Bright Segment (38 page)

“So where was I? Oh, yes, you say I’d nab this busy boy and get a reward. Well, there you go thinking like a human being. I, sir Henry, will do no such thing. Now I don’t know exactly why this boy does this bit and I don’t care much, long’s I can get him to do it for me. He wants to knock off obstacles from the path of poor imprisoned
souls, I got just the chore for him. Just some justice is all.

“You see that scared rabbit came in here a while back with the tray, that Loretta? Now that thing with Loretta, it was great while it lasted, and it lasted too long about four months back. All the time around, oh, please don’t drink so much, where have you been, but I was worried … you know the routine, Henry. Now I could handle this myself, but even I can’t think of a way which wouldn’t be either expensive or messy.

“When you come right down to it, I’d just as soon keep her around.

“Loretta’s not much trouble. She leaves me alone pretty much and comes in here about the time I’m bottle dippy every night and gets me into bed, talking on bright and cheery as anything, just as if I wasn’t hooked over the desk here, green as a gherkin and just as pickled …

“The reason, the
real
reason I’d like to introduce this other unhuman type to my lovely wife is that I’d get more of a kick than you’d understand, just making him do it. Humans I can handle; this boy would be a real challenge. You can talk anybody into anything, and yourself out of anything, if you can just think of the right thing to say—and I’m the boy who can do it. Was your mother frightened by a keyboard?”

“What?” he asked, startled.

“That grin. What I’d like to know, I’d like to know how that busy boy covers so much territory. First he has to find ’em, then he has to plan how to knock ’em off, then he has to wait his chance … so
many
, Henry! Five already this week and here it is only Thursday!”

“Maybe there’s more than one,” Henry suggested tentatively.

“Say, I never thought of that!” I exclaimed. “I guess it’s because there’s only one of me. Gosh, what a lovely idea—squads of unhumans thinking unhumanly, doing whatever they unhumanly want all over the lot. But why should the likes of him or them take chances just to make some humans happy?”

“They don’t care if anyone gets happy,” said Henry. “Why are you whispering?”

“Must be getting pretty tight, I guess; can’t seem to do much better.
Whee-ooo! Such a gorgeous load!
What?
What’s that you said about the unhumans, that they don’t care about making people happy? Listen, son, don’t go telling me about unhumans. Who’s the expert around here? I tell you, every time they knock somebody off, someone around stops getting mistreated. Those files there—”

“Right files, wrong conclusion. You keep worrying about what you are; we don’t. We just
are
.”

“We?
Are you classifying yourself with
me?”

“I wasn’t,” said Henry, not smiling. “Just what you are, human or not, I don’t know and I don’t care. You’re a blowhard, though.”

I snarled and heaved myself upward. But a whispered snarl doesn’t amount to much and you can heave all you like and get nowhere when your arms are deadwood and your legs are about as responsive as those old inner tubes in your neighbor’s back yard.

“What’s the matter with me?” I rasped.

“You’re about nine-tenths dead, that’s all.”

“Nine—what do you mean, Henry? What are you talking about? I’m just drunk, not—”

“Dicoumarin,” he said. “You know what that is?”

“Sure I know what it is. Capillary poison. All the smallest blood vessels rupture and you bleed to death internally before you even know you’re sick. Henry, you’ve poisoned
me!
”

“Well, yes.”

I tried to struggle up, but I couldn’t. “You weren’t supposed to kill
me
, Henry! It was Loretta! That’s why I brought you home—I guessed that the killer would be the opposite of the likes of me and you’re about as opposite as anybody could be. And you know I can’t stand her and killing her would make me happier. It’s
her
you’re supposed to kill, Henry!”

“No,” he answered stubbornly. “It couldn’t be her. I told you we don’t care if somebody’s made happier. It had to be you.”

“Why?
Why?
”

“To stop the noise.”

I looked at him, frowned foggily, shook my head.

