Killdozer! (28 page)

My abdomen kneaded itself with the horror of it. I put my hands on my face and my hands and face were wet with sweat and tears. Afraid? Have you ever been afraid to die, seeing Death looking right at you; closer than that; have you seen Death turn away from you because He knows you must follow Him? Have you seen that, and been afraid?

Well, this was worse. For this I’d hug Death to me, for He alone could spare me what would happen to me when I reached the place I was going to.

So I wouldn’t spread stone.

I wouldn’t do anything that would bring me closer to reaching the place where that thing would happen to me.
Had happened
to me.… I wouldn’t do it. That was an important thing.

There was one other important thing. I must not go on like this, not knowing my name, and what the name of the bottom-dump driver was, and where this airfield and this base were, and all those things.

These two things were the most important things in the world. In
this
world.… THIS world.…

This world, this world—
other
world.…

There was a desert all around me.

Ha! So the airfield wasn’t real, and the bottom-dump wasn’t real, and the anemometer and the grease racks weren’t real. Ha! (Why worry about the driver’s name if he wasn’t real?)

The bulldozer was real, though. I was sitting on it. The six big cylinders were ticking over, and the master-clutch lever was twitching rhythmically as if its lower end were buried in something that breathed. Otherwise—just desert, and some hills over there, and a sun which was too orange.

Think, now, think. This desert means something important. I wasn’t surprised at being in the desert. That was important. This place in the desert was near something, near an awful something that would hurt me.

I looked all around me. I couldn’t see it, but it was there, the something that would hurt so. I wouldn’t go through that again—

Again.

Again—that was an important thing. I wouldn’t spread stone and reach that place. I wouldn’t go through that which had happened to me even if I stayed crazy like I was for the rest of eternity. Let them put me away and tie me up and shake their heads over me and walk away and leave me, and put bars on the window to slice the light of the crooked moon into black and silver bars on the floor of my cell. I didn’t care about all that. I could face the ache of wanting to know about my name and the name of the driver of the bottom-dump (he was a Puerto Rican so his name must be Villamil or Roberto, not Bucyrus-Erie or Caterpillar Thirteen Thousand) and the people in the shining clothes; I
was
facing all that, and I knew how it hurt, but I would not go through that place again and be hurt so much more. Not again. Not again.

Again
. Again again again. What is the again-ness of everything? Everything I am doing I am doing again. I could remember that feeling from before—years ago it used to happen to me every once in a while. You’ve never been to a certain village before, we’ll say, and you come up over the crown of the hill on your bicycle and see the way the church is and the houses, and the turn of that crooked cobblestoned street, the shape and tone of the very flower stems. You know that if you were asked, you could say how many pickets were in the white gate in the blue-and-white fence in the little house third from the corner. All the scientists nod and smile and say you did see it for the second time—a twentieth of a second after the first glimpse; and that the impact of familiarity was built up in the next twentieth of a second. And you nod and smile too and say well, whaddaye know. But you know, you
know
you’ve seen that place before, no matter what they say.

That’s the way I knew it, sitting there on my machine in the desert and not surprised, and having that feeling of again-ness; because I
was remembering the last time the bottom-dump came to me there on the airfield shoulder, trailing a plume of blue smoke from the exhaust stack, bouncing and barking as it hurtled toward me. It meant nothing at first, remembering, that it came, nor that it was the same driver, the Puerto Rican; and of course he was carrying the same-sized load of the same material. All trips of the bottom-dump were pretty much the same. But there was one thing I remembered—
now
I remembered—

There was a grade-stake driven into the fill, to guide the depth of the gravel, and
it was no nearer to me than it had ever been
. So that hadn’t been the same bottom-dump, back another time. It was the
same time
, all over again! The last time was wiped out. I was on a kind of escalator and it carried me up until I reached the place where I realized about what I had to go through, and screamed. And then I was snatched back and put on the bottom again, at the place where the Puerto Rican driver Señor What’s-his-name dumped the gravel and went away again.

