Classic Audiobook Collection - The Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Leiber ~ Full Audiobook [fantasy]

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

The Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Leiber audiobook. Genre: fantasy 'I was one hundred miles from Nowhere—and I mean that literally—when I spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd been keeping an extra lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.' In a Post apocalyptic world, the few people left must be strong. And must not hesitate to kill. Of course, killing another Deathlander was one of the chief pleasures and urges of all the solitary wanders in this vast wasteland. Kill and kill again. But this other was a girl and that brought up the second great urge: sex. Which was it to be today? Perhaps both? And who would walk away afterward? For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 1 (00:32:17) Chapter 2 (01:00:01) Chapter 3 (01:34:04) Chapter 4 (02:11:52) Chapter 5 (02:31:56) Chapter 6 (03:01:29) Chapter 7 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Liber Chapter 1 I was one hundred miles from nowhere, and I mean that literally, when I spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd been keeping an extra lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over from the murder party at nowhere to be stalking me. I've been following a line of high-voltage towers, all canted over at the same gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast. from the last war. I judged the girl was going in the same general direction and was being

edged over toward my course by a drift of dust that even in my distance showed dangerous metallic gleams and dark humps that might be dead men or cattle. She looked slim, dark-topped, and on guard. Small, like me, and like me, wearing a scarf loosely around the lower half of her face in the style of the old buccaroos. We didn't wave or turn our heads, or give the slightest indication we'd seen each other, as our paths slowly converged. But we were intensely, minutely watchful. I knew I was, and she had better be. Overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always.

I don't remember what a high sky looks like. Three years ago I think I saw Venus, or it may have been serious or Jupiter. The hot, smoky light was turning from the amber of midday to the bloody bronze of evening. The line of towers I was following showed the faintest spread in the direction of their canting. They must have been only a few miles from blast center. As I passed each one, I could see where the metal of the blast side had been eroded, vaporized by the original blast, mostly smooth but with welts and postules where the metal had merely melted and run. I suppose the lines the towers carried had all been vaporized, too,

but with the haze I couldn't be sure, though I did see three dark blobs up there that might be vultures perching. From the drift around the foot of the nearest tower, a human skull peered whitely. That is rather unusual. Years later now you still see more dead bodies with the meat on them than skeletons. Intense radiation had killed their bacteria and preserved them indefinitely from decay, just like the packaged meat in the last advertisements. In fact, such bodies are one of the signs of a really hot drift, you avoid them.

The vultures pass up such poisonous hot carrion, too. They've learned their lesson. A head some big gas tanks began to loom up like deformed battleships and flat tops in a smokescreen, their prows being the juncture of the natural curve of the off-blast side with the massive concavity of the on-blast side. None of the three other buggers and me had had too clear an eye. idea of where nowhere had been, hence, in part, the name, but I knew in a general way that I was somewhere in the deathlands between Porter County and Washington Parish, probably much nearer the former.

It's a real mixed-up America we've got these days, you know, with just the faintest trickle of a sense of identity left, like a guy in the patinous cell and the most locked-up ward in the whole loony bin. If a time traveler from mid-20th century hopped forward to it, across the few intervening years, and looked at a map of it, if anybody has a map of it, he'd think that the map had run, that it had got some sort of disease that had swollen a few tiny parts beyond all bounds. Paper tumors, while most of the other parts, the parts he remembered carrying names in such big print, and showing such bold colors, had shrunk to nothingness.

to the east he'd see atlantic highlands and savannah fortress to the west walla walla territory pacific palisades and los alamos and there he'd see an actual change in the coastline i'm told where three of the biggest stockpiles of fusionables let go and opened death valley to the sea so that los alamos is closer to being a port centrally he'd find porter county and mantano asylum surprisingly close together near the great lakes which are tilted and spilled out a bit toward the southwest with the big quake south centrally washington parish inching up the mississippi from old louisiana under the cruel urging of the fisher sheriff's sheriff's those he'd find, and a few, a very few other places, including a couple I suppose I haven't heard of. Practically all of them would surprise him. No one can predict what scraps of a blasted nation are going to hang on to a shred of organization and ruthlessly maintain it, and very slowly and very jealously extended. But biggest of all, occupying practically all the map, reducing all those swollen localities I've mentioned,

mentioned back to tiny blobs, bounding most of America and thrusting its jelly pseudopods everywhere, he'd see the great ink blot of the Deathlands. I don't know how else than by an area of solid, absolutely unrelieved black you'd represent the Deathlands, with its multi-colored radioactive dusts and its skimpy freightage of lonely Deathlanders, each bound on his murderous, utterly pointless, but utterly absorbing business, an area where names like nowhere, it, anywhere, and the place are the most natural thing in the world when a few of us decide to try to pad down together for a few nervous months or weeks. As I say, I was somewhere in the Deathlands near Mantano

Asylum. The girl and me were getting closer now, well within pistol or dart range, though beyond any but the most expert or lucky knife throw. She wore boots and a weathered long sleeves, shirt, and jeans. The black topping was hair piled high in an elaborate coiffure that was held in place by twisted shavings of bright metal. A fine bug-trap, I told myself. In her left hand, which was closest to me, she carried a dart-gun, pointed away from me across her body. It was the kind of potent tiny crossbow you can't easily tell whether the spring is loaded. Back around on her left hip a small leather satchel was strapped to her belt. Also on the same side were two sheathed knives, one of which was an oddity. It had no handle,

just bear tang. For nothing but throwing, I guessed. I let my own left hand drift a little closer to my banker's special in its open holster. Ray Baxter's great psychological weapon, though, who knows, the two thirty-eight cartridges it contained might actually fire. The one I'd put to the test that nowhere had, and very lucky for me. She seemed to be hiding her right arm from me. Then I spotted the weapon it held. One you don't often see, a stevedore's hook. She was hiding her right hand, all right. She had the long sleeve pulled down over it, so just the hook stuck out. I asked myself if the hand were perhaps covered with radiation scars or sores or otherwise

disfigured. We Deathlanders have our vanities. I am sensitive about my baldness. Then she let her right arm swing more freely, and I saw how short it was. She had no right hand. The hook was attached. to the wrist stump. I judged she was about ten years younger than me. I'm pushing forty, I think, though some people have judged I'm younger. No way of my knowing for sure. In this life

you forget trifles like chronology. Anyway, the age difference meant she would have quicker reflexes. I'd have to keep that in mind. The greenish glinting dust drift that I judged she was avoiding swung closer ahead. The girl's left elbow gave a little kick to the satchel at her hip, and there was a sudden burst of irregular ticks that almost made me start. I steadied myself and concentrated on thinking whether I should attach any special significance to her carrying a Geiger counter. Naturally it wasn't the sort of thinking that interfered in any way with my watchfulness. You quickly lose the habit of that kind of thinking in the Deathlands, or you lose something else.

It could mean she was some sort of Greenhorn. most of us old-timers can visually judge the heat of a dust drift or crater or raid area more reliably than any instrument some buggers claim they just feel it though i'd never known any of the latter too eager to navigate an unfamiliar country at night which you'd think they'd be willing to do if they could feel the heat blind but she didn't look one bit like a tenderfoot like for instance some citizeness newly banished from mantano or like some porterberger's unfaithful wife or troublesome girlfriend whom he'd personally carted out beyond the ridges of cleaned-out hot dust to help guard such places and then abandoned in revenge or from boredom and they call themselves civilized those cultural queers no she looked like she belonged in the deathlands but then why the counter her eyes might be bad real bad i didn't think so She raised her boot an extra inch to step over a little jagged fragment of concrete. No. Maybe she was just a barn double-checker, using science to back up knowledge based on experience,

as rich as my own, or richer. I've met the super-careful type before. They mostly get along pretty well, but they tend to be a shade too slow in the clutches. Maybe she was testing the counter, planning to use it some other way or traded for something. Maybe she made a practice of traveling by night. Then the counter made good sense, but then why use it by day? Why reveal it to me in any case? Was she trying to convince me that she was a greenhorn?

Or had she hoped that the sudden noise would throw me off guard? But who would go to the trouble of carrying a Geiger counter for such devious purposes? And wouldn't she have waited until we got closer before trying the noise gambit? Think, schmink. It gets you nowhere. She kicked off the counter with another bump of her elbow, and started to edge in toward me faster. I turned the thinking all off and gave my whole mind to watchfulness. Soon we were barely more than eight feet apart, almost within lunging range without even the

preliminary one-two step, and still we hadn't spoken or looked straight at each other, though being that close we'd had to can't our heads around a bit to keep each other in peripheral vision, our eyes would be on each other steadily for five or six seconds, then dart forward an instant to check for rocks and holes in the trail we were following in parallel. A cultural queer from one of the civilized places would have found it funny, I suppose, if he'd been able to watch us perform in an arena or from behind armor glass for his exclusive pleasure. The girl had eyebrows as black as her hair, which, in its piled up in metal-knotted savagery,

called to mine African queens, despite her typical pale complexion, very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From the inside corner of a right eye socket, a narrow radiation scar ran up between her eyebrows and across her forehead at a rakish angle until it disappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper left corner of her forehead. I'd been smelling her, of course, for some time. I could even tell the color of her eyes now. They were blue.

It's a color you never see. Almost no dusts have a bluish cast. There are few blue objects except certain dark steels. The sky never gets very far away from the orange range, though it is green from time to time, and water reflects the sky. Yes, she had blue eyes. Blue eyes and that jaunty scar. Blue eyes and that jaunty scar.

And a dart gun and a steel hook for a right hand. And we were walking side by side, eight feet apart, not an inch closer, still not looking straight at each other, still not saying a word, and I realized that the initial period of unadulterated watchfulness was over, that I'd had adequate opportunity to inspect this girl and size her up, and that night was coming on fast, and that here I was once again back with the problem of the two urges. I could either try to kill her or go to bed with her. I know that at this point the cultural queers, and certainly our imaginary time-traveller

from mid-20th century, would make a great noise about not understanding and not believing in the genuineness of the simple urge to murder that governs the lives of us Deathlanders. Like detective story pundits, they would say that a man or woman murders for game. or concealment of crime, or from thwarted sexual desire, or outraged sexual possessiveness, and maybe they would list a few other rational motives. But not, they would say, just for the simple sake of murder, for the sure release and relief it gives, for the sake of wiping out one recognizable bit more, the closest bit we can, since those of us with the courage or lazy rationality to wipe out ourselves have long since done

so, wiping out one recognizable bit more of the whole miserable, unutterably disgusting human mess. Unless they would say, a person is completely insane, which is actually how all outsiders view us Deathlanders, they can think of us in no other way. I guess cultural queers in time travelers simply don't understand, though to be so blind it It seems to me that they have to overlook much of the history of the last war and of the subsequent years, especially the mushrooming of crackpot cults with a murder tinge, the whirl-wolf gangs, the berserkers and the muckers, the revival of Shiva worship and the black mass,

the machine-wreckers, the kill-the-killer's movements, the new witchcraft, the unholy creepers, the unconsciousers, the radioactive blue gods and rocket devils of the atomites, and the and a dozen other groupings clearly prefiguring Deathlander psychology. Those cults had all been unpredictable as thuggy or the dancing madness of the Middle Ages, or the Children's Crusade, yet they had happened just the same. But cultural queers are good at overlooking things. They have to be, I suppose. They think their humanity growing again.

Yes, despite their laughable warpedness and hysterical crippleness, they actually actually believe, each howlingly different community of them, that they're the new atoms and eaves. They're all excited about themselves, and whether or not they wear fig leaves. They don't carry with them twenty-four hours a day, like us Deathlanders do, the burden of all that was forever lost. Since I've gone this far I'll go a bit further, and make the paradoxical admission that even us Deathlanders don't really understand our urge to murder.

Oh, we have our rationalizations of it, just like everyone has his ruling passion. We call ourselves junkmen, scavengers, gangrene surgeons. We sometimes believe we're doing the person we kill the ultimate kindness. Yes, and get slobbery tearful about it afterwards. We sometimes tell ourselves we've finally found and are rubbing out the one man or woman who was responsible for everything. We talk mostly to ourselves about the aesthetics of homicide. We occasionally admit, but only each to himself alone, that we're just plain nuts.

But we don't really understand our urge to murder. We only feel it. At the hateful sight of another human being we feel it begins to grow in us, until it becomes an overpowering impulse that jerks us like a puppet is jerked by its strings, into the act itself or its attempted commission. Like I was feeling it grow in me now, as we did this parallel death march through the reddening haze, me and this girl in our problem, the girl with the blue eyes and the jaunty scar. The problem of the two urges, I said.

The other urge is sexual, is one that I know all cultural queers, and certainly our time traveler would claim to know all about. they do. But I wonder if they understand how intense it can be with us, Deathlanders, when it's the only release, except maybe liquor and drugs, which we seldom can get, and even more rarely dare use, the only complete release, even though a brief one, from the overpowering loneliness and from the tyranny of the urge to kill. To embrace, to possess, to glut lust on, yes, even briefly to love, briefly to shelter in. That was good. That was a relief and release to be treasured. But it couldn't last. You couldn't draw it out. Prop it up, perhaps, for a few

days, for a month even, though sometimes not for a single night. You might even start to talk to each other a little, after a while, but it could never last. The glands always tire, if nothing else. Murder was the only final solution, the only permanent release. Only us Deathlanders know how good it feels, but then after the kill, the loneliness would come back, redoubled, and after a while I'd meet another hateful human. Our problem of the two urges. As I watched this girl slogging along parallel to me, as I kept constant watch on her, of course, I wondered how she was feeling the two urges. Was she attracted to the ridgy scars on my cheeks, half revealed by my scarf?

To me they have a pleasing symmetry. Was she wondering how my head and face looked without the black-felt skull-cap low-visored over my eyes? Or was she thinking mostly of that hook swinging into my throat under the chin and dragging me down? I couldn't tell. She looked as poker-faced as I was trying to. For that matter I asked myself, How was I feeling the two urges?

How was I feeling them, as I watched this girl with the blue eyes and the jaunty scar, and the arrogantly thinned lips that asked to be smashed at the slender throat? And I realized that there was no way to describe that, not even to myself. I could only feel the two urges grow in me side by side, like monstrous twins, until they would simply be too big for my taut body, and one of them would have to get out fast. I don't know which one of us started to slow down first. It happened so gradually, but the dustpuffs that rise from the ground of the Deathlands,

even under the slightest treading, became smaller and smaller around our steps, and finally vanished altogether, and we were standing still. Only then did I notice the obvious physical trigger for our stopping. An old freeway ran at right angles across our path. The shoulder by which we'd approached it was sharply eroded, so that the pavement, which even had a shallow cave eroded under it, was a good three feet above the level of our path, forming a low wall. From where I'd stopped, I could almost reach out and touch the rough-edged,

smooth-topped concrete, so could she. We were right in the midst of the gas tanks now, six or seven of them towered around us, Squeeze like beer cans by the decade-old blast, but their metal-looking sound enough until you became aware of the red light showing through in odd patterns of dots and dashes, where vaporization or later erosion had been complete, almost but not quite lacework. Just ahead of us, right across the freeway, was the six-story skeletal structure of an old cracking plant, sagged like the power towers away from the blast, and the lower stories

drifted with piles and ridges and smooth gobbets of dust. The light was getting redder and smokier every minute. With the cessation of the physical movement of walking, which is always some sort of release for emotions, I could feel the twin urges growing faster in me. But that was all right, I told myself. This was the crisis, as she must realize too, and that should key us up to bear the urges a little longer without explosion. I was the first to start to turn my head, for the first time I looked straight into her

eyes and she into mine. And as always happens at such times, a third urge appeared abruptly, an urge momentarily as strong as the other two, the urge to speak, to tell and ask all about it. But even as I started to phrase the first crazily happy greeting, my throat lumped, as I'd known it would, with the awful melanched. of all that was forever lost, with the uselessness of any communication, with the impossibility of recreating the past, our individual pasts, any pasts, and as it always does, the third urge died.

