Echo Round His Bones Read online

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  echo

  round

  his

  bones

  The brilliant new SF novel about a man trying

  to save the world from Doomsday --

  by the author of THE GENOCIDES

  Thomas M. Disch

  SINKING INTO TROUBLE

  Worsaw shot the private three times in the face. The body

  crumpled backward against -- and partly through -- the

  wall.

  "That takes care of one son-of-a-bitch," said the spectral

  Worsaw.

  Before the man's murderous inference could be realized,

  Hansard acted. In a single motion he threw himself from

  the bench and the attaché case that he had been holding at

  Worsaw's gun hand. The gun went off, doing harm only to

  the case.

  In leaping from the bench Hansard had landed on the floor

  of the steel vault -- or more precisely, in it, for his hands had

  sunk several inches into the steel, which felt like chilled

  turpentine against his skin. This was strange, really very

  strange . . . But not to be distracted from his immediate

  purpose -- which was to disarm Worsaw -- he sprang up to

  catch hold of Worsaw's hand, but found that with the same

  movement his legs sank knee-deep into the insubstantial

  floor.

  echo

  round

  his

  bones

  Thomas M. Disch

  A BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOK

  published by

  BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  COPYRIGHT © 1967, BY THOMAS M. DISCH

  Published by arrangement with

  the author's agent

  BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, JANUARY, 1967

  BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by

  Berkley Publishing Corporation

  15 East 26th Street, New York, N. Y. 10010

  Berkley Medallion Books ™ TM 757,375

  Printed in the United States of America

  ECHO ROUND HIS BONES

  ONE

  NATHAN HANSARD

  The finger on the trigger grew tense. The safety was released, and in almost the same moment the gray morning stillness was shattered by the report of the rifle. Then, just as a mirror slivers and the images multiply, a myriad echoes returned from the ripening April hillsides -- a mirthful, mocking sound. The echoes re-echoed, faded, and died. But the stillness did not settle back on the land; the stillness was broken.

  The officer who had been marching at the head of the brief column of men -- a captain, no more -- came striding back along the dirt track. He was a man of thirty-five or perhaps forty years, with fair, regular features now set in an expression of anger -- or, if not quite anger, irritation. Some would have judged him a handsome man; others might have objected that his manner was rather too neutral -- a neutrality expressive not so much of tranquility as of truce. His jaw was set and his lips molded in the military cast. His blue eyes were glazed by that years-long unrelenting discipline. They might not, it could be argued, have been by nature such severe features: without that discipline the jaw might have been more relaxed, the lips fuller, the eyes brighter -- yes, and the captain might have been another man.

  He stopped at the end of the column and addressed himself to the red-haired soldier standing on the outside of the last file -- a master-sergeant, as might be ascertained from the chevron sewn to the sleeve of his fatigue jacket.

  "Worsaw?"

  "Sir." The sergeant came, approximately, to attention.

  "You were instructed to collect all ammunition after rifle practice."

  "Yes, sir."

  "All cartridges were to be given back to you, therefore no one should have any ammunition now."

  "No, sir."

  "And this was done?"

  "Yes, sir. So far as I know."

  "And yet the shot we just heard was certainly fired by one of us. Give me your rifle, Worsaw."

  With visible reluctance the sergeant handed his rifle to the captain. "The barrel is warm," the captain observed. Worsaw made no reply.

  "May I take your word, Worsaw, that this rifle is unloaded?"

  "Yes, sir."

  The captain put the butt of the rifle against his shoulder and laid his finger over the trigger. He remarked that the safety was off. Worsaw said nothing.

  May I pull the tngger, Worsaw?" The rifle was pointed at the sergeant's right shin. Worsaw still said nothing, but beads of sweat had broken out on his freckled face.

  "Do I have your permission? Answer me."

  Worsaw broke down. "No, sir," he said.

  The captain broke open the magazine and removed the cartridge clip. He handed the rifle back to the sergeant. "Is it possible, Worsaw, that the shot that brought us to a halt a moment ago was fired from this rifle?" There was, even now, no trace of sarcasm in the captain's voice.

  "I saw a rabbit, sir -- "

  The captain's brow furrowed. "Did you hit it, Worsaw?"

  "No, sir."

  "Fortunately for you. Do you realize that it is a federal offense to kill wildlife on this land?"

  "It was just a rabbit, sir. We shoot them around here all the time. Usually when we come out for rifle practice, or that sort of stuff -- "

  "Do you mean to say that it is not against the law?"

  "No, sir, I wouldn't know about that. I just know that usually -- "

  "Shut up, Worsaw!"

  Worsaw's face had become so red that his reddish-blond eyebrows and lashes seemed pale in comparison. In his bafflement his lower lip had begun to tic back and forth, as though some buried fragment of his character were trying to pout.

