A Natural History of Hell: Stories (15 page)

“When I strapped myself in and opened the book, something floated out of it. I grabbed it as it drifted overhead: a green square of paper. Then I remembered it was the fifty I’d gotten from Max. I’d put it in the book as a good-luck token for the trip. I unfolded it and looked at the face. For the first time I noticed that there was writing on it. In a very light ballpoint pen, someone had drawn a word balloon coming out of Grant’s mouth. It contained two words in Max’s handwriting:
Suicide Mission
.

“Tracy found me floating in my cabin, hyperventilating. She pulled me down to her cabin and strapped me to the wall. Across from me she secured one of her paintings, a bare black tree on a jade green background, on an easel that was bolted to the cabin. She told me to stare at the painting and breathe steadily. ‘Concentrate on the life of the tree,’ she said. I did. I was in shock and barely moved, but my mind was frantic with thoughts of suffocation and a sense that the walls were about to close in.

“The inanity of the painting actually brought me back around. Its simplicity was infectious. I eventually calmed down, and when my breathing had returned to normal, Tracy said, ‘If you get scared, just think of the painting.’ I swore to her that I wasn’t scared, and she just gave me a flat midwestern chuckle. All this time, the theremin was playing, and now that I was free of my own fear, I began to notice how annoying the instrument was, like a relentless robot cat in heat with digestion problems.

“I wondered what Max was up to writing on that fifty. Besides my machinations about that and the yips it gave me, the second biggest problem over the next day and a half was that we were all space slobs. Man, by the second day there was all kinds of crap floating around the rocket ship. Tracy had this glass box they’d designed for her with gloves you put your hands in to work inside the enclosure. Inside, she had paint and a canvas. The thing was a disaster. The paint globbed up and went weightless, and the box was so full of bubbles of color you couldn’t see the painting. The contraption started to leak. Every now and then, a small globe of cadmium yellow or scarlet drifted past my head like a miniature errant world.

“Other things in the slurry of atmosphere were a pair of Parson’s jockey shorts, my copy of
The Butterfly Kid
, empty food packets, droplets of water, scraps of paper. At lunch on the second day, while I tongued a packet of Ham and Swiss on Rye, Tracy announced that we needed to police the area. ‘You don’t want to breathe this stuff in while you’re sleeping,’ she said. Parson said, ‘You folks do it, I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.’ We decided to let the cleanup wait till after dinner.

“Parson’s breakthrough came a little later in the day. I didn’t even notice it at first, as I’d finally gotten into writing something despite how awkward and annoying the process was in outer space. My imagination was hot on the trail of a tale about Pirsute’s young female sidekick, Molly Molly. She was down an alley, her back to the wall, and the Surrogate of Fruition had her cornered with his claws and atom-strangling ray gun, when all of a sudden this noise drew me away. It was Parson and that infernal device. He was playing one single note over and over again. I mean nonstop.

“My head was being drilled out by that note. Eventually I unstrapped myself from my desk chair and went back to have a word with him. On the work side of his cabin, his feet in the metal shoes bolted down that grounded him to the ship, he was leaning over his electronic box and pinching the air with two fingers at the exact same place in the tone field. He had on an expression like he was passing ground glass, and droplets of sweat were being born and rolling upward off his brow. I called to him but he ignored me. I gave him a minute and then got right into his face and yelled his name. He suddenly looked up, angry, and said, ‘What do you want, Werber?’

“ ‘How about a different note?’ I said.

“ ‘Get out,’ he told me. ‘I’ve hit on the universal note of the universe. It’s all there.’

“ ‘Too bad you’re not,’ I said.

“He pinched the air again twice, achieving the exact same tone. I shoved him back out of his metal shoes, and he flew into the cabin wall, ricocheting upward. While he floated above me, I pulled the plug on the theremin. ‘From now on hum it to yourself,’ I said. He reached the opposite wall and then pushed off fast at me. We space-wrestled around his cabin, across the ceiling and walls, and wound up out in the core of the ship. On Earth I was a load and a half, but in space I was Bruce Lee. I did a flip, bounced off the wall, and kicked him right in his cold equations. He grimaced, looking back at me, as he flew down the central passage all the way to the control cabin.

“I pushed off to go after him, and he pushed off to come back at me. We met and tussled outside Tracy’s painting area. She came out red in the face, with her arms folded, and sent us to our cabins, telling Parson to either move on with the music or turn it off, and asking me, ‘How old are you?’ Later, after dinner, I got a chance to apologize to her. We sat together in the control cabin staring out at the universe.

“ ‘My ex-husband was always fighting,’ she said. ‘And drinking.’

