Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

VIP免费

2024-12-24 0 0 535.9KB 151 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Some Will Not Die

Algis Budrys

”We are not considering a man. We are considering men; if no man is an island in a world of

nearly six billions, then how can any man be independent of others when the population is

one-tenth that figure? Men who would have been lost and insignificant in the world before the

plague now had their slightest whims and quirks magnified by a factor of ten. The ripples of any

one man’s personality spread ten times as far, ten times as effectively. A man with nineteen

neighbors need not consider any of them too much. A man with one neighbor has either a brother

or an enemy, or both.

”So to understand the history of the world after the plague, we have to understand that no

man--not even Theodore Berendtsen--could possibly serve as the single focus of that time.

”We are studying a man, yes. But we are considering men.”

Harvey Haggard Drumm,

A Study of the Effects of Massive Depopulation on

Conventional Views of Human Nature.

Chicago, 2051 AD, mimeographed.

SECTION ONE

PROLOGUE:

This happened many years after the plague, at about the same time there was already talk of reviving the

American Kennel Club in the east and south. But this happened farther to the northwest:

Night was coming down on the immense plain that stretched from the Appalachians to the foothills of the

Rockies. The long grass whispered in the evening wind.

Clanking and whining, a half-tracked battlewagon snuffled toward the sunset. Behind it lay the featureless

grass horizon, almost completely flat and with no life visible in it. The empty grass fell away to either side.

Ahead, the first mountains lay black and blended by distance, a brush-stroke lying in a thick line just

under the sun.

The car moved forward at remorseless speed, a squat, dark, scurrying shape at the head of a constantly

lengthening trail of pulped grass. Its armor was red with rust and scarred by welds. The paint was a

peeling flat dark green. On the side of the broad double turret, someone had painted the Seventh North

American Republic’s escutcheon with a clumsy brush. The paint was bad here, too, though it was much

recent. Another badge showed through from underneath, and, under that, someone else’s.

Joe Custis, with the assimilated rank of captain in the Seventh Republican Army, sat in the car

commander’s saddle. His head and shoulders thrust up through the open hatch; his heavy hands were

braced on the coaming. His broadbilled cap was pulled down low over his scuffed American Optical

Company goggles, and crushed against his skull by an interphone harness. His thick jaw was burned

brown, and the tight, deep lines around his mouth were black with dust and sweat that had cemented

themselves together. His head turned constantly from side to side, and at intervals he twisted around to

look behind him.

A speck of white, off to his left, became a freshly painted, well-maintained signboard nailed to a post

planted at the top of a low, rounded rise. He dropped his goggles around his neck, and looked at it

through his binoculars. It was a hand-lettered sign in the shape of a skull--not a new sign, but one kept

renewed--reading:

NO FOOD--NO

FUEL--NO WO-

MEN

Custis picked up his command microphone. “Lew,” he said to his driver, “you see that thing? Okay, well

ease toward it. Get set for me telling you to stop altogether.”

He jacked down the command saddle until his face was level with the turret periscope eyepieces. He

raised the scope until its slim, stiffly flexible length was fully extended above the turret, looking, with its

many joints, like the raised and quivering antenna of something that bred and went to outrageous combat

on the red plains of Mars.

”Slow, now, Lew...slow...hold it.”

The car stopped, its motors idling, and the periscope searched over the rise. Joe Custis reached up and

pulled the turret hatch shut, close over his head as he sat awkwardly bent down, peering into the scope.

On the other side of the rise was a valley--what had been a valley, geologic ages past, and was now a

broad, shallow bowl into which ten thousand centuries of rain had washed the richest topsoil--and in the

valley were fields, and here and there low, humped, grass-grown mounds. There were no lights showing.

The fields were empty of movement, but one was half-harrowed--the ground freshly turned, the surface

still rich and greasy, until suddenly the marks of the spike harrow turned out of their course and swayed

away toward one of the mounds, which was in fact a sod hutment. A farmer had interrupted his work

and driven his horse--and the precious, hand-built harrow--into shelter.

The driver’s voice cut into Joe Custis’s headphones. “Want me to move in for a better look?”

”No. No, circle around this and let’s get back on the old heading. Don’t want to go no closer. Might be

traps or mines.”

As Custis lowered the periscope, the car backed away. When it had back-tracked to where it had first

turned off course, it swung around and began rolling forward again. The whine of the bogey motors built

back up its original pitch. Joe Custis threw the hatch back again, and raised the seat to its old position.

The signboard began to dwindle as the car left it behind. Back on the car’s turtledeck, the AA

machinegunner’s hatch crashed open. Custis turned and looked down. Major Henley, the political

officer, pulled himself up, shouting above the dentist’s-drill whine of the motors: “Custis! What did we

stop for?”

