The Very Best of F & SF v1 (17 page)

There isn’t much
crime on Cyg, though, despite the fact that everybody carries a sidearm of some
kind, even little kids. Everybody knows pretty much what their neighbors are up
to, and there aren’t too many places for a fugitive to run. We’re mainly aerial
traffic cops, with an eye out for local wildlife (which is the reason for all
the sidearms).

S.P.C.U. is what
we call the latter function—Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Us—which
is the reason each of my hundred-thirty eyes has six forty-five caliber
eyelashes.

There are things
like the cute little panda-puppy—oh, about three feet high at the shoulder when
it sits down on its rear like a teddy bear, and with big, square, silky ears, a
curly pinto coat, large, limpid, brown eyes, pink tongue, button nose, powder
puff tail, sharp little white teeth more poisonous than a Quemeda Island viper’s,
and possessed of a way with mammal entrails like unto the way of an imaginative
cat with a rope of catnip.

Then there’s a
snapper
, which
looks
as mean as it sounds:
a feathered reptile, with three horns on its armored head—one beneath each eye,
like a tusk, and one curving skyward from the top of its nose—legs about eighteen
inches long, and a four-foot tail which it raises straight into the air
whenever it jogs along at greyhound speed, and which it swings like a
sandbag—and a mouth full of long, sharp teeth.

Also, there are
amphibious things which come from the ocean by way of the river on occasion. I’d
rather not speak of them. They’re kind of ugly and vicious.

Anyway, those
are some of the reasons why there are Hell Cops—not just on Cyg, but on many,
many frontier worlds. I’ve been employed in that capacity on several of them,
and I’ve found that an experienced H.C. can always find a job Out Here. It’s
like being a professional clerk back home.

Chuck took
longer than I thought he would, came back after I was technically off duty,
looked happy though, so I didn’t say anything. There was some pale lipstick on
his collar and a grin on his face, so I bade him good morrow, picked up my
cane, and departed in the direction of the big washing machine.

It was coming
down too hard for me to go the two blocks to my car on foot.

I called a cab
and waited another fifteen minutes. Eleanor had decided to keep Mayor’s Hours,
and she’d departed shortly after lunch; and almost the entire staff had been
released an hour early because of the weather. Consequently, Town Hall was full
of dark offices and echoes. I waited in the hallway behind the main door,
listening to the purr of the rain as it fell, and hearing its gurgle as it
found its way into the gutters. It beat the street and shook the windowpanes
and made the windows cold to touch.

I’d planned on
spending the evening at the library, but I changed my plans as I watched the
weather happen. —Tomorrow, or the next day, I decided. It was an evening for a
good meal, a hot bath, my own books and brandy, and early to bed. It was good
sleeping weather, if nothing else. A cab pulled up in front of the Hall and
blew its horn.

I ran.

The next day the
rain let up for perhaps an hour in the morning. Then a slow drizzle began; and
it did not stop again.

It went on to
become a steady downpour by afternoon.

The following
day was Friday, which I always have off, and I was glad that it was.

Put dittoes
under Thursday’s weather report. That’s Friday.

But I decided to
do something anyway.

I lived down in
that section of town near the river. The Noble was swollen, and the rains kept
adding to it. Sewers had begun to clog and back up; water ran into the streets.
The rain kept coming down and widening the puddles and lakelets, and it was
accompanied by drum solos in the sky and the falling of
bright
forks and sawblades. Dead skytoads were washed along the gutters, like
burnt-out fireworks. Ball lightning drifted across Town Square; Saint Elmo’s
fire clung to the flag pole, the Watch Tower, and the big statue of Wyeth
trying to look heroic.

I headed uptown
to the library, pushing my car slowly through the countless beaded curtains.
The big furniture movers in the sky were obviously non-union, because they
weren’t taking any coffee breaks. Finally, I found a parking place and I
umbrellaed my way to the library and entered.

