Damon Knight - Orbit 21

Frank was fascinated by the makeup, which gave extreme heights and depths to the face, and by the great swell of the man’s back.

“Oh, yes,” said the hunchback, “it’s makeup and padding, they had to do it for my spot.”

Frank looked blank.

“My spot . . . it’s one of the most popular parts of the show apparently . . . it’s, er, it’s where someone who’s, er . . . afflicted . . . is, er, beaten up. If they don’t think you’re, er, unusual enough, they, er, try to help out a little . . .” He looked suddenly ashamed. “It’s for the paper, you see, only way I could get in to do the article. Authenticity, you know?”

Frank turned away. Even if the interview had been for the Sunday Times with perhaps a full-colour double spread, his vow of silence would have prevented him taking part. But with this crippled cub reporter and his toilet-paper rag ... it was ridiculous. Feeling his carefully built-up aloofness threatened, Frank moved farther along the bench and stared stonily into space.

But the hunchback was lost in his own little world. He set the tape moving and with the manner of a man addressing millions, began to speak into a small black microphone:

“I’m sitting here in the actors’ dressing room of London’s famous Thrill Palace, where Punishment Follies has been playing to packed houses for over a year, and I’m about to talk to the actor filling tonight’s star part. Why do these men submit to commercially-staged punishment, and some even to death? Is it the money, or is there some deeper reason? Perhaps our star for tonight will enlighten us?” He looked expectantly at Frank, moving the microphone under his nose.

Frank found himself wondering what the medical term for a hump on the back was. He felt a strange urge to run his hands over it. He would have liked to be one of the men who would administer the hunchback’s beating tonight.

The hunchback coughed and looked nervously at the guards. “Er, I’m sure our readers would be very grateful for anything you’d care to say, er . . . sir . . . er, anything you’d like to add as to, er, exactly, er . . . exactly why you’re here . . .”

The directness of the question panicked Frank, and he began a complicated game which involved pressing the knuckle of his right thumb five times with his left thumb and then the knuckle of his left thumb five times with his right thumb, the whole being repeated five times until five sets of five had been achieved. But it was not enough. The question hummed in his head. The thought of dying pointlessly, like the C.U.D. suicides, filled him with horror.

He imagined the hunchback talking nervously to a C.U.D. priest, holding his microphone up to the clean-shaven face, backing slowly and reluctantly to the wide-open door of the air freighter, hesitating momentarily on the lip of the booming space, and then, in helpless response to the bland, emptily smiling face, ruefully stepping out into air, falling like a sack of brittle sticks towards the wheeling ground, talking, talking into his microphone, apologizing to the telephoto lens with his smile. The image was so persuasive that Frank almost smiled to himself.

The audience roared above him and there was a spate of wild clapping and cheering. “Number twenty-six,” called the attendant. The emaciated man with the crucifixion part stood up and left the dressing room. Frank stared after him, ignoring the hunchback’s nervous questions. Presently the sound of hammering floated down from the stage. The audience was silent.

Frank turned his attention to the hunchback, and saw that the guards were standing behind him, grinning. One of them tapped him on the hump and said, “You’re on next, mate—severe beating, aren’t you?” The hunchback smiled sickly and made to unhook the recorder strap from his shoulders. “Oh, that’s all right,” said the guard, “we’ll take care of that for you . . . wouldn’t want any of this lot to nick it now, would we?”

They led him away, walking so quickly that he was almost running between them.

Presently a storm of applause floated down from above. Frank had a sudden vision of faces composed of wet slabs of flesh with ears and lips stuck on like lumps of modelling clay, saliva dribbling over stubble and face powder, eyes bright and blank and unblinking, limbs of monumental heaviness stacked against each other like lengths of waterlogged timber. And hands, great soggy puddings of hands, colliding damply with each other, dumb and contented in the warm darkness. Pigs away from the sty for a night, sitting upright and snorting. The old hatred built within him, blistering, bringing tears to his eyes, grinding his teeth together. He wanted to rampage among them with an axe and kill until his whole body was red with blood, he wanted to break and maim and chop and slash until the pieces of the broken bodies could never be fitted together again, he wanted to kill them all and stand triumphant on a mound of severed heads.

But the anger died in his chest as it always did, as if he were filling up with ash. He had never been able to release his hatred because he knew that he would be unable to control himself if he did; he knew that only the destruction of the world could satisfy him. Standing up to his knees in a river of blood, bodies floating and turning like drifting spars as far as the eye could see, the last man left alive on earth, hands covered in blood . . .

He was trembling violently, and he clasped his hands tightly together between his legs in an effort to still himself. The guards returned to the dressing room and he quickly picked up an Instapape someone had left on the bench and forced himself to read, quickly turning the flimsy yellow pages:

MILLIONAIRE SHOT DEAD BY HIS OWN DOG

Armaments millionaire Johann Kreuz was today shot dead by his own dog, a three-year-old bull-terrier named Nicki. Kreuz, who was out hunting, left his loaded double-barrelled shotgun on the back seat of his car with the dog. Nicki’s lead tangled in the trigger-guard and when she jumped out of the car to greet her master—

The guards laughed as they smashed the hunchback’s tape recorder. Frank turned the page:

TRAFALGAR SQUARE RIOT SPREADS

The riot which began earlier today in Trafalgar Square, scene of a C.U.D. mass-suicide demonstration, has spread down Whitehall to Parliament Square where riot troops have just begun to use automatic weapons on the mob. A smaller riot, started by commuters unable to get to Charing Cross Station because of the riot-barriers which were closed on the south side of the Square, is under control, but the barriers have had to be closed on the Shaftesbury Avenue side of Piccadilly Circus—

“Goodbye,” said the little man. He smiled at him as he was led from the room. Frank was alone with the guards. No escape, he thought.

MORE TO BE SQUEEZED INTO HACKNEY HIGH-RISES

The GLC announced today that the density quota of the Hackney high-rise estate is to be increased by 50% to cope with overspill from inner-city areas. This will mean dormitory accommodation for most of the estate’s 48,000 tenants, but Mr. Albert Cooper, spokesman of the Tenants’ Association, threatens that—

The smell of soggy cabbage and urine was heavy in Frank’s nostrils. He was one of the tenants of the Hackney estate, and the article had instantly created for him its powerful all-pervading smell. Fifty percent increase! As it was, his room was only a partitioned section of an access corridor, barely large enough to lie down flat in. But even that was preferable to sleeping in a dormitory with pigs.

Things were going to get worse. It was clear to him now. Soon the world would consist of armed camps, and after that, naked savages in mud-pits. Somehow, gradually, quietly and powerfully, life had become unbearable; a threshold had been crossed and the long slide into coldness and darkness had begun. The only salvation was to go inside and carefully lock and bolt all the doors, shutter the windows, turn out the lights, douse the fire, and wait in perfect quiet, alone. His retreat into himself was complete. There was nothing outside worth seeing. Only endless vistas of pale molluscs jerking back into darkness as sunlight swept over their undersea depths.