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COMPLETE
BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL
THE NIGHT
OF THE
LONG KNIVES
By FRITZ LEIBER
ILLUSTRATED by FINLAY
CHAPTER 1
_Any man who saw you, or even heard your footsteps must be ambushed,
stalked and killed, whether needed for food or not. Otherwise, so
long as his strength held out, he would be on your trail._
--The Twenty-Fifth Hour,
_by Herbert Best_
I was one hundred miles from Nowhere--and I mean that literally--when I
spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd been keeping an extra
lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over
from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.
[Illustration: They were two desperate scavengers in a no-man's land of
radiation and death.]
I'd been following a line of high-voltage towers all canted over at the
same gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast from the Last War. I judged
the girl was going in the same general direction and was being edged
over toward my course by a drift of dust that even at my distance showed
dangerous metallic gleams and dark humps that might be dead men or
cattle.
She looked slim, dark topped, and on guard. Small like me and like me
wearing a scarf loosely around the lower half of her face in the style
of the old buckaroos.
We didn't wave or turn our heads or give the slightest indication we'd
seen each other as our paths slowly converged. But we were intensely,
minutely watchful--I knew I was and she had better be.
Overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always. I don't remember what a
high sky looks like. Three years ago I think I saw Venus. Or it may have
been Sirius or Jupiter.
The hot smoky light was turning from the amber of midday to the bloody
bronze of evening.
The line of towers I was following showed the faintest spread in the
direction of their canting--they must have been only a few miles from
blast center. As I passed each one I could see where the metal on the
blast side had been eroded--vaporized by the original blast, mostly
smoothly, but with welts and pustules where the metal had merely melted
and run. I supposed the lines the towers carried had all been vaporized
too, but with the haze I couldn't be sure, though I did see three dark
blobs up there that might be vultures perching.
From the drift around the foot of the nearest tower a human skull peered
whitely. That is rather unusual. Years later now you still see more dead
bodies with the meat on them than skeletons. Intense radiation has
killed their bacteria and preserved them indefinitely from decay, just
like the packaged meat in the last advertisements. In fact such bodies
are one of the signs of a really hot drift--you avoid them. The vultures
pass up such poisonously hot carrion too--they've learned their lesson.
Ahead some big gas tanks began to loom up, like deformed battleships and
flat-tops in a smoke screen, their prows being the juncture of the
natural curve of the off-blast side with the massive concavity of the
on-blast side.
None of the three other buggers and me had had too clear an idea of
where Nowhere had been--hence, in part, the name--but I knew in a
general way that I was somewhere in the Deathlands between Porter County
and Ouachita Parish, probably much nearer the former.
* * * * *
It's a real mixed-up America we've got these days, you know, with just
the faintest trickle of a sense of identity left, like a guy in the
paddedest cell in the most locked up ward in the whole loony bin. If a
time traveler from mid Twentieth Century hopped forward to it across the
few intervening years and looked at a map of it, if anybody has a map of
it, he'd think that the map had run--that it had got some sort of
disease that had swollen a few tiny parts beyond all bounds, paper
tumors, while most of the other parts, the parts he remembered carrying
names in such big print and showing such bold colors, had shrunk to
nothingness.
To the east he'd see Atlantic Highlands and Savannah Fortress. To the
west, Walla Walla Territory, Pacific Palisades, and Los Alamos--and
there he'd see an actual change in the coastline, I'm told, where three
of the biggest stockpiles of fusionables let go and opened Death Valley
to the sea--so that Los Alamos is closer to being a port. Centrally he'd
find Porter County and Manteno Asylum surprisingly close together near
the Great Lakes, which are tilted and spilled out a bit toward the
southwest with the big quake. South-centrally: Ouachita Parish inching
up the Mississippi from old Louisiana under the cruel urging of the
Fisher Sheriffs.
Those he'd find and a few, a very few other places, including a couple I
suppose I haven't heard of. Practically all of them would surprise
him--no one can predict what scraps of a blasted nation are going to
hang onto a shred of organization and ruthlessly maintain it and very
slowly and very jealously extend it.
