Ferreno hated them all with a bitter obsession verging on madness itself. Then, the obsession passed. Even that passed.
Now he was an old man. His hands and face and neck wrinkled with the skin-folding of age. His eyes had sunk back under ridges of flesh, his eyebrows white as the stars. His hair loose and uncombed, trimmed raggedly by an ultra-safe shaving device he had not been able to adapt for suicide. A beard of unkempt and foul proportions. A body slumped into a position that fitted his pneumo-chair exactly.
Thoughts played leap-frog with themselves. Ferreno was thinking. For the first time in eight years–since the last hallucination had passed–actually thinking. He sat humped into the pneumo-chair that had long ago formed itself permanently to his posture. The muted strains of some long since over-familiarized piece of taped music humming above him. Was the horrible repetition Vivaldi’s Gloria Mass or a snatch of Monteverdi? He fumbled in the back of his mind, in the recess this music had lived for so long–consigned there by horrible repetition.
His thoughts veered before he found the answer. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the watching.
Beads of perspiration sprang out, dotting his upper lip and the receding arcs of sparse hair at his temples.
What if they never came?
What if they had gone already and through some failure of the mechanisms he had missed them? Even the subliminal persistence of the revolving scanners’ workings was not assurance enough. For the first time in many years he was hearing the scanners again, and did they sound right?
Didn’t…they…sound…a…bit…off?
They didn’t sound right! My God, all these years and now they weren’t working! He had no way of repairing them, no way of getting out of here, he was doomed to lie here till he died–his purpose gone! Oh My God! All these years here nowhere and my youth gone and they’ve stopped running and no-good damned things failing now and the aliens’ve slipped through and Earth’s gone and I’m no good here and it’s all for nothing and Marie and everything…
Ferreno! Good God, man! Stop yourself!
He grabbed control of himself abruptly, lurchingly. The machines were perfect. They worked on the basic substance of inverspace. They couldn’t go wrong, once set running on the pattern.
But the uselessness of it all remained.
His head fell into his shaking hands. He felt tears bubbling behind his eyes. What could one puny man do here, away from all and everyone? They had told him more than one man would be dangerous. They would kill each other out of sheer boredom. The same for a man and a woman. Only one man could remain in possession of his senses, to tickle out the intricate warning on the inverspace communicator.
He recalled again what they had said about relief.
There could be none. Once sealed in, a man had begun the fight with himself. If they took him out and put in another man, they were upping the chances of a miscalculation–and a failure. By picking the very best man by infallible computer, they were putting all their eggs in one basket–but they were cutting risk to the bone.
He recalled again what they had said about a machine in his place.
Impossible. A robot brain, equipped to perform that remarkable task of sorting the warning factors, and recording it on the inverspace communicators–including any possible ramifications that might crop up in fifty years–would have to be fantastically large.
It would have had to be five hundred miles long by three hundred wide. With tapes and back-up circuits and tranversistors and punch-checks that, if laid end to end, would have reached halfway from The Stone to Earth.
He knew he was necessary, which had been one of the things that had somehow stopped him from finding a way to wreck himself or the whole quonset during those twenty-four years.
Yet, it still seemed so worthless, so helpless, so unnecessary. He didn’t know, but he was certain the quonset bubble would inform them if he died or was helpless. Then they would try again.
He was necessary, if…
If the enemy was coming. If the enemy hadn’t already passed him by. If the enemy hadn’t died long ago. If, if, if!
He felt the madness walking again, like some horrible monster of the mind.
He pressed it back with cool argument.
He knew, deep inside himself, that he was a symbol. A gesture of desperation. A gesture of survival to the peoples of Earth. They wanted to live. But did they have to sacrifice him for their survival?
He could not come to an answer within himself.
Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps not. Either way, it just happened he had been the man.
Here at this junction of the galaxies; in this spot of most importance; here he was the key to a battle that must someday be fought.
But what if he was wasted? What if they never came? What if there was no enemy at all? Only supposition by the learned ones. Tampering with the soul and life of a human being!
God! The horror of the thought! What if…
A soft buzz accompanied the steady ruby glow from the eye in the ceiling. Ferreno stared, open-mouthed. He could not look up at the eye itself. He stared at the bloody film that covered the walls and floor of the quonset. This was the time he had waited twenty-four years to come!
Was this it? No strident noises, no flickering urgency of the red light. Only a steady glow and a soft buzz.
And at the same time he knew that this was far more effective. It had prevented his death from heart attack.
Then he tried to move. Tried to finger the forty-three keys of the inverspace communicator on the underarm of the pneumo-chair. Tried to translate the message the way it had been impressed sub-cortically in his mind, in a way he could never have done consciously.
He was frozen in his seat.
He couldn’t move. His hands would not respond to the frantic orders of his brain. The keys lay silent under the chair arm, the warning unsent. He was totally incapacitated. What if this was a dud? What if the machines were breaking down from the constant twenty-four years of use? Twenty-four years–and how many men before him? What if this was merely another hallucination? What if he was going insane at last?
He couldn’t take the chance. His mind blocked him off. The fear was there. He couldn’t be wrong, and send the warning now, crying wolf!
