_Any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of
thinking, and truly inaccurate principles._
--_Thomas de Quincey in_
Murder Considered as
One of the Fine Arts
For that matter we took off _fast_ with the plane swinging to beat hell.
Alice and me was in the two kneeling seats and we hugged them tight, but
Pop was loose and sort of rattled around the cabin for a while--and
serve him right!
On one of the swings I caught a glimpse of the seven dented gas tanks,
looking like dull crescents from this angle through the orange haze and
getting rapidly smaller as they hazed out.
After a while the plane levelled off and quit swinging, and a while
after that my image of the cabin quit swinging too. Once again I just
managed to stave off the vomits, this time the vomits from natural
causes. Alice looked very pale around the gills and kept her face buried
in the chinrest of her chair.
Pop ended up right in our faces, sort of spread-eagled against the
instrument panel. In getting himself off it he must have braced his
hands against half the buttons at one time or another and I noticed that
none of them went down a fraction. They were _locked_. It had probably
happened automatically when the Atla-Hi button got pushed.
I'd have stopped him messing around in that apish way, but with the
ultra-queasy state of my stomach I lacked all ambition and was happy
just not to be smelling him so close.
I still wasn't taking too great an interest in things as I idly watched
the old geezer rummaging around the cabin for something that got
misplaced in the shake-up. Eventually he found it--a small almond-shaped
can. He opened it. Sure enough it turned out to have almonds in it. He
fitted himself in the back seat and munched them one at a time. Ish!
"Nothing like a few nuts to top off with," he said cheerfully.
I could have cut his throat even more cheerfully, but the damage had
been done and you think twice before you kill a person in close quarters
when you aren't absolutely sure you'll be able to dispose of the body.
How did I know I'd be able to open the door? I remember philosophizing
that Pop ought at least to have broke an arm so he'd be as badly off as
Alice and me (though for that matter my right arm was fully recovered
now) but he was all in one piece. There's no justice in events, that's
for sure.
The plane ploughed along silently through the orange soup, though there
was really no way to tell it was moving now--until a skewy spindle shape
loomed up ahead and shot back over the viewport. I think it was a
vulture. I don't know how vultures manage to operate in the haze, which
ought to cancel their keen eyesight, but they do. It shot past _fast_.
Alice lifted her face out of the sponge stuff and began to study the
buttons again. I heaved myself up and around a little and said, "Pop,
Alice and me are going to try to work out how this plane navigates. This
time we don't want no interference." I didn't say a word more about what
he'd done. It never does to hash over stupidities.
"That's perfectly fine, go right ahead," he told me. "I feel calm as a
kitten now we're going somewheres. That's all that ever matters with
me." He chuckled a bit and added, "You got to admit I gave you and Alice
something to work with," but then he had the sense to shut up tight.
* * * * *
We weren't so chary of pushing buttons this time, but ten minutes or so
convinced us that you couldn't push any of the buttons any more, they
_were_ all locked down--all locked except for maybe one, which we didn't
try at first for a special reason.
We looked for other controls--sticks, levers, pedals, finger-holes and
the like. There weren't any. Alice went back and tried the buttons on
Pop's minor console. They were locked too. Pop looked interested but
didn't say a word.
We realized in a general way what had happened, of course. Pushing the
Atla-Hi button had set us on some kind of irreversible automatic. I
couldn't imagine the why of gimmicking a plane's controls like that,
unless maybe to keep loose children or prisoners from being able to mess
things up while the pilot took a snooze, but there were a lot of whys to
this plane that didn't seem to have any standard answers.
The business of taking off on irreversible automatic had happened so
neatly that I naturally wondered whether Pop might not know more about
navigating this plane than he let on, a whole lot more in fact, and the
seemingly idiotic petulance of his pushing all the buttons have been a
shrewd cover for pushing the Atla-Hi button. But if Pop had been acting
he'd been acting beautifully, with a serene disregard for the chances of
breaking his own neck. I decided this was a possibility I could think
about later and maybe act on then, after Alice and me had worked through
the more obvious stuff.