“ ‘What’d he think of your painting?’ I asked.

“ ‘He hated me going to the night classes.’

“ ‘Why do you always paint black trees?’

“ ‘It represents the darkness in my soul growing toward the sunlight,’ she said and stared at me.

“ ‘They’re nice trees,’ I told her.

“She smiled, and then things happened fast, in this order—Parson stuck his head into the control cabin and said, ‘The toilet is broken.’ When the last word was out of his mouth, there was a great shuddering throughout the ship, and a siren, like noon at a firehouse, sounded in the cabin. Parson and I looked to Tracy. ‘We’ve been hit by something,’ she said. ‘Get into your space suits.’ I grappled my way back to my cabin and suited up. ‘Put your helmets on,’ called Tracy as I was screwing mine into place. In less than four minutes we were back in the control cabin, and it immediately became clear what the danger was. Fist-size rocks, like a school of fish, were all around us. Very faintly, I could hear them banging off the outside of the
Icarus
.

“Parson pushed his way forward and brought his gloved hand down on the laser-beam button. We saw the red beacon flash outward. It took a few seconds to realize that the space rocks weren’t even so much as sizzling. Mr. Universal Note kept banging on the button, though. ‘Don’t you get it?’ I said to him. ‘It’s just a fucking toy.’ Tracy tapped my shoulder, and I heard her voice in my helmet say, ‘Push that blue one over your head.’ I looked up and saw a button above me I’d never noticed before. I hit it. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

“ ‘Abort mission,’ she said.

“Instantly, I felt the thrust of the boosters and had to hold on. I remembered them telling us that once that button was pushed, the rocket ship would immediately return to Earth. Our sudden speed caused the rocks to hit us with more force, and the ship jerked from side to side and up and down. From what I could see ahead, we seemed to be veering out of the rubble field, and as we did the pummeling eased. From out of that growing calm, a loud screeching noise was heard, and the ride got instantly rougher. ‘We’ve lost a fin,’ said Tracy. She hailed mission control and said, ‘Mayday,
Icarus
is falling. I repeat,
Icarus
is falling. We are aborting mission, leaving orbit.’

“I heard the transmissions in my helmet. A crackling response from the ground crew was half-garbled. All I could make out were the words
escape pods
.

“ ‘There are escape pods on board?’ I asked.

“Tracy never got a chance to respond, because a small, clear stone, a space diamond, shot through the window glass like a bullet, shattered her fishbowl, and hit her right between the eyes.

“ ‘Oh, fuck,’ I heard Parson say.

I immediately felt the current of the atmosphere whistling out of the ship. Tracy’s lifeless body was sucked against the windshield, which was slowly cracking, a pattern of fractures in the glass growing out from her like those trees branching in her paintings.

“ ‘Where are the escape pods?’ I asked Parson as we clawed our way back along the passage. I couldn’t even recall them mentioning escape pods in our training. Ahead of us, his last movement bobbed like a flying mud slide in midair. ‘What the hell?’ I said as it hit us.

“ ‘I told you the toilet was broken,’ he said. His helmet needed a windshield wiper.

“ ‘The escape pod—where and how?’ I managed to get out. Fighting a vacuum is hard work. My trips to the top floor of the casino kept me moving. I was sweating, and the water was pooling in my suit. There was something bad about that, but I couldn’t recall what it was.

“Parson was losing ground; his spindly theremin-playing arms weren’t enough for the job. ‘It’s the bed,’ he yelled.

“ ‘How do I activate it?’

“ ‘Save me,’ he yelled and grabbed my foot with both his hands.

“ ‘Activation?’

“ ‘You gotta take your helmet off and say, “Take me home.” ’ There was a pause. ‘It’s voice activated.’

“I tugged him a couple of feet, and just when I made it to the cabin, I looked back and the control cabin window gave out completely. Amid a cluster of glass shards, Tracy flew off into outer space. I got a burst of adrenalin from fear of death and kicked hard with my leg to shake off Parson.

“ ‘You bitch,’ he yelled back at me as he flew away.

“I put everything into it and was able to get into the bed, strap myself down, and take my helmet off. The atmosphere was leaving the ship at hurricane force. I screamed, ‘Take me home.’ Nothing happened. ‘Take me home,’ I repeated, and this time my desperation increased my volume and it managed to overcome the rush of air. From the wall side of the bed, a covering arced over my body and encapsulated me. My helmet was gone and I couldn’t breathe, but soon enough an emergency source of air came on. It was pitch black inside, and the fit was tight. The ship was shaking and seemed to be tumbling end over end. The pod vibrated like a washer on the spin cycle. And of course my claustrophobia was stuffed in there with me.

