Natural State

VIII

ON the Jersey flats, hidden by a forest of traveler trees, a sprawling settlement took form ― mile after mile of forcedgrowth dwellings, stables, administration buildings, instruction centers. It was one of five. There was another farther north in Jersey, two in the Poconos and one in the vestigial state of Connecticut.

They lay empty, waiting, their roofs sprouting foliage that perfectly counterfeited the surrounding forests. Roads had been cleared, converging toward the City, ending just short of the half-mile strip of wasteland that girdled New York, and it was there that Alvah stood.

He found it strange to feel himself ready to walk unprotected across that stretch of country, knowing it to be acrawl with tiny organisms that had been developed not to tolerate Man’s artificial buildings, whether of stone, metal, cement or plastics, but crumbled them all to the ground. Stranger still to be able to visualize the crawling organisms without horror or disgust.

But the strangest of all was to be looking at the City from this viewpoint. The towers stared back at him across the surrounding wall, tall and shining and proud, the proudest human creation―a century ago. Pitifully outdated today, the gleaming Cities fought back, unaware that they had lost long ago, that their bright spires and elaborate gadgets were as antiquated as polished armor would have been against a dun-painted motorized army.

“I wish I could go with you,” said Beej from the breathing forest at his back.

“You can’t,” Alvah said without turning. “They wouldn’t let you through the gate alive. They know me, but even so. I’m not sure they’ll let me in after all this time. Have to wait and see.”

“You know you don’t have to go. I mean―”

“I know what you mean, said Alvah unhappily, and you’re right. But all the same, I do have to go. Look, Beej, you’ve got that map I drew. It’s a ten-to-one chance that, if I don’t make the grade, they’ll put me in the quarantine cells right inside the wall. So you’re not to worry. Okay?”

“Okay,” she promised, worried. He kissed her and watched her fade back into the forest where the others were―Bither and Artie Brumbacher and a few others from home, the rest Jerseys and other clansmen from the Sea board Federation―cheerful, matter-of-fact people who were going to bear most of the burdens of what was coming, and never tired of reminding the inlanders of the fact.

He turned and walked out across the wasteland, crunching the dry weeds under his feet.

THERE was a darning moat around the City and, beyond the moat, high in the wall, a closed gateway―corroded tight, probably: it was a very long time since the City had had any traffic except by air. But there was a spy tower above the gate. Alvah walked up directly opposite its bulbous idiot eyes, waved, and then waited.

After a long time, an inconspicuous port in the tower squealed open and a fist-sized dark ovoid darted out across the flames. It came to rest in midair, two yards from Alvah, clicked and said crisply, “State your name and business.”

“Alvah Gustad. I just got back from a confidential mission for the City Manager. Floater broke down, communicator, everything. I had to walk back. Tell him I’m here.”

The ovoid hovered exactly where it was, as if pinned against the air. Alvah waited. When he got tired of standing, he dropped his improvised knapsack on the ground and sat on it. Finally the ovoid said harshly, in another voice, “Who are you and what do you want?”

Alvah patiently gave the same answer.

“What do you mean, broke down?”

“Broke down,” said Alvah. “Wouldn’t run any more.”

Silence. He settled himself for another long wait, but it was only five minutes or thereabouts before the ovoid said, “Strip.”

When he had done so, the gate opposite broke open with a scream of tortured metal and ground itself back into a recess in the wall. The drawbridge, a long rust-pitted tongue of metal, thrust out and down to span the moat, a wall of flame on either side of it.

Alvah walked across nimbly, the metal already hot against his naked soles, and the drawbridge whipped back into its socket. The gate screamed shut.

THE room was the same, the anthems were the same. Alvah, disinfected, shaved all over and clad in an airtight glassine overall with its own air supply, stopped short two paces inside the door. The man behind the Manager’s desk was not Wytak. It was jowly, red-faced Ellery McArdle, Commissioner of the Department of War.

One of the guards prodded Alvah and he kept going up to the desk. “Now I think I get it,” he said, staring at McArdle. “When―”

McArdle’s cold gaze flickered. Then his heavy head dropped forward a trifle, and he said, “Finish what you were saying, Gustad.”

“I was about to remark,” Alvah said, “that when Wytak’s pet project flopped, he lost enough support to let you impeach him. Is that right?”

McArdle nodded and seemed to lose interest. “Your feet are not swollen or blistered, Gustad. You didn’t walk back from the Plains. How did you get here?”

Alvah took a deep breath. “We flew―on a passenger roc―as far as the Adirondacks. We didn’t want to alarm you by too much air traffic so near the City, so we joined a freight caravan there.”

McArdle’s stony face did not alter, but all the meaning went suddenly out of it. It was as if the man himself had stepped back and shut a door. The porter behind his chair swayed and looked as if he were about to faint. Alvah heard one of the guards draw in his breath sharply.

