The Complete Dangerous Visions Page 9

  Now how, Chib wonders, how could she get pregnant that night? No woman, no matter how fertile, could have managed that. She must have been knocked up before or after. Yet she swears that it was that night, the night he was

  THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE

  or

  FOAM, FOAM ON THE RANGE

  “No, no!” Benedictine cries.

  “Why not? I love you,” Chib says. “I want to marry you.”

  Benedictine screams, and her friend Bela, out in the hall, yells, “What’s the matter? What happened?”

  Benedictine does not reply. Raging, shaking as if in the grip of a fever, she scrambles out of bed, pushing Chib to one side. She runs to the small egg of the bathroom in the corner, and he follows her.

  “I hope you’re not going to do what I think . . .?” he says.

  Benedictine moans, “You sneaky no-good son of a bitch!”

  In the bathroom, she pulls down a section of wall, which becomes a shelf. On its top, attached by magnetic bottoms to the shelf, are many containers. She seizes a long thin can of spermatocide, squats, and inserts it. She presses the button on its bottom, and it foams with a hissing sound even its cover of flesh cannot silence.

  Chib is paralyzed for a moment. Then he roars.

  Benedictine shouts, “Stay away from me, you rude-ickle!”

  From the door to the bedroom comes Bela’s timid, “Are you all right, Benny?”

  “I’ll all-right her!” Chib bellows.

  He jumps forward and takes a can of tempoxy glue from the shelf. The glue is used by Benedictine to attach her wigs to her head and will hold anything forever unless softened by a specific defixative.

  Benedictine and Bela both cry out as Chib lifts Benedictine up and then lowers her to the floor. She fights, but he manages to spray the glue over the can and the skin and hairs around it.

  “What’re you doing?” she screams.

  He pushes the button on the bottom of the can to full-on position and then sprays the bottom with glue. While she struggles, he holds her arms tight against her body and keeps her from rolling over and so moving the can in or out. Silently, Chib counts to thirty, then to thirty more to make sure the glue is thoroughly dried. He releases her.

  The foam is billowing out around her groin and down her legs and spreading out across the floor. The fluid in the can is under enormous pressure in the indestructible unpunchable can, and the foam expands vastly if exposed to open air.

  Chib takes the can of defixative from the shelf and clutches it in his hand, determined that she will not have it. Benedictine jumps up and swings at him. Laughing like a hyena in a tentful of nitrous oxide, Chib blocks her fist and shoves her away. Slipping on the foam, which is ankle-keep by now, Benedictine falls and then slides backward out of the bedroom on her buttocks, the can clunking.

  She gets to her feet and only then realizes fully what Chib has done. Her scream goes up, and she follows it. She dances around, yanking at the can, her screams intensifying with every tug and resultant pain. Then she turns and runs out of the room or tries to. She skids; Bela is in her way; they cling together and both ski out of the room, doing a half-turn while going through the door. The foam swirls out so that the two look like Venus and friend rising from the bubble-capped waves of the Cyprian Sea.

  Benedictine shoves Bela away but not without losing some flesh to Bela’s long sharp fingernails. Bela shoots backwards through the door toward Chib. She is like a novice ice skater trying to maintain her balance. She does not succeed and shoots by Chib, wailing, on her back, her feet up in the air.

  Chib slides his bare feet across the floor gingerly, stops at the bed to pick up his clothes, but decides he’d be wiser to wait until he’s outside before he puts them on. He gets to the circular hall just in time to see Benedictine crawling past one of the columns that divides the corridor from the atrium. Her parents, two middle-aged behemoths, are still sitting on a flato, beer cans in hand, eyes wide, mouths open, quivering.

  Chib does not even say goodnight to them as he passes along the hall. But then he sees the fido and realizes that her parents had switched it from EXT. to INT. and then to Benedictine’s room. Father and mother have been watching Chib and daughter, and it is evident from father’s not-quite dwindled condition that father was very excited by this show, superior to anything seen on exterior fido.

  “You peeping bastards!” Chib roars.

