semi custom bathroom vanities

the night of the long knives by fritz leiber chapter 1 i was one hundred miles from nowhere—andi mean that literally—when i spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. i'd beenkeeping an extra lookout because i still expected the other undead bugger left over from themurder party at nowhere to be stalking me. i'd been following a line of high-voltagetowers all canted over at the same gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast from the lastwar. i judged the girl was going in the same general direction and was being edged overtoward my course by a drift of dust that even at my distance showed dangerous metallic gleamsand dark humps that might be dead men or cattle.

she looked slim, dark topped, and on guard.small like me and like me wearing a scarf loosely around the lower half of her facein the style of the old buckaroos. we didn't wave or turn our heads or give theslightest indication we'd seen each other as our paths slowly converged. but we wereintensely, minutely watchful—i knew i was and she had better be. overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always.i don't remember what a high sky looks like. three years ago i think i saw venus. or itmay have been sirius or jupiter. the hot smoky light was turning from the amberof midday to the bloody bronze of evening. the line of towers i was following showedthe faintest spread in the direction of their

canting—they must have been only a few milesfrom blast center. as i passed each one i could see where the metal on the blast sidehad been eroded—vaporized by the original blast, mostly smoothly, but with welts andpustules where the metal had merely melted and run. i supposed the lines the towers carriedhad all been vaporized too, but with the haze i couldn't be sure, though i did see threedark blobs up there that might be vultures perching. from the drift around the foot of the nearesttower a human skull peered whitely. that is rather unusual. years later now you stillsee more dead bodies with the meat on them than skeletons. intense radiation has killedtheir bacteria and preserved them indefinitely

from decay, just like the packaged meat inthe last advertisements. in fact such bodies are one of the signs of a really hot drift—youavoid them. the vultures pass up such poisonously hot carrion too—they've learned their lesson. ahead some big gas tanks began to loom up,like deformed battleships and flat-tops in a smoke screen, their prows being the junctureof the natural curve of the off-blast side with the massive concavity of the on-blastside. none of the three other buggers and me hadhad too clear an idea of where nowhere had been—hence, in part, the name—but i knewin a general way that i was somewhere in the deathlands between porter county and ouachitaparish, probably much nearer the former.

it's a real mixed-up america we've got thesedays, you know, with just the faintest trickle of a sense of identity left, like a guy inthe paddedest cell in the most locked up ward in the whole loony bin. if a time travelerfrom mid twentieth century hopped forward to it across the few intervening years andlooked at a map of it, if anybody has a map of it, he'd think that the map had run—thatit had got some sort of disease that had swollen a few tiny parts beyond all bounds, papertumors, while most of the other parts, the parts he remembered carrying names in suchbig print and showing such bold colors, had shrunk to nothingness. to the east he'd see atlantic highlands andsavannah fortress. to the west, walla walla

territory, pacific palisades, and los alamos—andthere he'd see an actual change in the coastline, i'm told, where three of the biggest stockpilesof fusionables let go and opened death valley to the sea—so that los alamos is closerto being a port. centrally he'd find porter county and manteno asylum surprisingly closetogether near the great lakes, which are tilted and spilled out a bit toward the southwestwith the big quake. south-centrally: ouachita parish inching up the mississippi from oldlouisiana under the cruel urging of the fisher sheriffs. those he'd find and a few, a very few otherplaces, including a couple i suppose i haven't heard of. practically all of them would surprisehim—no one can predict what scraps of a

blasted nation are going to hang onto a shredof organization and ruthlessly maintain it and very slowly and very jealously extendit. but biggest of all, occupying practicallyall the map, reducing all those swollen localities i've mentioned back to tiny blobs, boundingmost of america and thrusting its jetty pseudopods everywhere, he'd see the great inkblot ofthe deathlands. i don't know how else than by an area of solid, absolutely unrelievedblack you'd represent the deathlands with its multicolored radioactive dusts and itsskimpy freightage of lonely deathlanders, each bound on his murderous, utterly pointless,but utterly absorbing business—an area where names like nowhere, it, anywhere, and theplace are the most natural thing in the world

when a few of us decide to try to pad downtogether for a few nervous months or weeks. as i say, i was somewhere in the deathlandsnear manteno asylum. the girl and me were getting closer now, wellwithin pistol or dart range though beyond any but the most expert or lucky knife throw.she wore boots and a weathered long-sleeved shirt and jeans. the black topping was hair,piled high in an elaborate coiffure that was held in place by twisted shavings of brightmetal. a fine bug-trap, i told myself. in her left hand, which was closest to me,she carried a dart gun, pointed away from me, across her body. it was the kind of potenttiny crossbow you can't easily tell whether the spring is loaded. back around on her lefthip a small leather satchel was strapped to

her belt. also on the same side were two sheathedknives, one of which was an oddity—it had no handle, just the bare tang. for nothingbut throwing, i guessed. i let my own left hand drift a little closerto my banker's special in its open holster—ray baker's great psychological weapon, though(who knows?) the two .38 cartridges it contained might actually fire. the one i'd put to thetest at nowhere had, and very lucky for me. she seemed to be hiding her right arm fromme. then i spotted the weapon it held, one you don't often see, a stevedore's hook. shewas hiding her right hand, all right, she had the long sleeve pulled down over it sojust the hook stuck out. i asked myself if the hand were perhaps covered with radiationscars or sores or otherwise disfigured. we

deathlanders have our vanities. i'm sensitiveabout my baldness. then she let her right arm swing more freelyand i saw how short it was. she had no right hand. the hook was attached to the wrist stump. i judged she was about ten years younger thanme. i'm pushing forty, i think, though some people have judged i'm younger. no way ofmy knowing for sure. in this life you forget trifles like chronology. anyway, the age difference meant she wouldhave quicker reflexes. i'd have to keep that in mind. the greenishly glinting dust drift that i'djudged she was avoiding swung closer ahead.

the girl's left elbow gave a little kick tothe satchel on her hip and there was a sudden burst of irregular ticks that almost mademe start. i steadied myself and concentrated on thinking whether i should attach any specialsignificance to her carrying a geiger counter. naturally it wasn't the sort of thinking thatinterfered in any way with my watchfulness—you quickly lose the habit of that kind of thinkingin the deathlands or you lose something else. it could mean she was some sort of greenhorn.most of us old-timers can visually judge the heat of a dust drift or crater or rayed areamore reliably than any instrument. some buggers claim they just feel it, though i've neverknown any of the latter too eager to navigate in unfamiliar country at night—which you'dthink they'd be willing to do if they could

feel heat blind. but she didn't look one bit like a tenderfoot—likefor instance some citizeness newly banished from manteno. or like some porter burgher'sunfaithful wife or troublesome girlfriend whom he'd personally carted out beyond theridges of cleaned-out hot dust that help guard such places, and then abandoned in revengeor from boredom—and they call themselves civilized, those cultural queers! no, she looked like she belonged in the deathlands.but then why the counter? her eyes might be bad, real bad. i didn'tthink so. she raised her boot an extra inch to step over a little jagged fragment of concrete.no.

maybe she was just a born double-checker,using science to back up knowledge based on experience as rich as my own or richer. i'vemet the super-careful type before. they mostly get along pretty well, but they tend to bea shade too slow in the clutches. maybe she was testing the counter, planningto use it some other way or trade it for something. maybe she made a practice of traveling bynight! then the counter made good sense. but then why use it by day? why reveal it to mein any case? was she trying to convince me that she wasa greenhorn? or had she hoped that the sudden noise would throw me off guard? but who wouldgo to the trouble of carrying a geiger counter for such devious purposes? and wouldn't shehave waited until we got closer before trying

the noise gambit? think-shmink—it gets you nowhere! she kicked off the counter with another bumpof her elbow and started to edge in toward me faster. i turned the thinking all off andgave my whole mind to watchfulness. soon we were barely more than eight feet apart,almost within lunging range without even the preliminary one-two step, and still we hadn'tspoken or looked straight at each other, though being that close we'd had to cant our headsaround a bit to keep each other in peripheral vision. our eyes would be on each other steadilyfor five or six seconds, then dart forward an instant to check for rocks and holes inthe trail we were following in parallel. a

cultural queer from one of the "civilized"places would have found it funny, i suppose, if he'd been able to watch us perform in anarena or from behind armor glass for his exclusive pleasure. the girl had eyebrows as black as her hair,which in its piled-up and metal-knotted savagery called to mind african queens despite hertypical pale complexion—very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. from the inside cornerof her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran up between her eyebrows and acrossher forehead at a rakish angle until it disappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper left cornerof her forehead. i'd been smelling her, of course, for sometime.

i could even tell the color of her eyes now.they were blue. it's a color you never see. almost no dusts have a bluish cast, thereare few blue objects except certain dark steels, the sky never gets very far away from theorange range, though it is green from time to time, and water reflects the sky. yes, she had blue eyes, blue eyes and thatjaunty scar, blue eyes and that jaunty scar and a dart gun and a steel hook for a righthand, and we were walking side by side, eight feet apart, not an inch closer, still notlooking straight at each other, still not saying a word, and i realized that the initialperiod of unadulterated watchfulness was over, that i'd had adequate opportunity to inspectthis girl and size her up, and that night

was coming on fast, and that here i was, onceagain, back with the problem of the two urges. i could try either to kill her or go to bedwith her. i know that at this point the cultural queers(and certainly our imaginary time traveler from mid twentieth century) would make a greatnoise about not understanding and not believing in the genuineness of the simple urge to murderthat governs the lives of us deathlanders. like detective-story pundits, they would saythat a man or woman murders for gain, or concealment of crime, or from thwarted sexual desire oroutraged sexual possessiveness—and maybe they would list a few other "rational" motives—butnot, they would say, just for the simple sake of murder, for the sure release and reliefit gives, for the sake of wiping out one recognizable

bit more (the closest bit we can, since thoseof us with the courage or lazy rationality to wipe out ourselves have long since doneso)—wiping out one recognizable bit more of the whole miserable, unutterably disgustinghuman mess. unless, they would say, a person is completely insane, which is actually howall outsiders view us deathlanders. they can think of us in no other way. i guess cultural queers and time travelerssimply don't understand, though to be so blind it seems to me that they have to overlookmuch of the history of the last war and of the subsequent years, especially the mushroomingof crackpot cults with a murder tinge: the werewolf gangs, the berserkers and amuckers,the revival of shiva worship and the black

mass, the machine wreckers, the kill-the-killersmovements, the new witchcraft, the unholy creepers, the unconsciousers, the radioactiveblue gods and rocket devils of the atomites, and a dozen other groupings clearly prefiguringdeathlander psychology. those cults had all been as unpredictable as thuggee or the dancingmadness of the middle ages or the children's crusade, yet they had happened just the same. but cultural queers are good at overlookingthings. they have to be, i suppose. they think they're humanity growing again. yes, despitetheir laughable warpedness and hysterical crippledness, they actually believe—eachhowlingly different community of them—that they're the new adams and eves. they're allexcited about themselves and whether or not

they wear fig leaves. they don't carry withthem, twenty-four hours a day, like us deathlanders do, the burden of all that was forever lost. since i've gone this far i'll go a bit furtherand make the paradoxical admission that even us deathlanders don't really understand oururge to murder. oh, we have our rationalizations of it, just like everyone has of his rulingpassion—we call ourselves junkmen, scavengers, gangrene surgeons; we sometimes believe we'redoing the person we kill the ultimate kindness, yes and get slobbery tearful about it afterwards;we sometimes tell ourselves we've finally found and are rubbing out the one man or womanwho was responsible for everything; we talk, mostly to ourselves, about the aestheticsof homicide; we occasionally admit, but only

each to himself alone, that we're just plainnuts. but we don't really understand our urge tomurder, we only feel it. at the hateful sight of another human being,we feel it begins to grow in us until it becomes an overpowering impulse that jerks us, likea puppet is jerked by its strings, into the act itself or its attempted commission. like i was feeling it grow in me now as wedid this parallel deathmarch through the reddening haze, me and this girl and our problem. thisgirl with the blue eyes and the jaunty scar. the problem of the two urges, i said. theother urge, the sexual, is one that i know all cultural queers (and certainly our timetraveler) would claim to know all about. maybe

they do. but i wonder if they understand howintense it can be with us deathlanders when it's the only release (except maybe liquorand drugs, which we seldom can get and even more rarely dare use)—the only completerelease, even though a brief one, from the overpowering loneliness and from the tyrannyof the urge to kill. to embrace, to possess, to glut lust on, yeseven briefly to love, briefly to shelter in—that was good, that was a relief and release tobe treasured. but it couldn't last. you could draw it out,prop it up perhaps for a few days, for a month even (though sometimes not for a single night)—youmight even start to talk to each other a little, after a while—but it could never last. theglands always tire, if nothing else.

murder was the only final solution, the onlypermanent release. only us deathlanders know how good it feels. but then after the killthe loneliness would come back, redoubled, and after a while i'd meet another hatefulhuman ... our problem of the two urges. as i watchedthis girl slogging along parallel to me, as i kept constant watch on her of course, iwondered how she was feeling the two urges. was she attracted to the ridgy scars on mycheeks half revealed by my scarf?—to me they have a pleasing symmetry. was she wonderinghow my head and face looked without the black felt skullcap low-visored over my eyes? orwas she thinking mostly of that hook swinging into my throat under the chin and draggingme down?

i couldn't tell. she looked as poker-facedas i was trying to. for that matter, i asked myself, how was ifeeling the two urges?—how was i feeling them as i watched this girl with the blueeyes and the jaunty scar and the arrogantly thinned lips that asked to be smashed, andthe slender throat?—and i realized that there was no way to describe that, not evento myself. i could only feel the two urges grow in me, side by side, like monstrous twins,until they would simply be too big for my taut body and one of them would have to getout fast. i don't know which one of us started to slowdown first, it happened so gradually, but the dust puffs that rise from the ground ofthe deathlands under even the lightest treading

became smaller and smaller around our stepsand finally vanished altogether, and we were standing still. only then did i notice theobvious physical trigger for our stopping. an old freeway ran at right angles acrossour path. the shoulder by which we'd approached it was sharply eroded, so that the pavement,which even had a shallow cave eroded under it, was a good three feet above the levelof our path, forming a low wall. from where i'd stopped i could almost reach out and touchthe rough-edged smooth-topped concrete. so could she. we were right in the midst of the gas tanksnow, six or seven of them towered around us, squeezed like beer cans by the decade-oldblast but their metal looking sound enough

until you became aware of the red light showingthrough in odd patterns of dots and dashes where vaporization or later erosion had beencomplete. almost but not quite lace-work. just ahead of us, right across the freeway,was the six-storey skeletal structure of an old cracking plant, sagged like the powertowers away from the blast and the lower storeys drifted with piles and ridges and smooth gobbetsof dust. the light was getting redder and smokier everyminute. with the cessation of the physical movementof walking, which is always some sort of release for emotions, i could feel the twin urgesgrowing faster in me. but that was all right, i told myself—this was the crisis, as shemust realize too, and that should key us up

to bear the urges a little longer withoutexplosion. i was the first to start to turn my head.for the first time i looked straight into her eyes and she into mine. and as alwayshappens at such times, a third urge appeared abruptly, an urge momentarily as strong asthe other two—the urge to speak, to tell and ask all about it. but even as i startedto phrase the first crazily happy greeting, my throat lumped, as i'd known it would, withthe awful melancholy of all that was forever lost, with the uselessness of any communication,with the impossibility of recreating the past, our individual pasts, any pasts. and as italways does, the third urge died. i could tell she was feeling that ultimatepain just like me. i could see her eyelids

squeeze down on her eyes and her face liftand her shoulders go back as she swallowed hard. she was the first to start to lay aside aweapon. she took two sidewise steps toward the freeway and reached her whole left armfurther across her body and laid the dart gun on the concrete and drew back her handfrom it about six inches. at the same time looking at me hard—fiercely angrily, you'dsay—across her left shoulder. she had the experienced duelist's trick of seeming tolook into my eyes but actually focussing on my mouth. i was using the same gimmick myself—it'stiring to look straight into another person's eyes and it can put you off guard.

my left side was nearest the wall so i didn'tfor the moment have the problem of reaching across my body. i took the same sidewise stepsshe had and using just two fingers, very gingerly—disarmingly, i hoped—i lifted my antique firearm fromits holster and laid it on the concrete and drew back my hand from it all the way. nowit was up to her again, or should be. her hook was going to be quite a problem, i realized,but we needn't come to it right away. she temporized by successively unsheathingthe two knives at her left side and laying them beside the dart gun. then she stoppedand her look told me plainly that it was up to me. now i am a bugger who believes in carryingone perfect knife—otherwise, i know for

a fact, you'll go knife-happy and end up byweighing yourself down with dozens, literally. so i am naturally very reluctant to get outof touch in any way with mother, who is a little rusty along the sides but made of thetoughest and most sharpenable alloy steel i've ever run across. still, i was most curious to find out whatshe'd do about that hook, so i finally laid mother on the concrete beside the .38 andrested my hands lightly on my hips, all ready to enjoy myself—at least i hoped i gavethat impression. she smiled, it was almost a nice smile—bynow we'd let our scarves drop since we weren't raising any more dust—and then she tookhold of the hook with her left hand and started

to unscrew it from the leather-and-metal basefitting over her stump. of course, i told myself. and her second knife,the one without a grip, must be that way so she could screw its tang into the base whenshe wanted a knife on her right hand instead of a hook. i ought to have guessed. i grinned my admiration of her mechanicalingenuity and immediately unhitched my knapsack and laid it beside my weapons. then a thoughtoccurred to me. i opened the knapsack and moving my hand slowly and very openly so she'dhave no reason to suspect a ruse, i drew out a blanket and, trying to show her both sidesof it in the process, as if i were performing some damned conjuring trick, dropped it gentlyon the ground between us.

