There’s winds out on the ocean
Blowin’ where they choose.
The winds got no emotion:
They don’t know the blues.
—traditional
Excerpt from the Journal of Isham Stone
I hadn’t meant to shoot the cat.
I hadn’t meant to shoot anything, for that matter—the pistol at my hip was strictly defensive armament at the moment. But my adrenals were on overtime and my peripheral vision was straining to meet itself behind my head—when something appeared before me with no warning at all my subconscious sentries opted for the Best Defense. I was down and rolling before I knew I’d fired, through a doorway I hadn’t known was there.
I fetched up with a heart-stopping crash against the foot of a staircase just inside the door. The impact dislodged something on the first-floor landing; it rolled heavily down the steps and sprawled across me: the upper portion of a skeleton, largely intact from the sixth vertebra up. As I lurched in horror to my feet, long-dead muscle and cartilage crumbled at last, and random bones skittered across the dusty floor. Three inches above my left elbow, someone was playing a drum-roll with knives.
Cautiously I hooked an eye around the doorframe, at about knee-level. The smashed remains of what had recently been gray-and-white Persian tom lay against a shattered fire hydrant whose faded red surface was spattered with brighter red and less appealing colors. Overworked imagination produced the odor of singed meat.
I’m as much cat-people as the One-Sleeved Mandarin, and three shocks in quick succession, in the condition I was in, were enough to override all the iron discipline of Collaci’s training. Eyes stinging, I stumbled out onto the sidewalk, uttered an unspellable sound, and pumped three slugs into a wrecked ’82 Buick lying on its right side across the street.
I was pretty badly rattled—only the third slug hit the exposed gas tank. But it was magnesium, not lead: the car went up with a very satisfactory roar and the prettiest fireball you ever saw. The left rear wheel was blown high in the air: it soared gracefully over my head, bounced off a fourth-floor fire escape and came down flat and hard an inch behind me. Concrete buckled.
When my ears had stopped ringing and my eyes uncrossed, I became aware that I was rigid as a statue. So much for catharsis, I thought vaguely, and relaxed with an effort that hurt all over.
The cat was still dead.
I saw almost at once why he had startled me so badly. The tobacconist’s display window from which he had leaped was completely shattered, so my subconscious sentries had incorrectly tagged it as one of the rare unbroken ones. Therefore, they reasoned, the hurtling object must be in fact emerging from the open door just beyond the window. Anything coming out a doorway that high from the ground just had to be a Musky, and my hand is much quicker than my eye.
Now that my eye had caught up, of course, I realized that I couldn’t possibly track a Musky by eye. Which was exactly why I’d been keyed up enough to waste irreplaceable ammo and give away my position in the first place. Carlson had certainly made life complicated for me. I hoped I could manage to kill him slowly.
This was no consolation to the cat. I looked down at my Musky-gun, and found myself thinking of the day I got it, just three months past. The first gun I had ever owned myself, symbol of man’s estate, mine for as long as it took me to kill Carlson, and for as long afterwards as I lived. After my father had presented it to me publicly, and formally charged me with the avenging of the human race, the friends and neighbors—and dark-eyed Alia—had scurried safely inside for the ceremonial banquet. But my father took me aside. We walked in silence through the West Forest to Mama’s grave, and through the trees the setting sun over West Mountain looked like a knothole in the wall of Hell. Dad turned to me at last, pride and paternal concern fighting for control of his ebony features, and said, "Isham. . . . Isham, I wasn’t much older than you when I got my first gun. That was long ago and far away, in a place called Montgomery—things were different then. But some things never change." He tugged an earlobe reflectively, and continued, "Phil Collaci has taught you well, but sometimes he’d rather shoot first and ask directions later. Isham, you just can’t go blazing away indiscriminately. Not ever. You hear me?"
The crackling of the fire around the ruined Buick brought me back to the present. Damn, you called it again Dad, I thought as I shivered there on the sidewalk. You can’t go blazing away indiscriminately.
Not even here in New York City.
It was getting late, and my left arm ached abominably where Grey Brother had marked me—I reminded myself sharply that I was here on business. I had no wish to pass a night in any city, let alone this one, so I continued on up the street, examining every building I passed with extreme care. If Carlson had ears, he now knew someone was in New York, and he might figure out why. I was on his home territory—every alleyway and manhole was a potential ambush.
There were stores and shops of every conceivable kind, commerce more fragmented and specialized than I had ever seen before. Some shops dealt only in a single item. Some I could make no sense of at all. What the hell is an "rko"?
I kept to the sidewalk where I could. I told myself I was being foolish, that I was no less conspicuous to Carlson or a Musky than if I’d stood on second base at the legendary Shea Stadium, and that the street held no surprise tomcats. But I kept to the sidewalk where I could. I remember Mama—a long time ago—telling me not to go in the street or the monsters would get me.
They got her.
Twice I was forced off the curb, once by a subway entrance and once by a supermarket. Dad had seen to it that I had the best plugs Fresh Start had to offer, but they weren’t that good. Both times I hurried back to the sidewalk and was thoroughly disgusted with my pulse rate. But I never looked over my shoulder. Collaci says there’s no sense being scared when it can’t help you—and the fiasco with the cat proved him right.
It was early afternoon, and the same sunshine that was warming the forests and fields and work-zones of Fresh Start, my home, seemed to chill the air here, accentuating the barren emptiness of the ruined city. Silence and desolation were all around me as I walked, bleached bones and crumbling brick. Carlson had been efficient, all right, nearly as efficient as the atomic bomb folks used to be so scared of once. It seemed as though I were in some immense Devil’s Autoclave, that ignored filth and grime but grimly scrubbed out life of any kind.
Wishful thinking, I decided, and shook my head to banish the fantasy. If the city had been truly lifeless, I’d be approaching Carlson from uptown—I would never have had to detour as far south as the Lincoln Tunnel, and my left arm would not have ached so terribly. Grey Brother is extremely touchy about his territorial rights.
I decided to replace the makeshift dressing over the torn biceps. I didn’t like the drumming insistence of the pain: it kept me awake but interfered with my concentration. I ducked into the nearest store that looked defensible, and found myself sprawled on the floor behind an overturned table, wishing mightily that it weren’t so flimsy.
Something had moved.
Then I rose sheepishly to my feet, holstering my heater and rapping my subconscious sentries sharply across the knuckles for the second time in half an hour. My own face looked back at me from the grimy mirror that ran along one whole wall, curly black hair in tangles, wide lips stretched back in what looked just like a grin. It was a grin. I hadn’t realized how bad I looked.
Dad had told me a lot about Civilization, before the Exodus, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand it. A glance around this room raised more questions than it answered. On my left, opposite the long mirror, were a series of smaller mirrors that paralleled it for three-quarters of its length, with odd-looking chairs before them. Something like armchairs made of metal, padded where necessary, with levers to raise and lower them. On my right, below the longer mirror, were a lot of smaller, much plainer wooden chairs, in a tight row broken occasionally by strange frameworks from which lengths of rotting fabric dangled. I could only surmise that this was some sort of arcane narcissist’s paradise, where men of large ego would come, remove their clothing, recline in luxuriously upholstered seats, and contemplate their own magnificence. The smaller, shabbier seats, too low to afford a decent view, no doubt represented the cut-rate or second-class accomodations.
But what was the significance of the cabinets between the larger chairs and the wall, laden with bottles and plastic containers and heathen appliances? And why were all the skeletons in the room huddled together in the middle of the floor, as though their last seconds of life had been spent frantically fighting over something?
Something gleamed in the bone-heap, and I saw what the poor bastards had died fighting for, and knew what kind of place this had been. The contested prize was a straight razor.
My father had spent eighteen of my twenty years telling me why I ought to hate Wendell Carlson, and in the past few days I’d acquired nearly as many reasons of my own. I intended to put them in Carlson’s obituary.
A wave of weariness passed over me. I moved to one of the big chairs, pressed gingerly down on the seat to make sure no cunning mechanism awaited my mass to trigger it (Collaci’s training again—if Teach’ ever gets to Heaven, he’ll check it for booby traps), took off my rucksack and sat down. As I unrolled the bandage around my arm I glanced at myself in the mirror and froze, struck with wonder. An infinite series of mes stretched out into eternity, endless thousands of Isham Stones caught in that frozen second of time that holds endless thousands of possible futures, on the point of some unimaginable cusp. I knew it was simply the opposed mirrors, the one before me slightly askew, and could have predicted the phenomenon had I thought about it—but I was not expecting it and had never seen anything like it in my life. All at once I was enormously tempted to sit back, light a joint from the first-aid kit in my rucksack, and meditate awhile. I wondered what Alia was doing right now, right at this moment. Hell, I could kill Carlson at twilight, and sleep in his bed—or hole up here and get him tomorrow, or the next day. When I was feeling better.
Then I saw the first image in line. Me. A black man just doesn’t bruise spectacularly as a rule, but there was something colorful over my right eye that would do until a bruise came along. I was filthy, I needed a shave, and the long slash running from my left eye to my upper lip looked angry. My black turtleneck was torn in three places that I could see, dirty where it wasn’t torn, and bloodstained where it wasn’t dirty. It might be a long time before I felt any better than I did right now.
Then I looked down at what was underneath the gauze I’d just peeled off, saw the black streaks on the chocolate brown of my arm, and the temptation to set a spell vanished like an overheated Musky.
I looked closer, and began whistling "Good Morning Heartache" through my teeth very softly. I had no more neosulfa, damned little bandage for that matter, and it looked like I should save what analgesics I had to smoke on the way home. The best thing I could do for myself was to finish up in the city and get gone, find a Healer before my arm rotted.
And all at once that was fine with me. I remembered the two sacred duties that had brought me to New York: one to my father and my people, and one to myself. I had nearly died proving to my satisfaction that the latter was impossible; the other would keep me no great long time. New York and I were, as Bierce would say, incompossible.
One way or another, it would all be over soon.
I carefully rebandaged the gangrenous arm, hoisted the rucksack and went back outside, popping a foodtab and a very small dosage of speed as I walked. There’s no point in bringing real food to New York—you can’t taste it anyway and it masses so damned much.
The sun was perceptibly lower in the sky—the day was in catabolism. I shifted my shoulders to settle the pack and continued on up the street, my eyes straining to decipher faded signs.
Two blocks up I found a shop that had specialized in psychedelia. A ’69 Ford shared the display window with several smashed hookahs and a narghile or two. I paused there, sorely tempted again. A load of pipes and papers would be worth a good bit at home; Techno and Agro alike would pay dearly for fine-tooled smoking goods—more evidence that, as Dad is always saying, technology’s usefulness has outlasted it.
But that reminded me of my mission again, and I shook my head savagely to drive away the daydreaming that sought to delay me. I was—what was the phrase Dad had used at my arming ceremony?—"The Hand of Man Incarnate," that was it, the product of two years personal combat training and eighteen years of racial hatred. After I finished the job I could rummage around in crumbling deathtraps for hash pipes and roach clips—my last detour had nearly killed me, miles to the north.
But I’d had to try. I was only two at the time of the Exodus, too young to retain much but a confused impression of universal terror, of random horror and awful revulsion everywhere. But I remember one incident very clearly. I remember my brother Israfel, all of eight years old, kneeling down in the middle of 116th Street and methodically smashing his head against the pavement. Long after Izzy’s eight-year-old brains had splashed the concrete, his little body continued to slam the shattered skull down again and again in a literally mindless spasm of escape. I saw this over my mother’s shoulder as she ran, screaming her fear, though the chaotically twisting nightmare that for as long as she could remember had been only a quietly throbbing nightmare; as she ran through Harlem.
Once when I was twelve I watched an Agro slaughter a chicken, and when the headless carcass got up and ran about I heard my mother’s scream again. It was coming from my throat. Dad tells me I was unconscious for four days and woke up screaming.
Even here, even downtown, where the bones sprawled everywhere were those of strangers, I was wound up tight enough to burst, and ancient reflex fought with modern wisdom as I felt the irrational impulse to lift my head and cast about for an enemy’s scent. I had failed to recover Izzy’s small bones; Grey Brother, who had always lived in Harlem, now ruled it, and sharp indeed were his teeth. I had managed to hold off the chittering pack with incendiaries until I reached the Hudson, and they would not cross the bridge to pursue me. And so I lived—at least until gangrene got me.
And the only thing between me and Fresh Start was Carlson. I saw again in my mind’s eye the familiar Carlson Poster, the first thing my father ran off when he got access to a mimeograph machine: a remarkably detailed sketch of thin, academic features surrounded by a mass of graying hair, with the legend, "WANTED: FOR THE MURDER OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION—WENDELL MORGAN CARLSON. An unlimited lifetime supply of hot-shot shells will be given to anyone bringing the head to The Council of Fresh Start."
No one ever took Dad up on it—at least, no one who survived to collect. And so it looked like it was up to me to settle the score for a shattered era and a planetful of corpses. The speed was taking hold now; I felt an exalted sense of destiny and a fever to be about it. I was the duly chosen instrument for mankind’s revenge, and that reckoning was long overdue.
