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Stories - Science Fiction
A Matter of Proportion - Anne Walker
00:36:40
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- [00:01]
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- [00:57]
Narrator/Storyteller
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- [01:31]
Narrator/Storyteller
A Matter of Proportion By Ann Walker in order to make a man stop, you must convince him that it's impossible to go on. Some people, though, just can't be convinced. In the dark, our glider chutes zeroed neatly on target. Only Art Benjamin missed the edge of the gorge. When we were sure Invader hadn't heard the crashing of bushes, I climbed down after him. The climb and what I found left me shaken. A Special Corps squad leader is not expendable by order. Clyde Estabrook, my second and ICEG mate, would have to mine the viaduct while my nerve and glycogen stabilized. We timed the patrols, Clyde said. Have to wait till a train's coming. No time otherwise, well, it was his show. When the next pair of burly coated men came over at a trot, he breathed now and ghosted out almost before they were clear. I switched on the ICEG intercortical encephalograph planted in my temporal bone. My own senses could hear young Ferd breathing, feel and smell the mat of pine needles under me. Through Clyde's I could hear the blind whuffle of wind in the girders, feel the crude wood of ties and the iron cold molding of rails in the star dark. I could feel, too, an odd, lilting elation in his mind, as if this savage universe were a good thing to take on. Spray guns, cold and all. We wanted to set the mine so the wreckage would clobber a trail below, one like they'd built in Burma and Japan, where you wouldn't think a monkey could go. But it probably carried more supplies than the viaduct itself, so Clyde made adjustments precisely just as we'd figured it with the model back at base, it was a tricky, slow job in the bitter dark. I began to figure if he armed it for this train and ran, she'd go off while we were on location and we'd be drenched in searchlights and spray guns already. Through his fingers I felt the hum in the rails that every tank town reared kid knows. I turned up my iceg. All right, Clyde, get back. Arm it when she's gone past for the next one. I felt him grin, felt his lips form words. I'll do better than that, Willie. Look, Daddy O no hands. He slid over the edge and rested elbows and ribs on the raw tie ends. We're all acrobats in the corps, but I didn't like this act one little bit. Even if he could hang by his hands, the heavy train would jolt him off, but I swallowed my thoughts. He groped with his foot, contacted a sloping beam, and brought his other foot in. I felt a dull scraping slither under his moccasin soles. Frost, he thought calmly rubbed a clear patch with the edge of his foot, put his weight on it, and transferred his hands to the beam. With a twist we hadn't learned in core school, my heart did a double take. One slip and he'd be off into the gorge, and the frost stung, melting under his bare fingers. He lay in the trough of the massive H beam, slid down about 20ft to where it made an angle with an upright and wedged himself there. It took all of 20 seconds, really, but I let out a breath as if I'd been holding it for minutes. As he settled, searchlights, began skimming the bridge. If he'd been running, he'd have been shot to a sieve. As it was, they'd never see him in the mingled glare and black. His heart hadn't even speeded up beyond what was required by exertion. The train roared around his shoulder and onto the viaduct, shaking it like an Angry hand. But as the box cars thunder clattered above his head, he was peering into the gulf at a string of feeble lights threading the bottom. There's the flywalk, Willie. They know their stuff, but we'll get it. Then as the caboose careened over and the searchlights cut off. Well, that gives us 10 minutes before the patrol comes back. He levered onto his side a joint at a time and began to climb the beam. Never again for me. Even by proxy, you just couldn't climb that thing nohow. The slope was too steep, the beam was too massive to shinny, yet too narrow to lie inside and elbow up. The metal was too smooth and scummed with frost. His fingers were beginning to numb and and he was climbing. In each fin of the beam, every foot or so was a round hole. He'd get one finger into a hole and pull. Inching his body against the beam, he timed himself to some striding music I didn't know. Not fast, but no waste. Motion, even the pauses rhythmic. I tell you, I was sweating under my leathers. Maybe I should have switched the iceg off for my own sake, if not to avoid distracting Clyde. But I was hypnotized. Climbing. In the old days when you were risking your neck, you were supposed to think great solemn thoughts. Recently you're supposed to think about something silly like a singing commercial. Clyde's mind was neither posturing in front of his mental mirror nor running in some feverish little circle. He faced terror as big as the