I could tell she was feeling that ultimate pain just like me. I could see her eyelids squeeze down on her eyes and her face lift, and her shoulders go back as she swallowed hard. She was the first to start to lay aside a weapon. She took two sidewise steps toward the freeway, and reached her whole left arm further across her body, and laid the dart gun on the concrete, and drew back her hand from it about six inches. At the same time, looking at me hard, fiercely angrily, you would say, across her left shoulder.

She had the experienced dutist trick of seeming to look into my eyes but actually focusing on my mouth. I was using the same gimmick myself. It's tiring to look straight into another person's eyes, and he can put you off guard. My left side was nearest the wall, so I didn't for the moment have the problem of reaching across my body. I took the same sidewise steps she had, and using just two fingers very gingerly, disarmingly, I hoped, I lifted my antique firearm from its holster and laid it on the concrete and drew back my hand from it all the way. Now it was up to her again, or should be.

Her hook was going to be quite a problem, I realized, but we didn't come to it right away. She temporized by successively unsheathing the two knives at her left side and laying them beside the dart gun. Then she stopped, and her look told me plainly that it was up to me. Now I am a bugger who believes in carrying one perfect knife. Otherwise, I know for a fact you'll go knife-happy and end up by weighing yourself down with dozens, literally, so I am naturally very reluctant to get out of touch in any way with Mother, who is a little rusty along the sides, but made of the toughest and most sharpenable alloy steel I've ever run across.

Still I was most curious to find out what she do about that hook. So I finally laid Mother on the concrete beside the 38, and rested my hands lightly on my hips, all ready to enjoy myself. At least I hoped I gave that impression. She smiled. It was almost a nice smile. By now we let our scarves drop since we weren't raising any more dust, and then she took hold of the hook with her left hand and started to unscrew it from

the leather and metal base fitting over her stump. Of course, I told myself, and her second knife, the one without a grip, must be that way so she can screw its tang into the base when she wanted a knife on her right hand instead of a hook. I ought to have guessed. I grinned my admiration of her mechanical ingenuity, and immediately unhitched my knapsack and laid it beside my weapons. Then a thought occurred to me.

I opened the knapsack, and moving my hands slowly and very openly, so she, you know, she was she'd have no reason to suspect a ruse, I drew out a blanket, and, trying to show her both sides of it in the process, as if I were performing some damned conjuring trick, dropped it gently on the ground between us. She unsnapped the straps of her satchel that fastened it to her belt, and laid it aside, and then she took off her belt, too, slowly drawing it through the wide loops of weathered denim. Then she looked meaningfully at my belt. I had to agree with her. Belts, especially heavy-buckled ones like ours, can be nasty weapons. I removed mine. Simultaneously, each belt joined its corresponding pile of weapons and other belongings.

She shook her head, not in any sort of negation, and ran her fingers into the black hair at several points, to show me it hid no weapons, then looked at me, questioningly. I nodded that I was satisfied. I hadn't seen anything run out of it, by the way. Then she looked up at my black skull cap and raised her eyebrows and smiled again, this time with a spice of mocking anticipation. In some ways I hate to part with that headpiece more than I do with Mother. Not really because of its sandwiched lead mesh inner lining. If the rays haven't baked my brain yet they never will, and I'm sure that the patches of

lead mesh sewed into my pants over my loins give a lot more practical protection. But I was getting real attached to this girl by now, and there are times when a person must make a sacrifice of his vanity. I whipped off my stylish black felt and tossed it on my pile, and dared her to laugh at my shiny egg-top. Strangely, she didn't even smile. She parted her lips and ran her tongue along the upper one. I gave an eager grin in reply, an incautiously wide one, and she saw my plates flash.

My plates are something rather special, though they are by no means unique. Back toward the end of the last war when it was obvious to any realist how bad things were going to be, though not how strangely terrible, a number of people, like myself, had all their teeth jerked and replaced with durable plates. I went some of them one better. My plates were stainless steel biting and chewing ridges, smooth, continuous ones that didn't attempt to copy individual teeth. A person who looks closely at a slab of chewing tobacco, say I offer him, will be puzzled

by the smoothly curved incision made as if by a razor blade mounted on the arm of a compass. Magnetic powder, buried in my gums, makes for a real nice fit. This sacrifice was worse than my hat and mother combined, but I could see the girl expected me to make it, and would take no substitutes, and in this attitude I had to admit that she showed very sound judgment, because I keep the incisor parts of those plates filed to razor sharpness. I have to be careful about my tongue and lips, but I figure it's worth it. With my dental cemeter's, I can, in a wink, bite out a chunk of throat and windpipe or

jugular, though I've never had occasion to do so yet. For the first minute it made me feel like an old man, a real daughterer, but by now the attraction this girl had for me was getting irrational. I carefully laid the two plates on top of my knapsack. In return, as a sort of reward you might say, she opened her mouth wide and showed me what was left of her own teeth, about two-thirds of them, a patchwork of tartar and gold. We took off our boots, pants and shirts, she watching very suspiciously, I knew she'd been skeptical of my carrying only one knife. Oddly perhaps, considering how touchy I am of about my baldness, I felt no sensitivity about revealing the lack of hair on my chest, and,

in fact, a sort of pride in displaying the slanting radiation scars that have replaced it, though they are crawling teloids of the ugliest, bumpiest sort. I guess to me such scars are tribal insignia. One man and one-woman tribes, of course. No question, but that scar on the girl's forehead had been the first focus of my desire for her, and it still added to my interest. By now we weren't staying as perfectly on guard or watching each other's clothing for concealed weapons as carefully as we should. I know I wasn't.

It was getting dark fast. There wasn't much time left. And the other interest was simply becoming too great. We were still automatically careful about how we did things. For instance, the way we took off our pants was like a ballet, simultaneously crouching a little on the left foot and whipping the right leg out of its sheath in one movement. all ready to jump without tripping ourselves, if the other person did anything funny, and then skinning down the left-pants leg with a movement almost as swift. But as I say, it was getting too late for perfect watchfulness, in fact for any kind of effective

watchfulness at all. The complexion of the whole situation was changing in a rush, the possibilities of dealing or receiving death, along with the chance of the minor indignity of cannibalism, which some of us practice, were suddenly going. gone, all gone. It was going to be all right this time, I was telling myself. This was the time it would be different. This was the time love would last. This was the time lust would be the firm foundation for understanding and trust. This time that would be really safe sleeping. This girl's body would be home for me, a beautiful, tender, inexhaustibly exciting home, and mine for her for always.

As she threw off her shirt, the last darkly red light showed me another smooth, slant-wise scar, this one around her hips, like a narrow girdle that has slipped down a little on one side. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 of the Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Liber. This Libra-Box recording is in the public domain. Chapter 2. Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural, Hamlet.

When I woke the light was almost full amber, and I could feel no flesh against mine, only the blanket under me. I very slowly rolled over, and there she was. Sitting on the corner of the blanket, not two feet from me, combing her long black hair, with a big wide-tooth comb she'd screwed into the leather and metal cap over her wrist-stump. She'd put on her pants and shirt, but the farmer were rolled up to her knees and the ladder, though tucked in, wasn't buttoned. She was looking at me, contemplating me, you might say, quite dreamily, but with a faint easy

smile. I smile back at her. It was lovely. Too lovely. There had to be something wrong with it. There was. Oh, nothing big, just a solitary trifle. Nothing worth noticing really.

But the tiniest solitary things can sometimes be the most irritating, like one mosquito. When I first rolled over, she'd been combing her hair straight back, revealing a wedge of baldness following the continuation of her forehead scar deep back across her scalp. Now with the movement that was swift, though not hurried looking, she swept the mass of her hair forward and to the left so that it covered the bald area. also her lips straightened out i was hurt she shouldn't have hidden her bit of baldness it was something we had in common something that brought us closer and she shouldn't have stopped smiling at just that moment didn't she realize i loved that blaze on her scalp just as much as any other part of her that she no longer had any need to practice vanity in front of me didn't she realize that as soon as she stopped smiling her contemplative stare became an insult to me what right had she to stare critically i felt sure at my bald head what right had she to know about the nearly healed ulcer on my left shin that was a piece of information worth a man

life in a fight? What right had she to cover up anyways, while I was still naked? She ought to have wake me up so that we could have got dressed as we'd undressed, together. There were lots of things wrong with her manners. Oh, I know that if I'd been able to think calmly, maybe if I'd just had some breakfast or a little coffee inside me, or even if there'd been some hot breakfast to eat at that moment, I'd have recognized my irritation for the irrational one mosquito surge of negative feeling that it was. Even without breakfast, if I just had the knowledge that there was a reasonably secured day ahead of me, in which there'd be an opportunity for me to straighten out my feelings, I wouldn't

have been irked, or at least being irked wouldn't have bothered me terribly, but a sense of security is an even rarer commodity in the Deathlands than a hot breakfast. Given just the ghost of a sense of security and or some hot breakfast, I'd have told myself that she was merely being amusingly coquettish about her ball-streak and her hair, that it was natural for a woman to try to preserve some mystery about herself in front of the man she beds with. But you get leery of any kind of mystery in the Deathlands. It makes you frightened and angry, like it does any animal.

is for a cultural queer strictly. The only way for two people to get along together in the Deathlands, even for a while, is never to hide anything, and never to make a move that doesn't have an immediate, clear explanation. You can't talk, you see, certainly not at first, so you can't explain anything. Most explanations are just lies and dreams anyway. So you have to be doubly careful, and explicit about everything you do. girl wasn't being either. Right now, on top of her other gosheries, she was unscrewing the comb from her wrist, an unfriendly, if not quite a hostile act, as anyone must admit. Understand, please, I wasn't showing any of these negative reactions of mine, any more than

she was showing hers, except for her stopping smiling. In fact, I hadn't stopped smiling. I was playing the game to the hilt. But inside me everything was stewed up, and the other urge had come back, and presently it would begin to grow again. That's the trouble, you know, with sex as a solution to the problem of the two urges. It's fine while it lasts, but it wears itself out. And then you're back with urge number one, and you have nothing left to balance it with. Oh, I wouldn't kill this girl to-day.

I probably wouldn't seriously think of killing her for a month or more. but old urge number one would be there and growing mostly under cover all the time of course there were things i could do to slow its growth lots of little gimmicks in fact i was pretty experienced at this business for instance i could take a shot at talking to her pretty soon for a catchy starter i could tell her about nowhere how these five other buggers and me found ourselves independently skulking along after this scavenging expedition from Porter, how we naturally joined forces in that situation, how we set a pitfall for their Elky-powered Jeep and wrecked it, and then how when our hull turned out to be unexpectedly big. The four of us left from the kill, chummied up and patted down together, and amused each other for a while and played games, you might say.

Why, at one point, we even had an old crank bonograph going and read some books. And of course, how when the loot gave out and the fun wore off. We had our murder party, and I survived along with, I think, a bugger named Jerry. At any rate, he was gone when the blood stopped spurting. And I'd had no stomach for tracking him, though I probably should have. And in return, she could tell me how she had killed off her last set of girlfriends, or boyfriends, our friend, or whatever it was. After that, we could have a go with exchanging news, rumors, and speculations about local,

national and world events, was it true that Atlantic Highlands had plains of some sort, or were they from Europe? Were they actually crucifying the Deathlanders around Walla Walla, or only nailing up their dead bodies as dire warnings to other such? Had Mantano made Christianity compulsory yet, or were they still tolerating Zen Buddhists? Was it true that Los Alamos had been completely wiped out by plague, but the area taboo to Deathlanders, because of the robot guards they left behind, metal guards eight feet tall, who tramped across the white sands wailing? Did they still have free love in Pacific Palisades?

Did she know there had been a pitched battle fought by expeditionary forces from Washter and Savannah Fortress? Over the loot of Birmingham, apparently, after Yellow Fever had finished off that principality. Had she rooted out any observers lately? some of the civilized communities, the more scientific ones, try to maintain a few weather stations and the like in the Deathlands, camouflaging them elaborately and manning them with one or two imprudent characters to whom we give a hard time if we uncover them. Had she heard the tale that was going around that South America and the French Riviera

has survived the last war absolutely untouched, and the obviously ridiculous rider that they had blue skies there and saw stars every third night? Did she think that subsequent conditions were showing that the Earth actually had plunged into an interstellar dust cloud, coincidentally with the start of the last war? The dust cloud used as a cover for the first attack, some said, or did she still hold with a majority that the dust was solely of atomic origin, with a little help from the volcanoes and dry spells? How many green sunsets had she seen in the last year?

After we chewed over those racy topics and some more like them, and incidentally got bored with guessing and fabricating, we might if we felt especially daring and conversation was going particularly well, even take a chance on talking a little about our childhoods, about how things were before the last war, though she was almost too young for that, about the little things we remembered. The big things were much too dangerous topics to venture on, and sometimes even the little memories could suddenly twist you up as if you swallowed lie. But after that there wouldn't be anything left to talk about. Anything you'd risk talking about, that is, for instance, no matter how long we talked, it was very unlikely that we'd either

of us tell the other anything complete or very accurate about how we live from day to today, about our techniques of surviving and staying sane or at least functional, that would be too imprudent. It would go too much against the grain of any player of the murder game. Would I tell her, or anyone, about how I worked the ruse of playing dead and disguising myself as a woman? About my trick of picking a path just before dark, and then circling back to it by a pre-surveyed route, about the chess games I played with myself?

About the bottle of green, terribly hot-looking powder I carried to sprinkle behind me to bluff off pursuers? A fat chance of my revealing things like that! And when all the talk was over, what would it have gained us? Our minds would be filled with a lot of painful stuff, better kept buried, meaningless hopes, scraps of vicarious living and cultured communities. that were nothing but melancholy given concrete form. The melancholy is easiest to bear, when it's the diffused background for everything. And all garbage is best kept in the can. Oh,

yes, our talking would have gained us a few more days of infatuation, of phantom security, but those we could have, almost as many of them at any rate, without talking. For instance, things were smoothing over already between her and me again, and I no longer felt quite so irked. She'd replaced the comb with an inoffensive-looking pair of light pliers, and was doing up her hair with the metal shavings. And I was acting as if content to watch her, as in a way I was, I'd still made no move to get dressed.

