The body of Paul Rivers lay next to the body of Percy X. But the body of Paul Rivers breathed. The body of Percy X did not.
Can that be me? Paul asked himself. Both bodies were covered with still-wet blood, and Paul, after the first shock, was able to piece together what had happened. When the machine had gone on, Paul had been hanging onto Percy X; when Paul began thrashing, trying to break the machine, he had instead beaten and kicked Percy viciously—had in fact brought about his death. Without either of the two men being aware of what was happening.
His own body had not escaped unharmed; Paul, making use of Joan’s body, bent over to take a close look. Every finger had been broken and the arms were a mass of cuts and abrasions where Paul had smashed them futilely against the rough-stone floor of the cave.
Carefully making his way forward he reached out and switched off the machine.
And exploded in pain!
The instant the machine sank into silence he found himself once again in his own damaged body, his mind bombarded by pain-signals from a thousand sources at once.
Mercifully, he fainted after only a few moments.
“They’re dead,” the medical creech said with a sigh. “Every single member of the limbless elite is dead.” He gazed out the porthole at the other ships of the line that drifted aimlessly in space nearby. In the distance hung the planet Earth, still green; still, seemingly, a plum ripe for the picking, if anyone happened to wish to conquer a planet.
“But why?” timidly asked one of the navigator creeches.
The medical creech shrugged. “Something came through the Great Common. When it reached Marshal Koli I was currently in telepathic contact with him; I saw it, the great darkness without end. Of course I broke contact immediately; it would have destroyed me as well.”
“Why did not Marshal Koli break contact?” a second navigator creech inquired. “He also might have saved himself that way.”
The medical creech propelled itself away from the porthole. “The ruling elite does not do that; in times of danger it merges into the polyencephalic mode. In this case, the more frightened they became the more they tried to lose themselves in unity—and thereby exposed themselves to whatever malignant force it was that came flowing through the Common to them.”
“It is a weakness we shall not have,” asserted a junior officer creech solemnly.
The medical creech smiled at the note of self-assertiveness in the younger creech’s voice; he would never have spoken in that tone while Marshal Koli lived. The young ones, the medical creech realized, will adjust and rebuild. But let us hope that they will not turn their thoughts to interplanetary conquest. That mistake has already been made once—and once is sufficient.
“Let us return home,” the medical creech said, and the others moved off to prepare the huge ship for the return voyage.
Now, thought the medical creech somberly, we are responsible for ourselves.
This odd and novel idea appealed to him, attracted him; yet at the same time it filled him with dread. Now that we have freedom, he thought, I hope it does not prove a burden too great for us.
XVII
GUS SWENESGARD blinked stupidly at the sudden light.
For a moment his sense of relief was so great that he simply lay there, saying a clumsy prayer to his fundamentalist God, a prayer of thanks; then a wave of panic swept over him. Am I, he asked himself, still alone?
He lurched from the bed and staggered to the window. Outside, in the evening darkness, he could see the dusty, familiar street, but nobody inhabited it. His terror increased by the second; hastily, he stumbled out into the hotel corridor and shouted, “Anybody there?”
“I’m here, boss.” The voice of one of his faithful Toms; it resounded from beyond a turn in the corridor. Gus broke into a run in the direction of the sound. “You’re fat and mean,” the Tom said, when they stood facing each other, seeing each other, “but you’re better than nothing.” His voice cracked with emotion.
Gus said, “You’re lazy as an old dog and ugly as a toad. But I never saw a better sight than your face this minute.” Both men exploded into near-hysterical laughter and other voices around them were laughing, too. One of the hotel rooms opened, then another; the occupants streamed shakily out, shouting greetings to one another.
In the center of the swirling mass of humanity, Gus shouted, “I’m gonna have all them doors taken off their hinges. This is gonna be the first hotel in the world with no doors!” They love me, Gus thought with awe. They really love me; see how they throw their arms around me. And that old lady just kissed me. It’s a miracle of love that’s happened. It’s God’s message of love to all mankind. “Hey,” Gus shouted above the hubbub, “how would you like for me to be king?”