Then he saw it, and he knew it was not a dud.
Far out in the ever-dark dark of the space beyond The Stone, he could see a spreading point of light piercing the ebony of the void. And he knew. A calmness covered him.
Now he knew it had not been waste. This was the culmination of all the years of waiting. The privation, the hunger of loneliness, the torture of boredom, all of it. It was worth suffering all that.
He reached under, and closed his eyes, letting his hypno-training take over. His fingers flickered momentarily over the forty-three keys.
That done, he settled back, letting his thoughts rest on the calmed surface of his mind. He watched the spreading points of light in the vista window, knowing it was an armada advancing without pause on Earth.
He was content. He would soon die, and his job would be finished. It was worth all the years without. Without anything good he would have known on Earth. But it was worth all of it. The struggle for life was coming to his people.
His night vigil was finally ended.
The enemy was coming at last.
THE VOICE IN THE GARDEN
Trying to inject a subtextual “moral” into a story as brief as this one puts me in mind of a great quotation by the author of Moby Dick, Mr. Herman Melville. He once said: “No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” (And even though the wonderful Don Marquis did a whole book about a cockroach named archy, and his swinging friend, the slut cat Mehitabel, a cockroach is certainly higher on the evolutionary scale than a flea, so what that tells us, hey, I don’t have all the answers.) But though I’m writing this “troublemaker lesson” where it ain’t necessary, because this short-short s
tory is essentially the product of a smartass who never grew up, it does, in fact, suggest a lesson you deadbeats ought to heed. Which is this: if all you’ve got to back up your wisecracks and stupid jokes–the kind you make in the movie audience that gets everyone cheesed-off at you–is more smartmouth, you are very quickly going to look to everyone around you, everyone you want to be impressed by you, as what you truly are: a horse’s patoot.
After the bomb, the last man on Earth wandered through the rubble of Cleveland, Ohio. It had never been a particularly jaunty town, nor even remotely appealing to aesthetes. But now, like Detroit and Rangoon and Minsk and Yokohama, it had been reduced to a petulantly shattered Tinkertoy of lath and brickwork, twisted steel girders and melted glass.
As he picked his way around the dust heap that had been the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in what had been Public Square, his eyes red-rimmed from crying at the loss of humanity, he saw something he had not seen in Beirut or Venice or London. He saw the movement of another human being.
Celestial choruses sang in his head as he broke into a run across the pitted and blasted remains of Euclid Avenue. It was a woman!
She saw him, and in the very posture of her body, he knew she was filled with the same glory he felt. She knew! She began running toward him, her arms outstretched. They seemed to swim toward each other in a ballet of slow motion. He stumbled once, but got to his feet quickly and went on. They detoured around the crumpled tin of tortured metal that had once been automobiles, and met in front of the shattered carcass that was, in a time seemingly eons before, The May Co.
“I’m the last man!” he blurted. He could not keep the words inside, they fought to fill the air. “I’m the last, the very last. They’re all dead, everyone but us. I’m the last man, and you’re the last woman, and we’ll have to mate and start the race again, and this time we’ll do it right. No war, no hate, no bigotry, nothing but goodness…we’ll do it, you’ll see, it’ll be fine, a bright new shining world from all this death and terror.”
Her face was lit with an ethereal beauty, even beneath the soot and deprivation. “Yes, yes,” she said. “It’ll be just like that. I love you, because we’re all there is left to love, each other.”
He touched her hand. “I love you. What is your name?”
She flushed slightly. “Eve,” she said. “What’s yours?”
“Bernie,” he said.
DEEPER THAN THE DARKNESS
Since I was in trouble from the git-go (hell, I was taken to the Principal’s Office on my first day in kindergarten; not ten minutes after my mother let go of my hand and left me in that classroom full of babies and sandboxes) (I’ll tell you that tale another time, but I suspect Miss Whatever Her Name Was, the kindergarten teacher at Lathrop Grade School in 1939 or ’40, whatever it was, in Painesville, Ohio, I’ll bet she still has the marks of my fangs in her right hand), I knew early on that I would have to pretend to be one of the crowd, as best I could fake it, or get the crap kicked out of me at recess and after-school every day. Well, like Alf Gunnderson in this next story, I managed to hide my true personality a little…but not very well, and not for very long times at a stretch. Folks, believe me on this one: if you are what we call a “green monkey,” the other apes are going to rip you a new one every time they smell you. Hiding out is an art. But don’t hide yourself so well that others like you can’t find you. And don’t follow the crowd so much that eventually you’re not playing at it. Don’t wind up doing it so well that the mask you’ve worn to perfection becomes your real face. Protect yourself, but don’t get assimilated. And never wage a land war in Asia. I just thought I’d throw that in. You never know.
They came to Alf Gunnderson in the Pawnee County jail.
He was sitting, hugging his bony knees, against the plasteel wall of the cell. On the plasteel floor lay an ancient, three-string mandolin he had borrowed from the deputy. He had been plunking, with some talent, all that hot, summer day. Under his thin buttocks the empty trough of his mattressless bunk curved beneath his weight. He was an extremely tall man, even hunched up that way.