she unsnapped the straps on her satchel thatfastened it to her belt and laid it aside and then she took off her belt too, slowlydrawing it through the wide loops of weathered denim. then she looked meaningfully at mybelt. i had to agree with her. belts, especiallyheavy-buckled ones like ours, can be nasty weapons. i removed mine. simultaneously eachbelt joined its corresponding pile of weapons and other belongings. she shook her head, not in any sort of negation,and ran her fingers into the black hair at several points, to show me it hid no weapon,then looked at me questioningly. i nodded that i was satisfied—i hadn't seen anythingrun out of it, by the way. then she looked

up at my black skullcap and she raised hereyebrows and smiled again, this time with a spice of mocking anticipation. in some ways i hate to part with that headpiecemore than i do with mother. not really because of its sandwiched lead-mesh inner lining—ifthe rays haven't baked my brain yet they never will and i'm sure that the patches of leadmesh sewed into my pants over my loins give a lot more practical protection. but i wasgetting real attracted to this girl by now and there are times when a person must makea sacrifice of his vanity. i whipped off my stylish black felt and tossed it on my pileand dared her to laugh at my shiny egg top. strangely she didn't even smile. she partedher lips and ran her tongue along the upper

one. i gave an eager grin in reply, an incautiouslywide one, and she saw my plates flash. my plates are something rather special thoughthey are by no means unique. back toward the end of the last war, when it was obvious toany realist how bad things were going to be, though not how strangely terrible, a numberof people, like myself, had all their teeth jerked and replaced with durable plates. iwent some of them one better. my plates were stainless steel biting and chewing ridges,smooth continuous ones that didn't attempt to copy individual teeth. a person who looksclosely at a slab of chewing tobacco, say, i offer him will be puzzled by the smoothlycurved incision, made as if by a razor blade mounted on the arm of a compass. magneticpowder buried in my gums makes for a real

nice fit. this sacrifice was worse than my hat and mothercombined, but i could see the girl expected me to make it and would take no substitutes,and in this attitude i had to admit that she showed very sound judgment, because i keepthe incisor parts of those plates filed to razor sharpness. i have to be careful aboutmy tongue and lips but i figure it's worth it. with my dental scimitars i can in a winkbite out a chunk of throat and windpipe or jugular, though i've never had occasion todo so yet. for the first minute it made me feel likean old man, a real dodderer, but by now the attraction this girl had for me was gettingirrational. i carefully laid the two plates

on top of my knapsack. in return, as a sort of reward you might say,she opened her mouth wide and showed me what was left of her own teeth—about two-thirdsof them, a patchwork of tartar and gold. we took off our boots, pants and shirts, shewatching very suspiciously—i knew she'd been skeptical of my carrying only one knife. oddly perhaps, considering how touchy i amabout my baldness, i felt no sensitivity about revealing the lack of hair on my chest andin fact a sort of pride in displaying the slanting radiation scars that have replacedit, though they are crawling keloids of the ugliest, bumpiest sort. i guess to me suchscars are tribal insignia—one-man and one-woman

tribes of course. no question but that thescar on the girl's forehead had been the first focus of my desire for her and it still addedto my interest. by now we weren't staying as perfectly onguard or watching each other's clothing for concealed weapons as carefully as we should—iknow i wasn't. it was getting dark fast, there wasn't much time left, and the other interestwas simply becoming too great. we were still automatically careful abouthow we did things. for instance the way we took off our pants was like ballet, simultaneouslycrouching a little on the left foot and whipping the right leg out of its sheath in one movement,all ready to jump without tripping ourselves if the other person did anything funny, andthen skinning down the left pants-leg with

a movement almost as swift. but as i say it was getting too late for perfectwatchfulness, in fact for any kind of effective watchfulness at all. the complexion of thewhole situation was changing in a rush. the possibilities of dealing or receiving death—alongwith the chance of the minor indignity of cannibalism, which some of us practice—weresuddenly gone, all gone. it was going to be all right this time, i was telling myself.this was the time it would be different, this was the time love would last, this was thetime lust would be the firm foundation for understanding and trust, this time there wouldbe really safe sleeping. this girl's body would be home for me, a beautiful tender inexhaustiblyexciting home, and mine for her, for always.

as she threw off her shirt, the last darklyred light showed me another smooth slantwise scar, this one around her hips, like a narrowgirdle that has slipped down a little on one side. chapter 2murder most foul, as in the best it is; but this most foul, strange and unnatural. —hamlet when i woke the light was almost full amberand i could feel no flesh against mine, only the blanket under me. i very slowly rolledover and there she was, sitting on the corner of the blanket not two feet from me, combingher long black hair with a big, wide-toothed

comb she'd screwed into the leather-and-metalcap over her wrist stump. she'd put on her pants and shirt, but theformer were rolled up to her knees and the latter, though tucked in, wasn't buttoned. she was looking at me, contemplating me youmight say, quite dreamily but with a faint, easy smile. i smiled back at her. it was lovely. too lovely. there had to be something wrongwith it. there was. oh, nothing big. just a solitarytrifle—nothing worth noticing really.

but the tiniest solitary things can sometimesbe the most irritating, like one mosquito. when i'd first rolled over she'd been combingher hair straight back, revealing a wedge of baldness following the continuation ofher forehead scar deep back across her scalp. now with a movement that was swift thoughnot hurried-looking she swept the mass of her hair forward and to the left, so thatit covered the bald area. also her lips straightened out. i was hurt. she shouldn't have hidden herbit of baldness, it was something we had in common, something that brought us closer.and she shouldn't have stopped smiling at just that moment. didn't she realize i lovedthat blaze on her scalp just as much as any

other part of her, that she no longer hadany need to practice vanity in front of me? didn't she realize that as soon as she stoppedsmiling, her contemplative stare became an insult to me? what right had she to stare,critically i felt sure, at my bald head? what right had she to know about the nearly-healedulcer on my left shin?—that was a piece of information worth a man's life in a fight.what right had she to cover up, anyways, while i was still naked? she ought to have wakedme up so that we could have got dressed as we'd undressed, together. there were lotsof things wrong with her manners. oh, i know that if i'd been able to thinkcalmly, maybe if i'd just had some breakfast or a little coffee inside me, or even if there'dbeen some hot breakfast to eat at that moment,

i'd have recognized my irritation for theirrational, one-mosquito surge of negative feeling that it was. even without breakfast, if i'd just had theknowledge that there was a reasonably secure day ahead of me in which there'd be an opportunityfor me to straighten out my feelings, i wouldn't have been irked, or at least being irked wouldn'thave bothered me terribly. but a sense of security is an even rarer commodityin the deathlands than a hot breakfast. given just the ghost of a sense of securityand/or some hot breakfast, i'd have told myself that she was merely being amusingly coquettishabout her bald streak and her hair, that it was natural for a woman to try to preservesome mystery about herself in front of the

man she beds with. but you get leery of any kind of mystery inthe deathlands. it makes you frightened and angry, like it does an animal. mystery isfor cultural queers, strictly. the only way for two people to get along together in thedeathlands, even for a while, is never to hide anything and never to make a move thatdoesn't have an immediate clear explanation. you can't talk, you see, certainly not atfirst, and so you can't explain anything (most explanations are just lies and dreams, anyway),so you have to be doubly careful and explicit about everything you do. this girl wasn't being either. right now,on top of her other gaucheries, she was unscrewing

the comb from her wrist—an unfriendly ifnot quite a hostile act, as anyone must admit. understand, please, i wasn't showing any ofthese negative reactions of mine any more than she was showing hers, except for herstopping smiling. in fact i hadn't stopped smiling, i was playing the game to the hilt. but inside me everything was stewed up andthe other urge had come back and presently it would begin to grow again. that's the trouble,you know, with sex as a solution to the problem of the two urges. it's fine while it lastsbut it wears itself out and then you're back with urge number one and you have nothingleft to balance it with. oh, i wouldn't kill this girl today, i probablywouldn't seriously think of killing her for

a month or more, but old urge number one wouldbe there and growing, mostly under cover, all the time. of course there were thingsi could do to slow its growth, lots of little gimmicks, in fact—i was pretty experiencedat this business. for instance, i could take a shot at talkingto her pretty soon. for a catchy starter, i could tell her about nowhere, how thesefive other buggers and me found ourselves independently skulking along after this scavengingexpedition from porter, how we naturally joined forces in that situation, how we set a pitfallfor their alky-powered jeep and wrecked it and them, how when our haul turned out tobe unexpectedly big the four of us left from the kill chummied up and padded down togetherand amused each other for a while and played

games, you might say. why, at one point weeven had an old crank phonograph going and read some books. and, of course, how whenthe loot gave out and the fun wore off, we had our murder party and i survived alongwith, i think, a bugger named jerry—at any rate, he was gone when the blood stopped spurting,and i'd had no stomach for tracking him, though i probably should have. and in return she could tell me how she hadkilled off her last set of girlfriends, or boyfriends, or friend, or whatever it was. after that, we could have a go at exchangingnews, rumors and speculations about local, national and world events. was it true thatatlantic highlands had planes of some sort

or were they from europe? were they actuallycrucifying the deathlanders around walla walla or only nailing up their dead bodies as direwarnings to others such? had manteno made christianity compulsory yet, or were theystill tolerating zen buddhists? was it true that los alamos had been completely wipedout by plague, but the area taboo to deathlanders because of the robot guards they'd left behind—metalguards eight feet tall who tramped across the white sands, wailing? did they still havefree love in pacific palisades? did she know there'd been a pitched battle fought by expeditionaryforces from ouachita and savannah fortress? over the loot of birmingham, apparently, afteryellow fever had finished off that principality. had she rooted out any "observers" lately?—someof the "civilized" communities, the more "scientific"

ones, try to maintain a few weather stationsand the like in the deathlands, camouflaging them elaborately and manning them with oneor two impudent characters to whom we give a hard time if we uncover them. had she heardthe tale that was going around that south america and the french riviera had survivedthe last war absolutely untouched?—and the obviously ridiculous rider that they had blueskies there and saw stars every third night? did she think that subsequent conditions wereshowing that the earth actually had plunged into an interstellar dust cloud coincidentallywith the start of the last war (the dust cloud used as a cover for the first attacks, somesaid) or did she still hold with the majority that the dust was solely of atomic originwith a little help from volcanoes and dry

spells? how many green sunsets had she seenin the last year? after we'd chewed over those racy topics andsome more like them, and incidentally got bored with guessing and fabricating, we might,if we felt especially daring and conversation were going particularly well, even take achance on talking a little about our childhoods, about how things were before the last war(though she was almost too young for that)—about the little things we remembered—the bigthings were much too dangerous topics to venture on and sometimes even the little memoriescould suddenly twist you up as if you'd swallowed lye. but after that there wouldn't be anythingleft to talk about. anything you'd risk talking

about, that is. for instance, no matter howlong we talked, it was very unlikely that we'd either of us tell the other anythingcomplete or very accurate about how we lived from day to day, about our techniques of survivingand staying sane or at least functional—that would be too imprudent, it would go too muchagainst the grain of any player of the murder game. would i tell her, or anyone, about howi worked the ruses of playing dead and disguising myself as a woman, about my trick of pickinga path just before dark and then circling back to it by a pre-surveyed route, aboutthe chess games i played with myself, about the bottle of green, terribly hot-lookingpowder i carried to sprinkle behind me to bluff off pursuers? a fat chance of my revealingthings like that!

and when all the talk was over, what wouldit have gained us? our minds would be filled with a lot of painful stuff better kept buried—meaninglesshopes, scraps of vicarious living in "cultured" communities, memories that were nothing butmelancholy given concrete form. the melancholy is easiest to bear when it's the diffusedbackground for everything; and all garbage is best kept in the can. oh yes, our talkingwould have gained us a few more days of infatuation, of phantom security, but those we could have—almostas many of them, at any rate—without talking. for instance things were smoothing over alreadybetween her and me again and i no longer felt quite so irked. she'd replaced the comb withan inoffensive-looking pair of light pliers and was doing up her hair with the metal shavings.and i was acting as if content to watch her,

as in a way i was. i'd still made no moveto get dressed. she looked real sweet, you know, primpingherself that way. her face was a little flat, but it was young, and the scar gave it justthe fillip it needed. but what was going on behind that foreheadright now, i asked myself? i felt real psychic this morning, my mind as clear as a bottleof white rock you find miraculously unbroken in a blasted tavern, and the answers to thequestion i'd asked myself came effortlessly. she was telling herself she'd got herselfa man again, a man who was adequate in the primal clutch (i gave myself that pat on theback), and that she wouldn't have to be plagued and have her safety endangered by that kindof mind-dulling restlessness and yearning

for a while. she was lightly playing around with ideasabout how she'd found a home and a protector, knowing she was kidding herself, that it wasthe most gimcracky feminine make-believe, but enjoying it just the same. she was sizing me up, deciding in detail justwhat i went for in a woman, what whetted my interest, so she could keep that roused aslong as seemed desirable or prudent to her to continue our relation. she was kicking herself, only lightly to beginwith, because she hadn't taken any precautions—because we who've escaped hot death against all reasonableexpectations by virtue of some incalculable

resistance to the ills of radioactivity, quiteoften find we've escaped sterility too. if she should become pregnant, she was tellingherself, then she had a real sticky business ahead of her where no man could be trustedfor a second. and because she was thinking of this and becauseshe was obviously a realistic deathlander, she was reminding herself that a woman isbasically less impulsive and daring and resourceful than a man and so had always better be sureshe gets in the first blow. she would be thinking that i was a realist myself and a smart man,one able to understand her predicament quite clearly—and because of that a much soonerdanger to her. she was feeling old number one urge starting to grow in her again andwondering whether it mightn't be wisest to

give it the hot-house treatment. that is the trouble with a clear mind. fora little while you see things as they really are and you can accurately predict how they'regoing to shape the future ... and then suddenly you realize you've predicted yourself a weekor a month into the future and you can't live the intervening time any more because you'vealready imagined it in detail. people who live in communities, even the cultural queersof our maimed era, aren't much bothered by it—there must be some sort of blinkers theyhand you out along with the key to the city—but in the deathlands it's a fairly common phenomenonand there's no hiding from it. me and my clear mind!—once again it haddone me out of days of fun, changed a thoroughly-explored

love affair into a one night stand. oh, therewas no question about it, this girl and i were finished, right this minute, as of now,because she was just as psychic as i was this morning and had sensed every last thing thati'd been thinking. with a movement smooth enough not to lookrushed i swung into a crouch. she was on her knees faster than that, her left hand hoveringover the little set of tools for her stump, which like any good mechanic she'd lined upneatly on the edge of the blanket—the hook, the comb, a long telescoping fork, a coupleof other items, and the knife. i'd grabbed a handful of blanket, ready to jerk it fromunder her. she'd seen that i'd grabbed it. our gazes dueled.

there was a high-pitched whine over our heads!quite loud from the start, though it sounded as if it were very deep up in the haze. itswiftly dropped in pitch and volume. the top of the skeletal cracking plant acrossthe freeway glowed with st. elmo's fire! three times it glowed that way, so bright we couldsee the violet-blue flames of it reaching up despite the full amber daylight. the whine died away but in the last moment,paradoxically, it seemed to be coming closer! this shared threat—for any unexpected eventis a threat in the deathlands and a mysterious event doubly so—put a stop to our murdergame. the girl and i were buddies again, buddies to be relied on in a pinch, for the durationof the threat at least. no need to say so

or to reassure each other of the fact in anyway, it was taken for granted. besides, there was no time. we had to use every second allowedus in getting ready for whatever was coming. first i grabbed up mother. then i relievedmyself—fear made it easy. then i skinned into my pants and boots, slapped in my teeth,thrust the blanket and knapsack into the shallow cave under the edge of the freeway, lookingaround me all the time so as not to be surprised from any quarter. meanwhile the girl had put on her boots, locatedher dart gun, unscrewed the pliers from her stump, put the knife in, and was arrangingher scarf so it made a sling for the maimed arm—i wondered why but had no time to wasteguessing, even if i'd wanted to, for at that

moment a small dull silver plane, beetle-shapedmore than anything else, loomed out of the haze beyond the cracking plant and came silentlydrifting down toward us. the girl thrust her satchel into the caveand along with it her dart gun. i caught her idea and tucked mother into my pants behindmy back. i'd thought from the first glimpse of it thatthe plane was disabled—i guess it was its silence that gave me the idea. this theorywas confirmed when one of its very stubby wings or vanes touched a corner pillar ofthe cracking plant. the plane was moving in too slow a glide to be wrecked, in fact itwas moving in a slower glide than i would have believed possible—but then it's manyyears since i have seen a plane in flight.

it wasn't wrecked but the little collisionspun it around twice in a lazy circle and it landed on the freeway with a scuffing noisenot fifty feet from us. you couldn't exactly say it had crashed in, but it stayed at anodd tilt. it looked crippled all right. an oval door in the plane opened and a mandropped lightly out on the concrete. and what a man! he was nearer seven feet tall thansix, close-cropped blond hair, face and hands richly tanned, the rest of him covered bytrim garments of a gleaming gray. he must have weighed as much as the two of us together,but he was beautifully built, muscular yet supple-seeming. his face looked brightly intelligentand even-tempered and kind. yes, kind!—damn him! it wasn't enough thathis body should fairly glow with a health

and vitality that was an insult to our searedskins and stringy muscles and ulcers and half-rotted stomachs and half-arrested cancers, he hadto look kind too—the sort of man who would put you to bed and take care of you, as ifyou were some sort of interesting sick fox, and maybe even say a little prayer for you,and all manner of other abominations. i don't think i could have endured my furystanding still. fortunately there was no need to. as if we'd rehearsed the whole thing forhours, the girl and i scrambled up onto the freeway and scurried toward the man from theplane, cunningly swinging away from each other so that it would be harder for him to watchthe two of us at once, but not enough to make it obvious that we attended an attack fromtwo quarters.