I unclipped one of the remaining incendiary grenades from my belt—it comforted me to hold that much raw power in my hand—and kept on walking uptown, feeling infinitely more than twenty years old. And as I stalked my prey through concrete canyons and brownstone foothills, I found myself thinking of his crime, of the twisted motives that had produced this barren jungle and countless hundreds like it. I remembered my father’s eyewitness account of Carlson’s actions, repeated so many times during my youth that I could almost recite it verbatim, heard again the Genesis of the world I knew from its first historian—my father, Jacob Stone. Yes, that Stone, the one man Carlson never expected to survive, to shout across a smashed planet the name of its unknown assassin. Jacob Stone, who first cried the name that became a curse, a blasphemy and a scream of rage in the throats of all humankind. Jacob Stone, who named our betrayer: Wendell Morgan Carlson!
And as I reviewed that grim story, I kept my hand near the rifle with which I hoped to write its happy ending. . . .
Excerpts from I WORKED WITH CARLSON,
by Jacob Stone, Ph.D., authorized version:
Fresh Start Press 1986 (Mimeo).
. . . The sense of smell is a curious phenomenon, oddly resistant to measurement or rigorous analysis. Each life form on Earth appears to have as much of it as they need to survive, plus a little. The natural human sense of smell, for instance, was always more efficient than most people realized, so much so that in the 1880s the delightfully eccentric Sir Francis Galton had actually succeeded, by associating numbers with certain scents, in training himself to add and subtract by smell, apparently just for the intellectual exercise.
But through a sort of neurological suppressor circuit of which next to nothing is known, most people contrived to ignore all but the most pleasing or disturbing of the messages their noses brought them, perhaps by way of reaction to a changing world in which a finely-tuned olfactory apparatus became a nuisance rather than a survival aid. The level of sensitivity which a wolf requires to find food would be a hindrance to a civilized human packed into a city of his fellows.
By 1983, Professor Wendell Morgan Carlson had raised olfactometry to the level of a precise science. In the course of testing the theories of Beck and Miles, Carlson almost absently-mindedly perfected the classic "blast-injection" technique of measuring differential sensitivity in olfaction, without regard for the subjective impressions of the test subject. This not only refined his data, but also enabled him to work with life forms other than human, a singular advantage when one considers how much of the human brain is terra incognita.
His first subsequent experiments indicated that the average wolf utilized his sense of smell on the order of a thousand times more efficiently than a human. Carlson perceived that wolves lived in a world of scents, as rich and intricate as our human worlds of sight and word. To his surprise, however, he discovered that the potential sensitivity of the human olfactory apparatus far outstripped that of any known species.
This intrigued him. . . .
. . . Wendell Morgan Carlson, the greatest biochemist Columbia—and perhaps the world—had ever seen, was living proof of the truism that a genius can be a damned fool outside his own specialty.
Genius he unquestionably was; it was not serendipity that brought him the Nobel Prize for isolating a cure for the entire spectrum of virus infections called "the common cold." Rather it was the sort of inspired accident that comes only to those brilliant enough to perceive it, fanatic seekers like Pasteur.
But Pasteur was a boor and a braggart, who frittered away valuable time in childish feuds with men unfit to wash out his test tubes. Genius is seldom a good character reference.
Carlson was a left-wing radical.
Worse, he was the type of radical who dreams of romantic exploits in a celluloid underground: grim-eyed rebels planting homemade bombs, assassinating the bloated oppressors in their very strongholds and (although he certainly knew what hydrogen sulfide was) escaping through the city sewers.
It never occurred to him that it takes a very special kind of man to be a guerilla. He was convinced that the moral indignation he had acquired at Washington in ’71 (during his undergraduate days) would see him through hardships and privation, and he would have been horrified if someone had pointed out to him that Che Guevara seldom had access to toilet paper. Never having experienced hunger, he thought it a glamorous state. He lived a compartmentalized life, and his wild talent for biochemistry had the thickest walls: only within them was he capable of logic or true intuition. He had spent a disastrous adolescent year in a seminary, enlisted as a "storm trooper of Mary," and had come out of it apostate but still saddled with a relentless need to Serve A Cause—and it chanced that the cry in 1982 was, once again, "Revolution Now!"
He left the cloistered halls of Columbia in July of that year, and applied to the smaller branch—the so-called "Action-Faction"—of the New Weathermen for a position as assassin. Fortunately he was taken for crazy and thrown out. The African Liberation Front was somewhat less discerning—they broke his leg in three places. In the Emergency Room of Jacobi Hospital Carlson came to the conclusion that the trouble with Serving A Cause was that it involved associating with unperceptive and dangerously unpredictable people. What he needed was a One-Man Cause.
And then, at the age of thirty-two, his emotions noticed his intellect for the first time.
When the two parts of him came together, they achieved critical mass—and that was a sad day for the world. I myself bear part of the blame for that coming-together—unwittingly I provided one of the final sparks, put forward the idea which sent Carlson on the most dangerous intuitive leap of his life. My own feelings of guilt for this will plague me to my dying day—and yet it might have been anyone. Or no one.
Fresh from a three-year stint doing biowar research for the Defense Department, I was a very minor colleague of Carlson’s, but quickly found myself becoming a close friend. Frankly I was flattered that a man of his stature would speak to me, and I suspect Carlson was overjoyed to find a black man who would treat him as an equal.
But for reasons which are very difficult to explain to anyone who did not live through that period—and which need no explanation for those who did—I was reluctant to discuss the ALF with a honky, however "enlightened." And so when I went to visit Carlson in Jacobi Hospital and the conversation turned to the self-defeating nature of uncontrollable rage, I attempted to distract the patient with a hasty change of subject.
"The Movement’s turning rancid, Jake," Carlson had just muttered, and an excellent digression occurred to me.
"Wendell," I said heedlessly, "do you realize that you personally are in a position to make this a better world?"
His eyes lit up. "How’s that?"
"You are probably the world’s greatest authority on olfactometry and the human olfactory apparatus, among other things—right?"
"As far as there is one, I suppose so. What of it?" He shifted uneasily within his traction gear: wearing his radical persona, he was made uncomfortable by reference to his scientist-mode. He felt it had little to do with the Realities of Life—like nightsticks and grand juries.
"Has it ever occurred to you," I persisted to my everlasting regret, "that nearly all the undesirable by-products of twentieth-century living, Technological Man’s most unlovable aspects, quite literally stink? The whole world’s going rancid, Wendell, not just the Movement. Automobiles, factory pollution, crowded cities—Wendell, why couldn’t you develop a selective suppressant for the sense of smell—controlled anosmia? Oh, I know a snort of formaldehyde will do the trick, and having your adenoids removed sometimes works. But a man oughtn’t to have to give up the smell of frying bacon just to survive in New York. And you know we’re reaching that pass—in the past few years it hasn’t been necessary to leave the city and then return to be aware of how evil it smells. The natural suppressor-mechanism in the brain—whatever it is—has gone about as far as it can go. Why don’t you devise a small-spectrum filter to aid it? It would be welcomed by sanitation workers, engineers—why, it would be a godsend to the man on the street!"
Carlson was mildly interested. Such an anosmic filter would be both a mordant political statement and a genuine boon to Mankind. He had been vaguely pleased by the success of his cold-cure, and I believe he sincerely wished to make the world a happier place—however perverted his methods tended to be. We discussed the idea at some length, and I left.
Had Carlson not been bored silly in the hospital, he would never have rented a television set. It was extremely unfortunate that the Late Show (ed. note: a television show of the period) on that particular evening featured the film version of Alistair MacLean’s The Satan Bug. Watching this absurd production, Carlson was intellectually repelled by the notion that a virus could be isolated so hellishly virulent that "a teaspoon of it would sweep the earth of life in a few days."
But it gave him a wild idea—a fancy, a fantasy, and a tasty one.
He checked with me by phone the next day, very casually, and I assured him from my experiences with advances in virus-vectoring that MacLean had not been whistling in the dark. In fact, I said, modern so-called "bacterial warfare" made the Satan Bug look like child’s play. Carlson thanked me and changed the subject.
On his release from the hospital, he came to my office and asked me to work with him for a full year, to the exclusion of all else, on a project whose nature he was reluctant to discuss. "Why do you need me?" I asked, puzzled.
"Because," he finally told me, "you know how to make a Satan Bug. I intend to make a God Bug. And you could help me."
"Eh?"
"Listen, Jake," he said with that delightful informality of his. "I’ve licked the common cold—and there are still herds of people with the sniffles. All I could think of to do with the cure was to turn it over to the pharmaceuticals people, and I did all I could to make sure they didn’t milk it, but there are still suffering folks who can’t afford the damned stuff. Well, there’s no need for that. Jake, a cold will kill someone sufficiently weakened by hunger—I can’t help the hunger, but I could eliminate colds from the planet in forty-eight hours . . . with your help."
"A benevolent virus-vector . . ." I was flabbergasted, as much by the notion of decommercializing medicine as by the specific nostrum involved.
"It’d be a lot of work," Carlson went on. "In its present form my stuff isn’t compatible with such a delivery system—I simply wasn’t thinking along those lines. But I’ll bet it could be made so, with your help. Jake, I haven’t got time to learn your field—throw in with me. Those pharmaceuticals goniffs have made me rich enough to pay you twice what Columbia does, and we’re both due for sabbatical anyway. What do you say?"
I thought it over, but not enough. The notion of collaborating with a Nobel Prize winner was simply too tempting. "All right, Wendell."
We set up operations in Carlson’s laboratory-home on Long Island, he in the basement and myself on the main floor. There we worked like men possessed for the better part of a year, cherishing private dreams and slaughtering guinea pigs by the tens of thousands. Carlson was a stern if somewhat slapdash taskmaster, and as our work progressed he began "looking over my shoulder," learning my field while discouraging inquiries about his own progress. I assumed that he simply knew his field too well to converse intelligently about it with anyone but himself. And yet he absorbed all my own expertise with fluid rapidity, until eventually it seemed that he knew as much about virology as I did myself. One day he disappeared with no explanation, and returned a week or two later with what seemed to me a more nasal voice.
And near the end of the year there came a day when he called me on the telephone. I was spending the weekend, as always, with my wife and two sons in Harlem. Chrismas was approaching, and Barbara and I were discussing the relative merits of plastic and natural trees when the phone rang. I was not at all surprised to hear Carlson’s reedy voice, so reminiscent of an oboe lately—the only wonder was that he had called during conventional waking hours.
"Jake," he began without preamble, "I haven’t the time or inclination to argue, so shut up and listen, right? Right. I advise and strongly urge you to take your family and leave New York at once—steal a car if you have to, or hijack a Greyhound (ed. note: a public transportation conveyance) for all of me, but be at least twenty miles away by midnight."
"But . . ."
". . . head north if you want my advice, and for God’s sake stay away from all cities, towns, and people in any number. If you possibly can, get upwind of all nearby industry, and bring along all the formaldehyde you can—a gun too, if you own one. Goodbye, my friend, and remember I do this for the greater good of mankind. I don’t know if you’ll understand that, but I hope so."
"Wendell, what in the name of God are you . . . ?" I was talking to a dead phone.
Barbara was beside me, a worried look on her face, my son Isham in her arms. "What is it?"
"I’m not sure," I said unsteadily, "but I think Wendell has come unhinged. I must go to him. Stay with the children; I’ll be back as quickly as I can. And Barbara . . ."
"Yes?"
"I know this sounds insane, but pack a bag and be ready to leave town at once if I call and tell you to."
"Leave town? Without you?"
"Yes, just that. Leave New York and never return. I’m fairly certain you won’t have to, but it’s just possible that Wendell knows what he’s talking about. If he does, I’ll meet you at the cabin by the lake, as soon as I can." I put off her questions then and left, heading for Long Island.
When I reached Carlson’s home in Old Westbury I let myself in with my key and made my way toward his laboratory. But I found him upstairs in mine, perched on a stool, gazing intently at a flask in his right hand. Its interior swirled, changing color as I watched.
Carlson looked up. "You’re a damned fool, Jake," he said quietly before I could speak. "I gave you a chance."
"Wendell, what on earth is this all about? My wife is scared half to—"
"Remember that controlled anosmia you told me about when I was in the hospital?" he went on conversationally. "You said the trouble with the world is that it stinks, right?"
I stared at him, vaguely recalling my words.
"Well," he said, "I’ve got a solution."
And Carlson told me what he held in his hand. A single word.
I snapped, just completely snapped. I charged him, clawing wildly for his throat, and he struck me with his left hand, his faceted ring giving me the scar I bear to this day, knocking me unconscious. When I came to my senses I was alone, alone with a helpless guilt and terror. A note lay on the floor beside me, in Wendell’s sprawling hand, telling me that I had—by my watch—another hour’s grace. At once I ran to the phone and wasted ten minutes trying to call Barbara. I could not get through—trunk failure, the operator said. Gibbering, I took all the formaldehyde I could find in both labs and a self-contained breathing rig from Carlson’s, stepped out into the streetlit night and set about stealing a car.
It took me twenty minutes, not bad for a first attempt but still cutting it fine—I barely made it to Manhattan, with superb traffic conditions to help me, before the highway became a butcher shop.
