Charles Beaumont: Selected Stories (18 page)

"You are seven minutes, twenty seconds late," said the Time Box.
"Up yours," said Kinkaid, happily.
He ran the gauntlet of eyes to his desk, took out his papers and sat down. A red bulb flashed.
Kinkaid walked down the aisle toward the door marked: William A. Biddle. Biddle was seated behind his desk.
"Hi," said Kinkaid. "You are late."
"I know. That absinthe must have got to me."
"Absinthe?"
"Maybe I didn't tell you, but I hadn't even tasted the stuff before last night. I'm sorry about what happened. Who took me home?"
"Kinkaid, I don't know what you're talking about."
"About last night. S.P.O.L." The corners of Kinkaid's lips curled upward. "Anybody wanna buy a duck?"
Biddle's expression was grim.
"I'll be happy to give you a goose instead," said Kinkaid. "There, how's that? That's a joke, isn't it?"
"I couldn't say."
"Come on, Mister Biddle. I know I was a disappointment to you, but it was all so new. I didn't understand. I wanted to, I tried… I'm willing to learn.
Biddle said nothing.
"They're not going to hold it against me because I didn't laugh, are they?" Kinkaid found that his heart had begun to beat rapidly. "I didn't know how. But I do now. Listen. Ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-"
"Kinkaid!"
"Yes, sir?"
"You're fired."
"What?" Kinkaid's mouth went dry. He stared at the stern man behind the desk and tried to remember how he looked with his tie loose and a naked woman in his lap. "Mister Biddle, I know the vote was against me. I know that. And I don't blame them. But, you can fix it, can't you?"
"Get out."
"Please! All I want is a second chance. Is that so much to ask? You people lived through the time, I didn't. I've got to learn."
"I don't know what you're babbling about, Kinkaid. But I warn you. If you repeat any of it to the authorities, they'll put you away."
Kinkaid stood there a moment, tense; then he sighed, turned around and walked quickly out of the building.
That night, and almost every night thereafter until the final demolition, he rode the belts to No Man's Land. He walked to where the ugly sightless buildings were, and he searched, but he could never find the building he wanted.
Sometimes he would stand perfectly still on the crumbling sidewalks, and listen. And once in a while it almost seemed that he could hear the distant laughter.
It was a lovely, desperate sound.

THE JUNGLE

by Charles Beaumont

Suddenly it was there. On foxfeet, invisibly, it had crept, past all the fences and traps he had laid, past all the barriers. And now it sat inside his mind, a part of him, like his pulse, like the steady beat of his heart.
Richard Austin became rigid in the chair. He closed his eyes and strained the muscles in his body until they were silent and unmoving as granite; and he listened to the thing that had come again, taking him by surprise even while he had been waiting. He listened to it grow-it seemed to grow; he couldn't be sure: perhaps he was merely bringing it into sharper focus by filtering out the other constant sounds: the winds that whispered through the foliage of balloon-topped trees the murmurous insect-drone of all the machines that produced this wind and pumped blood through the city from their stations far beneath the night-heavy streets. Or, perhaps, it was because he was searching, trying to lay hands on it that the thing seemed to be different tonight, stronger, surer. Or-what did it matter?
He sat in the darkened room and listened to the drum; to the even, steady throb that really neither rose nor diminished, but held to that slow dignified tempo with which he'd become so familiar.
Then, quickly he rose from the chair and shook his head. The sounds died and became an indistinguishable part of the silence. It was only concentration, he thought, and the desire to hear them that gave them life…
Richard Austin released a jagged breath from his swollen lungs, painfully. He walked to the bar and poured some whiskey into a glass and drank most of it in a single swallow: it went down his dry throat like knives, forcing the salivary glands back into action.
He shook his head again, turned and walked back across the living room to the far door. It swung out noiselessly as his hand touched the ornamented circle of hammered brass.
The figure of his wife lay perfectly still under the black light, still and pale, as she had lain three hours before. He walked toward her, feeling his nostrils dilate at the acrid medicine smells, harshly bitter and new to his senses. He blinked away the hot tears that had rushed, stinging, to his eyes; and stood for a time, quietly, trying not to think of the drums.