we didn't run though we covered the groundas fast as we dared—running would have been too much of a give-away too, and the pilot,which was how i named him to myself, had a strange-looking small gun in his right hand.in fact the way we moved was part of our act—i dragged one leg as if it were crippled andthe girl faked another sort of limp, one that made her approach a series of half curtsies.her arm in the sling was all twisted, but at the same time she was accidently showingher breasts—i remember thinking you won't distract this breed bull that way, sister,he probably has a harem of six-foot heifers. i had my head thrown back and my hands stretchedout supplicatingly. meanwhile the both of us were babbling a blue streak. i was rapidlycroaking something like, "mister for god's

sake save my pal he's hurt a lot worse'n iam not a hundred yards away he's dyin' mister he's dyin' o' thirst his tongue's black'nall swole up oh save him mister save my pal he's not a hundred yards away he's dyin' misterdyin'—" and she was singsonging an even worse rigamarole about how "they" were afterus from porter and going to crucify us because we believed in science and how they'd alreadyimpaled her mother and her ten-year-old sister and a lot more of the same. it didn't matter that our stories didn't fitor make sense, the babble had a convincing tone and getting us closer to this guy, whichwas all that counted. he pointed his gun at me and then i could see him hesitate and ithought exultingly it's a lot of healthy meat

you got there, mister, but it's tame meat,mister, tame! he compromised by taking a step back and sortof hooting at us and waving us off with his left hand, as if we were a couple of straydogs. it was greatly to our advantage that we'dacted without hesitation, and i don't think we'd have been able to do that except thatwe'd been all set to kill each other when he dropped in. our muscles and nerves andminds were keyed for instant ruthless attack. and some "civilized" people still say thatthe urge to murder doesn't contribute to self-preservation! we were almost close enough now and he wassteeling himself to shoot and i remember wondering for a split second what his damn gun did toyou, and then me and the girl had started

the alternation routine. i'd stop dead, asif completely cowed by the threat of his weapon, and as he took note of it she'd go in a littlefurther, and as his gaze shifted to her she'd stop dead and i'd go in another foot and thentry to make my halt even more convincing as his gaze darted back to me. we worked it perfectly,our rhythm was beautiful, as if we were old dancing partners, though the whole thing wasabsolutely impromptu. still, i honestly don't think we'd ever havegot to him if it hadn't been for the distraction that came just then to help us. i could tell,you see, that he'd finally steeled himself and we still weren't quite close enough. hewasn't as tame as i'd hoped. i reached behind me for mother, determined to do a last-minuterush and leap anyway, when there came this

sick scream. i don't know how else to describe it briefly.it was a scream, feminine for choice, it came from some distance and the direction of theold cracking plant, it had a note of anguish and warning, yet at the same time it was weakand almost faltering you might say and squeaky at the end, as if it came from a person halfdead and a throat choked with phlegm. it had all those qualities or a wonderful mimickingof them. and it had quite an effect on our boy in grayfor in the act of shooting me down he started to turn and look over his shoulder. oh, it didn't altogether stop him from shootingme. he got me partly covered again as i was

in the middle of my lunge. i found out whathis gun did to you. my right arm, which was the part he'd covered, just went dead andi finished my lunge slamming up against his iron knees, like a highschool kid trying toblock out a pro footballer, with the knife slipping uselessly away from my fingers. but in the blessed meanwhile the girl hadlunged too, not with a slow slash, thank god, but with a high, slicing thrust aimed arrow-straightfor a point just under his ear. she connected and a fan of blood sprayed herfull in the face. i grabbed my knife with my left hand as itfell, scrambled to my feet, and drove the knife at his throat in a round-house swingthat happened to come handiest at the time.

the point went through his flesh like nothingand jarred against his spine with a violence that i hoped would shock into nervous insensibilitythe stoutest medulla oblongata and prevent any dying reprisals on his part. i got my wish, in large part. he swayed, straightened,dropped his gun, and fell flat on his back, giving his skull a murderous crack on theconcrete for good measure. he lay there and after a half dozen gushes the bright bloodquit pumping strongly out of his neck. then came the part that was like a dying reprisal,though obviously not being directed by him as of now. and come to think of it, it mayhave had its good points. the girl, who was clearly a most cool-headedcuss, snatched for his gun where he'd dropped

it, to make sure she got it ahead of me. shesnatched, yes—and then jerked back, letting off a sizable squeal of pain, anger, and surprise. where we'd seen his gun hit the concrete therewas now a tiny incandescent puddle. a rill of blood snaked out from the pool around hishead and touched the whitely glowing puddle and a jet of steam sizzled up. somehow the gun had managed to melt itselfin the moment of its owner dying. well, at any rate that showed it hadn't contained anygunpowder or ordinary chemical explosives, though i already knew it operated on otherprinciples from the way it had been used to paralyze me. more to the point, it showedthat the gun's owner was the member of a culture

that believed in taking very complete precautionsagainst its gadgets falling into the hands of strangers. but the gun fusing wasn't quite all. as thegirl and me shifted our gaze from the puddle, which was cooling fast and now glowed redlike the blood—as we shifted our gaze back from the puddle to the dead man, we saw thatat three points (points over where you'd expect pockets to be) his gray clothing had charredin small irregularly shaped patches from which threads of black smoke were twisting upward. just at that moment, so close as to make mejump in spite of years of learning to absorb shocks stoically—right at my elbow it seemedto (the girl jumped too, i may say)—a voice

said, "done a murder, hey?" advancing briskly around the skewily groundedplane from the direction of the cracking plant was an old geezer, a seasoned, hard-bakeddeathlander if i ever saw one. he had a shock of bone-white hair, the rest of him that showedfrom his weathered gray clothing looked fried by the sun's rays and others to a stringycrisp, and strapped to his boots and weighing down his belt were a good dozen knives. not satisfied with the unnerving noise he'dmade already, he went on brightly, "neat job too, i give you credit for that, but why thehell did you have to set the guy afire?" chapter 3

we are always, thanks to our human nature,potential criminals. none of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow. —the undiscovered self,by carl jung ordinarily scroungers who hide around on theoutskirts until the killing's done and then come in to share the loot get what they deserve—wordlessorders, well backed up, to be on their way at once. sometimes they even catch an after-clapof the murder urge, if it hasn't all been expended on the first victim or victims. yetthey will do it, trusting i suppose to the irresistible glamor of their personalities.there were several reasons why we didn't at once give pop this treatment.

in the first place we didn't neither of ushave our distance weapons. my revolver and her dart gun were both tucked in the caveback at the edge of the freeway. and there's one bad thing about a bugger so knife-happyhe lugs them around by the carload—he's generally good at tossing them. with his dozenor so knives pop definitely outgunned us. second, we were both of us without the useof an arm. that's right, the both of us. my right arm still dangled like a string of sausagesand i couldn't yet feel any signs of it coming undead. while she'd burned her fingers badlygrabbing at the gun—i could see their red-splotched tips now as she pulled them out of her mouthfor a second to wipe the pilot's blood out of her eyes. all she had was her stump withthe knife screwed to it. me, i can throw a

knife left-handed if i have to, but you beti wasn't going to risk mother that way. then i'd no sooner heard pop's voice, breathyand a little high like an old man's will get, than it occurred to me that he must have beenthe one who had given the funny scream that had distracted the pilot's attention and letus get him. which incidentally made pop a quick thinker and imaginative to boot, andmeant that he'd helped on the killing. besides all that, pop did not come in fawningand full of extravagant praise, as most scroungers will. he just assumed equality with us rightfrom the start and he talked in an absolutely matter-of-fact way, neither praising nor criticizingone bit—too damn matter-of-fact and open, for that matter, to suit my taste, but theni have heard other buggers say that some old

men are apt to get talkative, though i hadnever worked with or run into one myself. old people are very rare in the deathlands,as you might imagine. so the girl and me just scowled at him butdid nothing to stop him as he came along. near us, his extra knives would be no advantageto him. "hum," he said, "looks a lot like a guy imurdered five years back down los alamos way. same silver monkey suit and almost as tall.nice chap too—was trying to give me something for a fever i'd faked. that his gun melted?my man didn't smoke after i gave him his quietus, but then it turned out he didn't have anymetal on him. i wonder if this chap—" he started to kneel down by the body.

"hands off, pop!" i gritted at him. that washow we started calling him pop. "why sure, sure," he said, staying there onone knee. "i won't lay a finger on him. it's just that i've heard the alamosers have itrigged so that any metal they're carrying melts when they die, and i was wondering aboutthis boy. but he's all yours, friend. by the way, what's your name, friend?" "ray," i snarled. "ray baker." i think themain reason i told him was that i didn't want him calling me "friend" again. "you talk toomuch, pop." "i suppose i do, ray," he agreed. "what'syour name, lady?" the girl just sort of hissed at him and hegrinned at me as if to say, "oh, women!" then

he said, "why don't you go through his pockets,ray? i'm real curious." "shut up," i said, but i felt that he'd putme on the spot just the same. i was curious about the guy's pockets myself, of course,but i was also wondering if pop was alone or if he had somebody with him, and whetherthere was anybody else in the plane or not—things like that, too many things. at the same timei didn't want to let on to pop how useless my right arm was—if i'd just get a twingeof feeling in that arm, i knew i'd feel a lot more confident fast. i knelt down acrossthe body from him, started to lay mother aside and then hesitated. the girl gave me an encouraging look, as ifto say, "i'll take care of the old geezer."

on the strength of her look i put down motherand started to pry open the pilot's left hand, which was clenched in a fist that looked amite too big to have nothing inside it. the girl started to edge behind pop, but hecaught the movement right away and looked at her with a grin that was so knowing andyet so friendly, and yet so pitying at the same time—with the pity of the old pro foreven the seasoned amateur—that in her place i think i'd have blushed myself, as she didnow ... through the streaks of the pilot's blood. "you don't have to worry none about me, lady,"he said, running a hand through his white hair and incidentally touching the pommelof one of the two knives strapped high on

the back of his jacket so he could reach oneover either shoulder. "i quit murdering some years back. it got to be too much of a strainon my nerves." "oh yeah?" i couldn't help saying as i priedup the pilot's index finger and started on the next. "then why the stab-factory, pop?" "oh you mean those," he said, glancing downat his knives. "well, the fact is, ray, i carry them to impress buggers dumber thanyou and the lady here. anybody wants to think i'm still a practicing murderer i got no objections.matter of sentiment, too, i just hate to part with them—they bring back important memories.and then—you won't believe this, ray, but i'm going to tell you just the same—guysjust up and give me their knives and i doubly

hate to part with a gift." i wasn't going to say "oh yeah?" again or"shut up!" either, though i certainly wished i could turn off pop's spigot, or thoughti did. then i felt a painful tingling shoot down my right arm. i smiled at pop and said,"any other reasons?" "yep," he said. "got to shave and i mightas well do it in style. a new blade every day in the fortnight is twice as good as theold ads. you know, it makes you keep a knife in fine shape if you shave with it. what yougot there, ray?" "you were wrong, pop," i said. "he did havesome metal on him that didn't melt." i held up for them to see the object i'd extractedfrom his left fist: a bright steel cube measuring

about an inch across each side, but it feltlighter than if it were solid metal. five of the faces looked absolutely bare. the sixthhad a round button recessed in it. from the way they looked at it neither popnor the girl had the faintest idea of what it was. i certainly hadn't. "had he pushed the button?" the girl asked.her voice was throaty but unexpectedly refined, as if she'd done no talking at all, not evento herself, since coming to the deathlands and so retained the cultured intonations she'dhad earlier, whenever and wherever that had been. it gave me a funny feeling, of course,because they were the first words i'd heard her speak.

"not from the way he was holding it," i toldher. "the button was pointed up toward his thumb but the thumb was on the outside ofhis fingers." i felt an unexpected satisfaction at having expressed myself so clearly andi told myself not to get childish. the girl slitted her eyes. "don't you pushit, ray," she said. "think i'm nuts?" i told her, meanwhile slidingthe cube into the smaller pocket of my pants, where it fit tight and wouldn't turn sidewaysand the button maybe get pressed by accident. the tingling in my right arm was almost unbearablenow, but i was getting control over the muscles again. "pushing that button," i added, "might meltwhat's left of the plane, or blow us all up."

it never hurts to emphasize that you may haveanother weapon in your possession, even if it's just a suicide bomb. "there was a man pushed another button once,"pop said softly and reflectively. his gaze went far out over the deathlands and tookin a good half of the horizon and he slowly shook his head. then his face brightened."did you know, ray," he said, "that i actually met that man? long afterwards. you don't believeme, i know, but i actually did. tell you about it some other time." i almost said, "thanks, pop, for sparing meat least for a while," but i was afraid that would set him off again. besides, it wouldn'thave been quite true. i've heard other buggers

tell the yarn of how they met (and invariablyrubbed out) the actual guy who pushed the button or buttons that set the fusion missilesblasting toward their targets, but i felt a sudden curiosity as to what pop's versionof the yarn would be. oh well, i could ask him some other time, if we both lived thatlong. i started to check the pilot's pockets. my right hand could help a little now. "those look like mean burns you got there,lady," i heard pop tell the girl. he was right. there were blisters easy to see on three ofthe fingertips. "i've got some salve that's pretty good," he went on, "and some cleancloth. i could put on a bandage for you if you wanted. if your hand started to feel poisonedyou could always tell ray here to slip a knife

in me." pop was a cute gasser, you had to admit. ireminded myself that it was pop's business to play up to the both of us, charm beingthe secret weapon of all scroungers. the girl gave a harsh little laugh. "verywell," she said, "but we will use my salve, i know it works for me." and she started tolead pop to where we'd hidden our things. "i'll go with you," i told them, standingup. it didn't look like we were going to haveany more murders today—pop had got through the preliminary ingratiations pretty welland the girl and me had had our catharsis—but that would be no excuse for any such stupidityas letting the two of them get near my .38.

strolling to the cave and back i eased thesituation a bit more by saying, "that scream you let off, pop, really helped. i don't knowwhat gave you the idea, but thanks." "oh that," he said. "forget about it." "i won't," i told him. "you may say you'vequit killing, but helped on a do-in today." "ray," he said a little solemnly, "if it'llmake you feel any happier, i'll take a bit of the responsibility for every murder that'sbeen done since the beginning of time." i looked at him for a while. then, "pop, you'renot by any chance the religious type?" i asked suddenly. "lord, no," he told us.

that struck me as a satisfactory answer. godpreserve me from the religious type! we have quite a few of those in the deathlands. itgenerally means that they try to convert you to something before they kill you. or sometimesafterwards. we completed our errands. i felt a lot moresecure with old financier's friend strapped to my middle. mother is wonderful but sheis not enough. i dawdled over inspecting the pilot's pockets,partly to give my right hand time to come back all the way. and to tell the truth ididn't much enjoy the job—a corpse, especially such a handsome cadaver as this, just didn'tgo with pop's brand of light patter. pop did up the girl's hand in high style,bandaging each finger separately and then

persuading her to put on a big left-hand workglove he took out of his small pack. "lost the right," he explained, "which wasthe only one i ever used anyway. never knew until now why i kept this. how does it feel,alice?" i might have known he'd worm her name outof her. it occurred to me that pop's ideas of scrounging might extend to alice's favors.the urge doesn't die out when you get old, they tell me. not completely. he'd also helped her replace the knife onher stump with the hook. by that time i'd poked into all the pilot'spockets i could get at without stripping him and found nothing but three irregularly shapedblobs of metal, still hot to the touch. under

the charred spots, of course. i didn't want the job of stripping him. somebodyelse could do a little work, i told myself. i've been bothered by bodies before (as whohasn't, i suppose?) but this one was really beginning to make me sick. maybe i was crackingup, it occurred to me. murder is a very wearing business, as all deathlanders know, and althoughsome crack earlier than others, all crack in the end. i must have been showing how i was feelingbecause, "cheer up, ray," pop said. "you and alice have done a big murder—i'd say thesubject was six foot ten—so you ought to be happy. you've drawn a blank on his pocketsbut there's still the plane."