The reason we hadn't tried the one button yet was that it showed a green
nimbus, just like the Atla-Hi button had had a violet nimbus. Now there
was no green on either of the screens except for the tiny green star
that I had figured stood for the plane and it didn't make sense to go
where we already were. And if it meant some other place, some place not
shown on the screens, you bet we weren't going to be too quick about
deciding to go there. It might not be on Earth.
Alice expressed it by saying, "My namesake was always a little too quick
at responding to those DRINK ME cues."
I suppose she thought she was being cryptic, but I fooled her. "_Alice
in Wonderland_?" I asked. She nodded, and gave me a little smile, not at
all like one of the EAT ME smiles she'd given me last evening.
It is funny how crazily happy a little touch of the intellectual past
like that can make you feel--and how horribly uncomfortable a moment
later.
We both started to study the North America screen again and almost at
once we realized that it had changed in one small particular. The green
star had twinned. Where there had been one point of green light there
were now two, very close together like the double star in the handle of
the Dipper. We watched it for a while. The distance between the two
stars grew perceptibly greater. We watched it for a while longer,
considerably longer. It became clear that the position of the more
westerly star on the screen was fixed, while the more easterly star was
moving east toward Atla-Hi with about the speed of the tip of the minute
hand on a wrist watch (two inches an hour, say). The pattern began to
make sense.
* * * * *
I figured it this way: the moving star must stand for the plane, the
other green dot must stand for where the plane had just been. For some
reason the spot on the freeway by the old cracking plant was recognized
as a marked locality by the screen. Why I don't know. It reminded me of
the old "X Marks the Spot" of newspaper murders, but that would be
getting very fancy. Anyway the spot we'd just taken off from was so
marked and in that case the button with the green nimbus ...
"Hold tight, everybody," I said to Alice, grudgingly including Pop in my
warning. "I got to try it."
I gripped my seat with my knees and one arm and pushed the green
button. It pushed.
The plane swung around in a level loop, not too tight to disturb the
stomach much, and steadied out again.
I couldn't judge how far we'd swung but Alice and me watched the green
stars and after about a minute she said, "They're getting closer," and a
little while later I said, "Yeah, for sure."
I scanned the board. The green button--the cracking-plant button, to
call it that--was locked down of course. The Atla-Hi button was up,
glowing violet. All the other buttons were still up and _locked_ up--I
tried them all again.
* * * * *
It was clear as day used to be. We could either go to Atla-Hi or we
could go back where we'd started from. There was no third possibility.
It was a little hard to take. You think of a plane as freedom, as
something that will carry you anywhere in the world you choose to go,
especially any paradise, and then you find yourself worse limited than
if you'd stayed on the ground--at least that was the way it was
happening to us.
But Alice and me were realists. We knew it wouldn't help to wail. We
were up against another of those "two" problems, the problem of two
destinations, and we had to choose ours.
_If we go back_, I thought, _we can trek on somewhere--anywhere--richer
by the loot from the plane, especially that Survival Kit. Trek on with
some loot we'll mostly never understand and with the knowledge that we
are leaving a plane that can fly, that we are shrinking back from an
unknown adventure_.
_Also if we go back there's something else we'll have to face, something
we'll have to live with for a little while at least that won't be nice
to live with after this cozily personal cabin, something that shouldn't
bother me at all but, dammit, it does._
Alice made the decision for us and at the same time showed she was
thinking about the same thing as me.
"I don't want to have to smell him, Ray," she said. "I am not going back
to keep company with that filthy corpse. I'd rather anything than that."
And she pushed the Atla-Hi button again and as the plane started to
swing she looked at me defiantly as if to say I'd reverse the course
again over her dead body.
"Don't tense up," I told her. "I want a new shake of the dice myself."
"You know, Alice," Pop said reflectively, "it was the smell of my
Alamoser got to me too. I just couldn't bear it. I couldn't get away
from it because my fever had me pinned down, so there was nothing left
for me to do but go crazy. No Atla-Hi for me, just Bug-land. My mind
died, though not my memory. By the time I'd got my strength back I'd
started to be a new bugger. I didn't know no more about living than a
newborn babe, except I knew I couldn't go back--go back to murdering
and all that. My new mind knew that much though otherwise it was just a
blank. It was all very funny."
