The Monadic Universe, page 8
Sam crossed the street, feeling a remarkable new lightness in his step. He stopped in front of the entrance to the building and checked the names of the mailbox panel. Harry Andrews—4L was the third name he looked at. He pushed the buzzer and held it until the reply buzzer sounded and he was able to push through the front door. He started quickly up the stairs instead of using the elevator.
He turned around on the third landing and Harry Andrews was standing there staring at him from the next floor. The younger man’s surprise quickly turned to a look of contempt. Sam felt the muscles in his own face tighten and tremble slightly.
“Now what’s this, old man? Coming to beat me with your fists?” And he laughed, echoing in the space of the stairwell. “Look, old man—I could kill you right here, or turn you in. But if you go nice-like and leave Kathy and me be, I’ll let you live out your days in peace. And no more peekaboo at the ration center either, deal?” And he smiled a winning smile.
Sam screamed and rushed up the stairs, his body a knotted mass of hate and pain. He clutched at Andrews’ throat. The younger man kicked him in the stomach. Sam doubled over and fell on his back.
As Sam tried to get up, Andrews turned and went through the door back into the building. Sam stood up and staggered after him through the swinging door. He stepped into the hall just in time to see Andrews pause in front of the door to his apartment.
“Andrews, listen good!” Sam shouted. “You’ll never get rid of me—it’s me she wants. There’s nothing you can do.”
Andrews ignored him. The younger man opened the door to the apartment and went inside. Sam leaned against the wall in the hallway and tried to catch his breath. In a moment Harry Andrews came out again. There was a gun in his hand.
“I’m taking you down to the nearest police station on a citizen’s arrest,” Andrews said as he came down the hall toward Sam. “They can check you over at the euthanasia station after I tell them I caught you trying to break into the hospital. You tried to bribe me for some drugs …”
Sam turned and pushed through the door to the stairs and started down quickly. As he turned on the second landing, Andrews shouted after him. “If I
shoot you trying to escape, like, it’ll be easier— especially after the autopsy shows your sickness!” Sam reached the ground floor and burst out into the dark street. He started running uptown. He looked over his shoulder. Andrews was not there.
Sam knew then that Harry Andrews was playing with him, that he intended to kill him and maybe say nothing to the police or anyone; not even Kathy.
As he ran Sam thought of Kathy. How far away she seemed now, like someone he had known in another life on a different world. If Andrews killed him, Sam Brickner would disappear from Kathy’s life and no one would look for him. In an overcrowded city he was not important enough to qualify as a legitimate missing person. A check of his age would be enough for the police to close his file. Even if Andrews let them find his body, and he would not, it would be unprofitable to search for the murderer of a fifty-three-year-old man.
Sam stopped and listened for footsteps behind him. He looked around at the run-down buildings of the old east side. He was near the river; many of these buildings had been condemned a hundred times, and a few blocks ahead had recently been sealed off. The air smelled of brick dust and sewage-polluted river water.
He heard slow footsteps somewhere behind him. A thought pushed into his mind like a cold icepick. There had to be more to Kathy and Andrews, more than Andrews using him to put a leash on Kathy.
Sam turned a corner and ran toward the river, a suspicion forming in his mind. The footsteps turned into staccato running sounds behind him, echoing out of step with his own.
Suddenly to his right the block ended, turning into a rubble-filled lot and a view of the dark river flowing dead toward an unseen ocean. Sam stepped into the moonlight shadow of the last building and waited. He reached down and picked up a rock. The steps grew louder. In the east the coming dawn was a sickly gray stain of light, and the last quarter moon was a bloated grainy yellow balloon sitting on a rooftop.
The figure came by Sam and stopped with its back to him. Sam hurled the rock at its head and the mannequin crumpled. He did not feel as angry as he thought he would be.
He dragged the still-breathing body into the empty lot near the wall of the building. He sat down next to it, removed the man’s gun, and waited.
Harry Andrews coughed and the cough turned into a laugh.
“That’s good, old man—but you don’t have it to kill me.”
Sam pointed the gun at the man’s head, saying, “Now tell me what you and Kathy are really up to.”
In the faint morning light Sam saw the look of uncertainty in the man’s face as he looked at the barrel of his own automatic. Andrews shrugged. “I really do love her too, you know.”
“What else?”
“It won’t do you any good to know.”
“Out with it!”
“Katherine feeds me the regular medication-type drugs, like insulin, for instance. I sell them on the street to those who are hiding things, like you for instance. I set up your doctor’s appointment when you needed it, old man.” Andrews shrugged again. “Who would have thought Kathy would fall for you? She was mine before, you know, and will be again after I sing about you. I have too much on her. There’s a chain of illegal medical practice and medication that runs clear into Canada, and she’s plugged into it. You should kill me now, but you won’t, you can’t.” Andrews coughed again, and Sam saw him touching the back of his head. “You bastard,” Andrews said, “you’ve opened my scalp!”