At precisely nine o’clock, Wendell Morgan Carlson stood on the roof of Columbia’s enormous Butler Library, held high in the air by fake Greek columns and centuries of human thought, gazing north across a quadrangle within which grass and trees had nearly given up trying to grow, toward the vast domed Lowe Library and beyond toward the ghetto in which my wife and children were waiting, oblivious. In his hands he held the flask I had failed to wrest from him, and within it were approximately two teaspoons of an infinitely refined and concentrated virus culture. It was the end result of our year’s work, and it duplicated what the military had spent years and billions to obtain: a strain of virus that could blanket the globe in about forty-eight hours. There was no antidote for it, no vaccine, no defense of any kind for virtually all of humanity. It was diabolical, immoral and quite efficient. On the other hand, it was not lethal.
Not that is, in and of itself. But Carlson had concluded, like so many before him, that a few million lives was an acceptable price for saving the world, and so at 9:00 p.m. on December 17, 1984 he leaned over the parapet of Butler Hall and dropped his flask six long stories to the concrete below. It shattered on impact and sprayed its contents into what dismal breeze still blew through the campus.
Carlson had said one word to me that afternoon, and the word was "Hyperosmia."
Within forty-eight hours every man, woman and child left alive on earth possessed a sense of smell approximately a hundred times more efficient than that of any wolf that ever howled.
During those forty-eight hours, a little less than a fifth of the planet’s population perished, by whatever means they could devise, and every city in the world spilled its remaining life into the surrounding countryside. The ancient smell-suppressing system of the human brain collapsed under unbearable demand, overloaded and burned out in an instant.
The great complex behemoth called Modern Civilization ground to a halt in a little less than two days. In the last hours, those pitiably few city-dwellers on the far side of the globe who were rigorous enough of thought to heed and believe the brief bewildered death-cries of the great mass media strove valiantly—and hopelessly—to effect emergency measures. The wiser attempted, as I had, to deaden their senses of smell with things like formaldehyde, but there is a limit to the amount of formaldehyde that even desperate men can lay hands on in a day or less, and its effects are generally temporary. Others with less vision opted for airtight environments if they could get them, and there they soon died, either by asphyxiation when their air supply ran out or by suicide when, fervently hoping they had outlived the virus, they cracked their airlocks at last. It was discovered that human technology had produced no commonly-available nose plug worth a damn, nor any air-purification system capable of filtering out Carlson’s virus. Although the rest of the animal kingdom was not measurably affected by it, mankind failed utterly to check the effects of the ghastly Hyperosmic Plague, and the Exodus began . . .
. . . I don’t believe Carlson rejoiced over the carnage that ensued, though a strict Malthusian might have considered it as a long-overdue pruning. But it is easy to understand why he thought it was necessary, to visualize the "better world" for which he spent so many lives: Cities fallen to ruin. Automobiles rotting where they stood. Heavy industry gone to join the dinosaurs. The synthetic-food industry utterly undone. Perfume what it had always been—a memory—as well as tobacco. A wave of cleanliness sweeping the globe, and public flatulation at last a criminal offense, punishable by death. Secaucus, New Jersey abandoned to the buzzards. The back-to-nature communalists achieving their apotheosis, helping to feed and instruct bewildered urban survivors (projected catch-phrase: "If you don’t like hippies, next time you’re hungry, call a cop"). The impetus of desperation forcing new developments in production of power by sun, wind and water rather than inefficient combustion of more precious resources. The long-delayed perfection of plumbing. And a profoundly interesting and far-reaching change in human mating customs as feigned interest or disinterest became unviable pretenses (as any wolf could have told us, the scent of desire can be neither faked nor masked).
All in all an observer as impartial as Carlson imagined himself to be might have predicted that an ultimate cost of perhaps thirty to forty percent of its population (no great loss), the world ten or twenty years after Carlson would be a much nicer place to live in.
Instead and in fact, there are four billion less people living in it, and this year Two ac we have achieved only a bare possibility of survival at a cost of eighty to ninety percent of our number.
The first thing Carlson could not have expected claimed over a billion and a half lives within the first month of the Brave New World. His compartmentalized mind had not been monitoring current developments in the field of psychology, a discipline he found frustrating. And so he was not aware of the work of Lynch and others, conclusively demonstrating that autism was the result of sensory overload. Autistic children, Lynch had proved, were victims of a physiochemical imbalance which disabled their suppressor-circuitry for sight, hearing, touch, smell, or any combination thereof, flooding their brains with an intolerable avalanche of useless data and shocking them into retreat. Lysergic acid diethylamide is said to produce a similar effect, on a smaller scale.
The Hyperosmic Virus produced a similar effect, on a larger scale. Within weeks, millions of near-catatonic adults and children perished from malnutrition, exposure, or accidental injury. Why some survived the shock and adapted, while some did not, remains a mystery, although there exists scattered data suggesting that those whose sense of smell was already relatively acute suffered most.
The second thing Carlson could not have expected was The War.
The War had been ordained by the plummeting fall of his flask, but he may perhaps be excused for not foreseeing it. It was not such a war as has ever been seen on earth before in all recorded history, humans versus each other or subordinate life forms. There was nothing for the confused, scattered survivors of the Hyperosmic Plague to fight over, few unbusy enough to fight over it; and with lesser life forms we are now better equipped to compete. No, war broke out between us bewildered refugees—and the Muskies.
It is difficult for us to imagine today how it was possible for the human race to know of the Muskies for so long without ever believing in them. Countless humans reported contact with Muskies—who at various times were called "ghosts," "poltergeists," "leprechauns," "fairies," "gremlins," and a host of other misleading labels—and not one of these thousands of witnesses was believed by humanity at large. Some of us saw our cats stare, transfixed, at nothing at all, and wondered—but did not believe—what they saw. In its arrogance the race assumed that the peculiar perversion of entropy called "life" was the exclusive property of solids and liquids.
Even today we know very little about the Muskies, save that they are gaseous in nature and perceptible only by smell. The interested reader may wish to examine Dr. Michael Gowan’s ground-breaking attempt at a psychological analysis of these entirely alien creatures, Riders of the Wind (Fresh Start Press, 1986).
One thing we do know is that they are capable of an incredible and disturbing playfulness. While not true telepaths, Muskies can project and often impose mood patterns over short distances, and for centuries they seem to have delighted in scaring the daylights out of random humans. Perhaps they laughed like innocent children as women to whom their pranks were attributed were hung in Salem. Dr. Gowan suggests that this aspect of their racial psyche is truly infantile—he feels their race is still in its infancy. As, perhaps, is our own.
But in their childishness, Muskies can be dangerous both deliberately and involuntarily. Years ago, before the Exodus, people used to wonder why a race that could plan a space station couldn’t design a safe airliner—the silly things used to fall out of the sky with appalling regularity. Often it was simply sheer bad engineering, but I suspect that at least as often a careless, drifting Musky, riding the trades lost in God knows what wildly alien thoughts, was sucked into the air intake of a hurtling jetliner and burst the engine asunder as it died. It was this guess which led me to theorize that extreme heat might disrupt and kill Muskies, and this gave us our first and so far only weapon in the bitter war that still rages between us and the windriders.
For, like many children, Muskies are dangerously paranoid. Almost at the instant they realized that men could somehow now perceive them directly, they attacked, with a ferocity that bespoke blind panic. They learned quickly how best to kill us: by clamping itself somehow to a man’s face and forcing him to breathe it in, a Musky can lay waste to his respiratory system. The only solution under combat conditions is a weapon which fires a projectile hot enough to explode a Musky—and that is a flawed solution. If you fail to burn a Musky in time, before it reaches you, you may be faced with the unpleasant choice of wrecking your lungs or blowing off your face. All too many Faceless Ones roam the land, objects of horror and pity, supported by fellow men uncomfortably aware that it could happen to them tomorrow.
Further, we Technos here at Fresh Start, dedicated to rebuilding at least a minimum technology, must naturally wear our recently-developed nose plugs for long intervals while doing Civilized work. We therefore toil in constant fear that at any moment we may feel alien projections of terror and dread, catch even through our plugs the characteristic odor that gives Muskies their name, and gasp our lungs out in the final spasms of death.
God knows how Muskies communicate—or even if they do. Perhaps they simply have some sort of group-mind or hive-mentality. What would evolution select for a race of gas-clouds spinning across the earth on the howling mistral? Someday we may devise a way to take one prisoner and study it; for the present we are content to know that they can be killed. A good Musky is a dead Musky.
Some day we may climb back up the ladder of technological evolution enough to carry the battle to the Muskies’ home ground; for the present we are at least becoming formidable defenders.
Some day we may have the time to seek out Wendell Morgan Carlson and present him with a bill; for the present we are satisfied that he dares not show himself outside New York City, where legend has him hiding from the consequences of his actions.
From the Journal of Isham Stone
. . . but my gestalt of the eighteen years that had brought me on an intersecting course with my father’s betrayer was nowhere near as pedantically phrased as the historical accounts Dad had written. In fact, I had refined it down to four words.
God damn you, Carlson!
Nearly mid-afternoon, now. The speed was wearing off; time was short. Broadway got more depressing as I went. Have you ever seen a bus-full of skeletons—with pigeons living in it? My arm ached like hell, and a muscle in my thigh had just announced it was sprained—I acquired a slight but increasing limp. The rucksack gained an ounce with every step, and I fancied that my right plug was leaking the barest trifle around the flange.
I kept walking north.
I came to Columbus Circle, turned on a whim into Central Park. It was an enclave of life in this concrete land of death, and I could not pass it by—even though my intellect warned that I might encounter a Doberman who hadn’t seen a can of dog food in twenty years.
The Exodus had been good to this place at least—it was lush with vegetation now that swarming humans no longer smothered its natural urge to be alive. Elms and oaks reached for the clouds with the same optimism of the maples and birches around Fresh Start, and the overgrown grasses were the greenest things I had seen in New York. And yet—in places the grass was dead, and there were dead bushes and shrubs scattered here and there. Perhaps first impressions were deceiving—perhaps a small parcel of land surrounded by an enormous concrete crypt was not a viable ecology after all. Then again, perhaps neither was Fresh Start.
I was getting depressed again.
I pocketed the grenade I still held and sat down on a park bench, telling myself that a rest would do wonders for my limp. After a time static bits of scenery moved—the place was alive. There were cats, and gaunt starved dogs of various breeds, apparently none old enough to know what a man was. I found their confidence refreshing—like I say, I’m a peaceful type assassin. Gregarious as hell.
I glanced about, wondering why so many of the comparatively few human skeletons here had been carrying weapons on the night of the Exodus—why go armed in a park? Then I heard a cough and looked around, and for a crazy second I thought I knew.
A leopard.
I recognized it from pictures in Dad’s books, and I knew what it was and what it could do. But my adrenaline system was tired of putting my gun in my fist—I sat perfectly still and concentrated on smelling friendly. My hand-weapon was designed for high temperature, not stopping-power; grenades are ineffective against a moving target; and I was leaning back against my rifle—but that isn’t why I sat still. I had learned that day that lashing out is not an optimum response to fear.
And so I took enough of a second look to realize that this leopard was incredibly ancient, hollow-bellied and claw-scarred, more noble than formidable. If wild game had been permitted to roam in Central Park, Dad would have told me—he knew my planned route. Yet this cat seemed old enough to predate the Exodus. I was certain he knew me for a man. I suppose he had escaped from a zoo in the confusion of the time, or perhaps he was some rich person’s pet. I understand they had such things in the Old Days. Seems to me a leopard’d be more trouble than an eagle—Dad kept one for four years and I never had so much grief over livestock before or since. Dad used to say it was the symbol of something great that had died, but I thought it was ornery.
This old cat seemed friendly enough, though, now that I noticed. He looked patriarchal and wise, and he looked awful hungry if it came to that. I made a gambler’s decision for no reason that I can name. Slipping off my rucksack slowly and deliberately, I got out a few foodtabs, took four steps toward the leopard and sat on my heels, holding out the tablets.
Instinct, memory or intuition, the big cat recognized my intent and loped my way without haste. Somehow the closer he got the less scared I got, until he was nuzzling my hand with a maw that could have amputated it. I know the foodtabs didn’t smell like anything, let alone food, but he understood in some empathic way what I was offering—or perhaps he felt the symbolic irony of two ancient antagonists, black man and leopard, meeting in New York City to share food. He ate them all, without nipping my fingers. His tongue was startlingly rough and rasping, but I didn’t flinch, or need to. When he was done he made a noise that was a cross between a cough and a snore and butted my leg with his head.
He was old, but powerful; I rocked backward and fell off my heels. I landed correctly, of course, but I didn’t get back up again. My strength left me and I lay there gazing at the underside of the park bench.
For the first time since I entered New York, I had communicated with a living thing and been answered in kind, and somehow that knowledge took my strength from me. I sprawled on the turf and waited for the ground to stop heaving, astonished to discover how weak I was and in how many places I hurt unbearably. I said some words that Collaci had taught me, and they helped some but not enough. The speed had worn off faster than it should have, and there was no more.
