Riders of the Purple Wage Read online

  Charlie had heard all this before. He said, “O.K.”

  Shortly before five, their eyes tending toward the glassy, they walked into the office. Junkers was not there. Charlie faxed his reports and went home to his apartment on High Street. It was one of seven semi-sleazy units in a once-magnificent mansion built by a whiskey baron in 1910. He could look down from his bathroom window at his domain of work, that part of Hell that did not border on the Styx, but on the Illinois River.

  The small, dead-aired, and close-pressing apartment rooms rang with his footsteps as if they were great high-ceilinged palace halls. After his wife left him, he had been able to endure the apartment only when he was asleep. Now nightmares swarmed over him like carrion flies.

  While his CD player poured out Mahler’s The Song of the Earth, he ate a TV dinner. Then, sitting on the sofa, staring at the blank set, he slowly drank a tall glassful of medium-priced bourbon. Before he drowsed away, he set the alarm. Its loud ring startled him from—thank God!—a dreamless sleep. Beethoven’s Fifth was just starting its loud knocking at the door of destiny.

  After a shower he looked out the window. The darkness was thick enough that lights were beginning to be turned on. For him, there was only one glow in the Southside of the city: Laura’s, a firefly (family Lampyridae) winking above a night-struck meadow.

  Twenty minutes later, his hangover only slowly receding, he drove away in his beat-up and run-down car. (Maybe he should get sterilized and have a new car for the first time in his life.) Ten minutes later he was in the Newstreet HPA area. He would not have ventured there alone after dark, but the green-capped Special Police and steel-helmeted Emergency Reserve troops stationed on various street corners ensured a sort of safety. An FDA-unit van passed Charlie on the other side of the street. Black, mournful faces looked out from behind the barred windows.

  The shiny new cars were bumper to bumper in the streets, parked on the sidewalks and jammed into open lots between houses.

  Charlie’s car turned into the alley back of Tchaka’s Fast Food Emporium. A young black, his neon-tubed garments glowing, leaned against the wall by the side entrance. When he saw Charlie’s car, he shut the door and stepped inside. He was “Slick” Ramsey, one of Ketcher’s gang. He looked furtive, but that did not mean much down here.

  Unable to find a parking space in the alley, Charlie drove slowly around the block. Before he was halfway, he realized—he jumped as if stung by a bee—that the kids on their work break always stood in the alley, talking and horsing around. But they had not been there.

  He brought the car screeching around the corner and into the alley. His headlights spotlighted Ramsey’s shiny, sweaty face sticking out from the doorway. Ramsey quickly shut the door. Charlie stopped the car by the door and was out of the car before it had quit rocking. He knew, he just knew, that Ketcher, inflamed with snark, his cool burned away when he found out that Laura would soon be out of his reach, was no longer waiting to get what he just had to have.

  Ramsey and another youth caught Charlie by the arms as he burst into the dimly lit hallway. A third, John “Welcome Wagon” Penney, came toward him with a knife in his hand. Charlie screamed and kicked out. His foot slammed into Penney’s hand, and the blade dropped. Twisting and turning, stomping on the feet of the two holding him, he broke loose and was down the hall and through the doorway from which Penney had come. Still screaming, he plunged into a large, well-lit storeroom. The workers were huddled in a corner, four of the gang standing guard, holding knives. One worker was down on her knees, vomiting, but several of her fellows were grinning and cheering Ketcher.

  At the opposite corner, Laura, naked, was on her back on the floor with Ketcher, fully dressed, on top of her. Charlie saw her face, bloodied, her mouth fallen open like a corpse’s, her eyes wide and glazed. Her outspread arms were pinned to the ground by the heavy feet of two gang members.

  Silent, all stared at Charlie except Ketcher and Laura. He was savagely biting her nose while pumping away.

  Charlie got to Ketcher before the others unfroze. No longer yelling, the others silent, the only sounds the slap of his shoes and those of the pursuers from the hall, he charged. No one got in his way, and he slammed his hands against the pockets of Ketcher’s jacket. The vials within the bags broke; the two chemicals mingled; the bags popped like firecrackers; the brief spurts of flame from them looked like flaming gas jets.