One of the Toms shouted back, “You can be anything you damn well please, Mr. Gus. Just let me look at you!”
Other voices joined in. “Hooooray for King Gus! Long live King Gus! Gus the King!”
Gus broke away from the crowd and stumped puffingly down the hall to a vidphone. Shaking with excitement, coins sliding from his fingers and bouncing to the floor, he put through a call to the nearest TV network station. “This is Gus Swenesgard,” he declared. “I want to buy an hour of prime time on a worldwide satellite hookup for, say, tomorrow night.” He got hold of the station manager, repeated this.
“On whose authority?” the station manager said.
“I’m the acting head of the bale of Tennessee,” Gus said sharply.
“Can you pay for it?” The station manager quoted an approximate price.
Blinking, Gus said, “S-s-sure.” It would break him financially—but it was worth it.
“You’ve made yourself a purchase,” the station manager said. “We might as well put you on the air as anybody else; at least you’re human. Since the lights went on all hell’s breaking loose around here. You know what’s going on now? Our head newscaster is in front of the cameras taking off his clothes and shouting ‘I love you.’ In a minute I expect he’ll start doing something really crazy, like telling the truth.”
“Then I’ve got the time slot?” Gus could hardly believe it.
“Sure. But payment has to be in advance of the telecast.”
“Worldwide?”
“You bet your sweet life.”
“Yippy!” Gus shouted.
“Hey,” the station manager said. “Say ‘yippy’ again. I love to hear a man sound so happy.”
“Yippy!” shouted Gus into the phone.
“Why don’t you and the wife come down and have dinner with us before the telecast?” the station manager asked. “I sure would like my family to meet the acting head of the bale of Tennessee.”
“I don’t have any wife,” Gus said. “You see—”
“Well, that’s okay. You can marry my eldest girl. I’m sure after what’s happened you’d appear pretty good to her no matter how you look.”
“I’ll take you up on the supper part, anyway,” Gus said, and, thanking the man, hung up. They love me, he thought again. Everyone in the world loves me.
The vidphone rang. Gus, being close to it, answered it.
“Gus Swenesgard?” inquired a voice. The screen remained blank. But sometimes this particular phone did that; he wasn’t surprised.
“Yes, this is Gus.” It seemed to him there was something familiar about the voice; he could not, however, place it. And in addition there was something frightfully strange about it, too; the voice raised goosebumps on Gus’ flabby flesh.
“So you want to be king.” The unidentified voice held contempt; cold, pitiless contempt.
“Sure,” Gus answered, suddenly not quite so sure of himself. Here, he realized with a sinking feeling, is at least one person who doesn’t love me.
“I know you, Gus Swenesgard,” the voice declared. “I know you better than you know yourself. You can’t even rule your own gluttony; how do you expect to rule others when you can’t rule yourself?”
“I’m no worse
than the next—” Gus began defensively.
“Is that a reason to call yourself ‘king’? Just because you’re no worse than the next person?” The voice had become hard and ruthless. “You’re a clown, Gus; a redneck, ranting, second-rate clown.” The voice rolled on relentlessly. “You hypocrite. Egomaniac. Overstuffed racist slob with a rear-end like a hog’s snout.”
Frightened, Gus said, “W-w-who do you think you are, anyhow?”
“Don’t you know me?”
“Hell no.” Nobody talked to him that way; at least nobody had for a long time.
“You were present at my birth. Don’t you remember? In the great darkness, in the silence.”
“What are you, some kind of nut?” His voice shook.
“You would like to be able to reduce me to the stature of a mere nut, wouldn’t you? I know how you think, Gus, how you divide humans into good men and bad men, the saved and the damned. And you, of course, are one of the saved.”
“I’m a good Christian,” Gus muttered, rallying.
