The Haunted Earth

'Oh, but it's a horrible place,' the old lady said.

'How do you know?' he asked, unable to resist hearing her whole line. 'Have you ever been inside?'

'I'd die first!' she said.

'It's actually a very respectable place.'

'The foreigners go there.'

'The maseni?' he asked.

'Them, yes, and others.'

Jessie removed her hand from his arm — no easy task, since she clung like a leech — and he patted it in a conciliatory manner. 'I can assure you, mother, that the best people go there, too. Just the other night I spent half an hour talking to God; He was sitting at the table next to mine, the father — not the son.'

'I know, I know,' the old lady moaned, quite distressed, clinging to the detective's hand as fiercely as she had clung to his sleeve a moment ago. 'I've seen the pictures in the newspapers and on the gossip pages. There He is, as big as you please, a hussy on His arm, drinking and watching that scandalous floor show…. What's happening to morality these days? If even God is corrupted, what hope have we?'

'He hasn't been corrupted,' Jessie explained. 'Haven't you read the maseni books, or taken a hypno-course in the nature of man and myth? God is as much our creation as we are his. He's as much a victim of circumstances as we are.'

'Tell the old bitch to get lost,' Brutus said, from the detective's side, his red eyes glowing.

The old woman looked past Jessie, at the hound, and shuddered. 'A beast of Hell,' she said.

'Precisely,' Brutus said. He showed lots of teeth.

'I see there's no use talking to you,' the old woman told Jessie. 'A man must contain at least the spark of righteousness if he's to hear and know the truth.' She turned away from him, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the plastiwalk, and she caught up with the other Pure Earthers who had reached the end of the block and were turning back for another pass at the Four Worlds.

'You have this compulsion to talk with zanies,' Brutus said. 'We never encounter a batch of Pure Earthers that you pass by; you've always got to stop and have a few words with them.'

'They fascinate me,' Jessie said.

'Sometimes, I think you could be one of them, with a little nudge,' the hell hound said, contemptuously.

Jessie ignored the hound's sneering remark. After fifteen hundred years in Hell, Brutus couldn't pass up a chance to sneer or be condescending; all those centuries of damnation had severely affected him. He said, 'The Pure Earthers are borderline Shockies; if they'd been just a hair more upset by the maseni landing and all that's come since, they'd be in one of the homes. I'll never have the chance to see any real Shockies, but I can get an idea what they must be like from studying the Pure Earthers.'

'Why this interest in Shockies?' Brutus asked.

'You know why. My parents are Shockies.'

'Oh, yeah,' Brutus said. 'I forgot.' But he hadn't forgotten at all. He was just looking for something more to sneer about. 'They went starkers when the maseni touched down, a couple of wide-eyed blubbers.'

Jessie watched the approaching Pure Earthers. 'That's right.'

The first maseni interstellar ships had landed a decade ago, in the second week of October, 1990. Within a year, the population of Earth — regardless of nationality, race, ethnic group, or education — had been roughly divided into three types of reactions. First, there were those who were profoundly shocked by these developments, but who were able to cope and reorder the nature of their lives and the limits of their perceptions of the universe. These were about forty-five percent of the population. Another forty-five percent were simply unable to adjust. These were the Shockies. They were jolted by the realization that mankind was not the most intelligent species in existence, a fact scientists had predicted for years but which the Shockies had always rejected as 'hokum' or 'bunkum' or 'crap,' or 'heresy' or 'craziness'. They were further jolted to discover — thanks to the maseni — that the supernatural world actually existed, that the denizens of nightmare were real. And they were crushed to discover that God — Yahweh, Christ, Buddha, Satan, Mohammed, what have you — was not quite the being they had always thought. Not only were their patriotic and racial convictions smashed, but so was their spiritual belief… Shockies behaved in one of three ways: uncontrolled rage that led to murder, bombing, rape and rampages of undirected violence; as they had always acted before, refusing to acknowledge that the maseni existed or that their world had changed at all, no matter how much that changed world impinged on their fantasy; or they simply became catatonic, staring off into another world, unable to speak, unable to feed themselves or control their own bodily functions. Cultural shock, severe, horrible. Space-program scientists had long theorized the extent of such a sickness if an alien race should ever be found, but none of them had realized how far-reaching the illness would be.

'Are you going to bleed for them forever?' Brutus asked. 'Haven't you ever heard of 'survival of the fittest'? Did the Cro-Magnon man weep for the Neanderthal?'

'These were my parents,' Blake said. 'My mother and father. If they could have just accepted change, a little bit—'

'Then they'd have been Pure Earthers,' Brutus said. 'Would you have been any happier with that?'

'I guess not.'

The Pure Earthers, at first, had no name and operated under no central organization; that development had required five years in the making. But they were all alike, and they could function coherently as a group; the Pure Earth League was an inevitable product of the maseni landing. Those citizens who had not gone starkers but who were also unable to cope, about ten percent of the world population, agitated for an end of human-maseni relations and a return to the simpler life. They were, of course, doomed to extinction. Their own children, more accustomed to seeing maseni and supernaturals in the streets, were falling away from the older folks; succeeding generations would give fewer and fewer bodies to the Cause.

'Come on!' the hell hound urged, trotting up to the Four Worlds' main revolving door. 'They're almost back again.'

Jessie looked at the rag-tag mob of Pure Earthers, saw the old lady in the sunflower dress at a position in the front of the march, sighed and followed Brutus into the Four Worlds.

* * *

A Shambler, one of the maseni supernaturals, was the current hostess at the Four Worlds Cafe. She greeted Jessie and Brutus when they entered the ornate foyer. Shambling up to them, her amorphous face pulsing through countless lumpy variations, she said, 'Welcome to the Four Worlds. May I check your coat, sir?'

'I'll keep it, thank you,' Jessie said, not bothering to shrug out of the tailored leather jacket. 'You're new, aren't you?'

'Yes, I am,' the Shambler said. 'My name's Mabel, sir.'

'Mabel?' Brutus asked.

'Well, not really Mabel,' the Shambler admitted. 'But my real maseni supernatural name is eighty-six characters long, and it really isn't suitable for human-maseni conversation.'

'I can see that,' Jessie said, watching the Shambler's face form and re-form, a mottled brown-black mass of rotten pudding without eyes, nose or mouth, with nothing but countless, changing knobby protrusions.

'May I seat you, sir?' Mabel asked.

'We're here to meet Mr. Kanastorous,' Jessie said.

'Ah, yes, the charming little demon,' Mabel said, bowing a little at the 'waist', her three hundred pounds rippling subtly like a mass of thick jelly seeking a shape more in harmony with gravity.

'That's him,' Jessie said.

'Right this way, sir,' Mabel said, shambling away across the mirrored foyer, a contrast with the elegance of rainbow-stone chandeliers, potted palms, star-glitter flooring and hand-carved maseni pillars. She led Jessie and Brutus to the door of the main club room and paused by her tip stand, waiting for Jessie to be generous.

He typed out MABEL on the bank computer keyboard and said, 'What's your account number, Mabel?'

The Shambler appeared to be embarrassed by this financial transaction, and she said, almost demurely, 'My number is MAS-55-46-29835, sir, and I thank you for your generosity.'

Jessie typed out the number, ordered five credits to her account, then gave his thumbprint to the scanner plate, to finalize the tip. When he was finished, he said, 'May I ask a personal question?'

Mabel shuddered slightly, her body rippling through another series of lumpy reformations, and she said,