I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream Read online

  BIG SAM WAS MY FRIEND

  I guess working for a Teeper Circus ain’t the quietest work in the Galaxy, but what the dickens, it’s more than just a buck, and you see a lot of the settled worlds, and there’s always enough quailette around to keep a guy happy, so why should I kick. By that I mean, so what if they did lynch my friend Big Sam out on Giuliu II? So what, you can always find another friend someplace around. But every time I start thinking that way, I kick myself mentally and say Johnny Lee, you got to stop passing Sam off like that. He was a good friend. He was a sick man, and he couldn’t help what he did, but that’s no call to be passin’ him off so quick.

  Then I’d start to remember the first time I’d ever seen Big Sam. That was outside Shreveport. Not the old Shreveport, but the one on Burris, with the green–sand hills just beyond in the dusk. We were featuring Dolly Blaze that time. She was a second stage pyrotic with a cute little trick of setting herself on fire, and what with her figure what it was, well, it wasn’t much of a trick—even for a drum–banger like me—to kick up some pretty hot publicity about the circus.

  It was the second show, and we’d packed the tent full—which wasn’t odd, because two hundred Burrites, each as big as an elephant (and looking a little bit like elephants with those hose proboscises), crammed our pneumotent till there was hardly room for the hawkers to mill through—when I spotted him. It wasn’t so strange to spot a Homebody from Earth on a Ridge world, what with the way we Earthmen move around, but there was something odd about this Homebody. Aside from the fact that he was close to seven feet tall.

  It wasn’t long till I spotted him as a teeper of some sort. At first, I figured him for a clairvoyant, but I could tell from the way he watched the acrobats (they were a pair of Hungarian floaters called the Spindotties, and the only way they could have fallen was to lose their teep powers of anti–grav altogether), the way he tensed up when they were making a catch, that he couldn’t read the future. Then I figured him for an empath, and that would have been useless for the circus; except in an administrative capacity of course. To tell us when one of the performers was sick, or unhappy, or a bad crowd, or like that. But right then credits were tight and we couldn’t afford an empath, so I counted him off. But as I watched him sitting there in the stands, between two big–as–houses Burrites sucking up pink lemonade from squeeze–bulbs, I discounted the empath angle, too.

  I didn’t realize he was a teleport till Fritz Bravery came on with his animal pack.

  In our circus, we clear both side tings for the central circle, when a specialty act goes on. Then the fluorobands are jockeyed into position over the center ring, and the mini–tapes set their reaction music for all–bands. That way we draw attention to the big act only.

  Fritz Bravery was an old–timer. He had been a lion–tamer in a German circus back Home, before teeping was understood, and the various types outlined. That was when Fritz had found out the reason he was so good with animals was that he was what the French had labeled animaux–voyeur. Which, in English, the way we accept it now, means he and the beasts think alike, and he suggests to them and like they just go through hoops if he thinks jump through a hoop.

  But Fritz was also one of those harkeners after the old days. He thought show biz was dead, nothing but commercial and plebeian crap left. You know, one of those. And he had lost his wife Gert somewhere between Madison Square Plaza and Burris, and eventually the old joy juice had grabbed him.

  That night old Fritz Bravery was juiced to the ears.

  You could spot it the moment he got into the ring with the beasts. He was using three big Nubian lions and a puma and a dree and a slygor, those days. Plus one mean bitch of a black panther called Felice, the likes of which for downright cussedness I’ve never seen.

  Old Fritz got with them, and he was shaky from the start. King Groth, who ran the show, looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both thought, I hope to God Fritz can handle them tonight with his senses all fogged up like that. But we didn’t do anything, because Fritz always had his escape plate ready to lift him over their heads, if he got into trouble. And besides, it was his act, we had no right to cramp it before he’d shown his stuff.

  But King murmured in my ear, “Better start looking around for a new cat man, Johnny. Fritz won’t be good much longer.” I nodded, and felt sort of sad, because Fritz was as good a cat man as we’d ever had with the circus.

  The old man went around them, walking backward with his lektrowhip snapping and sparking sweetly, and for a while everything was fine. He even had the lions and the puma up in a tricky pyramid, with the black panther about to leap up the backs of the five lions, to take her place at the apex of the pyramid. He pulled off that number pretty well, though one of the lions stumbled as the pyramid was breaking up, and growled at him. We had grown to know the difference between a “show” growl—commanded mentally by Fritz—for fright effect in the act, and a real one. A real one free of Fritz’s control. That was this last one. So we knew old Fritz was losing control.

  We grew more alert as he herded the lions and the puma into the corner of the force–cage in which he performed his act. It was transparent around the four walls, but there nonetheless.

  Then Fritz—ignoring Felice, who followed the other Earth–beasts—went to work on the dree. He got her to rotate on all sixteen, and hump, and then turn inside out, which is a pretty spectacular thing, considering a dree’s technicolor innards. Then he got it to lift him on one appendage, and place him gently on another, all the way up the length of her body, from appendage to appendage.

  Then he worked for a while with the slygor.

