Gauntlet Run: Birth of a Superhero

  Their demagogue was still on the back of her truck, exhorting her followers to greater sacrifices — or greater pleasure.

  “Get the ringleader!” a grizzled veteran Pacifier told a younger version of himself.

  “Can’t. She wearing armor.”

  “Then use your brain and get a marksman with a scope to zap her in the head.”

  “Yes sir!” The younger man trotted off.

  The senior cop shook his head sadly. “I dunno what they give the youngsters for brains these days,” he said.

  Henty was leaning against the door and to her surprise, it swung open behind her. She found herself looking into the living room of the occupant of the house. The occupant himself was watching The Gauntlet Run. For a few moments Henty was fascinated by the wildly exaggerated reports of her day’s doings. She was amazed at how many times The Caring Society’s Watcheyes had caught her.

  “And there she is now, right at this moment in the present time,” the announcer said gleefully.

  And there Henty was, eating the last of her cheese—

  “She’s standing in front of 71 Silvester Drive, Akron, Ohio. Remember, you heard it first on NBC!”

  —and looking up at the camera—

  “She’s staring directly at you and isn’t it a delicious thrill?”

  —and grinning and then looking back into the room at her own face on the vidi and at the man sitting there riveted to the set when he could see Henty by just turning around.

  On the vidi, in the background, behind the picture of herself, Henty could see the marksman run up with his rifle and take his orders from the senior Pacifier. While he was aiming at the Anti-Prescription League’s leader and zapping her, his boss was listening to his wrist walkie-talkie. He whispered something to his men and then pointed at Henty’s back. Since Henty was watching it all on Goggle-eye’s vidi, it took her a moment to realize that the zipguns and the rifle were being turned on her. The bullets took chunks out of the doorjamb.

  CHAPTER 30

  Henty swung the heavy bulletproof door closed.

  “And now,” garbled the announcer, almost beside himself with excitement, “She’s in the home of Mr Jerome L. Feodor, of 71 Silvester Drive, Akron. Ohio and you’re watching on NBC through The Caring Society Watcheye on Mr Feodor’s vidi!”

  Henty gave her vidi-likeness a quick look and tucked a stray strand of hair back off her forehead.

  “Hey, whatya doin’ here?” Mr Feodor had at last realized he was in the middle of real live action. “Being shot at,” Henty said, cocking an ear to the patter of zipgun fire on the door.

  “Soon they’re gonna bring up the heavy stuff, maybe a bazooka,” Mr Feodor said avidly. “Then they gonna getya.”

  “They’ll get you at the same time,” Henty said reasonably.

  “Oh yah? Yaaaah! You can’t stay here!”

  “Show me the back way and I’ll be gone,” Henty said. “Look”. The box showed, courtesy of The Caring Society’s Public Safety Watcheye outside, the two Pacifiers running up with a heavy cannon-like weapon between them.

  “Aargh!” said Mr Feodor. He almost fell over himself to lead her the back way out. In the kitchen Henty paused. She surveyed the piles of encrusted dishes stacked on every available surface. “My wife went back to her mother six months ago,” Mr Feodor said apologetically. “I eat teeveedindins.”

  “Have you anything clean I can drink out of? I’m thirsty.”

  “You can drink out of the can, like me.” He swung the fridge door open. It was full of beer. Nothing but beer.

  “Water,” Henty said firmly.

  “Water? You wanna drink water?” Mr Feodor demanded incredulously and threw her a beer. “With the Pacifiers outside the door with a cannon, you wanna drink water? With the Pacifiers outside— Here, have a six-pack.”

  He threw the six pack at her and Henty caught it in her other hand and consequently had no spare hand to fend him off when he came at her with the carving knife. The Fist squeezed the six-pack so hard, the cans of beer popped with tremendous force, hitting Mr Feodor bruisingly with their tag-tops and blinding him with hops-spray.

  Henty took the knife from his unresisting hand.