darkness from gorge bottom to stars, and he was just simply as big as it was sheer life exulting in, defying the dark, the frost and wind with the zombie grip of invader. I envied him. Then his rhythm checked. Five feet from the top, he reached confidently for a finger hole. No hole. He had already reached as high as he could without shifting his purchase and risking a skid. And even his wrestler's muscles wouldn't make the climb again. My stomach quaked. Never see sunlight in the trees any more. Just cling till dawn picked you out like a crow's nest in a dead tree or drop. Not Clyde. His flame of life crouched in anger. Not only the malice of nature and the rage of enemies, but human shiftlessness against him. Too good. He'd take it on shoulder, thigh, knee, foot scraped off frost. He jammed his jaw against the wet iron. His right hand never let go, but it crawled up the fin of the strut like a blind animal while the load on his points of purchase mounted. Watchmaker coordination where you'd normally think in boilermaker terms. The flame sank to a spark as he focused, but it never blinked out. This was not the anticipated warded danger, but the trick punch from nowhere. This was it. A sneak squall buffeted him. I cursed thinly, but he sensed an extra purchase from its pressure and reached the last 4 inches with a swift glide. The next hole was there. He waited five heartbeats and pulled. He began at the muscular disadvantage of aligned joints. He had to make it the first time. If you can't do it with a dollar, you won't do it with the change. But as elbow and shoulder bent, the flame soared again. Score one more for life. A minute later he hooked his arm over the butt of a tie, his chin, his other arm, and hung a moment. He didn't throw a knee up, just rolled and lay between the rails. Even as he relaxed, he glanced at his watch. Three minutes to spare. Leisurely, he armed the mine and jogged back to me and Ferd. As I broke ICEG contact, his flame had sunk to an ember glow of anticipation. We had almost reached the cave pricked on our map when we heard the slam of the mine. Wee and far off, we were lying doggo, looking out at the snow peaks, incandescent in dawn when the first invader patrols trailed by below. Our equipment was a miracle of hot food and basic medication. Not pastimes, though. And by the second day of hiding, I was thinking too much. There was Clyde, an Inca chief with a thread of black mustache and incongruous hazel eyes. My friend and ICEG mate. What made him tick? Where did he get his delight in the bright eyes of danger? How did he gear his daredevil valor not to the icy iron and obligatory you know what?
- [10:41]
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- [11:04]
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- [11:27]
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- [11:56]
Narrator/Storyteller
Killing but to the big music and stars over the gorge. But in the Corps we don't ask questions. And above all, never eavesdrop on iceg. Young Ferd wasn't so inhibited. Benjamin's death had shaken him. Losing your iceg, mate, is like losing an eye. He began fly fishing. Clyde. How had Clyde learned that stunt in the dark, with the few minutes he'd had? There's always a way, Ferd, if you're fighting for what you really want. Well, I want to throw out Invader, all right, but that's the start, of course. But beyond that. He changed the subject. Perhaps only I knew of his dream about a stronghold for rebels far in these mountains. He smiled. I guess you get used to calculated risks. Except for imagination. You're as safe walking a ledge 20 stories up as down on the sidewalk. Not if you trip. That's the calculated risk. If you climb it, you get used to it. Well, how did you get used to it? Were you a mountaineer or an acrobat? In a way, both. Clyde smiled again, a trifle bitterly, and switched the topic. Anyway, I've been in action for the duration. Except for some time in hospital. Ferd was on to that boner like an infielder. To get into SC you have to be not only championship fit, but have no history of injury that could crop up to haywire you in a pinch. So hospital you sure don't show it now. Clyde was certainly below par. To cover his slip, he backed into a bigger, if less obvious one. Oh, I was in that Operation Armada at Golden Gate had to be patched up. He must have figured Ferd had been a kid then and I hadn't been too old. Odds were we'd recall the episode and no more. Unfortunately. I'd been a ham operator, and I'd been in the corps that beamed those fire ships onto the invader supply fleet. In the dense fog, the whole episode was burned into my brain. It had been kamikaze stuff, though there'd been a theoretical chance of the 30 men escaping to justify sending them out. Actually, one escape boat did get back with three men. I'd learned about those men out of morbid conscience, scalded curiosity, their Leader was Edwin Scott, a medical student. At the very start he'd been shot through the lower spine. So his companions put him in the escape boat while they clinched their prey. But