Love Conquers All Read online

  He and Rita were together more or less constantly for several months. He became convinced that she wanted very much to marry him. They quarreled, and then made up. In the spring her Timmy was born and Art sent flowers to her at the hospital and a few days later came to pay her a visit at home.

  Rita, sitting in a rocking chair in her bedroom and feeding the baby from a nursing bottle, said to Art: “You know, I still think he’s yours. I have that feeling about him, and I’m glad.”

  Studying the small wizened face, still bruised from the violence of birth, Art could find in it no resemblance to himself. But he realized that he was hoping to find a resemblance and, giving this some solitary thought a little later, he decided it was enough to tip the balance. A month later he and Rita, now legally, financially, and socially united in the bonds of matrimony, moved into a new apartment with little Tim.

  AFTER marriage, as before, he and Rita preferred to spend most of their free time in each other’s company. After marriage Art experienced only one or two orgasms per month with anyone except his wife. And while he wasn’t sure, he had the impression that Rita’s sex life was even more intensely concentrated on him. He should have made a point of finding out. Such concentration of lust was one of the danger signals that the popular psychologists were always harping on, a sign that one’s sexual attitudes might be somehow warped.

  They had been married, quite happily for the most part, for two years when Rita surprised him with the announcement that she was pregnant again. It was really a surprise because they had both been taking anti-fertility pills, which certainly should have given protection. But, as Dr. Kuang explained, the pills were not one hundred per cent certain. Anyway the pregnancy was no real problem; they had caught it quite early and he could do a menstrual extraction right now in his office if they wished.

  Oh, no. Although Rita, too, seemed surprised and not at all as calm as she had been about her first pregnancy, she was if anything even more determined that this one should produce a baby. To her the fetus was a person inside her belly, as if someone had taken a real baby and stuffed it in there. Her new baby was alive already, and she must protect its life. As far as Art could tell she had not absorbed this dogma from any of the few religious or “humanistic” sects which still maintained it as official doctrine. She had arrived at it by herself.

  Naturally Art saw more of her during this pregnancy than he had during the previous one, and by now could more easily read her moods and guess her thoughts. What he saw this time began to frighten him. The first time he had thought she was simply being stubborn on the subject, acting in an immature, adolescent way. This time she seemed in the grip of some enormous force, a force bent on using her for making babies. Indeed, she refused even to discuss the possibility of getting an abortion. She even refused to take the tests that would predict whether her fetus was likely to grow into a deformed child; deformed or not, she said, it was her baby still. If Art persisted in trying to talk to her about it she quivered and suffered, seemingly outraged to the point of pain.

  Well, Art had always more or less expected his wife to have two children. And people said it was more convenient if your two kids were about the same age. They could play together, and you got the diapering and the rest of the messy business over with once and for all. Since Rita was so determined to have this one, why not?

  A couple of days after Paula was born Art called Dr. Kuang to talk over the best means of insuring against another pregnancy. Frowning from the phoneplate, Dr. Kuang told him that Rita’s psychological profile showed that surgical sterilization was definitely not indicated in her case. He would prescribe new pills for her. “And of course having a vasectomy yourself will help. And, with male partners who are known to be strongly virile, she should choose sex activities other than copulation.”

  One trouble was that sex activities other than copulation were not much fun for her. One good thing was that she so rarely brought any man but Art to orgasm. He hastily got his vasectomy; in six months or so the residual sperm in his ductwork would presumably all have had their chance and he would be permanently and completely sterile.

  He had done all he could, or so he thought. Meanwhile he had switched from teaching electronics to working at it, for Macrotron; also he had begun to spend more time away from home, improving his chess rating and winning more prizes. And then one day he came home and found a note.

  II

  THE suggestive dialogue of the pseudo-Victorian play nagged at Art’s attention, pulling him away from the fruitless game of trying to guess how he might better have managed his life with Rita in the past. He looked for the set of earplugs that should have been attached to his seat, intending to drown out the play with music or a soothing waterfall of gentle noise, but found to his disgust that one plug of the set was missing. Its connector of steel-jacketed wire had been neatly severed by some vandal, who seemed to have gone to the trouble of using a cutting torch.

  He was not going to be able to avoid hearing the struggle of Phyllis and Rodney (the nursemaid and leftenant, respectively) against their mutual lust, a struggle in which he was sure they would eventually be victorious, but at least nothing forced him to watch the repulsive sight. Art now kept his face turned most of the time to the small window beside his luxurious chair. In the buried tunnel there was of course nothing to be seen except advertisements, the kind that were now starting to be called flickersigns. These were glowing adjurations that might be a hundred kilometers long, lettered in elongated characters designed to be intelligible only to one hurtling past them at a distance of a few centimeters and a speed of hundreds of kilometers per hour.

  Art was reading one such ad, without absorbing an iota of its meaning, when without warning the train was thrown into violent deceleration. It was braking at emergency rate from jet-aircraft speeds, seemingly coming to a halt. In an instant the great plastic flowers of airbags bloomed before each seat, their multiple release coming with the sound of a single explosion.