  “You really should wash the cutlery before you attack guests,” she said sternly. She threw the knife back in the clutter and, popping the single beer in her other hand, trotted out of the back door drinking it just as the Pacifiers’ bazooka took out the steel front door, Mr Feodor’s living room, and that part of the kitchen she had just been standing in. As he came charging over the rubble, the chief Pacifier almost casually pacified Mr Feodor permanently.

  From up the street, Henty looked back to see the whole apartment building take on a list towards her. There was also a loud creaking noise. There was a medicenter standing there deserted and in passing Henty grabbed a roll of white bandage and wound it around the Fist as she ran. It wouldn’t hide the Fist from The Caring Society’s radio receivers and transmitters built into every street corner Watcheye but it would stop casual discovery by what Henty still thought of as innocent bystanders. But she'd already seen how the prospect of $10,000,000 turned even the most innocuous of vicarious bystanders into knife­ wielding rippers. She wouldn’t invite any more attacks if she could help it. Next time she might not be carrying a handy six-pack to fend off the assailant.

  She saw a cab and hailed it.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” said the cabbie over his intercom. “I ain’t heard a piercing whistle like that since— hey, hey, hey, I dunno since when. Wherya’ headin’, my beauty?”

  Henty looked anxiously out of the cab’s rear window. The building could still topple on them. The Pacifiers could come out of Mr Feodor’s hack door any moment.

  “Towards Cleveland.”

  “Hey, hey, hey! Mrs Van Winkle, whereyabin? Cleveland’s off-limits to Whitey.”

  “Towards Cleveland. Take me as far as US-80. Just get a move on!”

  He pulled out then, just as the building fell. A monster viditenna on top reached greedily for the cab and Henty screamed as a tentacle of the thing thrust through the window.

  “Hey, hey, hey! I got you now. You the lady chicken farmer become lady Runner.”

  “Oh dear,” said Henty.

  “You think you won’t get recognized just because you wear a bandage round your hand like some neurotic biddy what got pacified?”

  “Well, I was hoping—”

  “Lady, your’n the most famous face in the nation this week.”

  “Oh,” Henty said again, weakly. “Listen, I’ll—”

  “Never mind the tip. Hey, hey, hey! You really are a chicken farmer. You go Gauntlet Running and you tacka cab.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Henty bridled at the condescension, no matter how well intentioned.

  “Hey, hey, hey! I tell you! You see the little vidi the cab company provides as a free gratis bona fide service to customers at no extra cost because by law they must?”

  Henty looked down at it. The sound was down low but there was no off-switch on it. Worse, her face stared back at her from it. She was sitting in the back of a cab, looking at herself sitting in the back of a cab.

  “Every vidi,” the cabbie insisted on the obvious, “has a Watcheye.”

  Henty covered the fisheye with her hand and the screen went black for just a second before the announcer said, “And now she’s put her hand over The Caring Society’s Watcheye.”

  “Yes,” Henty said tiredly. “I get it.”

  But the cabbie insisted on spelling it out for her. “Wherever I drop you, every bounty hunter in the nation will know where you are.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Impulse and pleasure alone are real and life-affirming. — Daniel Bell

  It was only an empty hospital room but it jerked Henty out of her tired dejection. Instinctively she knew it was Petey’s room. She scrambled to turn the sound up. “Quiet!” she told the cab jockey.

  “...disappeared without a trace at exact
ly 7.52 pee-em tonight! Now here’s a rerun of exactly what happened, filmed live by ABC’s public service program Gauntlet Runner!”

  The vidi showed Petey in his bed, dozing. Then there was a flash of pink at one side of the screen and the screen went black. There were clanks of metal, the dragging of plastic tubes, and the scuff of shoe leather on the hospital-linoleum. Then the screen showed the empty, rumpled bed, with a flash of pink disappearing to one side of the screen.

  “Of course it was an inside job,” the announcer said. “A Caring Society spokesperson for the hospital said their security is excellent.”

  “Yes,” Henty told him, “and I know who did the dirty ‘on the inside’.”