And this desert, now. This desert was a sort of landing at the side of escalator, where I might fall sometimes instead of going all the way to the bottom where the truck came. I had been here before, and I was here again. I had been at the unfinished air base again and again. And there was the other place, with the shining people, and the girl with all those kinds of gold. That was the same place with the crooked moon.

I covered my eyes with my hands and tried to think. The clacking Diesel annoyed me, suddenly, and I got up and reached under the hood and pulled the compression release. Gases chattered out of the ports, and a bubble of silence formed around me, swelling, the last little sounds scampering away from me in all directions, leaving me quiet.

There was a soft thump in the sand beside the machine. It was one of the shining people, the old one, whose forehead was so broad and whose hair was fine, fine like a cobweb. I knew him. I knew his name, too, though I couldn’t think of it at the moment.

He dismounted from his flying-chair and came to me.

“Hello,” I said. I took my shirt from the seat beside me and hung it on my shoulder. “Come on up.”

He smiled and put up his hand. I took it and helped him climb up over the cat. His hands were very strong. He stepped over me and sat down.

“How do you feel?” Sometimes he spoke aloud, and sometimes he didn’t, but I always understood him.

“I feel—mixed up.”

“Yes, of course,” he said kindly. “Go on. Ask me about it.”

I looked at him. “Do I
—always
ask you about it?”

“Every time.”

“Oh.” I looked all around, at the desert, at the hills, at the dozer, at the sun which was too orange. “Where am I?”

“On Earth,” he said; only the word he used for Earth meant Earth only to him. It meant
his
earth.

“I know that,” I said. “I mean, where am I really? Am I on that air base, or am I here?”

“Oh, you are here,” he said.

Somehow I was vastly relieved to hear it. “Maybe you’d better tell me all about it again.”

“You said ‘again’,” he said, and put his hand on my arm. “You’re beginning to realize … good, lad. Good. All right. I’ll tell you once more.

“You came here a long time ago. You followed a road with your big noisy machine, and came roaring down out of the desert to the city. The people had never seen a noisy machine before, and they clustered around the gate to see you come. They stood aside to let you pass, and wondered, and you swung the machine and crushed six of them against the gate-posts.”

“I
did?”
I cried. Then I said, “I did. Oh, I did.”

He smiled at me again. “Shh. Don’t. It was a long time ago. Shall I go on?

“We couldn’t stop you. We have no weapons. We could do nothing in the face of that monster you were driving. You ranged up and
down the streets, smashing the fronts of buildings, running people down, and laughing. We had to wait until you got off the machine, and then we overpowered you. You were totally mad. It was,” he added thoughtfully, “a very interesting study.”

“Why did I do it?” I whispered. “How could I do such things to
—you?”

“You had been hurt. Dreadfully hurt. You had come here, arriving somewhere near this spot. You were crazed by what you had endured. Later, we followed the tracks of your machine back. We found where you had driven it aimlessly over the desert, and where, once, you had left the machine and lived in a cave, probably for weeks. You ate desert grasses and the eight-legged crabs. You killed everything you could, through some strange, warped revenge motivation.

“You were crazed with thirst and revenge, and you were very thin, and your face was covered with hair, of all extraordinary things, though analysis showed that you had a constant desire for a hairless face. After treatment you became almost rational. But your time-sense was almost totally destroyed. And you had two almost unbreakable psychological blocks—your memory of how you came here, and your sense of identity.

“We did what we could for you, but you were unhappy. The moons had an odd effect on you. We have two, one well inside the other in its orbit, but both with the same period. Without instruments they appear to be an eclipse when they are full. The sight of what you called that crooked moon undid a lot of our work. And then you would get attacks of an overwhelming emotion you term ‘remorse,’ which appeared to be something like cruelty and something like love and included a partial negation of the will to survive … and you could not understand why we would not punish you. Punish you—when you were sick!”