"And then I suppose," Alice cut in, her voice corrosive with sarcasm,
"you hunted up a wandering preacher, or perhaps a kindly old hermit who
lived on hot manna, and he showed you the blue sky!"
"Why no, Alice," Pop said. "I told you I don't go for religion. As it
happens, I hunted me up a couple of murderers, guys who were worse cases
then myself but who'd wanted to quit because it wasn't getting them
nowhere and who'd found, I'd heard, a way of quitting, and the three of
us had a long talk together."
"And they told you the great secret of how to live in the Deathlands
without killing," Alice continued acidly. "Drop the nonsense, Pop. It
can't be done."
"It's hard, I'll grant you," Pop said. "You have to go crazy or
something almost as bad--in fact, maybe going crazy is the easiest way.
But it can be done and, in the long run, murder is even harder."
* * * * *
I decided to interrupt this idle chatter. Since we were now definitely
headed for Atla-Hi and there was nothing to do until we got there,
unless one of us got a brainstorm about the controls, it was time to
start on the less obvious stuff I'd tabled in my mind.
"Why are you on this plane, Pop?" I asked sharply. "What do you figure
on getting out of Alice and me?--and I don't mean the free meals."
He grinned. His teeth were white and even--plates, of course. "Why,
Ray," he said, "I was just giving Alice the reason. I like to talk to
murderers, practicing murderers preferred. I need to--_have_ to talk to
'em, to keep myself straight. Otherwise I might start killing again and
I'm not up to that any more."
"Oh, so you get your kicks at second hand, you old peeper," Alice put in
but, "Quit lying, Pop," I said. "About having quit killing, for one
thing. In my books, which happen to be the old books in this case, the
accomplice is every bit as guilty as the man with the slicer. You helped
us kill the Pilot by giving that funny scream and you know it."
"Who says I did?" Pop countered, rearing up a little. "I never said so.
I just said, 'Forget it.'" He hesitated a moment, studying me. Then he
said, "I wasn't the one gave that scream. In fact, I'd have stopped it
if I'd been able."
"Who did then?"
Again he studied me as he hesitated. "I'm not telling," he said,
settling back.
"Pop!" I said, sharp again. "Buggers who pad together tell everything."
"Oh yeah," he agreed, smiling. "I remember saying that to quite a few
guys in my day. It's a very restful comradely sentiment. I killed every
last one of 'em, too."
"You may have, Pop," I granted, "but we're two to one."
"So you are," he agreed softly, looking the both of us over. I knew what
he was thinking--that Alice still had just her pliers on and that in
these close quarters his knives were as good as my gun.
"Give me your right hand, Alice," I said. Without taking my eyes off Pop
I reached the knife without a handle out of her belt and then I started
to unscrew the pliers out of her stump.
"Pop," I said as I did so, "you may have quit killing for all I know. I
mean you may have quit killing clean decent Deathland style. But I don't
believe one bit of that guff about having to talk to murderers to keep
your mind sweet. Furthermore--"
"It's true though," he interrupted. "I got to keep myself reminded of
how lousy it feels to be a murderer."
"So?" I said. "Well, here's one person who believes you've got a more
practical reason for being on this plane. Pop, what's the bounty Atla-Hi
gives you for every Deathlander you bring in? What would it be for two
live Deathlanders? And what sort of reward would they pay for a lost
plane brought in? Seems to me they might very well make you a citizen
for that."
"Yes, even give you your own church," Alice added with a sort of wicked
gaiety. I squeezed her stump gently to tell her let me handle it.
"Why, I guess you can believe that if you want to," Pop said and let out
a soft breath. "Seems to me you need a lot of coincidences and
happenstances to make that theory hold water, but you sure can believe
it if you want to. I got no way, Ray, to prove to you I'm telling the
truth except to say I am."
"Right," I said and then I threw the next one at him real fast. "What's
more, Pop, weren't you traveling in this plane to begin with? That cuts
a happenstance. Didn't you hop out while we were too busy with the Pilot
to notice and just _pretend_ to be coming from the cracking plant?
Weren't the buttons locked because you were the Pilot's prisoner?"
* * * * *
Pop creased his brow thoughtfully. "It could have been that way," he
said at last. "Could have been--according to the evidence as you saw it.
