A e van vogt, p.35
A E van Vogt, page 35
His ferocious hatred subsided gradually as the pace took its toll of his energy. He began to feel surges of grief, and then he seemed to be without emotion but immensely tired.
Crash!
He grew shakily aware that the Chinese soldier was standing over him, angrily gesticulating. Before that threat, Ruxton climbed to his feet. He felt weak, and his legs were trembling as once more he started on that merciless march up the treadmill.
This time he fell without any sensation.
His first awareness was that he was lying on the floor, and rough hands were jerking him back onto the machine. Something hard jabbed his side.
He blacked out.
Yet the next time that consciousness returned, he was walking quite firmly on the treadmill, as if he had recovered his strength.
Again the blackness closed over him, and when he had his next fleeting awareness he was still walking the treadmill. And he was thinking of a friend of his in the air force who, while acting as co-pilot, grew aware that the door beside him had sprung open. He felt an awful suction. That was the last thing he knew. When he came to, he was on a rubber raft. He had evidently opened his parachute, fallen 11,000 feet, landed in the ocean, freed himself, swam to a raft which his companions dropped to him—and he had done all of these things without being conscious of a single action.
Ruxton thought, “There is another part of the brain that can take over in an emergency—”
Whatever it was took over again, even as he had the thought about it.
From somewhere to somewhere came a voice, saying, “Tosti is a Japanese spy. She’s a spy—spy—” Ruxton listened to the sounds, at once alarmed and puzzled. He was alarmed that another person had discovered Tosti’s secret, and puzzled as to whom the information was being given. He grew so anxious that he was able to focus his eyes blurrily on his surroundings.
He was still in the barracks, still on the treadmill, still moving forward, but on his knees now, automatically straining to get away from the needles. His back felt numb. There was a feeling that the needles had been used many times now. Two soldiers, new to him, sat in the chairs. One seemed to be sleeping.
Although Ruxton had no particular conscious thought about it, as he turned his head aimlessly, his gaze flitted across the barred window, and he saw that it was night.
He crawled on, becoming more aware with each passing moment, so much so that the steady mumbling of his own voice suddenly roared in on him. And he was saying: “Tosti is a Jap spy—she’s a spy—a spy—”
Ruxton bit his tongue. It was not a small reaction. He bit so hard that blood gushed in his mouth, and his tongue hurt with an excruciating pain. The silencing act was so violent he stopped his movements on the treadmill and instantly the needles drove cruelly into his back. He jumped with the agony, and frantically scrambled forward, as he had done so often, earlier. He thought, “You scum, you’re betraying that girl—”
He forgot about it.
He seemed to be falling into some incredible distance. And as he fell, he dreamed.
A thousand dreams there were, that opened wide as many doors, and there, suddenly, was not a dream at all, but a complete memory.
Instantly, he felt feverishly ill. But it was a small child’s sickness. He was lying in bed, dying, because he wanted his daddy, who had gone away…
Ruxton came up out of some great depth of torture, and he thought in amazement, “My God—that was the time my father left my mother. Why, he even told me about it, and that he came back because of me ...”
His mind wandered. He heard himself raving; then—blackness. And then, as plain as if she were in the room, his mother’s head, face and shoulders loomed above him. She looked like a giant, completely out of proportion, and very young—a girlish mother. “Like that picture of her when she was in her twenties,” he thought. The large, pretty face was streaming with tears, and every word she spoke had a sob in it. The deluge of sympathy and sorrow was like a palpable force. She cried, “Oh, Seal, Seal, please get well. I love you. I’ll take care of you. You’ll be all right. You’re all that matters. You’ll always be my baby, and I’ll take care of you forever.”
He felt the meaning of those words then, and the power of that emotion, through the mist of his fever. The words came into his unprotected body, penetrated to every cell. The sympathy engulfed him with its warm, sticky wetness, and then like an all-pervading gas, saturated his being. The meaning and the emotion became as much a part of him as his arms, his legs, his head.
He started to sob, “Why, why isn’t she taking care of me?” But it was a young boy, then a teenager, then a youth, asking the question at some gut-level of life. The feeling never came near the surface of his thinking mind. It quavered at some deep of the self in the form of an awful grief. A promise betrayed. The terrible, unforgivable perfidy of women.
He had finally realized: “Those goddamned female bastards are all wanting to be taken care of themselves.”
On the day of that realization, he knew somehow that no woman would ever really take care of him. Not mother. Not all the mother substitutes that he had slept with, seduced, taken away from other men, struck, punished, mauled, betrayed—Not one of them would ever fulfill the promise made to each and every cell of his body.
As that truth began to penetrate, his father’s training of him, his father’s—and certain other men’s—ideas about women and life grew real to him. He became a man in his father’s image, thinking the same casually superior thoughts, feeling automatically that women belonged in a low category. He rejected their feelings, catered to a woman only to the extent necessary to get sex from her, and never felt any genuine respect for her as a person. Women were like children, to be tolerated by a grown man, and never granted equality.
