Out of Their Minds (17 page)

“But they aren't rules,” I said.

“I know. You call them adages. But once you get enough people to believe there is something in them, then we are stuck with them.”

“So you are still going to have one more go at me. Unless you agree with the Referee that this Quixote business …”

“The Quixote business stands,” he growled. “I agree with the Referee that this crack-brained character out of Spain is not difficult for anyone above the age of five to handle. But I want you out of this and the quicker and the easier I can get you out of it, the better it will be. There's business to be done. What I can't understand is what misplaced sense of chivalry made you agree to take on another round. Once you polished off the serpent, you were in the clear, but then you let that slimy Referee talk you into …”

“I owed Kathy something,” I told him. “I got her into it.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. There are times I can't get you humans figured out. Most of the time you go around slitting one another's throats and sticking knives into your fellow humans' backs and climbing over them to achieve what you call success, then you turn around and get so damn noble and compassionate it's enough to make one sick.”

“But why, in the first place, if you have some use for me, and I really can't believe you have—but if you do, why try to kill me? Why not just reach down, if that is how you do it, and simply pick me up?”

He sighed at my ignorance. “To kill you we must try. That also is a rule. But there was no need for so good a job of it. No need for all the fancy business. These expediters sit around and think up these fancy schemes, and it's all right if that's the way they like to spend their time, but they get so hopped up about these fancy ways of doing it, that they have to try them out. The trouble they will go to to accomplish simple homicide is past all understanding. It's all you humans' fault, of course. You humans do the same. Your book writers, your comic artists, your script writers—every one of your creative people—sit around and think up all these crazy characters and these impossible situations and we are the ones who get stuck with them. And that, I think, brings us around to the proposition I wish to talk with you about.”

“Then get on with it,” I said. “I've had a tough day and could do with about twenty hours of sleep. That is, if there is a place where I can bed down.”

“Oh, there is,” he said. “In between those two boulders over there is a bed of leaves. Blown in by the winds of latest autumn. It will be a restful place to catch a needed nap.”

“Complete,” I asked, “with rattlesnakes?”

“What do you take me for?” the Devil demanded, wrathfully. “Do you think I have no honor, that I would entrap you? I pledge to you that no harm will come to you before you're well awake.”

“And after that,” I asked.

“After that,” he said, “there is yet another threat and danger to fulfill the rule of three. You can rest assured that you have my best wishes in that encounter, whatever it may be.”

“O.K.,” I said, “since I can't weasel out of it. I wonder if you might just speak a word for me. I'm getting slightly worn down. I don't think I'd care right now for another serpent.”

“I can promise you,” the Devil said, “it won't be a serpent. And now let's get down to business.”

“All right,” I told him, somewhat weakly. “What is on your mind?”

“It is,” the Devil said, somewhat petulantly, “this junky fantasy that you are feeding us. How do you expect us to build any kind of life system with all this fuzziness and froth? Little dicky birds perching on a branch and yelling ‘I thought I saw a putty tat—I did, I did, I did,' and the fool cat down there on the ground leering up at the bird in a helpless and half-guilty manner. Where, I ask you with wholesome honesty, can we arrive at any decent character in a situation such as this? You gave us, to start with, a foundation that was solid and substantial, born out of firm conviction and a sound belief. But now you are facetious, and you give us character patterns that are both improbable and weak, and material such as this, rather than contributing to our strength, is undermining all we have accomplished in the past.”

“You mean,” I said, “that it would be a more healthful setup for you if we continued to believe in devils, ghouls, and goblins, and such-like.”

“Much more healthful,” said the Devil, “at least if you believed with some sincerity. But now you make a joke of us …”

“Not a joke,” I protested. “You must remember that, for the most part, the human race is not aware that any of you actually exist. How could they be when you go about killing off the ones who have some suspicion that this world exists?”

“It is this thing,” said the Devil, bitterly, “that you designate as progress. You can do almost anything you want and you keep on wanting more and you fill your minds with hopeful expectations and have no room for introspection on personal values—such as one's own shortcomings. There is no fear in you and no apprehension …”

“There is fear,” I said, “and plenty of apprehension. The difference is in the things we fear.”

“You are right,” the Devil said. “The H-bombs and the UFO's. What a thing to conjure up—crazy flying saucers!”

“Better, perhaps, than a devil,” I reminded him. “A UFO a man might have some chance to reason with, but a devil, never. You kind of folks are tricky.”

“It's the sign of the times,” the Devil mourned. “Mechanics instead of metaphysics. Would you believe that in this sad land of ours we have a horde of UFO's, most detestable contrivances and inhabited by all manner of most horrendous aliens. But with no honesty in their horror such as I carry in my person. Gimmicky creatures that make no sort of sense.”

“Perhaps it's bad for you,” I told him, “and I can see your point But I don't know what can be done about it. Except in certain culturally backward areas you find few people now who believe in you with any honesty. Oh, sure, they talk of you at times. They say ‘to the devil with it' or that it's the devil's work, but mostly they don't even think of you when they are saying it. You've become a very faintly dirty word. The belief in you simply isn't there. Not the way it once was. I don't think that attitude can be changed. You can't stop human progress. You'll simply have to wait for what comes next. It might just possibly be something that will work to your advantage.”

“I think we can do something,” the Devil said, “and we're not about to wait. We've waited too long now.”

“I can't imagine what you'd do,” I said. “You can't …”

“I am not about to reveal my plans to you,” he said. “You are by far too clever, with that dirty, weasely, ruthless cleverness of which only a human being can be capable. I tell you this much only so that sometime in the future you will understand and then perhaps will find some willingness to act as an agent for us.”

