Turn Left at Thursday (1961) SSC Read online

  Belsen? A concentration camp, explained his informant. For criminals, Jews, homosexuals, aliens and the politically suspect. For what? Haltingly, the Spaniard tried to explain each of the terms, but Roykin lacked patience for instruction in the mores of this time. Where? he asked. Germany.

  Where was Germany?

  His informant began to look worried, particularly as one of the men in brown uniforms was wandering near. Silently the man crept away.

  But Roykin at last remembered; yes, Germany — he had heard of it. Things fell into place. He discovered that the gauntlet he had run, naked, was called “medical inspection” and, for a while, Roykin thought wonderingly of the spectrum-readers of his own time, that diagnosed physical state by electronic measurement.

  But Roykin understood these matters: this was a place where things were not called by proper names; it was a place where things were concealed in part for purposes of security and in part so that those who were here should lack even the assurance of knowing what was in store for them ... and should therefore suspect and fear everything. Roykin determined to remember that principle; it would be helpful when the thirty days were up.

  The men in brown uniforms put Roykin to work.

  He was taken to an open ditch where blank-faced men in filthy

  rags like his own were up-ending wheelbarrows of ash into the trough and others were striking the ash with great hammers.

  Roykin looked closer and saw what the hammers were for. Mixed in the ash were pieces of calcined bone; it was the task of the hammers to shatter them out of shape, perhaps so that the ash itself could be added anonymously to some farmer’s soil, perhaps out of an instinct for neatness.

  Roykin rebelled. No, not at the cremated remains, for that was to be expected in a punishment time, but: “Work!” he cried, in the halting German he had begun to pick up. “I shall not work! I am not here for work!”

  “Halt's mahl,” said one of the men in brown uniforms standing by, and moved passionlessly to hit him in the face.

  Roykin felt his teeth crumble. He reeled to where he was ordered to go and stood for a moment, tasting the pain. It was an inconvenience again, he thought, appraising it; but not too bad, not too bad at all.

  Pain had never been punishment for Roykin, as has been said. Pain is only a tingle in the nerve endings, not different from touch or taste or chill; it is only the connotations of pain that make it feared. The pain of a knife rending through the flesh is only in part the message that the cut nerves send. In part it is also fear, and that the greater part — fear of death; fear of long slow healing aches; fear that it will never heal, that an arm or a leg may be lost or an eye go blind. Pain itself is not always feared — even by others than Roykin; the grueling pain of childbirth is more sought than evaded.

  From such fears as make pain insupportable, Roykin, for good reason, was immune. To that degree, he was immune from pain; and this was what Grillard had not been able to learn.

  All the same, Roykin picked up his hammer and began to punish the calcined bone.

  Roykin understood that there was danger here.

  Thirty days is not long, but it was up to him to survive the thirty days; it would be no court’s fault if he were killed first. And perhaps, he mused, it had even been Grillard’s wish that he should die here in this place, and thus the problem of Roykin should once and for all be solved. The thought amusing him, he laughed. He determined, then, to avoid the worst of the punishments these men offered.

  Of such punishments there were many. Around him was more than pain, pain multiplied to a pitch that raised it to another magnitude entirely. Roykin discovered that every person in this place was here because it was desired that he die. Some were killed outright by blow or knife or gun. Some were starved.

  Some were placed in enormous gas chambers, stripped and extinguished, and their corpses ransacked for dental fillings and for rings.

  Roykin thought, by the twentieth day, almost wistfully of the galleys.

  This was not the galleys. This was something different. Here the imprisoned were not commanded to work until they died. Here they were commanded to die.

  Roykin had to admit that it made a pattern and even that it had a certain elegance. This was Early Machine Age. There was no real need for human slaves, which inevitably made a difference in attitude toward the preservation of human life; the impulse to preserve life rested only on ethical considerations, not on the solid basis of conservation of usable property. There were, however, no ethical considerations in Belsen.

  It was a long stride from his tenth-century galleys, where his first offense had brought him, but it was not a stride upward.