It was the basic incorrigibility of the ‘right’ man.
A man’s voice said, in French, “All right, Ruxton. Get off!”
The words echoed in his mind like a senseless rhyme.
“Get off!”
“Get off!”
“Get off!”
And echoed. And re-echoed. Hands grabbed him, and shoved him violently, breaking the repetitious pattern.
“I said, GET OFF!”
The floor came up. He had a momentary glimpse of it coming toward him. Involuntarily, he put out his hands to stop it.
The next moment, or so it seemed, somebody was shaking him.
Ruxton had no means, then or later of determining how long he lay there on the floor. But when he opened his eyes he felt quite sane. His body ached a little, but otherwise he was normal.
His head had been facing toward one bare wall. Now, as he was about to sit up, he turned it automatically.
And stiffened.
Kuznetoff sat in a chair beside him. As Ruxton moved, the man placed the point of a short, thin knife against his throat.
“Stay right there, Ruxton!” he said in an even purposeful voice. “I have a question to ask you, and your answer will determine your fate. Were you the man who came to my room and tried to choke me to death?”
* * * *
63
Kuznetoff went on tensely, “Don’t expect any interruption. I’ve killed your guards. If you try to get up, or call for help, I’ll shove this needle knife right into your throat, and no one will ever know what happened.”
Ruxton lay there, stunned. He believed that Kuznetoff would do exactly that. He said at last, “I don’t understand what you are talking about. And for God’s sake, what would bring you here at a time like this?”
He spoke automatically, because he had no plan. Yet when the words were uttered, he realized that denial was his best reaction.
Kuznetoff said deliberately, “I’m trying to decide whether to kill you, or merely make you squeal for mercy. As for why I came here under these conditions, when I discovered that you might lose your memory in this fatigue treatment, I knew I had to find out about your attack on me before that happened. If it wasn’t you, then who was it. My life may be in danger.”
Ruxton lay back, breathing hard. He was amazed, again, that his brain was as clear as it was, and that he did not seem particularly tired. But, then, Lemoine, except for the new rage in him, had not appeared exhausted from his ordeal.
Before Ruxton could think further, Kuznetoff’s voice came, low and sharp, “Don’t brace yourself. Don’t try to roll away. I can push this knife faster than you can move.”
Ruxton hadn’t realized that he was tensing again. With an effort of will he forced himself to relax, and he said, shakily, “I can’t see what killing me will gain you—and I still don’t know what all this is about.”
“You deny that you came to my room one night and tried to choke me to death?”
“Look, brother,” said Ruxton harshly, “if I had ever started to choke you with the intention of killing you, you wouldn’t be here.”
Kuznetoff was silent for a moment. He said at last, slowly and implacably, “That makes some sense, but the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the voice was yours. So I’m not concerned with what scared you off. You’ve got one minute to go…Unless you tell me exactly why you attacked me. If you tell me, I may let you live— provided you beg for your life. One minute, Mr. Ruxton.”
Ruxton had no intention of begging, but it struck him now, finally, that with such a man he would have to admit the truth. And so, hastily, he cast about for a way of telling what happened that would be understandable to Kuznetoff.
“Hitler!” he thought abruptly. “Of course, Hitler.”
He said aloud, “You remember all that stuff we used to hear about Hitler and his rug-chewing rages?”
“Hitler!” Kuznetoff echoed. “What has he got to do with—”
Ruxton went on, “Those persons who watched him when he was eating the rug were convinced that he was completely out of his head. However, unlike what happened to me, I feel that he had a low-grade awareness of what he was doing. Which made it worse, of course. He could rationalize his behavior. I couldn’t.”
“Are you saying?—” the White Russian began. He stopped. He seemed to be out of his depth, and groping. He said then, irrelevantly, almost defensively, “Hitler was a genius.”
“I thought you might think so,” said Ruxton. “That night, with me it was not like that at all. When I woke up, there I was in the act of choking you.”
“You admit it!” The man’s face was livid. His voice held a triumphant grate. All right, Ruxton, your confession earns you the privilege of begging for your life, as I promised.”
The threat was hard to take. Yet Ruxton’s mind remained steady. He thought, as much in amazement as dismay, “Hatred really has no give in it.” But it seemed to him that the man’s admiration for Hitler was still bis point of entry into that rigid brain.
“One minute to start begging, Ruxton.”
Ruxton said in a steady tone, “I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently, and remembering what Mai said about Hitler understanding revolution.” He went on, “Hitler surprised the Communists by understanding their tactics, and by manipulating the reactionary energy the Reds had stirred up to gain control of the streets, and to then capture the state. In the final issue in Germany, it turned out that reactionary energy was actually more powerful than revolutionary energy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true everywhere. Now, if Hitler had used his method in a strictly scientific way, we would have realized that he was operating above the consequences of his actions, and been interested in what he was doing. But because of his psychotic hatred of the Jewish and Slavic peoples, he never could convince us that what he did was based purely on method, whereas Stalin, who seemed to adhere to his own theories, but who probably murdered just as many people, lived to be called Uncle Joe, and we still have an image of a pipe-smoking, fatherly figure. Fantastic, eh?” said Ruxton—and rolled over, away from the knife.
