The Death Wish

  Fantastic Universe – June 1956

  (1956)*

  Margaret St. Clair

  Astoundingly enough, the idea behind this unforgettable little science fantasy is one which might have occurred to almost anyone. Yet we doubt if it ever has —at least with quite the same St. Clairian insight into the eternity-long loneliness of one man and one woman shipwrecked on a strange planet in space. It's a little like Shiel's PURPLE CLOUD, in a way, that fearful chronicle of one man alone on Earth. But Margaret St. Clair has a magic wand all her own, and she doesn't need the wide, spreading canvas of a full-length novel to set it aglow.

  -

  They were very charming people-make no mistake. They liked games and were hospitable to a fault. What, then, was out of joint?

  -

  THE FREEWAY opened broad and exciting in front of them. With the top of the turndown back, the air was stingingly brisk against their faces. The sky overhead was a brilliant, deep, cloudless blue. It was a fine day to be going to a football game.

  "Isn't this nice?" Anne said. "Perfect weather, just the right amount of traffic on the road to make things interesting, and we're going to a football game. It couldn't be better. Everything is always just the way it ought to be, in this place." She pulled the collar of her gray fur coat up around her face and looked at him smilingly. But her eyes were challenging.

  "Urn," Paul said. He did not look at her or turn around even slightly.

  Anne lowered her eyes. She laid her hand over his, on the steering rod, and pressed his knuckles. He did not respond, and after a moment she drew her hand away.

  "Paul, what's the matter? Why don't you— What makes you act like that?"

  "I think you know why," he answered, still not turning.

  Anne drew in her breath. "Oh, .;re you still harping away on that? Can't you see you're wrong? It wasn't the way you thought it was at all. You're wrong. Paul, you're wrong. We're lucky to be comfortable and safe, lucky to be alive at all. Don't you realize that it was only by a kind of miracle that we landed on this wonderful planet? if you'd just stop to think—"

  "It's not a wonderful planet," Paul interrupted. "It's a very strange one."

  "It's not strange at all," Anne retorted. Her face seemed to have relaxed a little. "It's almost exactly like Earth."

  The turndown shot smoothly ahead on the long, broad road. Paul said, "And if you think that isn't strange, Anne, you're refusing to face facts.

  "We landed, by accident—" his voice faintly stressed the last two words—"on the surface of the planet of a sun on the other side of Sirius. It was a crash landing. We couldn't have gone anywhere else.

  "We found that the planet was not only very similar to Earth physically, but that it was populated by some two million human beings. The only noticeable way in which they differ from the population of Terra is that they all have white skins.

  "Their material culture is almost identical with that of Terra thirty years ago. The layout of their cities, their vehicles, their books—everything. They even have football games, with the nineteen-ninety rules. The one difference I've been able to locate so far is that they have no approach to space flight. They hardly seem to have thought of it. 'They tell me positively that our own ship can never be repaired. And that, from a culture as advanced technologically as this one, is in itself queer.

  "But the queerest thing of all is that they speak English perfectly. Their books and papers and journals are written in it. We land, by accident—" again his voice accented the last two words—"on a planet on the other side of Sirius. Its inhabitants have no idea of space flight, but they speak English as their mother tongue. This is a wonderful planet, Anne, certainly. But isn't it a little queer}" He turned his gaze from the road to peer at her triumphantly.

  Anne pleated her lower lip. "Yes, when you put it like that. But you see, Paul, there's another way of looking at it."

  She paused, seeming to arrange her thoughts. "I read once, somewhere, that there are ten million million planets like Earth in what we know of space. Ten million million planets, and billions of years of time. If you have chances enough, anything, no matter how improbable, becomes possible. Like the monkeys writing the Encyclopaedia Britannica out perfectly on typewriters. I think that's what has happened here."

  Paul laughed. His lean, sunburned face had grown cheerful. "I don't believe it," he declared. "No matter how many monkeys, how many typewriters, how much banging. I just don't believe it. What edition of the Encyclopaedia ? Uh—Here's the parking lot."

  -

  IT WAS A good game, stubbornly fought by both sides, with fast, brilliant plays that got everybody in the stadium up on his feet and yelling. The Blues won. On the way home, Anne asked, "Are you feeling better now, Paul?"

  "Um?"

  "I mean, more able to accept things. To be happy that we're honored guests here, and not worry so much."

  He turned toward her momentarily. His face was dark; it seemed she had mistaken his mood. "If you mean by that, that I've forgotten what I saw, the answer is no. Still no."

  "Don't start that again, Paul."

  He cleared his throat. "I can't forget that I went aft on the BRAHE," he said deliberately, "and found you wreaking assorted havoc with a monkey wrench. You'd already smashed up the steering gear hopelessly. If I hadn't gone in just then, God knows what else you'd have wrecked."