Suddenly Andrews swung at the gun, knocking it from Sam’s hand. It clattered in the rubble. Andrews crawled, half leaped onto Sam, reaching for his face. Sam tried to kick and fell backward, the sharp debris pushing into his back. Andrews grasped him tightly around the middle and pulled himself into a sitting position on top of Sam’s chest. Then he reached forward and put his hands around Sam’s neck. Sam saw him—a dark figure towering against a pale sky. Slowly the hands tightened their grip, until Sam started gasping for breath. A voice said, “I gotta do it, old man—it’s the only way. You’re two headaches for me. You know too much and I couldn’t stand living without her. You too, so it’ll be easier on you this way.” Sam was climbing a rope of glass winding into a black sky. The rope was suspended over an abyss. The glass crumbled in his hands like sugar, bloodying his palms, and he fell …
Sam thrashed around desperately, trying to get some air into his lungs. His hand closed on a rock and he brought it up and hit Andrews in the temple, caving it in with a crunch. The younger man’s grip loosened and he fell on top of Sam.
Sam lay still for a moment, taking in greedy mouthfuls of air. He crawled out from under the corpse embracing him and rested next to it. He thought about Kathy. He had known only a carefully selected portion of her, what she wanted him to see, what he wanted her to be.
The sky grew lighter. Everything seemed so calm now, so peaceful. Maybe he could take Harry’s place, if he recovered. Harry had tried to kill him, but he had also helped him live. How many others benefited? Someone would have to take his place.
Maybe Sam Brickner deserved to die, after all? Maybe he should never see her again, take no more treatments, and let only the strongest survive in a roomier world? That world might have a chance to look outward again to the stars, dream again, and maybe love better than he had. It could all be arranged.
He got up and covered the body with stones. As he worked he realized that he had not known Harry Andrews very well; they had both known only each other’s hate and violence. When he was done it was almost fully light. He looked down into a small pool of rainwater in the rubble, wondering how he could ever “explain to Kathy how he felt. The face which looked up at him betrayed nothing, a face wrapped in a shadow, a silhouette against a white sky.
HEATHEN GOD
“… every heathen deity has its place in the flow of existence.”
The isolation station and preserve for alien flora and fauna on Antares IV had only one prisoner, a three-foot-tall gnome-like biped with skin like creased leather and eyes like great glass globes. His hair was silky white and reached down to his shoulders, and he usually went about the great natural park naked. He lived in a small white cell located in one of the huge block-like administration modules. There was a small bed in the cell, and a small doorway which led out to the park. A hundred feet away from the door there was a small pool, one of many scattered throughout the park. It reflected the deep-blue color of the sky.
The gnome was very old, but no one had yet determined quite how old. And there seemed to be no way to find out. The gnome himself had never volunteered any information about his past. In the one hundred years of his imprisonment he had never asked the caretaker for anything. It was rumored among the small staff of Earthmen and humanoids that the gnome was mad. Generally they avoided him. Sometimes they would watch his small figure standing looking up at the giant disk of Antares hanging blood red on the horizon, just above the well-pruned trees of the park, and they would wonder what he might be thinking.
The majority of Earthmen spread over twelve star systems did not even know of the gnome’s existence, much less his importance. A few knew, but they were mostly scholarly and political figures, and a few theologians. The most important fact about the alien was that sometime in the remote past he had been responsible for the construction of the solar system and the emergence of intelligent life on earth.
The secret had been well kept for over a century.
In the one hundred and fourth year of the alien’s captivity two men set out for Antares to visit him. The first man’s motives were practical: the toppling of an old regime; the other man’s goal was to ask questions. The first man’s political enemies had helped him undertake this journey, seeing that it would give them the chance to destroy him. The importance of gaining definitive information about the alien was in itself enough reason to send a mission, but combined with what they knew about the motives of the man they feared, this mission would provide for them the perfect occasion to resolve both matters at the same time. In any case, the second man would bring back anything of value that they might learn about the gnome.
Everything had been planned down to the last detail. The first ship carrying the two unsuspecting men was almost ready to come out of hyperspace near Antares. Two hours behind it in the warp was a military vessel—a small troop ship. As the first vessel came out of nothingness into the brilliance of the great star, the commander of the small force ship opened his sealed orders.
As he came down the shuttle ramp with his two companions, Father Louis Chavez tried to mentally prepare himself for what he would find here. It was still difficult to believe what his superiors had told him about the alien who was a prisoner here. The morning air of Antares IV was fresh, and the immediate impression was one of stepping out into a warm botanical garden. At his left Sister Guinivere carried his small attache case. On his right walked < Benedict Compton, linguist, cultural anthropologist, and as everyone took for granted, eventual candidate for first secretary of Earth’s Northern Hemisphere. Compton was potentially a religious man, but the kind who always demanded an advance guarantee before committing himself to anything. Chavez felt suspicious of him; in fact he felt wary about this entire visit to Antares IV.
