At the close of that time, the ragged, starving, fever-stricken remnant of his troops staggered back to the base and reported utter failure. Cronkheit, who was in excellent health himself, made some sullen excuses. But he had never imagined that men who march twenty hours a day aren’t fit for battle at the end of the trip—the more so if they outrun their own supply train.
Because of the Empress’s wish, General Grythion could not do the sensible thing and cashier the Barbarian. He could not even reduce him to the ranks. Instead, he used his well-known guile and invited the giant to a private dinner.
“Obviously* most valiant lord,” he purred, “the fault is mine. I should have realized that a man of your type is too much for us decadent southerners. You are a lone wolf who fights best by himself.”
“Duh,” agreed Cronkheit, ripping a fowl apart with his fingers and wiping them on the damask tablecloth.
Grythion winced, but easily talked him into going out on a one-man guerrilla operation. When he left the next morning, the officers’ corps congratulated themselves on having gotten rid of the lout forever.
In the face of subsequent criticism and demands for an investigation, I still maintain that Grythion did the only rational thing under the circumstances. Who could have known that Cronkheit the Barbarian was so primitive that rationality simply slid off his hairy skin?
The full story will never be known. But apparently, in the course of the following year, while the border war continued as usual, Cronkheit struck off into the northern uplands. There he raised a band of horse nomads as ignorant and brutal as himself. He also rounded up a herd of mammoths and drove them into Chathakh, stampeding them at the foe. By such means, he reached their very capital, and the King offered terms of surrender.
But Cronkheit would have none of this. Not he! His idea of warfare was to kill or enslave every last man, woman, and child of the enemy nation. Also, his irregulars were supposed to be paid in loot. Also, being too unsanitary even for the nomad girls, he felt a certain urgency.
So he stormed the capital of Chathakh and burned it to the ground. This cost him most of his own men. It also destroyed several priceless books and works of art, and any possibility of tribute to Sarmia.
Then he had the nerve to organize a triumphal procession and ride back to our own city
This was too much even for the Empress. When he stood before—for he was too crude for the simple courtesy of a knee bend—she exceeded herself in describing the many kinds of fool, idiot, and all-around blockhead he was.
“Duh,” said Cronkheit. “But I won duh war. Look, I won duh war, I did. I won duh war.”
“Yes,” hissed the Lady Larra. “You smashed an ancient and noble culture to irretrievable ruin. And did you know that one half our peacetime trade was with Chathakh? There’ll be a business depression now such as history has never seen before.”
General Grythion, who had returned, added his own reproaches. “Why do you think wars are fought?” he asked bitterly. “War is an extension of diplomacy. It’s the final means of making somebody else do what you want. The object is not to kill them all off—how can corpses obey you?”
Cronkheit growled in his throat.
“We would have negotiated a peace in which Chathakh became our ally against Serpens,” went on the general. “Then we’d have been safe against all corners. But you—You’ve left a howling wilderness which we must garrison with our own troops lest the nomads take it over. Your atrocities have alienated every civilized state. You’ve left us alone and friendless. You’ve won this war by losing the next one!”
“And on top of the depression which is coming,” said the Empress, “we’ll have the cost of maintaining those garrisons. Taxes down and expenditures up—It may break the treasury, and then where are we?”
Cronkheit spat on the floor. “Yuh’re all decadent, dat’s what yuh are,” he snarled. “Be good for yuh if yer empire breaks up. Yuh oughtta get dat city rabble o’ years out in duh woods an’ make hunters of ‘em, like me. Let ‘em eat steak.”
The Lady Larra stamped an exquisite gold-shod foot. “Do you think we’ve nothing better to do with our time than spend the whole day hunting, and sit around in some mud hovel at night licking the grease off our fingers?” she cried. “What the hell do you think civilization is for, anyway?”
Cronkheit drew his great sword so it flashed before their eyes. “I hadda nuff!” he bellowed. “I’m t’rough widjuh! It’s time yuh was all wiped off duh face o’ duh eart’, an I’m jus’ duh guy t’ do it!”