  Benedictine has gotten to them and on her feet and she is stammering, weeping, indicating the can and then stabbing her finger at Chib. At Chib’s roar, the parents heave up from the flato as two leviathans from the deep. Benedictine turns and starts to run towards him, her arms outstretched, her long-nailed fingers curved, her face a medusa’s. Behind her streams the wake of the livid witch and father and mother on the foam.

  Chib shoves up against a pillar and rebounds and skitters off, helpless to keep himself from turning sidewise during the maneuver. But he keeps his balance. Mama and Papa have gone down together with a crash that shakes even the solid house. They are up, eyes rolling and bellowing like hippos surfacing. They charge him but separate, Mama shrieking now, her face, despite the fat, Benedictine’s. Papa goes around one side of the pillar; Mama, the other. Benedictine has rounded another pillar, holding to it with one hand to keep her from slipping. She is between Chib and the door to the outside.

  Chib slams against the wall of the corridor, in an area free of foam. Benedictine runs towards him. He dives across the floor, hits it, and rolls between two pillars and out into the atrium.

  Mama and Papa converge in a collision course. The Titanic meets the iceberg, and both plunge swiftly. They skid on their faces and bellies towards Benedictine. She leaps into the air, trailing foam on them as they pass beneath her.

  By now it is evident that the government’s claim that the can is good for 40,000 shots of death-to-sperm, or for 40,000 copulations, is justified. Foam is all over the place, ankle-deep—knee-high in some places—and still pouring out.

  Bela is on her back now and on the atrium floor, her head driven into the soft folds of the flato.

  Chib gets up slowly and stands for a moment, glaring around him, his knees bent, ready to jump from danger but hoping he won’t have to since his feet will undoubtedly fly away from under him.

  “Hold it, you rotten son of a bitch!” Papa roars. “I’m going to kill you! You can’t do this to my daughter!”

  Chib watches him turn over like a whale in a heavy sea and try to get to his feet. Down he goes again, grunting as if hit by a harpoon. Mama is no more successful than he.

  Seeing that his way is unbarred—Benedictine having disappeared somewhere—Chib skis across the atrium until he reaches an unfoamed area near the exit. Clothes over his arm, still holding the defixative, he struts towards the door.

  At this moment Benedictine calls his name. He turns to see her sliding from the kitchen at him. In her hand is a tall glass. He wonders what she intends to do with it. Certainly, she is not offering him the hospitality of a drink.

  Then she scoots into the dry region of the floor and topples forward with a scream. Nevertheless, she throws the contents of the glass accurately.

  Chib screams when he feels the boiling hot water, painful as if he had been circumcised unanesthetized.

  Benedictine, on the floor, laughs. Chib, after jumping around and shrieking, the can and clothes dropped, his hands holding the scalded parts, manages to control himself. He stops his antics, seizes Benedictine’s right hand, and drags her out into the streets of Beverly Hills. There are quite a few people out this night, and they follow the two. Not until Chib reaches the lake does he stop and there he goes into the water to cool off the burn, Benedictine with him.

  The crowd has much to talk about later, after Benedictine and Chib have crawled out of the lake and then run home. The crowd talks and laughs quite a while as they watch the sanitation department people clean the foam off the lake surface and the streets.

 
; “I was so sore I couldn’t walk for a month!” Benedictine screams.

  “You had it coming,” Chib says. “You’ve got no complaints. You said you wanted my baby, and you talked as if you meant it.”

  “I must’ve been out of my mind!” Benedictine says. “No, I wasn’t! I never said no such thing! You lied to me! You forced me!”

  “I would never force anybody,” Chib said. “You know that. Quit your bitching. You’re a free agent, and you consented freely. You have free will.”

  Omar Runic, the poet, stands up from his chair. He is a tall thin red-bronze youth with an aquiline nose and very thick red lips. His kinky hair grows long and is cut into the shape of the Pequod, that fabled vessel which bore mad Captain Ahab and his mad crew and the sole survivor Ishmael after the white whale. The coiffure is formed with a bowsprit and hull and three masts and yardarms and even a boat hanging on davits.

  Omar Runic claps his hands and shouts, “Bravo! A philosopher! Free will it is; free will to seek the Eternal Verities—if any—or Death and Damnation! I’ll drink to free will! A toast, gentlemen! Stand up, Young Radishes, a toast to our leader!”