as the escape boat sheared off, the blast of enemy fire killed three and disabled two. Scott must have been some boy. He'd already doctored himself with hemostatics and local anesthetics. But from the hips down he was dead as salt pork. And his visceral reflexes must have been reacting like a worm cut with a hoe. Yet somehow he doctored the two others and got that boat home. The other two had died, but Scott lived as sole survivor of Operation Armada. And he hadn't been a big bronze Latin Indian with incongruous hazel eyes, but a snub nosed redhead. And he'd been wheelchaired for life. They'd patched him up, decorated him, sent him to a base hospital in Wisconsin where he could live in whatever comfort was available. So he dropped out of sight. And now this. Clyde was lying, of course. He'd picked the episode at random. Except that so much else about him didn't square including his name compared to his physique. Now, I thought about it. I tabled it during our odyssey home. But during post mission leave, it kept bothering me. I checked and came up with what I'd already known. Scott had been sole survivor and the others were certified dead. But about Scott, I got a run around. He'd apparently vanished. Oh, they'd check for me, but that could take years. Which didn't lull my curiosity any into Clyde's past. I was sworn not to pry. We were training for our next assignment when word came through of the surrender at Kelowna. It was a flare of sunlight through a black sky. The end was suddenly close. Clyde and I were in Victoria, British Columbia, not subscribing to the folk way that prescribes seasick intoxication. As an expression of joy, we did the town with discrimination. At midnight we found ourselves strolling along the waterfront in that fine Vancouver island mist with just enough drink taken to be moving through a dream. At one point we leaned on a rail to watch the mainland lights twinkling dimly like the hope of a new world blackout being lifted suddenly. Clyde, what's fraying you recently? Will? When we were taking our ICEG reconditioning, it came through strong as garlic, though you wouldn't notice it normally. Why be coy about an opening like that? Clyde, what do you know about Edwin Scott that let him spin any yarn he chose? If he chose he did the cigarette lighting routine and said quietly, well, I was Edwin Scott Will. Then as I waited. Yes, really me, the real me talking to you. This he held out a powerful coppery hand. Once belonged to a man called Marco da Sanho. You've heard of transplanting limbs? I had. But this man was no transplant job. And if a spinal cord is cut transplanting legs from Ipolovsky, the Primo Ballerino is worthless. I said, what about it? I was the first successful brain transplant in man. For a moment it queered me, but only a moment. Hell, you read in fairy tales and fantasy magazines about one man's mind and another man's body, and it's marvellous. Not horrible. But by curiosity I know a bit about such things. A big surgery journal back in the 40s had published a visionary article on grafting a whole limb with colored plates, as if for a real procedure. Hall whole upper extremity transplant for human beings. Annals of surgery 1944, 120, paragraph 12. Then they developed techniques for acclimating a graft to the host's serum so it would not react as a foreign body. First they transplanted hunks of ear and such. Then in the 60s, fingers, feet and whole arms in fact. But a brain is another story. A cut nerve can grow together. Every fiber has an insulating sheath which survives the cut and guides growing stumps back to their stations in the brain and spinal cord. No sheaths. Growing fibers have about the chance of restoring contact that you'd have of traversing the Amazon jungle on foot without a map. I said so I know, he said. I learned all I could and as near as I can put it, it's like this. When you cut your finger, it can heal in two ways. Usually it bleeds scabs and skin grows under the scab, taking a week or so. But if you align the edges exactly at once, they may join almost immediately, healing by first intent. Likewise in the brain. If they line up cut nerve fibers before the cutoff bit degenerates, it'll join up with the stump. So take a serum conditioned brain and fit it to the stem of another brain so that the big fiber bundles are properly fitted together fast enough and you can get better than 90% recovery. Sure, I said, parading my own knowledge. I But what about injury to the masses of nerve cells? And you'd have to shear off the nerves growing out of the brain. There's always a way, Willie. There's a place in the brain stem called the isthmus. No cell masses just bundles of fiber running up and down. Almost all the nerves come off below that point and the few that don't can be spliced together except the smell nerves and optic nerve. Ever notice I can't smell Willie and they transplanted my eyes with the brain? Biggest trick of the whole job, it figured. But I'd still hate to go through with it. What could I lose? Some paraplegics seem to live a fuller life than ever.