And now General Grythion showed the qualities which had raised him to his high post. Artfully, he quailed. “Oh no!” he whimpered. “You’re not going to—to—to fight on the side of Serpens?”
“I yam,” said Cronkheit. “So long.” The last we saw of him was a broad, indignant, flea-bitten back, headed south, and the reflection of the sun on a sword.
Since then, of course, our affairs have prospered and Serpens is now frantically suing for peace. But we intend to prosecute the war till they meet our terms. We are most assuredly not going to be ensnared by their treacherous plea and take the Barbarian back!
<
~ * ~
THEODORE STURGEON
Mr. Sturgeon says that this is a science fiction story and he can, by God, prove it. You may decide that it’s fantasy ... or possibly a mystery ... or conceivably a surrealist view of straight reality. In other words, it’s a story outside of any ordinary commercial category, a story that creates its own genre—and one of the most distinguished stories that F&SF has had the pleasure of publishing.
AND NOW THE NEWS ...
The man’s name was MacLyle, which by looking at you can tell wasn’t his real name, but let’s say this is fiction, shall we? MacLyle had a good job in—well—a soap concern. He worked hard and made good money and got married to a girl called Esther. He bought a house in the suburbs and after it was paid for he rented it to some people and bought a home a little farther out and a second car and a freezer and a power mower and a book on landscaping, and settled down to the worthy task of giving his kids all the things he never had.
He had habits and he had hobbies, like everybody else and (like everybody else) his were a little different from anybody’s. The one that annoyed his wife the most, until she got used to it, was the news habit, or maybe hobby. MacLyle read a morning paper on the 8:14 and an evening paper on the 6:10, and the local paper his suburb used for its lost dogs and auction sales took up forty after-dinner minutes. And when he read a paper he read it, he didn’t mess with it. He read Page 1 first and Page 2 next, and so on all the way through. He didn’t care too much for books but he respected them in a mystical sort of way, and he used to say a newspaper was a kind of book, and so would raise particular hell if a section was missing or in upside down, or if the pages were out of line. He also heard the news on the radio. There were three stations in town with hourly broadcasts, one on the hour, and he was usually able to catch them all. During these five-minute periods he would look you right in the eye while you talked to him and you’d swear he was listening to you, but he wasn’t. This was a particular trial to his wife, but only for five years or so. Then she stopped trying to be heard while the radio talked about floods and murders and scandal and suicide. Five more years, and she went back to talking right through the broadcasts, but by the time people are married ten years, things like that don’t matter; they talk in code anyway, and nine-tenths of their speech can be picked up anytime like ticker tape. He also caught the 7:30 news on Channel 2 and the 7:45 news on Channel 4 on television.
Now it might be imagined from all this that MacLyle was a crotchety character with fixed habits and a neurotic neatness, but this was far from the case. MacLyle was basically a reasonable guy who loved his wife and children and liked his work and pretty much enjoyed being alive. He laughed easily and talked well and paid his bills. He justified his preoccupation with the news in a number of ways. He would quote Donne: “. . . any man’s dea
th diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…” which is pretty solid stuff and hard to argue down. He would point out that he made his trains and his trains made him punctual, but that because of them he saw the same faces at the same time day after endless day, before, during, and after he rode those trains, so that his immediate world was pretty circumscribed, and only a constant awareness of what was happening all over the earth kept him conscious of the fact that he lived in a bigger place than a thin straight universe with his house at one end, his office at the other, and a railway track in between.
It’s hard to say just when MacLyle started to go to pieces, or even why, though it obviously had something to do with all that news he exposed himself to. He began to react, very slightly at first; that is, you could tell he was listening. He’d shh! you, and if you tried to finish what you were saying he’d run and stick his head in the speaker grille. His wife and kids learned to shut up when the news came on, five minutes before the hour until five after (with MacLyle switching stations) and every hour on the half-hour, and from 7:30 to 8 for the TV, and during the forty minutes it took him to read the local paper. He was not so obvious about it when he read his paper, because all he did was freeze over the pages like a catatonic, gripping the top corners until the sheets shivered, knotting his jaw and breathing from his nostrils with a strangled whistle.
