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_It was only a year and a half ago that Phil Farmer, till then a
totally unknown (editorially speaking at any rate) young man of
Peoria, wrote himself a novel that won him instantaneous acclaim as
perhaps the hottest new science fiction writer currently astir. Its
title was "The Lovers" and since then he has gone right on proving
himself a top-hand craftsman._
they
twinkled
like
jewels
_by ... Philip Jose Farmer_
Crane didn't get the nice man's name--until it
was far too late to do anything at all about it.
Jack Crane lay all morning in the vacant lot. Now and then he moved a
little to quiet the protest of cramped muscles and stagnant blood, but
most of the time he was as motionless as the heap of rags he resembled.
Not once did he hear or see a Bohas agent, or, for that matter, anyone.
The predawn darkness had hidden his panting flight from the transie
jungle, his dodging across backyards while whistles shrilled and voices
shouted, and his crawling on hands and knees down an alley into the high
grass and bushes which fringed a hidden garden.
For a while his heart had knocked so loudly that he had been sure he
would not be able to hear his pursuers if they did get close. It seemed
inevitable that they would track him down. A buddy had told him that a
new camp had just been built at a place only three hours drive away from
the town. This meant that Bohas would be thick as hornets in the
neighborhood. But no black uniforms had so far appeared. And then, lying
there while the passionate and untiring sun mounted the sky, the
bang-bang of his heart was replaced by a noiseless but painful movement
in his stomach.
He munched a candy bar and two dried rolls which a housewife had given
him the evening before. The tiger in his belly quit pacing back and
forth; it crouched and licked its chops, but its tail was stuck up in
his throat. Jack could feel the dry fur swabbing his pharynx and mouth.
He suffered, but he was used to that. Night would come as surely as
anything did. He'd get a drink then to quench his thirst.
Boredom began to sit on his eyelids. Just as he was about to accept some
much needed sleep, he moved a leaf with an accidental jerk of his hand
and uncovered a caterpillar. It was dark except for a row of yellow
spots along the central line of some of its segments. As soon as it was
exposed, it began slowly shimmying away. Before it had gone two feet, it
was crossed by a moving shadow. Guiding the shadow was a black wasp with
an orange ring around the abdomen. It closed the gap between itself and
the worm with a swift, smooth movement and straddled the dark body.
Before the wasp could grasp the thick neck with its mandibles, the
intended victim began rapidly rolling and unrolling and flinging itself
from side to side. For a minute the delicate dancer above it could not
succeed in clenching the neck. Its sharp jaws slid off the frenziedly
jerking skin until the tiring creature paused for the chip of a second.
Seizing opportunity and larva at the same time, the wasp stood high on
its legs and pulled the worm's front end from the ground, exposing the
yellowed band of the underpart. The attacker's abdomen curved beneath
its own body; the stinger jabbed between two segments of the prey's
jointed length. Instantly, the writhing stilled. A shudder, and the
caterpillar became as inert as if it were dead.
Jack had watched with an eye not completely clinical, feeling the
sympathy of the hunted and the hounded for a fellow. His own struggles
of the past few months had been as desperate, though not as hopeless,
and ...
He stopped thinking. His heart again took up the rib-thudding. Out of
the corner of his left eye he had seen a shadow that fell across the
garden. When he slowly turned his head to follow the stain upon the
sun-splashed soil, he saw that it clung to a pair of shining black
boots.
Jack did not say anything. What was the use? He put his hands against
the weeds and pushed his body up. He looked into the silent mouth of a
.38 automatic. It told him his running days were over. You didn't talk
back to a mouth like that.
II
Jack was lucky. As one of the last to be herded into the truck, which
had been once used for hauling cattle, he had more room to breathe than
most of the others. He faced the rear bars. The vehicle was heading into
the sun. Its rays were not as hard on him as on some of those who were
so jam-packed they could not turn to get the hot yellow splotch out of
their eyes.
He looked through lowered lids at the youths on either side of him. For
the last three days in the transie jungle, the one standing on his left
had given signs of what was coming upon him, what had come upon so many
of the transies. The muttering, the indifference to food, not hearing
you when you talked to him. And now the shock of being caught in the
raid had speeded up what everybody had foreseen. He was hardened, like a
concrete statue, into a half-crouch. His arms were held in front of him
like a praying mantis', and his hands clutched a bar. Not even the
pressure of the crowd could break his posture.
The man on Jack's right murmured something, but the roaring of motor and
clashing of gears shifting on a hill squashed his voice. He spoke
louder:
"_Cerea flexibilitas_. Extreme catatonic state. The fate of all of us."
"You're nuts," said Jack. "Not me. I'm no schizo, and I'm not going to
become one."
As there was no reply, Jack decided he had not moved his lips enough to
be heard clearly. Lately, even when it was quiet, people seemed to have
trouble making out what he was saying. It made him mildly angry.
He shouted. It did not matter if he were overheard. That any of the
prisoners were agents of the Bureau of Health and Sanity didn't seem
likely. Anyway, he didn't care. They wouldn't do anything to him they
hadn't planned before this.
"Got any idea where we're going?"
"Sure. F.M.R.C. 3. Federal Male Rehabilitation Camp No. 3. I spent two
weeks in the hills spying on it."