  "It wasn't—Paul, you're wrong. It just wasn't that way."

  "It wasn't that way? You mean I was having a hallucination ? What way was it, then?"

  Anne was silent. At last she made a gesture of despair, her hands palely luminous in the gathering dusk. "But what—why can't you forget it? We're here. We're safe. We can't get away, but they let us have everything we want. They want us to live off the fat of the land. Why can't you be satisfied? What is it, anyway?"

  He turned toward her, taking one hand from the steering rod. "I can't be satisfied," he said slowly, "until I know why you wanted the BRAHE wrecked here. Why did you want us to spend the rest of our lives here?"

  He turned back to the road. His foot pressed down hard on the accelerator. The turndown shot ahead.

  Anne said, "It's cold. We ought to have put the top up. Paul, don't you think you ought to turn the lights on? It's getting dark."

  His only answer was to step down on the accelerator with all his strength.

  "Be careful," Anne said anxiously. "This is no place to try to pass. It's dark, and—Paul! Paul! . . . Look out! There's a car coming! Get back! Paul! Oh, my God!"

  They weren't hurt. They weren't even scratched. The oncoming car had, at the last moment, turned back into its own lane and crashed into the car ahead of it, to avoid hitting them.

  The cops came bobbing up on motorcycles, nearly a dozen of them, and then an ambulance that took the injured from the other two cars away. They took Paul away too—a little later.

  -

  Anne did not see him for three days after that, when he came back to the hotel where they were staying, after the hearing about the accident had been held.

  "I'm a free man," he said. He looked around the room—he and Anne, as honored guests, were occupying a luxury suite in the hotel —and said rather absently, "Everything seems different somehow, as if I'd been gone a long time."

  "How was jail?" Anne asked. After the first greeting she had hung back from him, in what looked like embarrassment or lack of ease.

  "Not bad. Lonesome. I had a cell all to myself. The population here must be remarkably law-abiding. I don't believe there was anyone at all besides myself in the jug-"

  "Would you like something to eat?" She went over to a low tabouret and began rearranging the flowers in a vase on it.

  "No, thanks, they fed me. Pretty good food." He sat down on the big green divan, his long legs stretched out in front of him. "Anne, did you get the force of what I said when I first came in? I'm a free man."

  "I know. I'm glad." She did not turn from her work with the flowers.

  "Yes, but—Anne, it's incredible. I'm responsible for the death of three men. That came out clearly enough at the hearing. And do you know what they did? They slapped a fine on me, which was remitted because I didn't have any money. And they gave me six months in jail, on a suspended sentence. In other words, no punishment at all. And yet I killed three men."

  "We're honored guests," Anne said slowly. "They wouldn't want to do anything that would make us unhappy."

  "Yes. But this is going too far."

  "How do we know ? It obviously isn't going too far, for them. How do we know what the rules are here? We can't expect them to act the way we would. They must have different rules."

  "Yes, I suppose that's it—the rules are different." His face did not clear. "They must be quite a bit different."

  Anne went over and sat down by him on the divan. "You were gone three days," she said. "It was lonely. There wasn't any news about what was happening to you. Kiss me, Paul."

  He kissed her. "I wish I knew why—"

  "Always you want to know why," she said teasingly. "Forget it. Kiss me again."

  His arms tightened around her. Lightly she caressed the muscles of his back. She was smiling. "Sweetheart. Paul."

  But he awoke in the night, his anxiety still unsatisfied. It was something about the accident, something he couldn't remember, and it was bothering him.

  Anne was sleeping quietly beside him. He got up and went over to the windows—softly, so that he should not disturb her.

  The suite Paul and his wife

occupied was high up in the hotel. When he looked out, he could see nearly the whole length of the street. The time was not much past midnight, but the street was almost deserted. The population, it seemed, was not only law-abiding but went to bed early. Then, as Paul watched, two cars started from opposite ends of the street, passed each other in the middle, and turned the corners again.

  There were cars and a scattering of pedestrians after that. Paul watched absently, his hands on the fastenings of the window, until his feet grew cold. Then he went back to bed. But as he slid gently between the covers he knew suddenly what had been bothering him about the accident. There hadn't been any blood.

  After that, Paul made experiments. A bellhop brought him a drink. Paul put out his foot and tripped him, and the man righted himself and went back to the bar without ever a word.

  He got a cigar from the girl at the tobacco counter in the hotel. When she stooped to replace the cigar box on the lower shelf, he pulled three bright ornaments from the back of her hair. She did not even straighten up. There were other experiments. He climaxed them with what he did to the plumber in the bath.

  Anne was in the habit of washing her long blonde hair in the shower, and that may have been what made the drain stop up. The plumber said so when Paul, leaning against the bathroom door with his hands in his pockets, questioned him. He seemed to be a good plumber. He went about his work neatly and efficiently.