But biggest of all, occupying practically all the map, reducing all
those swollen localities I've mentioned back to tiny blobs, bounding
most of America and thrusting its jetty pseudopods everywhere, he'd see
the great inkblot of the Deathlands. I don't know how else than by an
area of solid, absolutely unrelieved black you'd represent the
Deathlands with its multicolored radioactive dusts and its skimpy
freightage of lonely Deathlanders, each bound on his murderous, utterly
pointless, but utterly absorbing business--an area where names like
Nowhere, It, Anywhere, and the Place are the most natural thing in the
world when a few of us decide to try to pad down together for a few
nervous months or weeks.
As I say, I was somewhere in the Deathlands near Manteno Asylum.
* * * * *
The girl and me were getting closer now, well within pistol or dart
range though beyond any but the most expert or lucky knife throw. She
wore boots and a weathered long-sleeved shirt and jeans. The black
topping was hair, piled high in an elaborate coiffure that was held in
place by twisted shavings of bright metal. A fine bug-trap, I told
myself.
In her left hand, which was closest to me, she carried a dart gun,
pointed away from me, across her body. It was the kind of potent tiny
crossbow you can't easily tell whether the spring is loaded. Back around
on her left hip a small leather satchel was strapped to her belt. Also
on the same side were two sheathed knives, one of which was an
oddity--it had no handle, just the bare tang. For nothing but throwing,
I guessed.
I let my own left hand drift a little closer to my Banker's Special in
its open holster--Ray Baker's great psychological weapon, though (who
knows?) the two .38 cartridges it contained might actually fire. The one
I'd put to the test at Nowhere had, and very lucky for me.
She seemed to be hiding her right arm from me. Then I spotted the weapon
it held, one you don't often see, a stevedore's hook. She _was_ hiding
her right hand, all right, she had the long sleeve pulled down over it
so just the hook stuck out. I asked myself if the hand were perhaps
covered with radiation scars or sores or otherwise disfigured. We
Deathlanders have our vanities. I'm sensitive about my baldness.
Then she let her right arm swing more freely and I saw how short it was.
She had no right hand. The hook was attached to the wrist stump.
I judged she was about ten years younger than me. I'm pushing forty, I
think, though some people have judged I'm younger. No way of my knowing
for sure. In this life you forget trifles like chronology.
Anyway, the age difference meant she would have quicker reflexes. I'd
have to keep that in mind.
* * * * *
The greenishly glinting dust drift that I'd judged she was avoiding
swung closer ahead. The girl's left elbow gave a little kick to the
satchel on her hip and there was a sudden burst of irregular ticks that
almost made me start. I steadied myself and concentrated on thinking
whether I should attach any special significance to her carrying a
Geiger counter. Naturally it wasn't the sort of thinking that interfered
in any way with my watchfulness--you quickly lose the habit of that kind
of thinking in the Deathlands or you lose something else.
It could mean she was some sort of greenhorn. Most of us old-timers can
visually judge the heat of a dust drift or crater or rayed area more
reliably than any instrument. Some buggers claim they just feel it,
though I've never known any of the latter too eager to navigate in
unfamiliar country at night--which you'd think they'd be willing to do
if they could feel heat blind.
But she didn't look one bit like a tenderfoot--like for instance some
citizeness newly banished from Manteno. Or like some Porter burgher's
unfaithful wife or troublesome girlfriend whom he'd personally carted
out beyond the ridges of cleaned-out hot dust that help guard such
places, and then abandoned in revenge or from boredom--and they call
themselves civilized, those cultural queers!
No, she looked like she _belonged_ in the Deathlands. But then why the
counter?
Her eyes might be bad, real bad. I didn't think so. She raised her boot
an extra inch to step over a little jagged fragment of concrete. No.
Maybe she was just a born double-checker, using science to back up
knowledge based on experience as rich as my own or richer. I've met the
super-careful type before. They mostly get along pretty well, but they
tend to be a shade too slow in the clutches.
