And meanwhile, the living wave flashed on.
He was a man with his eyes in the present and his body in the past. Even now, as he stood examining his grubby clothes, smoothing his hair, rubbing his gums, even as he stood here in the antiseptic police cell, his senses were glued tight on another scene, a world that still danced with vitality, a world that hadn’t become stale. Much had happened in the next year. And as he scraped peevishly at his bearded chin, plucking at an old rash, the wave uncovered new moments, new excitements and events.
The wave of the future was washing up incredible shells for him to examine.
Impatiently, he strode to the door of the chamber and peered out. That was what he hated; that was the loathsome thing. The molasses of time: it couldn’t be hurried. On it dragged, with weary, elephantine steps. Nothing could urge it faster: it was monstrous and deaf. Already, he had exhausted the next year; he was totally tired of it. But it was going to take place anyhow. Whether he liked it or not—and he didn’t—he was going to have to relive each inch of it, re-experience in body what he had long ago known in mind.
Such had been happening all his life. The misphasing had always existed. Until he was nine years old, he had imagined that every human being endured duplication of all waking instants. At nine, he had lived out eighteen years. He was exhausted, disgusted, and fatalistic. At nine and a half years, he discovered that he was the only individual so burdened. From then on, his resignation rapidly became raging impatience.
He was born in Colorado, August 11, 1977. The war was still in progress, but it had bypassed the American Middle West. The war had not bypassed Greeley, Colorado; it had never come there. No war could reach into every town, to every living human being. The farm which his family maintained continued almost as usual; a self-sufficient economic unit, it carried on with its stagnant routine, ignorant of and indifferent to the crisis of mankind.
First memories were bizarre. Later, he had attempted to untangle them. The languid foetus had entertained impressions of a notyet world; as he crouched curled up in his mother’s bloated womb, a phantasmagoria, incomprehensible and vivid, had swirled around him. Simultaneously, he had lain in the bright sunshine of a Colorado autumn and dreamed quietly in the black moist sack, the dripping all-provider. He had known birth terror before he was conceived; by the time the embryo was a month old, the trauma was long in the past. The actual event of birth was of no significance to him; as he was swung suspended from the doctor’s fist, he had already been in the world one full year.
They wondered why the new baby failed to cry. And why his learning process was so rapid.
Once, he had conjectured this way: what was the real moment of his origin? At what point in time had he really come into being? Floating in the womb, he had clearly been alive, sentient. To what had the first memories come? One year before birth, he had not been a unit, not even a zygote; the elements that comprised him had not come together. And by the time the fertilized egg had begun to divide, the wall had carried well beyond the moment of birth: three months into the hot, dusty, bright Colorado fall.
It was a mystery. He finally stopped thinking about it.
In his early years of childhood he had accepted his dual existence, learned to integrate the two continua. The process had not been easy. For months he had laboriously crept head-on into doors, furniture, walls. He had reached for a spoon of Pablum one year hence; he had fretfully declined a nipple long ago forgotten. Confusion had virtually starved him to death; he had been force-fed, and forcibly prevented from wandering out of existence. Naturally, it was assumed that he was feeble-minded. A baby that groped for invisible objects, that tried to put its hands through the side of its crib . . .
But at four months he was saying complete words.
Scenes from his childhood, reinforced by double occurrence, had never left his mind. One of them leaped up now, as he stood in the white, sanitary police cell, impatiently waiting for his release papers. When he was nine and a half, the first hydrogen bomb had arrived. Not the first hydrogen bomb dropped in the war; dozens had fallen throughout the world. This was the first to penetrate the intricate screens guarding the heartland of America, the region from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi. The bomb had detonated a hundred miles from Greeley. Radioactive ash and particles had drifted mercilessly across the countryside for weeks after, sickening the cattle and withering the crops. From the death zone, trucks and cars laboriously carted off the sick and mutilated. Repair crews made their way forward to inspect the vast damage. To seal off the titanic sore until it had given up its load of toxins . . .