She looked real sweet, you know, primping herself that way. Her face was a little flat. But it was young, and the scar gave it just the fill of it needed. But what was going on behind that forehead right now? I asked myself. I felt real psychic this morning. My mind, as clear as a bottle of White Rock, you find miraculously unbroken in a blasted tavern, and the answers to the question I'd asked myself came effortlessly.

She was telling herself, she got herself a man again, a man who was adequate in the primal clutch, I gave myself that pat on the back, and that she wouldn't have to be plagued and have her safety endangered by that kind of mind-dulling restlessness and yearning for a while. She was lightly playing around with the ideas about how she'd found a home and a protector, knowing she was kidding herself, that it was the most jim-cracky feminine make-believe, but enjoying it just the same. She was sizing me up, deciding in detail what I went for in a woman. what wedded my interest, so she could keep that roused as long as seemed desirable or prudent

to her to continue our relation. She was kicking herself, only lightly to begin with, because she hadn't taken any precautions. Because we, who have escaped hot death against all reasonable expectations by virtue of some incalculable resistance to the ills of radioactivity, quite often find we've escaped sterility, If she should become pregnant, she was telling herself, then she had a real sticky business ahead of her, where no man could be trusted for a second. And because she was thinking of this, and because she was obviously a realistic death-lander, she was reminding herself that a woman is basically less impulsive and daring

and resourceful than a man, and so had always better be sure she gets in the first blow. She would be thinking that I was a realist myself and a smart man, one able to understand her predicament quite clearly, and because of that, a much sooner danger to her. She was feeling old number one urge starting to grow in her again, and wondering whether it might be wisest to give it the hot-house treatment. That is the trouble with a clear mind. For a little while you see things as they really are, and you can accurately predict how they're going to shape the future. And then suddenly you realize you've predicted yourself

a week or a month into the future, and you can't live the intervening time any more, because you've already imagined it in detail. People who live in communities, even the cultural queers of our maimed era, aren't much bothered by it. There must be some sort of blinkers they hand you out along with the key to the city, but in the deathlands. It's a fairly common phenomena, and there's no hiding from it. Me and my clear mind. Once again it had done me out of days of fun, changed a thoroughly explored love affair into a one-night stand.

Oh, there was no question about it. This girl and I were finished right this minute, as of now, because she was just as psychic as I was this morning, and had sensed every last thing that I'd been thinking. With a movement smooth enough not to look rushed, I swung into a crouch. She was on her knees faster than that. Her left hand, hovering over the little set of tools for her stump, which like any good mechanic she lined up neatly on the edge of the blanket.

The hook, the comb, a long telescoping fork, a couple of other items, and the knife. I'd grabbed a handful of blanket, ready to jerk it from under her. seen that I grabbed it. Our gazes dueled. There was a high-pitched wine over our heads, quite loud from the start, though it sounded as if it were very deep up in the haze. It swiftly dropped in pitch and volume. The top of the skeletal cracking plant across the freeway glowed with St. Elmo's fire. Three times it glowed that way, so bright we could see the violet blue flames of it, reaching up, despite the full amherstable. daylight. The wine died away, but in the last moment, paradoxically, it seemed to be coming closer.

This shared threat for any unexpected event is a threat in the Deathlands, and a mysterious event, doubly so, put a stop to our murder game. The girl and I were buddies again, buddies to be relied on in a pinch, for the duration of the threat at least. No need to say so, or to reassure each other of the fact in any way it was taken for granted. Besides, there was no time. We had to use every second allowed us in getting ready for whatever was coming. First I grabbed up, Mother, then I relieved myself, fear made it easy. Then I skinned into my pants and boots, slapped in my teeth, thrust the blanket and knapsack into the shallow cave under the edge of the freeway, looking around me all the time so as not to be surprised from any quarter.

Meanwhile, the girl had put on her boots, located her dart gun, unscrewed the pliers from her stump, put the knife in, and was arranging her scarf so it made a sling for the maimed arm. I wondered why but had no time to waste guessing, even if I'd wanted to, for at that moment a small dull silver plane, beetle-shaped more than anything else, loomed out of the haze beyond the cracking plant, and came silently drifting down toward us. Thurl thrust her satchel into the cave and along with it her dart gun I caught her idea and tucked mother into my pants behind my back I'd thought from the first glimpse of it that the plane was disabled I guess it was its silence that gave me the idea this theory was confirmed when one of its very stubby wings or veins touched a corner pillar of the cracking plant The plane was moving in too slow a glide to be wrecked in fact it was moving in a slower glide than I would have believed

possible, but then it's many years since I have seen a plane in flight. It wasn't wrecked, but the little collision spun it around twice in a lazy circle, and it landed on the freeway with a scuffing noise not fifty feet from us. You couldn't exactly say it had crashed in, but it stayed at an odd tilt. It looked crippled, all right. An oval door in the plane opened, and a man dropped lightly out on the concrete. And what a man! He was nearer, seven feet tall than six, close-cropped blonde hair, face and hands richly tanned, the rest of him covered by trim garments of a gleaming gray. He must have weighed as much as the two of us together, but he was beautifully built, muscular yet supple-seeming. His face looked brightly

intelligent, and even tempered in kind. Yes, kind, damn him. It wasn't enough that his body should fairly glow with the health and vitality that was an in the insubble. insult to our seared skins and stringy muscles and ulcers and half-rotted stomachs and half-arrested cancers. He had to look kind, too, the sort of man who would put you to bed and take care of you as if you were some sort of interesting sick fox, and maybe even say a little prayer for you and all manner of other abominations. I don't think I could have endured my fury standing still.

Fortunately, there was no need to. As if we'd rehearsed the whole thing for hours, the girl and I scrambled up onto the freeway, and scurried toward the man from the plane, cunningly swinging away from each other, so that it would be harder for him to watch the two of us at once, but not enough to make it obvious that we attended an attack from two quarters. We didn't run, though we covered the ground as fast as we dared. would have been too much of a giveaway, too, and the pilot, which was how I named him to myself, had a strange-looking small gun in his right hand.

In fact, the way we moved was part of our act. I dragged one leg as if it were crippled, and the girl faked another sort of limp, one that made her approach a series of half-curties. Her arm in the sling was all twisted, but at the same time she was accidentally showing her breasts. i remember thinking you won't distract this breed bull that way sister he probably has a harem of six-foot heifers i had my head thrown back and my hands stretched out supplicatingly meanwhile the both of us were babbling a blue streak i was rapidly croaking something like mr for god sake save my pal he's hurt a lot worse than i am not a hundred yards away he's dying mister he's dying the thirst his tongue's black and i'll swole up oh save him mister save my pal he's not a hundred yards away he's dying, Mr. Dine?"

And she was sing-songing an even worse rigmarole about how they were after us from Porter, and going to crucify us because we believed in science, and how they'd already impaled her mother and her ten-year-old sister, and a lot more of the same. It didn't matter that our stories didn't fit or make sense. The babble had a convincing tone, and getting us closer to this guy. Which was all that counted. He pointed his gun at me, and then I could see him hesitate, and I thought exultingly, It's a lot of healthy meat you got there, Mr. But it's tame, meat, Mr. Tame.

He compromised by taking a step back, and sort of hooting at us, and waving us off with his left hand, as if we were a couple of stray dogs. It was greatly to our advantage that we'd acted without hesitation, and I don't think we'd have been able to do that, except that we'd been all set to kill each other when he dropped in our muscles and nerves and minds were keyed for instant ruthless attack and some civilized people still say that the urge to murder doesn't contribute to self-preservation we were almost close enough now and he was stealing himself to shoot and i remember wondering for a split second what his damn gun did to you and then me and the girl had started the alternation routine i'd stop dead, as if completely cowed by the threat of his weapon, and as he took note of it, she'd go in a little further, and as his gaze shifted to her, she'd stop dead, and I'd go in another foot, and then try to make my halt even more convincing as his gaze darted back to me.

We worked it perfectly. Our rhythm was beautiful, as if we were old dancing partners, though the whole thing was absolutely impromptu. Still I honestly don't think we'd ever have got him if it hadn't been for the distraction that came just then to help us. I could tell, you see, that he'd finally steeled himself, and we still weren't quite close enough. He wasn't as tame as I'd hoped. I reached behind me for a mother, determined to do a last-minute rush and leap anyway, when there came this sick scream. I don't know how else to describe it briefly.

It was a scream, feminine for choice. It came from some distance and the direction of the old cracking plant. It had a note of anguish and warning, yet at the same time it was weak and almost faltering, you might say, and squeaky at the end, as if it came from a person half dead and a throat choked with flim. It had all those qualities or a wonderful mimicking of them. And it had quite an effect on our boy in gray, for in the act of shooting me down he He started to turn and look over his shoulder.

Oh, it didn't altogether stop him from shooting me. He got me partly covered again as I was in the middle of my lunge. I found out what his gun did to you. My right arm, which was the part he covered, just went dead, and I finished my lunge slamming up against his iron knees, like a high school kid trying to block out a pro footballer, with a knife slipping uselessly away from my fingers. But in the blessed, meanwhile, the girl had left.

lunged, too, not with a slow slash, thank God, but with a high slicing thrust, aimed arrow straight for a point just under his ear. She connected, and a fan of blood sprayed her full in the face. I grabbed my knife with my left hand as it fell, scrambled to my feet, and drove the knife at his throat. In a roundhouse swing that happened to come handiest at the time, the point went through his flesh like nothing, and jarred against his spine, with the violence that I hoped would shock into nervous insensibility the stoutest medulla oblagata, and prevent any dying

reprisals on his part. I got my wish in large part. He swayed, straightened, dropped his gun, and fell flat on his back, giving his skull a murderous crack on the concrete for good measure. He lay there, and after a half-dozen gushes the bright blood-tubek, quit pumping strongly out of his neck. Then came the part that was like a dying reprisal, though obviously not being directed by him as of now, and come to think of it, it may have had its good points. The girl, who was clearly a most cool-headed cuss, snatched for his gun

where he dropped it, to make sure she got it ahead of me. She snatched, yes, and then jerked back, letting off a sizable squeal of pain, anger, and surprise. where we'd seen his gun hit the concrete there was now a tiny incandescent puddle a rill of blood snaked out from the pool around his head and touched the whitely glowing puddle and a jet of steam sizzled up somehow the gun had managed to melt itself in the moment of its owner dying well at any rate that showed it hadn't contained any gunpowder or ordinary chemical explosives though i already knew it operated on other principles from the way it had been used paralyze me. More to the point, it showed that the gun's owner was the member of a culture that believed in taking very complete precautions against its gadgets falling into the hands of strangers. But the gun fusing wasn't quite all. As the girl and me shifted our gaze from the puddle, which was cooling fast and now glowed red like the blood, as we shifted our gaze

back from the puddle to the dead man, we saw that at three points, points over where you'd expect pockets to be. His gray clothing had charred in small, irregularly shaped patches from which threads of black smoke were twisting upward. Just at that moment, so close as to make me jump, in spite of years of learning to absorb shocks stoically, right at my elbow it seemed to—the girl jumped, too, I may say, a voice said, Don a murder, eh? Advancing briskly around the skewed, grounded plain from the direction of the cracking plant was an old geyser, a seasoned, hard-baked Deathlander, if ever I saw one.

He had a shock of bone-white hair, the rest of him that showed from his weathered gray clothing, looked fried by the sun's rays and others, to a stringy crisp, and strapped to his boots, and weighing down his belt were a good dozen knives. Not satisfied with the unnerving noise he made already. He went on brightly. Neat job, too. Give you credit for that. But why the hell did you have to set the guy afire?

End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of the Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Liber. This Lieber Vox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3. We are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals. none of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow the undiscovered self by karl yung ordinarily scroungers who hide around on the outskirts until the killings done and then come in to share the loot and get what they deserve wordless orders well backed up to be on their way at once sometimes they even catch an after-clap of the murder urge if it hasn't all been expended on the first victim or victims yet they will do it trusting i suppose to the irresistible glamour of their personalities there were several reasons why we didn't at once give pop this treatment

in the first place we didn't neither of us have our distance weapons my revolver and her dart gun were both tucked in the cave back at the edge of the freeway and there's one bad thing about a bugger so knife-happy he lugs them around by the carload he's generally good at tossing them With his dozen or so knives, Pop definitely outgunned us. Second, we were both of us without the use of an arm. That's right, the both of us. My right arm still dangled like a string of sausages, and I couldn't yet feel any sign of it coming undead. While she'd burned her fingers badly grabbing at the gun, I could see their red splotched tips now,

as she pulled them out of her mouth for a second to wipe the pilot's blood out of her eyes. All she had was her stump with a knife screwed to it. Me, I can throw a knife left-handed if I have to, but you bet I wasn't going to risk mother that way. Then I'd no sooner heard Pop's voice, Breathy and a little high like an old man's will get, Then it occurred to me that he must have been the one who had given the funny scream

that had distracted the pilot's attention and let us get him, which incidentally made Pop a quick thinker, and imaginative to boot, and meant that he'd helped on the killing. besides all that pop did not come in fawning and full of extravagant praise as most scroungers will he just assumed equality with us right from the start and he talked in an absolutely matter-of-fact way neither praising nor criticizing one bit too damn matter-of-fact and open for that matter to suit my taste but then i have heard other buggers say that some old men are apt to get talkative though i had never worked with or run into one myself old people are very rare in the deathlands as you might imagine so the girl and me just scowled at him and did nothing to stop him as he came along near us his extra knives would be no advantage to him hmm he said looks a lot like a guy murdered five years back down in los alamos way same silver monkey suit and almost as tall.

Nice chap, too. I was trying to give me something for a fever I'd faked. That his gun melted? My man didn't smoke after I gave him his quietus, but then it turned out he didn't have any metal on him. I wonder if this chap. He started to kneel down by the body. Hands off, Pop.

I gritted at him. That was how we started calling him, Pop. Why, sure, sure, he said. Staying there on one knee, I won't lay a finger on him. It's just that I've heard. the Alamousers have it rigged, so that any metal they're carrying melt when they die. And I was wondering about this boy. But he's all yours, friend.

By the way, what's your name, friend? Ray, I snarled. Ray Baker. I think the main reason I told him was that I didn't want him calling me friend again. You talk too much, Pop. I suppose I do, Ray, he agreed. What's your name, lady? The girl just sort of hissed at him.

and he grinned at me as if to say, Oh, women. Then he said, Why don't you go through his pockets, Ray? I'm real curious. Shut up, I said. But I felt that he'd put me on the spot just the same. I was curious about the guy's pockets myself, of course,

but I was also wondering if Pop was alone, or if he had somebody with him, and whether there was anybody else in the plane or not, things like that, too many things. At the same time, I didn't want to be. to let on to pop how useless my right arm was. If I'd just get a twinge of feeling in that arm, I knew I'd feel a lot more confident, fast. I knelt down across the body from him, started to lay mother aside, and then hesitated. The girl gave me an encouraging look as if to say,

I'll take care of the old geyser. On the strength of her look I put down mother and started to pry open the pilot's left hand, which was clenched in a fist that looked a much too big to have nothing inside it. The girl started to edge behind Pop, but he caught the movement right away and looked at her with a grin that was so knowing and yet so friendly and yet so pitying at the same time, with the pity of the old pro for even the seasoned amateur that in her place I think I'd have blushed myself, as she did now, through the streaks of the pilot's blood. You don't have to worry none about me, lady.