  It was poisonous, so he donned gloves, and used the sonic–whistle on it alone. Since electricity did not affect it in any way. Even his work with the slygor was fair that night, and for a while we thought he would make it fine. I kept tossing this seven–foot Homebody in the stands a look from time to time, trying to decide what sort of a teep he was, but he was just watching the act, and smiling, and not doing a thing.

  Then Fritz went to work on Felice.

  She had been invershipped from Earth not more than three weeks before, and the trip through inverspace, coupled with her natural instinctive nastiness, and more than likely allied with some temperament quirk aggravated by the warping of the ship and its occupants through inverspace, had left her a jangle–nerved, heaped–up body of hate and fury. We had had several close calls with her nipping her feeder–robots, and I for one didn’t like to see Old Fritz in there with her.

  But he was determined to break her—showmanship and all that bushwah—so we let him go ahead. After all, he did have the escape plate there, which whisks him anti–gravitically over the heads of the animals, should there be trouble.

  He picked up his lektrowhip, and moved in on Felice. She sat crouched back on her haunches, waiting him out. He stopped a foot from her, so close he could have stroked her sleek black fur. Then he did a double–movement crack–crack! with the lektrowhip, and caught her on the snout with a spark. Felice leaped.

  At that precise instant, the most remarkable thing I’ve ever glommed in all my days as flack for a top, happened. I’ve never yet been able to figure it out—whether the beasts were actually in mental contact with one another, or it was just chance—but the puma got to its feet, and softly padded over to the escape plate…and sat down on it. The lions moved out, and positioned themselves around the force cage. Fritz was hemmed in completely. Then Felice began stalking him.

  It was the most fascinating and horrifying thing I’ve ever seen. To witness that big cat, playing footsie with old Fritz. The tamer tried to control her, but even from where we were in the stands, we could see the sweat on his face, and the dark lines etched against the white of his face. He was scared; he had lost control of them completely. He knew he was dead.

  Felice’s eyes were two barbs, ready to impale poor old Fritz, and we were so stunned, it all happened so quickly, we just sat there and so help me God we just w
atched!

  I felt like a Roman in the arena.

  Felice crouched again, and the muscles in her black shoulders hunched and bunched and tensed, and she sprang full on old Fritz.

  He fell down, and her crushing weight landed atop him, and her jaws opened wide, with yellow fangs straining yowpingly for Fritz Bravery’s neck. Her head came up, and back, and her throat was stretched tight so the pulse of a blood vein could be seen, and then the head came down like the blade of a guillotine.

  But Fritz wasn’t there.

  He was sitting up in the stands with the seven–foot Homebody. That was when I knew. Hell, anybody’d be able to tell, by then. He was a teleport. The best kind—an outgoing teleport.

  He had teeped Fritz out of the jaws of the black panther.

  I looked at King Groth, who was looking from Felice to Fritz and back, not knowing I had already tagged the Homebody as a teeper, and there was amazement on his face.

  “We got us a new star act, King,” I said, slipping out of my seat. I cocked a thumb at Fritz, who was talking bewilderedly to the seven–foot Homebody. I started threading my way between the elephant–big Burrites, toward Fritz and his savior.

  Behind me, I heard King Groth saying, “Go get ‘im boy.”

  I got him.

  Now I won’t bother going into the year Big Sam spent with the circus. It was pretty routine. We covered the stardust route from Burris to Lyli A to Crown Colony to Peck’s Orchard to MoultonX/11i11 (they have a treaty there with the natives, so long as they use both Homebody and native name for the planet) to Ringaling and right along the Ridge to the new cluster worlds of Dawnsa, Jowlak, Min, Thornwire and Giuliu II. That was where we lost Big Sam.

  There on Giuliu II—where they lynched him.

  But to understand what happened, why it happened, I’d better tell you about Big Sam. Not just that he was nearly seven feet tall, with a long, horsey face, and high cheekbones, and dark, sad blue eyes. But about him, what he was like.

  And this is the best way to tell it:

  Sam’s act consisted of several parts. For instance, at the beginning, we turned off all the fluoro bands. Then three roustabots clanked out carrying this big pole in their metal arms. They would kick off the cover plate of the hole we had sunk in the floor of the arena or tent, and insert the pole in it, then clamp it so it was rigid.

  Then one of the roustabots would switch on the torch–finger of his utility hand, and set fire to the pole. We had already doused it in oil, and the thing caught fire up its length, till there was a pillar of fire in the middle of the ring. It was a specially treated pole, and didn’t really burn—though the fire on it was real enough—so we used the same pole over and over.

  Then the ringmaster would swoop in on his plate, and his sonic voice would boom out at the audience, “Laydeez and Gentilmenn! I ddrawww your attenshuuun to the center rinnnng, where the Galaxy’s most mystifying, most extraorrrrdinary artiste will perform for you. I am pppprowd to present: The Unbelievable Ugo!”

  That was Sam.

