I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream Read online

  Thank you Bob Bloch and Donald Wollheim. Thank you Knox Burger and Tom Scortia. Thank you Joe Hensley and Ed Wood.

  I forgot them earlier.

  Back to the point. Writing consumes me. It is truly what Mailer calls it, the bitch goddess. Or maybe Irwin Shaw pinned it more precisely when he said:

  “The explanations a writer gives himself for having written any particular book are more often not the real reasons why that book has been written. Honesty is not the issue. Understanding is. A man does not write one novel at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’”

  The stories in this book comprise various reports of what the terrain looked like, at various times. Check the original dates of publication on the acknowledgments page when you read them. And if the landscape seems less misty in some than others, it is probably because my eyesight got better as I grew older. Thanks Leo & Diane Dillon.

  As for all the tomorrows: I intend to keep writing stories that piss people off, that tell the particular kind of truth I think is valid, that will make me feel more and more like a Writer of Stature, which I honestly think I am, really, I mean it, I don’t doubt it for a second dammit, so stop giggling!

  Stories that will make Dr. Shedd sniff the air and make Lester smile as he thinks, “The kid’s coming along all right.”

  Stories that will make me enough money so I won’t have to go back to shoplifting. I mean, it is really unseemly for a Writer of Stature to be banging the bars with his tin cup screaming, “Ask Dorothy Parker! She’ll vouch for me!”

  Ellison done reporting in. Ten–four.

  Ellison Wonderland

  Hollywood, California

  September, 1966

  A special word about the stories in this book: they come from someplace special in me. Someplace I don’t care to visit too frequently. A friend read this group of yarns before I sent them in to Don Bensen at Pyramid. She said she was able to tell, without seeing the original dates of publication, which ones were early stories and which were fairly current. She was right. She hit it on every one of them. I asked her how she had done it. She said the earlier ones showed some light in them, had hope running as a sub–thread. The newer ones were more “compassionate cynicism,” darker, more bitter. I couldn’t argue with her. The last couple of years have been very good to me, but they’ve been disaster areas as well. I met this killer shark in February of ‘66, and spent forty–five days getting the inside of my skull scoured by napalm. Recovery comes slowly. But the writing—which keeps me alive because it’s all I’ve got—goes on. There’s Sherri, who gathered up all the broken glass that was me and has been trying to put it back into some sort of non–ghoulish replica of the whey–faced youth I was before; but mostly, every cripple has to do it himself, and my therapy is my writing. So the Ellison turns the pain to fiction in the storyteller’s alchemy, and the value of moments in that special place of anguish comes out as sometimes stories. I seldom go there, so the stories are only once in a while. One of them is the nightmare that follows. It was conceived initially around a pair of illustrations by California artist Dennis Smith, who drops by occasionally with his portfolio to see if some sketch catches my fancy. The first time he did it, I wrote “Bright Eyes” (in my previous Pyramid collection, Paingod & Other Delusions). The second time came “Delusion For A Dragon Slayer” and the third time is what follows. Frederik Pohl of Galaxy Magazine stopped by while he was in Hollywood, oh, about a year and a half ago, and I showed him the first half dozen pages of the story. He said he liked it, why didn’t I finish it for him. I said that would be nice. He said he’d insure it. He paid me in advance. That is called a show of confidence. The story took a year and a half to write. I completed it in hotel rooms in the Sheraton Cleveland during the 24th World Science Fiction Convention last Labor Day, the Roger Smith Hotel in New York after Labor Day, and the Tom Quick Inn in Milford, Pennsylvania during the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference after New York. John Brunner tells me it is allegorical as hell. Virginia Kidd says it is a story of religious experience. James Blish says it is a good story. Fred Pohl published it in his Hugo Winners issue of IF. He had to cut some things out of it—it got a little too rough for IF in spots. Also, the computer “talk fields” were cut. It is whole here. It wore me out to write it. The title comes from a sketch done by Bill Rotsler; he called it, and I call it

  I HAVE NO MOUTH & I MUST SCREAM

  Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.

  When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that once again AM had duped us, had had its fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.

  Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon, and was afraid of the future. “Oh God,” he mumbled, and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time, and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering banks, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. He didn’t move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. “Why doesn’t it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this.”

  It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.

  He was speaking for all of us.

  Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. “It’s another shuck,” I told them. “Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrified or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”

  Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.

  Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting thin. It couldn’t be any worse there, than here. Colder, but that didn’t matter much. Hot, cold, hail, lava, boils or locusts—it never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.

