The Night of the Long Knives Page 2

  CHAPTER 2

  _Murder most foul, as in the best it is; But this most foul, strange and unnatural._

  --Hamlet

  When I woke the light was almost full amber and I could feel no fleshagainst mine, only the blanket under me. I very slowly rolled over andthere she was, sitting on the corner of the blanket not two feet fromme, combing her long black hair with a big, wide-toothed comb she'dscrewed into the leather-and-metal cap over her wrist stump.

  She'd put on her pants and shirt, but the former were rolled up to herknees and the latter, though tucked in, wasn't buttoned.

  She was looking at me, contemplating me you might say, quite dreamilybut with a faint, easy smile.

  I smiled back at her.

  It was lovely.

  Too lovely. There had to be something wrong with it.

  There was. Oh, nothing big. Just a solitary trifle--nothing worthnoticing really.

  But the tiniest solitary things can sometimes be the most irritating,like _one_ mosquito.

  When I'd first rolled over she'd been combing her hair straight back,revealing a wedge of baldness following the continuation of her foreheadscar deep back across her scalp. Now with a movement that was swiftthough not hurried-looking she swept the mass of her hair forward and tothe left, so that it covered the bald area. Also her lips straightenedout.

  I was hurt. She shouldn't have hidden her bit of baldness, it wassomething we had in common, something that brought us closer. And sheshouldn't have stopped smiling at just that moment. Didn't she realizeI loved that blaze on her scalp just as much as any other part of her,that she no longer had any need to practice vanity in front of me?

  Didn't she realize that as soon as she stopped smiling, hercontemplative stare became an insult to me? What right had she to stare,critically I felt sure, at my bald head? What right had she to knowabout the nearly-healed ulcer on my left shin?--that was a piece ofinformation worth a man's life in a fight. What right had she to coverup, anyways, while I was still naked? She ought to have waked me up sothat we could have got dressed as we'd undressed, together. There werelots of things wrong with her manners.

  Oh, I know that if I'd been able to think calmly, maybe if I'd just hadsome breakfast or a little coffee inside me, or even if there'd beensome hot breakfast to eat at that moment, I'd have recognized myirritation for the irrational, one-mosquito surge of negative feelingthat it was.

  Even without breakfast, if I'd just had the knowledge that there was areasonably secure day ahead of me in which there'd be an opportunity forme to straighten out my feelings, I wouldn't have been irked, or atleast being irked wouldn't have bothered me terribly.

  But a sense of security is an even rarer commodity in the Deathlandsthan a hot breakfast.

  Given just the ghost of a sense of security and/or some hot breakfast,I'd have told myself that she was merely being amusingly coquettishabout her bald streak and her hair, that it was natural for a woman totry to preserve some mystery about herself in front of the man she bedswith.

  But you get leery of any kind of mystery in the Deathlands. It makes youfrightened and angry, like it does an animal. Mystery is for culturalqueers, strictly. The only way for two people to get along together inthe Deathlands, even for a while, is never to hide anything and never tomake a move that doesn't have an immediate clear explanation. You can'ttalk, you see, certainly not at first, and so you can't explain anything(most explanations are just lies and dreams, anyway), so you have to bedoubly careful and explicit about everything you do.

  * * * * *

  This girl wasn't being either. Right now, on top of her othergaucheries, she was unscrewing the comb from her wrist--an unfriendly ifnot quite a hostile act, as anyone must admit.

  Understand, please, I wasn't _showing_ any of these negative reactionsof mine any more than she was showing hers, except for her stoppingsmiling. In fact _I hadn't_ stopped smiling, I was playing the game tothe hilt.

  But inside me everything was stewed up and the other urge had come backand presently it would begin to grow again. That's the trouble, youknow, with sex as a solution to the problem of the two urges. It's finewhile it lasts but it wears itself out and then you're back with UrgeNumber One and you have nothing left to balance it with.

  Oh, I wouldn't kill this girl today, I probably wouldn't seriously thinkof killing her for a month or more, but Old Urge Number One would bethere and growing, mostly under cover, all the time. Of course therewere things I could do to slow its growth, lots of little gimmicks, infact--I was pretty experienced at this business.