“You believe,” the voice continued implacably, “that the flesh is evil, but you can’t escape it. You’re helpless to stop the regular, persistent functions of your body, the functions you regard as dirty and sinful and unmentionable, and so you live in constant guilt. You are an abomination, Gus; to me and to everyone—to yourself most of all. You can never be king, Gus; you have a powerful enemy who will sabotage everything you do, everything you try, step by step. As you build it up he will tear it down.”
“Who?” Gus shouted, now thoroughly terrified. “Who’ll do that to me?”
“I will,” the voice said. And the receiver clicked.
Gus, stepping unsteadily away from the dead vidphone, heard the gales of laughter from down the hall; for a moment it seemed to him that the merrymakers were laughing at him, personally. But of course that couldn’t be.
Just some crank, he thought shakily. I mustn’t pay him no mind.
But the words on the phone had gone right through him, like a burning knife, and now they haunted him. Try as he would he couldn’t forget them.
I’ve got work to do, he told himself. And slunk off back to his room, to write his forthcoming TV speech—and finish off the bottle of Cutty Sark.
Joan still sat quietly in the waiting room when Paul Rivers emerged from the general practitioner’s office, both hands bandaged and all his fingers in organic splints. “You didn’t have to stay,” he said to her. “I can manage all right by myself.” However, he thought, I’m glad you did. In actuality he could not manage—and would not for some time. And both of them knew it.
Joan opened the door for him and accompanied him out into the hall. He realized that she had noticed his limp and tried to walk as naturally as possible. I don’t, he reflected, want her to feel sorry for me…but that’s silly, of course; she feels nothing for me, one way or the other. It’s a part of her conditioning that she be indifferent to such matters.
Still, she had taken the trouble to drag his unconscious body into the ionocraft, give him first aid and bring him here to the doctor. She had not merely left him there in the cave to die, as she easily could have done.
As they stepped into the elevator, Joan said haltingly, “Paul, I—” She then stopped. The elevator door slid shut and they descended in silence. At last she continued, “It seemed so strange, up there in the mountains. Being you. Yet in another way not so strange being you. As if some part of me—this is how it felt—some part of me had always been you.”
The elevator door opened again, allowing them to exit into the main lobby of the medical building. Paul said, “I felt the same thing about you, when I became part of you.” They stepped out of the elevator and made their way through the crowd of milling, shouting, happy people, some of who now and then grabbed and hugged them. Paul did not object to their shoving him about, even though, because of his injuries, the experience was painful. The mob thinned out near the front entrance, and once again he and Joan could hear each other.
“In a way it felt good,” Joan said, “being you. A real, living, feeling, caring human being. Now, of course, it’s too late for me.”
Paul stopped and looked at her intently; her eyes had become moist and in the lights of evening they glistened. This has got to be an hallucination, he thought with astonishment. Joan Hiashi crying? Impossible.
“I have a problem,” Joan said wistfully; she looked away from him. “I have nothing and I want nothing; I’ve achieved the state that holy men have striven for down throughout centuries and now—I want out.”
“Joan,” he said, with an intensity he couldn’t conceal. “Don’t you see the contradiction in what you just said? You do want something.”
“Something I can never have.” Her voice sagged with hopelessness.
“That’s not true.” He touched her shoulder gently with his bandaged right hand. “Just your wanting to reenter the world of the shared reality means the battle is half won. Now, because you want something, I can help you. If you’ll let me, of course.”
“You’ll teach me?” Her voice had lost a little of its gray overcast of hopelessness.
“I’ll teach you how to be with people. And you can teach me how to be alone.”
“Between us,” Joan said wonderingly, “we have it all. Don’t we?” Abruptly she stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek.
Laughing recklessly, Paul trotted out onto the sidewalk, shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!”
All the taxis had been taken; they had to wait a long time, standing side by side. But that did not bother them; it struck both Joan and Paul as perfectly all right.