I have become
something of a bibliophile in recent years. It is not so much that I hunger and
thirst after knowledge, but that I am news-starved.

It all goes back
to my position in the big mixmaster. Admitted, there are
some
things faster than light,
like the phase velocities of radio waves in ion plasma, or the tips of the
ion-modulated light-beams of Duckbill, the comm-setup back in Sol System,
whenever the hinges of the beak snap shut on Earth—but these are highly
restricted instances, with no application whatsoever to the passage of
shiploads of people and objects between the stars. You can’t exceed lightspeed
when it comes to the movement of matter. You can edge up pretty close, but that’s
about it.

Life can be
suspended though, that’s easy—it can be switched off and switched back on again
with no trouble at all. This is why
I
have lasted so long. If we can’t
speed up the ships, we
can
slow down the people—slow them until they stop—and
let
the vessel, moving at
near-lightspeed, take half a century, or more if it needs it, to convey its
passengers to where they are going. This is why I am very alone. Each little
death means resurrection into both another land and another time. I have had
several, and
this
is why I have become a bibliophile: news travels slowly, as slowly
as the ships and the people. Buy a newspaper before you hop aboard a ship and
it will still be a newspaper when you reach your destination—but back where you
bought it, it would be considered a historical document. Send a letter back to
Earth and your correspondent’s grandson may be able to get an answer back to
your great-grandson, if the message makes real good connections and both kids
live long enough.

All the little
libraries Out Here are full of rare books—first editions of best sellers which
people pick up before they leave Someplace Else, and which they often donate
after they’ve finished. We assume that these books have entered the public
domain by the time they reach here, and we reproduce them and circulate our own
editions. No author has ever sued, and no reproducer has ever been around to
be
sued by representatives,
designates, or assigns.

We are
completely autonomous and are always behind the times, because there is a
transit-lag which cannot be overcome. Earth Central, therefore, exercises about
as much control over us as a boy jiggling a broken string while looking up at
his kite.

Perhaps Yeats
had something like this in mind when he wrote that fine line, “Things fall
apart; the center cannot hold.” I doubt it, but I still have to go to the
library to read the news.

The day melted
around me.

The words flowed
across the screen in my booth as I read newspapers and magazines, untouched by
human hands, and the waters flowed across Betty’s acres, pouring down from the
mountains now, washing the floors of the forest, churning our fields to
peanut-butter, flooding basements, soaking its way through everything, and
tracking our streets with mud.

I hit the
library cafeteria for lunch, where I learned from a girl in a green apron and
yellow skirts (which swished pleasantly) that the sandbag crews were now hard
at work and that there was no eastbound traffic past Town Square.

After lunch I
put on my slicker and boots and walked up that way.

Sure enough, the
sandbag wall was already waist high across Main Street; but then, the water
was
swirling around at
ankle level, and more of it falling every minute.

I looked up at
old Wyeth’s statue. His halo had gone away now, which was sort of to be
expected. It had made an honest mistake and realized it after a short time.

He was holding a
pair of glasses in his left hand and sort of glancing down at me, as though a
bit apprehensive, wondering perhaps, there inside all that bronze, if I would
tell on him now and ruin his hard, wet, greenish splendor. Tell... ? I guess I
was the only one around who really remembered the man. He had wanted to be the
father of this great new country, literally, and he’d tried awfully hard. Three
months in office and I’d had to fill out the rest of the two-year term. The
death certificate gave the cause as “heart stoppage,” but it didn’t mention the
piece of lead which had helped slow things down a bit. Everybody involved is
gone now: the irate husband, the frightened wife, the coroner. All but me. And
I won’t tell anybody if Wyeth’s statue won’t, because he’s a hero
now,
and we need heroes’ statues Out Here even more than we do heroes. He
did
engineer a nice piece of
relief work during the Butler Township floods, and he may as well be remembered
for that.

I winked at my
old boss, and the rain dripped from his nose and fell into the puddle at my
feet.