Jack looked the speaker over. Like all those in the truck, he wore a
frayed shirt, a stained and torn coat, and greasy, dirty trousers. The
black bristles on his face were long; the back of his neck was covered
by thick curls. The brim of his dusty hat was pulled down low. Beneath
its shadow his eyes roamed from side to side with the same fear that
Jack knew was in his own eyes.
Hunger and sleepless nights had knobbed his cheekbones and honed his
chin to a sharp point. An almost visible air clung to him, a hot aura
that seemed to result from veins full of lava and eyeballs spilling out
a heat that could not be held within him. He had the face every transie
had, the face of a man who was either burning with fever or who had seen
a vision.
Jack looked away to stare miserably at the dust boiling up behind the
wheels, as if he could see projected against its yellow-brown screen his
retreating past.
He spoke out of the side of his mouth. "What's happened to us? We should
be happy and working at good jobs and sure about the future. We
shouldn't be just bums, hobos, walkers of the streets, rod-hoppers,
beggars, and thieves."
His friend shrugged and looked uneasily from the corners of his eyes. He
was probably expecting the question they all asked sooner or later: _Why
are_ you _on the road?_ They asked, but none replied with words that
meant anything. They lied, and they didn't seem to take any pleasure in
their lying. When they asked questions themselves, they knew they
wouldn't get the truth. But something forced them to keep on trying
anyway.
Jack's buddy evaded also. He said, "I read a magazine article by a Dr.
Vespa, the head of the Bureau of Health and Sanity. He'd written the
article just after the President created the Bureau. He viewed, quote,
with alarm and apprehension, unquote, the fact that six percent of those
between the ages of twelve and twenty-five were schizophrenics who
needed institutionalizing. And he was, quote, appalled and horrified,
unquote, that five percent of the nation were homeless unemployed and
that three point seven percent of those were between the ages of
fourteen and thirty. He said that if this schizophrenia kept on
progressing, half the world would be in rehabilitation camps. But if
that occurred, the sane half would go to pot. Back to the stone age. And
the schizos would die."
* * * * *
He licked his lips as if he were tasting the figures and found them
bitter.
"I was very interested by Vespa's reply to a mother who had written
him," he went on. "Her daughter ended up in a Bohas camp for schizos,
and her son had left his wonderful home and brilliant future to become a
bum. She wanted to know why. Vespa took six long paragraphs to give six
explanations, all equally valid and all advanced by equally
distinguished sociologists. He himself favored the mass hysteria theory.
But if you looked at his gobbledegook closely, you could reduce it to
one phrase, _We don't know_.
"He did say this--though you won't like it--that the schizos and the
transies were just two sides of the same coin. Both were infected with
the same disease, whatever it was. And the transies usually ended up as
schizos anyway. It just took them longer."
Gears shifted. The floor slanted. Jack was shoved hard against the rear
boards by the weight of the other men. He didn't answer until the
pressure had eased and his ribs were free to work for more than mere
survival.
He said, "You're way off, schizo. My hitting the road has nothing to do
with those split-heads. Nothing, you understand? There's nothing foggy
or dreamy about me. I wouldn't be here with you guys if I hadn't been so
interested in a wasp catching a caterpillar that I never saw the Bohas
sneaking up on me."
While Jack described the little tragedy, the other allowed an
understanding smile to bend his lips. He seemed engrossed, however, and
when Jack had finished, he said:
"That was probably an ammophila wasp. _Sphex urnaria_ Klug. Lovely, but
vicious, little she-demon. Injects the poison from her sting into the
caterpillar's central nerve cord. That not only paralyzes but preserves
it. The victim is always stowed away with another one in an underground
burrow. The wasp attaches one of her eggs to the body of a worm. When
the egg hatches, the grub eats both of the worms. They're alive, but
they're completely helpless to resist while their guts are gnawed away.
Beautiful idea, isn't it?
"It's a habit common to many of those little devils: _Sceliphron
cementarium_, _Eumenes coarcta_, _Eumenes fraterna_, _Bembix spinolae_,
_Pelopoeus_ ..."
Jack's interest wandered. His informant was evidently one of those
transies who spent long hours in the libraries. They were ready at the
slightest chance to offer their encyclopaedic but often useless
knowledge. Jack himself had abandoned his childhood bookwormishness. For
the last three years his days and evenings had worn themselves out on
the streets, passed in a parade of faces, flickered by in plate-glass
windows of restaurants and department stores and business offices, while
he hoped, hoped....
"Did you say you spied on the camp?" Jack interrupted the sonorous,
almost chanting flow of Greek and Latin.
"Huh? Oh, yeah. For two weeks. I saw plenty of transies trucked in, but
I never saw any taken out. Maybe they left in the rocket."
"Rocket?"
The youth was looking straight before him. His face was hard as bone,
but his voice trembled.
"Yes. A big one. It landed and discharged about a dozen men."
"You nuts? There's been only one man-carrying rocket invented, and it
lands by parachute."
"I saw it, I tell you. And I'm not so nutty I'm seeing things that
aren't there. Not yet, anyway!"
"Maybe the government's got rockets it's not telling anybody about."
"Then what connection could there be between rehabilitation camps and
rockets?"