor. I ignored him, yanked the dashboard hood button and got out to inspect the guts. There was air showing on top of the gas in the sediment cup.
“We ride, professor,” I told him. “I know these babies and their fuel pumps. The car quit on the upgrade there and he let it roll back.” I unscrewed the clamp of the carburetor air filter, twisted the filter off and heaved it into the roadside bushes. The professor, of course was a “mere-machinery” boy with the true European intellectual’s contempt for greasy hands. He stood by haughtily while I poured a bottle of gin empty, found a wrench in the toolbox that fit the gas-tank drain plug and refilled the gin bottle with gasoline. He condescended to sit behind the wheel and crank the motor from time to time while I sprinkled gas into the carburetor. Each time the motor coughed there was less air showing in the sediment cup; finally the motor caught for good. I moved him over, tucked my briefcase in beside me, U-turned on the broad, empty highway and we chugged north into Scranton.
It was only natural that he edged away from me, I suppose. I was grimy from working under the gas tank. This plus the discreditable ability I had shown in starting the stalled car reminded him that he was, after all, a Herr Doktor from a real university while I was, after all, a publisher’s employee with nebulous qualifications from some place called Cornell. The atmosphere was wrong for it, but sooner or later he had to be told.
“Professor, we’ve got to have a talk and get something straight before we find Miss Phoebe.”
He looked at the huge striped sign the city fathers of Scranton wisely erected to mark that awful downgrade into the city.
WARNING’ SEVEN-MILE DEATH TRAP AHEAD. SHIFT INTO LOWER GEAR. $50 FINE. OBEY OR PAY!
“What is there to get straight?” he demanded. “She has partially mastered Functional Epistemology even though Hopedale Press prefers to call it ‘Living on the Cosmic Expense Account.’ This has unleashed certain latent powers of hers. It is simply our task to complete her mastery of the ethical aspect of F.E. She will cease to dominate other minds as soon as she comprehends that her behavior is dysfunctional and in contravention of the Principle of Permissive Evolution.” To him the matter was settled. He mused: “Really I should not have let you cut so drastically my exposition of Dyadic Imbalance; that must be the root of her difficulty. A brief inductive explanation--”
“Professor,” I said, “I thought I told you in the train that you’re a fake.”
He corrected me loftily. “You told me that you think I’m a fake, Mr. Norris. Naturally I was angered by your duplicity, but your opinion of me proves nothing. I ask you to look around you. Is this fakery?”
We were well into the city. Bewildered dogs yelped at our car. Windows were broken and goods were scattered on the sidewalks; here and there a house was burning brightly. Smashed and overturned cars dotted the streets, and zombies walked slowly around them. When Miss Phoebe hit a city the effects were something like a thousand-bomber raid.
“It’s not fakery,” I said, steering around a smiling man in a straw hat and overalls. “It isn’t Functional Epistemology either. It’s faith in Functional Epistemology. It could have been faith in anything, but your book just happened to be what she settled on.”
“Are you daring,” he demanded, white to the lips, “to compare me with the faith healers?”
“Yes,” I said wearily. “They get their cures. So do lots of people. Let’s roll it up in a ball, Professor. I think the best thing to do when we meet Miss Phoebe is for you to tell her you’re a fake. Destroy her faith in you and your system and I think she’ll turn back into a normal old lady again. Wait a minute! Don’t tell me you’re not a fake. I can prove you are. You say she’s partly mastered F.E. and gets her powers from that partial mastery. Well, presumably you’ve completely mastered F.E., since you invented it. So why can’t you do everything she’s done, and lots more? Why can’t you end this mess by levitating to La Plume, instead of taking the Lackawanna and a 1941 Ford? And, by God, why couldn’t you fix the Ford with a pass of the hands and F.E. instead of standing by while I worked?”
His voice was genuinely puzzled. “I thought I just explained, Norris. Though it never occurred to me before, I suppose I could do what you say, but I wouldn’t dream of it. As I said, it would be dysfunctional and in complete contravention of the Principle of Permissive “
I said something ve
ry rude and added: “In short, you can but you won’t.”