Maybe she was _testing_ the counter, planning to use it some other way
or trade it for something.
Maybe she made a practice of traveling by night! Then the counter made
good sense. But then why use it by day? Why reveal it to me in any case?
Was she trying to convince me that she was a greenhorn? Or had she hoped
that the sudden noise would throw me off guard? But who would go to the
trouble of carrying a Geiger counter for such devious purposes? And
wouldn't she have waited until we got closer before trying the noise
gambit?
Think-shmink--it gets you nowhere!
She kicked off the counter with another bump of her elbow and started to
edge in toward me faster. I turned the thinking all off and gave my
whole mind to watchfulness.
Soon we were barely more than eight feet apart, almost within lunging
range without even the preliminary one-two step, and still we hadn't
spoken or looked straight at each other, though being that close we'd
had to cant our heads around a bit to keep each other in peripheral
vision. Our eyes would be on each other steadily for five or six
seconds, then dart forward an instant to check for rocks and holes in
the trail we were following in parallel. A cultural queer from one of
the "civilized" places would have found it funny, I suppose, if he'd
been able to watch us perform in an arena or from behind armor glass for
his exclusive pleasure.
* * * * *
The girl had eyebrows as black as her hair, which in its piled-up and
metal-knotted savagery called to mind African queens despite her typical
pale complexion--very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From the
inside corner of her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran up
between her eyebrows and across her forehead at a rakish angle until it
disappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper left corner of her
forehead.
I'd been smelling her, of course, for some time.
I could even tell the color of her eyes now. They were blue. It's a
color you never see. Almost no dusts have a bluish cast, there are few
blue objects except certain dark steels, the sky never gets very far
away from the orange range, though it is green from time to time, and
water reflects the sky.
Yes, she had blue eyes, blue eyes and that jaunty scar, blue eyes and
that jaunty scar and a dart gun and a steel hook for a right hand, and
we were walking side by side, eight feet apart, not an inch closer,
still not looking straight at each other, still not saying a word, and I
realized that the initial period of unadulterated watchfulness was over,
that I'd had adequate opportunity to inspect this girl and size her up,
and that night was coming on fast, and that here I was, once again, back
with _the problem of the two urges_.
I could try either to kill her or go to bed with her.
* * * * *
I know that at this point the cultural queers (and certainly our
imaginary time traveler from mid Twentieth Century) would make a great
noise about not understanding and not believing in the genuineness of
the simple urge to murder that governs the lives of us Deathlanders.
Like detective-story pundits, they would say that a man or woman murders
for gain, or concealment of crime, or from thwarted sexual desire or
outraged sexual possessiveness--and maybe they would list a few other
"rational" motives--but not, they would say, just for the simple sake of
murder, for the sure release and relief it gives, for the sake of wiping
out one recognizable bit more (the closest bit we can, since those of us
with the courage or lazy rationality to wipe out ourselves have long
since done so)--wiping out one recognizable bit more of the whole
miserable, unutterably disgusting human mess. Unless, they would say, a
person is completely insane, which is actually how all outsiders view us
Deathlanders. They can think of us in no other way.
I guess cultural queers and time travelers simply _don't_ understand,
though to be so blind it seems to me that they have to overlook much of
the history of the Last War and of the subsequent years, especially the
mushrooming of crackpot cults with a murder tinge: the werewolf gangs,
the Berserkers and Amuckers, the revival of Shiva worship and the Black
Mass, the machine wreckers, the kill-the-killers movements, the new
witchcraft, the Unholy Creepers, the Unconsciousers, the radioactive
blue gods and rocket devils of the Atomites, and a dozen other groupings
clearly prefiguring Deathlander psychology. Those cults had all been as
unpredictable as Thuggee or the Dancing Madness of the Middle Ages or
the Children's Crusade, yet they had happened just the same.