- [21:07]
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- [22:37]
Narrator/Storyteller
Me, I was going mad. And I'd seen the dogs. This research team at my hospital was working on old dogs. Brains in whelps, bodies spry as natural. Then came the chance. Dasanjo was a Brazilian wrestler stranded here by the war. Not his war, he said, but he did have the decency to volunteer as medical orderly. But he got conscripted by a bomb that took off a corner of the hospital and won off his head. They got him into chemical stasis quicker than it had ever been done before. But he was dead as a human being. No brain worth salvaging above the isthmus. So the big guns at the hospital saw a chance to try their game on human material. Superb body and lower nervous system in ideal condition, waiting for a brain only whose naturally some big shots near the end of his rope and willing to gamble. But I decided it would be a forgotten little shot name of Edwin Scott. I already knew the surgeons from being a guinea pig on iceg. Of course when I sounded them out they gave me a kindly brush off. The matter was out of their hands. However, I knew whose hands it was in and I waited for my chance. A big job that needed somebody expendable. Then I'd make a deal writing my own ticket because they'd figure I'd never collect. Did you hear about Operation Seed Corn? That was the underground railway that ran thousands of farmers out of occupied territory. Manpower was what finally broke invader. Improbable as it seems, epidemics, desertions, overextended lines thinned that overwhelming combat strength and every farmer spirited out of their hands equaled 10 casualties. I nodded. Well, I planned that with myself as director and sold it to Philipson. I contemplated him, just a big man in a trench coat and droop brimmed hat silhouetted against the lamplit mist. I said, you directed Seed corn out of a wheelchair in enemy territory and came back to get transplanted into another body. Man, you didn't tell Ferd a word of a lie when you said you were used to walking up to death. But there was more besides that dour Scott's fortitude. Where did he come by that high hearted valor? He shrugged. You could. You do what you can with what you've got. Those weren't the big adventures I was thinking about when I said that I had a team behind me in those I could only Josh. I'd sure like to hear the Caperoo then. He towed out his cigarette. You're the only person who's equipped for it. Maybe you'd get it, Willie. How do you mean? I kept an ICEG record. Not that I knew it was going to happen. Just wanted proof. If they gave me a deal and I pulled it off, Philipson wouldn't renege. But generals were expendable. No one knew. I had that transmitter in my temporal bone and I rigged it to get a tape on my home receiver. Like to hear it? I said what anyone would and steered him back to quarters before he'd think better of it. This would be something on the way he filled in the background. Scott had been living out of hospital in a small apartment, enjoying as much liberty as he could manage. He had equipment so he could stump around and an antique car, special equipped. He wasn't complimentary about them. Orthopedic products had to unreliable, hard to service, unsightly, intricate and uncomfortable. If they also squeaked and cut your clothes, fine. Having to plan every move with an eye on weather and a dozen other factors, he developed an uncanny foresight. Yet he had to improvise at a moment's notice. With life a continuous high wire act, he trained every surviving fiber to precision, dexterity, and tenacity. Finally, he avoided help. Not pride. Self preservation. The compulsively helpful have rarely the wit to ask before rushing in to knock you on your face. So he learned to bide his time till the horizon was clear of beaming simpletons. Also, he found an interest in how far he could go. These qualities and the time he had for thinking begot seed corn. When he had it convincing, he applied to see General Phillipson, head of Regional Intelligence, a man with both insight and authority to make the deal, but also as tough as his post demanded, Scott got an appointment two weeks ahead. That put it early in April, which decreased the weather hazard, a major consideration in even a trip to the supermarket. What was Scott's grim consternation then, when he woke on D day to find his windows plastered with snow under a driving wind not mentioned in last night's forecast? Of course he could concoct a plausible excuse for postponement, which Philipson was just the man to see through or call help to get him to HQ and have Philipson bark. Man, you can't even make it across town on your own power because of a little snow. No, come hell or blizzard he'd have to go solo. Besides, when he faced the inevitable unexpected behind invader lines, he couldn't afford a precedent of having flinched. Now he dressed and breakfasted with all the petty foresights that can mean the shaving of clearance in a tight squeeze and got off with all the margin of time he could muster. In the apartment