It's quite a bright idea, Ray. I can almost see myself skulking in this
cabin, while you and Alice--"
"You were skulking somewhere," I said. I finished screwing in the knife
and gave Alice back her hand. "I'll repeat it, Pop," I said. "We're two
to one. You'd better talk."
"Yes," Alice added, disregarding my previous hint. "You may have given
up fighting, Pop, but I haven't. Not fighting, nor killing, nor anything
in between those two. Any least thing." My girl was being her most
pantherish.
"Now who says I've given up _fighting_?" Pop demanded, rearing a little
again. "You people assume too much, it's a dangerous habit. Before we
have any trouble and somebody squawks about me cheating, let's get one
thing straight. If anybody jumps me I'll try to disable them, I'll try
to hurt them in any way short of killing, and that means hamstringing
and rabbit-punching and everything else. Every least thing, Alice. And
if they happen to die while I'm honestly just trying to hurt them in a
way short of killing, then I won't grieve too much. My conscience will
be reasonably clear. Is that understood?"
I had to admit that it was. Pop might be lying about a lot of things,
but I just didn't believe he was lying about this. And I already knew
Pop was quick for his age and strong enough. If Alice and me jumped him
now there'd be blood let six different ways. You can't jump a man who
has a dozen knives easy to hand and not expect that to happen, two to
one or not. We'd get him in the end but it would be gory.
* * * * *
"And now," Pop said quietly, "I _will_ talk a little if you don't mind.
Look here, Ray ... Alice ... the two of you are confirmed murderers, I
know you wouldn't tell me nothing different, and being such you both
know that there's nothing in murder in the long run. It satisfies a
hunger and maybe gets you a little loot and it lets you get on to the
next killing. But that's all, absolutely all. Yet you got to do it
because it's the way you're built. The urge is there, it's an
overpowering urge, and you got nothing to oppose it with. You feel the
Big Grief and the Big Resentment, the dust is eating at your bones, you
can't stand the city squares--the Porterites and Mantenors and
such--because you know they're whistling in the dark and it's a dirty
tune, so you go on killing. But if there were a decent practical way to
quit, you'd take it. At least I think you would. When you still thought
this plane could take you to Rio or Europe you felt that way, didn't
you? You weren't planning to go there as murderers, were you? You were
going to leave your trade behind."
It was pretty quiet in the cabin for a couple of seconds. Then Alice's
thin laugh sliced the silence. "We were dreaming then," she said. "We
were out of our heads. But now you're talking about practical things, as
you say. What do you expect us to do if we quit our trade, as you call
it--go into Walla Walla or Ouachita and give ourselves up? I might lose
more than my right hand at Ouachita this time--that was just on
suspicion."
"Or Atla-Hi," I added meaningfully. "Are you expecting us to admit we're
murderers when we get to Atla-Hi, Pop?"
The old geezer smiled and thinned his eyes. "Now that wouldn't
accomplish much, would it? Most places they'd just string you up, maybe
after tickling your pain nerves a bit, or if it was Manteno they might
put you in a cage and feed you slops and pray over you, and would that
help you or anybody else? If a man or woman quits killing there's a lot
of things he's got to straighten out--first his own mind and feelings,
next he's got to do what he can to make up for the murders he's
done--help the next of kin if any and so on--then he's got to carry the
news to other killers who haven't heard it yet. He's got no time to
waste being hanged. Believe me, he's got work lined up for him, work
that's got to be done mostly in the Deathlands, and it's the sort of
work the city squares can't help him with one bit, because they just
don't understand us murderers and what makes us tick. We have to do it
ourselves."
* * * * *
"Hey, Pop," I cut in, getting a little interested in the argument (there
wasn't anything else to get interested in until we got to Atla-Hi or Pop
let down his guard), "I dig you on the city squares (I call 'em cultural
queers) and what sort of screwed-up fatheads they are, but just the same
for a man to quit killing he's got to quit lone-wolfing it. He's got to
belong to a community, he's got to have a culture of some sort, no
matter how disgusting or nutsy."
"Well," Pop said, "don't us Deathlanders have a culture? With customs
and folkways and all the rest? A very tight little culture, in fact.