“Self-defense,” he explained patiently. “I’m a—I suppose you’d
call it a telepath, though it isn’t telepathy like you’d read about. No words, no pictures. Just a
noise
, I guess is the best word. There’s a certain kind of mind—human or not, who cares?—it can’t get angry, and it enjoys degrading other people and humiliating them, and when it’s enjoying these things, it sets up … that noise. We can’t stand the noise. You—you’re special. Hear you for miles. When we get rid of you, of course it makes a human happy—whoever it was you were humiliating.” Then he said again, “We can’t stand the noise.”

I whispered, “Help me, Henry. Whatever it is, I’ll stop. I promise I’ll stop.”

“You can’t stop,” he said. “Not while you’re alive … Oh, damn you, damn you, you’re even enjoying dying!” He put forearms over his head—not over his ears—and rocked back and forth, and smiled and smiled.

“You smile all the time,” I hissed. “Even now.
You
enjoy
killing
.”

“It isn’t a smile and I kill only to stop the noise.” He was breathing hard. “How can I explain to anything like you? The noise—it’s—some people can’t stand the screek of a fingernail on a blackboard, some hate the scrape of a shovel on a cement sidewalk, most can’t take the rasp of a file on metal.”

“They don’t bother me a bit,” I said.

“Here, damn you, look here!” He snatched my sewing-machine needle and plunged it under his thumbnail. His lips spread wider. “It’s
pain
 … pain! Only, with you, it’s agony! I can’t stand your noise! It puts my teeth on edge, it hurts my head, it deafens me!”

I remembered all the times he had smiled since I brought him home. And each time like the nail on the blackboard, like the shovel, like the rasp on the file, like the needle under the nail …

I made a sort of laugh. “You’ll come with me. They’ll find the poison in me.”

“Dicoumarin? You know better than that. And there won’t be any in the whiskey glass, if that’s what you’re thinking. I gave it to you three hours ago, in Molson’s, in the drink I didn’t want and you took.”

“I’ll hang on and tell Lorrie.”

“Tell me,” he jeered, leaning toward me, his smile that wasn’t a
smile as huge as a boa’s about to bite.

My tongue was thick, numb and wobbly. “Don’t!” I gasped. “Don’t … jump me … now, Henry.”

Again he clutched his head. “Get mad! If you could get mad, it would go away, that noise! Argh, you snakes, you freaks … all of you who enjoy hating! The girl, remember her, in the bar? She was making that noise until I got her angry … she’s going to get better now that you’re dead.”

I was going to say I wasn’t dead, I wasn’t yet, but my mouth wouldn’t work.

“I’ll take these,” Henry said. I watched him stack the files right under my nose. “Everything’s nice and tidy,” he told me. “You were due to drink yourself to death, anyway, and here you are just like always. Only you won’t sleep this one off … I wish I could have got you sore.”

I watched him unlock the door, saw him go, heard him talking to Lorrie briefly. Then the outer door banged.

Loretta came into the room and stopped. She sighed. “Oh, dear, we’re in a
special
mess tonight, aren’t we?” she said brightly.

I tried, how I tried to yell, to scream at her, but I couldn’t, and it was growing dark.

Loretta bent and pulled my arm around her neck. “You’ll have to help just a little now.
Upsy
-daisy!” Strong shoulders and a practiced hip hauled me upright, lolling. “You know, I do like your friend Henry. The way he smiled when he left—why, it made me feel that everything’s going to be all right.”

Y
OU JUST DON
’
T LOOK
through viewports very often.

It’s terrifying at first, of course—all that spangled blackness, and the sense of disorientation. Your guts never get used to sustained free fall, and you feel, when you look out, that every direction is up, which is natural, or that every direction is
down
, which is sheer horror. But you don’t stop looking out there because it’s terrifying. You stop because nothing ever happens out there. You’ve no sensation of speed. You’re not going anywhere. After the weeks, and the months, there’s some change, sure; but day to day you can’t see the difference, so after a while you stop looking for any.

Which, of course, eliminates the viewports as an amusement device, which is too bad. There aren’t so many things for a man to do during a Long Haul that he can afford to eliminate anything. Getting bored with the infinities outside is only a reminder that the same could happen with your writing materials, and the music, with the stereo and all the rest of it. And it’s hard to gripe, to say, “Why don’t they install a such-and-such on these barrels?” because you’ve already got what a thousand space men griped about long since—many of them men with more experience, more imagination, and fewer internal resources (that is to say, more need) than you’ll ever have. Certainly more than you have now; this is your first trip, and you’re just making the transition from “inside looking out” to “inside looking on.” It’s a small world. It better be a little complicated.

