Froomb!

  Froomb!

  John Lymington

  FROOMB!

  A famous cartoon, published first in The Detroit Messenger and later in all countries, depicted the world at the wheel of a motorcar which was rushing at great speed down a slope to the final abyss and crying out, “The fluid’s running out of my brakes!” Shortened to Froomb! it so perfectly fitted the international picture that its cynical truth caught on very widely. It posed so many questions: Why didn’t he try the brakes before he started down? Who made the brakes leak? What difference does it make, anyway?

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  -1

  The sky was a strange color, like dirty copper. There was a stillness around him so absolute that he kept stopping and looking up at the dry, ragged trees sprawling above the road, and the high, spiky hedges. They were green, but it was a kind of dusty green, like the blush on a plum. The black tarred road was broken like a crazy paving, grass growing in the cracks, and weeds, like other-world stick insects, stood feet high.

  “Yet I know it,” he said aloud. “I know the hills over there.”

  He stared across wild Downs to the purple of a range of hills cutting a ragged limit line against the copper sky.

  “It is,” he said. “It bloody well is! . . . But it can’t be, now, can it? What was the name of the place? Something incredible like Blastard Pistrumpet, in the County of Somerset . . . Heaven? What the devil am I doing here? Can’t be Heaven. But it can’t be Blastard Pistrumpet, either. Or can it?”

  He walked on. The uneven, broken road tried to rick his ankles. He could feel the ache of walking on the stuff all up his body.

  “It hurts,” he said. “But can it hurt in Heaven? Something’s wrong, but what? Did that ruddy computer miscompute? If so what has it done to me? I must be alive because it hurts, it’s hot and I’m dry. I couldn’t feel those things in Heaven—or could I?”

  He looked round him again, stopped walking, breathed hard to make sure it felt like air coming into him then

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  blowing out again hard, as if the sensation might prove something.

  But he only added to sensations, for his body ached and was thirsty, his feet were hot and pained with the broken road and oddly, he felt a sexual excitement.

  “But they say you have an orgasm if you die suddenly,” he said. “So that might not be so strange. I don’t know . . . But surely—but surely this is Blastard Pistrumpet that I knew? Surely?—” *

  The trees met across the road in a ragged ^fagging arch as he went on. Once this road had been cut l. rough a wood and now the wood had grown over it again. A sudden wave of excitement surged in him as he remembged something.

  A wood by the road. There should be a track going to the right, leading down through birch woods and sljfrering screens of springing birch to a lake. He remembered if now, and that place where it was cleared a little and yoa^could look up and see the high wires looping against the sky. Yes, he could remember the line of splender steel pylons like Martian giants striding across the hills.

  It was strange to see a crazy paving running through a wood with the feet of trees rising through it, trying to touch toes across the once wide way.

  He went through the darkening wood and there, overgrown to a point where the track was no more than inches wide, he saw it, his little lane of escape of all those years ago.

  He stopped and looked around him again.

  “Those years ago,” he said to the trees. “How many? For God’s sake! Only twenty! How could this have happened in twenty years?”

  His brain recoiled like a startled snake, then slowly relaxed again. He reached out and touched a tree. Then he hit it with his hand and it stung.

  “No, not dreaming. Not Heaven either. I was bom near here,” he said, shaking his head. “What did Packard do wrong? . . . But then, he wasn’t sure, was he? He didn’t know what would happen. But it wasn’t this. What is this?”

  He started to run, tearing his way between the bushes and the weeds, following the faint line of his little track that once had led to—Heaven!

  He stopped and pushed his fingers through his wild hair.

  “Heaven, Heaven, Heaven!” he shouted. “No, not that kind of Heaven! That was just a boy’s Heaven! A place of

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  dreams and rainbow fish and the dragonflies like fairies in the sun—I can smell it! The cool water and the rich green trees and the moss, and the heat of the sun on that rock—!”

  He heard his yelling voice echoing in the vastness of the wild trees. He saw the gray remains of an old gate lurching in the prickles and the weeds, sinking into an enveloping sea. Beyond the gate there had been a clearing where the Martian giant had stood, legs wide, his mighty crown of insulators high against the summer sky.

  He stared through the jungle and saw the Martian, crumpled, as if its knees had given way. Its crown was strangled by weeds choking the trees. It was thin and red with rust, hardly distinguishable now in the voracious advance of savage decay; a poor, broken thing so wizened and rotted that it could never have had the majesty he had remembered.

  He felt tears in his eyes, as if sad for this thing; this ruined part of a remembered dream.

  He was mad. This was the world of madness. The decay was not around him, but in his mind, showing him a wrinkled, toothless gibbering mask of age on what must be still the face of youth.

  “Twenty years! Only twenty years!” he shouted and began to run again.

  Suddenly there it was. At the edges the trees drooped

  to the water, weeds trailed like fraying ropes in the deeper shadows at the shores of the rock lake. The water was still; the reflection of the copper sky made it like a burning mirror.