  A second after they had bloomed, the bags were soft and deflating once again, sagging into plastic detumescence. “Phyllis,” said the tridi leftenant’s voice, loud and clear in the first breathless moment of alarm among the passengers, who were only now reacting to being slammed in the face by plastic bags, “I am not an animal, to hurl myself upon you.”

  Phyllis’s reply was drowned out by a general commotion among the passengers. In Art’s car about half the seats were occupied, and the people were now exchanging exclamations, questions, and comments. As Art rubbed his nose where the bag had stung him a woman seated across the aisle looked over and asked him, almost pleadingly: “It must be just something wrong with the machinery, don’t you think?”

  Bracing his arms on the seat before him, against the continuing heavy deceleration, he tried to give her a reassuring nod. “Yes, it must be.” But he recalled the missing earplug; the Transon tubes were not immune to vandals, not any more at least, and therefore probably not immune to apes, or to terrorists of one persuasion or another. Glancing at his wristwatch, he determined that at the moment the train must be somewhere under the Great Plains, only a few hundred kilometers from his destination. Now the deceleration eased markedly. A look at the blur of tunnel wall and flickersign outside the little window indicated that the train was now moving not much faster than an automobile.

  As the train continued to slow toward a full stop, the tridi play was interrupted. A man’s voice, strong and reassuring and probably recorded, issued from the speakers on the momentarily empty stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm.” The voice paused as some decision-making process, human or electronic, selected the next phrase. “A technical difficulty has arisen. To minimize your inconvenience until your trip can be safely resumed, you will shortly be conducted to the surface by company guides. When the train stops, please remain seated until the guides arrive at your car. There is no cause for alarm.”

  Immediately a girl’s tremulous voice added: “Rodney?
I—I’ve always wanted a—a large family.” A moment later Phyllis’s image, as heavily garmented as ever, was back on stage, confronting the image of Rodney, who was standing in such a way that his uniform’s flat lack of any bulging codpiece could not very well be ignored.

  The airbags by now were nothing but wrinkled draperies on the seats. The passengers, who had quieted to get whatever news they could from the recorded announcement, were now babbling again and some of them were standing up. The woman across the aisle was once more addressing herself to Art but he could not hear her in the general noise. Now she got up and approached Art, to stand hovering over him. He unthinkingly took this as a sexual invitation and began to caress her hips, bare except for a G-string, but she gave only a perfunctory wiggle of response and he realized that her intent was to peer out of the little window beside his seat.

  “Is that water in the tunnel?” she asked in a loud, clear voice, looking out. Other passengers heard her words and echoed them, and alarm began to mount.

  Art took a turn at the window, trying to squint down at a difficult angle along a curve of dim concrete. The tunnel was circular in cross-section, as was the train, which filled it nearly from side to side and top to bottom. It was hard to see anything but Art thought there was at least some wetness on the concrete wall.

  “Yes, it was a Thug who strangled him,” groaned a grayhaired senior officer in full dress uniform upon the stage, “but I am the one really responsible for my son’s death.”

  AND THAT was the last of the play. The phantoms vanished from the stage again, as behind it, with a hiss and a clack, an emergency door opened in the front of the car. In a moment a man in a blue translucent uniform had come through the door and climbed upon the stage. Looking at first no more real than Rodney or Phyllis, he wore a hard helmet of blue plastic, with a clear faceplate, and carried some kind of pistol holstered at his belt. His stern expression eased into a professional smile as soon as a quick glance through the car assured him that all was peaceful. He stepped down briskly in front of the stage, making room for two more men, similarly dressed and armed, to mount it from behind.

  The man who had entered first, and who wore stripes on his sleeves like those of a military sergeant, leaned casually on one of the front seats and addressed the passengers in a loud but friendly voice. “There’s nothing to worry about, folks. The company regrets the inconvenience. We’ll just have to walk a few steps through the tunnel, that’s all. Will you all follow me, please, through the front of the train?”

  Eager as they were to get out of confinement and on their way again, the sergeant had no trouble keeping them moving past him and onto the stage and over it, while his two aides went on to the rear of the car, presumably to start evacuating people from the next car in that direction.

  “Nossir, there’s no flood,” the sergeant reassured a man who had mounted the stage ahead of Art. “It’s no more than a puddle. Just some kind of equipment breakdown. Keep moving. This way out, please.”

  A few people were burdened with enough luggage to make getting over the stage a struggle for them, and Art felt like offering a hand, but he would have had to back up or push ahead in line to do so, and he judged it better to keep the evacuation moving smoothly. So far all was going well enough, considering.

  He and his fellow passengers had to pass through two cars ahead of the one they had ridden in, surmounting another tridi stage in each, before an open door in the very front of the train let them descend a short, steep, folding emergency stair into the darkness of the tunnel. Maybe the sergeant had spoken too soon about there being no flood, or maybe he had simply been lying to prevent a panic. From somewhere ahead, beyond the point where the file of passengers preceding Art vanished in the gloom, there came a sound of heavy splashing, as of wading, shuffling feet. And now he could distinguish another watery noise, as of a minor waterfall. The tunnel seemed to slope downward gradually ahead of the train, so it was natural that the water, wherever it was coming from, would be deeper there.