  * * * * *

  For instance, I could take a shot at talking to her pretty soon. For acatchy starter, I could tell her about Nowhere, how these five otherbuggers and me found ourselves independently skulking along after thisscavenging expedition from Porter, how we naturally joined forces inthat situation, how we set a pitfall for their alky-powered jeep andwrecked it and them, how when our haul turned out to be unexpectedly bigthe four of us left from the kill chummied up and padded down togetherand amused each other for a while and played games, you might say. Why,at one point we even had an old crank phonograph going and read somebooks. And, of course, how when the loot gave out and the fun wore off,we had our murder party and I survived along with, I think, a buggernamed Jerry--at any rate, he was gone when the blood stopped spurting,and I'd had no stomach for tracking him, though I probably should have.

  And in return she could tell me how she had killed off her last set ofgirlfriends, or boyfriends, or friend, or whatever it was.

  After that, we could have a go at exchanging news, rumors andspeculations about local, national and world events. Was it true thatAtlantic Highlands had planes of some sort or were they from Europe?Were they actually crucifying the Deathlanders around Walla Walla oronly nailing up their dead bodies as dire warnings to others such? HadManteno made Christianity compulsory yet, or were they still toleratingZen Buddhists? Was it true that Los Alamos had been completely wiped outby plague, but the area taboo to Deathlanders because of the robotguards they'd left behind--metal guards eight feet tall who trampedacross the white sands, wailing? Did they still have free love inPacific Palisades? Did she know there'd been a pitched battle fought byexpeditionary forces from Ouachita and Savannah Fortress? Over the lootof Birmingham, apparently, after yellow fever had finished off thatprincipality. Had she rooted out any "observers" lately?--some of the"civilized" communities, the more "scientific" ones, try to maintain afew weather stations and the like in the Deathlands, camouflaging themelaborately and manning them with one or two impudent characters to whomwe give a hard time if we uncover them. Had she heard the tale that wasgoing around that South America and the French Riviera had survived theLast War absolutely untouched?--and the obviously ridiculous rider thatthey had blue skies there and saw stars every third night? Did she thinkthat subsequent conditions were showing that the Earth actually hadplunged into an interstellar dust cloud coincidentally with the start ofthe Last War (the dust cloud used as a cover for the first attacks, somesaid) or did she still hold with the majority that the dust was solelyof atomic origin with a little help from volcanoes and dry spells? Howmany green sunsets had she seen in the last year?

  * * * * *

  After we'd chewed over those racy topics and some more like them, andincidentally got bored with guessing and fabricating, we might, if wefelt especially daring and conversation were going particularly well,even take a chance on talking a little about our childhoods, about howthings were before the Last War (though she was almost too young forthat)--about the _little_ things we remembered--the big things were muchtoo dangerous topics to venture on and sometimes even the littlememories could suddenly twist you up as if you'd swallowed lye.

  But after that there wouldn't be anything left to talk about. Anythingyou'd risk talking about, that is. For instance, no matter how long
wetalked, it was very unlikely that we'd either of us tell the otheranything complete or very accurate about how we lived from day to day,about our techniques of surviving and staying sane or at leastfunctional--that would be too imprudent, it would go too much againstthe grain of any player of the murder game. Would I tell her, or anyone,about how I worked the ruses of playing dead and disguising myself as awoman, about my trick of picking a path just before dark and thencircling back to it by a pre-surveyed route, about the chess games Iplayed with myself, about the bottle of green, terribly hot-lookingpowder I carried to sprinkle behind me to bluff off pursuers? A fatchance of my revealing things like that!

  And when all the talk was over, what would it have gained us? Ourminds would be filled with a lot of painful stuff better keptburied--meaningless hopes, scraps of vicarious living in "cultured"communities, memories that were nothing but melancholy given concreteform. The melancholy is easiest to bear when it's the diffusedbackground for everything; and all garbage is best kept in the can. Ohyes, our talking would have gained us a few more days of infatuation, ofphantom security, but those we could have--almost as many of them, atany rate--without talking.

  For instance things were smoothing over already between her and me againand I no longer felt quite so irked. She'd replaced the comb with aninoffensive-looking pair of light pliers and was doing up her hair withthe metal shavings. And I was acting as if content to watch her, as in away I was. I'd still made no move to get dressed.