But cultural queers are good at overlooking things. They have to be, I
suppose. They think they're humanity growing again. Yes, despite their
laughable warpedness and hysterical crippledness, they actually
believe--each howlingly different community of them--that they're the
new Adams and Eves. They're all excited about themselves and whether or
not they wear fig leaves. They don't carry with them, twenty-four hours
a day, like us Deathlanders do, the burden of all that was forever lost.
* * * * *
Since I've gone this far I'll go a bit further and make the paradoxical
admission that even us Deathlanders don't really understand our urge to
murder. Oh, we have our rationalizations of it, just like everyone has
of his ruling passion--we call ourselves junkmen, scavengers, gangrene
surgeons; we sometimes believe we're doing the person we kill the
ultimate kindness, yes and get slobbery tearful about it afterwards; we
sometimes tell ourselves we've finally found and are rubbing out the one
man or woman who was responsible for everything; we talk, mostly to
ourselves, about the aesthetics of homicide; we occasionally admit, but
only each to himself alone, that we're just plain nuts.
But we don't really understand our urge to murder, we only _feel_ it.
At the hateful sight of another human being, we feel it begins to grow
in us until it becomes an overpowering impulse that jerks us, like a
puppet is jerked by its strings, into the act itself or its attempted
commission.
Like I was feeling it grow in me now as we did this parallel deathmarch
through the reddening haze, me and this girl and our problem. This girl
with the blue eyes and the jaunty scar.
The problem of the _two_ urges, I said. The other urge, the sexual, is
one that I know all cultural queers (and certainly our time traveler)
would claim to know all about. Maybe they do. But I wonder if they
understand how intense it can be with us Deathlanders when it's the only
release (except maybe liquor and drugs, which we seldom can get and even
more rarely dare use)--the only complete release, even though a brief
one, from the overpowering loneliness and from the tyranny of the urge
to kill.
To embrace, to possess, to glut lust on, yes even briefly to love,
briefly to shelter in--that was good, that was a relief and release to
be treasured.
But it couldn't last. You could draw it out, prop it up perhaps for a
few days, for a month even (though sometimes not for a single
night)--you might even start to talk to each other a little, after a
while--but it could never last. The glands always tire, if nothing else.
Murder was the only _final_ solution, the only _permanent_ release.
Only us Deathlanders know how good it feels. But then after the kill the
loneliness would come back, redoubled, and after a while I'd meet
another hateful human ...
_Our_ problem of the two urges. As I watched this girl slogging along
parallel to me, as I kept constant watch on her of course, I wondered
how _she_ was feeling the two urges. Was she attracted to the ridgy
scars on my cheeks half revealed by my scarf?--to me they have a
pleasing symmetry. Was she wondering how my head and face looked without
the black felt skullcap low-visored over my eyes? Or was she thinking
mostly of that hook swinging into my throat under the chin and dragging
me down?
I couldn't tell. She looked as poker-faced as I was trying to.
* * * * *
For that matter, I asked myself, how was _I_ feeling the two urges?--how
was I feeling them as I watched this girl with the blue eyes and the
jaunty scar and the arrogantly thinned lips that asked to be smashed,
and the slender throat?--and I realized that there was no way to
describe that, not even to myself. I could only feel the two urges grow
in me, side by side, like monstrous twins, until they would simply be
too big for my taut body and one of them would have to get out fast.
I don't know which one of us started to slow down first, it happened so
gradually, but the dust puffs that rise from the ground of the
Deathlands under even the lightest treading became smaller and smaller
around our steps and finally vanished altogether, and we were standing
still. Only then did I notice the obvious physical trigger for our
stopping. An old freeway ran at right angles across our path. The
shoulder by which we'd approached it was sharply eroded, so that the
pavement, which even had a shallow cave eroded under it, was a good
three feet above the level of our path, forming a low wall. From where
I'd stopped I could almost reach out and touch the rough-edged
smooth-topped concrete. So could she.