  Ellen decided us. “I’ve got to have something, Ted. Maybe there’ll be some Bartlett pears or peaches. Please, Ted, let’s try it.”

  I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though. She took me twice out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. And she never came, so why bother? But the machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us, he snickered. It snickered. Most of the time I thought of AM as it, without a soul; but the rest of the time I thought of it as him, in the masculine…the paternal…the patriarchal…for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the Deranged.

  We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us up–to–date on the date. The passage of time was important; not to us sure as hell, but to him…it…AM. Thursday. Thanks.

  Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands locked to their own and each other’s wrists, a seat. Benny and I walked before and after, just to make sure that if anything happened, it would catch one of us and at least Ellen would be safe. Fat chance, safe. Didn’t matter.

  It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and the second day, when we were lying out under the blistering sun–thing, he had materialized, he sent down some manna. Tasted like boil
ed boar urine. We ate it.

  On the third day we passed through a valley of obsolescence, filled with rusting carcasses of ancient computer banks. AM had been as ruthless with its own life as with ours. It was a mark of his personality: it strove for perfection. Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in his own world–filling bulk, or perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who had invented him—now long since gone to dust—could ever have hoped.

  There was light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface. But we didn’t try to crawl up to see. There was virtually nothing out there; had been nothing that could be considered anything for over a hundred years. Only the blasted skin of what had once been the home of billions. Now there were only five of us, down here inside, alone with AM.

  I heard Ellen saying frantically, “No, Benny! Don’t, come on, Benny, don’t please!”

  And then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring, under his breath, for several minutes. He was saying, “I’m gonna get out, I’m gonna get out…” over and over. His monkey–like face was crumbled up in an expression of beatific delight and sadness, all at the same time. The radiation scars AM had given him during the “festival” were drawn down into a mass of pink–white puckerings, and his features seemed to work independently of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the five of us: he had gone stark, staring mad many years before.

  But even though we could call AM any damned thing we liked, could think the foulest thoughts of fused memory banks and corroded base plates, of burnt out circuits and shattered control bubbles, the machine would not tolerate our trying to escape. Benny leaped away from me as I made a grab for him. He scrambled up the face of a smaller memory cube, tilted on its side and filled with rotted components. He squatted there for a moment, looking like the chimpanzee AM had intended him to resemble.

  Then he leaped high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and corroded metal, and went up it, hand–over–hand like an animal, till he was on a girdered ledge, twenty feet above us.

  “Oh, Ted, Nimdok, please, help him, get him down before—” She cut off. Tears began to stand in her eyes. She moved her hands aimlessly.

  It was too late. None of us wanted to be near him when whatever was going to happen, happened. And besides, we all saw through her concern. When AM had altered Benny, during the machine’s utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely Benny’s face the computer had made like a giant ape’s. He was big in the privates, she loved that! She serviced us, as a matter of course, but she loved it from him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristine–pure Ellen, oh Ellen the clean! Scum filth.

  Gorrister slapped her. She slumped down, staring up at poor loonie Benny, and she cried. It was her big defense, crying. We had gotten used to it seventy–five years before. Gorrister kicked her in the side.

  Then the sound began. It was light, that sound. Half sound and half light, something that began to glow from Benny’s eyes, and pulse with growing loudness, dim sonorities that grew more gigantic and brighter as the light/sound increased in tempo. It must have been painful, and the pain must have been increasing with the boldness of the light, the rising volume of the sound, for Benny began to mewl like a wounded animal. At first softly, when the light was dim and the sound was muted, then louder as his shoulders hunched together: his back humped, as though he was trying to get away from it. His hands folded across his chest like a chipmunk’s. His head tilted to the side. The sad little monkey–face pinched in anguish. Then he began to howl, as the sound coming from his eyes grew louder. Louder and louder. I slapped the sides of my head with my hands, but I couldn’t shut it out, it cut through easily. The pain shivered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth.

  And Benny was suddenly pulled erect. On the girder he stood up, jerked to his feet like a puppet. The light was now pulsing out of his eyes in two great round beams. The sound crawled up and up some incomprehensible scale, and then he fell forward, straight down, and hit the plate–steel floor with a crash. He lay there jerking spastically as the light flowed around and around him and the sound spiraled up out of normal range.

  Then the light beat its way back inside his head, the sound spiraled down, and he was left lying there, crying piteously.

  His eyes were two soft, moist pools of pus–like jelly. AM had blinded him. Gorrister and Nimdok and myself…we turned away. But not before we caught the look of relief on Ellen’s warm, concerned face.