“Yes,” I said. “I—remember most of it now. You gave me everything I could want. You even gave me—gave me—”

“Oh—that. Yes. You had some deep-seated convictions about love, and marriage. We felt you would be happier—”

“I was, and then I wasn’t. I—I wanted—”

“I know. I know,” he said soothingly. “You wanted your name again, and somehow you wanted your own earth.”

I clenched my fists until my forearms hurt. “I should be satisfied,” I cried. “I should be. You are all so kind, and she—and she—she’s been—” I shook my head angrily. “I must be crazy.”

“You generally ask me,” he said smiling, “at this point, how you came here.”

“I do?”

“You do. I’ll repeat it. You see, there are irregularities in the fabric of space. No—not space, exactly. We have a word for it—” (he spoke it) “—which means, literally, ‘space which is time which is psyche.’ It is a condition of space which by its nature creates time and thought and matter. Your world, relative to ours, is in the infinitely great, or in the infinitely small, or perhaps in the infinitely distant, either in space or in time—it does not matter, for they are all the same thing in their ultimate extensions … but to go on:

“While you were at your work, you ran your machine into a point of tension in this fabric—a freak, completely improbable position in—” (he spoke the word again) “—in which your universe and ours were tangential. You—went through.”

I tensed as he said it.

“Yes, that was the thing. It caused you inconceivable agony. It drove you mad. It filled you full of vengeance and fear. Well, we—cured you of everything but the single fear of going through that agony again, and the peculiar melancholy involving the loss of your ego—your desire to know your own name. Since we failed there—” he shrugged “—we have been doing the only thing left to us. We are trying to send you back.”

“Why? Why bother?”

“You are not content here. Our whole social system, our entire philosophy, is based on the contentment of the individual. So we must do what we can … in addition, you have given us a tremendous amount of research material in psychology and in theoretical cosmogony. We are grateful. We want you to have what you want.
Your fear is great. Your desire is greater. And to help you achieve your desire, we have put you on this course of abreaction.”

“Abreaction?”

He nodded. “The psychological re-enactment, or retracing, of everything you have done since you came here, in an effort to return you to the entrance-point in exactly the same frame of mind as that in which you came through it. We cannot find that point. It has something to do with your particular psychic matrix. But if the point is still here, and if, by hypnosis, we can cause you to do exactly what you did when you first came through—why, then, you’ll go back.”

“Will it be—dangerous?”

“Yes,” he said, unhesitatingly. “Even if the point of tangency is still here, where you emerged, it may not be at the same point on your earth. Don’t forget—you have been here for eleven of your years.… And then there’s the agony—bad enough if you do go through, infinitely worse if you do not, for you may drift in—in
somewhere
forever, quite conscious, and with no possibility of release.

“You know all this, and yet you still want us to try.… “He sighed. “We admire you deeply, and wonder too; for you are the bravest man we have ever known. We wonder most particularly at your culture, which can produce such an incredible regard for the ego.… Shall we try again?”

I looked at the sun which was too orange, and at the hills, and at his broad, quiet, beautiful face. If I could have spoken my name then, I think I should have stayed. If I could have seen
her
just at that moment, I think I should have waited a little longer, at least.

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s try it again.”

I was so afraid that I couldn’t remember my name or the name of Gracias de Nada, or something, the fellow who drove the bottom-dump. I couldn’t remember how to run the machine; but my hands remembered, and my feet.

Now I sat and looked at the windrow; and then I pulled back the throttle and raised the blade. I swung into the windrow, and the gravel loaded clean onto the blade and cleanly ran off in two even
rolls at the sides. When I sensed that the gravel was all off the blade, I stopped, shifted into high reverse, pulled the left steering clutch to me, let in the master clutch, stamped the left brake.…

That was the thing, then. Back-blading that roll out—the long small windrow of gravel that had run off the ends of my blade. As I backed over it, the machine straddling it, I dropped the blade on it and floated it so that it smoothed out the roll. Then it was that I looked back—force of habit, for a bulldozer that size can do real damage backing into powerpoles or buildings—and I saw the muzzy bit of fill.