We were right in the midst of the gas tanks now, six or seven of them
towered around us, squeezed like beer cans by the decade-old blast but
their metal looking sound enough until you became aware of the red light
showing through in odd patterns of dots and dashes where vaporization or
later erosion had been complete. Almost but not quite lace-work. Just
ahead of us, right across the freeway, was the six-storey skeletal
structure of an old cracking plant, sagged like the power towers away
from the blast and the lower storeys drifted with piles and ridges and
smooth gobbets of dust.
* * * * *
The light was getting redder and smokier every minute.
With the cessation of the physical movement of walking, which is always
some sort of release for emotions, I could feel the twin urges growing
faster in me. But that was all right, I told myself--this was the
crisis, as she must realize too, and that should key us up to bear the
urges a little longer without explosion.
I was the first to start to turn my head. For the first time I looked
straight into her eyes and she into mine. And as always happens at such
times, a third urge appeared abruptly, an urge momentarily as strong as
the other two--the urge to speak, to tell and ask all about it. But even
as I started to phrase the first crazily happy greeting, my throat
lumped, as I'd known it would, with the awful melancholy of all that was
forever lost, with the uselessness of any communication, with the
impossibility of recreating the past, our individual pasts, any pasts.
And as it always does, the third urge died.
I could tell she was feeling that ultimate pain just like me. I could
see her eyelids squeeze down on her eyes and her face lift and her
shoulders go back as she swallowed hard.
She was the first to start to lay aside a weapon. She took two sidewise
steps toward the freeway and reached her whole left arm further across
her body and laid the dart gun on the concrete and drew back her hand
from it about six inches. At the same time looking at me hard--fiercely
angrily, you'd say--across her left shoulder. She had the experienced
duelist's trick of seeming to look into my eyes but actually focussing
on my mouth. I was using the same gimmick myself--it's tiring to look
straight into another person's eyes and it can put you off guard.
My left side was nearest the wall so I didn't for the moment have the
problem of reaching across my body. I took the same sidewise steps she
had and using just two fingers, very gingerly--_disarmingly_, I hoped--I
lifted my antique firearm from its holster and laid it on the concrete
and drew back my hand from it all the way. Now it was up to her again,
or should be. Her hook was going to be quite a problem, I realized, but
we needn't come to it right away.
She temporized by successively unsheathing the two knives at her left
side and laying them beside the dart gun. Then she stopped and her look
told me plainly that it was up to me.
* * * * *
Now I am a bugger who believes in carrying _one perfect
knife_--otherwise, I know for a fact, you'll go knife-happy and end up
by weighing yourself down with dozens, literally. So I am naturally very
reluctant to get out of touch in any way with Mother, who is a little
rusty along the sides but made of the toughest and most sharpenable
alloy steel I've ever run across.
Still, I was most curious to find out what she'd do about that hook, so
I finally laid Mother on the concrete beside the .38 and rested my
hands lightly on my hips, all ready to enjoy myself--at least I hoped I
gave that impression.
She smiled, it was almost a nice smile--by now we'd let our scarves drop
since we weren't raising any more dust--and then she took hold of the
hook with her left hand and started to unscrew it from the
leather-and-metal base fitting over her stump.
Of course, I told myself. And her second knife, the one without a grip,
must be that way so she could screw its tang into the base when she
wanted a knife on her right hand instead of a hook. I ought to have
guessed.
I grinned my admiration of her mechanical ingenuity and immediately
unhitched my knapsack and laid it beside my weapons. Then a thought
occurred to me. I opened the knapsack and moving my hand slowly and very
openly so she'd have no reason to suspect a ruse, I drew out a blanket
and, trying to show her both sides of it in the process, as if I were
performing some damned conjuring trick, dropped it gently on the ground
between us.
She unsnapped the straps on her satchel that fastened it to her belt and
laid it aside and then she took off her belt too, slowly drawing it
through the wide loops of weathered denim. Then she looked meaningfully
at my belt.
I had to agree with her. Belts, especially heavy-buckled ones like ours,
can be nasty weapons. I removed mine. Simultaneously each belt joined
its corresponding pile of weapons and other belongings.
