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TWO
In a giant, empty, decaying building which had once
housed thousands, a single TV set hawked its wares to
an uninhabited room.
This ownerless ruin had, before World War Terminus, been tended and maintained. Here had been the
suburbs of San Francisco, a short ride by monorail
rapid transit; the entire peninsula had chattered like a
bird tree with life and opinions and complaints, and
now the watchful owners had either died or migrated to
a colony world. Mostly the former; it had been a costly
war despite the valiant predictions of the Pentagon and its smug
scientific vassal, the Rand Corporation --
which had, in fact, existed not far from this spot. Like
the apartment owners, the corporation had departed,
evidently for good. No one missed it.
In addition, no one today remembered why the war
had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust
which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. First, strangely, the
owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny,
the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards
and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as
they had while alive the owls escaped notice. Medieval
plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in
the form of many dead rats. This plague, however, had
descended from above.
After the owls, of course, the other birds followed,
but by then the mystery had been grasped and understood. A meager colonization program had been underway before the war but now that the sun had ceased to
shine on Earth the colonization entered an entirely new
phase. In connection with this a weapon of war, the
Synthetic Freedom Fighter, had been modified; able to
function on an alien world the humanoid robot --
strictly speaking, the organic android -- had become the
mobile donkey engine of the colonization program.
Under U.N. law each emigrant automatically received
possession of an android subtype of his choice, and, by
2019, the variety of subtypes passed all understanding,
in the manner of American automobiles of the 1960s.
That had been the ultimate incentive of emigration:
the android servant as carrot, the radioactive fallout as
stick. The U.N. had made it easy to emigrate, difficult if
not impossible to stay. Loitering on Earth potentially
meant finding oneself abruptly classed as biologically
unacceptable, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race. Once pegged
as special, a citizen, even if accepting sterilization, dropped out of history.
He ceased, in effect, to be part of mankind. And yet persons here and
there declined to migrate; that, even to those involved, constituted a perplexing irrationality. Logically,
every regular should have emigrated already. Perhaps,
deformed as it was, Earth remained familiar, to be
clung to. Or possibly the non-emigrant imagined that
the tent of dust would deplete itself finally. In any case
thousands of individuals remained, most of them constellated in urban areas where they could physically see
one another, take heart at their mutual presence. Those
appeared to be the relatively sane ones. And, in dubious addition to them, occasional peculiar
entities remained in the virtually abandoned suburbs.
John Isidore, being yammered at by the
television set
in his living room as he shaved in the bathroom, was
one of these.
He simply had wandered to this spot in the early
days following the war. In those evil times no one had
known, really, what they were doing. Populations, detached by the war, had roamed, squatted temporarily at
first one region and then another. Back then the fallout
had been sporadic and highly variable; some states had
been nearly free of it, others became saturated. The
displaced populations moved as the dust moved. The
peninsula south of San Francisco had been at first dust-free, and a great body of persons had responded by
taking up residence there; when the dust arrived, some had died and the rest had departed. J.R. Isidore
remained.
The TV set shouted, "-- duplicates the halcyon days
of the pre-Civil War Southern states! Either as body
servants or tireless field hands, the custom-tailored humanoid robot -- designed specifically for YOUR
UNIQUE NEEDS, FOR YOU AND YOY ALONE --
given to you on your arrival absolutely free, equipped
fully, as specified by you before your departure from
Earth; this loyal, trouble-free companion in the greatest, boldest
adventure contrived by man in modern history will provide --" It continued on and on.
I wonder if I'm late for work, Isidore wondered as he
scraped. He did not own a working clock; generally he
depended on the TV for time signals, but today was
Interspace Horizons Day, evidently. Anyhow the TV
claimed this to be the fifth (or sixth?) anniversary of
the founding of New America, the chief U.S. settlement
on Mars. And his TV set, being partly broken, picked
up only the channel which had been nationalized during the war and still
remained so; the government in Washington, with its colonization program, constituted the
sole sponsor which Isidore found himself forced to listen to.
"Let's hear from Mrs. Maggie Klugman," the TV
announcer suggested to John Isidore, who wanted only
to know the time. "A recent immigrant to Mars, Mrs.
Klugman in an interview taped live in New New York
had this to say. Mrs. Klugman, how would you contrast
your life back on contaminated Earth with your new
life here in a world rich with every imaginable possibility?" A pause, and then a tired, dry, middle-aged, female voice said, "I think what I and my family of three
noticed most was the dignity." "The dignity, Mrs.
Klugman?" the announcer asked. "Yes," Mrs. Klugman, now of New New York, Mars, said. "It's a hard
thing to explain. Having a servant you can depend on in
these troubled times ... I find it reassuring."
"Back on Earth, Mrs. KIugman, in the old days, did
you also worry about finding yourself classified, ahem,
as a special?"
Oh, my husband and myself worried ourselves
nearly to death. Of course, once we emigrated that
worry vanished, fortunately forever."