He said, running a hand through his white hair, and, incidentally, touching the pommel of one of the two knives, strapped high on the back of his jacket, so he could reach one over either shoulder. I quit murdering some years back. He got to be too much of a strain on my nerves. Oh, yeah, I couldn't help saying, as I pried up the pilot's indexed finger, and started on the next. Then why the stab factory pop?

Oh, you mean those! He said, glancing down at his nose. knives. Well, the fact is, Ray, I carry them to impress boogers dumber than you and the lady here. Anybody wants to think I'm still a practice and murderer? I got no objections. Matter of sentiment, too. I just hate to part with them. They bring back important memories. And then, you won't believe this, Ray, but I'm going to tell you just the same. Some guys just up and give me their knives, and I double hate to part with the gift. I

I wasn't going to say, oh, yeah, again, or shut up either, though I certainly wished I could turn off Pop Spigot, or thought I did. Then I felt a painful tingling shoot down my right arm. I smiled at Pop and said, any other reasons? Yep, he said. Got to shave, and I might as well do it in style. A new blade every day in the fortnight is twice as good as the old ads. You know, it makes you keep a knife in fine shape if you shave with it.

What you got there, Ray. You were wrong, Pop, I said. He did have some metal on him that didn't melt. I held up for them to see the object I'd extracted from his left fist, a bright steel cube, measuring about an inch across each side, but it felt lighter than if it were solid metal. Five of the faces looked absolutely bare. The sixth had a round button recessed in it. From the way they looked at it, neither Pop nor the girl had the faintest idea of what it was.

I certainly hadn't." "'Had he pushed the button?' the girl asked. Her voice was throaty but unexpectedly refined, as if she'd done no talking at all, not even to herself, since coming to the Deathlands, and so retained the cultured intonations she'd had earlier, whenever and wherever that had been. It gave me a funny feeling, of course, because they were the first words I'd heard her speak. Not from the way he was holding it, I told her. The button was pointed up toward his thumb, but the thumb was on the outside of his fingers.

I felt an unexpected satisfaction, and having expressed myself so clearly, and I told myself not to get childish. The girl slid at her eyes. Don't you push it, Ray, she said. Think I'm nuts, I told her. Meanwhile, sliding the cube into the smaller pocket of my pants, where it fit tight and wouldn't turn sideways, and the button maybe get pressed by ass. accident. The tingling in my right arm was almost unbearable now, but I was getting control over

the muscles again. Pushing that button, I added, might melt what's left of the plane or blow us all up. It never hurts to emphasize that you may have another weapon in your possession, even if it's just a suicide bomb. There was a man pushed another button once, said Pop softly and reflectively. His gaze went far out over the Deathlands. and took in a good half of the horizon. And he slowly shook his head. Then his face brightened.

Did you know, Ray, he said, that I actually met that man? Long afterwards, you don't believe me, I know, but I actually did. Tell you about it some other time. I almost said, Thanks, Pop, for sparing me at least for a while. But I was afraid that would set him off again. Besides, it wouldn't have been quite true. I've heard other buggers tell the yarn of how they met,

and invariably rubbed out, the actual guy who pushed the button or buttons that set the fusion missiles blasting toward their targets. But I felt a sudden curiosity as to what Pops' version of the yarn would be. Oh, well, I could ask him some other time, if we both lived that long. I started to check the pilot's pockets. My right hand could help a little now. Those looked like me Burns got there, lady. I heard Pop tell the girl.

He was right. There were blisters easy to see on three of the fingertips. "'I've got some salve that's pretty good,' he went on, and some clean cloth. "'I could put on a bandage for you if you wanted. If your hands started to feel poisoned, you could always tell Ray here to slip a knife in me.' Pop was a cute guesser, you had to admit. I reminded myself that it was Pop's business to play up to both of us, charm being the secret weapon of all scroungers.

The girl gave a hoarse little laugh. Very well, she said. But we will use my salve. I know it works for me. And she started to lead Pop to where we'd hidden our things. I'll go with you, I told him standing up. It didn't look like we were going to have any more murders today. Pop had got through the preliminary ingratiations pretty well,

and the girl and me had had our catharsis, but that would be no excuse for any such stupidity as letting the two of them get near my 38. Strolling to the cave and back, I ease the situation a bit more by saying, That scream, you la love, Pop, really helped. I don't know what gave you the idea, but thanks. Oh, that, he said, forget about it. I won't, I told him. You may say you've quit killing, but helped on a due in today.

Ray, he said a little solemnly, if it'll make you feel any happier, I'll take a bit of responsibility for every murder that's been done since the beginning of time. i looked at him for a while then pop you're not by any chance the religious type i asked suddenly lord no he told us that struck me as a satisfactory answer god preserve me from their religious type we have quite a few of those in the deathlands it generally means that they are trying to convert you to something before they kill you or sometimes afterwards we completed our errands i felt a lot more secure with old financier's friend strapped to my middle mother is wonderful but she is not enough i dawdled over inspecting the pilot's pockets partly to give my right hand some time to come back all the way and to tell the truth i didn't much enjoy the job a corpse especially such a handsome cadaver as this just didn't go with pop's brand of light patter pop did up the girl's hand in high style bandaging each finger separately and then persuading her to put on a big left-hand work glove he took out of his small pack lost the right he explained which was the only one i ever used anyway never knew until now why i kept this how does it feel alice i might have known he'd worm her name out of her it occurred to me that pop's ideas of scrounging might extend to alice's favors the urge doesn't die out when you get old they tell me not completely He'd also helped her replace the knife on her stump with the hook.

By that time, I'd poked into all the pilot's pockets I could get at without stripping him, and found nothing but three irregularly shaped blobs of metal, still hot to the touch, under the chart spots, of course. I didn't want the job of stripping him. Someone else could do a little work, I told myself. I've been bothered by bodies before, as who hasn't, I suppose. But this one was really beginning to make me sick. Maybe I was cracking up.

It occurred to me. Murder is a very wearying business, as all Deathlanders know, and although some crack earlier than others, all crack in the end. I must have been showing how I was feeling, because, cheer up, Ray, Pop said. You and Alice have done a big murder. I'd say the subject was six foot ten, so you ought to be happy. You've drawn a blank on his pockets, but they're still the plane. Yeah, that's right, I said, brightening.

a little. There's still the stuff in the plane. I knew there were some items I couldn't hope for, like 38 shells, but there'd be food and other things. "'N-uh, Pop corrected me. I said the plane. You may have thought it's wrecked, but I don't. Have you taken a real gander at it? It's worth doing, believe me.' I jumped up. My heart was suddenly pounding. I was glad of an excuse to get away from the body, but there was a lot more in my feelings than that. I was filled with an excitement, to which I didn't want to give a name because it would make the letdown too great.

One of the wide stubby wings of the plain raking downwards so that its tip almost touched the concrete had hidden the undercarriage of the fuselage from our view. Now coming around the wing I saw that there was no undercarriage. I had to drop to my hands and knees and scan around with my cheek next to the wing. to the concrete before I believed it. The wrecked plane was at all points at least six inches off the ground. I got to my feet again. I was shaking. I wanted to talk, but I couldn't. I grabbed the leading edge of the wing to stop from falling. The whole body of the plane gave a fraction of an inch, and then resisted my leaning weight with lazy power, just like a garroscope.

"'Antigravity!' I croaked, though you couldn't have heard. heard me two feet. Then my voice came back. Pop, Alice, they got anti-gravity. Antigravity! And it's working! Alice had just come around the wing and was facing me. She was shaking, too, and her face was white like I knew mine was. Pop was politely standing off a little to one side, watching us curiously. Told you you'd won a great prize, he said in his matter-of-fact way. Alice went her lips.

"'Ray,' she said. We can get away." Just those four words, but they did it. Something in me unlocked, no, exploded, describes it better. We can go places, I almost shouted. Beyond the dust, she said. Mexico City, South America. She was forgetting the Deathlander's cynical article of belief that the dust never ends,

but then so was I. It made a difference whether or not you've got a means of doing something. No, I topped her with, the Indies, Hong Kong, Bombay, Egypt, Bermuda, the French Riviera. Bullfights and clean beds, she burst out with. Restaurants, swimming pools, bathrooms, skin diving, I took it up with as hysterical as she was. Road races and roulette tables. Bentleyes and Porsches. Aircoops and DC-4s and comets.

Martini's and hashish and ice cream sodas. Hot food, fresh coffee, gambling, smoking, dancing, music drinks! I was going to add women, but then I thought of how hard-bitten little Alice would look beside the dream creatures I had in mind. I tactfully suppressed the word, but I file the idea away. I don't think either of us knew exactly what we were saying. Alice in particular I don't believe was old enough to have experienced almost any of the things the words referred to.

They were mysterious symbols of long, interdicted delights spewing out of us. Ray, Alice said, hurrying to me, let's get aboard. Yes, I said eagerly, and then I saw a little problem. The door to the plane was a couple of feet above our heads. Whoever hoisted himself up first, or got hoisted up, as would have to be the case with Alice on account of her hand, would be momentarily at the other's mercy. I guess it occurred to Alice, too, because she stopped and looked at her at me, it was a little like the old teaser about the fox, the goose, and the corn.

Maybe, too, we were both a little scared the plane was booby-trapped. Pop solved the problem in the direct way I might have expected of him, by stepping quietly between us, giving a light leap, catching hold of the curving sill, chining himself on it and scrambling up into the plane so quickly that we'd hardly have had time to do anything about it if we'd wanted to. Pop couldn't be much more than a bantam weight, even with it. with all his knives, the plane sagged an inch and then swung up again. As Pop disappeared from view, I backed off, reaching for my thirty-eight, but a moment later he

stuck out his head and grinned down at us, resting his elbows on the sill. Come on up, he said, it's quite a place, I promise not to push any buttons till you get here, though there's whole regiments of em." I grinned back at Pop and gave Alice a boost up. She didn't like it, but she could see it had to be her next. She hooked onto the sill, and Pop caught hold of her left wrist below the big glove and heaved. Then it was my turn. I didn't like it.

I didn't like the idea of those two buggers poised above me while my hands were helpless on the sill. But I thought, Pops a nut. You can trust a nut, at least a little ways, though you can't trust nobody else. I heaved myself up. It was strange to feel the plain giving and then bracing itself like something alive. It seemed to have no trouble accepting our combined weights, which, after all, was hardly more than half again the pilots.

Inside the cabin was pretty small, but as Pop had implied, oh my, everything looked soft and smoothly curved, like you imagine your insides being, and almost everything was a restful, dull silver. The general shape of it was something like the inside of an egg, forward, which was the larger end were a couple of screens and a wide viewport and some small dials in the button brigades Pop had mentioned lined up like blank typewriter keys, but enough for writing Chinese. Just after the instrument panel were two very comfortable-looking strange low seats. They seemed to be facing backwards until I realized that they were meant to be knelt into.

The occupant I could see would sort of sprawl forward his hands free for button-pushing and such. There were spongy chin-rests. Aft was a tiny instrument panel, and a kind of sideways seat, not nearly so fancy. The door by which we'd entered was to the side, a little aft. I didn't see any indications of cabinets or fixed storage spaces of any kind, but somehow, stuck to the walls here and there, were quite a few smooth, blobby packages, mostly dull silver, too, some large, some small, felices and handbags, you.

you might say. All in all, it was a lovely cabin, and more than that it seemed lived in. It looked as if it had been shaped for and maybe by one man. It had a personality you could feel, a strong but warm personality of its own. Then I realized whose personality it was. I almost got sick, so close to it I started telling myself it must be something anti-gravity did to your stomach. but it was all too interesting to let you get sick right away.

Pop was poking into two of the large mound-shaped cases that were sitting loose and opened on the right-hand seat, as if ready for emergency use. One had a folded something with straps on it that was probably a parachute. The second had I judged a thousand or more of the inch cubes, such as I'd pryed out of the pilot's hand, all neatly stacked in a cubicle box inside the soft outer bag. You could see the one cube gap where he'd taken the one.

I decided to take the rest of the bags off the walls and open them, if I could figure out how. The others had the same idea, but Alice had to take off her hook and put on her pliers, before she could make progress. Pop helped her. There was room enough for us to do these things without crowding each other too closely. By the time Alice was all set to go, I discovered the trick of getting the bags off. You couldn't pull them away from the walls. matter what force you used—at least I couldn't. And you couldn't even slide them straight

along the walls, but if you just gave them a gentle counterclockwise twist, they came off like nothing. Twisting them clockwise glued them back on. It was very strange. But I told myself that if these boys could generate anti-gravity fields, they could create screwy fields of other sorts. It also occurred to me to wonder if these boys came from Earth. The pilot had looked human enough, but these accomplishments didn't. Not by my standards for human achievement in the age of the debtors. At any rate, I had to admit to myself that my pet term cultural queer did not describe to my satisfaction, members of a culture which could create things like this cabin. Not that I liked making the admission. It's hard to admit an exception to a pet gripe

against things. The excitement of getting down and opening the Christmas packages saved me from speculating too much along these, or any other lines. I hit a minor jackpot right away. In the same bag were a compass, a catalytic pocket lighter, a knife with a sawtooth back edge that made my affection for mother waver, a dust mask, what looked like a compact water filtration unit, and several other items adding up to a deluxe Deathland Survival Kit. There were some goggles in the kit I didn't savvy,

until I put them on and surveyed the landscape out the viewport. A nearby dust drift I knew to be hot glowed green as death in the slightly smoky lenses. Wow. These specks had Geiger counters beat a mile, and I privately bet myself they worked at night. I stuck them in my pocket quick. We found bunches of tiny electronic parts. I think they were. Spools of magnetic tape, but nothing to play it on.

Reels of very narrow, film with frames much too small to see anything at all un-magnified. About three thousand cigarettes in unlabeled transparent packs of twenty, we lit up quick, using my new lighter, a picture book that didn't make much sense, because the views might have been of tissue sections or star fields we couldn't quite decide, and there were no captions to help. A thin book with rice-paper pages covered with Chinese characters. That was a puzzler.

A thick book with nothing but columns of figures, all zeros and ones and nothing else, some tiny chisels, and a mouth organ. Pop Hood made a point of just helping in the hunt appropriated that last item. I might have known he would, I told myself. Now we could expect turkey and the straw at odd moments. Alice found a whole bag of what were women's things, judging from the frilliness of the garments included. She set aside some squeeze packs and little gadgets and elastic items right away, but she didn't take any of the clothes. I caught her measuring some kind of transparent

shammies against herself when she thought we weren't looking. It was for a girl maybe six sizes bigger. And we found food, cans of food that was heated up inside by the time you got the top rolled off, though the outside could still be cool to the touch. Cans of Bones steak, boneless chops, cream soup, peas, carrots, and fried potatoes. They weren't labeled at all, but you could generally guess the contents from the shape of the can. Eggs that heated when you touched them and were soft-boiled evenly and barely firm by the time you had the shell broke, and small plastic bottles of strong coffee that heated up hospitably too. In this case the tops did a five-second hesitation in the middle of your unscrewing them.