"yeah, that's right," i said, brighteninga little. "there's still the stuff in the plane." i knew there were some items i couldn'thope for, like .38 shells, but there'd be food and other things. "nuh-uh," pop corrected me. "i said the plane.you may have thought it's wrecked, but i don't. have you taken a real gander at it? it's worthdoing, believe me." i jumped up. my heart was suddenly pounding.i was glad of an excuse to get away from the body, but there was a lot more in my feelingsthan that. i was filled with an excitement to which i didn't want to give a name becauseit would make the let-down too great. one of the wide stubby wings of the plane,raking downward so that its tip almost touched

the concrete, had hidden the undercarriageof the fuselage from our view. now, coming around the wing, i saw that there was no undercarriage. i had to drop to my hands and knees and scanaround with my cheek next to the concrete before i'd believe it. the "wrecked" planewas at all points at least six inches off the ground. i got to my feet again. i was shaking. i wantedto talk but i couldn't. i grabbed the leading edge of the wing to stop from falling. thewhole body of the plane gave a fraction of an inch and then resisted my leaning weightwith lazy power, just like a gyroscope. "antigravity," i croaked, though you couldn'thave heard me two feet. then my voice came

back. "pop, alice! they got antigravity! antigravity—andit's working!" alice had just come around the wing and wasfacing me. she was shaking too and her face was white like i knew mine was. pop was politelystanding off a little to one side, watching us curiously. "told you you'd won a real prize,"he said in his matter-of-fact way. alice wet her lips. "ray," she said, "we canget away." just those four words, but they did it. somethingin me unlocked—no, exploded describes it better. "we can go places!" i almost shouted. "beyond the dust," she said. "mexico city.south america!" she was forgetting the deathlander's

cynical article of belief that the dust neverends, but then so was i. it makes a difference whether or not you've got a means of doingsomething. "rio!" i topped her with. "the indies. hongkong. bombay. egypt. bermuda. the french riviera!" "bullfights and clean beds," she burst outwith. "restaurants. swimming pools. bathrooms!" "skindiving," i took it up with, as hystericalas she was. "road races and roulette tables." "bentleys and porsches!" "aircoups and dc4s and comets!" "martinis and hashish and ice cream sodas!" "hot food! fresh coffee! gambling, smoking,dancing, music, drinks!" i was going to add

women, but then i thought of how hard-bittenlittle alice would look beside the dream creatures i had in mind. i tactfully suppressed theword but i filed the idea away. i don't think either of us knew exactly whatwe were saying. alice in particular i don't believe was old enough to have experiencedalmost any of the things the words referred to. they were mysterious symbols of long-interdicteddelights spewing out of us. "ray," alice said, hurrying to me, "let'sget aboard." "yes," i said eagerly and then i saw a littleproblem. the door to the plane was a couple of feet above our heads. whoever hoisted himselfup first—or got hoisted up, as would have to be the case with alice on account of herhand—would be momentarily at the other's

mercy. i guess it occurred to alice too becauseshe stopped and looked at me. it was a little like the old teaser about the fox, the goose,and the corn. maybe, too, we were both a little scared theplane was booby-trapped. pop solved the problem in the direct way imight have expected of him by stepping quietly between us, giving a light leap, catchinghold of the curving sill, chinning himself on it, and scrambling up into the plane soquickly that we'd hardly have had time to do anything about it if we'd wanted to. popcouldn't be much more than a bantamweight, even with all his knives. the plane saggedan inch and then swung up again. as pop disappeared from view i backed off,reaching for my .38, but a moment later he

stuck out his head and grinned down at us,resting his elbows on the sill. "come on up," he said. "it's quite a place.i promise not to push any buttons 'til you get here, though there's whole regiments ofthem." i grinned back at pop and gave alice a boostup. she didn't like it, but she could see it had to be her next. she hooked onto thesill and pop caught hold of her left wrist below the big glove and heaved. then it was my turn. i didn't like it. i didn'tlike the idea of those two buggers poised above me while my hands were helpless on thesill. but i thought pop's a nut. you can trust a nut, at least a little ways, though youcan't trust nobody else. i heaved myself up.

it was strange to feel the plane giving andthen bracing itself like something alive. it seemed to have no trouble accepting ourcombined weight, which after all was hardly more than half again the pilot's. inside the cabin was pretty small but as pophad implied, oh my! everything looked soft and smoothly curved, like you imagine yourinsides being, and almost everything was a restfully dull silver. the general shape ofit was something like the inside of an egg. forward, which was the larger end, were acouple of screens and a wide viewport and some small dials and the button brigades pophad mentioned, lined up like blank typewriter keys but enough for writing chinese.

just aft of the instrument panel were twovery comfortable-looking strange low seats. they seemed to be facing backwards until irealized they were meant to be knelt into. the occupant, i could see, would sort of sprawlforward, his hands free for button-pushing and such. there were spongy chinrests. aft was a tiny instrument panel and a kindof sideways seat, not nearly so fancy. the door by which we'd entered was to the side,a little aft. i didn't see any indications of cabinets orfixed storage spaces of any kinds, but somehow stuck to the walls here and there were quitea few smooth blobby packages, mostly dull silver too, some large, some small—valisesand handbags, you might say.

all in all, it was a lovely cabin and, morethan that, it seemed lived in. it looked as if it had been shaped for, and maybe by oneman. it had a personality you could feel, a strong but warm personality of its own. then i realized whose personality it was.i almost got sick—so close to it i started telling myself it must be something antigravitydid to your stomach. but it was all too interesting to let youget sick right away. pop was poking into two of the large mound-shaped cases that weresitting loose and open on the right-hand seat, as if ready for emergency use. one had a foldedsomething with straps on it that was probably a parachute. the second had i judged a thousandor more of the inch cubes such as i'd pried

out of the pilot's hand, all neatly stackedin a cubical box inside the soft outer bag. you could see the one-cube gap where he'dtaken the one. i decided to take the rest of the bags offthe walls and open them, if i could figure out how. the others had the same idea, butalice had to take off her hook and put on her pliers, before she could make progress.pop helped her. there was room enough for us to do these things without crowding eachother too closely. by the time alice was set to go i'd discoveredthe trick of getting the bags off. you couldn't pull them away from the wall no matter whatforce you used, at least i couldn't, and you couldn't even slide them straight along thewalls, but if you just gave them a gentle

counterclockwise twist they came off likenothing. twisting them clockwise glued them back on. it was very strange, but i told myselfthat if these boys could generate antigravity fields they could create screwy fields ofother sorts. it also occurred to me to wonder if "theseboys" came from earth. the pilot had looked human enough, but these accomplishments didn't—notby my standards for human achievement in the age of the deaders. at any rate i had to admitto myself that my pet term "cultural queer" did not describe to my own satisfaction membersof a culture which could create things like this cabin. not that i liked making the admission.it's hard to admit an exception to a pet gripe against things.

the excitement of getting down and openingthe christmas packages saved me from speculating too much along these or any other lines. i hit a minor jackpot right away. in the samebag were a compass, a catalytic pocket lighter, a knife with a saw-tooth back edge that mademy affection for mother waver, a dust mask, what looked like a compact water-filtrationunit, and several other items adding up to a deluxe deathlands survival kit. there were some goggles in the kit i didn'tsavvy until i put them on and surveyed the landscape out the viewport. a nearby dustdrift i knew to be hot glowed green as death in the slightly smoky lenses. wow! those specshad geiger counters beat a mile and i privately

bet myself they worked at night. i stuck themin my pocket quick. we found bunches of tiny electronics parts—ithink they were; spools of magnetic tape, but nothing to play it on; reels of very narrowfilm with frames much too small to see anything at all unmagnified; about three thousand cigarettesin unlabeled transparent packs of twenty—we lit up quick, using my new lighter; a picturebook that didn't make much sense because the views might have been of tissue sections orstarfields, we couldn't quite decide, and there were no captions to help; a thin bookwith ricepaper pages covered with chinese characters—that was a puzzler; a thick bookwith nothing but columns of figures, all zeros and ones and nothing else; some tiny chisels;and a mouth organ. pop, who'd make a point

of just helping in the hunt, appropriatedthat last item—i might have known he would, i told myself. now we could expect "turkeyin the straw" at odd moments. alice found a whole bag of what were women'sthings judging from the frilliness of the garments included. she set aside some squeeze-packsand little gadgets and elastic items right away, but she didn't take any of the clothes.i caught her measuring some kind of transparent chemise against herself when she thought weweren't looking; it was for a girl maybe six sizes bigger. and we found food. cans of food that was heatedup inside by the time you got the top rolled off, though the outside could still be coolto the touch. cans of boneless steak, boneless

chops, cream soup, peas, carrots, and friedpotatoes—they weren't labeled at all but you could generally guess the contents fromthe shape of the can. eggs that heated when you touched them and were soft-boiled evenlyand barely firm by the time you had the shell broke. and small plastic bottles of strongcoffee that heated up hospitably too—in this case the tops did a five-second hesitationin the middle of your unscrewing them. at that point as you can imagine we let therest of the packages go and had ourselves a feast. the food ate even better than itsmelled. it was real hard for me not to gorge. then as i was slurping down my second bottleof coffee i happened to look out the viewport and see the pilot's body and the darkeningpuddle around it and the coffee began to taste,

well, not bad, but sickening. i don't thinkit was guilty conscience. deathlanders outgrow those if they ever have them to start with;loners don't keep consciences—it takes cultures to give you those and make them work. artisticinappropriateness is the closest i can come to describing what bothered me. whatever itwas, it made me feel lousy for a minute. about the same time alice did an odd thingwith the last of her coffee. she slopped it on a rag and used it to wash her face. i guessshe'd caught a reflection of herself with the blood smears. she didn't eat any moreafter that either. pop kept on chomping away, a slow feeder and appreciative. to be doing something i started to inspectthe instrument panel and right away i was

all excited again. the two screens were whatgot me. they showed shadowy maps, one of north america, the other of the world. the firstone was a whole lot like the map i'd been imagining earlier—faint colors marked thesmall "civilized" areas including one in eastern canada and another in upper michigan thatmust be "countries" i didn't know about, and the deathlands were real dark just as i'dalways maintained they should be! south of lake michigan was a brightly luminousgreen point that must be where we were, i decided. and for some reason the colored areasrepresenting los alamos and atlantic highlands were glowing brighter than the others—theyhad an active luminosity. los alamos was blue, atla-hi violet. los alamos was shown havingmore territory than i expected. savannah fortress

for that matter was a whole lot bigger thani'd have made it, pushing out pseudopods west and northeast along the coast, though itsred didn't have the extra glow. but its growth-pattern reeked of imperialism. the world screen showed dim color patchestoo, but for the moment i was more interested in the other. the button armies marched right up to thelower edge of the screens and right away i got the crazy hunch that they were connectedwith spots on the map. push the button for a certain spot and the plane would go there!why, one button even seemed to have a faint violet nimbus around it (or else my eyes weregoing bad) as if to say, "push me and we go

to atlantic highlands." a crazy notion as i say and no sensible wayto handle a plane's navigation according to any standards i could imagine, but then asi've also said this plane didn't seem to be designed according to any standards but ratherin line with one man's ideas, including his whims. at any rate that was my hunch about the buttonsand the screens. it tantalized rather than helped, for the only button that seemed tobe marked in any way was the one (guessing by color) for atlantic highlands, and i certainlydidn't want to go there. like alamos, atla-hi has the reputation for being a mysteriouslydangerous place. not openly mean and death-on-deathlanders

like walla walla or porter, but buggers whoswing too close to atla-hi have a way of never turning up again. you never expect to seeagain two out of three buggers who pass in the night, but for three out of three to keepdisappearing is against statistics. alice was beside me now, scanning things overtoo, and from the way she frowned and what not i gathered she had caught my hunch andalso shared my puzzlement. now was the time, all right, when we neededan instruction manual and not one in chinese neither! pop swallowed a mouthful and said, "yep, now'dbe a good time to have him back for a minute, to explain things a bit. oh, don't take offense,ray, i know how it was for you and for you

too, alice. i know the both of you had tomurder him, it wasn't a matter of free choice, it's the way us deathlanders are built. justthe same, it'd be nice to have a way of killing 'em and keeping them on hand at the same time.i remember feeling that way after murdering the alamoser i told you about. you see, icome down with the very fever i'd faked and almost died of it, while the man who couldhave cured me easy wouldn't do nothing but perfume the landscape with the help of a gangof anaerobic bacteria. stubborn single-minded cuss!" the first part of that oration started upmy sickness again and irked me not a little. dammit, what right had pop to talk about howall us deathlanders had to kill (which was

true enough and by itself would have mademe cotton to him) if as he'd claimed earlier he'd been able to quit killing? pop was, anold hypocrite, i told myself—he'd helped murder the pilot, he'd admitted as much—andalice and me'd be better off if we bedded the both of them down together. but then thesecond part of what pop said so made me want to feel pleasantly sorry for myself and laughat the same time that i forgave the old geezer. practically everything pop said had that reassuringtouch of insanity about it. so it was alice who said, "shut up, pop"—andrather casually at that—and she and me went on to speculate and then to argue about whichbuttons we ought to push, if any and in what order.

"why not just start anywhere and keep pushing'em one after another?—you're going to have to eventually, may as well start now," waspop's light-hearted contribution to the discussion. "got to take some chances in this life." hewas sitting in the back seat and still nibbling away like a white-topped mangy old squirrel. of course alice and me knew more than that.we kept making guesses as to how the buttons worked and then backing up our guesses withhot language. it was a little like two savages trying to decide how to play chess by lookingat the pieces. and then the old escape-to-paradise theme took hold of us again and we studiedthe colored blobs on the world screen, trying to decide which would have the fanciest accommodationsfor blase ex-murderers. on the north america

screen too there was an intriguing pink patchin southern mexico that seemed to take in old mexico city and acapulco too. "quit talking and start pushing," pop proddedus. "this way you're getting nowhere fast. i can't stand hesitation, it riles my nerves." alice thought you ought to push ten buttonsat once, using both hands, and she was working out patterns for me to try. but i was offon a kick about how we should darken the plane to see if any of the other buttons glowedbeside the one with the atla-hi violet. "look here, you killed a big man to get thisplane," pop broke in, coming up behind me. "are you going to use it for discussion groupsor are you going to fly it?"

"quiet," i told him. i'd got a new hunch andwas using the dark glasses to scan the instrument panel. they didn't show anything. "dammit, i can't stand this any more," popsaid and reached a hand and arm between us and brought it down on about fifty buttons,i'd judge. the other buttons just went down and up, butthe atla-hi button went down and stayed down. the violet blob of atla-hi on the screen goteven brighter in the next few moments. the door closed with a tiny thud. we took off.chapter 4 any man who deals in murder, must have veryincorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate

principles. —thomas de quincey inmurder considered as one of the fine arts for that matter we took off fast with theplane swinging to beat hell. alice and me was in the two kneeling seats and we huggedthem tight, but pop was loose and sort of rattled around the cabin for a while—andserve him right! on one of the swings i caught a glimpse ofthe seven dented gas tanks, looking like dull crescents from this angle through the orangehaze and getting rapidly smaller as they hazed after a while the plane levelled off and quitswinging, and a while after that my image of the cabin quit swinging too. once againi just managed to stave off the vomits, this

time the vomits from natural causes. alicelooked very pale around the gills and kept her face buried in the chinrest of her chair. pop ended up right in our faces, sort of spread-eagledagainst the instrument panel. in getting himself off it he must have braced his hands againsthalf the buttons at one time or another and i noticed that none of them went down a fraction.they were locked. it had probably happened automatically when the atla-hi button gotpushed. i'd have stopped him messing around in thatapish way, but with the ultra-queasy state of my stomach i lacked all ambition and washappy just not to be smelling him so close. i still wasn't taking too great an interestin things as i idly watched the old geezer

rummaging around the cabin for something thatgot misplaced in the shake-up. eventually he found it—a small almond-shaped can. heopened it. sure enough it turned out to have almonds in it. he fitted himself in the backseat and munched them one at a time. ish! "nothing like a few nuts to top off with,"he said cheerfully. i could have cut his throat even more cheerfully,but the damage had been done and you think twice before you kill a person in close quarterswhen you aren't absolutely sure you'll be able to dispose of the body. how did i knowi'd be able to open the door? i remember philosophizing that pop ought at least to have broke an armso he'd be as badly off as alice and me (though for that matter my right arm was fully recoverednow) but he was all in one piece. there's

no justice in events, that's for sure. the plane ploughed along silently throughthe orange soup, though there was really no way to tell it was moving now—until a skewyspindle shape loomed up ahead and shot back over the viewport. i think it was a vulture.i don't know how vultures manage to operate in the haze, which ought to cancel their keeneyesight, but they do. it shot past fast. alice lifted her face out of the sponge stuffand began to study the buttons again. i heaved myself up and around a little and said, "pop,alice and me are going to try to work out how this plane navigates. this time we don'twant no interference." i didn't say a word more about what he'd done. it never does tohash over stupidities.

