Dark Benediction

“No. I’m just curious. It keeps happening—a specialist trying to compete with a higher-level specialist’s tools. Why?”

“Higher level?” Thorny sat up with a snarl, groaned, caught at his side and sank back again, panting.

“Easy, old man,” Rick said quietly. “Sorry. Higher organizational-level, I meant. Why do you keep on doing it?”

Thorny lay silent for a few moments, then: “Status jealousy. Even hawks try to drive other hawks out of their hunting grounds. Fight off competition.”

“But you’re no hawk. And a machine isn’t competition.”

“Cut it out, Rick. What did you come here for?”

Rick glanced at the toe of his shoe, snickered faintly, and came on into the room. “Thought you might need some help finding a job,” he said. “When I looked in the door and saw you lying there looking like somebody’s King Arthur, I got sore again.” He sat restlessly on the edge of a chair and watched the old man with mingled sadness, irritation, and affection.

“You’d help me… find a job?”

“Maybe. A job, not a permanent niche.”

“It’s too late to find a permanent niche.”

“It was too late when you were born, old man! There isn’t any such thing—hasn’t been, for the last century. Whatever you specialize in, another specialty will either gobble you up, or find a way to replace you. If you get what looks like a secure niche, somebody’ll come along and wall you up is it and write your epitaph on it. And the more specialized a society gets, the more dangerous it is for the pure specialist. You think an electronic engineer is any safer than an actor? Or a ditch-digger?”

“I don’t know. It’s not fair. A man’s career—”

“You’ve always got one specialty that’s safe.”

“What’s that?”

“The specialty of creating new specialties. Continuously. Your own.”

“But that’s—” He started to protest, to say that such a concept belonged to the highly trained few, to the technical elite of the era, and that it wasn’t specialization, but generalization. But why to the few? The specialty of creating new specialties

“But that’s—”

“More or less a definition of Man, isn’t it?” Rick finished for him. “Now about the job—”

“Yes, about the job—”

So maybe you don’t start from the bottom after all, he decided. You start considerably above the lemur, the chimpanzee, the orangutan, the Maestro—if you ever start at all.

Dark Benediction

Always fearful of being set upon during the night, Paul slept uneasily despite his weariness from the long trek southward. When dawn broke, he rolled out of his blankets and found himself still stiff with fatigue. He kicked dirt over the remains of the campfire and breakfasted on a tough forequarter of cold boiled rabbit which he washed down with a swallow of earthy-tasting ditchwater. Then he buckled the cartridge belt about his waist, leaped the ditch, and climbed the embankment to the trafficless four-lane highway whose pavement was scattered with blown leaves and unsightly debris dropped by a long-departed throng of refugees whose only wish had been to escape from one another. Paul, with characteristic independence, had decided to go where the crowds had been the thickest—to the cities—on the theory that they would now be deserted, and therefore noncontagious.

The fog lay heavy over the silent land, and for a moment he paused groping for cognizance of direction. Then he saw the stalled car on the opposite shoulder of the road—a late model convertible, but rusted, flat-tired, with last year’s license plates, and most certainly out of fuel. It obviously had been deserted by its owner during the exodus, and he trusted in its northward heading as he would have trusted the reading of a compass. He turned right and moved south on the empty highway. Somewhere just ahead in the gray vapor lay the outskirts of Houston. He had seen the high skyline before the setting of yesterday’s sun, and knew that his journey would soon be drawing to a close.

Occasionally he passed a deserted cottage or a burned-out roadside tavern, but he did not pause to scrounge for food. The exodus would have stripped such buildings clean. Pickings should be better in the heart of the metropolitan area, he thought—where the hysteria had swept humanity away quickly.

Suddenly Paul froze on the highway, listening to the fog. Footsteps in the distance—footsteps and a voice singing an absent-minded ditty to itself. No other sounds penetrated the sepulchral silence which once had growled with the life of a great city. Anxiety caught him with clammy hands. An old man’s voice it was, crackling and tuneless. Paul groped for his holster and brought out the revolver he had taken from a deserted police station.

“Stop where you are, dermie!” he bellowed at the fog. “I’m armed.”

The footsteps and the singing stopped. Paul strained his eyes to penetrate the swirling mist-shroud. After a moment, the oldster answered: “Sure foggy, ain’t it, sonny? Can’t see ya. Better come a little closer. I ain’t no dermie.”

Loathing choked in Paul’s throat. “The hell you’re not. Nobody else’d be crazy enough to sing. Get off the road! I’m going south, and if I see you I’ll shoot. Now move!”

“Sure, sonny. I’ll move. But I’m no dermie. I was just singing to keep myself company. I’m past caring about the plague. I’m heading north, where there’s people, and if some dermie hears me a’singing… why, I’ll tell him t’come jine in. What’s the good o’ being healthy if yer alone?”

While the old man spoke, Paul heard his sloshing across the ditch and climbing through the brush. Doubt assailed him. Maybe the old crank wasn’t a dermie. An ordinary plague victim would have whimpered and pleaded for satisfaction of his strange craving—the laying-on of hands, the feel of healthy skin beneath moist gray palms. Nevertheless, Paul meant to take no chances with the oldster.

“Stay back in the brush while I walk past!” he called. “Okay, sonny. You go right by. I ain’t gonna touch you. You aiming to scrounge in Houston?”

Paul began to advance. “Yeah, I figure people got out so fast that they must have left plenty of canned goods and stuff behind.”

“Mmmm, there’s a mite here and there,” said the cracked voice in a tone that implied understatement. “Course, now, you ain’t the first to figure that way, y’know.”

Paul slacked his pace, frowning. “You mean… a lot of people are coming back?”

“Mmmm, no—not a lot. But you’ll bump into people every day or two. Ain’t my kind o’ folks. Rough characters, mostly—don’t take chances, either. They’ll shoot first, then look to see if you was a dermie. Don’t never come busting out of a doorway without taking a peek at the street first. And if two people come around a corner in opposite directions, somebody’s gonna die. The few that’s there is trigger happy. Just thought I’d warn ya.”

“Thanks.”

“D’mention it. Been good t’hear a body’s voice again, tho I can’t see ye.”

Paul moved on until he was fifty paces past the voice. Then he stopped and turned. “Okay, you can get back on the road now. Start walking north. Scuff your feet until you’re out of earshot.”

“Taking no chances, are ye?” said the old man as he waded the ditch. “All right, sonny.” The sound of his footsteps hesitated on the pavement. “A word of advice—your best scrounging’ll be around the warehouses. Most of the stores are picked clean. Good luck!”

Paul stood listening to the shuffling feet recede northward. When they became inaudible, he turned to continue his journey. The meeting had depressed him, reminded him of the animal-level to which he and others like him had sunk. The oldster was obviously healthy; but Paul had been chased by three dermies in as many days. And the thought of being trapped by a band of them in the fog left him unnerved. Once he had seen a pair of the grinning, maddened compulsives seize a screaming young child while each of them took turns caressing the