At that point, as you can imagine, we let the rest of the packages go, and had ourselves a feast. The food ate even better than it smelled. It was real hard for me not to gorge. Then as I was slurping down my second bottle of coffee, I happened to look out the viewport and see the pilot's body and the darkening puddle around it, and the coffee began to taste well, not bad, but sickening. I don't think it was guilty conscience. Deathlanders outgrow those, if they ever have them to start with.

Loaners don't keep consciences. It takes cultures to give you those and make them work. Artistic inappropriateness is the closest I can come to describing what bothered me. Whatever it was, it made me feel lousy for a minute. About the same time, Alice did an odd thing with the last of her coffee. She slopped it on a rag and used it to wash her face. I guess she'd caught a reflection of herself with the blood smears. She didn't eat any more after that either.

Pop kept on chomping away, a slow feeder and appreciative. To be doing something I started to inspect the instrument panel, and right away I was all excited again. The two screens were what got me. They showed shadowy maps, one of North America, the other of the world. The first one was a whole lot like the map I'd been imagining earlier. Faint colors marked the small, civilized areas. including one in eastern Canada, and another in Upper Michigan, that must be countries I didn't know about,

and the Deathlands were real dark, just as I'd always maintained they should be. South of Lake Michigan was a brightly luminous green point that must be where we were, I decided, and for some reason the colored areas representing Los Alamos and Atlantic Highlands were glowing brighter than the others. They had an active luminosity. Los Alamos was blue, Alta High, Vylands. island. Los Alamos was shown having more territory than I expected. Savannah Fortress, for that matter, was a whole lot bigger than I'd have made it, pushing out pseudopods west and northeast along the coast, though its red didn't have the extra glow, but its growth pattern

reeked of imperialism. The whirl-screen showed dim color patches, too, but for the moment I was more interested in the other. The button armies marched right up to the lower edge of the screen, and right away I got the crazy hunch that they were connected with spots on the map, push the button for a certain spot, and the plane would go there. Why, one button even seemed to have a faint violet nimbus around it, or else my eyes were going bad, as if to say, push me and we go to Atlantic Highlands. A crazy notion, as I say, and no sensible way to handle the plane's navigation according to any standards I could imagine.

But then, as I've also said, this plane, didn't seem to be designed according to any standards, but rather in line with one man's ideas, including his whims. At any rate, that was my hunch about the buttons and the screens. It tantalized, rather than helped, for the only button that seemed to be marked in any way was the one, guessing by color, for Atlantic Highlands. And I certainly didn't want to go there. Like Alamos, Alta High, has the reputation for being a mysteriously dangerous place.

Not openly mean and death-on-death-landers like Walla Walla or Porter, but buggers who swaying too close to Alta High have a way of never turning up again. You never expect to see again two out of three buggers who pass in the night, but for three out of three to keep disappearing is against statistics. Alice was beside me now, scanning things over, too, and from the way she frowned and what-not, I gathered she had caught my hunch and also shared my puzzlement. Now was the time all right, when we needed an instruction manual, and not one in Chinese, neither. Pops swallowed a mouthful and said,

Yep, now it'd be a good time to have him back for a minute to explain things a bit. Oh, don't take offense, Ray. I know how it was for you and for you, too, Alice. I know the both of you had to murder him. It wasn't a matter of free choice. It's the way us Deathlanders are built. Just the same. It'd be nice to have a way of killing them and keeping them on.

hand at the same time. I remember feeling that way after murdering the Alamosa I told you about. You see, I come down with a very fever-eyed fate and almost died of it, while the man who could have cured me easy wouldn't do nothing but perfume the landscape with the help of a gang of anaerobic bacteria. Stubborn single-minded cuss! The first part of that oration started up my sickness again and irked me not a little. Damn it! What right had Pop to talk about how all us Deathlanders had to kill? Which was true enough, and by itself, would have made any cotton to him, if, as he claimed

earlier, he'd been able to quit killing. Pop was an old hypocrite, I told myself. He'd helped murder the pilot. He'd admitted as much. And Alice and Me'd be better off if we'd better off if we'd bettered the both of them down together. But then the second part of what Pop said, so made me want to feel pleasantly sorry for myself and laugh at the same time that I forgave the old geezer.

Practically everything Pop said had that reassuring touch of insanity about it. So it was Alice who said, Shut up, Pop, and rather casually at that, and she and me went on to speculate and then to argue about which buttons we ought to push, if any, and in what order. Why not just start anywhere and keep pushing them one after another? You're going to have to eventually. may as well start now was Pop's light-hearted contribution to the discussion.

Got to take some chances in this life. He was sitting in the back seat and still nibbling away like a white-topped mangy old squirrel. Of course, Alice and me knew more than that. We kept making guesses as to how the buttons worked, and then backing up our guesses with hot language. It was a little like two savages trying to decide how to play chess by looking at the pieces. And then the old escaped Paradise theme took hold of us again, and we studied the colored blobs on the world screen, trying to decide which would have the fanciest accommodations for Blase X-Murderers.

On the North American screen, too, there was an intriguing pink patch in southern Mexico that seemed to take in old Mexico City and Acapulco, too. Quit talking and start pushing, Pop prodded us. That way you're getting nowhere fast. I can't stand hesitation at rouse my nerves. Alice thought you ought to push ten buttons at once, using both hands, and she was working out patterns for me to try. But I was off on a kick about how we should darken the plane to see if any of the other buttons glowed beside the one with the ultra-high violet.

Look here. You killed a big man to get this plane. Pop broke in, coming up behind me. Are you going to use it for discussion groups? Are you going to fly it? Quiet, I told him. I'd got a new hunch, and was using the dark glasses to scan the instrument panel. They didn't show anything.

Damn it, I can't stand this anymore. Pops said and reached a hand and arm between us, and brought it down on about 50 buttons, I judge. The other buttons just went down and up, but the Alta High button went down and stayed down. The violet blob of Alta High on the screen got even brighter in the next few moments. The door closed with a tiny thud. we took off end of chapter three chapter four of the knight of the long knives by fritz liber this labor box recording is in the public domain chapter four any man who deals in murder must have very incorrect ways of thinking and truly inaccurate principles thomas de quency in murder considered as one of the fine arts we took off fast, with the plane swinging to beat hell.

Alice and me were 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 served 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 leveled 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 chin rest 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 ultra-high 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 wasn't taking too great an interest in things, as I idly watched the old geyser rummaging around the cabin for something that got misplaced in the shake-up. Eventually he found it. A small ammon-shaped can. He opened it. Sure enough it turned out to have ammons in it. He fitted himself in the back seat and much them one at a time. Shh! 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 to at least have broken 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 plowed along silently through the orange soup, though there was really no way to tell

it was moving now, until a skewy spindle-shaped loomed up ahead of us and shot back over the viewport. I think it was a vulture. I don't know how vultures managed 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 spongy stuff and began to. 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 somewhere. 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 cherry 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 down except for maybe one, which we didn't try at first for a special reason. We looked for other controls, sticks, levers, petals, 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 ultra-high button had set us on some kind of irreversible automatic. I couldn't imagine the why of gimmicking I plane's controls like that, except 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 seeming idiotic Petulance of his pushing all the buttons have been a shrewd cover for pushing the ultra-high 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 Altah High button, that 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 Earth. Alice expressed it by saying, My namesake was always a little too quick at responding to those drink-me-cues. I supposed 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 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 American 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 Alta High, with about the speed of the tip of the minute hand on a wristwatch, 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 done, 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 didn'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 and 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 Alta High 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 Alta High or we could go back where we started from. There was no third possibility.

It was a little hard to take. You think of a plain 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 were. 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.

Track 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 damn it, 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 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 altahy button again, and as the planes started to swing, she looked at me defiantly, as if to say I reversed 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 alimosa got to me to. 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 altar-high for me, just bugland. My mind died, though not my memory. By the time I 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 wondering 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 in for religion. But as it happens, I hunted me up a couple of murderers, guys who were worse cases than 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 assidly.

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. In the long run, murder is even harder. I decided to interrupt this idle chatter, since we were now definitely headed for Alta High, 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 tabbed in my mind. "'Why are you on this plain, Pop?' I asked sharply. "'What do you figure on getting out of Alice and me, and I don't mean the free meals?' grinned. His teeth were white and even, plates, of course. "'Wa, 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 him, to keep myself straight. Otherwise I might start killing them again, and I'm not up to that anymore.'

"'Oh, so you get your kicks at second-hand, you old peeper,' Alice put in. "'Quit lying, Pop,' I said, about having quit killing, for one thing. In my books, which happened to be the old books in this case, the accomplices 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 have 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 conraddery sentiment. I killed every last one of them, 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 just had 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 quick killing, for all I know. I mean, you may have quick 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 plain pup. What's the bounty Altaxie gives you for each 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 stumped 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 hapastances to make that theory whole water, but you sure can't 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 while we were too busy with the pilot to notice and just pretend to be coming from the cracking plant? Aren'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 you saw.

It's quite a bright idea, right? 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 said, 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 hamstring 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 would 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 bloodlet 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 you both are you both are you both are you're not different and being such you both know that there's nothing in murder in the long run it satisfies the hunger and maybe you get 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 urge is there it's an overpowering urge and you've got nothing to oppose it with you feel the big grief and the little resentment the dust is eaten at your bones you can't stand the city squares the porterites and mantanors 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 take it. At least you 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 planned 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, slice the silence. We're dreaming then. She said, we're 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 washita and give ourselves up i might lose more than my right hand at washton this time that was just on suspicion or altahe hi i added meaningfully are you expecting us to admit we're murderers when we get to altahe pop the old geezer smiled and thinned his eyes now that wouldn't accomplish

as much, would it? Most places they just string you up, maybe after tickling your pain nerves a bit, or if it was Mantano, they might put you in a cage and feed your 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 the 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 or 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 Alta High or Pop let down his guard. I dig you on the city squares.

I call them cultural queers, and what sort of screwed up fat heads they are. But just the same for a man to quit killing. He's got to quit lone wolf in 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.

Nutsis 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 reinterpretation. 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. 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 in prisons? Did it ever prove those were the right answers for murderers? As for religion now, some of us who have 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 Pops 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 helped those who wanted to be helped. They had semi-permanent meeting places where they tried to get together at prearranged 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 murder it again, but some of these had come back after a while,

more determined than ever to make a go of it. We welcomed them, 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 bloodied yet we draw the line at, no matter how fine they are. Also, we have a lot of fun at our meetings,

papa suret us you never saw such high times nobody's got a right to go gloom it around or put a long face just because he's done a killing or two religion or no religion prides 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 that 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. Popp 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 chasely beside their finished victims and playing dead for a couple of hours. The ones who weren't so chased. The ones who could only do their killings when they were dressed in 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,

redheads, 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 of sex, the sticklers and the sloppy joes, the artists and the butchers, the accents stiletto types, the compulsive and the repulsives. Honestly, Pop's portraits of the 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 lives, your own business, I felt, as close as your own guts, and no jokes good enough to justify revealing a knot of it. Not that we talked about nothing but murder while we were bulleting along toward Alta High? The conversation was free-wheeling, and we got into 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 anti-gravity field that was key 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 Curly Q stayed in the air, wherever you put it, and when you moved it, you could feel the faintest sort of Gyro It was very strange. Pop pointed out it was a little like magnetism. A germ riding on an iron filling 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 would 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 anti-gravity plane should have even the stubbiest wings or a jet for that matter. For we remembered now we'd notice the tubes, and I said it was maybe just a reserve system, in case the anti-gravity 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 about the anti-gravity 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 you. 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 sparling it. We guessed around a little, though, about where the plane came from. Pop said Alamos. I said Alta-hi.

Alice said why not from both? Why couldn't Alamos and Alta-high 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 Alta-Hai 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 guess 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 Alta-high.

I looked out of 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. If the fact is, I welcomed him into him. 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 him. 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 poison-ins 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 soon. sooner be chopped up, then 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 American 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 Alta High. 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 defensive. 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 describe it. Practically Boston. Who are you and where is Grail? Come in, Grail.

I knew well enough who Grail must be, or rather have been. I looked at Pop. And Alice. Pop grinned. Maybe I might 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 Grale, 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 Grale 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 block. 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—near 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." End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 of the Night of the Long Knives by Fritz-Liber. This Lieber-Vox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 5 And we are here, as on a darkling plane, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. I am not going to try to describe point by point, all that happened the next half-hour, because there was too much of it. And it involved all three of us, sometimes doing different things at the same time, and although we were told a lot of things, we were seldom, if ever, told the why of them, and through it all was the constant impression that we were dealing with human beings. I almost left out the human, and I'm not absolutely sure whether I shouldn't. a vastly greater scope and probably intelligence, too, than ourselves.