  She looked real sweet, you know, primping herself that way. Her face wasa little flat, but it was young, and the scar gave it just the fillip itneeded.

  But what was going on behind that forehead right now, I asked myself? Ifelt real psychic this morning, my mind as clear as a bottle of WhiteRock you find miraculously unbroken in a blasted tavern, and the answersto the question I'd asked myself came effortlessly.

  * * * * *

  She was telling herself she'd got herself a man again, a man who wasadequate in the primal clutch (I gave myself that pat on the back), andthat she wouldn't have to be plagued and have her safety endangered by_that_ kind of mind-dulling restlessness and yearning for a while.

  She was lightly playing around with ideas about how she'd found a homeand a protector, knowing she was kidding herself, that it was the mostgimcracky feminine make-believe, but enjoying it just the same.

  She was sizing me up, deciding in detail just what I went for in awoman, what whetted my interest, so she could keep that roused as longas seemed desirable or prudent to her to continue our relation.

  She was kicking herself, only lightly to begin with, because she hadn'ttaken any precautions--because we who've escaped hot death against allreasonable expectations by virtue of some incalculable resistance to theills of radioactivity, quite often find we've escaped sterility too. Ifshe should become pregnant, she was telling herself, then she had a realsticky business ahead of her where no man could be trusted for a second.

  And because she was thinking of this and because she was obviously arealistic Deathlander, she was reminding herself that a woman isbasically less impulsive and daring and resourceful than a man and sohad always better be sure she gets in the first blow. She would bethinking that I was a realist myself and a smart man, one able tounderstand her predicament quite clearly--and because of that a muchsooner danger to her. She was feeling Old Number One Urge starting togrow in her again and wondering whether it mightn't be wisest to give itthe hot-house treatment.

  That is the trouble with a clear mind. For a little while you see thingsas they really are and you can accurately predict how they're going toshape the future ... and then suddenly you realize you've predictedyourself a week or a month into the future and you can't live theintervening time any more because you've already imagined it in detail.People who live in communities, even the cultural queers of our maimedera, aren't much bothered by it--there must be some sort of blinkersthey hand you out along with the key to the city--but in the Deathlandsit's a fairly common phenomenon and there's no hiding from it.

  * * * * *

  Me and my clear mind!--once again it had done me out of days of fun,changed a thoroughly-explored love affair into a one night stand. Oh,there was no question about it, this girl and I were finished, rightthis minute, as of now, because she was just as psychic as I was thismorning and had sensed every last thing that I'd been thinking.

  With a movement smooth enough not to look rushed I swung into a crouch.She was on her knees faster than that, her left hand hovering over thelittle set of tools for her stump, which like any good mechanic she'dlined up neatly on the edge of the blanket--the hook, the comb, a longtelescoping fork, a couple of other items, and the knife. I'd grabbed ahandful of blanket, ready to jerk it from under her. She'd seen that I'dgrabbed it. Our gazes dueled.

  There was a high-pitched whine over our heads! Quite loud from thestart, though it sounded as if it were very deep up in the haze. Itswiftly dropped in pitch and volume.

  The top of the skeletal cracking plant across the freeway glowed withSt. Elmo's fire! Three times it glowed that way, so bright we could seethe violet-blue flames of it reaching up despite the full amberdaylight.

  The whine died away but in the last moment, paradoxically, it seemed tobe coming closer!

  This shared threat--for any unexpected event is a threat in theDeathlands and a mysterious event doubly so--put a stop to our murdergame. The girl and I were buddies again, buddies to be relied on in apinch, for the duration of the threat at least. No need to say so or toreassure each other of the fact in any way, it was taken for granted.Besides, there was no time. We had to use every second allowed us ingetting ready for whatever was coming.

  First I grabbed up Mother. Then I relieved myself--fear made it easy.Then I skinned into my pants and boots, slapped in my teeth, thrust theblanket and knapsack into the shallow cave under the edge of thefreeway, looking around me all the time so as not to be surprised fromany quarter.