  Paul looked on lazily while the man probed in the drain with a length of flexible metal hose and poured a can of some caustic cleaner into it. He waited until the man bent over to see what was happening in the depths of the drain. Then he picked up a heavy wrench from the plumber's open kit of tools.

  For a moment he hesitated. What he was about to do frightened him. But after all, he was. nearly sure. He hefted the wrench. He hit the plumber as hard as he could on the back of the head with it.

  The plumber fell forward into the shower stall. He did not groan, or kick, or move. Paul took hold of him by the shoulder and tried to turn him over. He was much heavier than Paul had anticipated. When he got him over on his back, Paul saw that a long spiral of copper wire was protruding from the man's nose.

  Paul went into the bedroom, where Anne was fixing her nails with a little electric manicure tool. Above the noise the tool made, he said, "We're the only living people on this planet."

  "What? Sorry, I didn't hear what you said."

  He reached out and shut the manicure tool off. "I said, we're the only living people on this planet."

  "Oh. I—oh."

  "Yes. Come and look." He led her into the bathroom and showed her the fallen plumber.

  "Oh," she said once more. She began rubbing one cheek as if it had grown numb and she wanted to start the blood tingling in it.

  "You don't seem very surprised," he said, looking at her.

  "I'm not, Paul. You see, I've thought so for quite a long time."

  "How long?"

  "Oh—since before the accident."

  -

  His face relaxed. "What made you guess?" he asked.

  "A lot of things. They were always a little slow about answering questions or doing things, especially if one behaved in an unexpected way. I wasn't sure, though —until I went down the stairs one day instead of waiting for the elevator, and found two of the maids oiling each other on the stair landing."

  "Why didn't you tell me?" he wanted to know.

  "I thought it might frighten you or make you unhappy. You see, we're stuck here for the rest of our lives, and— Does it make you unhappy, Paul?"

  "It's a funny feeling," he said. He had put his hands back in his pockets. "There's traffic down in the street—I can hear the noise of the horns even in here. But . . . I suppose there are cities all over this world that would spring into life as we entered them, and go back to immobility and silence as soon as we left them. Or do they keep running all the time? That would use a good deal of power.

  "Yes, I think I am afraid. It's frightening."

  She went over to him and touched his arm. "Don't you see now, Paul, that your suspicions were wrong? I wasn't trying to wreck the ship so that we'd land on this planet. Nobody would want to live all his life with robots, dear."

  "No."

  "But—can't we be happy? You said once that you'd like to be alone with me on a desert island, that you'd like to spend your life alone with just me. Well—this is a desert island de luxe. Anything we want, we can have. Can't we be happy, dear?"

  "What about when we get old? When we get old and die?"

  She took him in her arms almost fiercely. "We won't die! We won't! And we won't be old for a long, long time. Paul, sweetheart! Say you can be happy here."

  "All right. Yes."

  -

  THEY MOVED into the control tower, high above the city. Paul liked to shut off the automatic controls and direct the activities of the robots himself. Sometimes he would produce a monstrous traffic jam, or crumple fenders in a series of minor wrecks. At least it provided entertainment.

  He and Anne made trips to the robot factories, or, later, drove through the country and watched towns and cities come alive when they entered and sink back quiet when they left again. Paul spent a good deal of his time going over the papers Wilkenson had left.

  "What do you suppose the old boy was like?" he said to Anne one day over highballs in the control tower. They were both drinking more than they once had. "Personally, I mean."

  "He must have hated people," Anne answered. "Hated them and feared them and needed them. He couldn't get along with the real world. So he came here and made a world he could control."

  "Yes. He must have been like that. And with a brilliant, brilliant intellect. Some of his mathematical stuff makes me feel like an infant. I can't even tell what his equations are aiming at. A big-brained cyberneticist. And a man with great organizing ability, too . . . I wonder how old he was when he came here. And hov old he was when he died."

  "Don't the papers tell?"

  "No. Most of the time they aren't dated. And they're thoroughly mixed up. Listen, Anne." He cleared his throat. "Where do you go in the afternoons?"

  "In the afternoons? Nowhere. I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Oh, yes you do. Twice lately you've said you were going to your room to lie down. But when I went looking for you, you were not there."

  "Oh, that." She laughed. "Now I remember. My headache got better and I went shopping. It's such fun to make the robots bring out everything in the stores."

  "I don't believe it. You weren't in any stores."

  Anne emptied her glass. "Paul, are you starting in Cm that stuff again?" she said when she put it down. "Suspicions—all that old stuff?"

  "I can't forget what I saw you doing with that wrench."

  She got up from her chair and walked over to one of the control tower's enormous windows. "I won't talk to you until you stop that, Paul," she said.

 

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