And that was just the basic confusion to give it a name. After a while the situation got more difficult, as I'll try to tell in due course. To begin with, it was extremely weird to plunge from a rather leisurely confab about a fairy-tale fellowship of nun practicing murderers into a shooting war between a violet blob and a dark-red puddle on a shadowy fluorescent map. The voice didn't throw any great shining lights on this topic, because after the first and perhaps unguarded revelation, we learned little more of the war between Alta High and Savannah Fortress and nothing of the reasons behind it. Presumably Savannah was the aggressor,

reaching out north after the conquest of Birmingham. But even that was just a guess. It is hard to describe how shadowy it all felt to me. There were some minutes while my mind kept mixing up the whole thing with what I'd read long ago about the Civil War. Savannah was Lee, Alta High was Grant, and we had been dropped spraying into the middle of the Second Battle of the Wilderness. Apparently the Savannah Plains had some sort of needle ray as part of their armament. At any rate I was warned to watch out for swinging. lines in the haze, like straight strings of pink stars, and later told to aim at the sources

of such lines. And naturally I guessed that the steel cubes must be some crucial weapon for the Alta High, or ammunition for a weapon, or parts for some essential instrument like a giant computer, but the voice ignored my questions on that point, and didn't fall into the couple of crude conversational traps I tried to set. We were to drop the cubes when told that was all. Pop had the box of them closed again and rigged to the parachute. He took over that job because Alice and me were busy with other things when the instructions

on that came through, and he was told how to open the door of the plane for the drop. You just held your hand steadily on a point beside the door, but as I say, that was all. Naturally it occurred to me that once we had made the drop, Alta High would have no more use for us, and might simply let us be destroyed by Savannah, or otherwise, perhaps want us to be destroyed, so that it might be wisest for us to refuse to make the drop when the signal came, and hang on to those myriad steel cubes, as our only bargaining point. Still, I could see no advantage to refusing before the signal came. I'd have liked to discuss the point with Alice and maybe pop, too, but apparently everything

we said even whispered could be overheard by Alta High. We never did determine, incidentally, whether Alta High could see into the cabin of the plane also. I don't believe they could, though they sure had it bug for sound. All in all, we found out almost nothing about Alta High. In fact, three witless germs, traveling in a cabin in an iron filing, wasn't a bad description for us at all. As I often say of my deductive faculties, think, schmink. But Alta High, always meaning, of course, the personality behind the voice from the screen,

found out all it wanted about us, and apparently knew a good deal to start with. For one thing, they must have been tracking our plane for some time, because they guessed it was on automatic, and that we could reverse its course but nothing else. Though they seemed to be, under the impression that we could reverse its course to Los Alamos, not the cracking plant. Here, obviously, I did get a nugget of new data, though it was just about the only one. For a moment, the voice from the screen got real unguarded, anxious as it seemed. Do you know if it is true that they have stopped dying at Los Alamos? Or are they merely broadcasting that to cheer us up? I answered, oh yes, they're all fine, to that. But I couldn't

and it made it very convincing, because the next thing I knew the voice was getting me to admit that we'd only boarded the plane somewhere in the central Deathlands. I even had to describe the cracking plant and freeway and gas tanks. I couldn't think of a lie that mightn't get us into as much trouble as the truth, and the voice said, oh, did Grail stay there? And I said, yes, and brace myself to do some more admitting or some heavy lying as the inspiration took me. But the voice continued to skirt around the question of what exactly had happened to Grale. I guess they knew well enough we'd bumped him off, but didn't bring it up because they needed

our cooperation. They were handling us like children or savages, you see. One pretty amazing point. Altahai apparently knew something about Pops' fairy tale fellowship of non-practicing murderers, because when he had to speak up, while he was getting instructions on preparing stuff for the drop, the voice said, excuse me, but you sound like one of those M.A. boys? Murderer is anonymous. Pop had said some of their boys called their unorganized organization. Yep, I am. Pop admitted uncomfortably. Well, a word of advice, then, or perhaps I only mean gossip. The screen said, for once getting on a sidetrack, most of our people do not believe you are serious about it, although you may think that you are. Our skeptics, which includes

all but a very few of us, split quite evenly between those who think that the MA spirit is a terminal psychotic illusion, and those who believe it is an elaborate ruse in preparation for some concerted attack on cities by Deathlanders. Can't say that I blame the either of them, was Pop's only comment. I think I'm nuts myself, and a murderer forever. Alice glared at him for that admission, but it seemed to do us no damage. Pop really did seem out of his depth, though, during this part of our adventure. More out of his depth than even Alice and me.

I mean, as if he could only really function in the Deathland, with Deathlanders and wanted to get anything else over quickly. I think one reason Pop was that way was that he was feeling very intensely something I was feeling myself. A sort of sadness and bewilderment that beings as smart as the voice from the screen sounded should still be fighting wars. Murder, as you must know by now, I can understand and sympathize with deeply. But war?

No. Oh, I can understand culture. Queers fighting city squares, and even get a kick out of it and whoop them on. But these Alta-high and Alamos folks seemed a different sort of cat altogether, though I'd only come to that point of view today, the kind of cat that ought to have outgrown war or thought its way around it. Maybe Savannah Fortress had simply forced the war on them, and they had to defend themselves. I hadn't contacted any Savanans.

They might be as blood-simple as the porter-writes. Still, I don't know that it's always a good excuse that somebody else forced you into war. That sort of justification can keep on until the end of time. But who's a germ to judge? A minute later I was feeling doubly like a germ and a very lowly one, because the situation had just got more difficult and depressing, too, the thing that happened that I said I'd tell you about in due course. The voice was just repeating its instructions to pop on making the drop,

when it broke off of a sudden, and a second voice came in, a deep voice with a sort of European accent, not Chinese, oddly, not talking to us, I think, but to the first voice and overlooking or not caring that we could hear. Also tell them, the second voice said, that we will blow them out of the sky, the instant they stop obeying us. If they should hesitate to make the drop, or if they should put a finger on the button that reverses their course,

then poof, such brutes understand only the language of force. Also, warn them that the blocks are atomic grenades that will blow them out of the sky, too, if— Dr. Kavalski, will you permit me to point out— The first voice interrupted, getting as close to expressing irritation as I imagined it ever allowed itself to do. Then both voices cut off abruptly, and the screen was silent for ten seconds or so. I guess the first voice thought it wasn't nice for us to overhear Alta-high bickering with

itself, even if the second voice didn't give a damn any more than a farmer would mind the pigs overhearing him squabble with his hard man. Of course, this guy seemed to overlook that we were killer pigs. But there wasn't anything we could do in that line just now except get burned. When the screen came on again, it was just the first voice talking once more, but it had something to say that was probably the result of a rapid conference in compromise. Attention, everyone. I wish to inform you that the plane in which you are traveling can be exploded, melted

in the air, rather, if we activate a certain control at this end. We will not do so now or subsequently if you make the drop of the drop of you. when we give the signal, and if you remain on your present course until then. Afterwards you will be at liberty to reverse your course and escape as best you may. Let me re-emphasize that when you told me you had taken over for Grail, I accepted that assertion in full faith, and still so accepted. Is that all fully understood? We all told him, yes, though I didn't imagine we sounded very happy about it, even Hop.

However, I did get that funny feeling again that the voice was being really sincere, an illusion, I supposed, but still a comforting one. Now while all of these things were going on, believe it or not, and while the plane continued to bullet through the orange haze, which hadn't shown any foreign objects in it so far, thank God, even vultures, let alone straight strings of pink stars, I was receiving a cram-coercion gurnery. Do you wonder I don't try to tell this part of my story consecutively? It turned out that Alice had been brilliantly right about one thing.

If you pushed some of the buttons simultaneously in patterns of five, they unlocked, and you could play on them like organ keys. Two sets of five keys, played properly, would rig out a site just in front of the viewport and let you aim and fire the plane's main gun in any forward direction. There was a rearwood firing gun, too, that you aimed by changing over the world's screen to a rear-view TV window, but we didn't get around to mastering that one. In fact, in spite of my special talents, it was all I could do to achieve a beginner's control over the main gun, and I wouldn't have managed even that, except that Alice, from

the thinking she'd been doing about patterns of five, was quick to understand from the voices descriptions which buttons were meant. She couldn't work them herself, of course, what with her stomp and burnt hand, but she could point them out for me. After twenty minutes of drill, I was a gunner of sorts, sprawled in the right hand kneeling seat, and intently scanning the onrushing orange haze, which at last was beginning to change toward the bronze of evening. If something showed up in it, I'd be able to make a stab at getting a shot in, not that I knew what my gun fired. The voice wasn't giving away any unnecessary data. Naturally, I had asked why the voice didn't teach me to fly the plane, so that I could

maneuver in case of attack. And naturally the voice had told me it was out of the question, much too difficult, and besides, they wanted us on a known course so they could plan better for the drop and recovery. I think maybe the voice would have given me some hints. and maybe even told me more about the steel cubes, too, and how much danger we were in from them, if it hadn't been for the second voice, which presumably had issued from a being who was keeping watch to make sure, among other things, that the first voice didn't get soft-hearted. So there I was, being a front gunner. Actually a part of me was getting a big bang out of it, from antique Bankers Special to Needle Cannon, or whatever it was.

But at the same time, another part of me was disgusted with the idea of acting like I belonged to a live culture, even a smart, unqueer one, and working in a war, even just so was to get out of it fast, while a third part of me, one that I normally keep down, was simply horrified. Pop was back by the door with the box and shoot, ready to make the drop. Allos had no duties for the moment, but she suddenly started gathering up food cans and, packing them in one bag. I couldn't figure out at first what she had in mind. Orderly housewife wouldn't be exactly my description of her occupational personality. Then, of course, everything had to happen at once. The voice said,

Make the drop. Alice crossed her pop and thrust out the bag of cans toward him, writhing her lips in silent talk to tell him something. She had a knife in her burnt hand, too. But I didn't have time to do any lip-reading, because just then, A glittering pink asterisk showed up in the darkening haze ahead, a whole half-dozen straight lines spreading out from a blank central spot as if a superfast gigantic spider had laid in the first strands of its web. When whistled at the door of the plain started to open, I fought to center my sight on the blank central spot which drifted toward the left.

One of the straight lines grew dazzlingly bright. I heard Alice whisper fiercely, Drop these, and the part of my mind that couldn't be applied to Gunnery instantly deduced that she'd had some last-minute inspiration about dropping a bunch of cans instead of the steel cubes. I got the sight-centered and held down the firing combo. The thought flashed to me, It's a city you're firing at, not a plane, and I flinched. The dazzlingly pink line dipped down toward me.

Behind me the sound of a struggle, Alice snarling and pop, giving a grunt. Then all at once a scream from Alice, a big whoosh of wind, a flash way ahead where I'd aimed, a spatter of hot metal inside the cabin, a blinding spot in the middle of the world screen, a searing beam inches from my neck, an electric shock that lifted me from my seat and ripped at my consciousness. When I came to, if I really ever was out, seconds later at most, there were no more pink lines. The haze was just its disgustingly tawny evening self, with black spots that were only after images.

The cabin stunk of ozone, but wind funneling through a hole in the one-time whirl-screen, was blowing it out fast enough. Savannah had gotten in one lick all right, and we were falling. The plane was swinging down like a crippled bird. I could feel it, and there was no use kidding myself. But staring at the control panel wouldn't keep us from crashing if that was in the cards. I looked around and there was Pop and Alice glaring at each other across the closing door. He looked mean.

She looked agonized, and was pressing her burnt hand into her side with her elbow, as if he'd stamped on the hand, maybe. I didn't see any blood, though. I didn't see the box and shoot either. Though I did see Alice's bag of groceries, I guessed Pop had made the drop. Now it occurred to me was a bully time for Voice II to melt the plane, if he hadn't already tried. My first thought had been that the splatter of hot metal had come from the savannah craft

spitting us, but there was no way to be sure. I looked around at the viewport in time to see rocks and stunted trees jump out of the haze. Good old ray, I thought always in at the death. But just then the plane took a sickening bounce, as if its anti-gravity had only started to operate within yards of the ground. Another lurching fall and another bounce, less violent. A couple of repetitions of that, each one a little gentler, and then we were sort of bumping along on an even keel, with the rocks and such sliding past fast, about a hundred feet below, I'd judged. We'd been spoiled for altitude work, it seemed, but we could still cripple along

in some sort of low-power repulsion field. I looked at the North American screen and the buttons, wondering if I should start us back west again, or leave us set on Alta High and see what the hell happened. At the moment, I hardly cared what else Savannah did to us. I needn't have wasted the mental energy. The decision was made for me. As I watched the Altahy's button jumped up by itself, and the button for the cracking plant went down, and there was some extra bumping as we swung around. Also the violet patch of Alta High went real dim, and the button for it no longer had a violet nimbus.

The Los Angeles blue went dull, too. The cracking plant dot glowed a brighter green, that was all. All except for one thing. As the violet dimmed, I thought I had to. heard voice one very faintly, not as if speaking directly, but as if the screen had heard and remembered, not a voice, but the fluorescent ghost of one. Thank you, and good luck. End of Chapter 5.

Chapter 6 of the Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Liber. This Libre-Fox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 6 Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other. that perhaps he thought little of at the time thomas de quency and a long merry siege to you sir and roast rat for christmas i responded very out loud and rather to my surprise whar how i hate war that was what pop exploded with he didn't exactly dance in senile rage he was still keeping too sharp a watch on alice but his voice sounded that way "'Damn, you, Pop,' Alice contributed. "'And you too, Ray. We might have pulled something, but you had to go obedience happy.'

Then her anger got the better of her grammar, or maybe Pop and me was corrupting it. "'Damn the both of you!' she finished. "'It didn't make much sense, any of it. We were just cutting loose, I guess, after being scared to say anything for the last half hour. I said to Alice, I don't know what you could have pulled except the chance. pain on us. To Pop, I remarked, You may hate war, but you sure helped that one along. Those grenades you dropped will probably take care of a few hundred savannans.

That's what you always say about me, isn't it? He snapped back. But I don't suppose I should expect any kind or interpretation of my motives. To Alice, he said, I'm sorry I had to slap your burnt finger, sister, but you can't say I didn't warn you about my low-down tactics. Then, to me, again. I do hate War, Ray. It's just murder on a bigger scale, though some of the boys give me an argument there. Then why don't you go preach against war in Alta High in Savannah, Alice demanded, still very hot, but not quite so bitter. Yeah, Pop, how about it? I seconded.

Maybe I should, he said, thoughtful all at once. They sure need it. Then he grinned. Hey, hide this sound. Here the world-famous murder. murder, pop, trumbel, talk against war, wear your steel throat protectors. Pretty good, hey?" We all laughed at that, grudgingly at first, then with the touch of whole-heartedness. I think we all recognized that things weren't going to be very cheerful from here on in, and we better not turn up our noses at the feeblest fun. I guess I didn't have anything very bright in mind. Alice admitted to me, while to pop, she said,

All right, I forgive you for the present. Don't, Pop said with a shudder. I hate to think of what happened to the last bugger, made the mistake of forgiven me. We looked around and took stock of our resources. It was time we did. It was getting dark fast, although we were chasing the sun and there wasn't any cabin lights coming on, and we sure didn't know of any way of getting any. We wotted a couple of satchels into the hole in the whirl-screen without

trying to probe it. After a while it got warmer again in the cabin, and the air was a little less dusty. Presently it started to get too smoky from the cigarettes we were burning, but that came later. We screwed off the walls the few storage bags we hadn't inspected. They didn't contain nothing of consequence, not even a flashlight. I had one last go with the buttons, though there weren't any left with nimbuses on them. The darker it got, the clearer that was. Even the Alta-high button wouldn't push, now that it had lost its violet halo. I tried the gunnery patterns, figuring to put in a little time taking pot-shots at any mountains that turned up. But the buttons that had been responding so well a few minutes ago

refused to budge. Alice suggested different patterns, but none of them worked. The console was really locked. Maybe the shot from Savannah was partly responsible, although Alta-Hai remote locking things was explanation enough. "'The buggers,' I said, "'they didn't have to tie us up this tight. Going east, we at least had a choice, forward or back. Now we got none.' "'Maybe we're just as well off,' Pop said. "'If Alta-Taha had been able to do anything more to us, that is, if they hadn't been siege in, I mean, they'd sure as anything have pulled us in, pulled the plane in, I mean, and

picked us out of it, with a big pair tweez as likely as not. And contrary to your flattering opinion of my preaching, which, by the way, none of the religious boys in my outfit share, they call me that misguided old atheist. I don't think none of us would go over big at Alta High. We had to agree with him there. I couldn't imagine Pop, or Alice, or even me, cutting much of a figure, even if we weren't murder pariahs, with the pack of geniuses that seemed to make up the Alamos crowd. The AA republics, to give them a name, might have their small brain types, but somehow I didn't think so.