“The last thing I heard before passing out was Parson’s voice from some speaker in the pod. He said, ‘I
am
the universal note,’ and his crazy cosmic bellowing followed me into unconsciousness. The next thing I knew, there was a terrible jarring, a shuddering thump, and the cover of the pod drew back. I saw before me a field of pure white. I was dizzy, fading in and out. I thought for sure I’d made it to heaven. I went out cold, and when I came back again the white field drew back and there were two huge men in dark suits and dark glasses. Behind them stood Masterson wearing a sour expression and shaking his head.

“They helped me out of the pod. We weren’t in heaven, but rather the white field I beheld was a parachute. We were in the Nevada desert. We walked over a small rise to a black limousine parked there in the middle of nowhere. The two big guys got in front, and Masterson and I got in the back. Thank God the car was air-conditioned. ‘What happened?’ I said, resting my head back. The driver started the car, and we were off. There was silence until we reached a paved road.

“ ‘What happened, sir, was that you have severely deflated my sense of wonder.’

“I laughed, thinking he was joking, but when I looked at him, his face was red with anger. ‘Sorry’ was all I said, because already I was thinking about the fifty thousand. When we came to a midsize desert town, a place called Numa, the car pulled over at a street corner and parked. Masterson handed me a bank roll. He said, ‘Here’s two thousand dollars. Buy some clothes, get a place to stay, and lay low for a while.’

“ ‘Out here?’ I said. ‘You’re dropping me off?’

“ ‘That’s right, and remember, do not mention the
Icarus
to anyone. If you do there will be regrettable consequences.’

“ ‘But my fifty grand,’ I said.

“ ‘We have to wait till things cool down. Check your bank account in three months. It will be there. Now get out.’

“ ‘I just came back from space,’ I said. The guy in the driver’s seat opened his door, and I knew he was coming to drag me out. ‘OK, OK,’ I said. I got out of the car. It was hot as hell on the street, and I wasn’t used to standing under the influence of gravity. I fell to my knees on the curb. ‘Your rocket ship was crummy,’ I yelled as the door closed. The black car drove off.”

“They just left you there?” I asked.

Werber nodded and stared off at the liquor shelf as if he couldn’t believe it either. He finished his third gin and pushed the glass forward. “Well?” he said.

“Is that all of it?” asked Breelyn.

“Well, there’s the fact that I never got paid.”

“Get out,” she said.

“Never got another dime out of the Rocket Club. I went back east and lived for a while on the remainder of the initial five thousand in my account and what was left of the roll Masterson had handed me. A few months after the bank deadline came and went with no payment, I decided to write a fictional account of the mission. I figured if it was fiction, who would care? I really got into it. My best work ever. I sold it to ACE for one half of a double. Remember when ACE did the doubles?”

“I used to get them off a spinning rack at the local newspaper shop when I was a kid,” I said.

“This was two books in one?” asked Breelyn.

“Yeah,” I said. “A cover and story on one side, and then you flipped it over and there was another cover on the back and another story that read to the middle of the book. You can definitely still find them.”

“I made, for me, good-enough money on that book. The production went along. They sent me a finished copy of it a few weeks before it was to hit the bookstores, and then, all of a sudden, I get a call from the editor, and he tells me, ‘We’re pulling the book.’ I was heartbroken. When I asked why, I was told, ‘We had a visit here from some of your friends in the federal government. They told us the book never existed. They confiscated all copies before they shipped to the stores.’ A few days later, I was rolled on the street not far from my apartment. Four guys with dark suits and glasses roughed me up, bloodied my nose, and warned me that if I didn’t keep the
Icarus
thing quiet, I would permanently disappear.”

“I don’t know,” said Breelyn. “I’ve got a hard time believing.”

“I’ll say,” I added.

Werber reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a paperback book, and tossed it on the bar. “All aboard,” he said. And there it was, staring up at us. A picture of a rocket ship streaking through space, and in the background, a visage of Satan, laughing. The title was in red saber-style across the top and in the corner was the ACE logo. The ship was the same as the one Werber described in his story.

Breelyn poured the old man a fourth straight gin.

“Who’s on the other side?” I asked and turned the book over. On that side there was an illustration of a guy, at night, crouched down under a tree, holding a futuristic-looking rifle while overhead in the starry sky a spacecraft in a shape sort of like a telephone searched the ground in the distance with a beacon of green light. The title on this side was in block letters in the same sea green as that of the searchlight. It read
Six Against the Mind Barons by Tom Purdom
. Breelyn picked the book up and turned it over to see Werber’s side again.