Along the narrow dirt road past the Jones’ farm passed a seemingly endless convoy of emergency vehicles, on their way to hospitals and wards erected outside of Denver. Going the other way moved a flow of supplies for the survivors remaining in the blighted area. All this, he had watched with fascination. From morning to night there was no let-up in the streams of cars, trucks, ambulances, people on foot, people on bicycles, dogs, cattle, sheep, chickens, a motley pack of shapes and colors and sounds; distant groans that reached the boy’s ear and sent him excitedly rushing into the house.
“What is it?” he screamed, dancing wildly around his mother.
His mother, Mrs. Edna Jones, paused by the laundry tubs, her gray face wrinkled with fatigue and annoyance. She tossed back her grime-soaked hair and turned crossly to the boy. “What are you babbling about?” she demanded.
“The cars!” he shouted, dancing to the window and pointing out. “See them? Who are they? What is it?”
Outside the window there was nothing. Nothing for her, at least; she couldn’t see what the boy saw.
Scampering outside, he stood gazing at the line moving along the horizon, outlined by the setting sun. On and on they moved . . . where were they going? What had happened to them? He ran to the edge of the farm, as far as it was permitted. Wire barred his way, a tangle of rusty barbs. Almost, he could make out individual faces; almost, he could penetrate the sight of individual pain. If only he could get closer . . .
This was the moment of his awakening. Because he alone saw the procession of doom. To all others, even to the doomed themselves, it was not there. He recognized a face: old Mrs. Lizzner, from Denver. She was there. Faces he knew, people he had seen in church. They were not strangers; they were neighbors, local people. They were the world, his world, the shrunken, dried-up Middle Western world.
The next day Mrs. Lizzner drove up to the farm in her dusty Oldsmobile, to spend an afternoon with his mother.
“Did you see?” he shouted at her. “Did you see it?”
She hadn’t seen it. And she had been a part of it. So there was no doubt; there was no point in pursuing the issue further.
Real understanding came in his tenth year. Now the bomb had come; Mrs. Lizzner was dead, and the area had in reality been laid waste. Such a unique cataclysm, never repeated, never seen before or since, was unmistakable. What he alone had seen had now swallowed up everyone. The relationship of the wave to what his fellow humans experienced was obvious. Of course, he told no one. As comprehension came, his attempts to communicate ceased.
He could not go back. Knowing that he was different, he could not return to the aimless activity of the farm. The monotony of farm chores was doubled for him; it was too much of a burden. At fifteen, gaunt and bony and brooding, he had collected his funds (perhaps two hundred dollars, all Westbloc inflation currency) and departed.
He found the Denver area painfully recovering from the blast. That was expected, as was everything else. One year before, at fourteen, he had previewed his journey. Once again, but this time at first hand, he examined the gaping crater the bomb had left, conjectured on the thousands of people who had been turned to ash in the wink of an eye. He boarded a bus and left Colorado. Three days later he was in the ruins of Pittsburgh.
Here, basic industrial activities continued. Underground, the forges still bellowed. But Jones wasn’t interested; on foot h
e continued his journey, past the smoldering miles of metal that had once been the greatest concentrate of factories in the universe. Military law prevailed; as he had previewed, patrols encountered him and swept him up in the general net.
At the age of fifteen years and three months he was examined by competent authorities, questioned, fingerprinted, and disposed of. The labor battalion he joined caused him no surprise; but the anguish remained. Grimly, wrathfully, he carried handfuls of rock for months on end, trying, with a company of others, to clear the ruins by the most primitive of means. By the end of the year, machinery had been brought in, and the hand-work disbanded. He was older, stronger, and considerably wiser. Just about the time he was given a gun and moved toward the crumbling lines, the war ended.
He had foreseen that. Slipping away from his unit, he traded in his rifle for a good meal and destroyed his military uniform. A day later he was tramping the highway as he had begun: on foot, in jeans and tattered sweatshirt, a pack on his back, wandering through the tumble of debris that had survived the war, the chaotic desolation that was the new world.