Naturally all this was a weight on his wife Esther, who tried her best to reason with him. At first he answered her, saying mildly that a man has to keep in touch, you know; but very quickly he stopped responding altogether, giving her the treatment a practiced suburbanite gets so expert in, as when someone mentions a lawn mower just too damn early on Sunday morning. You don’t say yes and you don’t say no, you don’t even grunt, and you don’t move your head or even your eyebrows. After a while your interlocutor goes away. Pretty soon you don’t hear these ill-timed annoyances any more than you appear to.
It needs to be said again here that MacLyle was, outside his peculiarity, a friendly and easygoing character. He liked people and invited them and visited them, and he was one of those adults who can really listen to a first-grade child’s interminable adventures and really care. He never forgot things like the slow leak in the spare tire or antifreeze or anniversaries, and he always got the storm windows up in time, but he didn’t rub anyone’s nose in his reliability. The first thing in his whole life he didn’t take as a matter of course was this news thing that started so small and grew so quickly.
So after a few weeks of it his wife took the bull by the horns and spent the afternoon hamstringing every receiver in the house. There were three radios and two TV sets, and she didn’t understand the first thing about them, but she had a good head and she went to work with a will and the can-opening limb of a pocket knife. From each receiver she removed one tube, and one at a time, so as not to get them mixed up, she carried them into the kitchen and meticulously banged their bases against the edge of the sink, being careful to crack no glass and bend no pins, until she could see the guts of the tube rolling around loose inside. Then she replaced them and got the back panels on the sets again.
MacLyle came home and put the car away and kissed her and turned on the living-room radio and then went to hang up his hat. When he returned the radio should have been warmed up but it wasn’t. He twisted the knobs a while and bumped it and rocked it back and forth a little, grunting, and then noticed the time. He began to feel a little frantic, and raced back to the kitchen and turned on the little ivory radio on the shelf. It warmed up quickly and cheerfully and give him a clear sixty-cycle hum, but that was all. He behaved badly from then on, roaring out the information that the sets didn’t work, either of them, as if that wasn’t pretty evident by that time, and flew upstairs to the boys’ room, waking them explosively. He turned on their radio and got another sixty-cycle note, this time with a shattering micro-phonic when he rapped the case, which he did four times, whereupon the set went dead altogether.
Esther had planned the thing up to this point, but no further, which was the way her mind worked. She figured she could handle it, but she figured wrong. MacLyle came downstairs like a pallbearer, and he was silent and shaken until 7:30, time for the news on TV. The living-room set wouldn’t peep, so up he went to the boys’ room again, waking them just as they were nodding off again, and this time the little guy started to cry. MacLyle didn’t care. When he found out there was no picture on the set, he almost started to cry too, but then he heard the sound come in. A TV set has an awful lot of tubes in it and Esther didn’t know audio from video. MacLyle sat down in front of the dark screen and listened to the news. “Everything seemed to be under control in the riot-ridden border country in India,” said the TV set. Crowd noises and a background of Beethoven’s “Turkish March.” “And then—” Cut music. Crowd noise up: gabble-wurra and a scream. Announcer over: “Six hours later, this was the scene.” Dead silence, going on so long that MacLyle reached out and thumped the TV set with the heel of his hand. Then, slow swell, Ketelbey’s “In a Monastery Garden.” “On a more cheerful note, here are the six finalists in the Miss Continuum contest.” Background music, “Blue Room,” interminably, interrupted only once, when the announcer said through a childish chuckle “. . . and she meant it!” MacLyle pounded himself on the temples. The little guy continued to sob. Esther stood at the foot of the stairs wringing her hands. It went on for thirty minutes like this. All MacLyle said when he came downstairs was that he wanted the paper—that would be the local one. So Esther faced the great unknown and told him frankly she hadn’t ordered it and wouldn’t again, which of course led to a full and righteous confession of her activities of the afternoon.