She shook her head, not in any sort of negation, and ran her fingers
into the black hair at several points, to show me it hid no weapon, then
looked at me questioningly. I nodded that I was satisfied--I hadn't seen
anything run out of it, by the way. Then she looked up at my black
skullcap and she raised her eyebrows and smiled again, this time with a
spice of mocking anticipation.
In some ways I hate to part with that headpiece more than I do with
Mother. Not really because of its sandwiched lead-mesh inner lining--if
the rays haven't baked my brain yet they never will and I'm sure that
the patches of lead mesh sewed into my pants over my loins give a lot
more practical protection. But I was getting real attracted to this girl
by now and there are times when a person must make a sacrifice of his
vanity. I whipped off my stylish black felt and tossed it on my pile and
dared her to laugh at my shiny egg top.
Strangely she didn't even smile. She parted her lips and ran her tongue
along the upper one. I gave an eager grin in reply, an incautiously wide
one, and she saw my plates flash.
* * * * *
My plates are something rather special though they are by no means
unique. Back toward the end of the Last War, when it was obvious to any
realist how bad things were going to be, though not how strangely
terrible, a number of people, like myself, had all their teeth jerked
and replaced with durable plates. I went some of them one better. My
plates were stainless steel biting and chewing ridges, smooth continuous
ones that didn't attempt to copy individual teeth. A person who looks
closely at a slab of chewing tobacco, say, I offer him will be puzzled
by the smoothly curved incision, made as if by a razor blade mounted on
the arm of a compass. Magnetic powder buried in my gums makes for a real
nice fit.
This sacrifice was worse than my hat and Mother combined, but I could
see the girl expected me to make it and would take no substitutes, and
in this attitude I had to admit that she showed very sound judgment,
because I keep the incisor parts of those plates filed to razor
sharpness. I have to be careful about my tongue and lips but I figure
it's worth it. With my dental scimitars I can in a wink bite out a chunk
of throat and windpipe or jugular, though I've never had occasion to do
so yet.
For the first minute it made me feel like an old man, a real dodderer,
but by now the attraction this girl had for me was getting irrational. I
carefully laid the two plates on top of my knapsack.
In return, as a sort of reward you might say, she opened her mouth wide
and showed me what was left of her own teeth--about two-thirds of them,
a patchwork of tartar and gold.
We took off our boots, pants and shirts, she watching very
suspiciously--I knew she'd been skeptical of my carrying only one knife.
Oddly perhaps, considering how touchy I am about my baldness, I felt no
sensitivity about revealing the lack of hair on my chest and in fact a
sort of pride in displaying the slanting radiation scars that have
replaced it, though they are crawling keloids of the ugliest, bumpiest
sort. I guess to me such scars are tribal insignia--one-man and
one-woman tribes of course. No question but that the scar on the girl's
forehead had been the first focus of my desire for her and it still
added to my interest.
By now we weren't staying as perfectly on guard or watching each other's
clothing for concealed weapons as carefully as we should--I know I
wasn't. It was getting dark fast, there wasn't much time left, and the
other interest was simply becoming too great.
* * * * *
We were still automatically careful about how we did things. For
instance the way we took off our pants was like ballet, simultaneously
crouching a little on the left foot and whipping the right leg out of
its sheath in one movement, all ready to jump without tripping
ourselves if the other person did anything funny, and then skinning down
the left pants-leg with a movement almost as swift.
But as I say it was getting too late for perfect watchfulness, in fact
for any kind of effective watchfulness at all. The complexion of the
whole situation was changing in a rush. The possibilities of dealing or
receiving death--along with the chance of the minor indignity of
cannibalism, which some of us practice--were suddenly gone, all gone. It
was going to be all right this time, I was telling myself. This was the
time it would be different, this was the time love would last, this was
the time lust would be the firm foundation for understanding and trust,
this time there would be really safe sleeping. This girl's body would be
home for me, a beautiful tender inexhaustibly exciting home, and mine
for her, for always.
As she threw off her shirt, the last darkly red light showed me another
smooth slantwise scar, this one around her hips, like a narrow girdle
that has slipped down a little on one side.