"that's perfectly fine, go right ahead," hetold me. "i feel calm as a kitten now we're going somewheres. that's all that ever matterswith me." he chuckled a bit and added, "you got to admit i gave you and alice somethingto work with," but then he had the sense to shut up tight. we weren't so chary of pushing buttons thistime, but ten minutes or so convinced us that you couldn't push any of the buttons any more,they were all locked down—all locked except for maybe one, which we didn't try at firstfor a special reason. we looked for other controls—sticks, levers,pedals, finger-holes and the like. there weren't any. alice went back and tried the buttonson pop's minor console. they were locked too.

pop looked interested but didn't say a word. we realized in a general way what had happened,of course. pushing the atla-hi button had set us on some kind of irreversible automatic.i couldn't imagine the why of gimmicking a plane's controls like that, unless maybe tokeep loose children or prisoners from being able to mess things up while the pilot tooka snooze, but there were a lot of whys to this plane that didn't seem to have any standardanswers. the business of taking off on irreversibleautomatic had happened so neatly that i naturally wondered whether pop might not know more aboutnavigating this plane than he let on, a whole lot more in fact, and the seemingly idioticpetulance of his pushing all the buttons have

been a shrewd cover for pushing the atla-hibutton. but if pop had been acting he'd been acting beautifully, with a serene disregardfor the chances of breaking his own neck. i decided this was a possibility i could thinkabout later and maybe act on then, after alice and me had worked through the more obviousstuff. the reason we hadn't tried the one buttonyet was that it showed a green nimbus, just like the atla-hi button had had a violet nimbus.now there was no green on either of the screens except for the tiny green star that i hadfigured stood for the plane and it didn't make sense to go where we already were. andif it meant some other place, some place not shown on the screens, you bet we weren't goingto be too quick about deciding to go there.

it might not be on earth. alice expressed it by saying, "my namesakewas always a little too quick at responding to those drink me cues." i suppose she thought she was being cryptic,but i fooled her. "alice in wonderland?" i asked. she nodded, and gave me a little smile,not at all like one of the eat me smiles she'd given me last evening. it is funny how crazily happy a little touchof the intellectual past like that can make you feel—and how horribly uncomfortablea moment later. we both started to study the north americascreen again and almost at once we realized

that it had changed in one small particular.the green star had twinned. where there had been one point of green light there were nowtwo, very close together like the double star in the handle of the dipper. we watched itfor a while. the distance between the two stars grew perceptibly greater. we watchedit for a while longer, considerably longer. it became clear that the position of the morewesterly star on the screen was fixed, while the more easterly star was moving east towardatla-hi with about the speed of the tip of the minute hand on a wrist watch (two inchesan hour, say). the pattern began to make sense. i figured it this way: the moving star muststand for the plane, the other green dot must stand for where the plane had just been. forsome reason the spot on the freeway by the

old cracking plant was recognized as a markedlocality by the screen. why i don't know. it reminded me of the old "x marks the spot"of newspaper murders, but that would be getting very fancy. anyway the spot we'd just takenoff from was so marked and in that case the button with the green nimbus ... "hold tight, everybody," i said to alice,grudgingly including pop in my warning. "i got to try it." i gripped my seat with my knees and one armand pushed the green button. it pushed. the plane swung around in a level loop, nottoo tight to disturb the stomach much, and steadied out again.

i couldn't judge how far we'd swung but aliceand me watched the green stars and after about a minute she said, "they're getting closer,"and a little while later i said, "yeah, for sure." i scanned the board. the green button—thecracking-plant button, to call it that—was locked down of course. the atla-hi buttonwas up, glowing violet. all the other buttons were still up and locked up—i tried themall again. it was clear as day used to be. we could eithergo to atla-hi or we could go back where we'd started from. there was no third possibility. it was a little hard to take. you think ofa plane as freedom, as something that will

carry you anywhere in the world you chooseto go, especially any paradise, and then you find yourself worse limited than if you'dstayed on the ground—at least that was the way it was happening to us. but alice and me were realists. we knew itwouldn't help to wail. we were up against another of those "two" problems, the problemof two destinations, and we had to choose ours. if we go back, i thought, we can trek on somewhere—anywhere—richerby the loot from the plane, especially that survival kit. trek on with some loot we'llmostly never understand and with the knowledge that we are leaving a plane that can fly,that we are shrinking back from an unknown

adventure. also if we go back there's something elsewe'll have to face, something we'll have to live with for a little while at least thatwon't be nice to live with after this cozily personal cabin, something that shouldn't botherme at all but, dammit, it does. alice made the decision for us and at thesame time showed she was thinking about the same thing as me. "i don't want to have to smell him, ray,"she said. "i am not going back to keep company with that filthy corpse. i'd rather anythingthan that." and she pushed the atla-hi button again and as the plane started to swing shelooked at me defiantly as if to say i'd reverse

the course again over her dead body. "don't tense up," i told her. "i want a newshake of the dice myself." "you know, alice," pop said reflectively,"it was the smell of my alamoser got to me too. i just couldn't bear it. i couldn't getaway from it because my fever had me pinned down, so there was nothing left for me todo but go crazy. no atla-hi for me, just bug-land. my mind died, though not my memory. by thetime i'd got my strength back i'd started to be a new bugger. i didn't know no moreabout living than a newborn babe, except i knew i couldn't go back—go back to murderingand all that. my new mind knew that much though otherwise it was just a blank. it was allvery funny."

"and then i suppose," alice cut in, her voicecorrosive with sarcasm, "you hunted up a wandering preacher, or perhaps a kindly old hermit wholived on hot manna, and he showed you the blue sky!" "why no, alice," pop said. "i told you i don'tgo for religion. as it happens, i hunted me up a couple of murderers, guys who were worsecases then myself but who'd wanted to quit because it wasn't getting them nowhere andwho'd found, i'd heard, a way of quitting, and the three of us had a long talk together." "and they told you the great secret of howto live in the deathlands without killing," alice continued acidly. "drop the nonsense,pop. it can't be done."

"it's hard, i'll grant you," pop said. "youhave to go crazy or something almost as bad—in fact, maybe going crazy is the easiest way.but it can be done and, in the long run, murder is even harder." i decided to interrupt this idle chatter.since we were now definitely headed for atla-hi and there was nothing to do until we got there,unless one of us got a brainstorm about the controls, it was time to start on the lessobvious stuff i'd tabled in my mind. "why are you on this plane, pop?" i askedsharply. "what do you figure on getting out of alice and me?—and i don't mean the freemeals." he grinned. his teeth were white and even—plates,of course. "why, ray," he said, "i was just

giving alice the reason. i like to talk tomurderers, practicing murderers preferred. i need to—have to talk to 'em, to keep myselfstraight. otherwise i might start killing again and i'm not up to that any more." "oh, so you get your kicks at second hand,you old peeper," alice put in but, "quit lying, pop," i said. "about having quit killing,for one thing. in my books, which happen to be the old books in this case, the accompliceis every bit as guilty as the man with the slicer. you helped us kill the pilot by givingthat funny scream and you know it." "who says i did?" pop countered, rearing upa little. "i never said so. i just said, 'forget it.'" he hesitated a moment, studying me.then he said, "i wasn't the one gave that

scream. in fact, i'd have stopped it if i'dbeen able." "who did then?" again he studied me as he hesitated. "i'mnot telling," he said, settling back. "pop!" i said, sharp again. "buggers who padtogether tell everything." "oh yeah," he agreed, smiling. "i remembersaying that to quite a few guys in my day. it's a very restful comradely sentiment. ikilled every last one of 'em, too." "you may have, pop," i granted, "but we'retwo to one." "so you are," he agreed softly, looking theboth of us over. i knew what he was thinking—that alice still had just her pliers on and thatin these close quarters his knives were as

good as my gun. "give me your right hand, alice," i said.without taking my eyes off pop i reached the knife without a handle out of her belt andthen i started to unscrew the pliers out of her stump. "pop," i said as i did so, "you may have quitkilling for all i know. i mean you may have quit killing clean decent deathland style.but i don't believe one bit of that guff about having to talk to murderers to keep your mindsweet. furthermore—" "it's true though," he interrupted. "i gotto keep myself reminded of how lousy it feels to be a murderer."

"so?" i said. "well, here's one person whobelieves you've got a more practical reason for being on this plane. pop, what's the bountyatla-hi gives you for every deathlander you bring in? what would it be for two live deathlanders?and what sort of reward would they pay for a lost plane brought in? seems to me theymight very well make you a citizen for that." "yes, even give you your own church," aliceadded with a sort of wicked gaiety. i squeezed her stump gently to tell her let me handleit. "why, i guess you can believe that if youwant to," pop said and let out a soft breath. "seems to me you need a lot of coincidencesand happenstances to make that theory hold water, but you sure can believe it if youwant to. i got no way, ray, to prove to you

i'm telling the truth except to say i am." "right," i said and then i threw the nextone at him real fast. "what's more, pop, weren't you traveling in this plane to begin with?that cuts a happenstance. didn't you hop out while we were too busy with the pilot to noticeand just pretend to be coming from the cracking plant? weren't the buttons locked becauseyou were the pilot's prisoner?" pop creased his brow thoughtfully. "it couldhave been that way," he said at last. "could have been—according to the evidence as yousaw it. it's quite a bright idea, ray. i can almost see myself skulking in this cabin,while you and alice—" "you were skulking somewhere," i said. i finishedscrewing in the knife and gave alice back

her hand. "i'll repeat it, pop," i said. "we'retwo to one. you'd better talk." "yes," alice added, disregarding my previoushint. "you may have given up fighting, pop, but i haven't. not fighting, nor killing,nor anything in between those two. any least thing." my girl was being her most pantherish. "now who says i've given up fighting?" popdemanded, rearing a little again. "you people assume too much, it's a dangerous habit. beforewe have any trouble and somebody squawks about me cheating, let's get one thing straight.if anybody jumps me i'll try to disable them, i'll try to hurt them in any way short ofkilling, and that means hamstringing and rabbit-punching and everything else. every least thing, alice.and if they happen to die while i'm honestly

just trying to hurt them in a way short ofkilling, then i won't grieve too much. my conscience will be reasonably clear. is thatunderstood?" i had to admit that it was. pop might be lyingabout a lot of things, but i just didn't believe he was lying about this. and i already knewpop was quick for his age and strong enough. if alice and me jumped him now there'd beblood let six different ways. you can't jump a man who has a dozen knives easy to handand not expect that to happen, two to one or not. we'd get him in the end but it wouldbe gory. "and now," pop said quietly, "i will talka little if you don't mind. look here, ray ... alice ... the two of you are confirmedmurderers, i know you wouldn't tell me nothing

different, and being such you both know thatthere's nothing in murder in the long run. it satisfies a hunger and maybe gets you alittle loot and it lets you get on to the next killing. but that's all, absolutely all.yet you got to do it because it's the way you're built. the urge is there, it's an overpoweringurge, and you got nothing to oppose it with. you feel the big grief and the big resentment,the dust is eating at your bones, you can't stand the city squares—the porterites andmantenors and such—because you know they're whistling in the dark and it's a dirty tune,so you go on killing. but if there were a decent practical way to quit, you'd take it.at least i think you would. when you still thought this plane could take you to rio oreurope you felt that way, didn't you? you

weren't planning to go there as murderers,were you? you were going to leave your trade behind." it was pretty quiet in the cabin for a coupleof seconds. then alice's thin laugh sliced the silence. "we were dreaming then," shesaid. "we were out of our heads. but now you're talking about practical things, as you say.what do you expect us to do if we quit our trade, as you call it—go into walla wallaor ouachita and give ourselves up? i might lose more than my right hand at ouachita thistime—that was just on suspicion." "or atla-hi," i added meaningfully. "are youexpecting us to admit we're murderers when we get to atla-hi, pop?"

the old geezer smiled and thinned his eyes."now that wouldn't accomplish much, would it? most places they'd just string you up,maybe after tickling your pain nerves a bit, or if it was manteno they might put you ina cage and feed you slops and pray over you, and would that help you or anybody else? ifa man or woman quits killing there's a lot of things he's got to straighten out—firsthis own mind and feelings, next he's got to do what he can to make up for the murdershe's done—help the next of kin if any and so on—then he's got to carry the news toother killers who haven't heard it yet. he's got no time to waste being hanged. believeme, he's got work lined up for him, work that's got to be done mostly in the deathlands, andit's the sort of work the city squares can't

help him with one bit, because they just don'tunderstand us murderers and what makes us tick. we have to do it ourselves." "hey, pop," i cut in, getting a little interestedin the argument (there wasn't anything else to get interested in until we got to atla-hior pop let down his guard), "i dig you on the city squares (i call 'em cultural queers)and what sort of screwed-up fatheads they are, but just the same for a man to quit killinghe's got to quit lone-wolfing it. he's got to belong to a community, he's got to havea culture of some sort, no matter how disgusting or nutsy." "well," pop said, "don't us deathlanders havea culture? with customs and folkways and all

the rest? a very tight little culture, infact. nutsy as all get out, of course, but that's one of the beauties of it." "oh sure," i granted him, "but it's a culturebased on murder and devoted wholly to murder. murder is our way of life. that gets yourargument nowhere, pop." "correction," he said. "or rather, re-interpretation."and now for a little while his voice got less old-man harsh and yet bigger somehow, as ifit were more than just pop talking. "every culture," he said, "is a way of growth aswell as a way of life, because the first law of life is growth. our deathland culture isdevoted to growing through murder away from murder. that's my thought. it's about thetoughest way of growth anybody was ever asked

to face up to, but it's a way of growth justthe same. a lot bigger and fancier cultures never could figure out the answer to the problemof war and killing—we know that, all right, we inhabit their grandest failure. maybe usdeathlanders, working with murder every day, unable to pretend that it isn't part of everyone of us, unable to put it out of our minds like the city squares do—maybe us deathlandersare the ones to do that little job." "but hell, pop," i objected, getting excitedin spite of myself, "even if we got a culture here in the deathlands, a culture that cangrow, it ain't a culture that can deal with repentant murderers. in a real culture a murdererfeels guilty and confesses and then he gets hanged or imprisoned a long time and thatsquares things for him and everybody. you

need religion and courts and hangmen and screwsand all the rest of it. i don't think it's enough for a man just to say he's sorry andgo around glad-handing other killers—that isn't going to be enough to wipe out his senseof guilt." pop squared his eyes at mine. "are you sofancy that you have to have a sense of guilt, ray?" he demanded. "can't you just see whensomething's lousy? a sense of guilt's a luxury. of course it's not enough to say you're sorry—you'regoing to have to spend a good part of the rest of your life making up for what you'vedone ... and what you will do, too! but about hanging and prisons—was it ever proved thosewere the right thing for murderers? as for religion now—some of us who've quit killingare religious and a lot of us (me included)

aren't; and some of the ones that are religiousfigure (maybe because there's no way for them to get hanged) that they're damned eternally—butthat doesn't stop them doing good work. i ask you now, is any little thing like beingdamned eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat?" that did it, somehow. that last statementof pop's appealed so much to me and was completely crazy at the same time, that i couldn't helpwarming up to him. don't get me wrong, i didn't really fall for his line of chatter at all,but i found it fun to go along with it—so long as the plane was in this shuttle situationand we had nothing better to do. alice seemed to feel the same way. i guessany bugger that could kid religion the way

pop could got a little silver star in herbooks. bronze, anyway. right away the atmosphere got easier. to startwith we asked pop to tell us about this "us" he kept mentioning and he said it was somedozens (or hundreds—nobody had accurate figures) of killers who'd quit and went nomadingaround the deathlands trying to recruit others and help those who wanted to be helped. theyhad semi-permanent meeting places where they tried to get together at pre-arranged dates,but mostly they kept on the go, by twos and threes or—more rarely—alone. they wereall men so far, at least pop hadn't heard of any women members, but—he assured aliceearnestly—he would personally guarantee that there would be no objections to a girljoining up. they had recently taken to calling

themselves murderers anonymous, after somepre-war organization pop didn't know the original purpose of. quite a few of them had slippedand gone back to murdering again, but some of these had come back after a while, moredetermined than ever to make a go of it. "we welcomed 'em, of course," pop said. "wewelcome everybody. everybody that's a genuine murderer, that is, and says he wants to quit.guys that aren't blooded yet we draw the line at, no matter how fine they are." also, "we have a lot of fun at our meetings,"pop assured us. "you never saw such high times. nobody's got a right to go glooming aroundor pull a long face just because he's done a killing or two. religion or no religion,pride's a sin."

alice and me ate it all up like we was a coupleof kids and pop was telling us fairy tales. that's what it all was, of course, a fairytale—a crazy mixed-up fairy tale. alice and me knew there could be no fellowship ofdeathlanders like pop was describing—it was impossible as blue sky—but it gave usa kick to pretend to ourselves for a while to believe in it. pop could talk forever, apparently, aboutmurder and murderers and he had a bottomless bag of funny stories on the same topic andcharacter vignettes—the murderers who were forever wanting their victims to understandand forgive them, the ones who thought of themselves as little kings with divine rightsof dispensing death, the ones who insisted

on laying down (chastely) beside their finishedvictims and playing dead for a couple of hours, the ones who weren't so chaste, the ones whocould only do their killings when they were dressed a certain way (and the troubles theyhad with their murder costumes), the ones who could only kill people with certain traitsor of a certain appearance (red-heads, say, or people who read books, or who couldn'tcarry tunes, or who used bad language), the ones who always mixed sex and murder and theones who believed that murder was contaminated by the least breath of sex, the sticklersand the sloppy joes, the artists and the butchers, the ax- and stiletto-types, the compulsivesand the repulsives—honestly, pop's portraits from life added up to a dance of death asgood as anything the middle ages ever produced

and they ought to have been illustrated likethose by some great artist. pop told us a lot about his own killings too. alice andme was interested, but neither of us wasn't tempted into making parallel revelations aboutourselves. your private life's your own business, i felt, as close as your guts, and no joke'sgood enough to justify revealing a knot of it. not that we talked about nothing but murderwhile we were bulleting along toward atla-hi. the conversation was free-wheeling and wegot onto all sorts of topics. for instance, we got to talking about the plane and howit flew itself—or levitated itself, rather. i said it must generate an antigravity fieldthat was keyed to the body of the plane but

nothing else, so that we didn't feel lighter,nor any of the objects in the cabin—it just worked on the dull silvery metal—and i provedmy point by using mother to shave a little wisp of metal off the edge of the controlboard. the curlicue stayed in the air wherever you put it and when you moved it you couldfeel the faintest sort of gyroscopic resistance. it was very strange. pop pointed out it was a little like magnetism.a germ riding on an iron filing that was traveling toward the pole of a big magnet wouldn't feelthe magnetic pull—it wouldn't be operating on him, only on the iron—but just the samethe germ'd be carried along with the filing and feel its acceleration and all, providedhe could hold on—but for that purpose you

could imagine a tiny cabin in the filing."that's what we are," pop added. "three germs, jumbo size." alice wanted to know why an antigravity planeshould have even the stubbiest wings or a jet for that matter, for we remembered nowwe'd noticed the tubes, and i said it was maybe just a reserve system in case the antigravityfailed and pop guessed it might be for extra-fast battle maneuvering or even for operating outsidethe atmosphere (which hardly made sense, as i proved to him). "if we're a battle plane, where's our guns?"alice asked. none of us had an answer. we remembered the noise the plane had madebefore we saw it. it must have been using

its jets then. "and do you suppose," pop asked,"that it was something from the antigravity that made electricity flare out of the topof the cracking plant? like to have scared the pants off me!" no answer to that either. now was a logical time, of course, to askpop what he knew about the cracking plant and just who had done the scream if not him,but i figured he still wouldn't talk; as long as we were acting friendly there was no pointin spoiling it. we guessed around a little, though, aboutwhere the plane came from. pop said alamos, i said atla-hi, alice said why not from both,why couldn't alamos and atla-hi have some sort of treaty and the plane be travelingfrom the one to the other. we agreed it might

be. at least it fitted with the atla-hi violetand the alamos blue being brighter than the other colors. "i just hope we got some sort of anti-collisionradar," i said. i guessed we had, because twice we'd jogged in our course a little,maybe to clear the alleghenies. the easterly green star was by now getting pretty closeto the violet blot of atla-hi. i looked out at the orange soup, which was one thing thathadn't changed a bit so far, and i got to wishing like a baby that it wasn't there andto thinking how it blanketed the whole earth (stars over the riviera?—don't make me laugh!)and i heard myself asking, "pop, did you rub out that guy that pushed the buttons for allthis?"

