Charles Beaumont - Selected Stories Part 33

Kinkaid followed his superior across a deep red carpet to a room. The walls of the room were lined with books.

Biddle handed Kinkaid a gilt-edged book weighing at least ten pounds. Opening at random, Kinkaid found a drawing which depicted communal breeding.

"The Germans were great hands at p.o.r.nography," Biddle said, chuckling. "They almost made an art of it. So did the j.a.panese. Here--this is our collection of _graffiti_." He reached down an impressive leather-bound volume. "You're probably not familiar with the word. It refers mainly to the scrawls one used to find on the walls of public restrooms." He flipped through the pages. "Some wonderful stuff, really. Completely uninhibited. Take this: 'Here I sit, broken-hearted--"

"Mr. Biddle," said Kinkaid. "I'm not feeling very well.""Oh? That's too bad. Well, next time. In case you're alone: this section contains essays and short works of fiction; this section is devoted entirely to cartoons; that's the film vault over there. All the Chaplin pictures, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, et al. Also a rather interesting selection of stag reels. When you decide to look at those, by the way, have one of the interlocutors help you. Personally I would recommend 'Bathroom Frolics,' though 'A Night at the Zoo' is also first rate."

There was an ugly bleating sound.

"The Bronx cheer," said Biddle. "That means show-time. Here go."

They hurried out of the book-filled room, across the crowded bar, through a curtained doorway, to a small amphitheatre.

They sat down. The lights dimmed. The curtains parted. A small man in a checkered suit walked to the center of the stage.

"Anybody wanna buy a duck?"

The people in the amphitheatre roared. A large man with white hair jabbed his elbow into Kinkaid's ribs. "Too much!" the man said. "Too much!"

The footlights became dimmer. A man in patched clothes shuffled across the stage. A spotlight came on. The man took a short-handled broom from his pocket and tried to sweep away the spotlight.

Again the roar.

Two men with black faces and white gloves shambled across the stage.

The tall one said: "Crony, my boy, where has you been? I ain't seen you in a long time!"

The short one said: "I been in de jailhouse."

"Whuffo?" asked the tall one.

"Well," said the short one, "lemme ax you sumfin'. What would you do if you come home and found yo wife in bed wid anudder man?"

"I would simply cut my wife's acquaintance."

"Dat's all I did. An' believe me, I cut him deep!"

"Yak! Yak!"

"Negroes," said Biddle, "were thought to be morally lax. The humor here derives from the odd speech patterns, the misunderstanding of a common phrase, and the casual att.i.tude toward murder. But forget that. Take it for what it is. Try!"

Kinkaid tried, but he did not understand any of the things that pa.s.sed before his eyes. Biddle's voice was a distant hum. The lights danced inside his mind.

When they returned to the lounge, Biddle ordered drinks.

They took a corner booth.

"Look at it this way," Biddle said. "Humor is an escape valve for the emotions. Everybody has emotions, even today. They're building up, all over the world. Getting ready to explode.

"James, listen to me," Biddle said. "This is the way it was. When television was born, censors started cracking down. Any humor that might offend--that's to say, all real humor--was banished. A new humor sprang up. It didn't offend anyone, but it didn't amuse anyone either. n.o.body liked it, but that didn't matter. Vaudeville died. Burlesque died. Circuses died. The wonderful jokes that used to spread like wildfire. . ." Biddle sighed and peered at his gla.s.s. "It was phenomenal. You're too young to remember, James. We had jokes about everything under the sun, about insanity and disease, about s.e.x and G.o.d and crime and marriage and--oh, nothing was sacred. And the wonder is, a lot of these jokes were good. Still are! I'm afraid it's a lost art. Everything's lost. Drink up, my boy. You're what's left."

Kinkaid threw down the remains of his drink and ordered another. There was a curious loss of control in his motor muscles. He looked at all the people, listened to the roar of their voices, and returned to the booth.

A naked woman sat in his lap.

"Coo, ducks," she said. "Have you heard the one about the married couple and the chimpanzee?"

"No," said Kinkaid. His mind was whirling now. The girl became two, then three. The voices faded.". . . got into bed and here was this ape . . ."

He blinked furiously. Now there was a girl in Biddle's lap, and they were making those barking, Laff-Track noises.

"Get it?" said a voice.

Kinkaid felt a sudden hot rush of tears on his face. "No!" he cried, pressing his hot wet face between the girl's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "No, I don't get it. I _don't get it!_"

A hand reached into his mind, then, and turned it off.

The morning light was cold and harsh. Kinkaid lay on the bed unmoving for a long time. When he did move, it was an agony. His head throbbed and his stomach felt as though someone had been punching it, hard, for hours.