On earth the religio-philosophic system was a blend of evolutionary Chardinism and Christianity, an imposing intellectual structure that had been dominant for some two hundred years now. The political structure based its legitimacy and continuing policies on it. Compton, from what he had learned, had frightened some high authoritites with the claim that the gnome creature here on Antares IV was a potential threat to the beliefs of mankind. This, combined with what was already known about the alien’s past, was seemingly enough to send this fact-finding mission. Only a few men knew about it, and Chavez remembered the fear he had sensed in them when he had been briefed. Their greatest fear was that somehow the gnome’s history would become public knowledge. Compton, despite his motives, had found a few more political friends. But Chavez suspected that Compton wanted power not for himself, but to do something about the quality of life on earth.
He was sure the man was sincere. How little of the thought in our official faith filters out into actual policy, Chavez thought. And what would the government do if an unorganized faith—a heresy in the old sense—were to result from this meeting between Compton and the alien? Then he remembered how Compton had rushed this whole visit. He wondered just how far a man like Compton would go to have his way in the world.
Antares was huge on the horizon, a massive red disk against a deep blue sky. A slight breeze waved the trees around the landing square. The pathway which started at the north corner led to three blocklike administration buildings set on a neat lawn and surrounded by flowering shrubs and fruit-bearing trees. The buildings were a bright-white color. The walk was pleasant.
Rufus Kade, the caretaker, met them at the front entrance to the main building. He showed them into the comfortable reception room. He was a tall, thin botanist, who had taken the administrative post because it gave him the opportunity to be near exotic plants. Some of the flora came from worlds as much as one hundred light-years away from Antares. After the introductions were over, Kade took the party to the enclosed garden which had a pool in its center, and where the gnome spent most of his time.
“Do you ever talk with him, Mr. Kade?” Father Chavez asked. The caretaker shook his head. “No,” he said. “And now I hope you will all excuse me, I have work to do.” He left them at the entrance to the garden path.
Compton turned to Father Chavez and said, “You are lucky, you’re the only representative of any church ever to get a chance to meet what might be the central deity of that church.” He smiled. “But I feel sorry for you—for whatever he is, he will not be what you expect, and most certainly he will not be what you want him to be.”
‘‘Let’s wait and see,” Chavez said. “I’m not a credulous man.”
“You know, Chavez,” Compton said in a more serious mood, “they let me come here too easily. What 1 mean is they took my word for the danger involved with little or no question.”
“Should they have not taken your word? You are an important man. You sound as if you didn’t quite tell them everything.”
They walked into the garden. On either side of them the plants were luxurious, with huge green leaves and strange varicolored flowers. The air was filled with rich scents, and the earth gave the sensation of being very moist and loosely packed. They came into the open area surrounding the pool. Sister Guinivere stood between the two men as they looked at the scene. The water was still, and the disk of Antares was high enough now in the morning sky to be reflected in it.
The gnome stood on the far side, watching them as they approached, as if he expected them at any moment to break into some words of greeting. Father Chavez knew that they would appear as giants next to the small figure. It would be awkward standing before a member of a race a million years older than mankind and towering over him. It would be aesthetically banal, Chavez thought.
As they came to the other side of the pool Compton said, “Let me start the conversation, Father.”
“If you wish,” Chavez said. Why ami afraid, and what does it matter who starts the conversation, he thought.
Compton walked up to the standing gnome and sat down cross-legged in front of him. It was a diplomatic gesture. Father Chavez felt relieved and followed the example, motioning Sister Guinivere to do the same. They all looked at the small alien.
His eyes were deep set and large; his hair was white, thin and reached down to his shoulders. He had held his hands behind his back when they had approached, but now they were together in front of him. His shoulders were narrow and his arms were thin. He wore a one-piece coverall with short sleeves.
Chavez hoped they would be able to talk to him easily. The gnome looked at each of them in turn. After a few minutes of silence it became obvious that he expected them to start the conversation.
“My name is Benedict Compton,” Compton said, “and this is Father Chavez and Sister Guinivere, his secretary. We came here to ask you about your past, because it concerns us.”
Slowly the gnome nodded his head, but he did not sit with them. There was more silence. Compton gave Chavez a questioning look.
“Could you tell us who you are?” Chavez asked. The gnome moved his head sharply to look at him. It’s almost as if I interrupted him at something. Chavez thought. There was a sad look on the face now, as if in that one moment he had understood everything—why they were here and the part he would have to play.
Chavez felt his stomach grow tense. He felt as if he were being carefully examined. Next to him Compton was playing with a blade of grass. Sister Guinivere sat with her hands folded in her lap. Briefly he recalled the facts he knew about the alien—facts which only a few Earthmen had been given access to over the last century. Facts which demanded that some sort of official attitude be taken.
The best-kept secret of the past century was the fact that this small creature had initiated the events which led to the emergence of intelligent life on Earth. In the far past he had harnessed his powers of imagination to a vast machine, which had been built for another purpose, and had used it to create most of the life on Earth. He had been caught at his experiments in cosmology, and exiled. Long before men had gone out to the stars he had been a wanderer in the galaxy, but in recent years he had been handed over to Earth authorities to keep at this extraterrestrial preserve. Apparently his people still feared his madness. This was all they had ever revealed to the few Earthmen who took charge of the matter.