It looked like it was time for a smoke. I argued with myself as I reached overhead to get the first-aid kit from the rucksack, but I saw no alternative. Carlson was not a trained fighter, had never had a teacher like Collaci: I could take him buzzed. And I might not get to my feet any other way.
The joint I selected was needle-slender—more than a little cannabis would do me more harm than good. I had no mind to get wrecked in this city. I lit up with my coil lighter and took a deep lungful, held it as long as I could. Halfway through the second toke the leaves dancing overhead began to sparkle, and my weariness got harder to locate. By the third I knew of it only by hearsay, and the last hit began melting the pains of my body as warm water melts snow. Nature’s own analgesic, gift of the earth.
I started thinking about the leopard, who was lying down himself now, washing his haunches. He was magnificent in decay—something about his eyes said that he intended to live forever or die trying. He was the only one of his kind in his universe, and I could certainly identify with that—I’d always felt different from the other cats myself.
And yet—I was kin to those who had trapped him, caged him, exhibited him to the curious and then abandoned him to die half a world away from his home. Why wasn’t he trying to kill me? In his place I might have acted differently . . .
With the clarity of smoke-logic I followed the thought through. At one time the leopard’s ancestors had tried to kill mine, and eat them, and yet there was no reason for me to hate him. Killing him wouldn’t help my ancestors. Killing me would accomplish nothing for the leopard, make his existence no easier . . . except by a day’s meal, and I had given him that.
What then, I thought uneasily, will my killing Carlson accomplish? It could not put the Hyperosmic Virus back in the flask, nor save the life of any now living. Why come all this way to kill?
It was not, of course, a new thought. The question had arisen several times during my training in survival and combat. Collaci insisted on debating philosophy while he was working you over, and expected reply; he maintained that a man who couldn’t hold up his end of the conversation while fighting for his life would never make a really effective killer. You could pause for thought, but if he decided you were just hoarding your wind he stopped pulling his punches.
One day we had no special topic, and I voiced my self-doubts about the mission I was training for. What good, I asked Collaci, would killing Carlson do? Teach’ disengaged and stood back, breathing a little hard, and grinned his infrequent wolf’s grin.
"Survival has strange permutations, Isham. Revenge is a uniquely human attribute—somehow we find it easier to bury our dead when we have avenged them. We have many dead." He selected a toothpick, stuck it into his grin. "And for your father’s sake it has to be you who does it—only if his son provides his expiation can Dr. Stone grant himself absolution. Otherwise I’d go kill that silly bastard myself." And without warning, he had tried, unsuccessfully, to break my collarbone.
And so now I sat tired, hungry, wounded and a little stoned in the middle of an enormous island mausoleum, asking myself the question I had next asked Collaci, while trying—unsuccessfully—to cave in his rib cage: is it moral or ethical to kill a man?
Across the months, his answer came back: Perhaps not, but it is sometimes necessary.
And with that thought my strength came to me and I got to my feet. My thoughts were as slick as wet soap, within reach but skittering out of my grasp. I grabbed one from the tangle and welded it to me savagely: I will kill Wendell Morgan Carlson. It was enough.
And saying good-bye to the luckier leopard, who could never be hagridden by ancient ghosts, I left the park and continued on up Broadway, as alert and deadly as I knew how to be.
When I reached 114th Street, I looked above the rooftops, and there it was: a thin column of smoke north and a little east, toward Amsterdam Avenue. Legend and my father’s intuition had been right. Carlson was holed up where he had always felt most secure—the academic womb-bag of Columbia. I felt a grin pry my face open. It would all be over soon now, and I could go back to being me—whoever that was.
I left the rucksack under a station wagon and considered my situation. I had three tracers left in my Musky-killing handgun, three incendiary grenades clipped to my belt, and the scope-sighted sniper-rifle with which I planned to kill Carlson. The latter held a full clip of eight man-killing slugs—seven more than I needed. I checked the action and jacked a slug into the chamber.
There was a detailed map of the Morningside Campus in my pack but I didn’t bother to get it out—I had its twin brother in my head. Although neither Teach’ nor I had entirely shared Dad’s certainty that Carlson would be at Columbia, I had spent hours studying the campus maps he gave me as thoroughly as the New York City street maps that Collaci had provided. It seemed the only direct contribution Dad could make to my mission.
It looked as though his effort had paid off.
I wondered whether Carlson was expecting me. I wasn’t sure if the sound of the car I’d shot downtown could have traveled this far, nor whether an explosion in a city full of untended gas mains was unusual enough to put Carlson on his guard. Therefore I had to assume that it could have and it was. Other men had come to New York to deal with Carlson, as independents, and none had returned.
My mind was clicking efficiently now, all confusion gone. I was eager. A car-swiped lamppost leaned drunkenly against a building, and I briefly considered taking to the rooftops for maximum surprise factor. But rooftops are prime Musky territory, and besides I didn’t have strength for climbing.
I entered the campus at the southwest, though the 115th Street gate. As my father had predicted, it was locked—only the main gates at 116th had been left open at night in those days, and it was late at night when Carlson dropped his flask. But the lock was a simple Series 10 American that might have made Teach’ laugh out loud. I didn’t laugh out loud. It yielded to the second pick I tried, and I slipped through the barred iron gate without a sound—having thought to oil the hinges first.
A flight of steps led to a short flagstone walkway, gray speckled hexagons in mosaic, a waist-high wall on either side. The walkway ran between Furnald and Ferris Booth Halls and, I knew, opened onto the great inner quadrangle of Columbia. Leaves lay scattered all about, and trees of all kinds thrashed in the lusty afternoon breeze, their leaves a million green pinwheels.
I hugged the right wall until it abutted a taller perpendicular wall. Easing around that, I found myself before the great smashed glass and stone façade of Ferris Booth Hall, the student activities center, staring past it toward Butler Library, which I was seeing from the west side. There was a good deal of heavy construction equipment in the way—one of the many student groups that had occupied space in Booth had managed to blow up itself and a sizable portion of the building in 1983, and rebuilding had still been in progress on Exodus Day. A massive crane stood before the ruined structure, surrounded by stacks of brick and pipe, a bulldozer, storage shacks, a few trucks, a two-hundred-gallon gasoline tank and a pair of construction trailers.
But my eyes looked past all the conventional hardware to a curious device beyond them, directly in front of Butler Library and nearly hidden by overgrown hedges. I couldn’t have named it—it looked like an octopus making love to a console stereo—but it obviously didn’t come with the landscaping. Dad’s second intuition was also correct: Carlson was using Butler for his base of operations. God knew what the device was for, but a man without his adenoids in a city full of Muskies and hungry German shepherds would not have built it further from home than could be helped. This was the place.
I drew in a great chest- and belly-full of air, and my grin hurt my cheeks. I held up my rifle and watched my hands. Rock steady.
Carlson, you murdering bastard, I thought, this is it. The human race has found you, and its Hand is near. A few more breaths and you die violently, old man, like a harmless cat in a smokeshop window, like an eight-year-old boy on a Harlem sidewalk, like a planetwide civilization you thought you could improve on. Get you ready.
I moved forward.
Wendell Morgan Carlson stepped out between the big shattered lamps that bracketed Butler Hall’s front entrance. I saw him plainly in profile, features memorized from the Carlson Poster and my father’s sketches, recognizable in the afternoon light even through white beard and tangled hair. He glanced my way, flinched, and ducked back inside a split second ahead of my first shot.
Determined to nail him before he could reach a weapon and dig in, I put my head down and ran, flat out, for the greatest killer of all time.
And the first Musky struck.
Terror sleeted through my brain, driving out the rage, as something warm and intangible plastered itself across my face. I think I screamed then, but somehow I kept from inhaling as I fell and rolled, dropping the rifle and tearing uselessly at the thing on my face. The last thing I saw before invisible gases seared my vision was the huge crane beside me on the right, its long arm flung at the sky like a signpost to Heaven. Then the world shimmered and faded, and I clawed my pistol from its holster. I aimed without seeing, my finger spasmed, and the gun bucked in my hand.
The massive gasoline drum between me and the crane went up with a whoom, and I sobbed in relief as I heaved to my feet and dove headlong through the flames. The Musky’s dying projections tore at my mind and I rolled clear, searing my lungs with a convulsive inhalation as the Musky exploded behind me. Even as I smashed into the fender of the crane, my hindbrain screamed Muskies never travel alone! and before I knew what I was doing I tore loose my plugs to locate my enemy.
Foul stenches smashed my sanity, noxious odors wrenched at my reason, I was torn, blasted, overwhelmed in abominable ordure. The universe was offal, and the world I saw was remote and unreal. My eyes saw the campus, but told me nothing of the rank flavor of putrefaction that lay upon it. They saw sky, but spoke nothing of the reeking layers of indescribable decay of which it was made. Even allowing for a greenhouse effect it was much worse than it should have been after twenty years, just as legend had said. I tasted excrement, I tasted metal, I tasted the flavor of the world’s largest charnel house, population seven millions, and I writhed on the concrete. Forgotten childhood memories of the Exodus burst in my brain and reduced me to a screaming, whimpering child. I couldn’t stand it, it was unbearable, how had I walked, arrogant and unknowing, through this stinking hell all day?
And with that I thought I remembered why I had come here, and knew I could not join Izzy in the peaceful, fragrant dark. I could not let go—I had to kill Carlson before I let the blackness claim me. Courage flowed from God knows where, feeding on black hatred and the terrible fear that I would let my people down, let my father down. I stood up and inhaled sharply, through my nose.
The nightmare world sprang into focus and time came to a halt.
There were six Muskies, skittering about before Butler as they sought to bend the breezes to their will.
I had three hot-shot shells and three grenades.
One steadied, banked my way. I fired from the hip and he flared out of existence.
A second caught hold of a prevailing current and came in like an express train. Panic tore through my mind, and I laughed and aimed and the Musky went incandescent.
Two came in at once then, like balloons in slow motion. I extrapolated their courses, pulled two grenades and armed them with opposing thumbs, counted to four and hurled them together as Collaci had taught me, aiming for a spot just short of my target. They kissed at that spot and rebounded, each toward an oncoming Musky. But one grenade went up before the other, killing its Musky but knocking the other one safely clear. It shot past my ear as I threw myself sideways.
Three Muskies. One slug, one grenade.
The one that had been spared sailed around the crane in a wide, graceful arc and came in low and fast, rising for my face as one of its brothers attacked from my left. Cursing, I burned the latter and flipped backwards through a great trail of burning gas from the tank I’d spoiled. The Musky failed to check in time, shot suddenly skyward and burst spectacularly. I slammed against a stack of twelve-inch pipe and heard ribs crack.
One Musky. One grenade.
As I staggered erect, beating at my smouldering turtleneck, Carlson re-emerged from Butler, a curious helmet over his flowing white hair.
I no longer cared about the remaining Musky. Almost absentmindedly I tossed my last grenade in its direction to keep it occupied, but I knew I would have all the time I needed. Imminent death was now a side issue. I lunged and rolled, came up with the rifle in my hands and aimed for the O in Carlson’s scraggly white beard. Dimly I saw him plugging a wire from his helmet into the strange console-device, but it didn’t matter at all. My finger tightened on the trigger.
And then something smashed me on the side of the neck behind the ear, and my finger clenched, and the blackness that had been waiting patiently for oh! so long swarmed in and washed away the pain and the hate and the weariness and oh God the awful smell. . . .
Excerpts from the BUILDING OF FRESH START, by Jacob Stone, Ph.D., authorized version,
Fresh Start Press, 2001.
Although Fresh Start grew slowly and apparently randomly as personnel and materials became available, its development followed the basic outline of a master plan conceived within a year of the Exodus. Of course, I had not the training or experience to visualize specifics of my dream at that early stage—but the basic layout was inherent in the shape and the landscape and in the nature of the new world Carlson had made for us all.
Five years prior to the Exodus, a man named Gallipolis had acquired title, by devious means, to a logged out area some distance northwest of New York City. It was an isolated two-hundred-acre parcel of an extremely odd shape. Seen from the air it must have resembled an enormous pair of sunglasses: two valleys choking with new growth, separated physically by a great perpendicular extrusion of the eastern mountain range, almost to the western slopes, leaving the north and south valleys joined only by a narow channel. The perpendicular "nose" between the valley "lenses" was a tall, rocky ridge, sharply sloped on both sides, forming a perfect natural division. The land dropped gently away from the foot of this ridge in either direction, and dirt roads left by the loggers cut great loops through both valleys. The land was utterly unsuited for farming, and too many miles from nowhere for suburban development—it was what real estate brokers called "an investment in the future."