court he had a parking space by the basement exit, and for a wonder, no free wheeling nincompoop had done him out of it last night. Even so, getting to the car door illustrated the ordeal ahead. The snow was the damp, heavy stuff that packs and glares. The streets were nasty, but he had the advantage of having learned restraint and foresight. HQ had been the post office, a ponderous red stone building filling a whole block. He had scouted it thoroughly in advance, outside and in, and scheduled his route to the general's office, allowing for minor hazards. Now he had half an hour extra for the unscheduled major hazard, but on arriving he could hardly believe his luck. No car was yet parked in front of the building and the walk was scraped clean and salted to kill the still falling flakes. No problems. He parked and began to unload himself quickly to forestall the elderly MP who hurried towards him. But as Scott prepared to thank him off, the man said, sorry Mac, no one can park here this morning. Scott felt the chill of nemesis, knowing it was useless. He protested his identity and mission but sorry Major, but you'll have to park around back. They're bringing in the big computer. General himself can't park here, them's orders. He could ask the sergeant to park the car, but the man couldn't leave his post would make a to do calling someone. And that was Philipson's suite overlooking the scene. No dice. Go see what might be possible. But side and back parking were jammed with refugees from the computer and so was the other side and he came around to the front again. Five minutes wasted, he thought searchingly. He could drive to a taxi lot, park there and be driven back by taxi, disembark on the clean walk and there you were. Of course he could hear Philipson's thought you drove your own car, huh? And his own damaging excuses. But even out yonder you'd cut corners in emergency. It was all such a comfortable out. He relaxed and relaxing, saw his alternative. He was driving around the block again and noted the back entrance. This was not ground level because of the slope of ground. It faced a broad landing reached by a double flight of steps. These began on each side at right angles to the building and then turned up to the landing along the face of the wall. Normally they were negotiable, but now even had he found parking near them he hadn't the chance of the celluloid cat in hell of even crossing the 10ft of unclean sidewalk. You might as well climb an 80 degree 50 foot wall of rotten ice. But there was always a way and he saw it. The unpassable walk itself was an avenue of approach. He swung his car onto it at the corner and drove along it to the steps to park in the angle between steps and wall and discovered a new shutout. He'd expected the steps to be a mean job in the raw wind that favored this face of the building. But a wartime janitor had swept them, skipped sketchily only down the middle, far from the balustrades he must use by the balustrades. Early feet had packed a semi ice far more treacherous than the untouched snow, and the two bottom steps curved out beyond the balustrade. So a sufficiently reckless alpinist might assay a cliff in a sleet storm and a gale. But he couldn't even try it if it began with an overhang. Still time for the taxi. And so again Scott saw the way that was always there, set the car so he could use its hood to heft up those first steps. Suddenly his thinking metamorphosed. He faced not a miserable, unwarranted, forlorn hope, but the universe as it was, titanic pressure suit against the hurricanes of Jupiter and against a gutter freshet. Life was always outclassed and always fought back. Proportions didn't matter, only mood. He switched on his ICEG to record what might happen. I auditioned it, but I can't disentangle it from what he told me. For example in his multiply distances by 5, heights by 10 and 6, slickness by 20, and in the playback, 30 chin high ledges loaded with soft lard and only finger holds and toe holds. And you did it on stilts that began not at your heels, at your hips. Add the hazard of helpful hosea. Here, let me give you a hand, Mac. Grabbing a key arm and crashing down the precipice on top of you. Switching on the iceg took his mind back to the snug apartment where its receiver stood, the armchair books, desk of diverting work. It looked awful good, but life fought back and always had found a way. He shucked his windbreaker because it would be more encumbrance than help in the showdown. He checked shoelaces and strapped on the cleats he had made for what they were worth. He vetoed the bag of sand and salt he kept for minor difficulties. Far too slow. He got out of the car. This could be the last job he'd have to do. Incognito he'd get credit for. Therefore he cherished it. Triumph for its own sake. Alternatively, he'd end at the bottom in a burlesque clutter of chrome alum splints and sticks, with maybe a broken bone to clinch the decision. For some men, death is literally more tolerable than defeat and humiliation. 