Then he whispered: "Mag… Mag, don't die tonight!"
Imbecile words! He clenched his fists and stared down at the face that was so full of pain, so twisted with defeat, that now you could not believe it had once been different, a young face, full of laughter and innocence and courage.
The color had gone completely. From the burning splotchy scarlet of last week to this stiff white mask, lifeless, brittle as dry paste. And covered over with perspiration that glistened above her mouth in cold wet buttons and over her face like oil on white stone. The bedding under and around her was drenched gray.
Austin looked at the bandage that covered his wife's head, and forced away the memory, brutally. The memory of her long silver hair and how it had fallen away in clumps in his hands within a week after she had been stricken…
But the thoughts danced out of control, and he found himself remembering all the terrible steps in this nightmare.
The scientists had thought it malaria, judging from the symptoms, which were identical. But that was difficult to accept, for malaria had been effectively conquered-powerful new discoveries in vaccines having been administered first, and then the primary cause of the disease itself-the Anopheles mosquitoe-destroyed completely. And the liquid alloys which formed the foundations for this new city eliminated all the likely breeding places, the bogs and marshlands and rivers. No instance of reoccurrence of the disease had been reported for half a century. Yet-malarial parasites were discovered in the bloodstreams of those first victims, unmistakable parasites that multiplied at a swift rate and worked their destruction of the red corpuscles. And the chemists immediately had to go about the business of mixing medicines from now ancient prescriptions, frantically working against time. A disquieting, even a frightening thing; but without terror for the builders of the new city; not sufficient to make them abandon their work or to spark mass evacuations. Panic was by now so forgotten by most that it had become a new emotion, to be learned all over again.
It had not taken very long to relearn, Austin recalled. Terror had come soon enough. The stricken-some thirty husky workmen, engineers, planners-had rallied under the drugs and seemed to be out of critical condition when, one night, they had all suffered relapses, fallen into fevered comas and proceeded to alternate between unconsciousness and delirium. The scientists were baffled. They tried frenziedly to arrest the parasites, but without success. Their medicines were useless, their drugs and radium treatments and inoculations-all, useless. Finally, they could only look on as the disease took new turns, developed strange characteristics, changed altogether from what they had taken to be malaria to something utterly foreign. It began to assume a horrible regular pattern: from prolonged delirium to catatonia, whereby the victim's respiratory system and heartbeat diminished to a condition only barely distinguishable from death. And then, the most hideous part: the swift decomposition of the body cells, the destruction of the tissues . . -
Richard Austin carefully controlled a shudder as he thought of those weeks that had been the beginning. He fingered out a cigarette from his pocekt, started to strike it, then broke the cylinder and ground its bright red flakes into his palms.
No other real hint had been given then: only the disease. Someone had nicknamed it "Jungle Rot"-cruel, but apt. The victims were rotting alive, the flesh falling from them like rain-soaked rags; and they did not die wholly, ever, until they had been transformed into almost unrecognizable mounds of putrescence…
He put out a hand and laid it gently against his wife's cheek. The perspiration was chill and greasy to his touch, like the stagnant water of slew banks. Instinctively his fingers recoiled and balled back into fists. He forced them open again and stared at the tiny dottles of flesh that clung to them.
"Mag!" It had started already! Wildly, he touched her arm, applying very slight pressure. The outer skin crumbled away, leaving a small wet gray patch. Austin's heart raced; an involuntary movement caused his fingers to pinch his own wrists, hard. A wrinkled spot appeared and disappeared, a small, fading red line.
She's dying, he thought. Very surely, very slowly, she's begun to die-Mag. Soon her body will turn gray and then it will come loose; the weight of the sheet will be enough to tear big strips of it away… She'll begin to rot, and her brain will know it- they had discovered that much: the victims were never completely comatose, could not be adequately drugged-she will know that she is mouldering even while she lives and thinks…
And why? His head ached, throbbed. Why?
The years, these past months, the room with its stink of decay-everything rushed up, suddenly, filling Austin's mind.
If I had agreed to leave with the rest, he thought, to run away, then Mag would be well and full of life. But-I didn't agree…
He had stayed on to fight. And Mag would would not leave without him. Now she was dying and that was the end of it.