Most smells did not bother the not overly-sensitive nostrils of Gus Swenesgard, but for some obscure reason the relatively faint odor of ozone, of electricity, in the TV studio did. They ought, he thought with annoyance, to air this place out once in a while. But maybe it was just that the prospect ahead of him made him tense.
Everything appeared to be in readiness for the telecast. Gus had personally supervised the installation of the idiot cards from which he would read his prepared speech. And he had, in addition, personally selected the heart-moving, patriotic music which would play softly in the background while he spoke.
He had even personally written the spot announcements that had been telecast at intervals throughout the day, preparing the world for the big moment.
Glancing toward the entrance of the studio Gus saw Dr. Paul Rivers just coming in, with Joan Hiashi on his arm. From Dr. Rivers’ bandaged hands and limping gait Gus gathered that he had met with a major accident, perhaps the result of too much celebrating. Putting on his best political smile Gus waddled over to greet them.
“Hey,” he said fondly, glad to see friends, “what do you think of the funny smell in here? Or maybe I’m just tense; is that it?” He peered at Paul Rivers nervously, awaiting his professional answer.
“I hadn’t noticed anything,” Paul Rivers said genially.
“Well, you don’t run a hotel,” Gus said, frowning. “I wouldn’t allow no smell like this in my hotel. Guests might complain.” He had, then, the sudden feeling that Paul Rivers might be silently laughing at him—and glanced suspiciously in the doctor’s direction. But Paul Rivers seemed perfectly straight-faced. I must, Gus thought, be getting stage-shy. He mopped his forehead, then; drops of greasy sweat had begun, as always, to stand out on his mottled flesh.
“You’re on in five minutes,” said a thin technician with glasses. “Five minutes, Mr. Swenesgard.” The technician hurried busily off.
“Would you like a tranquilizer?” Paul Rivers asked Gus.
“No, no; I’ll be okay,” Gus muttered. He wandered nervously off, found his way into the dressing cubicle which the studio people had assigned him and took a good, healthy drag on a bottle of Early Times bourbon. That, he told himself with satisfaction, is the only tranquilizer Gus Swenesgard needs.
The door opened; Gus hastily hid the bottle behind him. “Four minutes, Mr. Swenesgard,” the
technician with the glasses said.
“Go ’way,” grumbled Gus. “You make me jumpy.”
The technician departed, but Gus knew with grim certainty that he would soon be back to say, “Three minutes, Mr. Swenesgard.” So he stumped out of his cubicle and took his place at the modern, large table before the TV cameras.
Behind him hung the old pre-war flag of the United Nations. This would be the first time since the Gany occupation that this flag had been publicly displayed. A nice touch, Gus said to himself.
“Three minutes, Mr. Swenesgard.”
A weird feeling came over Gus at that moment, an eerie sensation of being watched. Someone, he thought, is staring at me. He looked around the studio. Yes, a lot of individuals here and there, including Paul Rivers and the Jap girl, had their eyes on him—not to mention the cameramen. But it wasn’t that.
I know what it is, he said to himself. It’s the entire people of the world. The whole cottonpickin’ planet; that’s who’s watching me.
This answer satisfied him intellectually, but emotionally there still remained a nagging feeling of the uncanny, an uneasiness—even fear—that could not rationally be explained.
“Two minutes, Mr. Swenesgard.” The thin technician with glasses said, hovering.
Now Gus localized the feeling. It emanated from the general direction of the stand on which his idiot cards rested, neatly stacked and waiting.
But there was nobody there, nobody within ten feet of the cards.
“One minute, Mr. Swenesgard.”
Gus, suddenly, felt a powerful urge to get to his feet and walk out of the studio, an intuition that to go on would only be to court disaster. However, it had become too late; the cameras had already begun dollying in to focus on him, and a ghostly hush had fallen over the studio as the ON THE AIR sign became illuminated.
There’s someone, Gus thought in panic, or something in this studio, and it’s out to get me.