For almost seventeen years his dual existence had been purposeless. It had been a burden, a great dead weight. Even the idea of utilizing it was lacking. He saw it as a cross, nothing more. Life was painful; his was twice painful. What good was it to know that the misery of the next year was unavoidable? If Mrs. Lizzner had seen her dying remains carted along the road, would she have been better off?
Somebody had to teach him to use his talent; somebody had to show him how to exploit it.
That person was a fat, perspiring salesman in a pink-stripe shirt and lemon-yellow dacron trousers, driving a battered Buick. The back seat of the car was crowded with slender brown boxes, great piles and heaps of them. Jones, hunched with fatigue, was creeping along the dusty shoulder of the road, when the Buick snarled to a steaming halt. Having boarded the car a year ago, he scarcely looked up. Yanking his pack around, he turned and stolidly climbed in beside the driver.
“You don’t seem very grateful,” Hyndshaw muttered resentfully, as he started up the car. “You want to get back out, sonny?”
Jones lay back against the tattered upholstery and rested. For him, the sequence ahead was visible; Hyndshaw was not going to throw him out. Hyndshaw was going to talk: he liked to talk. And in that talk, something of great value was coming for the boy.
“Where you going?” Hyndshaw demanded curiously. Between his lips jutted the wet stump of a cigar. His fingers daintily plucked at the power-driven wheel. His eyes, deep-set in fat, were wise with cunning of the world. Beer stains discolored the bib of his shirt. He was a sloppy, easy-going, vice-saturated creature, smelling of sweat and years of wandering travel. And he was a great, dreaming swindler.
“Nowhere,” Jones said, answering his question with his usual sullen indifference. He had been tired of the question for twelve months.
“Sure, you’re going somewhere,” Hyndshaw opined.
And then the event happened. Words, actions, taking place at the perimeter of the moving wave, had become eternally fixed. One year ago, the exhausted boy had uttered a brusque, thoughtless remark. He had had the interval to reap the provocative harvest from that remark.
“Don’t tell me where I’m going,” he shot back. “I can see; I can see where you’re going, too.”
“Where’m I going?” Hyndshaw retorted testily; he was on his way to a nearby house of ill repute, and the area was still under military jurisdiction.
Jones told him.
“How do you know?” Hyndshaw demanded hoarsely, breaking into Jones’ detailed account of the man’s forthcoming activity. “You goddamn foul-mouthed kid—” White and frightened, he shouted: “What are you, a goddamn mind reader?”
“No,” Jones answered. “But I’m going along. I’ll be with you.”
That sobered Hyndshaw even more. For a time he didn’t talk; unnerved, he clenched the wheel and glared ahead at the pitted, dilapidated road. Here and there, on each side, were the abandoned shells of houses. This region, around St. Louis, had been forcibly evacuated after a successful shower of Soviet bacterial pellets. The inhabitants were still in forced labor camps, rebuilding more vitally needed areas; industrial and agricultural production came first.
Hyndshaw was frightened, but at the same time his natural greed and interest grew. He was a born opportunist. God knew what he had stumbled on. He decided to proceed cautiously.
“You know what I’ve got back there?” he said, indicating the piles of slender cartons. “Give you three guesses.”
The concept guess was alien to Jones. “Magnetic belts,” he answered. “Fifty dollars retail, forty dollars in lots of ten or more. Guaranteed to ward off toxic radioactivity and bacterial poisons or your money back.”
Licking his lips nervously, Hyndshaw asked: “Did I already talk to you? Maybe up around the Chicago area?”
“You’re going to try to sell me one. When we stop for water.”
Hyndshaw hadn’t intended to stop for water; he was late as it was. “Water?” he muttered. “Why water? Who’s thirsty?”
“The radiator’s leaking.”
“How do you know?”
“In fifteen minutes—” Jones reflected; he had forgotten the exact interval. “In around half an hour your temperature gauge is going to flash, and you’re going to have to stop. You’ll find water at an abandoned well.”
“You know all that?”
“Of course I know all that.” Irritably, Jones tore a loose strip of cloth from the upholstery. “Would I be saying it if I didn’t?”
