A Woman a Day

by Philip José Farmer

  “If he sticks his head or hand out, shoot him!” he called back.

  “Dannto!” yelled Candleman. “Barker has dropped his gun! Shoot out that flash so Halla can’t see, and I’ll get him!”

  “When he does that, Halla,” bellowed Leif, “turn on your light and pin him as he comes around the wall. Or over!”

  Dannto must have dared to stick his hand around the comer, for his gun hosed the tunnel, feeling for the flash. As was inevitable, he hit it. However, when the light shattered, he did not stop, but kept shooting. He was trying to keep Halla from projecting her head from her comer. And he was being successful, for her beam did not flash on.

  However, Candleman did not dare jump over the wall until Dannto was through firing.

  Leif waited, knowing that the moment would come when even Dannto’s seemingly inexhaustible clips would be empty. When that happened, the Uzzite would probably stick his arm over the bricks and hose the area where he’d seen Leif. Halla would flash the beam on; whatever happened then would be up to the faster of the two.

  He inched up to the wall, keeping his head down to avoid the lethal swarm. When he reached the wall, he held the wristbox up to his mouth and spoke a code word. The ordered vibrations fractured a tiny disk inside the box. The disk had kept an equally tiny dial from being turned. Leif twisted the now free dial to the right and then flicked on the toggle that sent a predetermined frequency broadcasting from the box.

  Dannto’s gun stopped chattering. Silence, then a loud cry, full of fear and agony and despair.

  “Halla!”

  And silence again. Dannto was out of ammunition and out of breath—forever.

  The coded word sent by Leif’s box had stirred the ingredients left in Dannto’s body during the operation for removal of his tumor. Mixed, the chemicals formed a poison that paralyzed him in one second and stopped his heart in another.

  Leif had killed the Archurielite before the gun emptied because he knew that Candleman was familiar with their capacity and would be counting the seconds until it stopped. Whereupon the Uzzite, thinking himself safe from the fire of the obviously hysterical Dannto, would attack. The doctor hoped to jump first and catch Candleman off balance.

  He rose and jumped to the top of the brick wall, close to the side of the tunnel. At the same time, Halla, inspired by some unlucky devil, turned her flash on and caught Leif dead center in it. If Candleman had asked for it, he couldn’t have obtained a better target. He could have shot him off the wall as if he were a crow on a fence.

  But Candleman outfoxed himself. He had rushed around the wall hoping to catch Leif offguard. He whirled to shoot the man on the wall; Leif kept on going and jumped down just as the Uzzite hosed at where he had been. Candleman was fast-thinking, for he kept on revolving and shooting. He must have known that when Halla saw Leif on the wall, she had held her fire for fear of hitting him. Aware also that the agent had no gun, he decided in that second that the girl was the one to be taken care of.

  Leif looked around the side of the wall to see Candle-man’s bent back turned to him, outlined in Halla’s beam. The Uzzite’s uniform had been blown apart; his coat hung on him in rags; his boots were ripped; his pants hung in shreds. A dark spot showed on his back. Leif, seeing all those details in an instant, guessed that the spot was a burn.

  Then, as the doctor launched himself at the man’s back, he saw the flash jump out of Halla’s hand and roll back around the comer where it turned in upon her. Though it had been struck, the flash still shone, but evidently it was not being picked up again, for the beam remained motionless. Nor was there any fire from the woman.

  Leif bellowed with agony and fury. Halla must have been hit; she must be dead!

  The next instant, something struck his head. It was the Uzzite’s pistol butt, coming down out of the darkness and driving Leif into an even deeper night.

  Chapter 24

  He AWOKE FEELING as if an axe was buried in his skull. His hands were manacled in front of him; his back was against a cold damp wall. Halla sat across the tunnel. Her hands were cuffed also. A wing of dried blood across her face showed what had happened to knock her out. She’d been hit in the temple by a chip of brick knocked loose by an exploding bullet. That was bad, but he was happy that she had not been seriously hurt.

  Candleman stood before Leif. He was shouting into a wristbox and obviously getting no answer. His flashlight was lying upon a shelf sticking out of the wall, its end propped up so it shone down upon them all.