  A pebble’s toss ahead of Art one of the guides—they were really Transom’s uniformed private police, of course—was shining a pocket flash about, and someone else was doing the same thing much farther on. The only other illumination was that which shone feebly from inside the train, and from a dim red glowing line embedded in the tunnel wall and stretching crooked and broken into an indeterminate distance. Art realized that this was an elongated flickersign symbol; if he had been compelled to guess, he would have said it was a question mark.

  Following the vague form of the passenger ahead, he felt the water rise to slosh about his ankles. Now in the glow of the flickersign he spotted the water leak, or at least one leak. From a small crack in the concrete near the tunnel’s curving top, a kitchen-faucet-sized stream came burbling down the concavity of wall. But at least swimming was not going to be necessary, for now just ahead another sergeant with another pocket flash was lighting the file of evacuees into a doorway set into the curved concrete of the tunnel wall. When Art neared the door he saw just beyond it the steep steps of a service stair ascending in a tight helix.

  He climbed in the wet footprints of those ahead. At a landing that Art hoped was near the top, but later proved to have been approximately halfway up, another policeman was stationed to urge them on. It was a good thing there was nobody in a wheelchair. “Step right up, folks. When you’re all assembled on the surface we’ll see you safely across the river, then get you on another train. Sorry for the inconvenience. This way . . .”

  A black woman past middle age, gasping from the climb, wearing gigantic false breasts and an obvious merkin of false pubic hair beneath her transparent gown, stepped out of line to argue. “River? What river is this? Why were we halted here, for sex’s sake?”

  “It’s the Mississippi, lady,” said the officer, politely gesturing her upward, then when she still delayed, taking her arm with easy firmness and propelling her along. “You’re almost in Chicago. Don’t be alarmed, we’ll get you through in good shape.”

  Maybe three hundred kilometers to go, Art estimated. As he climbed on, he could still hear the guide’s voice from behind: “Have to keep moving, folks. No telling how high the water’ll come up these stairs if the tunnel should collapse down there. Step along, please. If you should see a little light rioting on the surface, don’t let it throw you. Just assemble where you’re told, and we’ll see you through.”

  OF COURSE there was adequate lighting on the stair, but still it was good to finally distinguish daylight coming from above. At its top the stair delivered its stream of refugees into a graceful low concrete structure that was open on three sides to the late summer afternoon. The structure looked as if it might serve as a picnic shelter on more peaceful days. It stood surrounded by a half-wooded, park-like area. The near bank of the wide, placid river was little more than a stone’s throw away, at the bottom of a broad gentle grassy slope. The sun was lowering over the woods behind Art’s back as he faced across the river toward a solid array of wooded bluffs that rose above the distant shore.

  In and around the shelter lay many pieces of freshly splintered wood that might very recently have formed picnic tables and benches, and nearby a trash container lay on its side, meager contents scattered. But there were no rioters in sight. Some forty or fifty passengers with their luggage, apparently all who had preceded Art up from the tunnel onto the grass, were standing in loose formation close by the shelter, like some motley levee of inducted troops about to begin their training. A single uniformed policeman stood casually before them, giving them something to look at, at least. Three more police, one wearing inconspicuously on his collar what Art supposed was an officer’s insignia, were standing inside the shelter. One of these carried a radio buzzing with distant messages. With the three police was a shivering middle-aged man wearing a translucent coverall and thick, tough-looking clear boots with mud dried on them. For a moment Art thought that this man too was armed, but then he saw that the holstered
object at his waist was an electronic calculator.

  Following the gaze of these men, Art saw that the park was becoming not so peaceful after all. Down near the water people were emerging at a run from the concealment of some trees. The people were mostly men, running like clowns in twos and threes and half-dozens, whooping and waving. There were twenty or twenty-five of them altogether, and they might have been playing a game, or just scampering in high good spirits. One was waving a festoon of what appeared to be cables or plastic tubing.

  The man with the calculator at his belt was talking rapidly to the police; with a little sideward glance he included Art in his audience, and went right on. “So we had our boat close in toward the west bank here, taking sediment samples, and just as I turned to say something to Carl, why pow, this rock went by my head and missed me by about a centimeter. And then I heard this mob up on the bank start yelling. Sex, once you hear a yell like that you know what it is, it means a bunch of people have all gone ape. Carl had his helmet off, see, but he still had his diving suit on, and it must have looked almost opaque and they must have thought we were from the monastery. I gunned the boat to get out from the shore, and then we must have hit something, a log or a piece of junk. When I came up for air that mob was heaving more rocks, there were splashes all around me. I ducked under and swam and waded, and came downstream about half a kilometer and climbed out here when I saw the uniforms. Never saw what happened to Carl. I hope he managed to grab his helmet and tank before he went under.”

  The capering people near the riverbank had disappeared into the trees again.

  “Looks like they’ve got her burning, finally,” one of the police said, squinting to the north, where the bank of the river on which they were standing mounted higher in tree-clothed bluffs. Rooted somewhere among the trees atop the bluffs, an ominously burgeoning growth of black smoke towered like the djinn of riot above the countryside.