To himself John Isidore thought acidly. And it's
gone away for me, too, without my having to emigrate.
He had been a special now for over a year, and not merely in regard to
the distorted genes which he carried. Worse still, he had failed to pass the minimum
mental faculties test, which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead. Upon him the contempt of three
planets descended. However, despite this, he survived.
He had his job, driving a pickup and delivery truck
for a false-animal repair firm; the Van Ness Pet Hospital and his gloomy, gothic boss Hannibal Sloat
accepted him as human and this he appreciated. Mors
certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared.
Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number
of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning.
After all, if a chickenhead could fathom Latin he would
cease to be a chickenhead. Mr. Sloat, when this was
pointed out to him, acknowledged its truth. And there
existed chickenheads infinitely stupider than Isidore,
who could hold no jobs at all, who remained in custodial institutions quaintly called "Institute of Special
Trade Skills of America," the word "special" having to
get in there somehow, as always.
"-- your husband felt no
protection," the TV announcer was saying, "in owning and continually
wearing an expensive and clumsy radiation-proof lead codpiece, Mrs. Klugman?"
"My husband," Mrs. Klugman began, but at that point, having finished shaving, Isidore strode into the
living room and shut off the TV set.
Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls;
it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated
by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the
tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself
from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the
kitchen, the dead machines which hadn't worked in all
the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole
lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the
empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from
every object within his range of vision, as if it -- the
silence -- meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it
assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by
the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible
and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its
austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of
the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer.
Not when it had virtually won.
He wondered, then, if the others who had remained
on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare
notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind
building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which
like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater
entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building
would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple
piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself
would settle into shapelessness, buried under the
ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself
would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate
as he stood here in his stricken living room alone with
the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.
Better, perhaps, to turn the TV back on. But the ads,
directed at the remaining regulars, frightened him. They
informed him in a countless procession of ways that he,
a special, wasn't wanted. Had no use. Could not, even
if he wanted to, emigrate. So why listen to that? he
asked himself irritably. Fork them and their colonization; I hope a war gets started there
-- after all, it theoretically could -- and they wind up like Earth. And
everybody who emigrated turns out to be special.
Okay, he thought; I'm off to work. He reached for
the doorknob that opened the way out into the unlit
hall, then shrank back as he glimpsed the vacuity of the
rest of the building. It lay in wait for him, out here, the
force which he had felt busily penetrating his specific
apartment. God, he thought, and reshut the door. He
was not ready for the trip up those clanging stairs to the
empty roof where he had no animal. The echo of himself ascending: the echo of nothing. Time to grasp the
handles, he said to himself, and crossed the living room
to the black empathy box.
When he turned it on the usual faint smell of negative ions surged from the power supply; he breathed in
eagerly, already buoyed up. Then the cathode-ray tube
glowed like an imitation, feeble TV image; a collage
formed, made of apparently random colors, trails, and
configurations which, until the handles were grasped,
amounted to nothing. So, taking a deep breath to steady
himself, he grasped the twin handles.
The visual image congealed; he saw at once a famous
landscape, the old, brown, barren ascent, with tufts of
dried-out bonelike weeds poking slantedly into a dim
and sunless sky. One single figure, more or less human in form, toiled its way up the hillside: an elderly man
wearing a dull, featureless robe, covering as meager as
if it had been snatched from the hostile emptiness of the
sky. The man, Wilbur Mercer, plodded ahead, and, as
he clutched the handles, John Isidore gradually experienced a waning of the living room in which he
stood; the dilapidated furniture and walls ebbed out
and he ceased to experience them at all. He found himself, instead, as
always before, entering into the landscape of drab hill, drab sky. And at the same time he
no longer witnessed the climb of the elderly man. His
own feet now scraped, sought purchase, among the familiar loose stones; he felt the same old painful, irregular roughness beneath his feet and once again smelled
the acrid haze of the sky -- not Earth's sky but that of
some place alien, distant, and yet, by means of the
empathy box, instantly available.
He had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion;
physical merging -- accompanied by mental and spiritual identification
-- with Wilbur Mercer had reoccurred. As it did for everyone who at this moment
clutched the handles, either here on Earth or on one of
the colony planets. He experienced them, the others,
incorporated the babble of their thoughts, heard in his
own brain the noise of their many individual existences.
They -- and he -- cared about one thing; this fusion of
their mentalities oriented their attention on the hill, the
climb, the need to ascend. Step by step it evolved, so
slowly as to be nearly imperceptible. But it was there.
Higher, he thought as stones rattled downward under
his feet. Today we are higher than yesterday, and tomorrow -- he, the compound figure of Wilbur Mercer,
glanced up to view the ascent ahead. Impossible to
make out the end. Too far. But it would come.