  Just inside the circle of light, a pair of naked and dirty feet pointed their toes to the roof. They belonged to the Man In The Dark. He must have been dead or near dead, for Leif could not discern any manacles restraining him.

  Candleman quit giving orders into the box and said to Leif, “So, Jacques Cuze, you’ve decided to come to life?”

  Leif felt too sick to try to smile defiance. He said, “How did you find out who Jacques Cuze really was?”

  The Uzzite said, “I’ll admit I was stupid. I must have been to have been deceived so long. But no one need know it now that Dannto is dead. And you’ll tell no one. Not as long as you’re in H. And Halla here will never see anyone—except me.”

  Leif swallowed. Candleman could safely pretend she’d been killed during the raid and have her kept imprisoned in a secret place.

  He said, “What do you know?”

  The Uzzite’s face did not lose any of its frozenness, but a hint of triumph crept into his voice.

  “If I’d studied the French language, I’d have understood at once. But how was I to know? In this day of vast knowledge, a man can know only a small fraction of his own specialty, let alone a tongue dead for centuries. Thus, when I first heard this name Jaques Cuze uttered by a CWC prisoner, I thought it actually must be the name of a Frenchman, one who lived in the Parisian underground, and the frequency of the initials J. C. scratched here and there over the city convinced me.

  “You know the inquiries I made about the initials, how I asked a linguistics man about them. His answers threw me off the track. I see now he must have been a Marcher. I ordered him arrested just before the raid tonight. But enough of that. You know how I tried to connect the first two letters of the Greek word for fish, IX, with J. C. I thought that perhaps IX stood for Ioannos Chusis or John Stream. That was a real stretch of meaning, caused by my eagerness. I didn’t know then that there were two African underground churches here: the Holy Timbuktu, which uses the fish for its symbol, and the Primitives, which use J.C. to stand both for their reputed Founder’s name and for the real founder, Jikiza Chandu.”

  Leif looked around, desperate for anything that would give him hope of escape. There was nothing, as he’d known there would be. The Bantu’s feet moved a trifle, perhaps in a death tremor.

  Again Candleman tried his wristbox and had no success. He lifted Halla’s head to look at her; she spat in his face. Grim-lipped, he turned away and began talking to Leif. It was as if he had to prove that Leif was the stupid one.

  “I was suspicious of you for some time,” he said. “You wore the lamech, true, but in these degenerate days that badge has been dishonored. There was a day when only a strict conformist to the ideals of the Sturch could pass the Elohimeter. But today the hierarchy uses that device to maintain a ruling class. Lamechian fathers, if you’ll check up on it, quite often have lamechian sons. There are too many to be a coincidence.

  “Moreover, I thought Halla had surely been killed in that crash. When you told me she was only slightly injured, I almost broke down.”

  “Nobody would have known it,” said Leif. He glanced at the Man In The Dark. The feet were definitely moving.

  “I have superb control,” said Candleman. “I was raised as an undeviating disciple of Sigmen, real be his name. Emotion is an abhorred thing.”

  He paused, breathed deeply, and said, “I suspected you, especially when the case of the two Ingolf’s came up. While I believe in the reality of time travel, of course, this was s
training my credulity. Nevertheless, it was possible.

  “As for Trausti and Palsson, I questioned them, but they must have been overwhelmed by your lamech. They saw the mangled body of Halla. Yet, because you had said she wasn’t badly hurt, they deliberately denied the evidence of their eyes.”

  “Typical Jackasses,” sneered Leif. “What else do you expect in a state where authority is the last word, and authority changes its mind from moment to moment.”

  “You revile us now. When you come out of H, you’ll be as firm a believer as anyone.”

  Leif shuddered and wondered if he were going to be sick. But he kept down the urge, for he saw the Bantu sit up. Perhaps, he would... no... the man was too far gone to put up a fight.

  “Jacques Cuze was haunting me day and night,” continued the Uzzite. “He was in my mind while I was awake, and when I slept he walked my dreams. But I could not help thinking that there was something about him I was missing, some small clue that would enable me to catch him and his whole organization.