18 shallow steps to the turn, 12 to the top. Once he'd have cleared it in three heartbeats. Now he had to make it to a 20 minute deadline without rope or Alpenstock, a moon man adapted to a fraction of earth gravity with the help of the car hood. The first two pitches were easy for the next four or five. Wind had swept the top of the balustrade, providing damp, gritty handhold before the going got tougher, he developed a technica rhythm and system of thrusts proportioned to heights and widths. A way of scraping holds where ice was not malignantly welded to stone. An appreciation of snow texture and depth, an economy of effort. He was enjoying a premature elation when on the 12th step, a cleat strap gave. Luckily, he was able to take his lurch with a firm grip on the balustrade. But he felt depth yawning behind him. Dourly. He took 30 seconds to retrieve the cleat. Stitching had been sawed through by a metal edge, just as he'd told the cocksure workmen it would be. Oh, to have a world where imbecility wasn't entrenched. Well, he was fighting here and now for the resources to found one. He resumed the Escalade. His rhythm knocked cockeyed things even out. Years back, an invader bomber had scored a near miss on the building and minor damage to stonework was unrepaired. Crevices gave finger hold chipped out hollows gave barely perceptible purchase to the heel of his hand, salutes to the random effects of unlikely causes. He reached the turn considered swiftly. His fresh strength was blunted. His muscles, especially in his thumbs, were stiffening with chill. Now he could continue up the left side by the building, which was tougher and hazardous with frozen drippings, or by the outside right hand rail, which was easier but meant crossing the open half swept wide step and recrossing the landing up top. Damn. Why hadn't he foreseen that? Oh, you can't think of everything. Get going. Left side. The wall of the building was rough, hewn and ornamented with surplus carvings. Cheers. For the 1890s architect qualified. Cheers. The first three lifts were easy, with handholds and a frieze of lotus. For the next, he had to heft with his side jaw against a boss of stone. A window ledge made the next three facile. The final five stared an open gap. Without recourse, he made two. By grace of the janitor's. Having swabbed his broom a little closer to the wall, his muscles began to wobble and waver in his proportions. He'd made 200ft of almost vertical ascent. But climbing a real ice fall, you'd unleash the last convulsive effort because you had to. Here, when you came down to it, you could always sit and bump yourself down to the car, which was, in that context, a mere safe 40ft away. So he went on, because he had to. He got the rubber tip off one stick. The bare metal tube would bore into the snowpack. It might hold if he bore down just right and swung his weight just so and got just the right sliding purchase on the wall. And the snow didn't give under foot or under cane. And if it didn't work, it didn't work. Beyond the landing westwards the sky had broken into April blue. Far away over Iowa and Kansas, over Operation Seed Corn, over the refuge for rebels that lay at the end of all his roads. He got set and lifted a thousand miles nearer the refuge, got set and lifted, balanced over plunging gulfs. His reach found a round pilaster at the top, a perfect grip for a hand. He drew himself up and this time his cleated foot cut through snow to stone and slipped. But his hold was too good and there he was. No salutes, no cheers, only one more victory for life. Even in victory, unlife gave you no respite. The doorstep was three feet wide, hollowed by 80 years of traffic and filled with frozen drippings from its pseudo Norman arch. He had to tilt across it and catch the brass knob like snatching a ring in a high dive. No danger now except sitting down in a growing puddle till someone came along to hoist him under the armpits. And then, arriving at the general's late with his seat black wet, you unhorse your foeman, curve it up to the royal box to receive the victor's chaplet, swing from your saddle and fall flat on your face. But he cogitated on the bench inside, getting his other cleat off and the tip back on his stick. Things do even out. No hearty helper had intervened. No snot nosed gaping child had twitched his attention. Nobody's secretary, pretty, of course, had scurried to helpfully knock him down with the door. They were all out front. Superintending arrival of the computer. The General said only if oh yes, Major, come in. You're late, aren't you? It's still icy, said Edson. Scott had to drive carefully, you know. In fact, he had lost minutes that way, enough to have saved his exact deadline. And that excuse being in proportion to Philipson's standard dimension was fair game. I wondered what dimension Clyde would go on to now that the challenge of war was past. To his rebel's refuge at last, maybe. Does it matter? Whatever it is, life will be outclassed and Scott Estabrook's brand of life will fight back. The end
- [40:57]
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