  "I despise a liar," the captain said blandly. He inserted his thumbnail under the tip of the chevron sewn on Worsaw's right sleeve and ripped it off with one quick motion. Then the other chevron.

  The captain returned to the front of the column, and the march back to the trucks that would return them to Camp Jackson was resumed.

  This captain, who will be the hero of our history, was a man of the future -- that is to say, of what would seem futurity to us; for to the captain it seemed the most commonplace present. Yet there are degrees of living in the future, of being contemporary there, and it must be admitted that in many ways the captain was more a man of the past (of his past, and even perhaps of ours) than of the future.

  Consider only his occupation: A career officer in the Regular Army -- surely a most uncharacteristic employment in the year 1990. By that time everyone knew that the army, the Regular Army (for though the draft was still in operation and young men were compelled to surrender their three years to the Reserve Army, they all knew that this was a joke; that the Reserves were useless; that they were maintained only as a device for keeping themselves out of the labor force, or off the unemployment rolls that much longer after college), was a career for louts and nincompoops. But if everyone knew this . . .? Everyone who was "with it"; everyone who was truly comfortable living in the future.

  These contemporaries of the captain (many of whom -- some 29 per cent -- were so much unlike him as to prefer three years of postgraduate study in the comfortable and permissive prisons that had been built for C.O.'s -- the conchies, as they were called -- rather than submit to the ritual nonactivities of the Reserves) regarded the captain and his like as -- and this is their most charitable judgment -- fossils.

  It is true that military service traditionally requires qualities more of character than of intelligence. Does this mean, then, that our hero is on the stupid side? By no means
! And to dispel any lingering doubts of this, let us hasten to note that in third grade the captain's I.Q., as measured by the Stanford-Binet Short Form, was a respectable 128 -- certainly as much or more than we can fairly demand of a hero in this line of work.

  In fact it had been the captain's experience that he possessed intelligence in excess of his needs; he would often have been happier in his calling if he had been as blind to certain distinctions -- often of a moral character -- as most of his fellow officers seemed to be. Once, indeed, this over-acuteness had directly injured the captain's prospects. And it might be that that long-ago event was the cause, even this much later, of the captain's relatively low position (considering his age) in the military hierarchy. We shall have opportunity to hear more of this unpleasant moment -- but in its proper place.

  It may just as plausibly be the case that the captain's lack of advancement was due simply to a lack of vacancies. The Regular Army of 1990 was much smaller than the Army of our own time -- partly because of international agreements, but basically in recognition of the fact that a force of 25,000 men was more than ample to prosecute a nuclear war -- and this, in 1990, was the only war that the two great power blocs were equipped to fight.

  Disarmament was a fait accompli, though it was of a kind that no one of our time had quite anticipated; instead of eliminating nuclear devices, it had preserved them alone. In truth, "disarmament" is something of a euphemism; what was done had been done more in the interests of domestic economy than of world peace. The bombs that the Pacifists complained of (and in 1990 everyone was a Pacifist) were still up there, biding their time, waiting for the day that everyone agreed was inevitable. Everyone, that is, who was with it; everyone who was truly comfortable living in the future.

  Thus, though the captain lived in the future, he was very little representative of it. His political opinions were conservative to a point just short of reaction. He read few of what we would think of as the better books of his time; saw few of the better movies -- not because he lacked aesthetic, sensibilities -- for instance, his musical taste was highly developed -- but because these things were made for other, and possibly better, tastes than his.

  He had no sense of fashion -- and this was not a small lack, for among his contemporaries fashion was a potent force. Other-directedness had carried all before it; shame, not guilt, was the greater shaper of souls, and the most important question one could ask oneself was: " Am I with it?" And the captain would have had to answer, " No."

  He wore the wrong clothes, in the wrong colors, to the wrong places. His hair was too short, though by present standards it would have seemed rather full for a military man; his face was too pale -- he wouldn't use even the most discreet cosmetics; his hands were bare of rings. Once, it is true, there had been a gold band on the third finger of his left hand, but that had been some years ago.

  Unfashionableness has its price, and for the captain the price had been steep. It had cost him his wife and son. She had been too contemporary for him -- or he too outmoded for her. In effect their love had spanned a century, and though at first it was quite strong enough to stand the strain, in time it was the times that won. They were divorced on grounds of incompatibility.

  At this point it may have occurred to the reader to wonder why in a tale of the future we should have chosen a hero so little representative of his age. It is an easy paradox to resolve, for the captain's position in the military establishment had brought him -- or, more precisely, was soon to bring him -- into contact with that phenomenon which, of all the phenomena of his age, was most advanced, most contemporary, most at the forefront of the future -- with, in short, the matter transmitter -- or, in the popular phrase, the manmitter -- or, in the still more popular phrase, the Steel Womb.