  “They got your boy, have they?” the cab jockey asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, hey, hey! That’s a foul. You know who did it?”

  “I know who helped them. I’ll find out in good time who did it because they’ll want something.”

  “I can tell you who done it.”

  “Oh yeah? Who do you think did it?”

  “Not think. Know. The people with most riding on you.”

  “The Syndicate?”

  “You learn fast.” He slewed the cab to a halt. “Now get out,” he ordered her.

  “But this is nowhere near Eighty!” Henty was outraged. “You can’t—”

  “Don’t you dare tell me who I can carry in my cab, out!”

  He hit the lever to swing the door open. “Out!”

  Shattered by his sudden change from friendliness to hatred, Henty backed away fearfully. She was in a scrap yard. He had brought her here to kill her. How could she have been so stupid? When she was into the shadows of a rusting diesel engine, she turned and ran.

  The cabbie took his zipgun and walked at a leisurely pace into the scrap yard. He had marked the direction in which she went. He was only about five feet high but he wasn’t frightened of Henty: despite all the propaganda about the evil Runners, he knew a harmless person when he met one.

  Henty thought she would be invisible in the darkness under a derelict bulk grain carrier sticking into the air at an acute angle. But the cabbie had spent years on night duty: he spotted her with ridiculous ease. For a moment the ten million tempted him as all the easy options for his family flashed by his mind’s eye, but he was a man content with his lot and his wit and he had never killed anyone.

  He put the zipgun down and stepped back from it. “I can see you,” he called. “The zipgun is for you.”

  Henty nearly called, No thanks but stopped herself just in time in case it was a trick.

  “Anyhow,” the cabbie went on, “Going up to Eighty after you broadcast where you was heading woulda bin suicide. I din wanna tellya in the hearing of the Watcheye because the thing listens as well as watches. Just behind you there, a coupla hundred paces, is the railway yard. To your right as you stand now is West.”

  “Thanks,” Henty called involuntarily.

  “It’s okay. A whole lotta people admire what you’re doing for your kid.”

  “Take the zipgun,” Henty said.

  He came forward and picked it up and turned and walked away. From a good way off she heard him call, “Hey, hey, hey!” And then, almost inaudibly. “Good luck!”

  CHAPTER 32

  Across the nation, while Henty slept with only her head sticking out of a load of brown rye and so travelled effortlessly through most of Ohio and all of Indiana and into Illinois, men and women figured the odds on Henty staying alive. Some figured that, with Henty telling the whole world where she was heading, directly on camera in the Gauntlet hour, what with all the bounty hunters and hopeful amateurs converging on Akron, she would never make it out of that city. Or that, since she was so stupid that she let herself be pinpointed by The Caring Society’s Watcheyes during the Gauntlet hour, even if she by some luck made it out of Akron, every manjack who could muster a rifle across the whole breadth of Ohio would be gunning for her and goodbye Henty. Almost nobody thought she would get across Indiana as well and as for reaching Illinois — the Syndicate didn’t take many LWC (level with Chicago) bets that night.

  By dawn, they had all lost their money, for Henty woke up amid the shunting yards and stock yards and grain silos of Chicago.

  Henty wiggled half out of the rye and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “Half my kingdom for a cup of coffee,” Henty said.

  “Here, try this instead.”

  Henty would have whirled around but her lower half was still covering with the grain. When she did manage to turn around, she saw an elderly gentleman with a bibulous nose he could have used for a lantern in the dark, dressed in neatly pressed Uncle Sam gear of tailcoat, stiff collar and top hat. He was holding a flask towards her.

  “Thank you but I never drink alcohol,” Henty said. “And on an empty stomach...”

  “It’s tea, child, the stuff for which this great nation first rebelled against our brutish British overlords and tax collectors.” He unscrewed the top of the flask and poured, then held the cup out to her. “There’s no milk, of course, but this is a fine effusion of Orange Pekoe and only a barbarian would put milk in it.”

  “You talk like the Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” Henty said between small sips of the steaming liquid. “Or like a college professor.”