  And so begins

  THE MAD P PARTY

  Madame Trismegista calls, “Tell your fortune, Chib! See what the stars tell through the cards!”

  He sits down at her table while his friends crowd around.

  “O.K., Madame. How do I get out of this mess?”

  She shuffles and turns over the top card.

  “Jesus! The ace of spades!”

  “You’re going on a long journey!”

  “Egypt!” Rousseau Red Hawk cries. “Oh, no, you don’t want to go there, Chib! Come with me to where the buffalo roam and . . .”

  Up comes another card.

  “You will soon meet a beautiful dark lady.”

  “A goddam Arab! Oh, no, Chib, tell me it’s not true!”

  “You will win great honors soon.”

  “Chib’s going to get the grant!”

  “If I get the grant, I don’t have to go to Egypt,” Chib says. “Madame Trismegista, with all due respect, you’re full of crap.”

  “Don’t mock, young man. I’m not a computer. I’m tuned to the spectrum of psychic vibrations.”

  Flip. “You will be in great danger, physically and morally.”

  Chib says, “That happens at least once a day.”

  Flip. “A man very close to you will die twice.”

  Chib pales, rallies, and says, “A coward dies a thousand deaths.”

  “You will travel in time, return to the past.”

  “Zow!” Red Hawk says. “You’re outdoing yourself, Madame. Careful! You’ll get a psychic hernia, have to wear an ectoplasmic truss!”

  “Scoff if you want to, you dumbshits,” Madame says. “There are more worlds than one. The cards don’t lie, not when I deal them.”

  “Gobrinus!” Chib calls. “Another pitcher of beer for the Madame.”

  The Young Radishes return to their table, a legless disc held up in the air by a graviton field. Benedictine glares at them and goes into a huddle with the other teemagers. At a table nearby sits Pinkerton Legrand, a gummint agent, facing them so that the fido under his one-way window of a jacket beams in on them. They know he’s doing this. He knows they know and has reported so to his superior. He frowns when he sees Falco Accipiter enter. Legrand does not like an agent from another department messing around on his case. Accipiter does not even look at Legrand. He orders a pot of tea and then pretends to drop into the teapot a pill that combines with tannic acid to become P.

  Rousseau Red Hawk winks at Chib and says, “Do you really think it’s possible to paralyze all of LA with a single bomb?”

  “Three bombs!” Chib says loudly so that Legrand’s fido will pick up the words. “One for the control console of the desalinization plant, a second for the backup console, the third for the nexus of the big pipe that carries the water to the reservoir on the 20th level.”

  Pinkerton Legrand turns pale. He downs all the whiskey in his glass and orders another, although he has already had too many. He presses the plate on his fido to transmit a triple top-priority. Lights blink redly in HQ; a gong clangs repeatedly; the chief wakes up so suddenly he falls off his chair.

  Accipiter also hears, but he sits stiff, dark, and brooding as the diorite image of a Pharaoh’s falcon. Monomaniac, he is not to be diverted by talk of inundating all LA, even if it will lead to action. On Grandpa’s trail, he is now here because he hopes to use Chib as the key to the house. One “mouse”—as he thinks of his criminals—one “mouse” will run to the hole of another.

  “When do you think we can go into action?” Huga Wells-Erb Heinsturbury, the science-fiction authoress, says.

  “In about three weeks,” Chib says.

  At HQ, the chief curses Legrand for disturbing him. There are thousands of young men and women blowing off steam with these plots of destruction, assassination, and revolt. He does not understand why the young punks talk like this, since they have everything handed them free. If he had his way, he’d throw them into jail and kick them around a little or more than.

  “After we do it, we’ll have to take off for the big outdoors,” Red Hawk says. His eyes glisten. “I’m telling you, boys, being a free man in the forest is the greatest. You’re a genuine individual, not just one of the faceless breed.”

  Red Hawk believes in this plot to destroy LA. He is happy because, though he hasn’t said so, he has grieved while in Mother Nature’s lap for intellectual companionship. The other savages can hear a deer at a hundred yards, detect a rattlesnake in the bushes, but they’re deaf to the footfalls of philosophy, the neigh of Nietzsche, the rattle of Russell, the honkings of Hegel.