  Meanwhile the girl had put on her boots, located her dart gun, unscrewedthe pliers from her stump, put the knife in, and was arranging her scarfso it made a sling for the maimed arm--I wondered why but had no time towaste guessing, even if I'd wanted to, for at that moment a small dullsilver plane, beetle-shaped more than anything else, loomed out of thehaze beyond the cracking plant and came silently drifting down towardus.

  The girl thrust her satchel into the cave and along with it her dartgun. I caught her idea and tucked Mother into my pants behind my back.

  I'd thought from the first glimpse of it that the plane was disabled--Iguess it was its silence that gave me the idea. This theory wasconfirmed when one of its very stubby wings or vanes touched a cornerpillar of the cracking plant. The plane was moving in too slow a glideto be wrecked, in fact it was moving in a slower glide than I would havebelieved possible--but then it's many years since I have seen a plane inflight.

  It wasn't wrecked but the little collision spun it around twice in alazy circle and it landed on the freeway with a scuffing noise not fiftyfeet from us. You couldn't exactly say it had crashed in, but it stayedat an odd tilt. It looked crippled all right.

  An oval door in the plane opened and a man dropped lightly out on theconcrete. And what a man! He was nearer seven feet tall than six,close-cropped blond hair, face and hands richly tanned, the rest of himcovered by trim garments of a gleaming gray. He must have weighed asmuch as the two of us together, but he was beautifully built, muscularyet supple-seeming. His face looked brightly intelligent andeven-tempered and kind.

  Yes, kind!--damn him! It wasn't enough that his body should fairly glowwith a health and vitality that was an insult to our seared skins andstringy muscles and ulcers and half-rotted stomachs and half-arrestedcancers, he had to look kind too--the sort of man who would put you tobed and take care of you, as if you were some sort of interesting sickfox, and maybe even say a little prayer for you, and all manner of otherabominations.

>   * * * * *

  I don't think I could have endured my fury standing still. Fortunatelythere was no need to. As if we'd rehearsed the whole thing for hours,the girl and I scrambled up onto the freeway and scurried toward the manfrom the plane, cunningly swinging away from each other so that it wouldbe harder for him to watch the two of us at once, but not enough to makeit obvious that we attended an attack from two quarters.

  We didn't run though we covered the ground as fast as we dared--runningwould have been too much of a give-away too, and the Pilot, which washow I named him to myself, had a strange-looking small gun in his righthand. In fact the way we moved was part of our act--I dragged one leg asif it were crippled and the girl faked another sort of limp, one thatmade her approach a series of half curtsies. Her arm in the sling wasall twisted, but at the same time she was accidently showing herbreasts--I remember thinking _you won't distract this breed bull thatway, sister, he probably has a harem of six-foot heifers_. I had my headthrown back and my hands stretched out supplicatingly. Meanwhile theboth of us were babbling a blue streak. I was rapidly croaking somethinglike, "Mister for God's sake save my pal he's hurt a lot worse'n I amnot a hundred yards away he's dyin' mister he's dyin' o' thirst histongue's black'n all swole up oh save him mister save my pal he's not ahundred yards away he's dyin' mister dyin'--" and she was singsonging aneven worse rigamarole about how "they" were after us from Porter andgoing to crucify us because we believed in science and how they'dalready impaled her mother and her ten-year-old sister and a lot more ofthe same.

  It didn't matter that our stories didn't fit or make sense, the babblehad a convincing tone and getting us closer to this guy, which was allthat counted. He pointed his gun at me and then I could see him hesitateand I thought exultingly _it's a lot of healthy meat you got there,mister, but it's tame meat, mister, tame!_

  He compromised by taking a step back and sort of hooting at us andwaving us off with his left hand, as if we were a couple of stray dogs.

  It was greatly to our advantage that we'd acted without hesitation, andI don't think we'd have been able to do that except that we'd been allset to kill each other when he dropped in. Our muscles and nerves andminds were keyed for instant ruthless attack. And some "civilized"people still say that the urge to murder doesn't contribute toself-preservation!