A rock, hurled at him, struck his arm. He felt the
pain. He half turned and another rock sailed past him,
missing him; it collided with the earth and the sound
startled him. Who? he wondered, peering to see his
tormentor. The old antagonists, manifesting themselves
at the periphery of his vision; it, or they, had followed
him all the way up the hill and they would remain until
at the top --
He remembered the top, the sudden leveling of the
hill, when the climb ceased and the other part of it
began. How many times had he done this? The several times blurred; future and past blurred; what he had
already experienced and what he would eventually experience blended so
that nothing remained but the moment, the standing still and resting during which he
rubbed the cut on his arm which the stone had left. God, he
thought in weariness. In what way is this fair?
Why am I up here alone like this, being tormented by
something I can't even see? And then, within him, the
mutual babble of everyone else in fusion broke the illusion of aloneness.
You felt it, too, he thought. Yes, the
voices answered. We got hit, on the left arm; it hurts like hell.
Okay, he said. We better get started moving again. He
resumed walking, and all of them accompanied him
immediately.
Once, he remembered; it had been different. Back
before the curse had come, an earlier, happier part of
life. They, his foster parents Frank and Cora Mercer,
had found him floating on an inflated rubber air-rescue
raft, off the coast of New England ... or had it been
Mexico, near the port of Tampico? He did not now
remember the circumstances. Childhood had been nice;
he had loved all life, especially the animals, had in fact
been able for a time to bring dead animals back as
they had been. He lived with rabbits and bugs, wherever it was, either on Earth or a colony world; now he
had forgotten that, too. But he recalled the killers, because they had arrested him as a freak, more special
than any of the other specials. And due to that everything had changed.
Local law prohibited the time-reversal faculty by
which the dead returned to life; they had spelled it out
to him during his sixteenth year. He continued for
another year to do it secretly, in the still remaining
woods, but an old woman whom he had never seen
or heard of had told. Without his parents' consent
they -- the killers -- had bombarded the unique nodule
which had formed in his brain, had attacked it with
radioactive cobalt, and this had plunged him into a
different world, one whose existence he had never suspected. It had been a pit of corpses and dead bones and
he had struggled for years to get up from it. The donkey
and especially the toad, the creatures most important to
him, had vanished, had become extinct; only rotting
fragments, an eyeless head here, part of a hand there,
remained. At last a bird which had come there to die
told him where he was. He had sunk down into the
tomb world. He could not get out until the bones
strewn around him grew back into living creatures; he
had become joined to the metabolism of other lives and
until they rose he could not rise either.
How long that part of the cycle had lasted he did not
now know; nothing had happened, generally, so it had
been measureless. But at last the bones had regained
flesh; the empty eyepits had filled up and the new eyes
had seen, while meantime the restored beaks and
mouths had cackled, barked, and caterwauled. Possibly
he had done it; perhaps the extrasensory node of his
brain had finally grown back. Or maybe he hadn't accomplished it; very likely it could have been a natural
process. Anyhow he was no longer sinking; he had
begun to ascend, along with the others. Long ago he
had lost sight of them. He found himself evidently
climbing alone. But they were there. They still accompanied him; he felt them, strangely, inside him.
Isidore stood holding the two handles, experiencing
himself as encompassing every other living thing, and
then, reluctantly, he let go. It had to end, as always,
and anyhow his arm ached and bled where the rock had
struck it.
Releasing the handles he examined his arm, then
made his way unsteadily to the bathroom of his apartment to wash the cut off. This was not the first wound
he had received while in fusion with Mercer and it probably would not be
the last. People, especially elderly ones, had died, particularly later on at the top of
the hill when the torment began in earnest. I wonder if
I can go through that part again, he said to himself as
he swabbed the injury. Chance of cardiac arrest; be better, he
reflected, if I lived in town where those buildings have a doctor standing by with those electro-spark
machines. Here, alone in this place, it's too risky.
But he knew he'd take the risk. He always had before.
As did most people, even oldsters who were physically fragile.
Using a Kleenex he dried his damaged arm.
And heard, muffled and far off, a TV set.
It's someone else in this building, he thought wildly,
unable to believe it. Not my TV; that's off, and I can
feel the floor resonance. It's below, on another level
entirely!
I'm not alone here any more, he realized. Another
resident has moved in, taken one of the abandoned
apartments, and close enough for me to hear him. Must
be level two or level three, certainly no deeper. Let's
see, he thought rapidly. What do you do when a new
resident moves in? Drop by and borrow something, is
that how it's done? He could not remember; this had
never happened to him before, here or anywhere else:
people moved out, people emigrated, but nobody ever
moved in. You take them something, he decided. Like a
cup of water or rather milk; yes, it's milk or flour or
maybe an egg -- or, specifically, their ersatz substitutes.
Looking in his refrigerator -- the compressor had long
since ceased working -- he found a dubious cube of
margarine. And, with it, set off excitedly, his heart
laboring, for the level below. I have to keep calm, he
realized. Not let him know I'm a chickenhead. If he
finds out I'm a chickenhead he won't talk to me; that's
always the way it is for some reason. I wonder why?
He hurried down the hall.
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