  Ketcher screamed while struggling to tear off his jacket.

  The two standing on Laura’s arms jumped at Charlie and grabbed him. Still silent, Charlie slapped at their pockets. There was more popping, and they let loose of him and tried to get rid of the clothes before they burned to death.

  The workers ran yelling out of the storeroom. Some of the gang followed them. Two ran at Charlie, their knives waving. By then Ketcher’s jacket was on the floor, but he was rolling in agony on the concrete, and seemingly unaware as yet that Charlie was here. Charlie snatched up the smoking and flaming jacket and thrust it into the face of the nearest knife fighter.

  He had become a fire in a wind, whirling, slapping jacket pockets, staggering back when a blade went through his left biceps, grabbing a wrist when his cheek was sliced, and twisting the wrist until it cracked. Only because he acted like a crazy man and was as elusive as a gnat did he escape death.

  When he saw Ketcher—his ribs, his shoulders, the front of his thighs, and one side of his face bright red with burns, again on top of Laura, but now slamming her head repeatedly into the concrete floor, blood spreading out below her, her mouth slack and open, her eyes shattered glass—Charlie truly became crazy.

  Ketcher’s only thought now seemed to be to kill Laura. It was as if he blamed her for the burns.

  The rest of his gang had run out of the storeroom.

  They knew that the cops and the troops would soon be here.

  Coughing from the smoke, Charlie ran toward Ketcher and Laura. Suddenly Ketcher sat back. His breath cracked. His chest heaved. But he looked at his work with what seemed to be satisfaction. Where the blood on Laura’s face did not conceal it, her deep brown skin was underlayered with gray.

  Ketcher rose, and Charlie turned. Ketcher started, and his eyes widened.

  “You, you done this?” he said. “The white gooser?”

  He half-turned and looked down at Laura.

  “The uppity bitch is dead. I had her, she ain’t gonna get away.”

  Charlie stopped and picked up a knife.

  Ketcher turned back toward him. “I killed the bitch. I’ll kill you, too, Charlie Charlie.”

  Charlie screamed. According to what he was told, he was still screaming when the cops came. He did not remember.

  If he was screaming until his throat was raw for days afterward, it was because he was giving vent to all the futility and despair and suffering and the sense of being imprisoned, straitjacketed, chained, which he felt for himself and which the cesspool dwellers he worked for felt far more keenly than he. And it was for Laura, whose drive and brains might have freed her, given her some freedom, anyway. No one raised here ever really got free of it.

  He did not remember stabbing Ketcher many times. Vaguely, he did recall a blurred vision of Ketcher on his back, his arms and legs up in the air and kicking like a dying water beetle. Charlie was told that blood had covered him, Ketcher, and Laura like liquid shrouds. His informant, a black cop, had not been trying to impress him. Born here, she had seen worse when she was in diapers.

  When discharged from the mental ward of the hospital five months later, Charlie had no job and did not look for one. In what seemed a short time, he was on welfare.

  The irony was doubled when Rex Bessey came to ask him if he wished to sign up for sterilization.

  “I’m really embarrassed,” Rex said. “But it’s my job.”

  Charlie smiled. “Don’t I know. But I’m not going to sign. My wife—you know Blanche—called me yesterday. She just had a baby girl. We’re going to get together again. It may
not work out, but we’re trying for the sake of the baby, for ours, too. I got hope now, Rex. I’m on welfare, but I won’t be forever. My situation’s different. I wasn’t raised on public aid, handicapped by my environment from birth, and I don’t have two strikes against me because I’m black. I can make it. I will make it.”

  Rex got a beer and sat down. He said. “You’ve been so sunk in hopeless apathy, your friends just gave up. You know I was the last to quit coming around. You just wouldn’t stop your dismal talk about Laura. I did my best, but I couldn’t cheer you up. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t take you anymore.”