Or-he turned slowly-was it? He walked out to the balcony. The forced air was soft and cool; it moved in little patches through the streets of the city. Mbarara, his city; the one he'd dreamed about and then planned and designed and pushed into existence; the place built to pamper five hundred thousand people.
Empty now, and deserted as a gigantic churchyard…
Dimly he recognized the sound of the drums with their slow muffled rhythm, directionless as always, seeming to come from everywhere and from nowhere. Speaking to him. Whispering.
Austin lit a cigarette and sucked the calming smoke into his lungs. He remained motionless until the cigarette was down to the cork.
Then he walked back into the bedroom, opened a cabinet and took a heavy silver pistol.
He loaded it carefully.
Mag was still; almost, it seemed to Austin, expectant, waiting, so very still and pale.
He pointed the barrel of the pistol at his wife's forehead and curled his finger around the trigger. Another slight pressure and it would be over. Her suffering would be over. Just a slight pressure!
The drums droned louder until they were exploding in the quiet room.
Austin tensed and fought the trembling, gripped the pistol with his other hand to steady it.
But his finger refused to move on the curved trigger.
After a long moment, he lowered his arm and dropped the gun into his pocket.
"No." He said it quietly, undramatically. The word hit a barrier of mucus and came out high-pitched and child-like.
He coughed.
That was what they wanted him to do-he could tell, from the drums. That's what so many of the others had done. Panicked.
"No."
He walked quickly out of the room, through the hall, to the elevator. It lowered instantly but he did not wait for it to reach bottom before he leapt off and ran across the floor to the barricaded front door.
He tore at the locks. Then the door swung open and he was outside; for the first time in three weeks-outside, alone, in the city.
He paused, fascinated by the strangeness of it. Impossible to believe that he was the only white man left in the entire city.
He strode to a high-speed walkway, halted it and stepped on. Setting the power at half with his pass key, he pressed the control button and sagged against the rail as the belt whispered into movement.
He knew where he was going. Perhaps he even knew why. But he didn't think about that; instead, he looked at the buildings that slid by silently, the vast rolling spheres and columns of colored stone, the balanced shapes that existed now and that had once existed only in his mind. And he listened to the drums, wondering why the sound of them seemed natural and his buildings suddenly so unnatural, so strange and disjointed.
Like green balloons on yellow stocks, the cultured Grant Wood trees slipped by, uniform and straight, arranged in aesthetically pleasing designs on the stone islands between belts. Austin smiled: The touch of nature. Toy trees, ruffling in artificial winds… It all looked, now, like the model he had presented to the Senators. About as real and lifelike.
Austin moved like a carefully carved and painted figurine, incredibly small and lonely-looking on the empty walkway. He thought about the years of preparation; the endless red tape and paper work that had preceded the actual job. Then of the natives, how they had protested and petitioned to influence the Five-Power governments and how that had slowed them down. The problem of money, whipped only by pounding at the point of over-populaton, again and again, never letting up for a moment. The problems, problems…
He could not recall when the work itself had actually begun-it was all so joined. Laying the first railroad could certainly not have been a particle as beset with difficulty. Because the tribes of the Kenya territory numbered into the millions; and they were all filled with hatred and fury, opposing the city at every turn.
No explanation had satisfied them. They saw it as the destruction of their world and so they fought. With guns and spears and arrows and darts, with every resource at their disposal, refusing to capitulate, hunting like an army of mad ants scattered over the land.
And, since they could not be controlled, they had to be destroyed. Like their forests and rivers and mountains, destroyed, to make room for the city.
Though not, Austin remembered grimly, without loss. The white men had fine weapons, but none more fatal than machetes biting deep into neck flesh or sharp wooden shafts coated with strange poisons. And they did not all escape. Some would wander too far, unused to this green world where a white man could become hopelessly lost within three minutes. Others would forget their weapons. And a few were too brave.
Austin thought of Joseph Fava, the engineer, who had been reported missing. And of how Fava had come running back to the camp after two days, running and screaming, a bright crimson nearly dead creature out of the worst dreams. He had been cleanly stripped of all his skin, except for the face, hands, and feet .