  But he could smell the coolness and the dank, clinging scent of the vegetation.

  The awful pain of disappointment filled him, as if the sweetness of life had been suddenly swept away out of reach among the stars and he was alone in a burning desert with only the feel of pain and thirst and the exhaustion of despair.

  It was decay, decay. There had never been youth and freshness and the richness of spring warming into summer; /there had been only the sensations of a dreaming brain. Twenty years! lust twenty years and there he was, a naked boy lying on his belly on the warm rock, staring down over the edge to the rainbow fish darting in the pool, the sun like the touch of a girl on his body.

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  Desperately he stepped on to the rock and looked down into the depths of the silent lake. No fish darted. For a moment he made out nothing but shimmering ghosts under the water. They took shape as he stared, became an iron bedstead, springs, the top of an old iron cooking range, red as desert sand. ...

  “God!” He turned his face to the copper sky. “I must be dead! Please God I must be deadl That’s what David promised —not this!”

  He turned suddenly and stumbled off the rock.

  It couldn’t be the truth. The computer had been wrong. He was not dead. He could feel and suffer.

  “Then it’s Hell!” he said and pushed through the jungle back to the forgotten road. “They were wrong. It’s Hell! not Heaven at all!”

  But it was too real for either. He felt and breathed and suffered and thought. He was alive. This was not the kind of life that could last a million years; this was the life of burning hurt and rapid decay; the only life Man knew.

  He came to the road and turned again to the West, breaking out of the wood between what had once been fields of wheat and barley. Now there were wild weeds and dancing poppies like painted whores in a world of dry, withering straw.

  Upon the hill ahead of him there had been a crown of trees —the Druids Ring, they had called it. Surely it had been on top?

  His pace increased as if impatience co
uld find what his eyes could see was not there. But as he rose higher on the broken road he saw the tops of trees showing above the breast of the hill. A ring no more, but a straggling, spreading blot on the soft hill. The road dived over the brow and entered a forest of young trees. He could not remember whether it had been there before, but he thought it had been fields when he had known it. This was like a great wall of trees stretching away to right and left.

  As he went toward it, sounds broke the stillness of the nightmare day. He stopped, startled, almost frightened.

  “Birds!” he said, his voice tearing in his dry throat. “Birds!” He looked back over his shoulder the way he had come. “There weren’t any birds down there!”

  Tears began to run down his cheeks as if the sound of the birds had aroused an emotion so strong that he could no

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  longer control it. He began to run toward the trees and the sound of the birds. The road smoothed as if at last someone lived in this decayed world who tended it against the weeds. He ran into the world of the trees and the singing birds and the shadows grew deeper beneath the great green roof of leaves. He ran as fast as he could, one hundred and ninety- six pounds of a strong and powerful young man running as fast along the empty road as if escaping from a pursuing ghost of madness.

  He heard his feet slapping and echoing, and his breath groaning in his chest, but above all rang the carillons of the birdsong in the cathedral of the trees.

  “The gates of Heaven!” he gasped. “David said there would be—”

  From the emptiness of the road some invisible force punched him in his chest and his belly, as if he had run full tilt into a solid wall. The breath was bounced out of him and he was paralyzed with the density of a pain that gripped all his muscles. His legs gave way and he began to fall headlong down to the road. Before he touched it, suffering ended and the Darkness came, just as it had done in .the electric chair.

  2

  He found himself being walked toward a log hut in the

  trees, a man supporting him on each side. Their hands hurt his arms, and he felt his feet dragging and stumbling on the grass. The sun had come out and the beams slanted down through the leaves, splashing brilliant translucent greens from their slowly moving planes. The ground was soft, patched with tree shadows on the rich grass, and the air was fresh and sweet with the smells of woodland, cool in the summer day. He had never noticed the colors, the smells, the very feel of the air on his face so richly before. He gained his feet and began to resist the shoving of the men as they came near the hut. The logs of its walls were wrinkled and brown like walnut shells, polished with rain and sun. The moving colors of the woodland and the shimmering of the

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  young beech sparkled in the windows like the sun on rippling water. He felt a need to gasp in air, to drink in the beauty after the sordid decay he had come through.

  The door of the log hut was open, and he saw a man inside sitting at a table and facing him.

  “St. Peter,” he panted.

  His two helpers got him to the doorway and then shoved him through. He stumbled and fell again, crashing to the floor in a whirl of pain, clutching at a chair as he went. The chair was pulled down on top of him. One of his two helpers came into the hut, lifted the chair off him and then smashed it down across his back before standing it in the corner.

  “Jesus!” he gasped, the pain searing through him like a white fire. He scrambled up, dizzy with the hurt, and as he reeled back against the wall he saw the energetic helper come at him and smash at his face with his fist. The blow caught his cheek and jarred his head back against the wooden wall.