Gallipolis was a mad Greek. Mad Greeks in literature are invariably swarthy, undereducated, poor and drunk. Gallipolis was florid, superbly educated, moderately well-off and a teetotaler. He looked upon his valleys and he smiled a mad smile and decided to hell with the future. He had a serviceable road cut through the north forest past the lake, to a lonely stretch of state highway which fed into the nearby interstate. He brought bulldozers down this road and had six widely-spaced acres cleared west of the logging road loop in the north valley, and a seventh acre on the lakeshore for himself. On these sites he built large and extremely comfortable homes, masterpieces of design which combined an appearance of "roughing it" with every imaginable modern convenience. He piped in water from spring-fed streams high on the slopes of The Nose (as he had come to call the central ridge). He built beach houses along the lakeshore. It was his plan to lease the homes to wealthy men as weekend or summer homes at an exorbitant fee, and use the proceeds to develop three similar sites in both valleys. He envisioned an ultimate two or three dozen homes and an early retirement, but the only two things he ultimately achieved were to go broke before a single home had been leased and to drop dead.
A nephew inherited the land—and the staggering tax bill. He chanced to be a student of mine, and was aware that I was in the market for a weekend haven from the rigors of the city; he approached me. Although the place was an absurdly long drive from New York, I went up with him one Saturday, looked over the house nearest the lake, made him a firm offer of a quarter of his asking price, and closed the deal on the spot. It was a beautiful place. My wife and I became quite fond of it, and never missed an opportunity to steal a weekend there. Before long we had neighbors, but we seldom saw them, save occasionally at the lake. We had all come there for a bit of solitude, and it was quite a big lake—none of us were socially inclined.
It was for this wooded retreat that my family and I made in the horrible hours of the Exodus, and only by the grace of God did we make it. Certainly none of the other tenants did, then or ever, and it must be assumed that they perished. Sarwar Krishnamurti, a chemist at Columbia who had been an occasional weekend guest at Stone Manor, remembered the place in his time of need and showed up almost at once, with his family. He was followed a few days later by George Dalhousie, a friend of mine from the Engineering Department to whom I had once given directions to the place.
We made them as welcome as we could under the circumstances—my wife was in a virtual state of shock from the loss of our eldest son, and none of us were in much better shape. I know we three men found enormous comfort in each other’s presence, in having other men of science with whom to share our horror, our astonishment, our guesses and our grim extrapolations. It kept us sane, kept our minds on practical matters, on survival; for had we been alone, we might have succumbed, as did so many, to a numb, traumatized disinterest in living.
Instead, we survived the winter that came, the one that killed so many, and by spring we had laid our plans.
We made occasional abortive forays into the outside world, gathering information from wandering survivors. All media save rumor had perished; even my international-band radio was silent. On these expeditions we were always careful to conceal the existence and location of our home base, pretending to be as disorganized and homeless as the aimless drifters we continually encountered. We came to know every surviving farmer in the surrounding area, and established friendly relations with them by working for them in exchange for food. Like all men, we avoided areas of previous urbanization, for nose plugs were inferior in those days, and Muskies were omnipresent and terrifying. In fact, rumor claimed, they tended to cluster in cities and towns.
But that first spring, we conquered our fear and revulsion with great difficulty and began raiding small towns and industrial parks with a borrowed wagon. We found that rumor had been correct: urban areas were crawling with Muskies. But we needed tools and equipment of all kinds and descriptions, badly enough to risk our lives repeatedly for them. It went slowly, but Dalhousie had his priorities right, and soon we were ready.
We opened our first factory that spring, on a hand-cleared site in the south valley (which we christened "Southtown"). Our first product had been given careful thought, and we chose well—if for the wrong reasons. We anticipated difficulty in convincing people to buy goods from us with barter, when they could just as easily have scavenged from the abandoned urban areas. In fact, one of our central reasons for founding Fresh Start had been the conviction that the lice on a corpse are not a going concern: we did not want our brother survivors to remain dependent on a finite supply of tools, equipment and processed food. If we could risk Musky attack, so could others.
Consequently we selected as our first product an item unobtainable anywhere else, and utterly necessary in the changed world: effective nose plugs. I suggested them; Krishnamurti designed them and the primitive assembly line on which they were first turned out, and Dalhousie directed us all in their construction. All of us, men and women, worked on the line. It took us several months to achieve success, and by that time we were our own best customers—our factory smelled most abominable. Which we had expected, and planned for: the whole concept of Fresh Start rested on the single crucial fact that prevailing winds were virtually always from the north. On the rare occasions when the wind backed, the Nose formed a satisfactory natural barrier.
Once we were ready to offer our plugs for sale, we began advertising and recruiting on a large scale. Word of our plans was circulated by word of mouth, mimeographed flyer and shortwave broadcast. The only person who responded by the onset of winter was Helen Phinny, but her arrival was providential, freeing us almost overnight from dependence on stinking gasoline-powered generators for power. She was then and is now Fresh Start’s only resident world-class genius, a recognized expert on what were then called "alternative" power sources—the only ones Carlson had left us. She quite naturally became a part of the planning process, as well as a warm friend of us all. Within a short time the malodorous generators had been replaced by water power from the streams that cascade like copious tears from the "bridge" of The Nose, and ultimately by methane gas and wind power from a series of "eggbeater" type windmills strung along The Nose itself. In recent years the generators have been put back on the line, largely for industrial use—but they no longer burn gasoline, nor does the single truck we have restored to service. Thanks to Phinney, they burn pure grain alcohol which we distill ourselves from field corn and rye, which works more efficiently than gasoline and produces only water and carbon dioxide as exhaust. (Pre-Exodus man could have used the same fuel in most of his internal combustion engines—but once Henry Ford made his choice, the industry he incidentally created tended of course to perpetuate itself.)
This then was the Council of Fresh Start, assembled by fate; myself, a dreamer, racked with guilt and seeking a truly worthwhile penance, trying to salvage some of the world I’d helped ruin. Krishnamurti, utterly practical wizard at both requirements analysis and design engineering, translator of ideas into plans. Dalhousie, the ultimate foreman, gifted at reducing any project to its component parts and accomplishing them with minimum time and effort. Phinney, the energy provider, devoted to drawing free power from the natural processes of the universe. Our personalities blended as well as our skills, and by that second spring we were a unit: the Council. I would suggest a thing, Krishnamurti would design the black box, Dalhousie would build it and Phinney would throw power to it. We fit. Together we felt useful again, more than scavenging survivors.
No other recruits arrived during the winter, which like the one before was unusually harsh for that part of the world (perhaps owing to the sudden drastic decline in the worldwide production of waste heat), but by spring volunteers began arriving in droves. We got all kinds: scientists, technicians, students, mechanics, handymen, construction workers, factory hands, a random assortment of men seeking civilized work. A colony of canvas tents grew in Northtown, in cleared areas we hoped would one day hold great dormitories. Our initial efforts that summer were aimed at providing water, power and sewage systems for our growing community, and enlarging our nose plug factory. A combination smithy-repair-shop-motor-pool grew of its own accord next to the factory in Southtown, and we began bartering repair work for food with local farmers to the east and northwest.
By common consent, all food, tools and other resources were shared equally by all members of the community, with the single exception of mad Gallipolis’s summer homes. We the council members retained these homes, and have never been begrudged them by our followers (two of the homes were incomplete at the time of the Exodus, and remained so for another few years). That aside, all the inhabitants of Fresh Start stand or fall, eat or starve together. The Council’s authority as governing committee has never in all the ensuing years been either confirmed or seriously challenged. The nearly one hundred technicians who have by now assembled to our call continue to follow our advice because it works: because it gives their lives direction and meaning, because it makes their hard-won skills useful again, because it pays them well to do what they do best, and thought they might never do again.
During that second summer we were frequently attacked by Muskies, invariably (of course) from the north, and suffered significant losses. For instance, Samuel Pegorski, the young hydraulic engineering major who with Phinney designed and perfected our plumbing and sewage systems, was cut down by the windriders before he lived to hear the first toilet flush in Northtown.
But with the timely arrival of Phillip Collaci, an ex-marine and former police chief from Pennsylvania, our security problems disappeared. A preternaturally effective fighting man, Collaci undertook to recruit, organize and train The Guard, comprising enough armed men to keep the northern perimeter of Fresh Start patrolled at all times. At first, these Guards did no more than sound an alarm if they smelled Muskies coming across the lake, whereupon all hands made for the nearest shelter and tried to blank their minds to the semitelepathic creatures.
But Collaci was not satisfied. He wanted an offensive weapon—or, failing that, a defense better than flight. He told me as much several times, and finally I put aside administrative worries and went to work on the problem from a biochecmical standpoint.
It seemed to me that extreme heat should work, but the problem was to devise a delivery system. Early experiments with a salvaged flamethrower were unsatisfactory—the cone of the fire tended to brush Muskies out of its path instead of consuming them. Collaci suggested a line of alcohol-burning jets along the north perimeter, ready to guard Fresh Start with a wall of flame, an idea which has since been implemented—but at the time we could not spare the corn or rye to make the alcohol to power the jets. Finally, weeks of research led to the successful development of "hot-shot"—ammunition which could be fired from any existing heavy-caliber weapon after its barrel had been replaced, that would ignite as it cleared the modified barrel and generate enormous heat as it flew, punching through any Musky it encountered and destroying it instantly. An early mixture of magnesium and perchlorate of potash has since given way to an even slower-burning mix of aluminum powder and potassium permanganate which will probably remain standard until the last Musky has been slain (long-range plans for long-range artillery shot will have to wait until we can find a good cheap source of cerium, zirconium or thorium—unlikely in the near future). Hot-shot’s effective range approximates that of a man’s nose on a still day—good enough for personal combat. This turned out to be the single most important advance since the Exodus, not only for mankind, but for the fledging community of Fresh Start.
Because our only major misjudgement had been the climate of social opinion in which we expected to find ourselves. I said earlier that we feared people would scavenge from cities rather than buy from us, even in the face of terrible danger from the Muskies who prowled the urban skies. This turned out not to be the case.
Mostly, people preferred to do without.
Secure in our retreat, we had misjudged the zeitgeist, the mind of the common man. It was Collaci, fresh from over a year of wandering up and down the desolate eastern seaboard, who showed us our error. He made us realize that Lot was probably more eager to return to Gomorrah than the average human was to return to his cities and suburbs. Cities had been the scenes of the greatest racial trauma since The Flood, the places where friends and loved ones had died horribly and the skies had filled with Muskies. The Exodus and the subsequent weeks of horror were universally seen as the Hammer of God falling on the idea of city itself, and hard-core urbanites who might have debated the point were mostly too dead to do so. The back-to-nature movement, already in full swing at the moment when Carlson dropped the flask, took on the stature and fervor of a Dionysian religion.
Fortunately, Collaci made us see in time that we would inevitably share in the superstition and hatred accorded to cities, become associated in the common mind with the evil-smelling steel-and-glass behemoth from which men had been so conclusively vomited. He made us realize something of the extent of the suspicion and intolerance we would incur—not ignored for our redundance, but loathed for our repugnance.
At Collaci’s suggestion Krishnamurti enlisted the aid of some of the more substantial farmers in neighboring regions to the east, northeast and northwest. He negotiated agreements by which farmers who supported us with food received preferential access to Musky-killing ammunition, equipment maintenance and, one day (he promised), commercial power. I could never have sold the idea myself—while I have always understood public relations well from the theoretical standpoint, I have never been very successful in interpersonal diplomacy—at least, with non-technicals. The dour Krishnamurti might have seemed an even more unlikely choice—but his utter practicality convinced many a skeptical farmer where charm might have failed.
Krishnamurti’s negotiations not only assured us a dependable supply of food (and incidentally, milled lumber), it had the invaluable secondary effect of gaining us psychological allies, non-Technos who were economically and emotionally committed to us.
Work progressed rapidly once our recruiting efforts began to pay off, and by our fifth year the Fresh Start of today was visible, at least in skeleton form. We had cut interior roads to supplement the northern and southern loops left by gyppo loggers two decades before; three dormitories were up and a fourth a-building; our "General Store" was a growing commercial concern; a line of windmills was taking shape along the central ridge of The Nose; our sewage plant/methane converter was nearly completed; plans were underway to establish a hospital and to blast a tunnel through The Nose to link North- and South-towns; "The Tool Shed," the depot which housed irreplaceable equipment and tools, was nearly full; and Southtown was more malodorous than ever, with a large fuel distillery, a chemistry lab, a primitive foundry, and glass blowing, match-making and weaving operations adjoining the hot-shot and nose-plug factories.
Despite these outward signs of prosperity, we led a precarious existence—there was strong public sentiment in favor of burning us to the ground, at least among the surviving humans who remained landless nomads. To combat this we were running and distributing a small mimeographed newspaper, Got News, and maintaining radio station WFS (then and now the only one in the world). In addition Krishnamurti and I made endless public relations trips for miles in every direction to explain our existence and purpose to groups and individuals.
But there were many who had no land, no homes, no families, nothing but a vast heritage of bitterness. These were the precursors of today’s so-called Agro Party. Surviving where and as they could, socialized for an environment that no longer existed, they hated us for reminding them of the technological womb which had unforgivably thrust them out. They raided us, singly and in loosely-organized groups, often with unreasonable, suicidal fury. From humanitarian concerns as much as from public relations considerations, I sharply restrained Guard Chief Collaci, whose own inclination was to shoot any saboteur he apprehended—wherever possible they were captured and turned loose outside city limits. Collaci argued strongly for deterrent violence, but I was determined to show our neighbors that Fresh Start bore ill will to no man, and overruled him.
