Part 17 (1/2)

She started to weave her head, No thank you, and her gla.s.ses slid down her nose. He picked them off and put them in her pocket. ”Eat.” He nodded, tucking her hand under his arm and starting out of the room. His other hand swept out and grabbed a bottle of red capsules by the bed and tossed them at me.

”You won't need these tonight, ma'am,” he told her. ”He'll keep them for you. Right?”

Her little mouth was going But, But silently under the. eyes. We trouped down the stairs. When we pushed through the front door it wheezed ”Win with Willkie!” He thumped it amicably.

The next two blocks were complicated. I realized it wasn't just me. The girl was weaving all over the place. By the time we reached his cat-stop all seventy-five pounds of her were hanging on my muscular one-thirty. The eatery smelled cheerful, sort of Detroit espresso. As we entered, the revolving door carolled ”H'lo-lo-lo!”

She heard and looked up at me, puzzled.

”It's a friendly city,” I told her. For some reason I put one finger on the end of her nose. She didn't go away.

”I have to eat and run.” He herded us into a booth and ordered. Then he unfolded his legs down the aisle, rubbing his s.h.a.ggy head. ”You don't often see a really mean piece of furniture. That old boy was poison all the way through. I knew one just like it once, h.e.l.l of a history. You can't blame them. But they're not safe, ma'am. Especially for someone like you.”

”You mean it was trying to start a fire?” I asked. ”Why would it burn itself up too?”His eyebrows went up.

”Surely you've heard of the death wish?”

The chick's head was going like watching a slow sad pingpong match.

”Show her the girl,” I urged. ”He has girls living in his clothes. Go on, show her.”

He laughed, bashful again.

”They're busy. They're fixing their hair now, you know girls.”

I started telling her about the Tall People's Bank and we were all laughing like crazy when the lasagna finally arrived. It was really all right.

”Look, I have to go uptown now.” He laid his spoon over his knife and fork in a pattern. ”You guys will be okay now, I think.” He smiled at the girl. ”He's going to find you a place to stay. First thing in the morning, remember.”

It bugged me a little because I'd been working on just that.

”What now? Rus.h.i.+ng water to a starving mailbox?”

Half his smile faded.

”Ah, I have to go chew somebody out.”

He scrooched out of the booth and towered over us, pus.h.i.+ng in his tie.

”What for?”

He muttered something that sounded like, ”The submarine is late.”

”Huh?”

”Like about a hundred years,” he said absently. He winked. ”See you.” As he made off, I saw a little head peeking out of his side pocket. It seemed to be wearing curlers. I waved. Something waved back.

”Beautiful,” I told the girl. He really was all right.

But you know, I never did catch his name and when I asked around later nothing checked out. You wouldn't even believe the ha.s.sles a guy my size can get into, goosing building ledges. But I've spotted one new Kennedy half at Grosvenor and Forty-fourth. We're keeping our eyes on the spot.

THE MAN WHO WALKED HOME.

-Transgression! Terror! And he thrust and lost there-punched into impossibility, abandoned never to be known how, the wrong man in the most wrong of all wrong places in that unimaginable collapse of never-to-be-reimagined mechanism-he stranded, undone, his lifeline severed, he in that nanosecond knowing his only tether parting, going away, the longest line to life withdrawing, winking out, disappearing forever beyond his grasp-telescoping away from him into the closing vortex beyond which lay his home, his life, his only possibility of being; seeing it sucked back into the deepest maw, melting, leaving him orphaned on what never-to-be-known sh.o.r.e of total wrongness-of beauty beyond joy, perhaps? Of horror? Of nothingness? Of profound otherness only, certainly-whatever it was, that place into which he transgressed, it could not support his life there, his violent and violating aberrance; and he, fierce, brave, crazy-clenched into total protest, one body-fist of utter repudiation of himself there in that place, forsaken there-what did he do? Rejected, exiled, hungering homewards more desperate than any lost beast driving for its unreachable home, his home, his HOME-and no way, no transport, no vehicle, means, machinery, no force but his intolerable resolve aimed homeward along that vanis.h.i.+ng vector, that last and only lifeline-he did, what?

He walked.Home.

Precisely what hashed up in the work of the major industrial lessee of the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Facility in Idaho was never known. Or rather, all those who might have been able to diagnose the original malfunction were themselves obliterated almost at once in the greater catastrophe which followed.

The nature of this second cataclysm was not at first understood either. All that was ever certain was that at 1153.6 of May 2, 1989 Old Style, the Bonneville laboratories and all their personnel were transformed into an intimately disrupted form of matter resembling a high-energy plasma, which became rapidly airborn to the accompaniment of radiating seismic and atmospheric events.

The disturbed area unfortunately included an operational MIRV Watchdog bomb.

In the confusions of the next hours the Earth's population was substantially reduced, the biosphere was altered, and the Earth itself was marked with numbers of more conventional craters. For some years thereafter the survivors were existentially preoccupied and the peculiar dustbowl at Bonneville was left to weather by itself in the changing climatic cycles.

It was not a large crater; just over a kilometer in width and lacking the usual displacement lip. Its surface was covered with a finely divided substance which dried into dust. Before the rains began it was almost perfectly flat. Only in certain lights, had anyone been there to inspect it, a small surface marking or abraded place could be detected almost exactly at the center.

Two decades after the disaster a party of short brown people appeared from the south, together with a flock of somewhat atypical sheep. The crater at this time appeared as a wide shallow basin in which the gra.s.s did not grow well, doubtless from the almost complete lack of soil micro-organisms.