  “Alas, you are wrong and you are right.” His tone changed. “I’m rodding the rails, as they used to say, exactly because, when I was a professor, I was no wizard with cures for this nation’s pains and ills”

  “This is very good tea,” Henty said politely. “Do you hope to find a solution by travelling on grain cars?”

  “Bless you, child! But no, I travel on goods trains for the solitude.”

  “Oh. I’ll get off when the train stops.”

  “No, I don’t mind persons, individuals. It’s crowds I can’t stand. And to think I was once a sociologist...”

  Henty nodded. In her experience sociologists were grim­ looking folk called to Washington to tell the President what to do next. They couldn’t be very successful because every season there was a new bunch looking sternly out of her vidi.

  “You try hard but your expression still shows you don’t hold sociologists in high regard.” He stilled Henty’s protests with raised hand. “No, no, no! You are right. The reason the social sciences cannot possibly make any further advance lies in the statistical nature of the very phenomena they seek to study. The French mathematician Mandelbrot told us long ago that uniqueness cannot be the subject of scientific study. But we weren’t listening,” he concluded sadly.

  “You mean we can’t succeed however hard we try?”

  “Indeed that is what I mean with regard to the study of our society’s disease.”

  “I know a doctor who says correct diagnosis is half the cure.”

  “A wise man. But the disease itself, aah! The disease is caused by the fact that we have succeeded too well.”

  “How could that be?” Henty asked. “The President says there’s no such thing as ‘too much’.”

  “He would, poor man, because he needs to be re-elected. He doesn’t understand that the more progress succeeds, the harder it is to propagate the drive to success.”

  “You mean we did so well for ourselves that now we are slowing down?”

  “Yes. But more, I’m saying the drive to achievement is itself a desirable attribute or at least that its lack is highly undesirable.”

  “Oh, come on, Professor. Everybody knows freedom from want is a good thing. That’s what The Caring Society is all about. I don’t mean be disagreeable but everybody knows that much.”

  “On you, child, a little disputation sits well. But let me give you an example of how affluence destroys.”

  “Oh boy, this I got to hear!”

  “For years we studied the Polynesians but never drew the right conclusions.”

  “Tahiti and those places?”

  “Yes, Tahiti and the rest of the Lotus Islands. Some two thousand years before Christ, peop
le from somewhere in South­ East Asia launched themselves into the infinite Pacific. The feats of those people are totally beyond belief. They must have been truly driven Faustian men.”

  “Faustians. You mean they were Mormons?”

  “You force me to digress, than which no activity is nearer the educationalist’s heart. No. Faust has nothing to do with the Mormons. You see, the Faust of the legend exchanged his soul for the Devil’s promise that he would make scientific discoveries, that he would be an achiever. It is only modern perversion that credits him with a lust for beautiful maidens. The Mormons are derogatively called ‘Faustians’ because they still believe in achieving things, in striving after progress, in standards whereby men who do things are most highly regarded by their fellows. So, these Polynesians were achievers — ‘Faustians’.”

  “Okay, you persuaded me,” Henty laughed.

  “Right. They settled the Polynesian islands and then there was a change. They introduced some form of birth control; population was stabilized; worry about the next meal became unknown; they achieved a steady-state society. The Europeans, when they arrived, found a beat society.”

  “Like hippies?”

  “Indeed. It was not the same on all islands. Cook, who discovered them, found that the more lush the conditions, the more beat the people. On Tahiti, for instance, they were taking dope almost all the time; they had overthrown all conventional ideas of sex. A typical hippie scene, as you say.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “In New Zealand, on the other hand, a temperate rather than tropical zone, with larger and more challenging islands, the Maoris were still pretty rugged — though not in comparison with the Europeans. What’s more, the Maoris were the only islanders who still had artistic forms.”

  “And what should we learn from that, Professor?”

  “That an affluent society without intellectual problems left to solve inevitably goes into decline.”

  “Yes,” Henty said, “but most people won’t believe you when you say having no problems is the problem.”