But, the city had grown, implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wider every day over the dark and feral country. Nothing could stop it. Mountains were stamped flat. Rivers were damned off or drained or put elsewhere. The marshes were filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. And the big gray machines moved forward, gobbling up the jungle with their iron teeth, chewing it clean of its life and all its living things.
Until it was no more.
Leveled, smoothed as a highway is smoothed, its centuries choked beneath millions and millions of tons of hardened stone.
The birth of a city… It had become the death of a world.
And Richard Austin was its murderer.
As he traveled, he thought of the shaman, the half-naked toothless Bantu medicine man who had spoken for most of the tribes. "You have killed us, and we could not stop you. So now we will wait, until you have made your city and others come to live here, Then YOU will know what it is to die." Bokawah, who lived in superstition and fear, whom civilization had passed, along with the rest of his people. Who never spoke again after those words, and allowed himself to be moved to the wide iron plateau that had been built for the surviving natives.

Bokawah, the ignorant shaman, with his eternal smile… How distinct that smile was now!
The walkway shuddered, suddenly, and jarred to a noisy grinding stop. Austin pitched forward and grasped the railing in order to break his fall,
Awareness of the silence came first. The eerie dead silence that hung like a pall. It meant that the central machines had ceased functioning. They had been designed to operate automatically and perpetually; it was unthinkable that these power sources could break down!
As unthinkable as the drums that murmured to life again beyond the stainless towers, so loud now in the silence, so real.
Austin gripped his pistol tightly and shook away the panic that had bubbled up like acid in his chest. It was merely that the power had gone off. Strike out impossible, insert improbable. Improbabilities happen. The evil spirits do not summon them, they happen. Like strange diseases.
I am fighting, he thought, a statistical paradox. That's all. A storage pike of coincidences. If I wait-he walked close to the sides of the buildings-and fight, the graph will change. The curve will…
The drums roared out a wave of scattered sound, stopped, began again…
He thought a bit further of charts; then the picture of Mag materialized, blocking out the thick ink lines, ascending and descending on their giant graphs.
Thinking wasn't going to help…
He walked on.
Presently, at the end of a curve in the city maze, the "village" came into view, suspended overhead like a gigantic jeweled spider. It thrust out cold light. It was silent.
Austin breathed deeply. By belt, his destination was only minutes away. But the minutes grew as he walked through the city, and when he had reached the lift, hot pains wrenched at his muscles. He stood by the crystal platform, working action back into numbed limbs.
Then he remembered the silence, the dead machines. If they were not functioning, then the elevator-.
His finger touched a button, experimentally.
A glass door slid open with a pneumatic hiss.
He walked inside, and tried not to think as the door closed and the bullet-shaped lift began to rise.
Below, Mbarara grew small. The treated metals glowed in a dimming lace of light. And the city looked even more like the little clay model he had built with his hands.
At last, movement ceased. Austin waited for the door to slide open again, then he strode out onto the smooth floor.
It was very dark. The artificial torches did not even smolder: their stubs, he noticed, were blackened and cold.
But the gates to the village lay open.
He looked past the entrance into the frozen shadows.
He heard the drums, throbbing from within, loud and distinct. But-ordinary drums, whose sound-waves would dissipate before ever reaching the city below,
He walked into the village.
The huts like glass blisters on smooth flesh, sat silent. Somehow, they were obscene in the dark, to Austin. Built to incorporate the feel and the atmosphere of their originals and yet to include the civilized conveniences; planned from an artistic as well as a scientific standpoint-they were suddenly obscene.
Perhaps, Austin thought, as he walked, perhaps there was something to what Barney had been saying . . - No-these people had elected to stay of their own free will. It would have been impossible to duplicate exactly the montrous conditions under which they had lived. If not impossible, certainly wrong.
Let them wallow in their backward filth? In their disease and corruption, let them die-merely because their culture had failed to absorb scientific progress? No. You do not permit a man to leap off the top of a hundred-story building just because he has been trained to believe it is the only way to get to the ground floor-even though you insult him and blaspheme against his gods through your intervention. You restrain him, at any cost. Then, much later, you show him the elevator, And because he is a man, with a brain no smaller than yours, he will understand. He will understand that a crushed superstition is better than a crushed head. And he will thank you, eventually.