A lot that has happened in worlds like these would be simple, if you knew about it. Not knowing is all right: it keeps you wondering. Some of it you can figure out, knowing as you do that a lot of men have died in these things, a lot have disappeared, ship and all, and some—but you don’t know how many—have been taken out of the ships and straight to the laughing academy. You find out fairly
soon, for example, that the manual controls are automatically relayed out, and stay out of temptation until you need them to land. (Whether they’ll switch in if you need them for evasive maneuvering some time, you don’t know yet.) Who died, how many died, because they started playing with the manuals? And was it because they decided to quit and go home? Or because they convinced themselves that the autoastrogator had bugs in it? Or because they just couldn’t stand all those stationary stars?

Then there’s this: You’re alone. You crouch in this little cell in the nose of your ship, with the curving hull to your left and the flat wall of the midship bulkhead to your right. You know that in previous models that bulkhead wasn’t there. You can imagine what happened to some—how many?—ships to make it necessary, at last, to seal you away from your shipmate. Psychodynamics has come a long way, but it hasn’t begun to alter the fact that human beings are the most feral, vicious, destructive, and self-destructive creatures God ever made. You called this a world; well, reduce a world to two separate nations and see what happens. Between two confined entities there’s no mean and no median, and no real way of determining a majority. How many battered pilots have come home crazed, cooped up with the shredded bodies of their shipmates? You can’t trust two human beings together, not for long enough. If you don’t believe it look at the bulkhead; look again. It’s there because it has to be there.

You’re a peaceable guy. Scares you a little, to know how dangerous you are. Makes you a little proud, too, doesn’t it?

Be proud of this, too: that they trust you to be alone so much. Sure, there
is
a shipmate; but by and large you’re alone, and that’s what’s expected of you. What most people, especially earthside people, never find out is that a man who can’t be by himself is a man who knows, away down deep, that he’s not good company. You could probably make it by yourself altogether … but you must admit you’re glad you don’t have to. You have access to the other side of the bulkhead, when you need it. If you need it. It didn’t take you too long to figure out you’d use it sparingly. You have books and you have games, you have pictures and text tapes and nine different euphorics (with a watchdog dispenser, so you can never become an
addict), all of which help you, when you need help, to explore yourself. But having another human mind to explore is a wonderful idea. The wonder is tempered by the knowledge—oh, how smart you were to figure it out in time!—that the other mind is a last resort; if you ever use up the potentialities it holds for you, you’ve had it, brother.

So you squeeze it out slowly; you have endurance contests with yourself to see how long you can leave it alone. You do pretty well.

You go back over your life, the things you’ve done. People have written whole novels about twenty-four hours in a man’s life. That’s the way you think it all out, slowly, piece by piece; every feature of every face, and they way they were used; what people did, and why. Especially why. It doesn’t take any time to remember what a man did, but you can spend hours thinking about why he did it.

You live it again and it’s like being a little god, knowing what’s going to happen to everyone. When you reported to Base there was a busload of guys with you. Now you know who would go all the way through the course and wind up out here; reliving it, you still know that, so you can put yourself back in the bus again and say, that stranger across the aisle is Pegg, and he isn’t going to make it. He’ll go home on furlough three months from now and he’ll try to kill himself rather than come back. The freckled nape in the seat ahead of you belongs to the redhead Walkinok, who will throw his weight around during the first week and pay expensively for it afterward. But he’ll make it. And you make friends with the shy dark guy next to you; his name is Steih and he looks like a big-brain; he’s easy to talk to and smart, the kind of fellow who always goes straight to the top. And he won’t last even until the first furlough; two weeks is all he can take, and you never see him again. But you remember his name. You remember everything, and you go back over it and remember the memories in between the memories. Did somebody on that bus have shoes that squeaked? Back you go and hunt for it; if it happened, you’ll remember it.