  “Things went on in this way until I came back from Canada. I determined to drive deep to the foundation, not to rest until I found out all I could. So for a day and a night, I buried myself in the Library of Paris. I read a resume of the history of France. I took a French dictionary, and, after learning the pronunciation of French, I looked for cuze and couze. I thought perhaps the name was an adopted one, symbolizing something. But there was no such word listed.

  “I looked up the many meanings of Jacques. None were appropriate. I decided I was on the wrong trail. I was lost. The man was driving me crazy, and I did not like that, for I want to be unaffected by anything or anybody.”

  “Even by Halla?” said Leif.

  “Keep your filthy mouth closed! Listen to me! You shall learn that you Marchers, no matter how clever you are, cannot escape us. Your unreal thinking dooms you to failure!

  “I sat down and thought. I said to myself that surely there must be some pattern in the general picture which I should be able to tie up with the man and his activities, something that would betray him. I tried to wrench myself from the frame of events, to stand off and see objectively as I’d never done before. I asked myself, ‘What is the greatest trouble the Union is having today?’ I thought that if we were deeply concerned with something, it was likely the CWC agents would be behind it. So, the answer came. We are having the most trouble in keeping our technology and production at a high level. So many techs, doctors, scientists and administrators are going to H that we have difficulty keeping the Union together. Moreover, many bright young men refuse to go into the professional schools because of the great responsibility and the vulnerability to accusation. I saw this, yet I didn’t see the answer.

  “In desperation, I imported another linguistics specialist and asked him if he could make anything at all out of the name. By then I’d captured Jim Crew. The similarity of his initials didn’t escape me; 1 wanted to know if he could be Jacques under another name. However, I found that Crew was merely the way he spelled the name of his tribe, the Kru, plus the fact that it indicated their way of living in a group and working together.

  “And, of course, I got out of him that you operated willingly upon his daughter. When I learned that, I sent men to the hospital at once, but they were an hour late. And, immediately after, Dannto informed me that Halla was missing.

  “Everything broke at once, for while I was giving orders to start the manhunt, the linguistics expert arrived in Paris.

  “He was a specialist in the French tongue, the only one in the Union. Curiously enough, he’d been living in Haiti, because there was an isolated mountain village there where they still spoke a degenerate form of his subject. I had to locate him and have him flown here.”

  If Leif hadn’t felt so sick from his head wound, he’d have laughed. He watched the man stride back and forth, a ridiculous figure with powderburns blacking his face, coat hanging by shreds, and his trousers reduced to a mere loincloth. Yet, he was frightening. His stiff-faced drive and single-mindedness made him a juggernaut.

  Leif noticed that, though the Man In The Dark was sitting up, his head hung down and saliva dripped from his lips. The wound in his shoulder oozed steadily.

  Though Candleman had noticed him, he was ignoring him.

  “He listened to my problem and asked me to pronounce the name. I did so. He dared to laugh, and then he told me the simple secret.”

  For the first time, Candleman showed signs of emotion. His hard lips curled; his voice rose.

  “There it was. The whole situation in one word, or, rather, in two. There was the reason why our techs were going in such great numbers to H that we couldn’t handle them. That was why our industries and sciences were lagging in production!”

  Thank God, thought Leif, he still hasn’t caught on to the fact that the day of Timestop was an artificial issue forced by the CWC agents! That will be the downfall of the Jacks. When a dozen rival Sigmens pop up on that day, each claiming to be the true one, civil war will rage. That, plus the breakdowns originated by Jacques Cuze, will bring the Sturch crashing into ruins.—Or so he hoped.

  Candleman screeched, “You thought you were getting away with something, didn’t you, Barker? You were snickering up your sleeve all the time and conducting operations under our noses! And all the time escaping detection because of a miserable pun! By Sigmen, I should have known it was you! If only I’d called in that specialist sooner! Why, the moment he told me the truth, I saw the whole thing, and I knew who was behind it!”

  He stood before the manacled man and leveled his finger at him and yelled,” Vaccuse! J’accuse! That was the technique you Marchers used to undermine and to cripple us—the accusation technique.”

