The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison Page 5

  The amber substance carrying its silent burden began to rise. It reached the level of the two men, and slid smoothly through the air between them. They drifted after the smooth container with the dog-headed dragon imbedded in it, and Semph seemed as though he wanted to say something else. But there was nothing to say.

  The amber chrysalloid cradle faded and vanished, and the men became insubstantial and were no more. They all reappeared in the drainage chamber. The beaming stage was empty. The amber cradle settled down on it without sound, and the substance flowed away, vanishing as it uncovered the dragon.

  The maniac tried desperately to move, to heave himself up. Seven heads twitched futilely. The madness in him overcame the depressants and he was consumed with frenzy, fury, crimson hate. But he could not move. It was all he could do to hold his shape.

  Semph turned the band on his left wrist. It glowed from within, a deep gold. The sound of air rushing to fill a vacuum filled the chamber. The beaming stage was drenched in silver light that seemed to spring out of the air itself, from an unknown source. The dragon was washed by the silver light, and the seven great mouths opened once, exposing rings of fangs. Then his double-lidded eyes closed.

  The pain within his heads was monstrous. A fearful wrenching that became the sucking of a million mouths. His very brains were pulled upon, pressured, compressed, and then purged.

  Semph and Linah looked away from the pulsing body of the dragon to the drainage tank across the chamber. It was filling from the bottom as they watched. Filling with a nearly-colorless roiling cloud of smokiness, shot through with sparks. “Here it comes,” Semph said, needlessly.

  Linah dragged his eyes away from the tank. The dragon with seven dog heads was rippling. As though seen through shallow water, the maniac was beginning to alter. As the tank filled, the maniac found it more and more difficult to maintain his shape. The denser grew the cloud of sparkling matter in the tank, the less constant was the shape of the creature on the beaming stage.

  Finally, it was impossible, and the maniac gave in. The tank filled more rapidly, and the shape quavered and altered and shrank and then there was a superimposition of the form of a man, over that of the seven-headed dragon. Then the tank reached three-quarters filled and the dragon became an underlying shadow, a hint, a suggestion of what had been there when the drainage began. Now the man-form was becoming more dominant by the second.

  Finally, the tank was filled, and a normal man lay on the beaming stage, breathing heavily, eyes closed, muscles jumping involuntarily.

  “He’s drained,” Semph said.

  “Is it all in the tank?” Linah asked softly.

  “No, none of it.”

  “Then…”

  “This is the residue. Harmless. Reagents purged from a group of sensitives will neutralize it. The dangerous essences, the degenerate force-lines that make up the field…they’re gone. Drained off already.”

  Linah looked disturbed, for the first time. “Where did it go?”

  “Do you love your fellow man, tell me?”

  “Please, Semph! I asked where it went…when it went?”

  “And I asked if you cared at all about anyone else?”

  “You know my answer…you know me! I want to know, tell me, at least what you know. Where…when…?”

  “Then you’ll forgive me, Linah, because I love my fellow man, too. Whenever he was, wherever he is; I have to, I work in an inhuman field, and I have to cling to that. So…you’ll forgive me…”

  “What are you going to…”

  In Indonesia they have a phrase for it: Djam Karet—the hour that stretches.

  In the Vatican’s Stanza of Heliodorus, the second of the great rooms he designed for Pope Julius II, Raphael painted (and his pupils completed) a magnificent fresco representation of the historic meeting between Pope Leo I and Attila the Hun, in the year 452.

  In this painting is mirrored the belief of Christians everywhere that the spiritual authority of Rome protected her in that desperate hour when the Hun came to sack and burn the Holy City. Raphael has painted in Saint Peter and Saint Paul, descending from Heaven to reinforce Pope Leo’s intervention. His interpretation was an elaboration on the original legend, in which only the Apostle Peter was mentioned—standing behind Leo with a drawn sword. And the legend was an elaboration of what little facts have come down through antiquity relatively undistorted: Leo had no cardinals with him, and certainly no wraith Apostles. He was one of three in the deputation. The other two were secular dignitaries of the Roman state. The meeting did not take place—as legend would have us believe—just outside the gates of Rome, but in northern Italy, not far from what is today Peschiera.