“Fthuh!” said McArdle abruptly, his face contorting. “Let’s get this over. What do you know about the military plans of the Muckfeet? Answer me fully. If I’m not satisfied that you do, I’ll have you worked over till I am satisfied.”

Alvah, who had been feeling something like St. George and something like a plucked chicken, discovered that anger could be a very comforting thing. “That’s what I came here to do, he said tightly. The Muckfeets’ military plans are about what you might have expected, after that lousy trick of yours. They know it wasn’t Chicago that raided them.”

McArdle started and made as if to rise. Then he sank back, staring fixedly at Alvah.

“They’ve had a gutful. They’re going to finish New York.”

“When?” said McArdle, biting the word off short.

“That depends on you. If you’re willing to be reasonable, they’ll wait long enough for you to dicker with them. Otherwise, if I’m not back in about an hour, the fun starts.”

McARDLE touched a stud, “Green alert” pressed the stud again and laced his fingers together on the desk. Hurry it up, he said to Alvah. Let’s have the rest.

I’m going to ask you to do something difficult, said Alvah. It’s this―think about what I’m telling you. You’re not thinking now, you’re just reacting―”

He heard a slight movement behind him, saw McArdle’s eyes flicker and his hand make a Not now gesture.

You’re in the same room with a man who’s turned Muckfoot and it disgusts you. You’ll be cured of that eventually ― you can be. I’m the proof―but all I want you to do now it put it aside and use your brains. Here are the facts. Your raiding parties got the shorts beat off them. I saw one of the fights―it lasted about twenty minutes. The Muckfeet could have polished off the Cities any time in the last thirty years. They haven’t done it till now, because―”

McArdle was beating time with his fingertips on the polished ebonite. He wasn’t really listening, Alvah saw, but there was nothing for it except to go ahead.

“―they had the problem of deconditioning and re-educating more than twenty million innocent people, or else letting them starve to death. Now they have the knowledge they need. They can―”

The terms, said McArdle. They’re going to close down this ― this reservation, Alvah said. They’ll satisfy you in any way you like that they can do it by force. If you help, it can be an orderly process in which no body gets hurt and everybody gets the best possible break. And they’ll keep the City intact as a museum. I talked them into that. Or, if they have to, they’ll take the place apart slab by slab.

MeArdie’s mouth was working violently. Take him out and kill him, for City’s sake! And, Morgan!” he called when Alvah and his guards were halfway to the door.

Yes, Mr. Manager.

When you’re through, dump him out the gate he came in.

IT was a pity about Wytak, Alvah’s brain was telling him frozenly. Wytak was a scoundrel or he could never have got where he was―had been―but he wasn’t afraid of a new idea. It might have been posssible to deal with Wytak.

“Where we going to do it?” the younger one asked nervously. He had been pale and sweating in the floater all the way across Middle Jersey.

“In the disinfecting chamber,” Morgan said, gesturing with his pistol. “Then we haul him straight out. In there, you.”

“Well, let’s get it over with, the younger one said. I’m sick.”

“You think I’m not sick?” said Morgan in a strained voice. He gave Alvah a final shove into the middle of the room and stood back, adjusting his gun.

Alvah found himself saying calmly, “Not that way. Morgan, unless you want to turn black and shrivel up a second after.

“What’s he talking about?” the boy whispered shakily.

“Nothing,” said Morgan. The hand with the gun moved indecisively.

“To puncture me,” Alvah warned, “you’ve got to puncture the suit. And I’ve been eating Muckfeet food for the last month and a half. I’m full of microorganisms―swarming with them. They’ll bloop out of me straight at you, Morgan.”

Both men jerked back, as if they had been stung. “I’m getting outa here!” said the boy, grabbing for the door stud.

Morgan blocked him. “Stay here!”

“What’re you going to do?” the younger one asked.

He swore briefly. “We’ll tell the O. D. Come on.”

The door closed and locked solidly behind them. Alvah looked to see if there was a way to double-lock it from his side, but there wasn’t. He tried the opposite door to make sure it was locked, which it was. Then he examined the disinfectant nozzles, wondering if they could be used to squirt corrosive in on him. He decided they probably couldn’t and, anyhow, he had no way to spike the nozzles. Then there was nothing to do but sit in the middle of the bare room and wait, which he did.

The next thing that happened was that he heard a faint far-off continuous noise through the almost soundproof door. He stood up and went over and put his ear against the door, and decided it was his imagination.

Then there was a noise, and he jumped back, his skin tingling all over, just before the door slid open. The sudden maniacal clangor of a bell swept Morgan into the room with it, wild-eyed, his cap missing, drooling from a corner of his mouth, his gun high in one white-knuckled fist.