Nutsy as all get out, of course, but that's one of the beauties of it."
"Oh sure," I granted him, "but it's a culture based on murder and
devoted wholly to murder. Murder is our way of life. That gets your
argument nowhere, Pop."
"Correction," he said. "Or rather, re-interpretation." And now for a
little while his voice got less old-man harsh and yet bigger somehow, as
if it were more than just Pop talking. "Every culture," he said, "is a
way of growth as well as a way of life, because the first law of life is
growth. Our Deathland culture is devoted to growing _through_ murder
_away from_ murder. That's my thought. It's about the toughest way of
growth anybody was ever asked to face up to, but it's a way of growth
just the same. A lot bigger and fancier cultures never could figure out
the answer to the problem of war and killing--_we_ know that, all right,
we inhabit their grandest failure. Maybe us Deathlanders, working with
murder every day, unable to pretend that it isn't part of every one of
us, unable to put it out of our minds like the city squares do--maybe us
Deathlanders are the ones to do that little job."
"But hell, Pop," I objected, getting excited in spite of myself, "even
if we got a culture here in the Deathlands, a culture that can grow, it
ain't a culture that can deal with repentant murderers. In a _real_
culture a murderer feels guilty and confesses and then he gets hanged
or imprisoned a long time and that squares things for him and everybody.
You need religion and courts and hangmen and screws and all the rest of
it. I don't think it's enough for a man just to say he's sorry and go
around glad-handing other killers--_that_ isn't going to be enough to
wipe out his sense of guilt."
Pop squared his eyes at mine. "Are you so fancy that you have to have a
sense of guilt, Ray?" he demanded. "Can't you just see when something's
lousy? A sense of guilt's a luxury. Of course it's not enough to say
you're sorry--you're going to have to spend a good part of the rest of
your life making up for what you've done ... and what you will do, too!
But about hanging and prisons--was it ever proved those were the right
thing for murderers? As for religion now--some of us who've quit killing
are religious and a lot of us (me included) aren't; and some of the ones
that are religious figure (maybe because there's no way for them to get
hanged) that they're damned eternally--but that doesn't stop them doing
good work. I ask you now, is any little thing like being damned
eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat?"
That did it, somehow. That last statement of Pop's appealed so much to
me and was completely crazy at the same time, that I couldn't help
warming up to him. Don't get me wrong, I didn't really fall for his line
of chatter at all, but I found it fun to go along with it--so long as
the plane was in this shuttle situation and we had nothing better to do.
Alice seemed to feel the same way. I guess any bugger that could kid
religion the way Pop could got a little silver star in her books.
Bronze, anyway.
* * * * *
Right away the atmosphere got easier. To start with we asked Pop to tell
us about this "us" he kept mentioning and he said it was some dozens (or
hundreds--nobody had accurate figures) of killers who'd quit and went
nomading around the Deathlands trying to recruit others and help those
who wanted to be helped. They had semi-permanent meeting places where
they tried to get together at pre-arranged dates, but mostly they kept
on the go, by twos and threes or--more rarely--alone. They were all men
so far, at least Pop hadn't heard of any women members, but--he assured
Alice earnestly--he would personally guarantee that there would be no
objections to a girl joining up. They had recently taken to calling
themselves Murderers Anonymous, after some pre-war organization Pop
didn't know the original purpose of. Quite a few of them had slipped and
gone back to murdering again, but some of these had come back after a
while, more determined than ever to make a go of it.
"We welcomed 'em, of course," Pop said. "We welcome everybody.
Everybody that's a genuine murderer, that is, and says he wants to quit.
Guys that aren't blooded yet we draw the line at, no matter how fine
they are."
Also, "We have a lot of fun at our meetings," Pop assured us. "You never
saw such high times. Nobody's got a right to go glooming around or pull
a long face just because he's done a killing or two. Religion or no
religion, pride's a sin."
Alice and me ate it all up like we was a couple of kids and Pop was
telling us fairy tales. That's what it all was, of course, a fairy
tale--a crazy mixed-up fairy tale. Alice and me knew there could be no
fellowship of Deathlanders like Pop was describing--it was impossible as
blue sky--but it gave us a kick to pretend to ourselves for a while to
believe in it.