  He stayed a moment, his body rigid at his own command, and then as the helper came to hit him again he went forward with both feet widely placed. He drove one fist into the man’s belly and the other to his ear. The pain of the blows landing added to the aching mass of his body, but stimulated it. He smashed at the man again. The man dropped his guard and just stood there, backing and gasping with each blow. The traveler hit him like a punching bag until the fellow gave way at the knees and fell down, retching.

  Neither Peter at the desk nor the second helper at the doorway did anything to stop the traveler in his powerful onslaught. They looked at. their fallen comrade as he rolled over on the floor and lay there gasping and groaning.

  Peter cocked his head and looked at the traveler.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Brunt,” said the traveler. “John Brunt.”

  The helper at the door dragged his companion out of the hut, left him lying in grunting misery on the grass and came in again, closing the door to shut out the disturbing sounds of agony.

  “Your tag,” the man at the desk said, holding out his hand.

  “What tag?” said Brunt, blankly.

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  The man let his hand fall to the desk, and eyed John Brunt with smooth suspicion.

  “Where have you come from?” he asked.

  “I can’t answer for the route,” said John, “but I started in London. I’ll explain it, but—tell me one thing first.”

  Peter sat still, watching him. Brunt was a big, powerfully built young man of nearly thirty, and something about his appearance, or perhaps his behavior, held the official with a kind of fascination. Peter was smooth, dark-haired, sallow in complexion, with brown eyes of a velvet Brunt could see no light in.

  “You are Peter?" Brunt said, and held his breath for the answer.

  The official considered the question.

  “Call me that if you like,” he said quietly, then looked beyond Brunt to the man by the door. “George, if he doesn’t stop that row, knock him right out.”

  “Done,” said George, and smiled as he went outside. The groaning stopped. George came back and left the door open behind him.

  “Heaven?” said John Brunt, half to himself.

  “How did you get here?” Peter said.

  “I died, you see,” John said quickly. “I was killed specially for the purpose. We didn’t know what to expect, but—it wasn’t this. I used to know this place years ago. I was bom here. I know it’s the same place.”

  “You were born here?” said Peter, looking him up and down.

  “Yes. But for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it. I know it like my own, but it just won’t come.” “It hasn’t got a name,” said Peter.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  John could not sort out the confusion of his feelings, and for a moment clung to something that seemed to help.

  “Well, this is the place I knew,” he said reasonably. “It’s very different, but it’s the place.”

  “And you say you were killed?”

  “Yes. Being deliberately killed doesn’t disqualify you, does it? It was one of the things Packard wasn’t sure about. We decided to risk it.”

  “Who is Packard?”

  “David Packard, chief scientific adviser to the government,

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  Minister of Science, but this is a private experiment. Of course, we realized all along that you might have strong objections to this kind of work, but I hope that it won’t count against me.”

  Brunt felt anxious, even frightened of the possibility.

  “I don’t see why it should courtt against you,” said Peter, watching him. “But I am only a steward. Such decisions don’t rest with me. They come from a higher quarter. All I can do is tell them what you say. My duties are to prevent people getting in who have no right to be here, but— You say you came from the government?”

  “Not exactly,” said John. “From one of their chief advisers.”

  “And he has sent you here?”

  “That’s it. Professor David Packard."

  Peter did not show much interest in Packard; perhaps he had not heard of him yet. John realized that there must be wide areas of complete blankness in Peter’s awareness of names. There could be more peop
le than stars. After all, people probably didn’t interest Peter until they arrived at reception.

  Peter’s manner changed. His slow easy, smooth attitude was suddenly drowned. He picked up a pill bottle, tipped a handful of pills into his palm and swallowed them. A mathematical ferocity took command of him.

  “You say you were murdered?”

  “It won’t disqualify me?”

  “Yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you feel anything?”

  “Yes.”

  Peter shot the contents of the bottle into John’s face. The traveler jumped back blinking. The bottle struck him on the nose a second later, and he uttered an exclamation of pain.

  Peter sat still, watching him. Then he took up a pencil and wrote in thick black on a sheet of paper, “Reactions abnormal.”

  “Do you feel short of breath?” Peter said.

  “No. Just short of patience.”

  Peter made a sign to George, who went out through a door into a room behind the desk.

  “So this man killed you,” Peter went on.

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  “Yes.”

  “You still feel normal?”

  “Yes. I didn’t expect that—”

  “You feel hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  Peter made scrawling notes with the charcoal pencil, using a sheet of paper for every six or seven words.

  “You were born here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “I can’t remember the name. It’s gone somehow.”

  “What kind of place?”

  “A village. It used to be down there, a mile down there.” John pointed at the west wall of the hut.

  “And you think it isn’t there now?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see if it is or not.”

  “What kind of house?”

  “It wasn’t a house. It was a pub—an inn. A fine old place going back to the sixteenth century. It was—I remember now! It was called The Ostlers!”

  Peter sat back, let his pencil fall and spread his hands, palms down, on the desk. His smooth sallow face was a mask, but his eyes at last were bright with suspicion.