  Nothing more than this is known of the confrontation. Yet Attila, who had never been stopped, did not raze Rome. He turned back.

  Djam Karet. The force-line field spewed out from a parallax center crosswhen, a field that had pulsed through time and space and the minds of men for twice ten thousand years. Then cut out suddenly, inexplicably, and Attila the Hun clapped his hands to his head, his mind twisting like rope within his skull. His eyes glazed, then cleared, and he breathed from deep in his chest. Then he signaled his army to turn back. Leo the Great thanked God and the living memory of Christ the Saviour. Legend added Saint Peter. Raphael added Saint Paul.

  For twice ten thousand years—Djam Karet—the field had pulsed, and for a brief moment that could have been instants or years or millennia, it was cut off.

  Legend does not tell the truth. More specifically, it does not tell all of the truth: forty years before Attila raided Italy, Rome had been taken and sacked by Alaric the Goth. Djam Karet. Three years after the retreat of Attila Rome was once more taken and sacked, by Gaiseric, king of all the Vandals.

  There was a reason the garbage of insanity had ceased to flow through everywhere and everywhen from the drained mind of a seven-headed dragon…

  Semph, traitor to his race, hovered before the Concord. His friend, the man who now sought his final flux, Linah, Proctored the hearing. He spoke softly, but eloquently, of what the great scientist had done.

  “The tank was draining; he said to me, ‘Forgive me, because I love my fellow man. Whenever he was, wherever he is; I have to, I work in an inhuman field, and I have to cling to that. So you’ll forgive me.’ Then he interposed himself.”

  The sixty members of the Concord, a representative from each race that existed in the center, bird-creatures and blue things and large-headed men and orange scents with cilia shuddering…all of them looked at Semph where he hovered. His body and head were crumpled like a brown paper bag. All hair was gone. His eyes were dim and watery. Naked, shimmering, he drifted slightly to one side, then a vagrant breeze in the wall-less chamber sent him back. He had drained himself.

  “I ask for this Concord to affix sentence of final flux on this man. Though his interposition only lasted a few moments, we have no way of knowing what damage or unnaturalness it may have caused crosswhen. I submit that his intent was to overload the drain and thereby render it inoperative. This act, the act of a beast who would condemn the sixty races of the center to a future in which insanity still prevailed, is an act that can only be punished by termination.”

  The Concord blanked and meditated. A timeless time later they re-linked, and the Proctor’s charges were upheld; his demand of sentence was fulfilled.

  • • •

  On the hushed shores of a thought, the papyrus man was carried in the arms of his friend, his executioner, the Proctor. There in the dusting quiet of an approaching night, Linah laid Semph down in the shadow of a sigh.

  “Why did you stop me?” the wrinkle with a mouth asked.

  Linah looked away across the rushing dark.

  “Why?”

  “Because here, in the center, there is a chance.”

  “And for them, all of them out there…no chance ever?”

  Linah sat down slowly, digging his hands into the golden mist, letting it sift over his wrists and
back into the waiting flesh of the world. “If we can begin it here, if we can pursue our boundaries outward, then perhaps one day, sometime, we can reach to the ends of time with that little chance. Until then, it is better to have one center where there is no madness.”

  Semph hurried his words. The end was rapidly striding for him. “You have sentenced them all. Insanity is a living vapor. A force. It can be bottled. The most potent genie in the most easily uncorked bottle. And you have condemned them to live with it always. In the name of love.”

  Linah made a sound that was not quite a word, but called it back. Semph touched his wrist with a tremble that had been a hand. Fingers melting into softness and warmth. “I’m sorry for you, Linah. Your curse is to be a true man. The world is made for strugglers. You never learned how to do that.”

  Linah did not reply. He thought only of the drainage that was eternal now. Set in motion and kept in motion by its necessity.

  “Will you do a memorial for me?” Semph asked.