  Charlie waved his hand. “I don’t blame you. But I’m better. I know I’ll make it. My wife’s phone call, well, soon as I hung up, something seemed to turn over. How can I describe it? I’ll try. Listen, insects thrive as a species mainly because they breed so wondrously. Kill all but two, and in less than a year, there are 10 billion. It’s nature’s way; God’s, if you prefer. People aren’t insects, but nature doesn’t seem to care about the individual human or insect being killed, or even millions being wiped out. Laura Dott was one of the unlucky ones, and that’s the way it is.

  “But I’m human. I do what insects can’t do. I care; I hurt; I mourn; I grieve. But I wasn’t doing what most humans do. Healing, getting over the hurt as time did its work, accepting this world for what it is. Nor was I trying to do my little bit to make the world just a little better. I gave up even that after Laura died.”

  Charlie fell silent until Rex said. “And?”

  “Blanche and I were discussing what to name the baby. Blanche’s mother was named Laura, and she wanted to name the baby Laura. I was so struck with the coincidence, I couldn’t talk for a minute.”

  Rex leaned forward in the chair, his huge hand squeezing the sides of the beer can together.

  “You mean?”

  “One Laura down, one Laura to go.”

  UFO Versus IRS

  “They just killed one of our babies!”

  The tiny TV transmitter-receiver orbiting the mothership, Herschel, showed the bright side of the craft and, below, the blue-green oblate shape of Uranus. Though Herschel was in epsilon, the broadest of the planet’s eleven rings, the TV viewers on Earth did not see epsilon. The coal-black particles composing the ring were too far apart and too small to appear solid at this close range. Nor did the rings cast a shadow on the planet. At this moment and for twenty years to come. Uranus was tipped so that its south pole was to the Sun. When the TV satellite circled to Herschel’s other side, its camera would show the bright crescent that the Sun made on the planet’s southern hemisphere.

  “There’s the Sun.”

  Rees, the anchorman for KPIT-TV, was talking from the Houston studio to his three billion viewers. “That tiny disk of intense light. Not much compared to our bonfire terrestrial Sun, but it’s millions of times brighter than the great star Sirius. From Uranus, our Sun is a bright thought in the midst of many pale ones.”

  Throughout the special program, the statistics had been spooned to the mass audience because of its limited attention span, an estimated three and a half minutes. The viewers had learned, or a least heard, that Uranus was the seventh planet out from the Sun. It was a far-off celestial body, being nineteen point eighteen times the mean distance of Earth from the Sun. Way out.

  The “jolly green giant,” as the Herschel crew called it, was only one-fifth denser than water and was more massive than fourteen Earths. Its hot core of silicon and iron, however, was not quite as large as Earth’s. The outermost layers of its enormous atmosphere were thin, cold hydrogen layers. A spacecraft descending through this (none had) would get warmer as it passed through methane, hydrogen, and helium clouds into a thick fog of ammonia crystals. The warmth was only relative; you certainly couldn’t use it to toast your marshmallows.

  Below the crystals blowing at hurricane speed would be water vapor clouds. Then the fog would become slush and, later and deeper, hot liquid hydrogen. At a depth of approximately eight thousand kilometers, the temperature would shoot up to more than two thousand degrees Centigrade. Then the spacecraft would penetrate, if it could, a slushy or frozen layer of water and ammonia. The rock-metal core would be at seven thousand degrees Centigrade, hotter than the surface of the Sun.

  At this statement, one of the three billion viewers had muttered, though in no terrestrial language, “A thousand kilometers above the core is hot enough for the third stage of growth.”

  Uranus, Rees said, had seven small moons. Puck and Bottom had recently been added to the long-known Ariel, Titania. Oberon, Umbriel, and Miranda.

  Like Saturn, Uranus had rings around its equator, but these were not Saturn-bright. They were dark and much narrower, steeped in iron oxides and complex carbon compounds, which absorbed sunlight. These rotated in a thin gas of negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions.