In that fifth year, however, I was myself overruled.
". . . and when I came to, Carlson was dead with a slug through the head and the last Musky was nowhere in smell. So I reset my plugs, found the campfire behind the hedges and ate his supper, and then left the next morning. I found a Healer in Jersey. That’s all there is, Dad."
My father chewed the pipe he had not smoked in eighteen years and stared into the fire. Dry poplar and green birch together produced a steady blaze that warmed the spacious living room and peopled it with leaping shadows.
"Then it’s over," he said at last, and heaved a great sigh.
"Yes, Dad. It’s over."
He was silent, his coal-black features impassive, for a long time. Firelight danced among the valleys and crevices of his patriarch’s face, and across the sharp scar on his left cheek (so like the one I now bore). His eyes glittered like rainy midnight. I wondered what he was thinking, after all these years and all that he had seen.
"Isham," he said at last, "you have done well."
"Have I, Dad?"
"Eh?"
"I just can’t seem to get it straight in my mind. I guess I expected tangling with Carlson to be a kind of solution, to some things that have been bugging me all my life. Somehow I expected pulling that trigger to bring me peace. Instead I’m more confused than ever. Surely you can smell unease, Dad? Or are your plugs still in again?" Dad used the best plugs in Fresh Start, entirely internal, and he perpetually forgot to remove them after work. Even those who loved him agreed he was the picture of the absentminded professor.
"No," he said hesitantly. "I can smell that you are uneasy, but I can’t smell why. You must tell me, Isham."
"It’s not easy to explain, Dad. I can’t seem to find the words. Look, I wrote out a kind of journal of events in Jersey, while the Healer was working on me, and afterwards while I rested up. It’s the same story I just told you, but somehow on paper I think it conveys more of what’s bothering me. Will you read it?"
He nodded. "If you wish."
I gave my father all the preceding manuscript, right up to the moment I pulled the trigger and blacked out, and brought him his glasses. He read it slowly and carefully, pausing now and again to gaze distantly into the flames. While he read, I unobtrusively fed the fire and immersed myself in the familiar smells of woodsmoke and ink and chemicals and the pines outside, all the thousand indefinable scents that tried to tell me I was home.
When Dad was done reading, he closed his eyes and nodded slowly for a time. Then he turned to me and regarded me with troubled eyes. "You’ve left out the ending," he said.
"Because I’m not sure how I feel about it."
He steepled his fingers. "What is it that troubles you, Isham?"
"Dad," I said earnestly, "Carlson is the first man I ever killed. That’s . . . not a small thing. As it happens I didn’t actually see my bullet blow off the back of his skull, and sometimes it’s hard to believe in my gut that I really did it—I know it seemed unreal when I saw him afterward. But in fact I have killed a man. And as you just read, that may be necessary sometimes, but I’m not sure it’s right. I know all that Carlson did, to us Stones and to the world, I know the guilt he bore. But I must ask you: Dad, was I right to kill him? Did he deserve to die?"
He came to me then and gripped my shoulder, and we stood like black iron statues before the raving fire. He locked eyes with me. "Perhaps you should ask your mother, Isham. Or your brother Israfel. Perhaps you should have asked the people whose remains you stepped over to kill Carlson. I do not know what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’; they are slippery terms to define. I only know what is. And revenge, as Collaci told you, is a uniquely human atribute.
"Superstitious Agro guerillas used to raid us from time to time, and because we were reluctant to fire on them they got away with it. Then one day in our fifth year they captured Collaci’s wife, not knowing she was diabetic. By the time he caught up with them she was dead of lack of insulin. Within seven days, every guerilla in that raiding party had died, and Fresh Start has not been raided in all the years since, for all Jordan’s rhetoric. Ask Collaci about vengeance."
"But Jordan’s Agros hate us more than ever."
"But they buy our axheads and wheels, our sulfa and our cloth, just like their more sensible neighbors, and they leave us alone. Carlson’s death will be an eternal warning to any who would impose their values on the world at large, and an eternal comfort to those who were robbed by him of the best of their lives—of their homes and their loved ones.
"Isham, you . . . did . . . right. Don’t ever think differently, son. You did right, and I am deeply proud of you. Your mother and Israfel are resting easier now, and millions more too. I know that I will sleep easier tonight than I have in eighteen years."
That’s right, Dad, you will. I relaxed. "All right, Dad. I guess you’re right. I just wanted to hear someone tell me besides myself. I wanted you to tell me." He smiled and nodded and sat down again, and I left him there, an old man lost in his thoughts.
I went to the bathroom and closed the door behind me, glad that restored plumbing had been one of Fresh Start’s first priorities to be realized. I spent a few minutes assembling some items I had brought back from New York City, and removing the back of the septic tank behind the toilet bowl. Then I flushed the toilet.
Reaching into the tank I grabbed the gravity ball and flexed it horizontal so that the tank would not refill with water. Holding it in place awkwardly, I made a long arm and picked up the large bottle of chlorine bleach I had fetched from the city. As an irreplaceable relic of Civilization it was priceless—and utterly useless to modern man. I slipped my plugs into place and filled the tank with bleach, replacing the porcelain cover silently but leaving it slightly ajar. I bent again and grabbed a large canister—also a valuable but useless antique—of bathroom bowl cleaner. It was labeled "Vanish," and I hoped the label was prophetic. I poured the entire canister into the bowl.
Hang the expense, I thought, and giggled insanely.
Then I put the cover down on the seat, hid the bleach and bowl cleaner and left, whistling softly through my teeth.
I felt good, better than I had since I left New York.
I walked through inky dark to the lake, and I sat among the pines by the shore, flinging stones at the water, trying to make them skip. I couldn’t seem to get it right. I was used to the balancing effect of a left arm. I rubbed my stump ruefully and lay back and just thought for awhile. I had lied to my father—it was not over. But it would be soon.
Right or wrong, I thought, removing my plugs and lighting a joint, it sure can be necessary.
Moonlight shattered on the branches overhead and lay in shards on the ground. I breathed deep of the cool darkness, tasted pot and woods and distant animals and the good crisp scents of a balanced ecology, heard the faraway hum of wind-generators storing power for the work yet to be done. And I thought of a man gone mad with a dream of a better, simpler world; a man who, Heaven help him, meant well. And I thought of the tape recording I planned to leave behind me, explaining what I had done to The Council and the world.
Transcript of a Tape Recording Made by Isham Stone (Fresh Start Judicial Archives)
I might as well address this tape to you, Collaci—I’ll bet my Musky-gun that you’re the first one to notice and play it. I hope you’ll listen to it as well, but that might be too much to ask, the first time around. Just keep playing it.
The story goes back a couple of months, to when I was in the city. By now you’ve no doubt found my journal, with its account of my day in New York, and you’ve probably noticed the missing ending. Well, there are two endings to that story. There’s the ending I told my father, and then there’s the one you’re about to hear. The true one.
I drifted in the darkness for a thousand years, helpless as a Musky in a hurricane, caroming off the inside of my skull. Memories swept by like drifting blimps, and I clutched at them as I sailed past, but the ones tangible enough to grasp burned my fingers. Vaguely, I sensed distant daylight on either side, decided those must be my ears and tried to steer for the right one, which seemed a bit closer. I singed my arm banking off an adolescent trauma, but it did the trick—I sailed out into daylight and landed on my face with a hell of a crash. I thought about getting up, but I couldn’t remember whether I’d brought my legs with me, and they weren’t talking. My arm hurt even more than my face, and something stank.
"Help?" I suggested faintly, and a pair of hands got me by the armpits. I rose in the air and closed my eyes against a sudden wave of vertigo. When it passed, I decided I was on my back in the bed I had just contrived to fall out of. High in my chest, a dull but insistent pain advised me to breathe shallowly.
I’ll be damned, I thought weakly. Collaci must have come along to back me up without telling me. Canny old son of a bitch, I should have thought to pick him up some toothpicks.
"Hey, Teach’." I croaked, and opened my eyes.
Wendell Morgan Carlson leaned over me, concern in his gaze.
Curiously enough, I didn’t try to reach up and crush his larynx. I closed my eyes, relaxed all over, counted to ten very slowly, shook my head to clear it and opened my eyes again. Carlson was still there.
Then I tried to reach up and crush his larynx. I failed, of course, not so much because I was too weak to reach his larynx as because only one arm even acknowledged the command. My brain said that my left arm was straining upwards for Carlson’s throat, and complaining like hell about it too, but I didn’t see the arm anywhere. I looked down and saw the neatly bandaged stump and lifted it up absently to see if my arm was underneath it and it wasn’t. It dawned on me then that the stump was all the left arm I was ever going to find, and whacko: I was back inside my skull, safe in the friendly dark, ricocheting off smouldering recollections again.
The second time I woke up was completely different. One minute I was wrestling with a phantom, and then a switch was thrown and I was lucid. Play for time was my first thought, the tactical situation sucks. I opened my eyes.
Carlson was nowhere in sight. Or smell—but then my plugs were back in place.
I looked around the room. It was a room. Four walls, ceiling, floor, the bed I was in and assorted ugly furniture. Not a weapon in sight, nor anything I could make one from. A look out the window in the opposite wall confirmed my guess that I was in Butler Hall, apparently on the ground floor, not far from the main entrance. The great curved dome of Low "Library" was nearly centered in the windowframe, its great stone steps partly obscured by overgrown shrubbery in front of Butler. The shadows said it was morning, getting on toward noon. I closed my eyes, firmly.
Next I took stock of myself. My head throbbed a good deal, but it was easily drowned out by the ache in my chest. Unquestionably some ribs had broken, and it felt as through the ends were mismatched. But as near as I could tell the lung was intact—it didn’t hurt more when I inhaled. Not much more, anyway. My legs both moved when I asked them to, with a minimum of backtalk, and the ankles appeared sound. No need to open my eyes again, was there?
I stopped the inventory for a moment. In the back of my skull a clawed lizard yammered for release, and I devoted a few minutes to reinforcing the walls of its prison. When I could no longer hear the shrieking, I switched on my eyes again and quite dispassionately considered the stump on my left arm.
It looked like a good, clean job. The placement of the cut said it was a surgical procedure—it seemed as though the gangrene had been beaten. Oh fine, I thought, a benevolent madman I have to kill. Then I was ashamed. My mother had been benevolent, as I remembered her; and Israfel never got much chance to be anything. All men knew Carlson’s intentions had been good. I could kill him with one hand.
I wondered where he was.
A fly buzzed mournfully around the room. Hedges rustled outside the window, and somewhere birds sang, breathless trills that hung sparkling on the morning air. It was a beautiful day, just warm enough to be comfortable, no clouds evident, just enough breeze and the best part of the day was yet to come. It made me want to do go down by the stream and poke frogs with a stick, or go pick strawberries for Mr. Fletcher, red-stained hands and a bellyful of sweet and the trots next morning. It was a great day for an assassination.
I thought about it, considered the possibilities. Carlson was . . . somewhere. I was weaker than a Musky in a pressure cooker and my most basic armament was down by twenty-five percent. I was on unfamiliar territory, and the only objects in the room meaty enough to constitute weaponry were too heavy for me to lift. Break the windowpane and acquire a knife? How would I hold it? My sneakers were in sight across the room, under a chair holding the rest of my clothes, and I wondered if I could hide behind the door until Carlson entered, then strangle him with the laces.
I brought up short. How was I going to strangle Carlson with one hand?
Things swam then for a bit, as I got the first of an endless series of flashes of just how drastically my life was altered now by the loss of my arm. You’ll never use a chainsaw again, or a shovel, or a catcher’s mitt, or . . .
I buried the lizard again and forced myself to concentrate. Perhaps I could fashion a noose from my sneaker laces. With one hand? Could I? Maybe if I fastened one end of the lace to something, then looped the other end around his neck and pulled? I needn’t be strong, it could be arranged so that my weight did the killing. . . .
Just in that one little instant I think I decided not to die, decided to keep on living with one arm, and the question never really arose in my mind again. I was too busy to despair, and by the time I could afford to—much later—the urge was gone.
All of my tentative plans, therapeutic as they were, hinged on one important question: could I stand up? It seemed essential to find out.
Until then I had moved only my eyes—now I tried to sit up. It was no harder than juggling bulldozers, and I managed to cut the scream down to an explosive, "Uh huh!" My ribs felt like glass, broken glass ripping through the muscle sheathing and pleural tissue. Sweat broke out on my forehead and I fought down dizziness and nausea, savagely commanding my body to obey me like a desperate rider digging spurs into a dying horse. I locked my right arm behind me and leaned on it, swaying but upright, and waited for the room to stop spinning. I spent the time counting to one thousand by eighths. Finally it stopped, leaving me with the feeling that a stiff breeze could start it spinning again.
All right then. Let’s get this show on the road, Stone. I swung a leg over the side of the bed, discovered with relief that my foot reached the floor. That would make it easier to balance upright on the edge of the bed before attempting to stand. Before I could lose my nerve I swung the other leg over, pushed off with my arm, and was sitting upright. The floor was an incredible distance below—had I really fallen that far and lived? Perhaps I should just wait for Carlson to return, get him to come close and sink my teeth into his jugular.