Joe cupped one hand to his ear, and after a moment Henley kicked himself higher in the hatch, squirmed

over the coaming, and scrambled forward up the turtledeck. He braced a foot on the portside track

cover and took hold of the grab iron welded to the side of the turret. He looked up at Custis, swaying

and jouncing. Custis wondered how soon he was going to slip and smash out his teeth on the turret.

”What did you stop for?”

”Fortified town. Independent. Wanted to look it over. Gettin’ to be a few of those places up this way.

Interestin’.”

”What do you mean, independent?”

”Don’t give a damn for nobody. Only way to get in is to be born there. Or have somethin’ it would take

a cannon to stop. I don’t think they got cannon. Would of hit us, otherwise, instead of buttonin’ up the

way they did.”

”I thought you said this was outlaw-controlled territory.”

Custis nodded. “Except for these towns, it is. Don’t see any more open towns, do you?”

”I don’t see any outlaws, either.”

Custis pointed toward the mountains. “Watching us come at ‘em.”

Henley’s eyes twitched west. “How do you know?”

”It’s where I’d be.” Custis explained patiently: “Out here on the grass, I can run rings around ‘em, and

they know it. Up there, I’m a sitting duck. So that’s where they are.”

”That’s pretty smart of them. I suppose a little bird told them we were coming?”

”Look, Henley, we been pointin’ in this direction for a solid week.”

”And they have a communications net that warns them in time. I suppose someone runs the news along

on foot?”

”That’s right.”

”Rubbish!”

ooooooooooooooooooooo

”You go to your church and I’ll go to mine.” Custis spat over the side, to starboard. “I been out on these

plains all my life, workin’ hired out to one outfit or another. If you say you know this country better, I

guess that’s right on account of you’re a major.”

”All right, Custis.”

”I guess all these people out here must be stupid or somethin’. Can’t figure out how come they’re still

alive.”

”I said all right.”

Custis grinned without any particular malice, giving the needle another jab under Henley’s city-thin skin.

“Hell, man, if I thought Berendtsen was still alive and around here someplace, I’d figure things were being

run so smart out here that we ought to of never left Chicago at all.”

Henley flushed. “Custis, you furnish the vehicle and I’ll handle the thinking. If the government thinks it’s

good enough a chance to be worth investigating, then that’s it--we’ll investigate it.”

Joe looked at him in disgust. “Berendtsen’s dead. They shot him in New York thirty years ago. They

pumped him full of holes and dragged his body behind a Jeep, right down the main street at twenty miles

an hour. People threw cobblestones at it all the way. That’s all there is left of Berendtsen--a

thirty-year-old streak of blood down Broadway Avenue.”

”That’s only one of the stories you hear. There are others.”

”Henley, a lot more people have heard that one than have heard he’s still alive. And ‘way out here.

Maybe we should look around for Julius Caesar, too?”

”All right, Custis! That’ll be enough of your kind of wisdom!”

Custis looked down at him steadily, the expression on his face hovering at the thin edge between a grin

and something else entirely. After a moment, Henley blinked and broke the conversation off into a new

direction. “How soon before we reach the mountains?”

”Tonight. Couple more hours, you’ll get a chance to see some bandits.” Now Custis smiled.

Henley said “Well, let me know when you come across something,” and gingerly crawled back to the

AA hatch. He dropped out of sight inside the car. After a moment he remembered, reached up, and

pulled the hatch shut.

Custis went back to keep an eye out. At rest, his face was impassive. His hands motionlessly held the

thick metal of the armor. But now and then, as his eyes touched the mountains in his constant scan

around the horizon, he frowned. And at those times, his fingers would flex, as though it were necessary

for him to reacquaint himself with the texture of wrought steel.

Custis had no faith in Henley’s hopes. Berendtsen’s name was used to frighten children--real children or

politicians; it was all one--all over the Republic. It had been the same during all the Republics before it.

Somebody was always waving the blue-and-silver flag, or threatening to. A handful of fake Berendtsens

had been turned up, here and there all over the Chicago hegemony, trading on a dead man’s legend these

past thirty years. Some of them had been laughed down, or otherwise taken care of, before they got

fairly started. Some hadn’t--the Fourth Republic got itself started while the Third was busy fighting a man

who’d turned out to be merely a better liar than most. Through the years, the whole thing had turned into

a kind of grim running joke.

But the fact was that the politicians back in Chicago couldn’t afford to have the ghost walking their

frontiers--or what they thought were their frontiers, though no one could truly say whose word was Law

south of Gary. The fact was that somehow, in some way, the tale of Berendtsen had come drifting over

the eastern mountains and contaminated the people with impatience. The fact was that Berendtsen was a

man who had been able to take hold, after the plague scoured the world clean of ninety percent of its

people in six howling months. --Or so the legend said; Custis had not much faith in that, either.