  Leif gave a short laugh and said, “Yes. In your country all you have to do to condemn a man is send an anonymous accusation to the police. That’s all.”

  Candleman gestured wildly with his automatic.

  “You’ve laughed too much, Marcher! By the time we’re through with you at H, you’ll never laugh again. You’ll think it’s blasphemy to be happy as long as the Sturch doesn’t reign supreme. You’ll no longer laugh behind our backs. You’ll cringe every time you hear the name of Jacques Cuze!”

  The Bantu groaned. The Uzzite’s shouting seemed to have brought him halfway to life.

  Candleman whirled, walked over and kicked the man in the foot. “Dirty Primitive! There’ll be no more of your kind skulking under the streets and creeping out to corrupt our minds!”

  Leif, watching the sitting man, saw his body shimmer and begin to change into something unpleasant. Evidently the cycle between the Bantu and the Jack was not quite a closed one. There was a line through to Leif, or else there was a splash of energy touching him. Whatever it was, he had to turn his head for a moment to steady himself. He found himself, however, unable to keep it twisted away. Even if the glimpse were revolting, it was too fascinating.

  During that second of “hooking” into the cycle between the two, Leif had undergone what Candleman was undergoing. Now, when he did gaze again, he saw the shimmer gone, replaced by the steady lines of the physical man. The vision had gone. Nor was that surprising, for the fellow had concentrated all his force upon Candleman. There was no more ‘splash’.

  The Uzzite had dropped his automatic and stepped back to the wall. There he spread out his arms on each side as if groping for something solid in a dissolving world. His legs straddled an invisible horse, and his always bent-forward body was for the first time strained backwards in an agony. The face was shedding the old skin of control and was growing into knots of impossible shapes.

  Leif was shaking. He had peered through a crack into hell. He was sure that if he had continued to be part of the cycle, he, too would have suffered.

  Candleman had stiffened all his members. Blood had congested his skin and was driving into his protuberances with terrible pressure. The buried repressions, urges, impulses, inhibitions and thoughts kept all his long life
inside the cell of himself were striving to leave at once. They could not do it because there was not room enough, and as fast as they did throng out, the Man In The Dark caught them and magnified them and flung them back.

  And Candleman, not knowing how to discharge them, seldom having wept or laughed or sung or loved or even given reasonable vent to hate, always having clenched his fist around the valve, now poured out the accumulated pressure and rottenness of a lifetime.

  Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, sweat pores, every avenue of exit in his body ran with poison boiling to get out.

  Leif watched him until he could bear it no longer. Rising, he picked up the fallen automatic, and he shot Candleman through the head. Nor did he doubt that the man would have thanked him for that.

  A short time later, he’d taken the key from the corpse’s only remaining pocket and unlocked Halla’s manacles. She, in turn, freed him. Together, they helped each other down the tunnel, wounded, yet knowing the ship waited for them.

  A solitary figure crouched behind them. He had refused to go with them. He was dying, and he clung to the long damp labyrinth and the lack of light. He crouched by the dead man and contemplated his work.

  He would always be The Man In The Dark.

  Chapter 25

  THEY WALKED SEVERAL miles more and met nothing but two rats that scuttled into a hole. When they arrived at the spot that had been indicated by Beatrice, they tapped the signal upon a small red brick sticking from the wall. Presently a section swung back far enough for them to slip in sidewise. A tall, thin, brown-skinned man wearing a turban greeted them with a gun and a demand for the password. They gave it; he lowered his weapon. He was Socha Yami, a Malay, native of Calcutta, and his job was to pilot the spaceship beneath the waters of the Seine and the Atlantic, ferrying men and materials.

  As the craft was small, Leif and Halla were forced to squat upon a rug on the floor, their backs against the etemalloy wall. Bodies jammed against them, for twenty Timbuktu men and a Primitive group from another colony under Paris’s west end had also taken flight. Leif was surprised to see the former, as he had not known cooperation was so close between the two nations. Dr. Djouba, huddled near him, informed him that, though the churches differed widely in beliefs, they had an agreement to use the same means of getting into the city. Aside from that, they seldom mingled.