It was not until after his shower that he remembered the previous night.

Excited, he dressed, breakfasted, and took the hi-speed belt to work.

"You are seven minutes, twenty seconds late," said the Time Box.

"Up yours," said Kinkaid, happily.

He ran the gauntlet of eyes to his desk, took out his papers and sat down. A red bulb flashed.

Kinkaid walked down the aisle toward the door marked: _William A. Biddle_. Biddle was seated behind his desk.

"Hi," said Kinkaid. "You are late."

"I know. That absinthe must have got to me."

"Absinthe?"

"Maybe I didn't tell you, but I hadn't even tasted the stuff before last night. I'm sorry about what happened. Who took me home?"

"Kinkaid, I don't know what you're talking about."

"About last night. S.P.O.L." The corners of Kinkaid's lips curled upward. "Anybody wanna buy a duck?"

Biddle's expression was grim.

"I'll be happy to give you a goose instead," said Kinkaid. "There, how's that? That's a joke, isn't it?"

"I couldn't say."

"Come on, Mister Biddle. I know I was a disappointment to you, but it was all so new. I didn't understand. I wanted to, I tried . . . I'm willing to learn.

Biddle said nothing.

"They're not going to hold it against me because I didn't laugh, are they?" Kinkaid found that his heart had begun to beat rapidly. "I didn't know how. But I do now. Listen. Ha! Ha-ha! _Ha-ha-ha_--"

"Kinkaid!"

"Yes, sir?"

"You're fired."

"What?" Kinkaid's mouth went dry. He stared at the stern man behind the desk and tried to remember how he looked with his tie loose and a naked woman in his lap. "Mister Biddle, I know the vote was against me. I know that. And I don't blame them. But, you can fix it, can't you?"

"Get out."

"Please! All I want is a second chance. Is that so much to ask? You people _lived_ through the time, I didn't. I've got to learn."

"I don't know what you're babbling about, Kinkaid. But I warn you. If you repeat any of it to the authorities, they'll put you away."

Kinkaid stood there a moment, tense; then he sighed, turned around and walked quickly out of the building.

That night, and almost every night thereafter until the final demolition, he rode the belts to No Man's Land. He walked to where the ugly sightless buildings were, and he searched, but he could neverfind the building he wanted.

Sometimes he would stand perfectly still on the crumbling sidewalks, and listen. And once in a while it almost seemed that he could hear the distant laughter.

It was a lovely, desperate sound.

THE JUNGLE.

by Charles Beaumont

Suddenly it was there. On foxfeet, invisibly, it had crept, past all the fences and traps he had laid, past all the barriers. And now it sat inside his mind, a part of him, like his pulse, like the steady beat of his heart.

Richard Austin became rigid in the chair. He closed his eyes and strained the muscles in his body until they were silent and unmoving as granite; and he listened to the thing that had come again, taking him by surprise even while he had been waiting. He listened to it grow--it _seemed_ to grow; he couldn't be sure: perhaps he was merely bringing it into sharper focus by filtering out the other constant sounds: the winds that whispered through the foliage of balloon-topped trees the murmurous insect-drone of all the machines that produced this wind and pumped blood through the city from their stations far beneath the night-heavy streets. Or, perhaps, it was because he was searching, trying to lay hands on it that the thing seemed to be different tonight, stronger, surer. Or--what did it matter?

He sat in the darkened room and listened to the drum; to the even, steady throb that really neither rose nor diminished, but held to that slow dignified tempo with which he'd become so familiar.

Then, quickly he rose from the chair and shook his head. The sounds died and became an indistinguishable part of the silence. It was only concentration, he thought, and the desire to hear them that gave them life . . .

Richard Austin released a jagged breath from his swollen lungs, painfully. He walked to the bar and poured some whiskey into a gla.s.s and drank most of it in a single swallow: it went down his dry throat like knives, forcing the salivary glands back into action.

He shook his head again, turned and walked back across the living room to the far door. It swung out noiselessly as his hand touched the ornamented circle of hammered bra.s.s.

The figure of his wife lay perfectly still under the black light, still and pale, as she had lain three hours before. He walked toward her, feeling his nostrils dilate at the acrid medicine smells, harshly bitter and new to his senses. He blinked away the hot tears that had rushed, stinging, to his eyes; and stood for a time, quietly, trying not to think of the drums.

Then he whispered: "Mag . . . Mag, don't die tonight!"

Imbecile words! He clenched his fists and stared down at the face that was so full of pain, so twisted with defeat, that now you could not believe it had once been different, a young face, full of laughter and innocence and courage.

