Damon Knight: Orbit 21

Well, if that’s how they want it, let them bark at the moon alone (or whatever it is they do) and dance and keep their own home fires burning. Let them live, as was said, “in the shadow of man.” It serves them right.

I ask the psychoanalyst, “Who are we, anyway?” He says about 90 percent of us ask that same question in one form or another, while about 10 percent seem to have found some kind of an answer of their own. He says that, anyway, we will remain essentially who we already are whether we bother to ask the question or not.

The trashmen came upon a nest of maniacs in the cool shelter of what had been a parking garage. They had been sitting around a fire frying a skinned bird, drinking sour water out of gin bottles. When the trashmen ran in, they scrambled to their feet, scuttling off in different directions.

The trashmen split up, Kane going through a black cavity in the cracked green wall, Glaser darting down a corridor, and Underwood flinging open the door labeled stairwell and bounding up the steps.

Dammit, thought Underwood, this’ll take a while. It made killing harder when you had to chase maniacs through their own territory. They had spots where they hid, waiting for you to come along so they could bust open your head when your back was turned.

His scuffling echoed hollowly in the shaft, paused as he bounced off the wall of the landing, then charged up the next flight of stairs. He stopped, his back against the wall; he listened for steps above. For a few moments the only sound was his ragged breathing; then the door on the landing above banged against the wall.

Underwood took the steps three at a time, whipped open the door, and a bar slammed into his chest, flinging him back into the stairwell. The edges of steps were jammed against his back as he watched a tall, pimply teenager come at him with a rusty pipe.

Underwood’s rifle lay on the floor, a thousand miles away. He jacked his combat boots into the boy’s chest, knocking a sharp grunt out of him as he slammed against the wall. Underwood snatched up the rifle. The boy had run out the door.

He was bolting down the sunlit corridor as Underwood took aim at the center of his head. The body was jerked forward, spraying the walls and floor.

Glaser did the driving for their car pool. He liked to drive. Easy-listening music poured through the car. Kane was intent on a crossword puzzle. She always worked on crossword puzzles in her spare time. Underwood sat in the back, idly observing how Kane’s brown hair was stirred by the wind blowing in her open window. He could still smell the industrial-strength cleanser on his hands; he had gotten used to it, but he still didn’t care for it.

“I’m putting in the swimming pool this week,” Glaser said, half turning his craggy, middle-aged face toward them. “I’m going to open it up with a barbecue next weekend after it’s filled. I want to see you two there.”

“I’d be a fool to pass up an offer like that,” Kane said vacantly, concentrating on the magazine in her lap.

“Why don’t you bring the old man by, Underwood? It’s been about a year since I last seen him.”

Small wonder, Underwood thought. The last time, his father had tried to club Glaser with an ivory statuette.

Underwood fished through his pockets for his keys, opened the door of his townhouse. The place he had rushed from in the morning was a beautiful sight in the evening. He took off his brown leather jacket, tossed it on the couch, walked across the plush white carpeting to the kitchen, where he took a can of beer from the refrigerator.

“Just come back from the slaughterhouse, eh, son?”

He turned to face the short, old black man with the white goatee. That was his father.

Every day when he came home from work he heard the same line. It irritated him, but he had to ignore it because it was inevitable.

“We got an invitation to Glaser’s: he’s putting in a swimming pool next week.”

J. P. Underwood stared at his son with a look of astonishment.

“You’re shittin’ me. What makes you hang around with that idiot?”

“I admit he isn’t the world’s brightest man, but I like him. And he was good enough to invite you, after the way you tried to maul him.” Underwood pulled off the tab and took a cold sip.

“The way he sat around talking about the sexual habits of the plague-deranged? During dinner? Come on , Max, you can do better than that.”

“Look. Why don’t you go—get out of the house for a change —see how people live. Modern people. It’s been—what?—more than a year since we got out of the death zone; have a little fun.” He handed J. P. a beer from the refrigerator.

“I oughta go, just to see how they reconstruct suburban mediocrity.”

Underwood grinned, sipped the beer, and began to relax.

Underwood swam up from under the sheets, blindly reaching out to shut off the blaring alarm clock. He sat up, slid his feet into his slippers, shuffled into the bathroom.

He idly watched Kane’s brown hair stir in the wind blowing in her open window. Her head was bent over a crossword puzzle. The radio was on. Glaser was talking about something.

They came down through the huge hole in the roof, landing on the rubble and plaster, firing the submachine guns at the scampering maniacs. They had gotten six, but four others had dashed away into the recesses of the building.

Underwood ducked into a hole in a grey wall, stepping over soft plaster. The dust was thick and dry-smelling. He came out in a large room where the sun filtered down through gaps in the ceiling. He stepped over the rubble, crunching, raising dust.

He went through various rooms, found nothing. He didn’t mind that.

He met Kane and Glaser back at the grey van outside. They had a short break and opened their lunch boxes, poured coffee from a vacuum bottle.

Kane said, “It’s odd: some of them look almost normal. I mean they don’t have the scaly skin or the paws that you normally see.”

Underwood looked over at her squinty-eyed gaze, said, “They’re still contagious, though. The war really fucked them over, didn’t it?”

“Yeah,” she answered grimly.

They watched the massive grey trashwagon parked down the street.

The trashwagon ground toward the black cube in the middle of the dusty plain.

Kane backed it to the hatch as Underwood and Glaser, in masks and gloves, walked around the sides. Glaser yanked down the iron lever on the box and the hatch clanked open slowly. Underwood pulled the lever on the trashwagon. The top rose high in the grey sky, the dirty bodies sliding down into the black hatch, landing with a sound like a thousand falling potatoes. The iron machinery whined and shrieked, the noise barely diminished by their earplugs. Underwood could see blue and yellow sparks beyond the hatch as the corpses were fed to the furnace.

Underwood stood in line with the trashmen of other districts to punch out. He read the same posters on the same bulletin board.

A green poster with black letters: report any person you suspect may be a carrier of postbellum disease to your local health department center!

A black poster with orange letters: support our great national recovery. Beneath this was an orange drawing of a man, a woman and a child, holding hands.

He idly watched Kane’s hair stir in the wind blowing in her open window. He closed his eyes and salty darkness took over. It wasn’t until he had sunk his weary bones into the back seat that he became aware how exhausted he was. Dumping the week’s dead was dreaded—the tons of limp weight that had to be moved to the truck, then to the furnace.