"nope," pop answered without hesitation, justas if it hadn't been four hours or so since he'd mentioned the point. "nope, ray. factis i welcomed him into our little fellowship about six months back. this is his knife here,this horn-handle in my boot, though he never killed with it. he claimed he'd been torturedfor years by the thought of the millions and millions he'd killed with blast and radiation,but now he was finding peace at last because he was where he belonged, with the murderers,and could start to do something about it. several of the boys didn't want to let himin. they claimed he wasn't a real murderer, doing it by remote control, no matter howmany he bumped off." "i'd have been on their side," alice said,thinning her lips.

"yep," pop continued, "they got real hot aboutit. he got hot too and all excited and offered to go out and kill somebody with his barehands right off, or try to (he's a skinny little runt), if that's what he had to doto join. we argued it over, i pointed out that we let ex-soldiers count the killingsthey'd done in service, and that we counted poisonings and booby traps and such too—whichare remote-control killings in a way—so eventually we let him in. he's doing goodwork. we're fortunate to have him." "do you think he's really the guy who pushedthe buttons?" i asked pop. "how should i know?" pop replied. "he claimsto be." i was going to say something about peoplewho faked confessions to get a little easy

glory, as compared to the guys who were reallyguilty and would sooner be chopped up than talk about it, but at that moment a fourthvoice started talking in the plane. it seemed to be coming out of the violet patch on thenorth america screen. that is, it came from the general direction of the screen at anyrate and my mind instantly tied it to the violet patch at atla-hi. it gave us a fright,i can tell you. alice grabbed my knee with her pliers (she changed again), harder thanshe'd intended, i suppose, though i didn't let out a yip—i was too defensively frozen. the voice was talking a language i didn'tunderstand at all that went up and down the scale like atonal music.

"sounds like chinese," pop whispered, givingme a nudge. "it is chinese. mandarin," the screen respondedinstantly in the purest english—at least that was how i'd describe it. practicallyboston. "who are you? and where is grayl? come in, grayl." i knew well enough who grayl must be—orrather, have been. i looked at pop and alice. pop grinned, maybe a mite feebly this time,i thought, and gave me a look as if to say, "you want to handle it?" i cleared my throat. then, "we've taken overfor grayl," i said to the screen. "oh." the screen hesitated, just barely. then,"do any of 'you' speak mandarin?"

i hardly bothered to look at pop and alice."no," i said. "oh." again a tiny pause. "is grayl aboardthe plane?" "no." i said. "oh. incapacitated in some way, i suppose?" "yes," i said, grateful for the screen's tactfulness,unintentional or not. "but you have taken over for him?" the screenpressed. "yes," i said, swallowing. i didn't know whati was getting us into, things were moving too fast, but it seemed the merest sense toact cooperative. "i'm very glad of that," the screen said withsomething in its tone that made me feel funny—i

guess it was sincerity. then it said, "isthe—" and hesitated, and started again with "are the blocks aboard?" i thought. alice pointed at the stuff shedumped out of the other seat. i said. "there's a box with a thousand or so one-inch underweightsteel cubes in it. like a child's blocks, but with buttons in them. alongside a boxwith a parachute." "that's what i mean," the screen said andsomehow, maybe because whoever was talking was trying to hide it, i caught a note ofgreat relief. "look," the screen said, more rapidly now,"i don't know how much you know, but we may have to work very fast. you aren't going tobe able to deliver the steel cubes to us directly.

in fact you aren't going to be able to landin atlantic highlands at all. we're sieged in by planes and ground forces of savannahfortress. all our aircraft, such as haven't been destroyed, are pinned down. you're goingto have to parachute the blocks to a point as near as possible to one of our ground partiesthat's made a sortie. we'll give you a signal. i hope it will be later—nearer here, thatis—but it may be sooner. do you know how to fight the plane you're in? operate itsarmament?" "no," i said, wetting my lip. "then that's the first thing i'd best teachyou. anything you see in the haze from now on will be from savannah. you must shoot itdown."

chapter 5and we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,where ignorant armies clash by night. —dover beach, by matthew arnold i am not going to try to describe point bypoint all that happened the next half hour because there was too much of it and it involvedall three of us, sometimes doing different things at the same time, and although we weretold a lot of things, we were seldom if ever told the why of them, and through it all wasthe constant impression that we were dealing with human beings (i almost left out the "human"and i'm still not absolutely sure whether

i shouldn't) of vastly greater scope—andprobably intelligence too—than ourselves. and that was just the basic confusion, togive it a name. after a while the situation got more difficult, as i'll try to tell indue course. to begin with, it was extremely weird to plungefrom a rather leisurely confab about a fairy-tale fellowship of non-practicing murderers intoa shooting war between a violet blob and a dark red puddle on a shadowy fluorescent map.the voice didn't throw any great shining lights on this topic, because after the first—andperhaps unguarded—revelation, we learned little more of the war between atla-hi andsavannah fortress and nothing of the reasons behind it. presumably savannah was the aggressor,reaching out north after the conquest of birmingham,

but even that was just a guess. it is hardto describe how shadowy it all felt to me; there were some minutes while my mind keptmixing up the whole thing with what i'd read long ago about the civil war: savannah waslee, atla-hi was grant, and we had been dropped spang into the middle of the second battleof the wilderness. apparently the savannah planes had some sortof needle ray as part of their armament—at any rate i was warned to watch out for "swinginglines in the haze, like straight strings of pink stars" and later told to aim at the sourcesof such lines. and naturally i guessed that the steel cubes must be some crucial weaponfor atla-hi, or ammunition for a weapon, or parts for some essential instrument like agiant computer, but the voice ignored my questions

on that point and didn't fall into the coupleof crude conversational traps i tried to set. we were to drop the cubes when told, thatwas all. pop had the box of them closed again and rigged to the parachute—he took overthat job because alice and me were busy with other things when the instructions on thatcame through—and he was told how to open the door of the plane for the drop (you justheld your hand steadily on a point beside the door), but, as i say, that was all. naturally it occurred to me that once we hadmade the drop, atla-hi would have no more use for us and might simply let us be destroyedby savannah or otherwise—perhaps want us to be destroyed—so that it might be wisestfor us to refuse to make the drop when the

signal came and hang onto those myriad steelcubes as our only bargaining point. still, i could see no advantage to refusing beforethe signal came. i'd have liked to discuss the point with alice and maybe pop too, butapparently everything we said, even whispered, could be overheard by atla-hi. (we never diddetermine, incidentally, whether atla-hi could see into the cabin of the plane also. i don'tbelieve they could, though they sure had it bugged for sound.) all in all, we found out almost nothing aboutatla-hi. in fact, three witless germs traveling in a cabin in an iron filing wasn't a baddescription of us at all. as i often say of my deductive faculties—think—shmink! butatla-hi (always meaning, of course, the personality

behind the voice from the screen) found outall it wanted about us—and apparently knew a good deal to start with. for one thing,they must have been tracking our plane for some time, because they guessed it was onautomatic and that we could reverse its course but nothing else. though they seemed underthe impression that we could reverse its course to los alamos, not the cracking plant. hereobviously i did get a nugget of new data, though it was just about the only one. fora moment the voice from the screen got real unguarded—anxious as it asked, "do you knowif it is true that they have stopped dying at los alamos, or are they merely broadcastingthat to cheer us up?" i answered, "oh yes, they're all fine," tothat, but i couldn't have made it very convincing,

because the next thing i knew the voice wasgetting me to admit that we'd only boarded the plane somewhere in the central deathlands.i even had to describe the cracking plant and freeway and gas tanks—i couldn't thinkof a lie that mightn't get us into as much trouble as the truth—and the voice said,"oh, did grayl stay there?" and i said, "yes," and braced myself to do some more admitting,or some heavy lying, as the inspiration took me. but the voice continued to skirt around thequestion of what exactly had happened to grayl. i guess they knew well enough we'd bumpedhim off, but didn't bring it up because they needed our cooperation—they were handlingus like children or savages, you see.

one pretty amazing point—atla-hi apparentlyknew something about pop's fairy-tale fellowship of non-practicing murderers, because whenhe had to speak up, while he was getting instructions on preparing the stuff for the drop, the voicesaid, "excuse me, but you sound like one of those m. a. boys." murderers anonymous, pop had said some oftheir boys called their unorganized organization. "yep, i am," pop admitted uncomfortably. "well, a word of advice then, or perhaps ionly mean gossip," the screen said, for once getting on a side track. "most of our peopledo not believe you are serious about it, although you may think that you are. our skeptics (whichincludes all but a very few of us) split quite

evenly between those who think that the m.a. spirit is a terminal psychotic illusion and those who believe it is an elaborate rusein preparation for some concerted attack on cities by deathlanders." "can't say that i blame the either of them,"was pop's only comment. "i think i'm nuts myself and a murderer forever." alice glaredat him for that admission, but it seemed to do us no damage. pop really did seem out ofhis depth though during this part of our adventure, more out of his depth than even alice andme—i mean, as if he could only really function in the deathland with deathlanders and wantedto get anything else over quickly. i think one reason pop was that way was thathe was feeling very intensely something i

was feeling myself: a sort of sadness andbewilderment that beings as smart as the voice from the screen sounded should still be fightingwars. murder, as you must know by now, i can understand and sympathize with deeply, butwar?—no! oh, i can understand cultural queers fightingcity squares and even get a kick out of it and whoop 'em on, but these atla-hi and alamosfolk seemed a different sort of cat altogether (though i'd only come to that point of viewtoday)—the kind of cat that ought to have outgrown war or thought its way around it.maybe savannah fortress had simply forced the war on them and they had to defend themselves.i hadn't contacted any savannans—they might be as blood-simple as the porterites. still,i don't know that it's always a good excuse

that somebody else forced you into war. thatsort of justification can keep on until the end of time. but who's a germ to judge? a minute later i was feeling doubly like agerm and a very lowly one, because the situation had just got more difficult and depressingtoo—the thing had happened that i said i'd tell you about in due course. the voice was just repeating its instructionsto pop on making the drop, when it broke off of a sudden and a second voice came in, adeep voice with a sort of european accent (not chinese, oddly)—not talking to us,i think, but to the first voice and overlooking or not caring that we could hear.

"also tell them," the second voice said, "thatwe will blow them out of the sky the instant they stop obeying us! if they should hesitateto make the drop or if they should put a finger on the button that reverses their course,then—pouf! such brutes understand only the language of force. also warn them that theblocks are atomic grenades that will blow them out of the sky too if—" "dr. kovalsky, will you permit me to pointout—" the first voice interrupted, getting as close to expressing irritation as i imagineit ever allowed itself to do. then both voices cut off abruptly and the screen was silentfor ten seconds or so. i guess the first voice thought it wasn't nice for us to overhearatla-hi bickering with itself, even if the

second voice didn't give a damn (any morethan a farmer would mind the pigs overhearing him squabble with his hired man; of coursethis guy seemed to overlook that we were killer-pigs, but there wasn't anything we could do in thatline just now except get burned up). when the screen came on again, it was justthe first voice talking once more, but it had something to say that was probably theresult of a rapid conference and compromise. "attention, everyone! i wish to inform youthat the plane in which you are traveling can be exploded—melted in the air, rather—ifwe activate a certain control at this end. we will not do so, now or subsequently, ifyou make the drop when we give the signal and if you remain on your present course untilthen. afterwards you will be at liberty to

reverse your course and escape as best youmay. let me re-emphasize that when you told me you had taken over for grayl i acceptedthat assertion in full faith and still so accept it. is that all fully understood?" we all told him "yes," though i don't imaginewe sounded very happy about it, even pop. however i did get that funny feeling againthat the voice was being really sincere—an illusion, i supposed, but still a comfortingone. now while all these things were going on,believe it or not, and while the plane continued to bullet through the orange haze—whichhadn't shown any foreign objects in it so far, thank god, even vultures, let alone "straightstrings of pink stars"—i was receiving a

cram course in gunnery! (do you wonder i don'ttry to tell this part of my story consecutively?) it turned out that alice had been brilliantlyright about one thing: if you pushed some of the buttons simultaneously in patternsof five they unlocked and you could play on them like organ keys. two sets of five keys,played properly, would rig out a sight just in front of the viewport and let you aim andfire the plane's main gun in any forward direction. there was a rearward firing gun too, thatyou aimed by changing over the world screen to a rear-view tv window, but we didn't getaround to mastering that one. in fact, in spite of my special talents it was all i coulddo to achieve a beginner's control over the main gun, and i wouldn't have managed eventhat except that alice, from the thinking

she'd been doing about patterns of five, wasquick at understanding from the voice's descriptions which buttons were meant. she couldn't workthem herself of course, what with her stump and burnt hand, but she could point them outfor me. after twenty minutes of drill i was a gunnerof sorts, sprawled in the right-hand kneeling seat and intently scanning the onrushing orangehaze which at last was beginning to change toward the bronze of evening. if somethingshowed up in it i'd be able to make a stab at getting a shot in. not that i knew whatmy gun fired—the voice wasn't giving away any unnecessary data. naturally i had asked why didn't the voiceteach me to fly the plane so that i could

maneuver in case of attack, and naturallythe voice had told me it was out of the question—much too difficult and besides they wanted us ona known course so they could plan better for the drop and recovery. (i think maybe thevoice would have given me some hints—and maybe even told me more about the steel cubestoo and how much danger we were in from them—if it hadn't been for the second voice, whichpresumably had issued from a being who was keeping watch to make sure among other thingsthat the first voice didn't get soft-hearted.) so there i was being a front gunner. actuallya part of me was getting a big bang out of it—from antique banker's special to needlecannon (or whatever it was)—but at the same time another part of me was disgusted withthe idea of acting like i belonged to a live

culture (even a smart, unqueer one) and workingin a war (even just so as to get out of it fast), while a third part of me—one thati normally keep down—was very simply horrified. pop was back by the door with the box and'chute, ready to make the drop. alice had no duties for the moment, but she'dsuddenly started gathering up food cans and packing them in one bag—i couldn't figureout at first what she had in mind. orderly housewife wouldn't be exactly my descriptionof her occupational personality. then of course everything had to happen atonce. the voice said, "make the drop!" alice crossed to pop and thrust out the bagof cans toward him, writhing her lips in silent

"talk" to tell him something. she had a knifein her burnt hand too. but i didn't have time to do any lip-reading,because just then a glittering pink asterisk showed up in the darkening haze ahead—awhole half dozen straight lines spreading out from a blank central spot, as if a super-fastgigantic spider had laid in the first strands of its web. wind whistled as the door of the plane startedto open. i fought to center my sight on the blank centralspot, which drifted toward the left. one of the straight lines grew dazzlinglybright. i heard alice whisper fiercely, "drop these!"and the part of my mind that couldn't be applied

to gunnery instantly deduced that she'd hadsome last-minute inspiration about dropping a bunch of cans instead of the steel cubes. i got the sight centered and held down thefiring combo. the thought flashed to me: it's a city you're firing at, not a plane, andi flinched. the dazzlingly pink line dipped down towardme. behind me, the sound of a struggle. alicesnarling and pop giving a grunt. then all at once a scream from alice, a bigwhoosh of wind, a flash way ahead (where i'd aimed), a spatter of hot metal inside thecabin, a blinding spot in the middle of the world screen, a searing beam inches from myneck, an electric shock that lifted me from

my seat and ripped at my consciousness! when i came to (if i really ever was out—secondslater, at most) there were no more pink lines. the haze was just its disgustingly tawny eveningself with black spots that were only after-images. the cabin stunk of ozone, but wind funnelingthrough a hole in the one-time world screen was blowing it out fast enough—savannahhad gotten in one lick, all right. and we were falling, the plane was swinging downlike a crippled bird—i could feel it and there was no use kidding myself. but staring at the control panel wouldn'tkeep us from crashing if that was in the cards. i looked around and there were pop and aliceglaring at each other across the closing door.