There must be more than one Edison, Einstein, it seemed to me, back of anti-gravity and all the wonders in this plane, and the other things we'd gotten hints of. Also, Grail had seemed bred for brains as well as size, even if us small mammals had cooked his goose, and none of the modern countries had more than a few thousand population yet, I was pretty sure, and that hardly left room for a dumbbell class. Finally, too, I got hold of a memory I'd been reaching for the last hour. How, when I was a kid, I'd read about some scientists who learned to talk Mandarin just for kicks. I told Alice and Pop.

And if that's the average, Alamoser's idea of mental recreation, I said, Well, you can see what I mean. I'll grant you they got a monopoly on brains, Pop agreed. Nonsense, though, he added doggedly. Intellectual snobs, was Alice's comment. I know the type, and I detest it. You are some sort of intellectual, aren't you?

Pop told her, which fortunately didn't start a riot. Still, I guess all three of us found it fun to chew over a bit the new slant we'd gotten on two, in a way three, of the great countries of the modern world, and as long as we thought of it as fun, we didn't have to admit the envy and wistfulness that was behind our wisecracks. I said, We've always figured in a general way that Alamos was the remains of a community of scientists and technicians. Now we know the same's true of the Alta High group. They're the Brookhaven survivors.

Manhattan Project, don't you mean? Alice corrected. Nope. That was in Colorado Springs, Pop said with finality. I also pointed out that a community of scientists would educate for technical intelligence, maybe breed for it too, and, being a group picked for higher Q to begin with, They might make startlingly fast progress. You could easily imagine such folk, unimpeded by the boobs,

creating a wonder world in a couple of generations. They got their troubles, though, Pop reminded me, and that led us to speculating about the war we dipped into. Savannah Fortress, we knew, was supposed to be based on some big atomic plants on the river down that way, but its culture seemed to have a fiercer ingredient than a lanker, Alamos. Before we knew it, we were musing almost romantically about the plight of Alta High, besieged by superior and, it was easy to suppose, barbaric forces, and maybe distant Los Alamos,

in a similar predicament. Alice reminded me how the voice had asked if they were still dying out there. For a moment I found myself fiercely proud that I had been able to strike a blow against the evil aggressors. At once, of course, then the revulsion came. This is a hell of a way, I said, for three so-called realists to be moaning about things. Yes, especially when your heroes kicked us out, Alice agreed. Pop chuckled. Yep, he said.

They even took Ray's artillery away from him. You're wrong there, Pop, I said sitting up. I still got one of the grenades. the one the pilot had in his fist. To tell the truth I'd forgotten all about it, and it bothered me a little now to feel it snuggled up in my pocket against my hip-bone where the skin is thin. "'You believe what that old Dutchman said about the steel cubes being atomic grenades?'

Pop asked me. "'I don't know,' I said. He sure didn't sound enthusiastic about telling us the truth about anything. But for that matter he sounded mean enough to tell the truth. truth, figuring we'd think it was a lie. Maybe this is some sort of baby A-bomb with a fuse time like a grenade. I got it out and hefted it. How about I press the button and drop it out the door? Then we'll know. I really felt like doing it. Restless, I guess. Don't be a fool, Ray, Alice said. Don't tense up, I won't, I told her. At the same time, I made myself the

little promise that if I ever got to feeling restless, that is restless and bad, I'd just go ahead and punch the button and see what happened. Sort of leave my future up to the gods of the Deathlands, you might say. What makes you so sure it's a weapon? Pop asked. What else could it be, I asked him, that they'd be so hot on getting them in the middle of a war? I don't know for sure, pop said. I've made a guess, but I don't want to tell it now. What I'm getting at, is that you first thought about anything you find in the world outside or in your own mind, is that it's a weapon. Anything worthwhile in your mind is a weapon, Alice interjected with surprising intensity.

You see, Pop said, that's what I mean about the both of you. That sort of thinking's been going on a long time. Caveman picks up a rock and right away asks himself, Who can I brain with this? Doesn't occur to him for several hundred thousand years. to use it to start building a hospital." "'You know, Pop,' I said, carefully tucking the cube back in my pocket, "'you are sort of preachy at times.'

"'Guess I am,' he said. "'How about some grub?' "'It was a good idea. Another few minutes, and we wouldn't have been able to see to eat, though with the cans shaped to tell their contents I guess we'd have managed. It was a funny circumstance that in this wonder-plane we didn't even know how to turn on the light, and a good measure of our general helplessness. We had our little feed, and lit up again, and settled ourselves. I judged it would be an

overnight trip, at least to the cracking plant. We weren't making anything like the speed we had been going east. Pop was sitting in back again, and Alice and I lay half-hitched around on the kneeling seats, which allowed us to watch each other. Pretty soon it got so dark we couldn't see anything of each other but the glowing tips of the cigarettes and a bit of face around the mouth when the person took a deep drag. They were a good idea, those cigarettes, kept us from having ideas about the other person starting to creep around with a knife in his hand. The North American screens still glowed dimly, and we could watch our green dot trying to make

progress. The viewport was dead black at first. there came the faintest sort of bronze blotch that very slowly shifted forward and down, the old moon, of course, going west ahead of us. After a while I realized what it was like. An old Pullman car. I'd traveled in one once as a kid, or especially the smoker of an old Pullman very late at night.

Our crippled anti-gravity working on the irregularities of the ground as they came along below Made the ride rhythmically bumpy, you see. I remember how lonely and strange that old sleeping car had seemed to me as a kid. This felt the same. I kept waiting for a hoot or a whistle. It was the sort of loneliness that settles in your bones and keeps working at you. I recall the first man I ever killed. Pop started to reminisce softly.

Shut up, Alice told him. Don't you ever talk about anything but murder, Pop? guess not he said after all it's the only really interesting topic there is do you know of another it was silent in the cabin for a long time after that then alice said it was the afternoon before my twelfth birthday when they came into the kitchen and killed my father he'd been wise in a way and had us living at a spot where the bombs didn't touch us or the worst fallout But he hadn't counted on the local werewolf gang. He'd just been slicing some bread, homemade from our own wheat. Dad was great on back to nature and all. But he laid down the knife.

Dad couldn't see any object or idea as a weapon, you see. That was his great weakness. Dad couldn't even see weapons as weapons. Dad had a philosophy of cooperation. That was his name for it. That he was going to explain to people. Sometimes I think he was glad of the last war because he believed it would give him his chance. But the werewolves weren't interested in philosophy, and although their knives weren't as sharp as dads, they didn't lay them down.

Afterwards they had themselves a meal with me for dessert. I remember one of them used a slice of bread to sop up blood-like gravy, and another washed his hands and face in the cold coffee. She didn't say anything else for a bit. Pop said softly, "'That was the afternoon, wasn't it, that the fallen angels?' And then just said, my big mouth. "'You were going to say the afternoon they killed God?' Alice asked him. You're right, it was.

They killed God in the kitchen that afternoon. That's how I know he's dead. Afterwards they would have killed me, too, eventually, except— Again, she broke off. This time to say, Pop, do you suppose I can have been thinking about myself as the daughter of God all these years, that that's why everything seems so intense? I don't know, Pop said. The religious boys say we're all children of God, but I don't put much stock in it, or else God sure has some lousy children. Go on with your story.

Well, they would have killed me, too, except the leader took a fancy to me. and got the idea of training me up for a whir-girl or she-wolf-deb or whatever they called it. That was my first experience of ideas as weapons. He got an idea about me, and I used it to kill him. I had to wait three months for my opportunity. I got him so lazy he let me shave him. He bled to death the same way as dead." "'Hemn't Pop commented after a bit.

that was a chiller all right i got to remember to tell it to bill it was somebody killing his mother that got him started alice you had just as good a justification for your first murder as any i remember hearing yes alice said after another pause with just a trace of the old sarcasm creeping back into her voice i don't suppose you think i was right to do it right wrong who knows pop said almost blusteringly sure you were justified in a whole pack of ways anybody that sympathize with you a man often has fine justification for the first murder he commits but as you must know it's not that first murder is always so bad at itself as that it's apt to start you on a killing spree your sense of values gets shifted a tiny bit and never shifts back but you know all that and who am i to tell you anything anyway i've killed men because i didn't like the way they spit and may very well do it again if i don't keep watching myself and come Keep my mind ventilated." "'Well, Pop,' Alice said, "'I didn't always have such dandy justification for my killings. Last one was a moony old physicist.

He fixed me the Geiger counter I carry. A silly old geek. I don't know how he survived so long. Maybe an exile or a runaway. You know, I often attach myself to the elderly do-gooder type like my father was. Or like you, Pop!' Pop nodded. It's good to know yourself, he said.

There was a third pause, and then, although I hadn't exactly been intending to, I said, Alice had justification for her first murder, personal justification that an ape would understand. I had no personal justification at all for mine. Yet I killed about a million people, at a modest estimate. You see, I was the boss of a crew that took care of the hydrogen missile ticketed for Moscow. And when the ticket was finally taken up, I was the one to punch it. My finger on the firing button, I mean. I went on, yeah, Pop.

I was one of the button pushers. There were really quite a few of us, of course. That's why I get such a laugh, out of stories about being or rubbing out the one guy who pushed all the buttons. That's so, Pop said, with only mild-sounding interest. In that case, you ought to know. We didn't get to hear right then. who I ought to know, because I had a fit of coughing, and we realized the cigarette smoke was getting just too thick.

Pop fixed the door, so it was open to crack, and after a while the atmosphere got reasonably okay, though we had to put up with a low, lonely whistling sound. Yeah, I continued. I was the boss of the missile crew, and I wore a very handsome uniform with impressive insignia. Not the bully old stripes I got on my chest now, and I was very young and handsome myself. We were all very young in that line of service, although a few of the men under me were a little older, young and dedicated. I remember feeling a very deep and grim and clean responsibility, but I wonder sometimes

just how deep it went or how clean it really was. I had an uncle, flew in the war they fought to lick fascism. Bombadier were on a flying fortress or something. And once, when he got drunk, he told me how some days it didn't bother him at all to drop the eggs on Germany. The buildings and people down there seemed just like toys that a kid set up to kick over, and the whole business about as naive fun as poking an ant-hill. I didn't even have to fly over at seven miles what I was going to be aiming at.

Only I remember sometimes getting out a map and looking at a certain large, dot on it, and smiling a little and softly saying, pow, and then giving a little conventional shutter and folding up the map quick. Naturally, we told ourselves we'd never have to do it, afar the thing I mean. We joked about how after twenty years or so we'd all be given jobs as museum attendance of this same bomb deactivated at last. But naturally it didn't work out that way. There came the day when our side of the world got hit, and the ardor started cascading

down from Defense Coordinator Bigelow. Bigelow? Pop interrupted. Not Joe Bigelow. Joseph A, I believe. I told him a little annoyed. Why, he's my boy, then, the one I was telling you about. The skinny runt had this horn handle.

Can you beat that? Pop sounded startlingly happy. Him and you'll have a lot to talk about when you get together. i wasn't so sure of that myself in fact my first reaction was that the opposite would be true to be honest i was for the first moment more than a little annoyed at pop interrupting my story of my big grief for it was that to me make no mistake here my story had finally been teased out of me against all expectation after decades of repression and in spite of dozens of assorted psychological blocks and here was pop interrupting it for the sake of a lot of trivial organizational gossip about joes and bills and georgias we never heard of and what they'd say or think but then all of a sudden i realized that i didn't really care that it didn't feel like a big grief any more that just starting to tell about it after hearing pop and alice tell their stories had purged me of that unnecessary weight of feeling that had made it a millstone around my neck it seemed to me now that i could look down at ray baker from a considerable height but not an angelic or contemptuously superior height

and asked myself not why he had grieved so much that was understandable and even desirable but why he had grieved so uselessly in such a stuffy little private hell and it would be interesting to find out how joseph a bigelow had felt how does it feel ray to kill a million people i realized that alice had asked me the question several seconds back and it was hanging in the air that's just what i've been trying to tell you i told her and started to explain it all over again the words poured out of me now i won't put them down here it would take too long but they were honest words as far as i knew and they eased me i couldn't get over it here were us three murderers feeling a trust and understanding and sharing a communion that i wouldn't have believed possible between any two or three people in the age of the debtors or in any age to tell the truth It was against everything I knew of Deathland psychology, but it was happening just the same. Oh, our strange isolation had something to do with that I knew, and that Pullmancore memory hypnotizing my mind, and our reactions to the voices and violences of Alamos. But in spite of all that, I ranked it as a wonder.

I felt an inward freedom and easiness that I never would have believed possible. Pop's little disorganized organization had really got hold of something, I couldn't deny it. Three treacherous killers talking from the bottoms of their hearts and believing each other, for it never occurred to me to doubt that Pop and Alice were feeling exactly like I was. In fact, we were all so sure of it that we didn't even mention our communion to each other. Perhaps we were a little afraid we would rub off the bloom. We just enjoyed it." We must have talked about a thousand things that night and smoked a couple of hundred cigarettes.

After a while we started taking little catnaps. We'd gotten too much off our chests and come to feel too tranquil for even our excitement to keep us awake. I remember the first time I dozed, waking up with a cold start and grabbing for mother, and then hearing Pop and Alice gabbing in the dark and remembering what had happened and relaxing again with a smile. Of all things, Pop was saying, Yep, I imagine Ray must be good to make love to. Murderers almost always are. They got the fire. It reminds me of what a guy named Fred told me, one of our boys. Mostly we took turns going to

sleep, though I think there were times when all three of us were snoozing. About the fifth time I woke, after some tighter shut-eye, the orange soup was back again outside and Alice was snoring gently in the next seat, and Pop was up and had one of his knives out. He was looking at his reflection in the viewport. His face gleamed. He was rubbing butter into it. "'Another day, another pack of troubles,' he said cheerfully. The tone of his remark, jangled my nerves, as that tone generally does early in the morning. I squeezed my eyes. Where are we?' I asked. He poked his elbow toward the North American screen. The two of the two of the

green dots were almost one. My God, we're practically there, Alice said to me. She'd waked fast, Deathland style. I know, Pop said, concentrating on what he was doing. But I aim to be shaved before they commence landing maneuvers. You think automatic will land us? Alice asked. What if we just start circling around?

We can figure out what to do when it happens, Pop said, whittling away at his chin. Until then, I'm not interested. There's still a couple of bottles of coffee in the sack. I've had mine. I didn't join in this chit-chat because the green dots and Alice's first remark had reminded me of a lot deeper reason for my jangled nerves than Pop's cheerfulness. Night was gone, with its shielding cloak and its feeling of being able to talk forever,

and the naked day was here, with its demands for action. It is not so difficult to change your whole view of life when you are flying, or even bumping along above the ground with friends who understand, but soon I knew I'd be down in the dust with something I never wanted to see again. Coffee, Ray? Yeah, I guess so. I took the bottle from Ellis and wondered whether my face looked as glum as hers. "'They shouldn't salt butter,' Papa asserted.

"'It makes it lousy for shaving.' "'It was the best butter,' Alice said. "'Yeah, I said. the dormouse when they buttered the watch. It may be true that feeble humor is better than none. I don't know. What are you two yacking about? Pop demanded.