* * * * *
Pop could talk forever, apparently, about murder and murderers and he
had a bottomless bag of funny stories on the same topic and character
vignettes--the murderers who were forever wanting their victims to
understand and forgive them, the ones who thought of themselves as
little kings with divine rights of dispensing death, the ones who
insisted on laying down (chastely) beside their finished victims and
playing dead for a couple of hours, the ones who weren't so chaste, the
ones who could only do their killings when they were dressed a certain
way (and the troubles they had with their murder costumes), the ones who
could only kill people with certain traits or of a certain appearance
(red-heads, say, or people who read books, or who couldn't carry tunes,
or who used bad language), the ones who always mixed sex and murder and
the ones who believed that murder was contaminated by the least breath of
sex, the sticklers and the Sloppy Joes, the artists and the butchers, the
ax- and stiletto-types, the _com_pulsives and the _re_pulsives--honestly,
Pop's portraits from life added up to a Dance of Death as good as
anything the Middle Ages ever produced and they ought to have been
illustrated like those by some great artist. Pop told us a lot about his
own killings too. Alice and me was interested, but neither of us wasn't
tempted into making parallel revelations about ourselves. Your private
life's your own business, I felt, as close as your guts, and no joke's
good enough to justify revealing a knot of it.
Not that we talked about nothing but murder while we were bulleting
along toward Atla-Hi. The conversation was free-wheeling and we got onto
all sorts of topics. For instance, we got to talking about the plane and
how it flew itself--or levitated itself, rather. I said it must generate
an antigravity field that was keyed to the body of the plane but nothing
else, so that _we_ didn't feel lighter, nor any of the objects in the
cabin--it just worked on the dull silvery metal--and I proved my point
by using Mother to shave a little wisp of metal off the edge of the
control board. The curlicue stayed in the air wherever you put it and
when you moved it you could feel the faintest sort of gyroscopic
resistance. It was very strange.
Pop pointed out it was a little like magnetism. A germ riding on an iron
filing that was traveling toward the pole of a big magnet wouldn't feel
the magnetic pull--it wouldn't be operating on him, only on the
iron--but just the same the germ'd be carried along with the filing and
feel its acceleration and all, provided he could hold on--but for that
purpose you could imagine a tiny cabin in the filing. "That's what we
are," Pop added. "Three germs, jumbo size."
Alice wanted to know why an antigravity plane should have even the
stubbiest wings or a jet for that matter, for we remembered now we'd
noticed the tubes, and I said it was maybe just a reserve system in case
the antigravity failed and Pop guessed it might be for extra-fast battle
maneuvering or even for operating outside the atmosphere (which hardly
made sense, as I proved to him).
"If we're a battle plane, where's our guns?" Alice asked. None of us had
an answer.
We remembered the noise the plane had made before we saw it. It must
have been using its jets then. "And do you suppose," Pop asked, "that it
was something from the antigravity that made electricity flare out of
the top of the cracking plant? Like to have scared the pants off me!" No
answer to that either.
Now was a logical time, of course, to ask Pop what he knew about the
cracking plant and just who had done the scream if not him, but I
figured he still wouldn't talk; as long as we were acting friendly there
was no point in spoiling it.
* * * * *
We guessed around a little, though, about where the plane came from. Pop
said Alamos, I said Atla-Hi, Alice said why not from both, why couldn't
Alamos and Atla-Hi have some sort of treaty and the plane be traveling
from the one to the other. We agreed it might be. At least it fitted
with the Atla-Hi violet and the Alamos blue being brighter than the
other colors.
"I just hope we got some sort of anti-collision radar," I said. I
guessed we had, because twice we'd jogged in our course a little, maybe
to clear the Alleghenies. The easterly green star was by now getting
pretty close to the violet blot of Atla-Hi. I looked out at the orange
soup, which was _one_ thing that hadn't changed a bit so far, and I got
to wishing like a baby that it wasn't there and to thinking how it
blanketed the whole Earth (stars over the Riviera?--don't make me
laugh!) and I heard myself asking, "Pop, did you rub out that guy that
pushed the buttons for all this?"