he looked mean. she looked agonized and waspressing her burnt hand into her side with her elbow as if he'd stamped on the hand,maybe. i didn't see any blood though. i didn't see the box and 'chute either, though i didsee alice's bag of groceries. i guessed pop had made the drop. now, it occurred to me, was a bully time forvoice two to melt the plane—if he hadn't already tried. my first thought had been thatthe spatter of hot metal had come from the savannah craft spitting us, but there wasno way to be sure. i looked around at the viewport in time tosee rocks and stunted trees jump out of the haze. good old ray, i thought, always in atthe death. but just then the plane took a

sickening bounce, as if its antigravity hadonly started to operate within yards of the ground. another lurching fall and anotherbounce, less violent. a couple of repetitions of that, each one a little gentler, and thenwe were sort of bumping along on an even keel with the rocks and such sliding past fastabout a hundred feet below, i judged. we'd been spoiled for altitude work, it seemed,but we could still cripple along in some sort of low-power repulsion field. i looked at the north america screen and thebuttons, wondering if i should start us back west again or leave us set on atla-hi andsee what the hell happened—at the moment i hardly cared what else savannah did to us.i needn't have wasted the mental energy. the

decision was made for me. as i watched, theatla-hi button jumped up by itself and the button for the cracking plant went down andthere was some extra bumping as we swung around. also, the violet patch of atla-hi went realdim and the button for it no longer had a violet nimbus. the los alamos blue went dulltoo. the cracking-plant dot glowed a brighter green—that was all. all except for one thing. as the violet dimmedi thought i heard voice one very faintly (not as if speaking directly but as if the screenhad heard and remembered—not a voice but the fluorescent ghost of one): "thank youand good luck!" chapter 6

many a man has dated his ruin from some murderor other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. —thomas de quincey "and a long merry siege to you, sir, and roastrat for christmas!" i responded, very out loud and rather to my surprise. "war! how i hate war!"—that was what popexploded with. he didn't exactly dance in senile rage—he was still keeping too sharpa watch on alice—but his voice sounded that way. "damn you, pop!" alice contributed. "and youtoo, ray! we might have pulled something,

but you had to go obedience-happy." then heranger got the better of her grammar, or maybe pop and me was corrupting it. "damn the bothof you!" she finished. it didn't make much sense, any of it. we werejust cutting loose, i guess, after being scared to say anything for the last half hour. i said to alice, "i don't know what you couldhave pulled, except the chain on us." to pop i remarked, "you may hate war, but you surehelped that one along. those grenades you dropped will probably take care of a few hundredsavannans." "that's what you always say about me, isn'tit?" he snapped back. "but i don't suppose i should expect any kinder interpretationof my motives." to alice he said, "i'm sorry

i had to slap your burnt fingers, sister,but you can't say i didn't warn you about my low-down tactics." then to me again: "ido hate war, ray. it's just murder on a bigger scale, though some of the boys give me anargument there." "then why don't you go preach against warin atla-hi and savannah?" alice demanded, still very hot but not quite so bitter. "yeah, pop, how about it?" i seconded. "maybe i should," he said, thoughtful allat once. "they sure need it." then he grinned. "hey, how'd this sound: hear the world-famousmurderer pop trumbull talk against war. wear your steel throat protectors. pretty good,hey?"

we all laughed at that, grudgingly at first,then with a touch of wholeheartedness. i think we all recognized that things weren't goingto be very cheerful from here on in and we'd better not turn up our noses at the feeblestfun. "i guess i didn't have anything very brightin mind," alice admitted to me, while to pop she said, "all right, i forgive you for thepresent." "don't!" pop said with a shudder. "i hateto think of what happened to the last bugger made the mistake of forgiving me." we looked around and took stock of our resources.it was time we did. it was getting dark fast, although we were chasing the sun, and thereweren't any cabin lights coming on and we

sure didn't know of any way of getting any. we wadded a couple of satchels into the holein the world screen without trying to probe it. after a while it got warmer again in thecabin and the air a little less dusty. presently it started to get too smoky from the cigaretteswe were burning, but that came later. we screwed off the walls the few storage bagswe hadn't inspected. they didn't contain nothing of consequence, not even a flashlight. i had one last go at the buttons, though thereweren't any left with nimbuses on them—the darker it got, the clearer that was. eventhe atla-hi button wouldn't push now that it had lost its violet halo. i tried the gunnerypatterns, figuring to put in a little time

taking pot shots at any mountains that turnedup, but the buttons that had been responding so well a few minutes ago refused to budge.alice suggested different patterns, but none of them worked. that console was really locked—maybethe shot from savannah was partly responsible, though atla-hi remote-locking things was explanationenough. "the buggers!" i said. "they didn't have totie us up this tight. going east we at least had a choice—forward or back. now we gotnone." "maybe we're just as well off," pop said."if atla-hi had been able to do anything more for us—that is, if they hadn't been siegedin, i mean—they'd sure as anything have pulled us in. pull the plane in, i mean, andpicked us out of it—with a big pair of tweezers,

likely as not. and contrary to your flatteringopinion of my preaching (which by the way none of the religious boys in my outfit share—theycall me 'that misguided old atheist'), i don't think none of us would go over big at atla-hi." we had to agree with him there. i couldn'timagine pop or alice or even me cutting much of a figure (even if we weren't murder-pariahs)with the pack of geniuses that seemed to make up the atla-alamos crowd. the double-a republics,to give them a name, might have their small-brain types, but somehow i didn't think so. theremust be more than one edison-einstein, it seemed to me, back of antigravity and allthe wonders in this plane and the other things we'd gotten hints of. also, grayl had seemedbred for brains as well as size, even if us

small mammals had cooked his goose. and noneof the modern "countries" had more than a few thousand population yet, i was prettysure, and that hardly left room for a dumbbell class. finally, too, i got hold of a memoryi'd been reaching for the last hour—how when i was a kid i'd read about some scientistswho learned to talk mandarin just for kicks. i told alice and pop. "and if that's the average atla-alamoser'sidea of mental recreation," i said, "well, you can see what i mean." "i'll grant you they got a monopoly of brains,"pop agreed. "not sense, though," he added doggedly.

"intellectual snobs," was alice's comment."i know the type and i detest it." ("you are sort of intellectual, aren't you?" pop toldher, which fortunately didn't start a riot.) still, i guess all three of us found it funto chew over a bit the new slant we'd gotten on two (in a way, three) of the great "countries"of the modern world. (and as long as we thought of it as fun, we didn't have to admit theenvy and wistfulness that was behind our wisecracks.) i said, "we've always figured in a generalway that alamos was the remains of a community of scientists and technicians. now we knowthe same's true of the atla-hi group. they're the brookhaven survivors." "manhattan project, don't you mean?" alicecorrected.

"nope, that was in colorado springs," popsaid with finality. i also pointed out that a community of scientistswould educate for technical intelligence, maybe breed for it too. and being a grouppicked for high i. q. to begin with, they might make startlingly fast progress. youcould easily imagine such folk, unimpeded by the boobs, creating a wonder world in acouple of generations. "they got their troubles though," pop remindedme and that led us to speculating about the war we'd dipped into. savannah fortress, weknew, was supposed to be based on some big atomic plants on the river down that way,but its culture seemed to have a fiercer ingredient than atla-alamos. before we knew it we were,musing almost romantically about the plight

of atla-hi, besieged by superior and (it waseasy to suppose) barbaric forces, and maybe distant los alamos in a similar predicament—alicereminded me how the voice had asked if they were still dying out there. for a moment ifound myself fiercely proud that i had been able to strike a blow against evil aggressors.at once, of course, then, the revulsion came. "this is a hell of a way," i said, "for threeso-called realists to be mooning about things." "yes, especially when your heroes kicked usout," alice agreed. pop chuckled. "yep," he said, "they even tookray's artillery away from him." "you're wrong there, pop," i said, sittingup. "i still got one of the grenades—the one the pilot had in his fist." to tell thetruth i'd forgotten all about it and it bothered

me a little now to feel it snugged up in mypocket against my hip bone where the skin is thin. "you believe what that old dutchman said aboutthe steel cubes being atomic grenades?" pop asked me. "i don't know," i said, "he sure didn't soundenthusiastic about telling us the truth about anything. but for that matter he sounded meanenough to tell the truth figuring we'd think it was a lie. maybe this is some sort of babya-bomb with a fuse timed like a grenade." i got it out and hefted it. "how about i pressthe button and drop it out the door? then we'll know." i really felt like doing it—restless,i guess.

"don't be a fool, ray," alice said. "don't tense up, i won't," i told her. atthe same time i made myself the little promise that if i ever got to feeling restless, thatis, restless and bad, i'd just go ahead and punch the button and see what happened—sortof leave my future up to the gods of the deathlands, you might say. "what makes you so sure it's a weapon?" popasked. "what else would it be," i asked him, "thatthey'd be so hot on getting them in the middle of a war?" "i don't know for sure," pop said. "i've madea guess, but i don't want to tell it now.

what i'm getting at, ray, is that your firstthought about anything you find—in the world outside or in your own mind—is that it'sa weapon." "anything worthwhile in your mind is a weapon!"alice interjected with surprising intensity. "you see?" pop said. "that's what i mean aboutthe both of you. that sort of thinking's been going on a long time. cave man picks up arock and right away asks himself, 'who can i brain with this?' doesn't occur to him forseveral hundred thousand years to use it to start building a hospital." "you know, pop," i said, carefully tuckingthe cube back in my pocket, "you are sort of preachy at times."

"guess i am," he said. "how about some grub?" it was a good idea. another few minutes andwe wouldn't have been able to see to eat, though with the cans shaped to tell theircontents i guess we'd have managed. it was a funny circumstance that in this wonder planewe didn't even know how to turn on the light—and a good measure of our general helplessness. we had our little feed and lit up again andsettled ourselves. i judged it would be an overnight trip, at least to the cracking plant—weweren't making anything like the speed we had been going east. pop was sitting in backagain and alice and i lay half hitched around on the kneeling seats, which allowed us towatch each other. pretty soon it got so dark

we couldn't see anything of each other butthe glowing tips of the cigarettes and a bit of face around the mouth when the person tooka deep drag. they were a good idea, those cigarettes—kept us from having ideas aboutthe other person starting to creep around with a knife in his hand. the north america screen still glowed dimlyand we could watch our green dot trying to make progress. the viewport was dead blackat first, then there came the faintest sort of bronze blotch that very slowly shiftedforward and down. the old moon, of course, going west ahead of us. after a while i realized what it was like—anold pullman car (i'd traveled in one once

as a kid) or especially the smoker of an oldpullman, very late at night. our crippled antigravity, working on the irregularitiesof the ground as they came along below, made the ride rhythmically bumpy, you see. i rememberedhow lonely and strange that old sleeping car had seemed to me as a kid. this felt the same.i kept waiting for a hoot or a whistle. it was the sort of loneliness that settles inyour bones and keeps working at you. "i recall the first man i ever killed—"pop started to reminisce softly. "shut up!" alice told him. "don't you evertalk about anything but murder, pop?" "guess not," he said. "after all, it's theonly really interesting topic there is. do you know of another?"

it was silent in the cabin for a long timeafter that. then alice said, "it was the afternoon before my twelfth birthday when they cameinto the kitchen and killed my father. he'd been wise, in a way, and had us living ata spot where the bombs didn't touch us or the worst fallout. but he hadn't counted onthe local werewolf gang. he'd just been slicing some bread—homemade from our own wheat (dadwas great on back to nature and all)—but he laid down the knife. "dad couldn't see any object or idea as aweapon, you see—that was his great weakness. dad couldn't even see weapons as weapons.dad had a philosophy of cooperation, that was his name for it, that he was going toexplain to people. sometimes i think he was

glad of the last war, because he believedit would give him his chance. "but the werewolves weren't interested inphilosophy and although their knives weren't as sharp as dad's they didn't lay them down.afterwards they had themselves a meal, with me for dessert. i remember one of them useda slice of bread to sop up blood like gravy. and another washed his hands and face in thecold coffee ..." she didn't say anything else for a bit. popsaid softly, "that was the afternoon, wasn't it, that the fallen angels ..." and then justsaid, "my big mouth." "you were going to say 'the afternoon theykilled god?'" alice asked him. "you're right, it was. they killed god in the kitchen thatafternoon. that's how i know he's dead. afterwards

they would have killed me too, eventually,except—" again she broke off, this time to say, "pop,do you suppose i can have been thinking about myself as the daughter of god all these years?that that's why everything seems so intense?" "i don't know," pop said. "the religious boyssay we're all children of god. i don't put much stock in it—or else god sure has somelousy children. go on with your story." "well, they would have killed me too, exceptthe leader took a fancy to me and got the idea of training me up for a weregirl or she-wolfdeb or whatever they called it." "that was my first experience of ideas asweapons. he got an idea about me and i used it to kill him. i had to wait three monthsfor my opportunity. i got him so lazy he let

me shave him. he bled to death the same wayas dad." "hum," pop commented after a bit, "that wasa chiller, all right. i got to remember to tell it to bill—it was somebody killinghis mother that got him started. alice, you had about as good a justification for yourfirst murder as any i remember hearing." "yet," alice said after another pause, withjust a trace of the old sarcasm creeping back into her voice, "i don't suppose you thinki was right to do it?" "right? wrong? who knows?" pop said almostblusteringly. "sure you were justified in a whole pack of ways. anybody'd sympathizewith you. a man often has fine justification for the first murder he commits. but as youmust know, it's not that the first murder's

always so bad in itself as that it's apt tostart you on a killing spree. your sense of values gets shifted a tiny bit and never shiftsback. but you know all that and who am i to tell you anything, anyway? i've killed menbecause i didn't like the way they spit. and may very well do it again if i don't keepwatching myself and my mind ventilated." "well, pop," alice said, "i didn't alwayshave such dandy justification for my killings. last one was a moony old physicist—he fixedme the geiger counter i carry. a silly old geek—i don't know how he survived so long.maybe an exile or a runaway. you know, i often attach myself to the elderly do-gooder typelike my father was. or like you, pop." pop nodded. "it's good to know yourself,"he said.

there was a third pause and then, althoughi hadn't exactly been intending to, i said, "alice had justification for her first murder,personal justification that an ape would understand. i had no personal justification at all formine, yet i killed about a million people at a modest estimate. you see, i was the bossof the crew that took care of the hydrogen missile ticketed for moscow, and when theticket was finally taken up i was the one to punch it. my finger on the firing button,i mean." i went on, "yeah, pop, i was one of the button-pushers.there were really quite a few of us, of course—that's why i get such a laugh out of stories aboutbeing or rubbing out the one guy who pushed all the buttons."

"that so?" pop said with only mild-soundinginterest. "in that case you ought to know—" we didn't get to hear right then who i oughtto know because i had a fit of coughing and we realized the cigarette smoke was gettingjust too thick. pop fixed the door so it was open a crack and after a while the atmospheregot reasonably okay though we had to put up with a low lonely whistling sound. "yeah," i continued, "i was the boss of themissile crew and i wore a very handsome uniform with impressive insignia—not the bully oldstripes i got on my chest now—and i was very young and handsome myself. we were allvery young in that line of service, though a few of the men under me were a little older.young and dedicated. i remember feeling a

very deep and grim—and clean—responsibility.but i wonder sometimes just how deep it went or how clean it really was. "i had an uncle flew in the war they foughtto lick fascism, bombardier on a flying fortress or something, and once when he got drunk hetold me how some days it didn't bother him at all to drop the eggs on germany; the buildingsand people down there seemed just like toys that a kid sets up to kick over, and the wholebusiness about as naive fun as poking an anthill. "i didn't even have to fly over at seven mileswhat i was going to be aiming at. only i remember sometimes getting out a map and looking ata certain large dot on it and smiling a little and softly saying, 'pow!'—and then givinga little conventional shudder and folding

up the map quick. "naturally we told ourselves we'd never haveto do it, fire the thing, i mean, we joked about how after twenty years or so we'd allbe given jobs as museum attendants of this same bomb, deactivated at last. but naturallyit didn't work out that way. there came the day when our side of the world got hit andthe orders started cascading down from defense coordinator bigelow—" "bigelow?" pop interrupted. "not joe bigelow?" "joseph a., i believe," i told him, a littleannoyed. "why he's my boy then, the one i was tellingyou about—the skinny runt had this horn-handle!

can you beat that?" pop sounded startlinglyhappy. "him and you'll have a lot to talk about when you get together." i wasn't so sure of that myself, in fact myfirst reaction was that the opposite would be true. to be honest i was for the firstmoment more than a little annoyed at pop interrupting my story of my big grief—for it was thatto me, make no mistake. here my story had finally been teased out of me, against allexpectation, after decades of repression and in spite of dozens of assorted psychologicalblocks—and here was pop interrupting it for the sake of a lot of trivial organizationalgossip about joes and bills and georges we'd never heard of and what they'd say or think!

but then all of a sudden i realized that ididn't really care, that it didn't feel like a big grief any more, that just starting totell about it after hearing pop and alice tell their stories had purged it of that unnecessaryweight of feeling that had made it a millstone around my neck. it seemed to me now that icould look down at ray baker from a considerable height (but not an angelic or contemptuouslysuperior height) and ask myself not why he had grieved so much—that was understandableand even desirable—but why he had grieved so uselessly in such a stuffy little privatehell. and it would be interesting to find out howjoseph a. bigelow had felt. "how does it feel, ray, to kill a millionpeople?"

i realized that alice had asked me the questionseveral seconds back and it was hanging in the air. "that's just what i've been trying to tellyou," i told her and started to explain it all over again—the words poured out of menow. i won't put them down here—it would take too long—but they were honest wordsas far as i knew and they eased me. i couldn't get over it: here were us threemurderers feeling a trust and understanding and sharing a communion that i wouldn't havebelieved possible between any two or three people in the age of the deaders—or in anyage, to tell the truth. it was against everything i knew of deathland psychology, but it washappening just the same. oh, our strange isolation

had something to do with it, i knew, and thatpullman-car memory hypnotizing my mind, and our reactions to the voices and violence ofatla-alamos, but in spite of all that i ranked it as a wonder. i felt an inward freedom andeasiness that i never would have believed possible. pop's little disorganized organizationhad really got hold of something, i couldn't deny it. three treacherous killers talking from thebottoms of their hearts and believing each other!—for it never occurred to me to doubtthat pop and alice were feeling exactly like i was. in fact, we were all so sure of itthat we didn't even mention our communion to each other. perhaps we were a little afraidwe would rub off the bloom. we just enjoyed

we must have talked about a thousand thingsthat night and smoked a couple of hundred cigarettes. after a while we started takinglittle catnaps—we'd gotten too much off our chests and come to feel too tranquil foreven our excitement to keep us awake. i remember the first time i dozed waking up with a coldstart and grabbing for mother—and then hearing pop and alice gabbing in the dark, and rememberingwhat had happened, and relaxing again with a smile. of all things, pop was saying, "yep, i imagineray must be good to make love to, murderers almost always are, they got the fire. it remindsme of what a guy named fred told me, one of our boys ..."

mostly we took turns going to sleep, thoughi think there were times when all three of us were snoozing. about the fifth time i wokeup, after some tighter shut-eye, the orange soup was back again outside and alice wassnoring gently in the next seat and pop was up and had one of his knives out. he was looking at his reflection in the viewport.his face gleamed. he was rubbing butter into "another day, another pack of troubles," hesaid cheerfully. the tone of his remark jangled my nerves,as that tone generally does early in the morning. i squeezed my eyes. "where are we?" i asked. he poked his elbow toward the north americascreen. the two green dots were almost one.