  Linah nodded. “It’s traditional.”

  Semph smiled softly. “Then do it for them; not for me. I’m the one who devised the vessel of their death, and I don’t need it. But choose one of them; not a very important one, but one that will mean everything to them if they find it, and understand. Erect the memorial in my name to that one. Will you?”

  Linah nodded.

  “Will you?” Semph asked. His eyes were closed, and he could not see the nod.

  “Yes. I will,” Linah said. But Semph could not hear. The flux began and ended, and Linah was alone in the cupped silence of loneliness.

  The statue was placed on a far planet of a far star in a time that was ancient while yet never having been born. It existed in the minds of men who would come later. Or never.

  But if they did, they would know that hell was with them, that there was a Heaven that men called Heaven, and in it there was a center from which all madness flowed; and once within that center, there was peace.

  In the remains of a blasted building that had been a shirt factory, in what had been Stuttgart, Friedrich Drucker found a many-colored box. Maddened by hunger and the memory of having eaten human flesh for weeks, the man tore at the lid of the box with the bloodied stubs of his fingers. As the box flew open, pressed at a certain point, cyclones rushed out past the terrified face of Friedrich Drucker. Cyclones and dark, winged, faceless shapes that streaked away into the night, followed by a last wisp of purple smoke smelling strongly of decayed gardenias.

  But Friedrich Drucker had little time to ponder the meaning of the purple smoke, for the next day, World War IV broke out.

  * * *

  A Boy and His Dog

  1970 Nebula Award: Best Novella

  film – 1976 Hugo Award: Best Dramatic Presentation

  I

  I was out with Blood, my dog. It was his week for annoying me; he kept calling me Albert. He thought that was pretty damned funny. Payson Terhune: ha ha.

  I’d caught a couple of water rats for him, the big green and ocher ones, and someone’s manicured poodle, lost off a leash in one of the downunders.

  He’d eaten pretty good, but he was cranky. “Come on, son of a bitch,” I demanded, “find me a piece of ass.”

  Blood just chuckled, deep in his dog-throat. “You’re funny when you get horny,” he said.

  Maybe funny enough to kick him upside his sphincter asshole, that refugee from a dingo-heap.

  “Find! I ain’t kidding!”

  “For shame, Albert. After all I’ve taught you. Not ‘I ain’t kidding.’ I’m not kidding.”

  He knew I’d reached the edge of my patience. Sullenly, he started casting. He sat down on the crumbled remains of the curb, and his eyelids flickered and closed, and his hairy body tensed. After a while he settled down on his front paws, and scraped them forward till he was lying flat, his shaggy head on the outstretched paws. The tenseness left him and he began trembling, almost the way he trembled just preparatory to scratching a flea. It went on that way for almost a quarter of an hour, and finally he rolled over and lay on his back, his naked belly toward the night sky, his front paws folded mantislike, his hind legs extended and open. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s nothing.”

  I could have gotten mad and booted him, but I knew he had tried. I wasn’t happy about it, I really wanted to get laid, but what could I do? “Okay,” I said, with resignation, “forget it.”

  He kicked himself onto his side and quickly got up.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “Not much we can do, is there?” I was more than a little sarcastic. He sat down again, at my feet, insolently humble.

  I leaned against the melted stub of a lamppost, and thought about girls. It was painful. “We can always go to a show,” I said. Blood looked around the street, at the pools of shadow lying in the weed-overgrown craters, and didn’t say anything. The whelp was waiting for me to say okay, let’s go. He liked movies as much as I did.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  He got up and followed me, his tongue hanging, panting with happiness. Go ahead and laugh, you eggsucker. No popcorn for you!

  Our Gang was a roverpak that had never been able to cut it simply foraging, so they’d opted for comfort and gone a smart way to getting it. They were movie-oriented kids, and they’d taken over the turf where the Metropole Theater was located. No one tried to bust their turf, because we all needed the movies, and as long as Our Gang had access to films, and did a better job of keeping the films going, they provided a service, even for solos like me and Blood. Especially for solos like us.