I stood up.
A staggering crescendo in the symphony of pain, ribs still carrying the melody. I locked my knees and tottered, moaning piteously like a kitten trapped on a cornice. It was the closest I could come to stealthy silence, and all things considered it was pretty damn close. My right shoulder was discernibly heavier than the left one, and it played hob with my balance. The floor, which had been steadily receding, was now so far away I stopped worrying about it—surely there would be time for the ’chute to open.
Well then, why not try a step or two?
My left leg was as light as a helium balloon—once peeled off the floor it tried to head for the ceiling, and it took an enormous effort to force it down again. The right leg fared no better. Then the room started spinning again, just as I’d feared, and it was suddenly impossible to keep either leg beneath my body, which began losing altitude rapidly. The ’chute didn’t open. There was a jarring crash, and a ghastly bounce. Many pretty lights appeared, and one of the screams fenced in behind closed teeth managed to break loose. The pretty lights gave way to flaking ceiling, and the ceiling gave way to blackness. I remembered a line from an old song Doctor Mike used to sing, something about ". . . roadmaps in a well-cracked ceiling . . ." and wished I’d had time to read the map. . . .
I came out of it almost at once, I think. It felt as though the room was still spinning, but I was now spinning with it at the same velocity. By great good fortune I had toppled backward, across the bed. I took a tentative breath, and it still felt like my lung was intact. I was drenched with sweat, and I seemed to be lying on someone’s rock collection.
Okay, I decided, if you’re too weak to kill Carlson now, pretend you’re even weaker. Get back under the sheets and play dead, until your position improves. Isham Machiavelli, that’s me. You’d’ve been proud of me, Teach’.
The rock collection turned out to be wrinkled sheets. Getting turned around and back to where I’d started was easier than reeling a whale into a rowboat, and I had enough strength to arrange the sheets plausibly before all my muscles turned into peanut butter. Then I just lay there breathing as shallowly as I could manage, wondering why my left . . . why my stump didn’t seem to hurt enough. I hated to look a gift horse in the mouth; the psychological burden was quite heavy enough, thanks. But it made me uneasy.
I began composing a square-dance tune in time to the throbbing of my ribs. The room reeled to it, slightly out of synch at first but then so rhythmically that it actually seemed to stumble when the snare-drummer out in the hall muffed a paradiddle. The music stopped, but the drummer staggered on off-rhythm, faint at first but getting louder. Footsteps.
It had to be Carlson.
He was making a hell of a racket. Feverishly I envisioned him dragging a bazooka into the room and lining it up on me. Crazy. A flyswatter would have more than sufficed. But what the hell was he carrying then?
The answer came through the doorway: a large carton filled with things that clanked and rattled. Close behind it came Wendell Morgan Carlson himself, and it was as well that the square-dance music had stopped—the acceleration of my pulse would have made the tune undanceable. My nostrils tried to flare around the plugs, and the hair on the back of my neck might have bristled in atavistic reflex if there hadn’t been a thousand pounds of head lying on it.
The Enemy!
He had no weapons visible. He looked much older than his picture on the Carlson Poster—but the craggy brow, thin pinched nose and high cheeks were unmistakable, even if the lantern jaw was obscured by an inordinate amount of gray beard. He was a bit taller than I had pictured him, with more hair and narrower shoulders. I hadn’t expected the pot belly. He wore baggy jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, both ineptly patched here and there, and a pair of black sandals.
His face held more intelligence than I like in an antagonist—he would not be easy to fool. Wendell who? Never heard of him. Just got back from Pellucidar myself, and I was wondering if you could tell me where all the people went? Sorry I took a shot at you, and oh, yeah, thanks for cutting off my arm; you’re a brick.
He put the carton down on an ancient brown desk, crushing a faded photograph of someone’s children, turned at once to meet my gaze and said an incredible thing.
"I’m sorry I woke you."
I don’t know what I’d expected. But in the few fevered moments I’d had to prepare myself for this moment, my first exchange of words with Wendell Morgan Carlson, I had never imagined such an opening gambit. I had no riposte prepared.
"You’re welcome," I croaked insanely, and tried to smile. Whatever it was I actually did seemed to upset him; his face took on that look of concern I had glimpsed once before—when? Yesterday? How long had I been here?
"I’m glad you are awake," he went on obligingly. "You’ve been unconscious for nearly a week." No wonder I felt constructed-of-inferior-materials. I decided I must be a pretty tough mothafucka. It was nice to know I wasn’t copping out.
"What’s in the box?" I asked, with a little less fuzz-tone.
"Box?" He looked down. "Oh yes, I thought . . . you see, it’s intravenous feeding equipment. I studied the literature, and I . . ." he trailed off. His voice was a reedy but pleasant alto, with rustling brass edges. He appeared unfamiliar with its use.
"You were going to . . ." An ice cube formed in my bowels. Needle into sleeping arm, suck my life from a tube; have a hit of old Isham. Steady boy, steady.
"Perhaps it might still be a good idea," he mused. "All I have to offer you at the moment is bread and milk. Not real milk of course . . . but then you could have honey with the bread. I suppose that’s as good as glucose."
"Fine with me, Doctor," I said hastily. "I have a thing about needles." And other sharp instruments. "But where do you get your honey?"
He frowned quizzically. "How did you know I have a Ph.D.?"
Think quick. "I didn’t. I assumed you were a Healer. It was you who amputated my arm?" I kept my voice even.
His frown deepened, a striking expression on that craggy face. "Young man," he said reluctantly, "I have no formal medical training of any sort. Perhaps your arm could have stayed on—but it seemed to me . . ." He was, to my astonishment, mortally embarrassed.
"Doctor, it needed extensive cutting the last time I saw it, and I’m sure it got worse while I was under. Don’t . . . worry about it. I’m sure you did the best you could." If he was inclined to forget my attempt to blow his head off, who was I to hold a grudge? Let bygones be bygones—I didn’t need a new reason to kill him.
"I read all I could find on field amputation," he went on, still apologetic, "but of course I’d never done one before." On anything smaller than a race. I assured him that it looked to me like a textbook job. It was inexpressibly weird to have this man seek my pardon for saving my life when I planned to take his at the earliest possible opportunity. It upset me, made me irritable. My wounds provided a convenient distraction, and I moved enough to justify a moan.
Carlson was instantly solicitous. From his cardboard carton he produced a paper package which, torn open, revealed a plastic syringe. Taking a stoppered jar from the carton, he drew off a small amount of clear fluid.
"What’s that?" I said, trying to keep the suspicion from my voice.
"Demerol."
I shook my head. "No, thanks, Doc. I told you I don’t like needles."
He nodded, put down the spike and took another object from the carton. "Here’s oral Demerol, then. I’ll leave it where you can reach it." He put it on a bedside table. I picked up the jar, gave it a quick glance. It said it was Demerol. I could not break the seal around the cap with one hand—Carlson had to open it for me. Thank you, my enemy. Weird, weird, weird! I palmed a pill, pretending to swallow it. He looked satisfied.
"Thanks, Doc."
"Please don’t call me ‘Doc,’ " he asked. "My name is Wendell Carlson."
If he was expecting a reaction, he was disappointed. "Sure thing, Wendell. I’m Tony Latimer. Pleased to meet you." It was the first name that entered my head.
There was a lull in the conversation. We studied each other with the frank curiosity of men who have not known human company for a while. At last he looked embarrassed again and tore his gaze from mine. "I’d better see about that food. You must be terribly hungry."
I thought about it. It seemed to me that I could put away a quarter-horse. Raw. With my fingers. "I could eat."
Carlson left the room, looking at his sandals.
I thought of loading the hypo with an overdose and ambushing him when he returned, but it was just a thought. That hypo was mighty far away. I returned my attention to the jar on the table. It still said it was Demerol—and it had been sealed, with white plastic. But Carlson could have soaked off and replaced a skull-and-crossbones label—I decided to live with the pain awhile longer.
It seemed like a long time before he returned, but my time-sense was not too reliable. He fetched a half-loaf of brown bread, a mason jar of soymilk and some thick, crystallized honey. They say that smell is essential to taste, and I couldn’t unplug, but it tasted better than food ever had before.
"You never told me where you get honey, Wendell."
"I have a small hive down in Central Park. Only a few supers, but adequate for my needs. Wintering the bees is quite a trick, but I manage."
"I’ll bet it is." Small talk in the slaughterhouse. I ate what he gave me and drank soymilk until I was full. My body still hurt, but not as much.
We talked for about half an hour, mostly inconsequentialities, and it seemed that a tension grew up between us, because of the very inconsequentiality of our words. There were things of which we did not speak, of which innocent men should have spoken. In my dazed condition I could concoct no plausible explanation for my presence in New York, nor for the shot I had fired at him. Somehow he accepted this, but in return I was not to ask him how he came to be living in New York City. I was not supposed to have any idea who Wendell Morgan Carlson was. It was an absurd bargain, a truth-level impossible to maintain, but it suited both of us. I couldn’t imagine what he thought of my own conversational omissions, but I was convinced that his silence was an admission of guilt, and my resolve was firmed. He left me at last, advising me to sleep if I could and promising to return the next day.
I didn’t sleep. Not at first. I lay there looking at the Demerol bottle for a hundred years, explaining to myself how unlikely it was that the bottle wasn’t genuine. I could not help it—hatred and distrust of Carlson were ingrained in me.
But enough pain will break through the strongest conditioning. About sundown I ate the pill I’d palmed, and in a very short time I was unconscious.
The next few days passed slowly.
Whoops—I’m out of tape. Time to flip over the re—
Stone Tape Transcript, Side Two
The days passed slowly, but not so slowly as the pain. Lucidity returned slowly, but no faster than physical strength.
You’ve got to understand how it was, Teach’.
The Demerol helped—but not by killing the pain. What it did was keep me so stoned that I often forgot the pain was there. In a warm, creative glow I would devise a splendidly subtle and poetic means of Killing Carlson—then half an hour later the same plan would seem hopelessly crackbrained. An imperfection of the glass in the window across the room, warping the clean proud line of Low Dome, held me fascinated for hours—yet I could not seem to concentrate for five minutes on practical matters.
Carlson came and went, asking few questions and answering fewer, and in my stupor I tried to fire my hate to the killing point, and—Collaci, my instructor and mentor and (I hope) friend—I failed.
You must understand me—I spent hours trying to focus on the hatred my father had passed on to me, to live up to the geas that fate had laid on me, to do my duty. But it was damned hard work. Carlson was an absurd combination: so absentminded as to remind me of Dad—and as thoughtful, in his way, as you. He would forget his coat when he left at night—but be back on time with a hot breakfast, shivering and failing to notice. He would forget my name, but never my chamberpot. He would search, blinking, in all directions for the coffee cup that sat perched on his lap, but he never failed to put mine where I could reach it without strain on my ribs. I discovered quite by accident that I slept in the only bed Carlson had ever hauled into Butler, that he himself dossed on a makeshift bed out in the hall, so as to be near if I cried out in the night.
He offered no clue to his motivations, no insight into what had kept him entombed in New York City. He spoke of his life of exile as a simple fact, requiring no explanation. It seemed more and more obvious that his silence was an admission of guilt: that he could not explain his survival and continued presence in this smelly mausoleum without admitting his crime. I tried, how I tried, to hate him.
But it was damnably difficult. He supplied my needs before I could voice them, wants before I could form them. He sensed when I craved company and when to leave me be, when I needed to talk and when I needed to be talked to. He suffered my irritability and occasional rages in a way that somehow allowed me to keep my self-respect.
He was gone for long periods of time during the day and night, and never spoke of his activities. I never pressed him for information; as a recuperating assassin it behooved me to display no undue curiosity. I could not risk arousing his suspicions.
We never, for instance, chanced to speak of my weapons or their whereabouts.
And so the subconscious tension of our first conversation stayed with us, born of the things of which we did not speak. It was obvious to both of us—and yet it was a curious kind of kinship, too: both of us lived with something we could not share, and recognized the condition in the other. Even as I planned his death I felt a kind of empathy between Wendell Morgan Carlson and myself. It bothered the hell out of me. If Carlson was what I knew he was, what his guilty silence only proved him to be, then his death was necessary and just—for my father had taught me that debts are always paid. But I could not help but like the absentminded old man.
Yet that tension was there. We spoke only of neutral things: where he got gasoline to feed the generator that powered wallsockets in the ground-floor rooms (we did not discuss what he would store it in now that I’d ruined his 200-gallon tank). How far he had to walk these days to find scavengeable flour, beans and grains. The trouble he had encountered in maintaining the University’s hydroponics cultures by himself. What he did with sewage and compost. The probability of tomatoes growing another year in the miserable sandy soil of Central Park. What a turkey he’d been to not think of using the pure-grain alky in Organic Chem for fuel. Never did we talk of why he undertook all the complex difficulty of living in New York, nor why I had sought him here. He . . . diverted the patient with light conversation; and the patient allowed him to do so.