The fact you had to live with, in any case, was that Berendtsen had put together something called the

Second Free American Republic--meaning probably the old American East and the eastern half of old

Canada--and made it stand up for ten years before he got his. And nobody else had ever been able to

do as well--at least not here, where the Great Lakes and Appalachians kept Berendtsen from ever being

much more than a name and an occasional banner. But between the times his name frightened them, with

its promise of armed men coming over the mountains someday, and ordering things to suit a stranger

someday, people still thought of ten whole years with no fighting in the cities. It made them growl with

anger whenever the local politicians did something they disliked. It made them restless; it left no peace in

the minds of the politicians as they tried to convince themselves the cities were almost back to normal--

That soon enough, now, the cities and the people of the plains would become part of a functioning

civilization once more, and the scar of the plague would be healed over at last.

It was not a comfortable thing, being haunted by a man nobody knew. You could say, and say with a

good part of justice, that Berendtsen was behind every mob that rolled down on Government House and

dragged the men inside up to the dark lamp posts.

Thirty years since Berendtsen died--the story went. Nobody was sure of exactly who’d been behind the

shooting; the politicians or the people. But it was a sure thing it had been the people who’d mutilated his

body. And six months later the mobs’d killed the men they said killed Berendtsen. So there you

were--try and make sense out of it, in a world where the towns went without machinery and the cities

went without more than the barest trickle of food. A world where it was still worth a city man’s life to

approach farm country alone.

You couldn’t. The man’s name was magic, and that was that.

Custis, up in his turret, shook his head. If he didn’t find this ghost for Henley, it was a cinch he’d never

get paid--contract or no contract. But at least he’d gotten his car re-shopped for this job. Sourly, Custis

weighed cutting the political officer’s throat right here and reporting him lost to bandit action. Or cutting

his throat and not reporting back at all.

The battlewagon was a long way from Chicago at this point. The only drinking water aboard was a

muddy mess scooped out of one of the summer-shrunk creeks. The food was canned army

rations--some of it, under the re-labeling, might be from before the plague--and the inside of the car

stank with clothes that hadn’t been off their backs in three weeks. The summer sun pounded down on

them all through the long day, and the complex power-train that began with a nuclear reactor and a steam

turbine, and ended in the individual electric motors turning the drive wheels and sprockets, threw off

more waste heat than most men could stand.

Henley was just barely getting along. For Custis and his crew, any other way of life was too remote to

consider. But it had been a long run. They’d stretched themselves to make it from the marginal, inexpert

captive farmlands at the Chicago periphery, and they still had the worst part of the job to do. Maybe it

would be easier to simply turn bandit himself.

But that meant cutting himself off from the city, at least until the next Republic needed the hire of the

battlewagon. That was something Custis wouldn’t have minded--if oil and ammunition, replacement

barrels for his guns, pile fuels, and rations for his crew grew on the plain as thick as the grass.

”Bear 340, Lew,” he said to his driver through the command microphone, and the car jerked slightly on

its tracks, heading on a more direct course for the nearest of the dark foothills.

And so, Joe Custis thought, there’s no help for it--you have to chase after a ghost no matter what you’d

rather do.

He looked back across the grass, with its swath of crushed, matted leaves, forever stretching away

behind the car. Here and there, he knew, there were flecks of oil and dried mud that had dropped from

the battlewagon’s underside. Here and there lay discarded ration cans, their crude paper labels already

curling away from the flecked tin or enamel plating. Back along that trail lay campsites, each with its pits

for the machineguns dismounted from the car to guard its perimeter. The ashes were cold. Rain was

beginning to turn them into darker blotches on the bared black earth. The gun pits were crumbling. Who

came to search these sites--what patient men came out of their hiding places to investigate, to see if

anything useful had been left behind, perhaps to find some clue to the car’s purpose?

There were such men, even outside the independent towns and the captive farms on the cities’ borders.

Lost, wandering hunters--mavericks of one kind or another--men like Joe Custis, but without his

resources. Half-bandit, but unorganized and forever unorganizable. Rogue males, more lost than anything

else that roamed the plains, for the bandits at least had their organization, and the independent towns had

safety along with their inbreeding.

But the men on the plains would die, and their children would be few, and dying. And the bandits

couldn’t go on forever. There was no weapon of their own manufacture that could stand up to a farmer’s

shotgun. And the independent farmer would die, buried in the weakling seed he spawned, afraid to reach

out across the miles of empty grass toward where other independent farmers would give him short

welcome, scratching the ground with deteriorating tools, trying to raise food here on the prairie where

there were no smelters--not even any hardwood trees--to give him implements.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

SomeWillNotDieAlgisBudrysStorycopyright©1954AlgisBudrys”Wearenotconsideringaman.Weareconsideringmen;ifnomanisanislandinaworldofnearlysixbillions,thenhowcananymanbeindependentofotherswhenthepopulationisone-tenththatfigure?Menwhowouldhavebeenlostandinsignificantintheworldbeforetheplaguenowhadtheirslig...

展开>> 收起<<

Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die.pdf

共151页,预览31页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: