The Kyben Stories Read online

  She clamped the oilcloth onto the pipe, immediately stopping the escape of the water and refuse, and began filling the hole in. Themus watched her till the hole was neatly packed in, only slightly lower than the street level. She had thrown dirt haphazardly in all directions, and some of it was still evident on car tops and in doorways.

  His curiosity could be contained no longer.

  He walked over to the old woman, who was slapping dirt off her polka-dotted dress, getting spots of blood on it, from her rawed hands. “Excuse me—” he began.

  The old woman’s face suddenly assumed, “Oh no, here they are again!” as its message in life.

  “Garbage runs with the drinking water?” He asked the question tremulously, thinking of all the water he had drunk since his arrival, of the number of deaths from botulism and ptomaine poisoning, of the madness of these people.

  The old woman muttered something that sounded like, “Cretinous Stuffed-Shift,” and began to pick up a bag of groceries obviously dumped in a hurry before the excavating began.

  “Are there many deaths from this?” Themus asked, knowing it was a stupid question, knowing the figures must be staggering, wondering if he would be one of the statistics.

  “Hmmph, man, they don’t even bother up and back to flow that way in negative polarization of the garboh, let me away from this maniac!” And she stalked off, dirt dropping in small clots from her polka-dotted dress.

  He shook his head several times, trying to clear it, but the buzzing of his brains trying to escape through his ears prevented any comfort. He communicated her passage out of his sight through the Communicator-Attachment, received the word she had been picked up by someone else, and started to make his rounds again.

  He stopped in mid-stride. It dawned on him suddenly: why hadn’t that bit of oilcloth been squirted out of the hole from the pressure in the pipe? What had held it on?

  He felt his tongue begin to swell in his mouth, and he realized it had all been deceiving. There had been wires attached to that scrap of oilcloth, they had served some purpose. Undoubtedly that was it. Undoubtedly.

  His fine Kyben mind pushed the problem aside.

  He walked on, watching, recording. With a sudden headache.

  The afternoon netted a continuous running commentary on the ordinary mundane habits of the Crackpots (biting each other on the left earlobe, which seemed to be a common activity; removing tires from landcars and replacing them with wadded-up articles of clothing; munching loaves of the spiral Kyben bread on the streets; poking long sticks through a many-holed board, to no visible purpose), and several items that Themus considered off-beat even for these warped members of his race:

  Item: a young man leaped from the seventeenth story of an office building, plummeted to the third, landed on an awning, and after bouncing six times, lowered himself off the canvas, through the window, into the arms of an attractive blonde girl holding a stenographic pad, who immediately threw the pad away and began kissing him. He did not seem to be hurt by the fall or the abrupt landing. Themus was not sure whether they had been total strangers before the leap, but he did record a break in their amours when his Audio Pickup caught her panting, “What was the name?”

  Item: a blind beggar approached him on the street, crying for alms, and when he reached into a pocket to give the fellow a coin, the beggar drew himself taller than Themus had thought he could, and spat directly onto Themus’ jump-boots. “Not that coin, you clod, not that coin. The other one.” Themus was amazed, for he had but two coins in his pocket and the one intended had been a silver half-kyle and the one the beggar seemed to want was a copper nark. The beggar became indignant at the delay and hurried away, carefully sidestepping a group of men who came hurrying out of an alley.

  Item: Themus saw a woman in a televiz booth, rapidly erasing the wall. Viz numbers left there by a hundred occupants suddenly disappeared under the woman’s active hands. When she had the walls completely bare she reached into a bag at her feet and brought out a tube of spray-paint.

  In a few minutes the booth was repainted a cherry pink, and was completely dry.

  Then she began writing new numbers in. After an hour and a quarter, she left, and Themus did too.

  Item: a young woman lowered herself by her legs from the sign above a bar-and-grill, swinging directly into Themus’ path.

  Even upside down she looked good to Themus. She was wearing a pretty print dress and lavender lace-undies. Themus averted his eyes and began to step around her.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Themus stopped and found himself looking up at her, hanging by her knees from the wooden sign that said, YOU CAN EAT HERE TOO!

  She was a beautiful girl, indeed; bright blue hair, a fair golden complexion, high cheekbones, lovely legs, delightful.

  He drew himself to attention, turning his eyes slightly away from her, “Watcher Themus at your service, Miss.”

  “I like you,” she said.

  “Ummm?” asked Themus, not quite believing he had heard her correctly.

  “Do I stutter?”

  “Oh—no—certainly not!”

  “Then you heard what I said. “

  “Well, yes, I suppose I did.”

  “Then why ask me to repeat it?”

  “Because—because—you just don’t come down that way and tell someone you like them. It isn’t—it isn’t—well, it isn’t—it just isn’t ladylike!”

  She did a double-Hip in the air and came down lightly on the balls of her feet, directly in front of the Watcher. “Oh, swizzlegup! It’s ladylike if I want to do it. If you can’t tell I’m a lady just from looking at me, then I’d better find someone who can tell the difference between the sexes.”

  Themus found himself quite enthralled. Somehow she was not like the rest of the mad inhabitants of this world. She talked logically—although a bit more forwardly than what he had become accustomed to—and she was certainly delightful to look at. He began to ask her name, when a clear, bright picture of the damned Elix came to him. He turned to leave.

  She grabbed him roughly by the sleeve, her fingernails tinkling on his armor.

  “Wait a minute, where are you going? I’m not finished talking to you.”

  “I can’t talk to you. The Superior doesn’t approve.” He nervously ran a hand across the bridge of his nose, while looking up and down the street for brother Watchers.

  “Oh, urbbledooz! Him!” She giggled, “He doesn’t like anything, that’s his job. If you have a job to do, do it, you understand?” She mimicked Furth’s voice faithfully, and Themus grinned in spite of himself. She seized on his gesture of pleasure and continued, hurriedly, ‘I'm nineteen. My name is Darfla. What’s yours, Themus?”

  “I’ve got to go. I’ll be sent to the Mines. This isn’t part of my job. I’ve got to Watch, don’t you under—”

  “Oh, all right! If I make it part of your stupid Stuffed-Shirt job will you talk to me?” She drew him into a wide, shadowed doorway with much difficulty.

  “Well, I don’t know how you can make it a part of my—” He looked about him in apprehension. Could he be court-martialed just for talking? Was he doomed already?

  She cut in, “You’re looking for a man named Boolbak, aren’t you?”

  “How did you—”

  “Are you are you are you are you are you are you are you are?”

  “Yes, yes, stop that! I don’t know how you found out, but yes, we are, why?” Oddly, he found himself slipping into the running-away speech of these people, and it was both pleasing and distressing. He was somehow afraid he might be going native. But in less than two days?

  “He’s my uncle. Would you like to meet him?”

  “Record!” Themus barked at his dicto-box.

  “Oh, must you?” Darfla looked toward the twin suns and crossed her arms in exasperation.

  Themus’ brow furrowed and he reluctantly muttered, “Off,” into the box. “I’m a Watcher, and that’s what I’m supposed to do. Watch. But
if I don’t record it all, then they can’t send it to Kyben-Central and there won’t be any tapes for me, and I’ll get sent to the Mines.” He stopped, then added, with a finger stiffly pointed between her eyebrows, “ And that may not bother you, but I’ve seen reels of the Mines and crawling through a bore-shaft not much wider than your body dragging an ore-sack tied to your leg, and the chance that sterility won’t have time to hit before your face just ups and falls off, well, it sort of makes me worry.”

  He looked at her, surprised. She was tinkling. Her laughter was actually a tinkle, falling lightly from her and pleasantly tingling his ears. “What are you laughing at?” he frowned, trying to be angry though her laughter made him feel lighter than he had since he’d hit this madball world.

  “Your face ups and falls off!” She laughed again. “That’s the kind of thing you Stuffed-Shirts would expect me to say! Beautiful! Yes, I’m sure I like you.”

  The underclass Watcher was confused. He looked about in confusion, feeling distinctly as though he had come in during the middle of a conversation. “I—I’d better be going. I don’t think I want to meet your—”

  “ All right, all right. Suppose I fix your stupid box so it keeps right on recording; recording things that are happening, in your voice, without your being here, then would you leave it and come with me ?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” he yelled in a hushed tone.

  “Certainly: she said, smiling broadly.

  He turned once more to leave, angry and annoyed at her making fun of him. Again she stopped him.

  “No, I’m sorry. Please, I can do it. Honestly. Here, let me have it.”

  “Look, I can’t give you my dicto-box. That’s about the most terrible thing a Watcher can do. I’d be—I’d be—they’d hang me, shoot me, starve me, kill me, then send the ashes of my cremated stump to our Mines to be used for feeding the slave-apes. Leave me alone!” The last was a rising note, for the girl had lifted her skirt and drawn a curved knife from her garter-belt and was determinedly prying off the top of the dicto-box, still attached to Themus’ chest.

  The Watcher fought down a mad impulse to ask her why she was wearing a garter-belt when she wasn’t wearing hose, and tried to stop her.

  “Wait! Wait! They’ll throw me out of the Corps. Stop! Here, let go there, wait a minute, I say waitaminuteforgod’sake, if you won’t stop, at least let me take it off so you don’t slice my throat. Here.”

  He slipped the shoulder-straps off and unbuckled the belt. The dicto-box fell into the girl’s hand and she set to work fumbling about in the machine’s intricate innards.

  Finally she stood up, her feet lost in a pile of wirespools, vacuum tubes, metal separators, punch-circuits and plastic coils. The box looked empty inside, except for a strangely flotsam-like construction in one corner.

  “Look what you’ve done now!”

  “Stop whining, man! It’s all right.”

  “If it’s all right, make it record and play back for me.” He was terrified, indignant, furious and interested, all at once.

  “I can’t”

  “Whaaaaaaat!”

  “Why should I? I’m crazy, remember?”

  Themus felt his face turn to lava. “Damn you! Look what you’ve done to me! In five minutes you’ve taken me from my Corps and sentenced me to a life that may be no longer than all the brains you have, stretched end to end!”

  “Oh, stop being so melodramatic.“ She was smiling, tinkling again. “Now you can come with me to meet my uncle. There’s no reason why you should stay here. There is a chance the box will play, if you come back to it later, as I said it would. But even if it doesn’t, staying here is no help, since it isn’t functioning. I’ll get a mechanic to fix it, if that will make you any happier.”

  “No Crackpot mechanic can fix that, you fool! It’s a masterpiece of Kyben science. It took hundreds of men thousands of hours to arrive at this—Oh, what’s the use!” He sat down in the doorway, head in his hands.

  Somehow, her logic was sound. If the box was broken, there was no reason for his refusing to go with her, for staying there could only bring him trouble sooner. It was sound, yes, but only sound on the muggy foundation of her ruining the machine in the first place. He was beginning to feel like a tompora—snake—the kind that swallows its own tail. He didn’t know which end was which.

  “Come with me.” Her voice had suddenly lost its youthful happiness. It was suddenly strong, commanding. He looked up.

  “Get on your feet’”

  He arose slowly.

  “Now, come with me. If you want to come back to your box, it will be here, and it will ‘Nork. Right now it will do as well if you believe I’m mad and ruined your dicto-box. “ She jerked her head sharply toward the street. “Come on. Perhaps you can reinstate yourself by finding the man named Boolbak.”

  It was hopeless there among the remnants of the dicto-box. There was a chance the girl wasn’t as totally insane as she seemed and she actually might be Boolbak’s niece. And, somehow, against all his better, stricter reasoning to the contrary, her logic was queerly sound. In a fugitive sort of way.

  He went with her.

  (Wondering if he was insane, himself.)

  Themus followed the girl through sections of the city Superior Furth had missed during his guided tour of inspection. They passed under a beautifully filigreed arch into a gardened street lined with monstrous blossoms growing to heights of eight and nine feet on either side of the road, casting twin shadows from the bright suns above.

  Once he stopped her, in the shadows of a towering flower, and asked, “Why did you decide you wanted me to meet your uncle?”