  They made me check my .45 and the Browning .22 long at the door. There was a little alcove right beside the ticket booth. I bought my tickets first; it cost me a can of Oscar Mayer Philadelphia Scrapple for me, and a tin of sardines for Blood. Then the Our Gang guards with the Bren guns motioned me over to the alcove and I checked my heat. I saw water leaking from a broken pipe in the ceiling and I told the checker, a kid with big leathery warts all over his face and lips, to move my weapons where it was dry. He ignored me. “Hey you! Motherfuckin’ toad, move my stuff over the other side…it goes to rust fast…an’ it picks up any spots, man, I’ll break your bones!”

  He started to give me jaw about it, looked at the guards with the Brens, knew if they tossed me out I’d lose my price of admission whether I went in or not, but they weren’t looking for any action, probably understrength, and gave him the nod to let it pass, to do what I said. So the toad moved my Browning to the other end of the gun rack, and pegged my .45 under it.

  Blood and me went into the theater.

  “I want popcorn.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Come on, Albert. Buy me popcorn.”

  “I’m tapped out. You can live without popcorn.”

  “You’re just being a shit.”

  I shrugged: sue me.

  We went in. The place was jammed. I was glad the guards hadn’t tried to take anything but guns. My spike and knife felt reassuring, lying-up in their oiled sheaths at the back of my neck. Blood found two together, and we moved into the row, stepping on feet. Someone cursed and I ignored him. A Doberman growled. Blood’s fur stirred, but he let it pass. There was always some hardcase on the muscle, even on neutral ground like the Metropole.

  (I heard once about a get-it-on they’d had at the old Loew’s Granada, on the South Side. Wound up with ten or twelve rovers and their mutts dead, the theater burned down and a couple of good Cagney films lost in the fire. After that was when the roverpaks had got up the agreement that movie houses were sanctuaries. It was better now, but there was always somebody too messed in the mind to come soft.)

  It was a triple feature. Raw Deal with Dennis O’Keefe, Claire Trevor, Raymond Burr and Marsha Hunt was the oldest of the three. It’d been made in 1948, eighty-six years ago; god only knows how the damn thing’d hung together all that time; it slipped sprockets and they had to stop the movie all the time to re-thread it. But it
was a good movie. About this solo who’d been japped by his roverpak and was out to get revenge. Gangsters, mobs, a lot of punching and fighting. Real good.

  The middle flick was a thing made during the Third War, in ’92, twenty-seven years before I was even born, thing called Smell of a Chink. It was mostly gut-spilling and some nice hand-to-hand. Beautiful scene of skirmisher greyhounds equipped with napalm throwers, jellyburning a Chink town. Blood dug it, even though we’d seen this flick before. He had some kind of phony shuck going that these were ancestors of his, and he knew and I knew he was making it up.

  “Wanna burn a baby, hero?” I whispered to him. He got the barb and just shifted in his seat, didn’t say a thing, kept looking pleased as the dogs worked their way through the town. I was bored stiff.

  I was waiting for the main feature.

  Finally it came on. It was a beauty, a beaver flick made in the late 1970s. It was called Big Black Leather Splits. Started right out very good. These two blondes in black leather corsets and boots laced all the way up to their crotches, with whips and masks, got this skinny guy down and one of the chicks sat on his face while the other one went down on him. It got really hairy after that.

  All around me there were solos playing with themselves. I was about to jog it a little myself when Blood leaned across and said, real soft, the way he does when he’s onto something unusually smelly, “There’s a chick in here.”

  “You’re nuts,” I said.

  “I tell you I smell her. She’s in here, man.”

  Without being conspicuous, I looked around. Almost every seat in the theater was taken with solos or their dogs. If a chick had slipped in there’d have been a riot. She’d have been ripped to pieces before any single guy could have gotten into her. “Where?” I asked, softly. All around me, the solos were beating-off, moaning as the blondes took off their masks and one of them worked the skinny guy with a big wooden ram strapped around her hips.