That is logic.
Austin walked, letting these thoughts form a thick crust. He felt the slap of the pistol against his thigh and this, also, was comforting.
Where were they now? Inside the huts, asleep? All of them? Or had they, too, contracted the disease and begun to die of it? . - -
Far ahead, at the clearing which represented the tip of the design, a glow of light appeared. As he approached, the drums grew louder, and other sounds-voices. How many voices? The air was at once murmurous and alive.
He stopped before the clearing and leaned on the darkness and watched,
Nearby a young woman was dancing. Her eyes were closed, tightly, and her arms were straight at her sides like black roots. She was in a state of possession, dancing in rhythm to the nearest drum. Her feet moved so fast they had become a blur, and her naked body wore a slick coat of perspiration.
Beyond the dancing woman, Austin could see the crowd, squatted and standing, swaying; over a thousand of them-surely every native in the village!
A clot of brown skin and bright white paint and brilliant feathers, hunched in the firelight.
An inner line of men sat over drums and hollow logs, beating these with their palms and with short sticks of wood. The sounds blended strangely into one-the one Austin had been hearing, it seemed, all his life.
He watched, fascinated, even though he had witnessed Bantu ceremonies countless times in the past, even though he was perfectly familiar with the symbols. The little leather bags of hex-magic: nail-filings, photographs, specks of flesh; the rubbing boards stained with fruit-skins; the piles of bones at the feet of the men-old bones, very brittle and dry and old.
Then he looked beyond the natives to the sensible clean crystal walls that rose majestically, cupping the area, giving it form.
It sent a chill over him.
He walked into the open.
The throng quieted, instantly, like a scream cut off. The dancers caught their balance, blinked, drew in breath. The others lifted their heads, stared.
All were turned to dark, unmoving wax.
Austin went past the gauntlet of eyes, to one of the painted men.
"Where is Bokawah?" he said loudly, in precise Swahili. His voice regained its accustomed authority. "Bokawah. Take me to him."
No one moved. Hands lay on the air inches above drums, petrified.
"I have come to talk!"
From the corner of his eyes, Austin felt the slight disturbance. He waited a moment, then turned.
A figured crouched beside him. A man, unbelievably old and tiny, sharp little bones jutting into loose flesh like pins, skin cross-hatched with a pattern of white paint, chalky as the substance some widows of the tribes wore for a year after the death of their mates. His mouth was pulled into a shape not quite a smile, but resembling a smile. It revealed hardened toothless gums.
The old men laughed, suddenly. The amulet around his chicken-neck bobbled. Then he stopped laughing and stared at Austin.
"We have been waiting," he said, softly. Austin started at the perfect English. He had not heard English for a long time; and now, coming from the little man… Perhaps Bokawah had learned it. Why not? "Walk with me, Mr. Austin."
He followed the ancient shaman, dumbly, not having the slightest idea why he was doing so, to a square of moist soil. It was surrounded by natives.
Bokawah looked once at Austin, then reached down and dipped his hands into the soil. The horny fingers scratched away the top-dirt, burrowed in like thin, nervous animals, and emerged, finally, holding something.
Austin gasped. It was a doll.
It was Mag.
He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat. He knew how primitives would try to inflict evil upon an enemy by burying his effigy. As the effigy rotted symbolically, so would…
He snatched the doll away from the old man. It crumbled in his hands.
"Mr. Austin," Bokawah said, "I'm very sorry you did not come for this talk long ago." The old man's lips did not move. The voice was his and yet not his.
Austin knew, suddenly, that he had not come to this place of his own accord. He had been summoned.
The old man held a hyena's tail in his right hand. He waved this and a slight wind seemed to come up, throwing the flames of the fire into a neurotic dance.