  * * * * *

  We were almost close enough now and he was steeling himself to shoot andI remember wondering for a split second what his damn gun did to you,and then me and the girl had started the alternation routine. I'd stopdead, as if completely cowed by the threat of his weapon, and as he tooknote of it she'd go in a little further, and as his gaze shifted to hershe'd stop dead and I'd go in another foot and then try to make my halteven more convincing as his gaze darted back to me. We worked itperfectly, our rhythm was beautiful, as if we were old dancing partners,though the whole thing was absolutely impromptu.

  Still, I honestly don't think we'd ever have got to him if it hadn'tbeen for the distraction that came just then to help us. I could tell,you see, that he'd finally steeled himself and we still weren't quiteclose enough. He wasn't as tame as I'd hoped. I reached behind me forMother, determined to do a last-minute rush and leap anyway, when therecame this sick scream.

  I don't know how else to describe it briefly. It was a scream, femininefor choice, it came from some distance and the direction of the oldcracking plant, it had a note of anguish and warning, yet at the sametime it was weak and almost faltering you might say and squeaky at theend, as if it came from a person half dead and a throat choked withphlegm. It had all those qualities or a wonderful mimicking of them.

  And it had quite an effect on our boy in gray for in the act of shootingme down he started to turn and look over his shoulder.

  Oh, it didn't altogether stop him from shooting me. He got me partlycovered again as I was in the middle of my lunge. I found out what hisgun did to you. My right arm, which was the part he'd covered, just wentdead and I finished my lunge slamming up against his iron knees, like ahighschool kid trying to block out a pro footballer, with the knifeslipping uselessly away from my fingers.

  But in the blessed meanwhile the girl had lunged too, not with a slowslash, thank God, but with a high, slicing thrust aimed arrow-straightfor a point just under his ear.

  She connected and a fan of blood sprayed her full in the face.

  I grabbed my knife with my left hand as it fell, scrambled to my feet,and drove the knife at his throat in a round-house swing that happenedto come handiest at the time. The point went through his flesh likenothing and jarred against his spine with a violence that I hoped wouldshock into nervous insensibility the stoutest medulla oblongata andprevent any dying reprisals on his part.

  I got my wish, in large part. He swayed, straightened, dropped his gun,and fell flat on his back, giving his skull a murderous crack on theconcrete for good measure. He lay there and after a half dozen gushesthe bright blood quit pumping strongly out of his neck.

  Then came the part that was like a dying reprisal, though obviously notbeing directed by him as of now. And come to think of it, it may havehad its good points.

  * * * * *

  The girl, who was clearly a most cool-headed cuss, snatched for his gunwhere he'd dropped it, to make sure she got it ahead of me. Shesnatched, yes--and then jerked back, letting off a sizable squeal ofpain, anger, and surprise.

  Where we'd seen his gun hit the concrete there was now a tinyincandescent puddle. A rill of blood snaked out from the pool around hishead and touched the whitely glowing puddle and a jet of steam sizzledup.

  Somehow the gun had managed to melt itself in the moment of its ownerdying. Well, at any rate that showed it hadn't contained any gunpowderor ordinary chemical explosives, though I already knew it operated onother principles from the way it had been used to paralyze me. More tothe point, it showed that the gun's owner was the member of a culturethat believed in taking very complete precautions against its gadgetsfalling into the hands of strangers.

  But the gun fusing wasn't quite all. As the girl and me shifted our gazefrom the puddle, which was cooling fast and now glowed red like theblood--as we shifted our gaze back from the puddle to the dead man, wesaw that at three points (points over where you'd expect pockets to be)his gray clothing had charred in small irregularly shaped patches fromwhich threads of black smoke were twisting upward.

  Just at that moment, so close as to make me jump in spite of years oflearning to absorb shocks stoically--right at my elbow it seemed to (thegirl jumped too, I may say)--a voice said, "Done a murder, hey?"

  Advancing briskly around the skewily grounded plane from the directionof the cracking plant was an old geezer, a seasoned, hard-bakedDeathlander if I ever saw one. He had a shock of bone-white hair, therest of him that showed from his weathered gray clothing looked fried bythe sun's rays and others to a stringy crisp, and strapped to his bootsand weighing down his belt were a good dozen knives.

  Not satisfied with the unnerving noise he'd made already, he went onbrightly, "Neat job too, I give you credit for that, but why the helldid you have to set the guy afire?"