  Still, he survived, though he grew quite thin. Twenty days. Thirty.

  And he felt the invisible Web wrapped, tight and burning, around him. The dying prisoner whom he had been robbing of a moldy piece of bread looked apathetically up at him, then wonderingly, then disappeared.

  Roykin dropped a few inches onto a padded couch.

  Bright lights blazed around him. He was home.

  Zenomia was waiting to greet “ him — of course.

  “Pfiu,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Darling Roykin, I am here but — pfiu.”

  Roykin felt strong as a tiger. He fought his way free of the Web and kicked against the protecting bars. “I stink!” he exulted. “Ah, we all did, Zenomia, but I lived and the others didn’t. You, there! Let me out of here.”

  Behind his glass panel, the Web operator silently disapproved, but he moved a hand and the bars that kept visitors from tangling with the Web dropped away. Roykin bounded out and clutched the girl.

  “We’ll get married again,” he planned. “I need a woman tonight. Now! You’ll do.”

  “Roykin,” she said, straining away, “please bathe. I’ll wait.”

  Roykin laughed and, walking lightly, stripped off his clothes and threw them at the Web operator. They struck the glass and left a mark. Roykin laughed again.

  He went surely to the dressing rooms on the other side of the door, for he remembered the way. Naked and laughing to himself, he passed unremembered faces, men and women who perhaps worked there, perhaps had business elsewhere in the building, perhaps had come to see what it was like — everyone knew about the Web, though only a few like Roykin would ever experience it themselves. Or perhaps they had come to see Roykin! Some of the faces seemed to know him, for they whispered to each other.

  He laughed louder. Roykin! Roykin knew Roykin, too —it was a name that everyone should know!

  He was still laughing as the bath sprayed him, soaped him, rinsed him and dried him.

  “Love?” whispered the bath recording, its perfume sprays and powder jets cocked. “Sport? Sleep? What is your pleasure?”

  Roykin frowned. The mood for Zenomia had passed him.

  “Nothing,” he decided. “Just get me out of here.”

  Warm gusts of air wrapped themselves obediently around him and the curtain slipped away.

  He stepped out and clothed himself, while Zenomia waited lovingly. But he said grandly, “Not now. I will see you later, perhaps. Now I intend to visit with Grillard.”

  Grillard's house stood alone on stilts in six feet of water.

  “Hoy!” cried Roykin, waving at the house. “Come get me!”

  Obediently, the house unrolled a floating streamer from the door to the grassy bank where Roykin stood. He stepped on it and stood regally as it retracted to deposit him on the doorstep.

  A silvery voice recognized him and chimed, “Roykin, Roykin,” though he had never been there before.

  Trust Grillard, he thought —he hasn’t neglected to tell the house that I might appear. Roykin waited, tapping his foot.

  Grillard himself appeared.

  The handsome face, white-haloed, was dignified but uneasy. “What do you want, Roy kin?”

  I'm back, Grillard.”

  “I know you’re back. I signed the order for the Web.”

  Roykin pushed by
him. “You signed the order that sent me there, too.”

  “I had no choice. What do you want?”

  Roykin walked on in and sat down, fingering little knickknacks on a table before him. “Chinese, Grillard?” he guessed, picking up a little figurine. It was quite heavy and dangerous. “It looks Chinese.” “Get out of here, Roykin.”

  Roykin considered. “No,” he decided, “I don’t want to do that. I thought I wanted Zenomia, but I didn’t want her either. I’m not sure what I do want. Is that amusing, Grillard?”

  Grillard peered fretfully out from the white whiskers that framed his face. He said uneasily: “I’m warning you, Roykin. The next time will be your third offense, and that isn’t a matter of thirty days.”

  “What is?” asked Roykin dreamily. “No, it wasn’t Zenomia I wanted, though she has taut breasts. It wasn’t a woman at all. I wanted to frighten someone."

  “Get out of here!"