“Naturally not! The Principle of Permissive “ He looked at me with slow awareness dawning in his eyes. “Norris! My editor. My proofreader. My by-the-publisher-officially-assigned fidus Achates. Norris, haven’t you read my book?”
“No,” I said sharply. “I’ve been much too busy. You didn’t get on the cover of Time magazine by blind chance, you know.”
He was laughing helplessly. “How goes that song,” he finally asked me, his eyes damp, “‘God Bless America’?”
I stopped the car abruptly. “I think I feel something,” I said. “Professor, I like you.”
“I like you too, Norris,” he told me. “Norris, my boy, what do you think of ladies?”
“Delicate creatures. Custodians of culture. Professor, what about meat eating?”
“Shocking barbarous survival. This is it, Norris!”
We yanked open the doors and leaped out. We stood on one foot each, thumbed our noses, and stuck out our tongues.
Allowing for the time on the train, this was the 1,961st time I had done it in the past two months. One thousand, nine hundred and sixty-one times the professor had arranged for spiders to pop out at me from books, from the television screen, from under steaks, from desk drawers, from my pockets, from his. Black widows, tarantulas, harmless (hah!) big house spiders, real and imitation. One thousand, nine hundred and sixty-one times I had felt the arachnophobe’s horrified revulsion. Each time I felt it I had thrown major voluntary muscular systems into play by drawing up one leg violently, violently swinging my hand to my nose, violently grimacing to stick out my tongue.
My body had learned at last. There was no spider (his time; there was only Miss Phoebe: a vague, pleasant feeling something like the first martini. But my posture of defense this 1,962d time was accompanied by the old rejection and horror. It had no spider, so it turned on Miss Phoebe. The vague first-martini feeling vanished like morning mist burned away by the sun.
I relaxed cautiously. On the other side of the car so did Professor Leuten. “Professor,” I said, “I don’t like you any more.”
“Thank you,” he said coldly. “Nor do I like you.”
“I guess we’re back to normal,” I said. “Climb in.” He climbed in and we started off. I grudgingly said: “Congratulations.”
“Because it worked? Don’t be ridiculous. It was to be expected that a plan of campaign derived from the principles of Functional Epistemology would be successful. All that was required was that you be at least as smart as one of Professor Pavlov’s dogs, and I admit I considered that hypothesis the weak link in my chain of reasoning....”
We stopped for a meal from the canned stuff in the back of the car about one o’clock and then chugged steadily north through the ruined countryside. The little towns were wrecked and abandoned. Presumably refugees from the expanding Plague Area did the first damage by looting; the subsequent destruction just happened. It showed you what would just happen to any twentieth-century town or city in the course of a few weeks if the people who wage endless war against breakdown and dilapidation put aside their arms. It was anybody’s guess whether fire or water had done more damage.
Between the towns the animals were incredibly bold. There was a veritable army of rabbits eating their way across a field of clover. A farmer-zombie flapped a patchwork quilt at them, saying affectionately: “Shoo, little bunnies! Go away, now! I mean it!”
But they knew he didn’t and continued to chew their way across his field.
I stopped the car and called to the farmer. He came right away, smiling. “The little dickenses!” he said, waving at the rabbits. “But I haven’t the heart to really scare them.”
“Are you happy?” I asked him.
“Oh yes!” His eyes were sunken and bright; his cheekbones showed on his starved face. “People should be considerate,” he said. “I always say that being considerate is what matters most.”
“Don’t you miss electricity and cars and tractors?”
“Goodness, no, I always say that things were better in the old days. Life was more gracious, I always say. Why, I don’t miss gasoline or electricity one little bit. Everybody’s so considerate and gracious that it makes up for everything.”
“I wonder if you’d be so considerate and gracious as to lie down in the road so we can drive over you?”
He looked mildly surprised and started to get down, saying: “Well, if it would afford you gentlemen any pleasure--”
“No; don’t bother after all. You can get back to your rabbits.”