And, saying this, he vanished in a puff of sulfurous smoke and I was left alone upon the ridgetop, the smoke of his leaving drifting eastward with the wind. I shivered in the wind, although it wasn't really cold. The coldness was, rather, from the company I'd been keeping.

The land was empty, lighted palely by the moon—empty and silent and foreboding.

He had said there'd be a bed of leaves between two boulders and I hunted for and found it. I poked around in it, but there were no rattlesnakes. I hadn't thought there'd be; the Devil didn't seem the kind of being who'd tell a downright lie. I crawled between the boulders and arranged the leaves so I'd be more comfortable.

Lying there in the darkness, with the wind moaning on the land, I thought, with thankfulness, of Kathy safely home. I'd told her that somehow we would make it back, the two of us together, and when I'd told her that I had not dreamed that within another hour she would be safely home. Through no effort of my own, of course, but that didn't really matter. It had been the Devil's doing and although his act had not been dictated by compassion, I found myself feeling rather kindly toward him.

I thought of Kathy, her face turned up toward me in the firelight from the blaze upon the witch's hearth, and I tried to catch again the happiness that had been upon her face. I couldn't seem to get the right expression and while I still was trying I must have gone to sleep.

To wake to Gettysburg.

14

Something nudged me and woke me so quickly that I sat bolt upright and bumped my head on one of the boulders. Through the stars that spun within my brain I saw a man scrooched down and staring at me. He held a rifle and while the barrel was aimed in my direction, I got the impression that he wasn't really pointing it at me. He had used it, more than likely, to nudge me into wakefulness.

He wore a forage cap which did not fit well because it had been some time since he had had a haircut, and his jacket was a faded blue with brass buttons on it.

“It do beat all,” he said, amiably, “how some folk can fall asleep just any time at all.”

He turned his head aside and spat a neat stream of tobacco juice onto the face of one of the boulders.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“The Rebs are bringing up their guns,” he said. “All morning they been at it. They must have a thousand of them, on the rise across the way. Lined up, hub to hub.”

I shook my head, “Not a thousand of them. Two hundred would be closer to it.”

“Mebbe you are right,” he said. “I guess them Rebs ain't got no thousand guns.”

“This must be Gettysburg,” I said.

“Of course it's Gettysburg,” he said, disgusted. “Don't tell me you don't know. You couldn't have been here long without knowing what it is. There've been right smart doings here, I tell you, and if I don't miss my guess, we'uns are going to start catching hell again in just a little while.”

It was Gettysburg, of course. It simply had to be. There had been, I recalled, a fleeting familiarity to the grove of trees the night before—last night, I thought; had it been last night, or a century before last night? In this world did time make as little sense as all the rest of it?

I crouched on the bed of leaves and tried to get my bearings. Last night a grove of trees and a clump of boulders and this morning Gettysburg!

I bent my head and crawled out from between the boulders, but stayed squatting to face the man who'd wakened me. He shifted the quid from one cheek to the other and looked me over closely.

“What outfit are you with?” he asked, suspiciously. “I don't recollect no one rigged out the way you are.”

If I had been a bit more alert, perhaps I could have found an answer, but my mind still was fogged with sleep and my skull still hurt from the knock upon the boulder. Waking up at Gettysburg hadn't helped me, either. I knew that I should answer, but there was no answer I could think of, so I simply shook my head.

On the summit of the slope above me, cannons were ranged in line, with the cannoneers beside them, standing stiff and straight, staring out across the swale that lay below the ridge. A field officer sat erect upon a horse that was prancing nervously, while on the slope below the cannon the infantry lay sprawled in a long, uneven line, some of them behind barricades variously constructed, some of them flat upon the ground, while others sat around at leisure, all staring off across the swale.

“I don't like it,” said the soldier who had found me. “I don't like the looks or smell of it. If you are from the town, you ain't got no business up here.”

From far off came a heavy bang, sonorous, but not very loud. At the sound, I stood up and looked across the swale and could see that from the tree line on the opposite ridge a puff of smoke was drifting up. Further down the line of trees there was a sudden flash, as if someone had opened the door of a red-hot stove, then closed it immediately.

“Get down!” the soldier was yelling at me. “Get down, you goddamn fool …”

The rest of what he said was blotted out by a jarring crash from somewhere just behind me.

I saw that he was flat upon the ground and so were all the others. I threw myself heavily, sprawling. Another crash sounded to my left and then I saw the sparkling of many stove doors opening along the other ridge. From the air above and ahead of the ridge on which I lay came the sound of whickering objects traveling very fast, and then, on the ridge behind me, the entire world blew up.

And kept on blowing up.

Beneath me the very ground was bucking with the cannonade. The air thundered until it was unendurable and kept on being unendurable. Smoke drifted across the heaving ground and as a sort of undertone to the crashing of the shot and shell were whirring, whistling noises. With that utter clarity of thought which sometimes comes when one is stiff with fear, I realized that the whistling was made by chunks of metal flying off the ridge behind me and spraying down the slope.

With my face pressed tight against the ground, I twisted my head so that I could have a look back at the ridgetop. I was surprised to find there wasn't really much to see—certainly not what I had expected seeing. A heavy fog bank of smoke obscured the entire ridge, hanging not more than three feet above the ground. Below the smoke I saw the legs of frantic gunners as they worked their battery of guns, as if a group of half-men were firing a battery of half-guns, with only a little better than a half of the carriages showing, the rest obscured by roiling smoke.

Out of that roiling smoke came stabbing bursts of fire as the hidden guns fired back across the swale. At each belch of flame, I felt an angry flare of heat sweep through the air above me, but the uncanny thing about it was that the barking of those cannons firing directly over me was so muffled by the racket of the bombardment which swept the ridge that it sounded as if they were being fired from some distance off.