Hyndshaw said nothing. He sat driving silently until, after twenty or so minutes, the temperature gauge flashed, and he brought the Buick quickly to the side of the road.
The only sound was the unhappy wheezing of the empty radiator. A few wisps of oil smoke curled upward from the vents of the hood.
“Well,” Hyndshaw muttered shakily, fumbling for the door handle. “I guess we better start looking. Which way you say that well is?”
Because he didn’t have to guess, Jones found the well instantly. It was half-buried under a heap of stone, brick, and slats that had been a barn. Together, the two of them lowered a rusty bucket. Ten minutes later Hyndshaw was opening bottles of warm beer and showing off one of his magnetic belts.
As he babbled his pitch, his mind raced furiously. Here was something. He had heard of mutants, even seen them. Hideous freaks, most of them; deformed monstrosities systematically destroyed by the authorities. But this was something else; this was no oddity. Anybody who could eliminate surprises, who could cut through guesswork . . .
That was why Hyndshaw made a good salesman. He was a good guesser. But he could guess wrong; he could mis-evaluate a situation. Not so with the youth beside him. They both knew it. Hyndshaw was fascinated and impressed. Jones was contemptuous.
“How much money have you got?” Hyndshaw demanded suddenly, interrupting his own pitch. Cunningly, he conjectured: “You haven’t got fifty bucks to your name. You couldn’t afford one of these belts.”
“I’ve got fifty bucks,” Jones said, “but not for a cheap piece of fakery.”
Hyndshaw spluttered; in years of preying on ignorant rural populations, made even more fearful and superstitious by the war, he had come to believe his own lies. “What do you mean?” he began, and then shut up, as Jones told him.
“I see,” Hyndshaw said, when the short, bitter tirade was done. “You’re quite a kid . . . you’re not afraid to say what you think.”
“Why should I be?”
Tightly, Hyndshaw said: “Maybe somebody might kick your smart teeth down your throat, one of these days. Your wise-guy talk might not sit right with somebody . . . they might resent a punk kid.”
“Not you,” Jones told him. “You’re not going to lay a hand on me.”
“What, then?”
“You’re going to propose we go into business together. Your stock of belts and experience—my abili
ty. Fifty-fifty.”
“Belts? You’re coming in with me on the belt business?”
“No,” Jones answered. “That’s your idea. I’m not interested in belts. We’re going into bone-throwing.”
Hyndshaw was baffled. “What’s that?”
“Gambling. Dice. Craps.”
“I don’t know anything about gambling.” Hyndshaw was deeply suspicious. “You’re sure this is on the level? You’re sure this isn’t a goddamn come-on?”
Jones didn’t bother to answer; he continued what he had been saying. “We’ll operate a concession at this cat house for maybe a month or so. You’ll get most of the take; I’m not interested. Then we’ll split up. You’ll try to stop me and I’ll turn the whole place in to the military police. The girls will be sent to labor camps, you’ll go to prison.”
Horrified, Hyndshaw gasped: “God, I don’t want anything to do with you.” He grabbed up a beer bottle and smashed it against a nearby rock; the jagged teeth of glass oozed damp foam as he clutched the weapon convulsively. Repelled by the boy, he was nearing a point of hysteria. “You’re crazy!” he shouted, half-lifting the bottle in an innate gesture of defense.
“Crazy?” Jones was puzzled. “Why?”
Jerkily, Hyndshaw gestured. Cold sweat leaked off his face, into his open collar. “You’re telling me this? You sit there telling me what you’re going to do to me?”
“It’s the truth.”
Tossing the bottle away, Hyndshaw savagely yanked the boy to his feet. “Don’t you know anything but the truth?” he snarled, in despair.
No, he didn’t. How could he? For Jones there was no guessing, no error, and no false knowledge. He knew; he had absolute certainty. “Take it or leave it,” he said, shrugging indifferently. He had already lost interest in the fat salesman’s fate; after all, it had happened a long time ago. “Do whatever you want.”