Algis Budrys: Some Will Not Die

Custis grinned without any particular malice, giving the needle another jab under Henley’s city-thin skin. “Hell, man, if I thought Berendtsen was still alive and around here someplace, I’d figure things were being run so smart out here that we ought to of never left Chicago at all.”

Henley flushed. “Custis, you furnish the vehicle and I’ll handle the thinking. If the government thinks it’s good enough a chance to be worth investigating, then that’s it—we’ll investigate it.”

Joe looked at him in disgust. “Berendtsen’s dead. They shot him in New York thirty years ago. They pumped him full of holes and dragged his body behind a Jeep, right down the main street at twenty miles an hour. People threw cobblestones at it all the way. That’s all there is left of Berendtsen—a thirty-year-old streak of blood down Broadway Avenue.”

“That’s only one of the stories you hear. There are others.”

“Henley, a lot more people have heard that one than have heard he’s still alive. And ’way out here. Maybe we should look around for Julius Caesar, too?”

“All right, Custis! That’ll be enough of your kind of wisdom!”

Custis looked down at him steadily, the expression on his face hovering at the thin edge between a grin and something else entirely. After a moment, Henley blinked and broke the conversation off into a new direction. “How soon before we reach the mountains?”

“Tonight. Couple more hours, you’ll get a chance to see some bandits.” Now Custis smiled.

Henley said “Well, let me know when you come across something,” and gingerly crawled back to the AA hatch. He dropped out of sight inside the car. After a moment he remembered, reached up, and pulled the hatch shut.

Custis went back to keep an eye out. At rest, his face was impassive. His hands motionlessly held the thick metal of the armor. But now and then, as his eyes touched the mountains in his constant scan around the horizon, he frowned. And at those times, his fingers would flex, as though it were necessary for him to reacquaint himself with the texture of wrought steel.

Custis had no faith in Henley’s hopes. Berendtsen’s name was used to frighten children—real children or politicians; it was all one—all over the Republic. It had been the same during all the Republics before it. Somebody was always waving the blue-and-silver flag, or threatening to. A handful of fake Berendtsens had been turned up, here and there all over the Chicago hegemony, trading on a dead man’s legend these past thirty years. Some of them had been laughed down, or otherwise taken care of, before they got fairly started. Some hadn’t—the Fourth Republic got itself started while the Third was busy fighting a man who’d turned out to be merely a better liar than most. Through the years, the whole thing had turned into a kind of grim running joke.

But the fact was that the politicians back in Chicago couldn’t afford to have the ghost walking their frontiers—or what they thought were their frontiers, though no one could truly say whose word was Law south of Gary. The fact was that somehow, in some way, the tale of Berendtsen had come drifting over the eastern mountains and contaminated the people with impatience. The fact was that Berendtsen was a man who had been able to take hold, after the plague scoured the world clean of ninety percent of its people in six howling months. —Or so the legend said; Custis had not much faith in that, either.

The fact you had to live with, in any case, was that Berendtsen had put together something called the Second Free American Republic—meaning probably the old American East and the eastern half of old Canada—and made it stand up for ten years before he got his. And nobody else had ever been able to do as well—at least not here, where the Great Lakes and Appalachians kept Berendtsen from ever being much more than a name and an occasional banner. But between the times his name frightened them, with its promise of armed men coming over the mountains someday, and ordering things to suit a stranger someday, people still thought of ten whole years with no fighting in the cities. It made them growl with anger whenever the local politicians did something they disliked. It made them restless; it left no peace in the minds of the politicians as they tried to convince themselves the cities were almost back to normal— That soon enough, now, the cities and the people of the plains would become part of a functioning civilization once more, and the scar of the plague would be healed over at last.

It was not a comfortable thing, being haunted by a man nobody knew. You could say, and say with a good part of justice, that Berendtsen was behind every mob that rolled down on Government House and dragged the men inside up to the dark lamp posts.

Thirty years since Berendtsen died—the story went. Nobody was sure of exactly who’d been behind the shooting; the politicians or the people. But it was a sure thing it had been the people who’d mutilated his body. And six months later the mobs’d killed the men they said killed Berendtsen. So there you were—try and make sense out of it, in a world where the towns went without machinery and the cities went without more than the barest trickle of food. A world where it was still worth a city man’s life to approach farm country alone.

You couldn’t. The man’s name was magic, and that was that.

Custis, up in his turret, shook his head. If he didn’t find this ghost for Henley, it was a cinch he’d never get paid—contract or no contract. But at least he’d gotten his car re-shopped for this job. Sourly, Custis weighed cutting the political officer’s throat right here and reporting him lost to bandit action. Or cutting his throat and not reporting back at all.

The battlewagon was a long way from Chicago at this point. The only drinking water aboard was a muddy mess scooped out of one of the summer-shrunk creeks. The food was canned army rations—some of it, under the re-labeling, might be from before the plague—and the inside of the car stank with clothes that hadn’t been off their backs in three weeks. The summer sun pounded down on them all through the long day, and the complex power-train that began with a nuclear reactor and a steam turbine, and ended in the individual electric motors turning the drive wheels and sprockets, threw off more waste heat than most men could stand.

Henley was just barely getting along. For Custis and his crew, any other way of life was too remote to consider. But it had been a long run. They’d stretched themselves to make it from the marginal, inexpert captive farmlands at the Chicago periphery, and they still had the worst part of the job to do. Maybe it would be easier to simply turn bandit himself.

But that meant cutting himself off from the city, at least until the next Republic needed the hire of the battlewagon. That was something Custis wouldn’t have minded—if oil and ammunition, replacement barrels for his guns, pile fuels, and rations for his crew grew on the plain as thick as the grass.

“Bear 340, Lew,” he said to his driver through the command microphone, and the car jerked slightly on its tracks, heading on a more direct course for the nearest of the dark foothills.

And so, Joe Custis thought, there’s no help for it—you have to chase after a ghost no matter what you’d rather do.

He looked back across the grass, with its swath of crushed, matted leaves, forever stretching away behind the car. Here and there, he knew, there were flecks of oil and dried mud that had dropped from the battlewagon’s underside. Here and there lay discarded ration cans, their crude paper labels already curling away from the flecked tin or enamel plating. Back along that trail lay campsites, each with its pits for the machineguns dismounted from the car to guard its perimeter. The ashes were cold. Rain was beginning to turn them into darker blotches on the bared black earth. The gun pits were crumbling. Who came to search these sites—what patient men came out of their hiding places to investigate, to see if anything useful had been left behind, perhaps to find some clue to the car’s purpose?