The color had gone completely. From the burning splotchy scarlet of last week to this stiff whitemask, lifeless, brittle as dry paste. And covered over with perspiration that glistened above her mouth in cold wet b.u.t.tons and over her face like oil on white stone. The bedding under and around her was drenched gray.

Austin looked at the bandage that covered his wife's head, and forced away the memory, brutally. The memory of her long silver hair and how it had fallen away in clumps in his hands within a week after she had been stricken . . .

But the thoughts danced out of control, and he found himself remembering all the terrible steps in this nightmare.

The scientists had thought it malaria, judging from the symptoms, which were identical. But that was difficult to accept, for malaria had been effectively conquered--powerful new discoveries in vaccines having been administered first, and then the primary cause of the disease itself--the Anopheles mosquitoe--destroyed completely. And the liquid alloys which formed the foundations for this new city eliminated all the likely breeding places, the bogs and marshlands and rivers. No instance of reoccurrence of the disease had been reported for half a century. Yet--malarial parasites were discovered in the bloodstreams of those first victims, unmistakable parasites that multiplied at a swift rate and worked their destruction of the red corpuscles. And the chemists immediately had to go about the business of mixing medicines from now ancient prescriptions, frantically working against time. A disquieting, even a frightening thing; but without terror for the builders of the new city; not sufficient to make them abandon their work or to spark ma.s.s evacuations. Panic was by now so forgotten by most that it had become a new emotion, to be learned all over again.

It had not taken very long to relearn, Austin recalled. Terror had come soon enough. The stricken--some thirty husky workmen, engineers, planners--had rallied under the drugs and seemed to be out of critical condition when, one night, they had all suffered relapses, fallen into fevered comas and proceeded to alternate between unconsciousness and delirium. The scientists were baffled. They tried frenziedly to arrest the parasites, but without success. Their medicines were useless, their drugs and radium treatments and inoculations--all, useless. Finally, they could only look on as the disease took new turns, developed strange characteristics, changed altogether from what they had taken to be malaria to something utterly foreign. It began to a.s.sume a horrible regular pattern: from prolonged delirium to catatonia, whereby the victim's respiratory system and heartbeat diminished to a condition only barely distinguishable from death. And then, the most hideous part: the swift decomposition of the body cells, the destruction of the tissues . . - Richard Austin carefully controlled a shudder as he thought of those weeks that had been the beginning. He fingered out a cigarette from his pocekt, started to strike it, then broke the cylinder and ground its bright red flakes into his palms.

No other real hint had been given then: only the disease. Someone had nicknamed it "Jungle Rot"--cruel, but apt. The victims were rotting alive, the flesh falling from them like rain-soaked rags; and they did not die wholly, ever, until they had been transformed into almost unrecognizable mounds of putrescence . . .

He put out a hand and laid it gently against his wife's cheek. The perspiration was chill and greasy to his touch, like the stagnant water of slew banks. Instinctively his fingers recoiled and balled back into fists. He forced them open again and stared at the tiny dottles of flesh that clung to them.

"Mag!" It had started already! Wildly, he touched her arm, applying very slight pressure. The outer skin crumbled away, leaving a small wet gray patch. Austin's heart raced; an involuntary movement caused his fingers to pinch his own wrists, hard. A wrinkled spot appeared and disappeared, a small, fading red line.

She's dying, he thought. Very surely, very slowly, she's begun to die--Mag. Soon her body will turn gray and then it will come loose; the weight of the sheet will be enough to tear big strips of it away. .

. She'll begin to rot, and her brain will know it-- they had discovered that much: the victims were never completely comatose, could not be adequately drugged--she will know that she is mouldering even while she lives and thinks . . .

And why? His head ached, throbbed. _Why?_The years, these past months, the room with its stink of decay--everything rushed up, suddenly, filling Austin's mind.

If I had agreed to leave with the rest, he thought, to run away, then Mag would be well and full of life. But--I didn't agree . . .

He had stayed on to fight. And Mag would would not leave without him. Now she was dying and that was the end of it.

Or--he turned slowly--was it? He walked out to the balcony. The forced air was soft and cool; it moved in little patches through the streets of the city. Mbarara, _his city_; the one he'd dreamed about and then planned and designed and pushed into existence; the place built to pamper five hundred thousand people.

Empty now, and deserted as a gigantic churchyard . . .

Dimly he recognized the sound of the drums with their slow m.u.f.fled rhythm, directionless as always, seeming to come from everywhere and from nowhere. Speaking to him. Whispering.

Austin lit a cigarette and sucked the calming smoke into his lungs. He remained motionless until the cigarette was down to the cork.

Then he walked back into the bedroom, opened a cabinet and took a heavy silver pistol.

He loaded it carefully.

Mag was still; almost, it seemed to Austin, expectant, waiting, so very still and pale.