Neither this nor the surrounding vigorous gra.s.s were found to harm the sheep. A few crude hogans went up at the southern edge and a faint path began to be traced across the crater itself, pa.s.sing by the central bare spot.

One spring morning two children who had been driving sheep across the crater came screaming back to camp. A monster had burst out of the ground before them, a huge flat animal making a dreadful roar. It vanished in a flash and a shaking of the earth, leaving an evil smell. The sheep had run away.

Since this last was visibly true, some elders investigated. Finding no sign of the monster and no place in which it could hide, they settled for beating the children, who settled for making a detour around the monster-spot, and nothing more occurred for a while.

The following spring the episode was repeated. This time an older girl was present but she could add only that the monster seemed to be rus.h.i.+ng flat out along the ground without moving at all. And there was a sc.r.a.ped place in the dirt. Again nothing was found; an evil-ward in a cleft stick was placed at the spot.

When the same thing happened for the third time a year later, the detour was extended and other charm-wands were added. But since no harm seemed to come of it and the brown people had seen far worse, sheep-tending resumed as before. A few more instantaneous apparitions of the monster were noted, each time in the spring.

At the end of the third decade of the new era a tall old man limped down the hills from the south, pus.h.i.+ng his pack upon a bicycle wheel. He camped on the far side of the crater, and soon found the monster-site. He attempted to question people about it, but no one understood him, so he traded a knife for some meat. Although he was obviously feeble, something about him dissuaded them from killing him, and this proved wise because he later a.s.sisted the women in treating several sick children.

He spent much time around the place of the apparition and was nearby when it made its next appearance. This excited him very much and he did several inexplicable but apparently harmless things, including moving his camp into the crater by the trail. He stayed on for a full year watching the site and was close by for its next manifestation. After this he spent a few days making a charm-stone for the spot and then left northwards, hobbling as he had come.More decades pa.s.sed. The crater eroded and a rain-gully became an intermittent streamlet across one edge of the basin. The brown people and their sheep were attacked by a band of grizzled men, after which the survivors went away eastward. The winters of what had been Idaho were now frost-free; aspen and eucalyptus sprouted in the moist plain. Still the crater remained 'treeless, visible as a flat bowl of gra.s.s; and the bare place at the center remained. The skies cleared somewhat.

After another three decades a larger band of black people with ox-drawn carts appeared and stayed for a time, but left again when they too saw the thunderclap-monster. A few other vagrants straggled by.

Five decades later a small permanent settlement had grown up on the nearest range of hills, from which men riding on small ponies with dark stripes down their spines herded humped cattle near the crater. A herdsman's hut was built by the streamlet, which in tune became the habitation of an olive-skinned, red-haired family. In due course one of this clan again observed the monster-flash, but these people did not depart. The stone the tall man had placed was noted and left undisturbed.

The homestead at the crater's edge grew into a group of three and was joined by others, and the trail across it became a cartroad with a log bridge over the stream. At the center of the still faintly discernible crater the cartroad made a bend, leaving a gra.s.sy place which bore on its center about a square meter of curiously impacted bare earth and a deeply etched sandstone rock.

The apparition of the monster was now known to occur regularly each Spring on a certain morning in this place, and the children of the community dared each other to approach the spot. It was referred to in a phrase that could be translated as ”the Old Dragon.” The Old Dragon's appearance was always the same: a brief, violent thunderburst which began and cut off abruptly, in the midst of which a dragonlike creature was seen apparently in furious motion on the earth although it never actually moved. Afterwards there was a bad smell and the earth smoked. People who saw it from close by spoke of a s.h.i.+vering sensation.

Early in the second century two young men rode into town from the north. Their ponies were s.h.a.ggier than the local breed and the equipment they carried included two boxlike objects which the young men set up at the monster site. They stayed in the area a full year, observing two materializations of the Old Dragon, and they provided much news and maps of roads and trading towns in the cooler regions to the north. They built a windmill which was accepted by the community and offered to build a lighting machine, which was refused. Then they departed with their boxes after unsuccessfully attempting to persuade a local boy to learn to operate one.

In the course of the next decades other travelers stopped by and marveled at the monster, and there was sporadic fighting over the mountains to the south. One of the armed bands made a cattle raid into the crater hamlet. It was repulsed, but the raiders left a spotted sickness which killed many. For all this time the bare place at the crater's center remained, and the monster made his regular appearances, observed or not.

The hill-town grew and changed and the crater hamlet grew to be a town. Roads widened and linked into networks. There were gray-green conifers in the hills now, spreading down into the plain, and chirruping lizards lived in their branches.

At century's end a shabby band of skin-clad squatters with stunted milk-beasts erupted out of the west and were eventually killed or driven away, but not before the local herds had contracted a vicious parasite. Veterinaries were fetched from the market city up north, but little could be done. The families near the crater left and for some decades the area was empty. Finally cattle of a new strain reappeared in the plain and the crater hamlet was reoccupied. Still the bare center continued annually to manifest the monster and he became an accepted phenomenon of the area. On several occasions parties came from the distant Northwest Authority to observe it.

The crater hamlet flourished and grew into the fields where cattle had grazed and part of the old crater became the town park. A small seasonal tourist industry based on the monster-site developed. The townspeople rented rooms for the appearances and many more-or-less authentic monster-relics were ondisplay in the local taverns.