Damon Knight - Orbit 21

He paused at an Instapape slot, inserted a coin, and carefully folded the flimsy yellow sheet as it emerged.

C.U.D.’s most spectacular stunt yet

The Church of Universal Despair today chartered a Hercules airfreighter which was used in a mass-suicide demonstration by the Church’s disciples over central London. Two hundred men and women jumped from the aircraft over Trafalgar Square in what was described as an evangelical gesture. The Church, which considers suicide the only acceptable response to the modern world—

He stuffed the pape in his pocket. Evangelical gesture! No one would ever know the names of any of those two hundred, they would forever be as anonymous as the remnants of their bodies, probably even now being sucked up by the police waste-vacuums for eventual consignment to the Ilford rubbish-tip. Stupid! Dying for nothing.

He had just passed the end of the Haymarket when the rush-hour warning lights came on and the klaxons began to rise and fall. The iron gates of the office buildings swung open all at once, and almost in the same instant, riot-barriers began to slowly creak and grate out of their housings and across the streets which led to Trafalgar Square. The first office-workers to come tumbling blindly out of their buildings saw this and sprinted madly for the slowly narrowing gap, briefcases bouncing on their wrist-chains. Some made it and continued running across the Square to Charing Cross Station, skirting the fast-growing Mob on the left. The others were too late and after kicking the barriers in frustration, began the long roundabout walk which would eventually bring them to the Station. The street was full now, of pushing, stumbling, elbowing people, all completely single-minded, and as Frank had been unable to get into a Shelter before the rush began, he was forced to shuffle along with them. This was a much better area of the city than the one in which the Department of Unemployment, where he worked, was situated. These people were probably going home to single-unit houses out in the country: three, or perhaps even four rooms, tended day-long by neat wives, fingers always on the button of the Dust-maid, or the Airkleen, or the Dazzlewash. They did not look at Frank, they did not look at each other, they did not raise their heads at the steadily growing howl of riot behind them. They were secure. They knew where they were going.

Frank realised that he had been carried well past Lower Regent Street, and had to push and shove vigorously against the unyielding, uncaring wall of bodies around him before he could join a cross-flow going up to Piccadilly. Once out of the main stream, the crowd thinned a little and he was able to make a small space to walk in untouched. The flow took him to just short of Piccadilly Circus before it lost its identity in the strolling crowd. A boy with piled-up blond hair smiled at him. A woman wearing only shorts and high-heeled shoes looked at him and lifted her breasts in the palms of her hands. A man beckoned at the doorway of a club offering the torture of live animals on stage “in the half-round.” He ignored them, only sank deeper down into himself.

There had been women in his life, he’d known women. He wasn’t a boy to be excited because a whore flaunted herself at him in the street. No, sex exerted no power over him. He thought of Julia. He had never made love to Julia, never even touched her . . . anywhere. He had given her no reason to think him base, like other men. He had struggled to hold her above the filth, the way he had excluded those he loved from his adolescent masturbation fantasies. And she had left him, of course. Yes, she had left him.

He turned into Shaftesbury Avenue and walked past the Thrill Palace. A scaffold projected from its roof with a body dangling from the rope, man hanged on stage every night! screamed the posters. A small knot of tourists was already forming a queue to book for the evening performance. A busker, stripped to the waist, and obviously drunk, was trying to attract their attention. A young man accepted his challenge to make him sick by punching him in the stomach, and after handing over his five pounds, rolled up his sleeves. The punch was short and vicious and the fist almost disappeared in rolls of flesh. The busker staggered backward, fell, but picked himself up, pale-faced and bent double, to prove that the five pounds was his. Frank moved on.

Next to the Thrill Palace was a sex-shop. He dawdled at the window, looking at the finger-breakers, branding-irons, eye-gouges. Cellophane-wrapped magazines with titles like The Executioner, The Torturer, The Pain-Object, full-size iron maiden, said a poster, ask inside.

He walked on slowly. In a street off the main road he found a small café and had a coffee, pretending absorption in his pape while he drank it. In fact, he was thinking of bodies falling from the sky, spinning and twisting, the expressions on their faces caught by telephoto lenses at the beginning of the descent and held through the long fall in detail, faces distorted in the rush of air, limbs out of control, eyes fixed on the earth turning below, jerking upward with sickening speed, down and down and down until they rammed into the earth like bullets. He felt his teeth being smashed through his lips, his skull crushing into pulp, his spine telescoping, his legs splintering, and clutched the pape convulsively.

A detail which had not been prominent appeared before him vividly: falling beside each body, slamming and banging in the slipstream, had been a briefcase, held in place by a wrist-chain. . . .

Outside, he wandered back the way he had come, and stopped when he reached the Thrill Palace. The actors’ queue was already forming at the top of the narrow alley at the side of the theatre. The busker had changed his act. He was now making shallow cuts on his body with a razor blade. A crowd of grinning Japanese tourists were dropping five-pound notes in his hand and pointing out the spots where they wanted the cuts to be made. Frank watched absentmindedly for a moment or two, and then, as if suddenly remembering an urgent appointment, broke away and walked up the alley at the side of the Thrill Palace, pushing his way through the group around the vacancies board.

wanted:

actress: rough handling and intercourse with animals

actor: severance of right hand

actor: crucifixion (hang for minimum one hour)

actor: severe beating

actor: severe beating with broken limbs

actor: homosexual acts with severe beating

There were over thirty entries on the list. At the bottom, in large capitals, was the entry:

ACTOR: STAR PART: DEATH BY HANGING

He joined the queue, looking disdainfully at those beside him. In front of him, a hunchback with sharp delicate features ran his fingers nervously up and down the strap of the tape recorder slung from his shoulder. A fat man wearing a tentlike white djellaba continually licked his caricature cupid-lips. An intelligent-looking woman wearing a fur coat smoked cigarette after cigarette, sucking smoke deep into her lungs, closing her eyes often.

“Hat-trick tonight if I’m lucky.”

He looked round. A little man behind him gave an apologetic smile. His face was covered with bruises and his bottom lip bore a scab from a recent cut, “Hat-trick tonight if I’m lucky,” he repeated. “Got a severe beating part last night at the Theatre of Terror, a prolonged interrogation with slapping at the Roxy Squealdrome matinee this afternoon, and this’ll be my hat-trick if they take me on tonight.”

He turned away and heard the little man say, half-defensively, but almost without interest, “Fifty pounds so far . . . seventy-five if I get it tonight. . . .” His voice took on feeling again: “Mmmm, wouldn’t mind if he administered the beating . . .”