Only a woman married better than fourteen years can know a man well enough to handle him so badly. She was aware that she was wrong but that was quite overridden by the fact that she was logical. It would not be logical to continue her patience, so patience was at an end. That which offendeth thee, cast it out, yea, even thine eye and thy right hand. She realized too late that the news was so inextricably part of her husband that in casting it out she cast him out too. And out he went, while whitely she listened to the rumble of the garage door, the car door speaking its sharp syllables, clear as Exit in a playscript; the keen of a starter, the mourn of a motor. She said she was glad and went in the kitchen and tipped the useless ivory radio off the shelf and retired, weeping.
And yet, because true life offers few clean cuts, she saw him once more. At seven minutes to three in the morning she became aware of faint music from somewhere; unaccountably it frightened her, and she tiptoed about the house looking for it. It wasn’t in the house, so she pulled on MacLyle’s trench coat and crept down the steps into the garage. And there, just outside in the driveway, where steel beams couldn’t interfere with radio reception, the car stood where it had been all along, and MacLyle was in the drivers seat dozing over the wheel. The music came from the car radio. She drew the coat tighter around her and went to the car and opened the door and spoke his name. At just that moment the radio said “…and now the news” and MacLyle sat bolt upright and shh’d furiously. She fell back and stood a moment in a strange transition from unconditional surrender to total defeat. Then he shut the car door and bent forward, his hand on the volume control, and she went back into the house.
After the news report was over and he had recovered himself from the stab wounds of a juvenile delinquent, the grinding agonies of a derailed train, the terrors of the near-crash of a C-119, and the fascination of a cabinet officer, charter member of the We Don’t Trust Nobody Club, saying in exactly these words that there’s a little bit of good in the worst of us and a little bit of bad in the best of us, all of which he felt keenly, he started the car (by rolling it down the drive because die battery was almost dead) and drove as slowly as possible into town.
At an all-night garage he had the car washed and greased while he waited, after which the automat was open and he sat in it for three hours drinking coffee, holdi
ng his jaw set until his back teeth ached, and making occasional, almost inaudible noises in the back of his throat. At nine he pulled himself together. He spent the entire day with his astonished attorney, going through all his assets, selling, converting, establishing, until when he was finished he had a modest packet of cash and his wife would have an adequate income until the children went to college, at which time the house would be sold, the tenants in the older house evicted, and Esther would be free to move to the smaller home with the price of the larger one added to die basic capital. The lawyer might have entertained fears for MacLyle except for the fact that he was jovial and loquacious throughout, behaving like a happy man—a rare form of insanity, but acceptable. It was hard work but they did it in a day, after which MacLyle wrung the lawyer’s hand and thanked him profusely and checked into a hotel.
When he awoke the following morning he sprang out of bed, feeling years younger, opened the door, scooped up the morning paper and glanced at the headlines.
He couldn’t read them.
He grunted in surprise, closed the door gently, and sat on the bed with paper in his lap. His hands moved restlessly on it, smoothing and smoothing until the palms were shadowed and the type hazed. The shouting symbols marched across the page like a parade of strangers in some unrecognized lodge uniform, origins unknown, destination unknown, and the occasion for marching only to be guessed at. He traced the letters with his little finger, he measured the length of a word between his index finger and thumb and lifted them up to hold them before his wondering eyes. Suddenly he got up and crossed to the desk, where signs and placards and printed notes were trapped like a butterfly collection under glass—the breakfast menu, something about valet service, something about checking out. He remembered them all and had an idea of their significance—but he couldn’t read them. In the drawer was stationery, with a picture of the building and no other buildings around it, which just wasn’t so, and an inscription which might have been in Cyrillic for all he knew. Telegram blanks, a bus schedule, a blotter, all bearing hieroglyphs and runes, as far as he was concerned. A phone book full of strangers’ names in strange symbols.
The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction Sixth Series Page 24