  “I’ve been watching you all day,” she said simply, as if prepared to leave that as a total explanation.

  “But why me?”

  “I like you,” she said, as though being purposely repetitious to impress him. Themus distinctly got the idea she was treating him as she would a very young child.

  “Oh. I see,” he said, more baffled than before. They continued down the street through an area covered by long, low structures that might have been factories were it not for the impossibly tall and spindly looking towers that reared from the roof of each one. Themus shaded his eyes from the glare of the twin suns as he sought to glimpse what was at the top of each tower. He could see nothing.

  “What are those?” he asked. He was surprised to hear his own voice. It sounded like that of an inquisitive little boy.

  “Quiet, you.”

  That was the last thing Darfla said till they came out of nowhere and grabbed her and Themus.

  Before the Watcher knew what was happening, a horde, more men than he could count, had surrounded them. They were dressed in everything from loincloth and top hat to burnoose and riding boots. Darfla gave one sharp, tiny squeal and then let her hands fall limply to her sides.

  “All right, you want your say, so say!” Anger and annoyance fluttered in her voice.

  A short, pock-faced man wearing a suit that appeared to be made from ropes of different colors stepped forward.

  “We thought negative (click-click!) and wanted to talk on this at Cave (click-click!).” Themus listened with growing amazement. Not only did the man intersperse every few words with a metallic, unnerving tongue-clacking, but he said the word “Cave” with a low, mysterious, important tone totally unlike the rest of his speech which was quite flat and uninflected.

  Darfla raised her hands, palms upward, in resignation. “What can I say, Deere, after I say I’m sorry?”

  The man addressed as Deere shook his head and said, “(Click-click!) we before talked and him not now never never never! Nothing to say against the (Click!) but he’s def but def a stuffed one at least well now for a time (Click!).Cave.” Same clucking, same cryptic tone when speaking of the Cave. Themus began to worry in direct proportion to the number of surrounders.

  “Let’s go,” Darfla said over her shoulder to Themus, not taking her eyes from Deere.


  “W—where?” trembled Themus.

  “Cave. Where else?”

  “Oh, nowhere—I guess.” He tried to be lighthearted about it. Somehow, he failed miserably.

  They started off, the surrounders doing a masterful job of surrounding; cutting Themus and the girl off from anyone who might be looking. They were a walking camouflage.

  Darfla began to needle Deere with caustic, and to Themus, cryptic remarks. Deere looked about to turn and put his pudgy fist in her face, and Themus nudged the girl to stop.

  “Woof woof a goldfish,” she tossed off as a final insult.

  “(Click!)” answered Deere, sticking his tongue out.

  It was a huge, featureless block in the midst of completely empty ground. Something about it suggested that it was an edifice of total disinterest. Themus recalled buildings he had seen in his youth that had been vaguely like this one. Buildings he would make a point of not bothering to enter, so uninteresting were they.

  Inside it was a cave.

  Stalactites hung down from the ceiling in wedge-shaped rockiness. Stalagmites pushed their way up from the floor, spiking the stone underfoot. A mud collar surrounded a small pool in which clear water rippled. The walls were hewn out of rock, the floor was sand-covered stone.

  They could have been five miles underground. It was another world.

  It was crammed with Crackpots.

  Themus walked between two huge men wearing fezzes and sword-belts, behind the clicking Deere and next to Darfla who looked uneasy. Themus felt more than merely uneasy, He was terrified.

  “Deere!”

  It was Darfla. She had stopped, was being pushed unwillingly by the weight of people moving behind her. “I want this talked out right now. Here. Now. Here. Now. Here. Now—”

  “Don’t (Click!) try that here, Darfla. We have ours, too, you know (Click-click!).”

  “All right. Straight, then.”

  “Were you taking him to see Boolbak?”“

  “Yes, why?”

  “You know your uncle isn’t reliable. He could say anything, Darfla. We have no fear, really, but why tempt the Chances.” He pursed his pudgy lips and said, “We’ll have to recondition your Watcher, girl. I’m sorry.” There wasa murmur from the large, restless crowd.