"You are not convinced, even now, Mr. Austin. Aiii. You have seen suffering and death, but you are not convinced," Bokawah sighed. "I will try one last time." He squatted on the smooth floor, "When you first came to our country, and spoke your plans, I told you-even then-what must happen. I told you that this city must not be. I told you that my people would fight, as your people would fight if we were to come to your land and build jungles. But you understood nothing of what I said," He did not accuse; the voice was expressionless. "Now Mbarara lies silent and dead beneath you and still you do not wish to understand. What must we do, Mr. Austin? How shall we go about proving to you that this Mbarara of yours will always be silent and dead, that your people will never walk through it?"
Austin thought of his old college friend Barney-and of what Barney had once told him. Staring at Bokawah, at this scrawny, painted savage, he saw the big Texan clearly and he remembered his wild undergraduate theories-exhuming the antique view of primitives and their religions, their magics.
"Go on, pal, laugh at their tabus," Barney, who was an anthropologist, used to be fond of saying, "sneer, while you throw salt over your shoulder. Laugh at their manas, while you blab about our own 'geniuses'!"
He had even gone beyond the point of believing that magic was important because it held together the fabric of culture among these natives, because it-and their religious superstitions-gave them a rule for behavior, therefore, in most cases, happiness. He had even come to believe that native magic was just another method of arriving at physical truths.
Of course, it was all semantic nonsense, It suggested that primitive magic could lift a ship into space or destroy disease or…
That had been the trouble with Barney. You could never tell when he was serious. Even a social anthropologist wouldn't go so far as to think there was more than one law of gravity.
"Mr. Austin, we have brought you here for a purpose. Do you know what that purpose is?"
"I don't know and I don't-"
"Have you wondered why you, alone, of all your people, have been spared? Then-listen to me, very carefully. Because if you do not, then what has happened in your new city is merely the beginning. The winds of death will blow over Mbarara and it will be far more awful than what has been." The medicine man stared down at the scattered piles of bones. Panther bones, Austin knew-a divination device. Their position on the ground told Bokawah much about the white people.
"Go back to your chiefs. Tell them that they must forget this city. Tell them that death walks here and that it will always walk, and that their magic is powerful but not powerful enough. It cannot stand against the spirits from time who have been summoned to fight. Go and talk to your chiefs and tell them these things. Make them believe you. Force them to understand that if they come to Mbarara, they will die, in ways they never dreamed, of sickness, in pain, slowly. Forever."
The old man's eyes were closed. His mouth did not move at all and the voice was mechanical.
"Tell them, Mr. Austin, that at first you thought it was a strange new disease that struck the workers. But then remind them that your greatest doctors were powerless against the contagion, that it spread and was not conquered. Say these things. And, perhaps, they will believe you. And be saved."
Bokawah studied the panther bones carefully, tracing their arrangement.
Austin's voice was mechanical, also. "You are forgetting something," he said. He refused to let the thoughts creep in. He refused to wonder about the voice that came through closed lips, about where the natives could have found soil or fresh panther bones or. . - "No one," he said to the old man, "has fought back-yet."
"But why would you do that, Mr. Austin, since you do not believe in the existence of your enemy? Whom shall you fight?" Bokawah smiled.
The crowd of natives remained quiet, unmoving, in the dying firelight.
"The only fear you hold for us," Austin said, "is the fear that you may prove psychologically harmful." He looked at the crushed doll at his feet. The face was whole; otherwise, it lay hideously disfigured.
"Yes?"
"Right now, Bokawah, my government is sending men. They will arrive soon. When they do, they will study what has happened. If it is agreed that your rites- however harmless in themselves-cause currents of fear-are in any way responsible for the disease-you will be given the opportunity to go elsewhere or-"
"Or, Mr. Austin?"
"-you will be eliminated."
"Then people will come to Mbarara. Despite the warnings and the death, they will come?"
"Your magic sticks aren't going to scare away five hundred thousand men and women."
"Five hundred thousand…" The old man looked at the bones, sighed, nodded his head. "You know your people very well," he murmured.
Austin smiled. "Yes, I do."
"Then I think there is little left for us to talk about."
Austin wanted to say, No, you're wrong. We must talk about Mag! She's dying and I want to keep her from dying. But he knew what these words would mean. They would sketch his real feelings, his fears and doubts. And everything would be lost. He could not admit that the doll was anything more than a doll. He must not!