Thus ended his delaying tactic.
* * * *
64
As Ruxton flung his body along the floor, and leaped to his feet, he felt, rather than saw, the White Russian make a belated thrust at his back. For Kuznetoff, it was a fateful effort. He lunged up out of his chair, lost his balance, and staggered within reach of Ruxton’s arms. Ruxton caught him in a grip of iron, slapped one arm around the slender, wiry body, and with his free hand grasped the man’s right wrist. He squeezed mercilessly until the knife fell to the floor. Instantly, he slammed his foot down on it, and with a lurch of his own body to give power to the thrust, sent him spinning back into the chair.
Kuznetoff brought himself to a precarious stability, and from this position stared up at Ruxton with glazed eyes.
The look of confusion on the man’s face stopped the attack Ruxton had been about to make. He drew back, and it was then he noticed that he felt dizzy. It was a wild sensation, as if something big inside him had gone out of control. The threat had been too great. He grew aware of a warmth around his neck and upper body. Rage! The same fury that had been in him when he found himself choking Kuznetoff that night, the same overpowering anger that he had awakened with the following morning. Only now it didn’t seem to be “over there.” He could feel himself sinking into it, identifying with the anger. Briefly, then, it was as if he had three distinct awarenesses. He was himself, somehow detached, viewing the rage, and at the same time there was his own developing entanglement with a passion that grew more blinding every moment.
Ruxton saw that Kuznetoff was staring at him, his blue eyes wide. The man said in a low, urgent tone, “For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”
Ruxton couldn’t speak. The choked feeling in his throat prevented him from talking. And the haze in his brain made his vision blur. Yet, he noticed the fact vaguely, he was still holding back. Could it be that the tiny portion of good sense that he had gained through understanding himself was restraining an anger that almost seared him, so white hot was the sensation of it in his head and body? A faraway thought came, that this was what the men who faced Hitler had been up against. This was the mental, physical and emotional madness of Stalin when he was angry, and in Mao Tse-tung. Many had reported the fury of these men at key moments. It was the same rage that had been in Mai Lin Yin at the time of the execution of Gongoe and the others.
Kuznetoff said, uneasily, “Mr. Ruxton, my attack on you has evidently put you into such anger that this conversation should—”
“What you’re looking at,” said Ruxton thickly, “is a reasonable copy of Genghis Khan and Mao Tse-tung, and Mai Lin Yin, and Hitler and all the little Hitlers, and Stalin, and that whole breed. This is how they reasoned when someone crossed them. So let’s see how it comes out, hey, Anton?” He went on recklessly, “Speaking of my attack on you, how about your attack on me—with Gregory?”
He was thinking: “I’m crazy. I shouldn’t be staying here. I should be deciding what to do next.”
But his voice went on, “Remember that, Mr. Kuznetoff?” The startled look on Kuznetoff’s thin face was replaced by an expression of relief. “That makes us even,” he said quickly. “I’m willing to call quits.”
“How do you know,” Ruxton demanded irrationally, “that I won’t sleep-walk into your room again?”
Kuznetoff admitted that he didn’t know. Ruxton stared at him blurrily. It almost didn’t feel like anger, but rather some body turbulence which he was confusing with that emotion. He thought: “I’m standing up here like a drunken sailor. But if this isn’t rage, what is it?” But that thought was over there in the distance. He heard himself say, “Why don’t you sleep with your bed against the door, like I do?”
“I will,” said Kuznetoff. He added hastily, “That solves that.”
At that point Ruxton saw the two Chinese soldiers sprawled on the other side of the treadmill. The sight slowed the violence inside him.
He blurted out, “Good God, you really did kill them!”
Kuznetoff made a dismissing gesture. “I’m sure they deserve it,” he said. “One of them was sleeping,” he explained, “and the other dozed for a few moments. That’s when I came in through that backroom window—” he pointed vaguely—”and cut their throats.” Again he gestured. “But we can solve that problem later. It’s a few minutes before four in the morning. Gives us time.”
Time for what, he didn’t say. They were more than a thousand miles inside China, and it was winter, and they were not going anywhere. Inside Ruxton the rage subsided, even more, like a wave striking a rock and shattering into spray, still in motion, but its power diminishing second by second.
He thought of Tosti. “I’ve got to get her to Wanchan,” he told himself, “before they put me on that damned machine again.”
It was a complete purpose. So subjective and all-enveloping, that it took no account or consideration of others. He had the idea. Instantly, he leaped at Kuznetoff. The man jerked away in alarm. But Ruxton merely grabbed his arm, and pulled him.