  Most of this data had slipped by or been forgotten by most of the viewers. They were absorbed in watching the Herschel matching its velocity and proximity with one of the larger objects forming the ring. This was black and about two meters long and three meters at the widest part. Its “body” was flattened out; its “wings” were almost as thick as the body. It looked more like a devilfish or batfìsh than anything, though it took some imagination to see the parallel. What made it so riveting to the viewers was that it was not the first such object observed. One hundred and thirty-nine had been photographed in this small sector approximately one hundred kilometers wide and ten thousand kilometers long.

  “No theory has been advanced, so far,” Rees said, “as to why these space objects seem to resemble artifacts. Nor has any scientist theorized why they’re so evenly distributed.”

  “How about the need for living room, space to grow and feed in?” Agrafan said. Agrafan was one of the two viewers in three billion who could have enlightened Rees. Not that he was going to do so.

  The Herschel, having matched its velocity exactly to that of the object, moved sideways toward it. The screen displayed to the Earthbound audience a closeup so that they could see the four “antennae,” two slim spirals of seeming rocklike material projecting from the junction of “wings” and “body” and two pointing from the “belly.” The remotely controlled TV machine revolving around the ship showed the cargo bay port swinging out from the hull. Then it showed the brightly illuminated bay and a long mechanical arm unfolding from its base on the hull. Its spidery metal “fingers” were opening.

  Netter, one of the two viewers who knew what was happening, said, “About ten seconds to go.”

  “It’s terrible.” Agrafan said. “And there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.”

  Agrafan, the more emotional of the two, discharged a mist of formaldehyde particles, its equivalent of human tears.

  The mechanical arm stopped. Its fingers only needed to close to delicately grip the object.

  “They can’t be blamed,” Netter said. “How’re they to know?”

  “That doesn’t help.” Agrafan said.

  The fingers of the mechanical arm closed on the object. Only two of the three billion viewers were not surprised when the fingers and the object were briefly shrouded in blinding electricity. There was no explosive noise, of course.

  The fragments of the object, impelled by the discharge, floated away. The fingers, half-melted, were frozen in their half-grip.

  Startled and shocked, Rees cried out a four-letter word as pungent (socially speaking) as the product it referred to. Half of the citizens of the United States heard that, and less than half of that were offended. However, the network executives and millions of members of American religious organizations were outraged.

  When the astronauts had recovered from their alarm, the captain explained what had happened. The epsilon ring was in a low-density plasma of relatively negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions. Since the electrons were less massive, they moved faster in the ring than the ions did. They collided more often with
the rock debris in the ring. Thus, the pieces of debris built up, after a long time, a negative charge.

  The astronauts had known this, but the Herschel, having been in the ring for thirteen months, had also collected a negative charge. Hence, they had not expected much of a discharge, if any.

  The object they had tried to pick up must not have been in the ring long enough to pick up much of a negative charge. That had to be the only explanation possible. The object had been relatively positive to the arm, which, placed on the outside of the hull, had become positively charged.

  The astronauts had assumed that the object had been in the plasma of the ring as long as the other space debris. Obviously, it had not. Where, then, had it come from? And when? And why were there so many similar objects that, for some unknown reason, looked as if they had been shaped by sentients?

  Neither the astronauts nor the scientists on Earth were ever to advance the theory that the objects were living.

  The only two on Earth who could have enlightened the theorizers were too shaken with grief at that moment to pass on their knowledge even if they had wanted to. They were flying—rocketing was a better description—around their huge room deep under a house. They were out of control, bouncing into the frozen carbon dioxide walls and ceiling and floors. Added to their grief were slight injuries from the impacts as their fierce discharges of formaldehyde droplets shot them here and there.

  These expressions were matched by anchorman Rees’s uncontrollable tears and howlings. Rees was giving vent in his human way to the news that he had just been fired. Moreover, the entire industry would blackball him.

  Jeremiah Gnatcatcher, a district director of the Internal Revenue Service, sat behind his desk in the Detroit skyscraper and scowled. The three field agents standing before his desk looked away from his eyes, as cold and as blue-green as Uranus in their human way and shields for a soul as black as Uranus’s rings. No one spoke for a long time; if Gnatcatcher had not been grinding his teeth, there would have been complete silence. It sounded to the agents like a shovel digging their graves.