He was more than tired-looking, more than weary. His was an inside weariness…he was a gaunt, empty-looking man. His hair fell lanky and drab and gray-brown in shocks over a low forehead. His eyes seemed to be peas, withdrawn from their pods and placed in a starkly white face. It was difficult to tell whether he could see from them.
Their blankness only accented the total cipher he seemed. There was no inch of expression or recognition on his face, in the line of his body.
More, he was a thin man. He seemed to be a man who had given up the Search long ago. His face did not change its hollow stare at the plasteel-barred door opposite, even as it swung back to admit the two nonentities.
The two men entered, their stride as alike as the unobtrusive gray mesh suits they wore; as alike as the faces that would fade from memory moments after they had turned. The turnkey–a grizzled country deputy with a minus 8 rating–stared after the men with open wonder on his bearded face.
One of the gray-suited men turned, pinning the wondering stare to the deputy’s face. His voice was calm and unrippled. “Close the door and go back to your desk.” The words were cold and paced. They brooked no opposition. It was obvious: they were Mindees.
The roar of a late afternoon inverspace ship split the waiting moment outside, then the turnkey slammed the door, palming it loktite. He walked back out of the cell block, hands deep in his coverall pockets. His head was lowered as though he were trying to solve a complex problem. It, too, was obvious: he was trying to block his thoughts off from those goddammed Mindees.
When he was gone, the telepaths circled Gunnderson slowly. Their faces softly altered, subtly, and personality flowed in with quickness. They shot each other confused glances.
Him? the first man thought, nodding slightly at the still, knee-hugging prisoner.
That’s what the report said, Ralph. The other man removed his forehead-concealing snapbrim and sat down on the edge of the bunk-trough. He touched Gunnderson’s leg with tentative fingers. He’s not thinking, for God’s sake! the thought flashed. I can’t get a thing.
Incredulousness sparkled in the thought.
He must be blocked off by trauma-barrier, came the reply from the telepath named Ralph.
“Is your name Alf Gunnderson?” the first Mindee inquired softly, a hand on Gunnderson’s shoulder.
The expression never changed. The head swiveled slowly and the dead eyes came to bear on the dark-suited telepath. “I’m Gunnderson,” he replied briefly. His tones indicated no enthusiasm, no curiosity.
The first man looked up at his partner, doubt wrinkling his eyes, pursing his lips. He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, Who knows?
He turned back to Gunnderson.
Immobile, as before. Hewn from rock, silent as the pit.
“What are you in here for, Gunnderson?” He spoke as though he were unused to words. The halting speech of the telepath.
The dead stare swung back to the plasteel bars. “I set the woods on fire,” he said shortly.
The Mindee’s face darkened at the prisoner’s words. That was what the report had said. The report that had come in from one of the remote corners of the country.
The American Continent was a modern thing, all plasteel and printed circuits, all relays and fast movement, but there had been areas of backwoods country that had never taken to civilizing. They still maintained roads and jails, and fishing holes and forests. Out of one of these had come three reports, spaced an hour apart, with startling ramifications–if true. They had been snapped through the primary message banks in Capitol City in Buenos Aires, reeled through the computalyzers, and handed to the Bureau for check-in. While the inverspace ships plied between worlds, while Earth fought its transgalactic wars, in a rural section of the American Continent, a strange thing was happening.
A mile and a half of raging forest fire, and Alf Gunnderson the one responsible. So they had sent t
wo Bureau Mindees.
“How did it start, Alf?”
The dead eyes closed momentarily, in pain, opened, and he answered, “I was trying to get the pot to heat up. Trying to set the kindling under it to burning. I fired myself too hard.” A flash of self-pity and unbearable hurt came into his face, disappeared just as quickly. Empty once more, he added, “I always do.”
The first man exhaled sharply, got up and put on his hat. The personality flowed out of his face. He was a carbon copy of the other telepath once more.
“This is the one,” he said.
“Come on, Alf,” the Mindee named Ralph said. “Let’s go.”
The authority of his voice no more served to move Gunnderson than their initial appearance had. He sat as he was. The two men looked at one another.
What’s the matter with him? the second one flashed.
If you had what he’s got–you’d be a bit buggy yourself, the first one replied. They were no longer individuals; they were Bureau men, studiedly, exactly, precisely alike in every detail.
They hoisted the prisoner under his arms, lifted him off the bunk, unresisting. The turnkey came at a call, and still marveling at these men who had come in–shown Bureau cards, sworn him to deadly silence, and were now taking the tramp firebug with them–opened the cell door.
As they passed before him, the telepath named Ralph turned suddenly sharp and piercing eyes on the old guard. “This is government business, mister,” he warned. “One word of this, and you’ll be a prisoner in your own jail. Clear?”
The turnkey bobbed his head quickly.
“And stop thinking, mister.” The Mindee added nastily, “We don’t like to be referred to as slimy peekers!” The turnkey turned a shade paler and watched silently as they disappeared down the hall, out of the Pawnee County jail-house. He waited, blanking fiercely, till he heard the whine of the Bureau solocab rising into the afternoon sky.