"my god, we're practically there," alice saidfor me. she'd waked fast, deathlands style. "i know," pop said, concentrating on whathe was doing, "but i aim to be shaved before they commence landing maneuvers." "you think automatic will land us?" aliceasked. "what if we just start circling around?" "we can figure out what to do when it happens,"pop said, whittling away at his chin. "until then, i'm not interested. there's still acouple of bottles of coffee in the sack. i've had mine." i didn't join in this chit-chat because thegreen dots and alice's first remark had reminded me of a lot deeper reason for my jangled nervesthan pop's cheerfulness. night was gone, with

its shielding cloak and its feeling of beingable to talk forever, and the naked day was here, with its demands for action. it is notso difficult to change your whole view of life when you are flying, or even bumpingalong above the ground with friends who understand, but soon, i knew, i'd be down in the dustwith something i never wanted to see again. "coffee, ray?" "yeah, i guess so." i took the bottle fromalice and wondered whether my face looked as glum as hers. "they shouldn't salt butter," pop asserted."it makes it lousy for shaving." "it was the best butter," alice said.

"yeah," i said. "the dormouse, when they butteredthe watch." it may be true that feeble humor is betterthan none. i don't know. "what are you two yakking about?" pop demanded. "a book we both read," i told him. "either of you writers?" pop asked with suddeninterest. "some of the boys think we should have a book about us. i say it's too soon,but they say we might all die off or something. whoa, jenny! easy does it. gently, please!" that last remark was by way of recognizingthat the plane had started an authoritative turn to the left. i got a sick and cold feeling.this was it.

pop sheathed his knife and gave his face afinal rub. alice belted on her satchel. i reached for my knapsack, but i was staringthrough the viewport, dead ahead. the haze lightened faintly, three times. iremembered the st. elmo's fire that had flamed from the cracking plant. "pop," i said—almost whined, to be truthful,"why'd the bugger ever have to land here in the first place? he was rushing stuff theyneeded bad at atla-hi—why'd he have to break his trip?" "that's easy," pop said. "he was being a badboy. at least that's my theory. he was supposed to go straight to atla-hi, but there was somebodyhe wanted to check up on first. he stopped

here to see his girlfriend. yep, his girlfriend.she tried to warn him off—that's my explanation of the juice that flared out of the crackingplant and interfered with his landing, though i'm sure she didn't intend the last. by theway, whatever she turned on to give him the warning must still be turned on. but graylcame on down in spite of it." before i could assimilate that, the sevendeformed gas tanks materialized in the haze. we got the freeway in our sights and steadiedand slowed and kept slowing. the plane didn't graze the cracking plant this time, thoughi'd have sworn it was going to hit it head on. when i saw we weren't going to hit it,i wanted to shut my eyes, but i couldn't. the stain was black now and the pilot's bodywas thicker than i remembered—bloated. but

that wouldn't last long. three or four vultureswere working on it. chapter 7here now in his triumph where all things falter, stretched out on the spoils that his own handspread, as a god self-slain on his own strange altar, death lies dead. —a forsaken garden, by charles swinburne pop was first down. between us we helped alice.before joining them i took a last look at the control panel. the cracking plant buttonwas up again and there was a blue nimbus on another button. for los alamos, i supposed.i was tempted to push it and get away solo,

but then i thought, nope, there's nothingfor me at the other end and the loneliness will be worse than what i got to face here.i climbed out. i didn't look at the body, although we werepractically on top of it. i saw a little patch of silver off to one side and remembered thegun that had melted. the vultures had waddled off but only a few yards. "we could kill them," alice said to pop. "why?" he responded. "didn't some hindus usethem to take care of dead bodies? not a bad idea, either." "parsees," alice amplified.

"yep, parsees, that's what i meant. give youa nice clean skeleton in a matter of days." pop was leading us past the body toward thecracking plant. i heard the flies buzzing loudly. i felt terrible. i wanted to be deadmyself. just walking along after pop was an awful effort. "his girl was running a hidden observationtower here," pop was saying now. "weather and all that, i suppose. or maybe settingup a robot station of some kind. i couldn't tell you about her before, because you wereboth in a mood to try to rub out anybody remotely connected with the pilot. in fact, i did mybest to lead you astray, letting you think i'd been the one to scream and all. even now,to be honest about it, i don't know if i'm

doing the right thing telling and showingyou all this, but a man's got to take some risks whatever he does." "say, pop," i said dully, "isn't she apt totake a shot at us or something?" not that i'd have minded on my own account. "or areyou and her that good friends?" "nope, ray," he said, "she doesn't even knowme. but i don't think she's in a position to do any shooting. you'll see why. hey, shehasn't even shut the door. that's bad." he seemed to be referring to a kind of manholecover standing on its edge just inside the open-walled first story of the cracking plant.he knelt and looked down the hole the cover was designed to close off.

"well, at least she didn't collapse at thebottom of the shaft," he said. "come on, let's see what happened." and he climbed into theshaft. we followed him like zombies. at least that'show i felt. the shaft was about twenty feet deep. there were foot- and hand-holds. itgot stuffy right away, and warmer, in spite of the shaft being open at the top. at the bottom there was a short horizontalpassage. we had to duck to get through it. when we could straighten up we were in a largeand luxurious bomb-resistant dugout, to give it a name. and it was stuffier and hotterthan ever. there was a lot of scientific equipment aroundand several small control panels reminding

me of the one in the back of the plane. someof them, i supposed, connected with instruments, weather and otherwise, hidden up in the skeletalstructure of the cracking plant. and there were signs of occupancy, a young woman's occupancy—clothesscattered around in a frivolous way, and some small objects of art, and a slightly morethan life-size head in clay that i guessed the occupant must have been sculpting. i didn'tgive that last more than the most fleeting look, strictly unintentional to begin with,because although it wasn't finished i could tell whose head it was supposed to be—thepilot's. the whole place was finished in dull silverlike the cabin of the plane, and likewise it instantly struck me as having a livingpersonality, partly the pilot's and partly

someone else's—the personality of a marriage.which wasn't a bit nice, because the whole place smelt of death. but to tell the truth i didn't give the placemore than the quickest look-over, because my attention was rivetted almost at once ona long wide couch with the covers kicked off it and on the body there. the woman was about six feet tall and builtlike a goddess. her hair was blonde and her skin tanned. she was lying on her stomachand she was naked. she didn't come anywhere near my libido, though.she looked sick to death. her face, twisted towards us, was hollow-cheeked and flushed.her eyes, closed, were sunken and dark-circled.

she was breathing shallowly and rapidly throughher open mouth, gasping now and then. i got the crazy impression that all the heatin the place was coming from her body, radiating from her fever. and the whole place stunk of death. honestlyit seemed to me that this dugout was death's underground temple, the bed death's altar,and the woman death's sacrifice. (had i unconsciously come to worship death as a god in the deathlands?i don't really know. there it gets too deep for me.) no, she didn't come within a million milesof my libido, but there was another part of me that she was eating at ...

if guilt's a luxury, then i'm a plutocrat. ... eating at until i was an empty shell,until i had no props left, until i wanted to die then and there, until i figured i hadto die ... there was a faint sharp hiss right at my elbow.i looked and found that, unbeknownst to myself, i'd taken the steel cube out of my pocketand holding it snuggled between my first and second fingers i'd punched the button withmy thumb just as i'd promised myself i would if i got to really feeling bad. it goes to show you that you should nevergive your mind any kind of instructions even half in fun, unless you're prepared to havethem carried out whether you approve later

or not. pop saw what i'd done and looked at me strangely."so you had to die after all, ray," he said softly. "most of us find out we have to, oneway or another." we waited. nothing happened. i noticed a veryfaint milky cloud a few inches across hanging in the air by the cube. thinking right away of poison gas, i jerkedaway a little, dispersing the cloud. "what's that?" i demanded of no one in particular. "i'd say," said pop, "that that's somethingthat squirted out of a tiny hole in the side of the cube opposite the button. a hole sonearly microscopic you wouldn't see it unless

you looked for it hard. ray, i don't thinkyou're going to get your baby a-blast, and what's more i'm afraid you've wasted somethingthat's damn valuable. but don't let it worry you. before i dropped those cubes for atla-hii snagged one." and darn if he didn't pull the brother ofmy cube out of his pocket. "alice," he said, "i noticed a half pint ofwhiskey in your satchel when we got the salve. would you put some on a rag and hand it tome." alice looked at him like he was nuts, butwhile her eyes were looking her pliers and her gloved hand were doing what he told her. pop took the rag and swabbed a spot on thesick woman's nearest buttock and jammed the

cube against the spot and pushed the button. "it's a jet hypodermic, folks," he said. he took the cube away and there was the weltto substantiate his statement. "hope we got to her in time," he said. "theplague is tough. now i guess there's nothing for us to do but wait, maybe for quite a while." i felt shaken beyond all recognition. "pop, you old caveman detective!" i burstout. "when did you get that idea for a steel hospital?" don't think i was feeling anywherenear that gay. it was reaction, close to hysterical. pop was taken aback, but then he grinned."i had a couple of clues that you and alice

didn't," he said. "i knew there was a verysick woman involved. and i had that bout with los alamos fever i told you. they've had alot of trouble with it, i believe—some say its spores come from outside the world withthe cosmic dust—and now it seems to have been carried to atla-hi. let's hope they'vefound the answer this time. alice, maybe we'd better start getting some water into thisgal." after a while we sat down and fitted the factstogether more orderly. pop did the fitting mostly. alamos researchers must have beenworking for years on the plague as it ravaged intermittently, maybe with mutations and ettricks to make the job harder. very recently they'd found a promising treatment (cure,we hoped) and prepared it for rush shipment

to atla-hi, where the plague was raging tooand they were sieged in by savannah as well. grayl was picked to fly the serum, or drugor whatever it was. but he knew or guessed that this lone woman observer (because she'dfallen out of radio communication or something) had come down with the plague too and he decidedto land some serum for her, probably without authorization. "how do we know she's his girlfriend?" i asked. "or wife," pop said tolerantly. "why, therewas that bag of woman's stuff he was carrying, frilly things like a man would bring for awoman. who else'd he be apt to make a special stop for?

"another thing," pop said. "he must have beenusing jets to hurry his trip. we heard them, you know." that seemed about as close a reconstructionof events as we could get. strictly hypothetical, of course. deathlanders trying to figure outwhat goes on inside a "country" like atla-alamos and why are sort of like foxes trying to understandworld politics, or wolves the gothic migrations. of course we're all human beings, but thatdoesn't mean as much as it sounds. then pop told us how he'd happened to be onthe scene. he'd been doing a "tour of duty", as he called it, when he spotted this woman'sobservatory and decided to hang around anonymously and watch over her for a few days and maybehelp protect her from some dangerous characters

that he knew were in the neighborhood. "pop, that sounds like a lousy idea to me,"i objected. "risky, i mean. spying on another person, watching them without their knowing,would be the surest way to stir up in me the idea of murdering them. safest thing for meto do in that situation would be to turn around and run." "you probably should," he agreed. "for now,anyway. it's all a matter of knowing your own strength and stage of growth. me, it helpsto give myself these little jobs. and the essence of 'em is that the other person shouldn'tknow i'm helping." it sounded like knighthood and pilgrimageand the boy scouts all over again—for murderers.

well, why not? pop had seen this woman come out of the manholea couple of times and look around and then go back down and he'd got the impression shewas sick and troubled. he'd even guessed she might be coming down with alamos fever. he'dseen us arrive, of course, and that had bothered him. then when the plane landed she'd comeup again, acting out of her head, but when she'd seen the pilot and us going for himshe'd given that scream and collapsed at the top of the shaft. he'd figured the only thinghe could do for her was keep us occupied. besides, now that he knew for sure we weremurderers he'd started to burn with the desire to talk to us and maybe help us quit killingif we seemed to want to. it was only much

later, in the middle of our trip, that hebegan to suspect that the steel cubes were jet hypodermics. while pop had been telling us all this, wehadn't been watching the woman so closely. now alice called our attention to her. herskin was covered with fine beads of perspiration, like diamonds. "that's a good sign," pop said and alice startedto wipe her off. while she was doing that the woman came to in a groggy sort of wayand pop fed her some thin soup and in the middle of his doing it she dropped off tosleep. alice said, "any other time i would be wildto kill another woman that beautiful. but

she has been so close to death that i wouldfeel i was robbing another murderer. i suppose there is more behind the change in my feelingsthan that, though." "yeah, a little, i suppose," pop said. i didn't have anything to say about my ownfeelings. certainly not out loud. i knew that they had changed and that they were stillchanging. it was complicated. after a while it occurred to me and aliceto worry whether we mightn't catch this woman's sickness. it would serve us right, of course,but plague is plague. but pop reassured us. "actually i snagged three cubes," he said."that should take care of you two. i figure i'm immune."

time wore on. pop dragged out the harmonica,as i'd been afraid he would, but his playing wasn't too bad. "tenting tonight," "when johnniecomes marching home," and such. we had a meal. the pilot's woman woke up again, in her fullmind this time or something like it. we were clustered around the bed, smiling a littlei suppose and looking inquiring. being even assistant nurses makes you all concerned aboutthe patient's health and state of mind. pop helped her sit up a little. she lookedaround. she saw me and alice. recognition came into her eyes. she drew away from uswith a look of loathing. she didn't say a word, but the look stayed. pop drew me aside and whispered, "i thinkit would be a nice gesture if you and alice

took a blanket and went up and sewed him intoit. i noticed a big needle and some thread in her satchel." he looked me in the eye andadded, "you can't expect this woman to feel any other way toward you, you know. now orever." he was right of course. i gave alice the highsign and we got out. no point in dwelling on the next scene. aliceand me sewed up in a blanket a big guy who'd been dead a day and worked over by vultures.that's all. about the time we'd finished, pop came up. "she chased me out," he explained. "she'sgetting dressed. when i told her about the plane, she said she was going back to losalamos. she's not fit to travel, of course,

but she's giving herself injections. it'snone of our business. incidentally, she wants to take the body back with her. i told herhow we'd dropped the serum and how you and alice had helped and she listened." the pilot's woman wasn't long after pop. shemust have had trouble getting up the shaft, she had a little trouble even walking straight,but she held her head high. she was wearing a dull silver tunic and sandals and cloak.as she passed me and alice i could see the look of loathing come back into her eyes,and her chin went a little higher. i thought, why shouldn't she want us dead? right nowshe probably wants to be dead herself. pop nodded to us and we hoisted up the bodyand followed her. it was almost too heavy

a load even for the three of us. as she reached the plane a silver ladder telescopeddown to her from below the door. i thought, the pilot must have had it keyed to her someway, so it would let down for her but nobody else. a very lovely gesture. the ladder went up after her and we managedto lift the body above our heads, our arms straight, and we walked it through the doorof the plane that way, she receiving it. the door closed and we stood back and theplane took off into the orange haze, us watching it until it was swallowed. pop said, "right now, i imagine you two feelpretty good in a screwed-up sort of way. i

know i do. but take it from me, it won't last.a day or two and we're going to start feeling another way, the old way, if we don't getbusy." i knew he was right. you don't shake old urgenumber one anything like that easy. "so," said pop, "i got places i want to showyou. guys i want you to meet. and there's things to do, a lot of them. let's get moving." so there's my story. alice is still with me(urge number two is even harder to shake, supposing you wanted to) and we haven't killedanybody lately. (not since the pilot, in fact, but it doesn't do to boast.) we're makinga stab (my language!) at doing the sort of work pop does in the deathlands. it's toughbut interesting. i still carry a knife, but

i've given mother to pop. he has it strappedto him alongside alice's screw-in blade. atla-hi and alamos still seem to be in existence,so i guess the serum worked for them generally as it did for the pilot's woman; they haven'tsent us any medals, but they haven't sent a hangman's squad after us either—whichis more than fair, you'll admit. but savannah, turned back from atla-hi, is still going strong:there's a rumor they have an army at the gates of ouachita right now. we tell pop he'd betterstart preaching fast—it's one of our standard jokes. there's also a rumor that a certain fellowshipof deathlanders is doing surprisingly well, a rumor that there's a new america growingin the deathlands—an america that never

need kill again. but don't put too much stockin it. not too much.

Author : indra

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