  "Brought into contact" is perhaps too weak and passive a phrase. The captain's role was to be more heroic than such words would suggest. "Came into conflict" would do much better. Indeed he was to come into conflict with much more than the Steel Womb -- with the military establishment as well, with society in general, and with himself. It could even be said, without stretching the meaning too far, that in his conflict he pitted himself against the nature of reality itself.

  One final paradox before we re-embark upon this tale: It was to be this captain, the military man, the man of war, who was, at the last minute and by the most remarkable device, to rescue the world from that ultimate catastrophe -- the war to end wars, the Armageddon that we are all, even now, waiting for. But by that time he would not be the same man, but a different man; a man quite thoroughly of the future -- because he had made it in his own image.

  At twilight of that same day on which we last saw him, the captain was sitting alone in the office of "A" Artillery Company. It was as bare a room as it could possibly be and yet be characterized as an office. On the gray metal desk were only an appointment calendar that showed the date to be the twentieth of April; a telephone, and a file folder containing brief statistical profiles of the twenty-five men under the captain's command: Barnstock, Blake, Cavender, Dahlgren, Doggett. . . .

  The walls of the room were bare, except for framed photos, cut out of magazines, of General Samuel ("Wolf") Smith, Army Chief of Staff, and of President Lind, whose presence here would have to be considered as merely commemorative, since he had been assassinated some forty days before. As yet, apparently, no one had found a good likeness of Lee Madigan, his successor, to replace Lind's photo. On the cover of Life , Madigan had been squinting into the sun; on Time's cover he was shown splattered with the President's blood.

  There was a metal file, and it was empty; a metal wastebasket, it was empty; metal chairs, empty. The captain cannot be held strictly to account for the bareness of the room, for he had been in occupancy only two days. Even so, it was not much different from the office he had left behind in the Pentagon Building, where he had been the aide of General Pittmann.

  . . . Fanning, Green, Homer, Lesh, Maggit, Norris, Nelsen, Nelson. . . . They were Southerners mostly, the men of "A" Company; sixty-eight per cent of the Regular Army was recruited in Southern states, from the backwoods and back alleys of that country-within-a-country, the fossil society that produced fossil men. . . . Lathrop, Perigrine, Pearsall, Pearsall, Rand, Ross. . . . Good men in their way -- that cannot be denied. But they were not, any more than their captain, contemporary with their own times. Plain, simple, honest men -- Squires, Sumner, Truemile, Thorn, Worsaw, Young -- but also mean-spirited, resentful, stupid men, as the captain well knew. You cannot justly expect anything else of men who have been outmoded; who have had no better prospect than this; who will never make much money, or have much fun or taste the sparkling elixir of being "With It," who are and always will be deprived -- and who know it.

  These were not precisely the terms with which the captain regarded this problem, though he had been long enough in the Army (since 1976) to realize that they did not misrepresent the state of affairs. But he looked at things on a reduced scale (he was only a captain, after all) and considered how to deal with the twenty-five men under his command so as to divert the full force of their resentment from his own person. He had expected to be resented; this is the fate of all officers who inherit the command of an established company. But he hadn't expected matters to go to such mutinous extremes as they had this morning after rifle drill.

  Rifle drill was a charade. Nobody expected rifles to be used in the next war. In much the same way, the captain suspected, this contest of wills between himself and his men was a charade -- a form that had to be gone through before a state of equilibrium could be reached; a tradition-sanctioned period of mutual testing out. The captain's object was to abbreviate this period as much as possible; the company's to draw it out to their advantage.

  The phone rang, the captain answered it. The orderly of Colonel Ives hoped that the captain would be free to see the colonel. Certainly, whenever it was convenient to the colonel. In half an hour? In half an hour. Splendid. In the meantime, perhaps, it woul
d be possible for the captain to instruct "A" Company to prepare for a jump in the morning?

  The captain felt his mouth grow dry; his blood quickened perceptibly. He was hardly aware of answering or of hanging up the receiver.

  Prepare to jump. . . .

  He seemed for a moment to fission, to become two men -- an old man and a young man; and while the old man sat behind the bare desk, the young one stood crouched before the open hatch of an airplane, machine gun in hand (they had used small arms in that war), staring out into the vast brightness and down, far down, at the unfamiliar land, the improbable rice paddies. The land had been so green . And then he had jumped, and the land had come rushing up toward him. The land, in that instant, became his enemy, and he . . . Did he become the enemy of that land?

  But the captain knew better than to ask himself such questions. A policy of deliberate and selective amnesia was the wisest. It had served him in good stead these twelve years.