“Glah!” said Morgan and pulled the trigger.

ALVAH’s heart went bonk hard against his ribs, and the room blurred. Then he realized that there hadn’t been any hiss of an ejected pellet. And he was still on his feet. And Morgan, with his mouth stretched open all the way back to the uvula, was standing there a yard away, staring at him and pulling the trigger repeatedly.

Alvah stepped forward half a pace and put a straight left squarely on the point of Morgan’s jaw. As the man fell, there were shrieks and running footsteps in the outer room. Somebody in Guard uniform plunged past the doorway, shouting incoherently, caromed off a wall, dwindled down a corridor. Then the room was full of leaping men in motley.

The first of them was Artie Brumbacher, almost unrecognizable because he was grinning from ear to ear. He handed Alvah a four-foot knobkerrie and a bulging skin bag and said, “Le’s go!”

The streets were full of grounded floaters and stalled surface cars. The bells had fallen silent, and so had the faint omnipresent vibration that was like silence itself until it was gone. Not a motor was turning in the Borough of Jersey. Occasional chittering sounds floated on the air, and muffled buzzings and other odd sounds, all against the background chorus of faraway shrieks that rose and fell.

At the corner of Middle Orange and Weehawken, opposite the Superior Court Building, they came upon a squad of Regulars who had thrown away their useless guns and picked up an odd lot of assorted bludgeons ― lengths of pipe, tripods and the like.

“Now you’ll see,” said Artie.

The Regulars set up a ragged yell and came running forward. The two Muckfeet on either side of Alvah, Artie and the bucktoothed one called Lafe, dipped heaping dark-brown handfuls out of the bags they carried slung from their shoulders. Alvah followed suit, and recognized the stuff at last―bran meal, soaked in some fragrant syrup until it was mucilaginous and heavy.

Artie swung first, then Lafe, and Alvah last―and the soggy lumps smacked the foremost faces. The squad broke, wiping frenziedly. But you couldn’t wipe the stuff off. It clung coldly and grainily to the hair on the backs of your hands and your eyelashes and the nap of your clothing. All you could do was move it around.

One berserker with a smeared face didn’t stop, and Lafe dropped him with a knobkerrie between the eyes. One more, a white-faced youth, stood miraculously untouched, still hefting his club. He took a stride forward menacingly.

Grinning, Artie raised another glob of the mash and ate it, smacking his lips. The youth spun around, walked drunkenly to the nearest wall and was rackingly sick.

AN hour later, Knickerbocker Circle in Over Manhattan was littered with ameba-shaped puddles of clear plastic. Overhead, the stuff was hanging in festoons from the reticulated framework of the Roof and, for the first time in a century, an unfiltered wind was blowing into New York. Halfway up the sheer facade of the Old Movie House, the roc that had brought Alvah from Jersey was flapping along, a wingtip almost brushing the louvers, while its rider sprinkled pale dust from a sack. Farther down the street, a sickly green growth was already visible on cornices and window frames.

The antique neon sign of the Old Movie dipped suddenly, its supports softened visibly. It swung, nodded and crashed to the pavement.

Three hours later, a little group of whey-faced men in official dress was being loaded aboard a freight roc opposite the underpass to the Cauldwell Floatway in Over Bronnix. Alvah thought he saw McArdle among them, but he couldn’t be sure.

Twilight―all the streets that radiated from the heart of the City were afloat with long, slowly surging tides of humanity, dim in the weak glow from the lumen globes plastered haphazardly to the flanks of the buildings. At the end of every street, the Wall was crumbled down and the moat filled, its fire long gone out. And down the new railed walkways from all three levels came the men, women and children, stumbling out into the alien lumenlit night and the strange scents and the wide world.

Watching from the hilltop with his arm around his wife’s waist, Alvah saw them being herded into groups and led away, unprotesting―saw them in the wains, rolling off toward the temporary shelters where, likely as not, they would sleep the night through, too numbed to be afraid of the morrow.

In the morning, their teaching would begin.

Babylon, Alvah thought, Thebes, Angkor, Lagash, Agade, Tyre, Luxor, and now New York.

A City grew out and then in―it was always the way, whether or not it had a Barrier around it.

Growing, it crippled itself and its people―and died. The weeds overgrew its felled stones.

“Like an egg,” B. J. said, although he had not spoken. “Omne ex ovum―but the eggshell has to break.”

“I know,” said Alvah, discovering that the empty ache in his belly was not sentiment but hunger. “Speaking of eggs―”

B. J. gave his arm a reassuring little pat. “Anything you want, dear. Radnip, orangoe, pearots, fleetmeat―you pick the menu.” Alvah’s mouth began to water.