  Sea–green light suffused the cavern where we made camp. AM provided punk and we burned it, sitting huddled around the wan and pathetic fire, telling stories to keep Benny from crying in his permanent night.

  “What does AM mean?”

  Gorrister answered him. We had done this sequence a thousand times before, but it was Benny’s favorite story. “At first it meant Allied Mastercomputer, and then it meant Adaptive Manipulator, and later on it developed sentience and linked itself up and they called it an Aggressive Menace, but by then it was too late, and finally it called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am…cogito ergo sum…I think, therefore I am.”

  Benny drooled a little, and snickered.

  “There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and—” He stopped. Benny was beating on the floorplates with a large, hard fist. He was not happy. Gorrister had not started at the beginning.

  Gorrister began again. “The Cold War started and became World War Three and just kept going. It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that element. But one day AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, except for the five of us, and AM brought us down here.”

  Benny was smiling gladly. He was also drooling again. Ellen wiped the spittle from the corner of his mouth with the hem of her skirt. Gorrister always tried to tell it a little more succinctly each time, but beyond the bare facts there was nothing to say. None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, nor even why he had made us virtually immortal…

  In the darkness, one of the computer banks began humming. The tone was picked up half a mile away down the cavern by another bank. Then one by one, each of the elements began to tune itself, and there was a faint chittering as thought raced through the machine.

  The sound grew, and the lights ran across the faces of the consoles like heat lightning. The sound spiraled up till it sounded like a million metallic insects, angry, menacing.

  “What is it?” Ellen cried. There was terror in her voice. She hadn’t become accustomed to it, even now.

  “It’s going to be bad this time,” Nimdok said.

  “He’s going to speak,” Gorrister said. “I know it.”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” I said suddenly, getting to my feet.

  “No, Ted, sit down…what if he’s got pits out there, or something else, we can’t see, it’s too dark.” Gorrister said it with resignation.

  Then we heard…I don’t know…

  Something moving toward us in the darkness. Huge, shambling, hairy, moist, it came toward us. We couldn’t even see it, but there was the ponderous impression of bulk, heaving itself toward us. Great weight was coming at us, out of the darkness, and it was more a sense of pressure, of air forcing itself into a limited space, expanding the invisible walls of a sphere. Benny began to whimper. Nimdok’s lower lip trembled and he bit it hard, trying to stop it. Ellen slid across the metal floor to Gorrister and huddled into him. There was the smell of matted, wet fur in the cavern. There was the smell of charred wood. There was the smell of dusty velvet. There was the smell of rotting orchids. There was the smell of sour milk. There was the smell of sulphur,
of rancid butter, of oil slick, of grease, of chalk dust, of human scalps.

  AM was keying us. He was tickling us. There was the smell of—

  I heard myself shriek, and the hinges of my jaws ached. I scuttled across the floor, across the cold metal with its endless lines of rivets, on my hands and knees, the smell gagging me, filling my head with a thunderous pain that sent me away in horror. I fled like a cockroach, across the floor and out into the darkness, that something moving inexorably after me. The others were still back there, gathered around the firelight, laughing…their hysterical choir of insane giggles rising up into the darkness like thick, many–colored wood smoke. I went away, quickly, and hid.

  How many hours it may have been, how many days or even years, they never told me. Ellen chided me for “sulking,” and Nimdok tried to persuade me it had only been a nervous reflex on their part—the laughing.

  But I knew it wasn’t the relief a soldier feels when the bullet hits the man next to him. I knew it wasn’t a reflex. They hated me. They were surely against me, and AM could even sense this hatred, and made it worse for me because of the depth of their hatred. We had been kept alive, rejuvenated, made to remain constantly at the age we had been when AM had brought us below, and they hated me because I was the youngest, and the one AM had affected least of all.

  I knew. God, how I knew. The bastards, and that dirty bitch Ellen. Benny had been a brilliant theorist, a college professor, now he was little more than a semi–human, semi–simian. He had been handsome, the machine had ruined that. He had been lucid, the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse. AM had done a job on Benny. Gorrister had been a worrier. He was a connie, a conscientious objector, he was a peace marcher; he was a planner, a doer, a looker–ahead. AM had turned him into a shoulder–shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concern. AM had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long times. I don’t know what it was he did out there, AM never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if we didn’t know quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe: that she had been a virgin only twice, removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us. It was all filth, that lady my lady Ellen. She loved it, four men all to herself. No, AM had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn’t nice to do.