I walked back to
the library through loud sounds and bright flashes, hearing the splashing and
the curses of the work crew as the men began to block off another street. Black,
overhead, an eye drifted past. I waved, and the filter snapped up and back down
again. I think
 H.C. John Keams was tending shop that afternoon, but I’m not sure.

Suddenly the
heavens opened up and it was like standing under a waterfall.

I reached for a
wall and there wasn’t one, slipped then, and managed to catch myself with my
cane before I flopped. I found a doorway and huddled.

Ten minutes of
lightning and thunder followed. Then, after the blindness and the deafness
passed away and the rains had eased a bit, I saw that the street (Second
Avenue) had become a river. Bearing all sorts of garbage, papers, hats, sticks,
mud, it sloshed past my niche, gurgling nastily. It looked to be over my boot
tops, so I waited for it to subside.

It didn’t.

It got right up
in there with me and started to play footsie.

So, then seemed
as good a time as any. Things certainly weren’t getting any better.

I tried to run,
but with filled boots the best you can manage is a fast wade, and my boots were
filled after three steps.

That shot the
afternoon. How can you concentrate on anything with wet feet? I made it back to
the parking lot, then churned my way homeward, feeling like a riverboat captain
who really wanted to be a camel driver.

It seemed more
like evening that afternoon when I pulled up into my damp but unflooded garage.
It seemed more like night than evening in the alley I cut through on the way to
my apartment’s back entrance. I hadn’t seen the sun for several days, and it’s
funny how much you can miss it when it takes a vacation. The sky was a sable
dome, and the high brick walls of the alley were cleaner than I’d ever seen
them, despite the shadows.

I stayed close
to the lefthand wall, in order to miss some of the rain. As I had driven along
the river I’d noticed that it was already reaching after the high-water marks
on the sides of the piers. The Noble was a big, spoiled, blood sausage, ready
to burst its skin. A lightning flash showed me the whole alley, and I slowed in
order to avoid puddles.

I moved ahead,
thinking of dry socks and dry martinis, turned a corner to the right, and it
struck at me: an org.

Half of its
segmented body was reared at a forty-five degree angle above the pavement,
which placed its wide head with the traffic-signal eyes saying “Stop,” about
three and a half feet off the ground, as it rolled toward me on all its pale
little legs, with its mouthful of death aimed at my middle.

I pause now in
my narrative for a long digression concerning my childhood, which, if you will
but consider the circumstances, I was obviously quite fresh on it an instant:

Born, raised,
educated on Earth, I had worked two summers in a stockyard while going to
college. I still remember the smells and the noises of the cattle; I used to
prod them out of the pens and on their way up the last mile. And I remember the
smells and noises of the university: the formaldehyde in the Bio labs, the
sounds of Freshmen slaughtering French verbs, the overpowering aroma of coffee
mixed with cigarette smoke in the Student Union, the splash of the newly-pinned
frat man as his brothers tossed him into the lagoon down in front of the Art
Museum, the sounds of ignored chapel bells and class bells, the smell of the
lawn after the year’s first mowing (with big, black Andy perched on his grass-chewing
monster, baseball cap down to his eyebrows, cigarette somehow not burning his
left cheek), and always, always, the
tick-tick-snick-stamp!
as I moved up or down the
strip. I had not wanted to take General Physical Education, but four semesters
of it were required. The only out was to take a class in a special sport. I
picked fencing because tennis, basketball, boxing, wrestling, handball, judo
all sounded too strenuous, and I couldn’t afford a set of golf clubs. Little
did I suspect what would follow this choice. It was as strenuous as any of the
others, and more than several. But I liked it. So I tried out for the team in
my Sophomore year, made it on the epee squad, and picked up three varsity
letters, because I stuck with it through my Senior year. Which all goes to
show: Cattle who persevere in looking for an easy out still wind up in the
abattoir, but they may enjoy the trip a little more.