I had the hate part all ready to go, but I couldn’t superimpose my lifetime picture of Carlson over this fuzzy, pleasant old academic and make it fit. And so the hate boiled in my skull and made convalescence an aimless, confused time. It got much worse when Carlson, explaining that few things on earth are more addictive than oral Demerol, cut me off cold turkey in my second week. Less potent analgesics, Talwin, aspirin, all had decayed years ago, and if I sent Carlson rummaging through the rucksack I had left under a station wagon on 114th Street for the remaining weed, he would in all likelihood come across the annotated map of New York given me by Collaci, and the mimeo’d Carlson Poster. Besides, my ribs hurt too much to smoke.
One night I woke in a sweat-soaked agony to find the room at a crazy angle, the candle flame slanting out of the dark like a questing tongue. I had half-fallen out of bed, and my right arm kept me from falling the rest of the way, but I could not get back up without another arm. I didn’t seem to have one. Ribs began to throb as I considered the dilemma, and I cried out in pain.
From out in the hallway came a honking snore that broke off in a grunted "Whazzat? Wha?" and then a series of gasps as Carlson dutifully rolled from his bed to assist me. There came a crash, then a greater one attended by a splash, then a really tremendous crash that echoed and re-echoed. Carlson lurched into view, a pot-bellied old man in yellow pajamas, eyes three-quarters closed and unfocused, one foot trapped in a galvanized wastebasket, gallantly coming to my rescue. He hit the doorframe a glancing blow with his shoulder, overbalanced and went down on his face. I believe he came fully awake a second after he hit the floor; his eyes opened wide and he saw me staring at him in a dazed disbelief from a few inches away. And for one timeless moment the absurdity of our respective positions hit us, and we broke up, simultaneous whoops of laughter at ourselves that cut off at once, and a second later he was helping me back into bed with strong, gentle hands, and I was trying not to groan aloud.
Dammit, I liked him.
Then one day while he was away I rose from the bed all by myself, quite gratified to find that I could, and hobbled like an old, old man composed of glass to the window that looked out on the entrance area of Butler and the hedge-hidden quadrangle beyond. It was a chill, slightly off-white day, but to me even the meager colors of shrub and tree seemed unaccountably vivid. From the overfamiliar closeness of the sickroom, the decaying campus had a magnificent depth. Everything was so far away. It was a little overwhelming. Moving closer to the window, I looked to the right.
Carlson stood before the front doors, staring up at the sky over the quadrangle with his back to me. On his head was the same curious helmet I had seen once before, days ago, framed in the crosshairs of my rifle. The odd-looking machine was before him, wired to his helmet and his arms, I wondered again what it could be, and then I saw something that made me freeze, made me forget the pain and the dizziness and stare with full attention.
Carlson was staring down the row between two greatly overgrown hedges that ran parallel to each other and perpendicular to Butler, facing toward Low’s mighty cascade of steps. But he stared as a man watching something near him, and its position followed that of the wind-tossed upper reaches of the hedges.
Intuitively I knew that he was using the strange machine to communicate with a Musky, and all the hatred and rage for which I had found no outlet boiled over, contorting my face with fury.
It seemed an enormous effort not to cry out some primal challenge; I believe I bared my teeth. You bastard, I thought savagely, you set us up for them, made them our enemies, and now you’re hand in glove with them. I was stupefied by such incredible treachery, could not make any sense of it, did not care. As I watched from behind and to the left I saw his lips move silently, but I did not care what they said, what kind of deal Carlson had worked out with the murderous gas-clouds. He had one. He dealt with the creatures that had killed my mother, that he had virtually created. He would soon die.
I shuffled with infinite care back to bed, and planned.
I was ready to kill him within a week. My ribs were mostly healed now—I came to realize that my body’s repair-process had been waiting only for me to decide to heal, to leave the safe haven of convalescence. My strength returned to me and soon I could walk easily, and even dress myself with care, letting the left sleeve dangle. Most of the pain was gone from the stump, leaving only the many annoying tactile phenomena of severed nerves, the classic "phantom arm" and the flood of sweat which seemed to pour from my left armpit but could not be found on my side. Thanks to Carlson’s tendency toward sound sleep, I was familiar with the layout of the main floor—and had recovered the weapons he was too absentminded to destroy. He had "hidden" them in the broom closet.
I wanted to take him in a time and place where his Musky pals couldn’t help him; it seemed to me certain that the ones I had destroyed were bodyguards. A blustery cold night obliged by occurring almost immediately, breezes too choppy to be effectively used by a windrider.
The kind of night which, in my childhood, we chose for a picnic or a hayride.
We ate together in my room, a bean and lentil dish with tamari and fresh bread, and as he was finishing his last sip of coffee I brought the rifle out from under the blanket and drew a bead on his face.
"End of the line, Wendell."
He sat absolutely still, cup still raised to his lips, gazing gravely over it at me, for a long moment. Then he put the cup down very slowly, and sighed. "I didn’t think you’d do it so soon. You’re not well enough, you know."
I grinned. "You were expecting this, huh?"
"Ever since you discovered your weapons the night before last, Tony."
My grin faded. "And you let me live? Wendell, have you a death wish?"
"I cannot kill," he said sadly, and I roared with sudden laughter.
"Maybe not any more, Wendell. Certainly not in another few minutes." But you have killed before, killed more than anyone in history. Hell, Hitler, Attila, they’re all punks beside you!
He grimaced. "So you know who I am."
"The whole world knows. What’s left of it."
Pain filled his eyes, and he nodded. "The last few times I tried to leave the city, to find others to help me in my work, they shot at me. Two years ago I found a man down in the Bowery who had been attacked by a dog-pack. He had a tooth missing. He said he had come to kill me, for the price on my head, and he died, cursing me, in my arms as I brought him here. The price he named was high, and I knew there would be others."
"And you nursed me back to health? You must know that you deserve to die." I sneered. "Musky-lover."
"You know even that, then?"
"I saw you talking with them, with that crazy helmet of yours. The ones who attacked me were your bodyguards, weren’t they?"
"The windriders came to me almost twenty years ago," he said softly, eyes far away. "They did not harm me. Since then I have slowly learned to speak with them, after a fashion, using the undermind. We might yet have understood one another."
The gun was becoming heavy on my single arm, difficult to aim properly. I rested the barrel on my knee, and shifted my grip slightly. My hands were sweaty.
"Well?" he said gruffly. "Why haven’t you killed me already?"
A good question. I swept it aside irritably. "Why did you do it?" I barked.
"Why did I create the Hyperosmic Virus?" His weathered face saddened even more, and he tugged at his beard. "Because I was a damned fool, I suppose. Because it was a pretty problem in biochemistry. Because no one else could have done it, and because I wasn’t certain that I could. I never suspected when I began that it would be used as it was."
"Its release was a spur of the moment decision, is that it?" I snarled, tightening my grip on the trigger.
"I suppose so," he said quietly. "Only Jacob could say, of course."
"Who?"
"Jacob Stone," he said, startled by my violence. "My assistant. I thought you said you . . ."
"So you knew who I was all the time," I growled.
He blinked at me, plainly astounded. Then understanding flooded his craggy features. "Of course," he murmured. "Of course. You’re young Isham—I should have recognized you. I smelled your hate, of course, but I never . . ."
"You what?"
"Smelled the scent of hate upon you," he repeated, puzzled. "Not much of a trick—you’ve been reeking with it lately."
How could he? . . . impossible, sweep it aside.
"And now I imagine you’ll want to discharge that hate and avenge your father’s death. That was his own doing, but no matter: it was I who made it possible. Go ahead, pull the trigger." He closed his eyes.
"My father is not dead," I said, drowning now in confusion.
Carlson opened his eyes at once. "No? I assumed he perished when he released the Virus."
My ears roared; the rifle was suddenly impossible to aim. I wanted to cry out, to damn Carlson for a liar, but I knew the fuzzy professor was no actor and all at once I sprang up out of the bed and burst from the room, through wrought-iron lobby doors and out of the great empty hall, out into blackness and howling wind and a great swirling kaleidoscope of stars that reeled drunkenly overhead. Ribs pulsing, I walked for a hundred years, clutching my idiot rifle, heedless of danger from Musky or hungry Doberman, pursued by a thousand howling demons. Dimly I heard Carlson calling out behind me for a time, but I lost him easily and continued, seeking oblivion. The city, finding its natural prey for the first time in two decades, obligingly swallowed me up.
More than a day later I had my next conscious thought. I became aware that I had been staring at my socks for at least an hour, trying to decide what color they were.
My second coherent thought was that my ass hurt.
I looked around: beyond smashed observation windows, the great steel and stone corpse of New York City was laid out below me like some incredible three-dimensional jigsaw. I was at the top of the Empire State Building.
I had no memory of the long climb, nor of the flight downtown from Columbia University, and it was only after I had worked out how tired I must be that I realized how tired I was. My ribs felt sandblasted and the winds that swept the observation tower were very very cold.
I was higher from the earth than I had ever been before in my life, facing south toward the empty World Trade Center, toward that part of the Atlantic into which this city had once dumped five hundred cubic feet of human shit every day; but I saw neither city nor sea. Instead I saw a frustrated, ambitious black man, obsessed with a scheme for quick-and-easy world salvation, conning a fuzzy-headed genius whose eminence he could never hope to attain. I saw that man, terrified by the ghastly results of his folly, fashioning a story to shift blame from himself and repeating it until all men believed it—and perhaps he himself as well. I saw at last the true face of that story’s villain: a tormented, guilt-driven old man, exiled for the high crime of gullibility, befriended only by his race’s bitterest enemies, nursing his assassin back to health. And I saw as though for the first time that assassin, trained and schooled to complete a cover-up, the embittered black man’s last bucket of whitewash.
My father had loaded me with all the hatred and anger he felt for himself, aimed me toward a scapegoat and fired me like a cannon.
But I would ricochet.
I became aware of noise below me, in the interior of the building. I waited incuriously, not even troubling to lift my rifle from my lap. The noise became weary footsteps on the floor below me. They shuffled slowly up the iron stairway nearest me, and paused at the top. I heard hoarse, wheezing breath, struggling to slow itself, succeeding. I did not turn.
"Hell of a view," I said, squinting at it.
"View of a hell," Carlson wheezed behind me.
"How’d you find me, Wendell?"
"I followed your spoor."
I spun, stared at him, "You—"
"Followed your spoor."
I turned around again, and giggled. The giggle became a chuckle, and then I sat on it. "Still got your adenoids, eh, Doc? Sure. Twenty years in this rotten graveyard and I’ll bet you’ve never owned a set of nose plugs. Punishment to fit the crime—and then some."
He did not reply. His breathing was easier now.
"My father, Wendell, now there’s an absentminded man for you," I went on conversationally. "Always doing some sort of Civilized work, always forgetting to remove his plugs when he comes home—he surely does take a lot of kidding. Our security chief, Phil Collaci, quietly makes sure Dad has a Guard with him when he goes outdoors—just can’t depend on Dad’s sense of smell, Teach’ says. Dad always was a terrible cook, you know? He always puts too much garlic in the soup. Am I boring you, Wendell? Would you like to hear a lovely death I just dreamed? I am the last assassin on earth, and I have just created a brand-new death, a unique one. It convicts as it kills—if you die, you deserve to." My voice was quite shrill now, and a part of me clinically diagnosed hysteria. Carlson said something I did not hear as I raved of toilet bowls and brains splashing on a sidewalk and impossible thousands of chittering gray rats and my eyes went nova and a carillon shattered in my skull and when the world came back I realized that the exhausted old man had slapped my head near off my shoulders. He crouched beside me, holding his hand and wincing.
"Why have no Muskies attacked me, here in the heights?" My voice was soft now, wind-tossed.
"The windriders project and receive emotions. Those who sorrow as you and I engender respect and fear in them. You are protected now, as I have been these twenty years. An expensive shield."
I blinked at him and burst into tears.
He held me then in his frail old arms, as my father had never done, and rocked me while I wept. I wept until I was exhausted, and when I had not cried for a time he said softly, "You will put away your new death, unused. You are his son, and you love him."
I shivered then, and he held me closer, and did not see me smile.
So there you have it, Teach’. Stop thinking of Jacob Stone as the Father of Fresh Start, and see him as a man—and you will not only realize that his sense of smell was a hoax, but like me will wonder how you were ever taken in by so transparent a fiction. There are a dozen blameless explanations for Dad’s anosmia—none of which would have required pretense.
So look at the method of his dying. The lid of the septic tank will be found ajar—the bathroom will surely smell of chlorine. Ask yourself how a chemist could possibly walk into such a trap—if he had any sense of smell at all?
Better yet, examine the corpse for adenoids.
When you’ve put it all together, come look me up. I’ll be at Columbia University, with my good friend Wendell Morgan Carlson. We have a lot of work to do, and I suspect we’ll need the help of you and the Council before long. We’re learning to talk with Muskies, you see.
If you come at night, I’ve got a little place of my own set up in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. You can’t miss me. But be sure to knock: I’m Musky-proof these days, but I’ve still got those subconscious sentries you gave me.
And I’m scared of the dark.