He touched his straw hat and went away, beaming. We drove on. I said to the professor: “Chapter Nine: ‘How to be in Utter Harmony with Your Environment.’ Only she didn’t change herself, Professor Leuten; she changed the environment. Every man and woman in the Area is what Miss Phoebe thinks they ought to be: silly, sentimental, obliging and gracious to the point of idiocy. Nostalgic and all thumbs when it comes to this dreadful machinery.”
“Norris,” the professor said thoughtfully, “we’ve been associated for some time. I think you might drop the ‘professor’ and call me ‘Leuten.’ In a way we’re friends--”
I jammed on the worn, mushy brakes. “Out!” I yelled, and we piled out. The silly glow was enveloping me fast. Again, thumb to nose and tongue out, I burned it away. When I looked at the professor and was quite sure he was a stubborn old fossil I knew I was all right again. When he glared at me and snapped: “Naturally I withdraw my last remark, Norris, and no gentleman would hold me to it,” I knew he was normal. We got in and kept going north.
The devastation became noticeably worse after we passed a gutted, stinking shambles that had once been the town of Meshoppen, PA. After Meshoppen there were more bodies on the road and the flies became a horror. No pyrethrum from Kenya. No DDT from Wilmington. We drove in the afternoon heat with the windows cranked up and the hood ventilator closed. It was at about Meshoppen’s radius from La Plume that things had stabilized for a while and the Army Engineers actually began to throw up barbed wire. Who knew what happened then? Perhaps Miss Phoebe recovered from a slight cold, or perhaps she told herself firmly that her faith in Professor Leuten’s wonderful book was weakening; that she must take hold of herself and really work hard at being in utter harmony with her environment. The next morning no Army Engineers. Zombies in uniform were glimpsed wandering about and smiling. The next morning the radius of the Plague Area was growing at the old mile a day.
I wanted distraction from the sweat that streamed down my face. “Professor,” I said, “do you remember the last word in Miss Phoebe’s letter? It was forever.’ Do you suppose...?”
“Immortality? Yes; I think that is well within the range of misapplied F.E. Of course complete mastery of F.E. ensures that no such selfish power would be invoked. The beauty of F.E. is its conservatism, in the kinetic sense. It is self-regulating. A world in which universal mastery of F.E. has been achieved and I now perceive that the publication of my views by the Hopedale Press was if anything a step away from that ideal would be in no outward wise different from the present world.”
“Built-in escape clause,” I snapped. “Like yoga. You ask ‘em to prove they’ve achieved self-mastery, just a little demonstration like levitating or turning transparent, but they’re all ready for you. They tell you they’ve achieved so much self-mastery they’ve mastered the desire to levitate or turn transparent. I almost wish I’d read your book, professor, instead of just editing it. Maybe you’re smarter than I thought--”
He turned brick red and gritted out: “Your insults merely bore me, Norris.”
The highway took a turn and we turned with it. I braked again and rubbed my eyes. “Do you see them?” I asked the professor.
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “This must be the retinue of the Duchess of Carbondale.”
They were a dozen men shoulder to shoulder barricading the road. They were armed with miscellaneous sporting rifles and one bazooka. Th
ey wore kilt-like garments and what seemed to be bracelets from a five-and-ten. When we stopped they opened up the center of the line and the Duchess of Carbondale drove through in her chariot only the chariot was a harness-racing sulky and she didn’t drive it; the horse was led by a skinny teen-age girl got up as Charmian for a high-school production of Antony and Cleopatra. The Duchess herself wore ample white robes, a tiara and junk jewelry. She looked like your unfavorite aunt, the fat one, or a grade-school teacher you remember with loathing when you’re forty, or one of those women who ring your doorbell and try to bully you into signing petitions against fluoridation or atheism in the public schools.
The bazooka man had his stovepipe trained on our hood. His finger was on the button and he was waiting for the Duchess to nod. “Get out,” I told the professor, grabbing my briefcase, He looked at the bazooka and we got out.
The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction Sixth Series Page 2