"Nope," Pop answered without hesitation, just as if it hadn't been four
hours or so since he'd mentioned the point. "Nope, Ray. Fact is I
welcomed him into our little fellowship about six months back. This is
_his_ knife here, this horn-handle in my boot, though he never killed
with it. He claimed he'd been tortured for years by the thought of the
millions and millions he'd killed with blast and radiation, but now he
was finding peace at last because he was where he belonged, with the
murderers, and could start to do something about it. Several of the boys
didn't want to let him in. They claimed he wasn't a real murderer, doing
it by remote control, no matter how many he bumped off."
"I'd have been on their side," Alice said, thinning her lips.
"Yep," Pop continued, "they got real hot about it. _He_ got hot too and
all excited and offered to go out and kill somebody with his bare hands
right off, or try to (he's a skinny little runt), if that's what he had
to do to join. We argued it over, I pointed out that we let ex-soldiers
count the killings they'd done in service, and that we counted
poisonings and booby traps and such too--which are remote-control
killings in a way--so eventually we let him in. He's doing good work.
We're fortunate to have him."
"Do you think he's really the guy who pushed the buttons?" I asked Pop.
"How should I know?" Pop replied. "He claims to be."
I was going to say something about people who faked confessions to get a
little easy glory, as compared to the guys who were really guilty and
would sooner be chopped up than talk about it, but at that moment a
fourth voice started talking in the plane. It seemed to be coming out of
the violet patch on the North America screen. That is, it came from the
general direction of the screen at any rate and my mind instantly tied
it to the violet patch at Atla-Hi. It gave us a fright, I can tell you.
Alice grabbed my knee with her pliers (she changed again), harder than
she'd intended, I suppose, though I didn't let out a yip--I was too
defensively frozen.
* * * * *
The voice was talking a language I didn't understand at all that went up
and down the scale like atonal music.
"Sounds like Chinese," Pop whispered, giving me a nudge.
"It _is_ Chinese. Mandarin," the screen responded instantly in the
purest English--at least that was how I'd describe it. Practically
Boston. "Who are you? And where is Grayl? Come in, Grayl."
I knew well enough who Grayl must be--or rather, have been. I looked at
Pop and Alice. Pop grinned, maybe a mite feebly this time, I thought,
and gave me a look as if to say, "_You_ want to handle it?"
I cleared my throat. Then, "We've taken over for Grayl," I said to the
screen.
"Oh." The screen hesitated, just barely. Then, "Do any of 'you' speak
Mandarin?"
I hardly bothered to look at Pop and Alice. "No," I said.
"Oh." Again a tiny pause. "Is Grayl aboard the plane?"
"No." I said.
"Oh. Incapacitated in some way, I suppose?"
"Yes," I said, grateful for the screen's tactfulness, unintentional or
not.
"But you have taken over for him?" the screen pressed.
"Yes," I said, swallowing. I didn't know what I was getting us into,
things were moving too fast, but it seemed the merest sense to act
cooperative.
"I'm very glad of that," the screen said with something in its tone that
made me feel funny--I guess it was sincerity. Then it said, "Is the--"
and hesitated, and started again with "Are the blocks aboard?"
I thought. Alice pointed at the stuff she dumped out of the other seat.
I said. "There's a box with a thousand or so one-inch underweight steel
cubes in it. Like a child's blocks, but with buttons in them. Alongside
a box with a parachute."
"That's what I mean," the screen said and somehow, maybe because whoever
was talking was trying to hide it, I caught a note of great relief.
"Look," the screen said, more rapidly now, "I don't know how much you
know, but we may have to work very fast. You aren't going to be able to
deliver the steel cubes to us directly. In fact you aren't going to be
able to land in Atlantic Highlands at all. We're sieged in by planes and
ground forces of Savannah Fortress. All our aircraft, such as haven't
been destroyed, are pinned down. You're going to have to parachute the
blocks to a point as near as possible to one of our ground parties
that's made a sortie. We'll give you a signal. I hope it will be
later--nearer here, that is--but it may be sooner. Do you know how to
fight the plane you're in? Operate its armament?"
"No," I said, wetting my lip.
"Then that's the first thing I'd best teach you. Anything you see in the
haze from now on will be from Savannah. You must shoot it down."