  “I may steal your Chinese figurine,” said Roykin, “or I may hit you with it. Perhaps I will pull out your whiskers. Have you a wife, Grillard? I don’t know, maybe I could violate her. I have learned these things, in thirty days with your help as well as elsewhere. I am grateful, I think.”

  “Roykin,” Grillard cried shrilly, “the third offense is — ”

  “Shut up, old man, and come here,” said Roykin, moving toward him, and he couldn’t afterward remember what had come next.

  But he remembered what happened the next morning, oh, yes.

  Grillard, with a bit of surgeon’s plaster across his forehead, stood over him on the dais, scowling, and said into the microphone: “The diagnosis is total dissociation, schizoid. Third offense. One week.” And then it was the Web again.

  Roykin leaped to his feet where the Web dropped him, very angry, for not even Zenomia had been there to see him go. (He thought, though he couldn’t remember for sure, that he had been to see her after striking Grillard. Also there had been something about a fire. Perhaps he had made her dislike him.)

  But he looked about him, and he was not so angry. This time they had let him keep his clothes, and besides it was not cold. Oh, it was hot Fools, he cried silently, very pleased. Only one week?

  But it might be an unpleasant week.

  Foul stenches smote his nose. He was standing calf-deep in thick black mud, and two sorry horses were straining to draw a wheeled wagon past him. The heat was appalling; the smell was awful; there were clouds of insects. (But only one week! he sang to himself.)

  “Hi!" he cried. "Hoy!”

  The man on the wagon shouted at him and whipped his horses. This angered Roykin and he leaped to the wagon — leaped and missed and came down half sprawling in the ugly mud. But he caught himself up again, laughing (only one week!), and climbed aboard.

  “Where am I, man?” he demanded. “When is this?”

  The man snarled at him.

  “Man, tell me!” cried Roykin, and finally made himself understood.

  “Philadelphia?” repeated Roykin, trying to remember where that was. “And the year is seventeen hundred and ninety-three?”

  It made no sense, no sense at all. He swung off the wagon and let the carter flog his feeble beasts away. There were many like him; the road was packed. Overhead, a cloud-fogged sun steamed the earth gently, evoking every smell that the smeared soil was capable of. Seventeen-ninety-three, thought Roykin, frowning. But what was 1793, that it should be a punishment? And for only one week?

  “Ware!” cried a voice strongly. “Ware for the dead wagon!”

  And another wagon sloshed and slithered by; and it held a cargo of stickfigures in rags. There had been bodies like that in Belsen when Roykin took the task of cleaning out the gas rooms after a busy day’s extermination; but he had never thought to see them here.

  “Ware!” cried the dead-cart driv-er’s voice, passing away. ‘Ware for the victims of the yellow fever!”

  And Roykin stopped and looked around.

  It was a city in flight and he was in the middle of it. Half of Philadelphia was on these roads, striving for the safety that lay outside the city — striving in vain for wherever they went they could not escape themselves, and it was in themselves that the plague lay.

  Yellow fever!

  Angrily Roykin ran, slipping and falling, to a house and thundered at the door. A curtain quivered at an upper window, but the door remained barred.

  “Prophylaxis!” shouted Roykin. “An ampoule of antibiotic, quickly!” The window curtain quivered again to mock him, and then not even that.

  “I beg you!” shouted Roykin, but no answer. And how could there be? he sobbed to himself. Seventeen hundred and ninety-three! Antibiotics were nearly two centuries away, as far from reach as the Moon!

  He looked around him again, and the smell no longer mattered. It was filth that bred the fever, but the fever was grown now; the filth no longer mattered.

  Yellow fever.

  With horror, Roy kin brushed the stinging insects from his skin.

  But they returned again, bringing their itch of death.

  There were wagons, there were roads, there were many ways of getting out of the city.

  But not in time. Roykin stood with the whining mosquitoes swarming around his head, staring up at the uncaring sky.

  Third offense.

  One week.