  “The illiterate swine!” he says aloud. The others say, “What?”

  “Nothing. Listen, you guys must know how wonderful it is. You were in the WNRCC.”

  “I was 4-F,” Omar Runic says. “I got hay fever.”

  “I was working on my second M.A.,” Gibbon Tacitus says.

  “I was in the WNRCC band,” Sibelius Amadeus Yehudi says. “We only got outside when we played the camps, and that wasn’t often.”

  “Chib, you were in the Corps. You loved it, didn’t you?”

  Chib nods but says, “Being a neo-Amerind takes all your time just to survive. When could I paint? And who would see the paintings if I did get time? Anyway, that’s no life for a woman or a baby.”

  Red Hawk looks hurt and orders a whiskey mixed with P.

  Pinkerton Legrand doesn’t want to interrupt his monitoring, yet he can’t stand the pressure in his bladder. He walks towards the room used as the customers’ catch-all. Red Hawk, in a nasty mood caused by rejection, sticks his leg out. Legrand trips, catches himself, and stumbles forward. Benedictine puts out her leg. Legrand falls on his face. He no longer has any reason to go to the urinal except to wash himself off.

  Everybody except Legrand and Accipiter laugh. Legrand jumps up, his fists doubled. Benedictine ignores him and walks over to Chib, her friends following. Chib stiffens. She says, “You perverted bastard! You told me you were just going to use your finger!”

  “You’re repeating yourself,” Chib says. “The important thing is, what’s going to happen to the baby?”

  “What do you care?” Benedictine says. “For all you know, it might not even be yours!”

  “That’d be a relief,” Chib says, “if it weren’t. Even so, the baby should have a say in this. He might want to live—even with you as his mother.”

  “In this miserable life!” she cries. “I’m going to do it a favor. I’m going to the hospital and get rid of it. Because of you, I have to miss out on my big chance at the Folk Festival! There’ll be agents from all over there, and I won’t get a chance to sing for them!”

  “You’re a liar,” Chib says. “You’re all dressed up to sing.”

  Benedictine’s face is red; her eyes, wide; her nostrils, flaring.

  “You spoile
d my fun!”

  She shouts, “Hey, everybody, want to hear a howler! This great artist, this big hunk of manhood, Chib the divine, he can’t get a hardon unless he’s gone down on!”

  Chib’s friends look at each other. What’s the bitch screaming about? So what’s new?

  From Grandpa’s Private Ejaculations: Some of the features of the Panamorite religion, so reviled and loathed in the 21st century, have become everyday facts in modern times. Love, love, love, physical and spiritual! It’s not enough to just kiss your children and hug them. But oral stimulation of the genitals of infants by the parents and relatives has resulted in some curious conditioned reflexes. I could write a book about this aspect of mid-22nd century life and probably will.

  Legrand comes out of the washroom. Benedictine slaps Chib’s face. Chib slaps her back. Gobrinus lifts up a section of the bar and hurtles through the opening, crying, “Poisson! Poisson!”

  He collides with Legrand, who lurches into Bela, who screams, whirls, and slaps Legrand, who slaps back. Benedictine empties a glass of P in Chib’s face. Howling, he jumps up and swings his fist. Benedictine ducks, and the fist goes over her shoulder into a girlfriend’s chest.

  Red Hawk leaps up on the table and shouts, “I’m a regular bearcat, half-alligator, half . . .”

  The table, held up in a graviton field, can’t bear much weight. It tilts and catapults him into the girls, and all go down. They bite and scratch Red Hawk, and Benedictine squeezes his testicles. He screams, writhes, and hurls Benedictine with his feet onto the top of the table. It has regained its normal height and altitude, but now it flips over again, tossing her to the other side. Legrand, tippytoeing through the crowd on his way to the exit, is knocked down. He loses some front teeth against somebody’s knee cap. Spitting blood and teeth, he jumps up and slugs a bystander.

  Gobrinus fires off a gun that shoots a tiny Very light. It’s supposed to blind the brawlers and so bring them to their senses while they’re regaining their sight. It hangs in the air and shines like

  A STAR OVER BEDLAM

  The Police Chief is talking via fido to a man in a public booth. The man has turned off the video and is disguising his voice.