  Then the one spot would go on, like the eye of a god, and pick out Sam, striding across the plastidust (sawdust went out with the high cost of invershipping). He would be wearing skin–tight black clothing that accentuated his slim build, and high–topped black boots—very soft and with two inch soles to make him seem even taller. And a black cape with a crimson lining. Helluva look, lemme tell ya.

  He would advance to the center of the ring, just beside the burning pole, and raise his arms. A girl wearing spangles and not much else (that was Beatrice, whom I had been dating, when she wasn’t on her iron filing kick—but that’s another story, fortunately) would run out and take his cape, and Ugo, that’s Sam, would turn and look at the pole for a long minute.

  Then he would take a running leap, hit the pole and start to shinny up. Everyone would shriek. He was being burned to death. Then he was gone.

  And a second later, he was at the top of the pole, on the little platform above the flames. Everyone was astonished. For some reason, they never realized he was a teleport. I guess there aren’t many teleports around, and most people don’t see them as flagrantly displaying their talents as Big Sam did. It’s a recessive trait.

  For a moment he would poise himself there on toetip, as the audios scirled their danger music on all–bands, and then as the drums rolled, Sam would do a neat swan dive off the platform. The shrieking would get even bigger then.

  He would turn a gainer, a flip, a half–gainer and then—just as it seemed he was about to smash full force into the ground—he disappeared and reappeared standing lightly on the balls of his feet, in the same position he had been when he started—his arms widespread over his head, an enigmatic grin splitting his craggy features.

  That was the first part of his act. The applause was always deafening. (And we never had to modify it by taped responses, either, isn’t that beyond belief?)

  To see an almost certain horrible death—you know how crowds all sit on the edge of their seats, praying subconsciously for a spectacular accident—and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly—brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always knew they were—that was the supreme thrill.

  But it was merely a beginning.

  Then Ugo–Sam did juggling—magnificent high–flown juggling with hundreds of knives, and fireballs, and even thousand–pound weights—moving them all by teleportation. Then he wrestled with the bear, slipping out of the most fearsome grips, as easily as a greased fish. Then came the tennis match he played with himself. (He beat himself in straight sets.)

  His act was sensational. For on many of the outer Ridge worlds, they had had little or no truck with teleports. By the Service system for teeps, each of the categories had to send representative members to the Ridge worlds to serve tours, to spread Homebody technology and advantages around, but there were so few teleports, they had been rarely seen.

  So Big Sam was a novelty. And as such, he dragged the credits for us. I played him big.

  But there was more to Sam than just the tricks.

  We used to sit alone at night under a saffron sky, or a mauve sky or an ebony sky, and talk. I liked talking to him, because he wasn’t dumb, like most of the washed–up and used–up carny creeps we had with us. He had been an educated man, that was obvious, and there was a deep, infinite sadness about him that sometimes made me want to cry, just talking to him there.

  I remember the night I found out how sick Big Sam really was. That was on Rorespokine I, a little plug of a world by all rights we should have avoided; but a combination of low money for paychecks, repair work for the ships, and general all–around lethargy, had set us down on that whistle stop for a three–week set.

  Mostly, we just puttered around and killed time resting up till the big six month tour on Giuliu II.

  That night, Big Sam and I lay back with our heads on grassy mounds, staring up at the night that was deep blue with the stars ticking away eternity over us. I looked over at the rough topography of his face, and asked him, “Sam, what the hell is a guy like you doing out on the fly like this?”

  His face tightened all over. It was so odd, the way he looked. So tight, like my question had sucked all the life from him.

  “I’m looking for a dead girl, JohnnyLee.” He always pronounced my name as though it were one word only. His answer didn’t sink in for a second.

  I didn’t want to push, but I felt somehow this was the first opening–up he had ever given me.

  “Oh? How’d that happen?”

  “She died a long time ago, Johnny. A long time ago.”

  His eyes closed. He no longer saw the stars.

  “She was just a girl, Johnny. Just another girl, and I guess I was more in love with the idea of love, than with her.”

  I didn’t say a word. For a long time, neither did he. Then, when I was starting to fall asleep, and thought he already had, he went on: “Her name was Clair
e. Nothing very pretentious about her, so simple and clean. I wanted very much to marry her, I don’t know why, we were nothing alike. Then one day we were walking, and I don’t know what it was—just something, you know—and I teleported away from her. Half a block away. I didn’t know then, quite, what I could do. I had never teleported in front of Claire. I suppose it was a shock to her. She was a No–Talent, and it must have shocked her. I could see she was repulsed by the idea of it.”

  “I’d, I’d been…sleeping with her, Johnny, and I guess it was pretty foreign. Like finding out the guy you’d been making love to was an android or some–such. She ran away. I was so shocked at her attitude, I just didn’t follow her.

  “Then I heard a screech and she screamed, and I teleported to the source of the scream, and she’d been hit by a truck, trying to cross the street. Oh, it wasn’t my fault, nothing like that, and no guilt complex or anything, but—well, you know, I had to get away from things. So I took to the fly. Just like that.”

  He was finished. I said, “Just like that. You ever goin’ back, Sam?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t suppose so. I’ll find her someday.”