  The Hated

  The bar didn't have a name; all it said on the outside was:

  Café

  EAT

  Cocktails

  which doesn't make a lot of sense. But it was a bar. It had a big TV set going ya-ta-ta ya-ta-ta in three glorious colors, and a jukebox that tried to drown out the TV with that lousy music they play. Anyway, it wasn't a kid hangout. I kind of like it. But I wasn't supposed to be there at all—it's in the contract. I was supposed to stay in New York and the New England states.

  Café-EAT-Cocktails was right across the river. I think the name of the place was Hoboken, I'm not sure. It all had a kind of dreamy feeling to it. I was. . . . Well, I couldn't even remember going there. I remembered one minute I was downtown New York, looking across the river. I did that a lot. And then I was there. I don't remember crossing the river at all.

  I was drunk, you know.

  You know how it is? Double bourbons and keep them coming. And after a while the bartender stops bringing me the ginger ale because gradually I forget to mix them. I got pretty loaded long before I left New York, I realize that. I guess I had to get pretty loaded to risk the pension and all.

  Used to be I didn't drink much, but now, I don't know, when I have one drink I get to thinking about Sam and Wally and Chowderhead and Gilvey and the captain. If I don't drink I think about them too, and then I take a drink. And that leads to another drink, and it all comes out to the same thing. Well, I guess I said it already. I drink a pretty good amount, but you can't blame me.

  There was a girl.

  I always get a girl someplace. Usually they aren't much, and this one wasn't either. I mean, she was probably somebody's mother. She was around thirty-five and not so bad, though she had a long scar from under her ear down along her throat to the little round spot where her larynx was. It wasn't ugly. She smelled nice—while I could still smell, you know—and she didn't talk much. I liked that. Only— Well, did you ever meet somebody with a nervous cough? Like when you say something funny, a little funny, not a big yock, they don't laugh and they don't stop with just smiling, but they sort of cough? She did that. I began to itch; I couldn't help it. I asked her to stop it.

  She spilled her drink and looked at me almost as though she was scared—and I'd tried to say it quietly, too. "Sorry," she said, a little angry, a little scared. "Sorry. But you don't have to—"

  "Forget it."

  "Sure. But you asked me to sit down here with you, remember? If you're going to—"

  "Forget it!" I nodded at the bartender and held up two fingers. "You need another drink," I said. "The thing is," I said, "Gilvey used to do that."

&n
bsp; "What?"

  "That cough."

  She looked puzzled. "You mean like—"

  "God damn it, stop it!" Even the bartender looked over at me that time. Now she was really mad, but I didn't want her to go away. I said, "Gilvey was a fellow who went to Mars with me. Pat Gilvey."

  "Oh." She sat down again and leaned across the table, low. "Mars."

  The bartender brought our drinks and looked at me suspiciously.

  I said, "Say, Mac. Would you mind turning down the air-conditioning?"

  "My name isn't Mac. No."

  "Oh, have a heart. It's too cold in here."

  "Sorry." He didn't sound sorry. But I was cold. I mean, that kind of weather, it's always cold in those places. You know around New York in August? It hits eighty, eighty-five, ninety. All the places have air-conditioning and what they really want is for you to wear a shirt and tie. But I like to walk a lot. You would too, you know. And you can't walk around much in long pants and a suit coat and all that stuff. Not around there. Not in August. And so then when I went into a bar it'd have one of those built-in freezers for the used-car salesmen with their dates, or maybe their wives, all dressed up. For what? But I froze.

  "Mars." the girl breathed. "Mars."

  I began to itch again. "Want to dance?"

  "They don't have a license," she said. "Byron, I didn't know you'd been to Mars! Please tell me about it."

  "It was all right," I said. That was a lie.

  She was interested. She forgot to smile. It made her look nicer. She said, "I knew a man—my brother-in-law—he was my husband's brother—I mean my ex-husband—"

  "I know."

  "He worked for General Atomic. In Rockford, Illinois. You know where that is?"

  "Sure." I couldn't go there, but I knew where Illinois was.