A book we both read, I told him. Either of you writers? Pop asked with sudden interest. Some of the boys think we should have a book about us. I say it's too soon, but they say we might all die off or something. Whoa, Jenny, easy, does it gently please. That last remark was by way of

recognizing that the plane had started an authoritative turn to the left. I got a sick and cold feeling. This was it. Pop sheathed his knife and gave his face a final rub. Alice belted on her satchel. I reached for my knapsack, but I was staring through the viewport, dead ahead. The haze lightened faintly three times. I remembered the St. Elmo's fire that had flamed from the cracking plant.

Pop, I said, almost whined to be truthful. Why'd the bugger ever have to land here in the first place? He was rushing stuff they needed bad at Alta High. Why'd he have to break his trip? That's easy, said Pop. He was being a bad boy. At least that's my theory. He was supposed to go straight to Alta High,

but there was somebody he wanted to check up on first. He stopped here to see his girlfriend. Yep, his girlfriend. She tried to warn him off. that's my explanation of the juice that flared out of the cracking plant and interfered with his landing though i'm sure she didn't intend the last by the way whenever she turned on to give him the warning must still be turned on but grail came down in spite of it before i could assimilate that the seven deformed gas tanks materialized in the haze we got the freeway in our sights and steadied and slowed and kept slowing the plane didn't graze the plane didn't graze the car's cracking plant this time, though I'd have sworn it was going to hit it head on. When I saw we weren't going to hit it, I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn't. The stain was black

now, when the pilot's body was thicker than I remembered, bloated. But that wouldn't last long. Three or four vultures were working on it. End of Chapter 6. Chapter 7 of the Night of the Long Knives by Fritz-Liber. This leads to you. Ravoc's recording is in the public domain. Chapter 7. The Last Chapter. Here now, in his triumph, where all things falter, stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, as a god self-slain on his own strange altar, death lies dead. A forsaken garden by Charles Swinburne. Pop was first down. Between us we helped Alice. Before joining them, I took a last

look at the control panel. The cracking plant button was up again, and there was a blue nimbus on another button. For Los Alamos, I supposed. I was tempted to push it and get away solo, but then I thought, nope, there's nothing for me at the other end, and the loneliness will be worse than what I got to face here. I climbed out. I didn't look at the body, although we were practically on top of it. I saw a little patch of silver off to the wall. one side and remembered the gun that had melted. The vultures had waddled off only a few yards. We could kill them, Alice said to Pop. Why? He responded. Didn't some Hindus use them to take care of dead bodies? Not a bad idea, either. Parsis, Alice amplified. Yep, Parsis, that's what I meant.

Give you a nice, clean skill of them in a matter of days. Pop was leading us past the body toward the cracking plant. I heard the flies buzzing loudly. I felt terrible. I wanted to be dead myself. Just walking along after Pop was an awful effort. His girl was running a hidden observation tower here, Pop was saying now, weather and all that, I suppose, or maybe setting up a robot station of some kind. I couldn't tell you about her before because you were both in a mood to try to rub out anybody remotely connected with the pilot. In fact, I did my best to lead you astray, letting you think I'd been the one to scream and all. Even now, to be honest about it, I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, telling and showing

you all this, but a man's got to take some risks whatever he does. Say, Pop, I said Dully. Isn't she apt to take a shot at us or something? Not that I'd have minded on my own account. Or are you and her that good friends? Nope, Ray, he said. She doesn't even know me. But I don't think she's in a position to do any shooting.

You'll see why. Hey, she hasn't even shut the door. That's bad. He seemed to be referring to a kind of manhole cover, standing on its edge just inside the open-walled first-story of the cracking plant. He knelt and looked down the hole the cover was designed to close off. Well, at least he didn't collapse at the bottom of the shaft. He said,

Come on, let's see what happened. And he climbed into the shaft. we followed him like zombies at least that's how i felt the shaft was about twenty feet deep there were foot and hand-holes it got stuffy right away and warmer in spite of the shaft being opened at the top at the bottom there was a short horizontal passage we had to duck to get through it when we could straighten up we were in a large luxurious bomb-resistant dug-out to give it a name and it was stuffier and hotter than ever there was a lot of scientific equipment around and several small control panels reminding me of the one in the back of the plane some of them i supposed connected with instruments whether or otherwise hidden up in the skeletal structure of the cracking plant and there were signs of occupancy a young woman's occupancy clothes scattered around in a frivolous way and some small objects of art and a slightly more than life-size head and clay that i guessed the occupant must have been sculpting i didn't give that last more than the most fleeting look strictly unintentional to begin with because although it wasn't finished i could tell whose head it was supposed to be the pilots The whole place was finished in dull silver like the cabin of the plane, and likewise it instantly

struck me as having a living personality, partly the pilots and partly someone else's, the personality of a marriage, which wasn't a bit nice because the whole place smelt of death. But to tell the truth I didn't give the place more than the quickest look over because my attention was riveted almost at once, on a large, wide couch, with the covers kicked off it and on the body there. The woman was about six feet tall and built like a goddess. Her hair was blonde and her skin tanned. She was lying on her stomach and she was naked.

She didn't come anywhere near my libido, though. She looked sick to death. Her face twisted towards us, was hollow-cheeked and flushed. Her eyes closed, were sunken and dark-circled. She was breathing, shallowly and rapidly through her open mouth, gasping now and then. I got the crazy impression that all the heat in the place was coming from her body, radiating from her fever. And the whole place stunk of death.

Honestly, it seemed to me that this dug-out was Death's Underground Temple, the bed, death's altar, and the woman Death's Sacrifice. I unconsciously come to worship death as a god in the deathlands? I don't really know. There it gets too deep for me. No, she didn't come within a million miles of my libido, but there was another part of me that she was eating at. If guilt's a luxury, then I'm a plutocrat, eating at until I was an empty shell, until

I had no props left, until I wanted to die then and there, until I figured. I figured I had to die. There was a faint, sharp hiss right at my elbow. I looked and found that, unbeknownst to myself, I'd taken the steel cube out of my pocket, and holding it snuggled between my first and second fingers, I'd punch the button with my thumb, just as I'd promised myself I would, if I got to be really feeling bad. It goes to show you that you should never give your mind any kind of instrument. instructions even half in fun, unless you're prepared to have them carried out whether you

approve later or not." Pop saw what I'd done and looked at me strangely. So you had to die after all, Ray," he said softly. Most of us find out we have to, one way or another. We waited. Nothing happened. I noticed a very faint milky cloud a few inches across, hanging in the air by the cube. Thinking right away of poison gas, I jerked away a little, dispersing.

the cloud. What's that? I demanded of no one in particular." "'I'd say,' said Pop, "'that that's something that squirted out of a tiny hole in the side of the cube opposite the button. A hole so nearly microscopic you couldn't see it unless you look for it hard. Ray, I don't think you're going to get your baby A-blast. And what's more, I'm afraid you've wasted something that's damn valuable.

But don't let it worry you. I dropped those cubes for Alta High. I snagged one. And darn if he didn't pull the brother of my cube out of his pocket. Alice, he said, I noticed a half-pond of whiskey in your satchel when we got the sal. Would you put some on a rag and hand it to me? Alice looked at him like he was nuts, but while her eyes were looking her pliers and her gloved hand were doing what he told her. Pop took the rag and swabbed a spot on the sick woman's nearest buttock, and jammed the cube against the spot and pushed the button. It's a jet-hopperdermic, folks, he said.

He took the cube away, and there was the welt to substantiate his statement. Hope we got to her in time, he said. The plague is tough. Now I guess there's nothing for us to do but wait, maybe for quite a while. I felt shaken beyond all recognition. Pop, you old caveman detective, I burst out. When did you get that idea for a stupid? Steel Hospital.

Don't think I was feeling anywhere near that gay. It was reaction, close to hysterical. Pop was taken aback, but then he grinned. I had a couple of clues that you and Alice didn't. He said, I knew there was a very sick woman involved. And I had that bout with Los Alamos fever, I told you. They've had a lot of trouble with it, I believe. Some say its spores come from outside the world with the cosmic dust,

and now it seems to have been carried to Alta High. Let's hope they'd found the answer this time. Alice, maybe we'd better start getting some water into this gal. After a while we sat down and fitted the facts together more orderly. Pop did the fitting mostly. Alamos researchers must have been working for years on the plague, as it ravaged intermittently, maybe with mutations and ET tricks to make the job harder. Very recently they found a promising treatment, cure we hoped,

and prepared it for rush shipment to Alta High, where the plague was raging too, and they were sieged in by Savannah as well. Grail was picked to fly the serum or drug or whatever it was, but he knew or guessed that this lone woman observer, because she'd fallen out of radio communication or something, had come down with the plague, too, and he decided to land some serum for her, probably without authorization. How do we know she's his girlfriend? I asked. Our wife, Pop said tolerantly,

Why, there was that bag of woman's stuff he was carrying? For other things, like a man would bring for a woman. Who else he'd be apt to make a special stop for? Another thing, Pop said. He must have been used as jets to hurry his trip. We heard them, you know. That seemed about as close a reconstruction of events as we could get. Strictly hypothetical, of course.

Deathlanders trying to figure out what goes on inside a, country like Alta Alamos and why, or sort of like foxes trying to understand world politics, are wolves the Gothic migrations. Of course we're all human beings, but that doesn't mean as much as it sounds. Then Pop told us how he'd happened to be on the scene. He'd been doing a tour of duty, as he called it, when he spotted this woman's observatory and decided to hang around anonymously and watch over her for a few days, and maybe help protect her from some dangerous characters that he knew were in the neighborhood. Pop, that sounds like a lousy idea to me, I objected, risky, I mean.

Spying on another person, watching them without their knowing, would be the sure its way to start up in me the idea of murdering them. Safest thing for me to do in that situation would be to turn around and run. You probably should, he agreed. For now, anyway, it's all a matter of knowing your own strength and stage of growth. Me, it helps to give myself these little jobs, and the essence of them is that the other person shouldn't know I'm helping. It sounded like knighthood and pilgrimage and the Boy Scouts all over again, for murderers.

Well, why not? Popp had seen this woman come out of the manhole a couple of times and look around, and then go back down, and he got the impression she was sick and troubled. he'd even guessed she might be coming down with alamo's fever he'd seen us arrive of course and that had bothered him then when the plane landed she'd come up again acting out of her head but when she'd seen the pilot and us going for him she'd given that scream and collapsed at the top of the shaft He'd figured the only thing he could do for her was to keep us occupied. Besides, now that he knew for sure we were murderers, he'd started to burn with the desire to talk to us and maybe help us quit killing, if we seemed to want to.

It was only much later in the middle of our trip that he began to suspect that the steel cubes were jet hyperdermics. While Pop was telling us all this, we hadn't been watching the woman so closely. Now Alice called our attention to her. Her skin was covered with fine beads of perspiration, like diamonds. That's a good sign, Pop said, and Alice started to wipe her off. While she was doing that, the woman came to in a groggy sort of way, and Pop fed her some thin soup, and in the middle of his doing it she dropped off to sleep.

Alice said, any other time I would be wild to kill another woman that beautiful, but she has been so close to death that I would feel I was robbing another man. murderer. I suppose there is more behind the change in my feelings than that, though. Yeah, a little, I suppose, Pop said. I didn't have anything to say about my own feelings, certainly not out loud. I knew that they had changed and that they were still changing. It was complicated. After a while, it occurred to me and Alice to worry whether we mightn't catch this woman's sickness. It would serve as right, of course, but plague is plague.

But Pop reassured us. Actually, I snagged three cubes, he said. That should take care of you, too. I figure I'm immune. Time wore on. Pop dragged out the harmonica, as I'd been afraid he would, but his playing wasn't too bad. Tinting tonight, when Johnny comes marching home and such,

we had a meal. The Pilotswoman woke up again in her full mind this time or something like it. We were clustered around the bed, smiling a little, I suppose, and looking inquiringly. Being even assistant nurses makes you all concerned about the patient's health and state of mind. Pop helped her sit up a little. She looked around. She saw me and Alice. Recognition came into her eyes. She drew away from us with a look of loathing. She didn't say a word, but the look stayed.

Pop drew me aside and whispered, I think it would be a nice gesture if you would be a nice gesture if you had. and Alice took a blanket and went up and sewed him into it. I noticed a big needle and some thread in her satchel. He looked me in the eye and added, You can't expect this woman to feel any other way toward you, you know. Now, ever. He was right, of course. I gave Alice the high sign, and we got out. No point in dwelling on the next scene. Alice and me sewed up in a blanket a big guy who'd been dead a day and worked over by vultures. That's all. About the time we'd finished,

Pop came up. She chased me out, he explained. She's getting dressed. When I told her about the plane, she said she was going back to Los Alamos. She's not fit to travel, of course, but she's given herself injections. It's none of our business.

Incidentally, she wants to take the body back with her. I told her how we dropped the serum and how you and Alice had helped, and she listened. The pilot's woman wasn't long after Pop. She must have had trouble getting up the shaft. She had a little trouble, even walking straight, but she held her head high. She was wearing a dull silver tunic and sandals and cloak.

As she passed me and Alice I could see the look of loathing come back into her eyes, and her chin went up a little higher. I thought, Why shouldn't she want us dead? Right now she probably wants to be dead herself. Pop nodded to us, and we hoisted up the body and followed her. It was almost too heavy a load, even for the three of us. As we reached the plane, a silver ladder telescope down to her from below the door, I thought, The pilot must have had a key to her some way, so it would let down for her but nobody else,

a very lovely gesture. The ladder went up after her, and we managed to lift the body above our heads, our arms straight, and we walked it through the door of the plane that way, she receiving it. The door closed, and we stood back and the plane took off into the orange haze, us watching it until it was swallowed. Pop said, Right now I imagine you two feel pretty good in a screwed-up sort of way. I know I do.

But take it from me. It won't last. A day or two and we're going to start feeling another way, the old way, if we don't get busy. I knew he was right. You don't shake old urge number one anything like that easy. So, said Pop, I got places I want to show you. Guys, I want you to meet.

And there's things to do, a lot of them. Let's get moving. So there's my story. Alice is still with me. Urge number two is even harder to shake, supposing you wanted to. And we haven't killed anybody lately. Not since the pilot, in fact, but it doesn't do to boast. We're making a stab, my language, at doing the sort of work Pop does in the Deathlands.

It's tough, but interesting. I still carry a knife, but I've given. given mother to pop. He has its strapped to him alongside Alice's screwing blade. Alta High and Alamos still seem to be in existence, so I guess the serum worked for them generally as it did for the pilot's woman. They haven't sent us any medals, but they haven't sent a hangman squad after us either, which is more than fair, you'll admit. But Savannah, turned back from Alta High, is still going strong. There's a rumor they have an army at the gates of Washington right now. We tell Pop he'd better start preaching fast. It's one of our standard

jokes. There's also a rumor that a certain fellowship of Deathlanders is doing surprisingly well, a rumor that there's a new America growing in the Deathlands, an America that never need kill again. But don't put too much stock in it. Not too much. End of Chapter 6. End of the Night of The Long Knives by Fritz Lieber.