ELUSON and CARTER
A BELMONT /TOWER
SCIENCE-FICTION DOUBLE
BY TWO OF AMERICA'S
MOST HONORED WRITERS
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DOOMS MAN
Harlan Ellison
THE THIEF OF THOTH
Lin Carter
Belmont/Tower Books
•
New York City
DOOMSMAN/THE THIEF OF THOTH
A BELMONT/TOWER BOOK- July 1972
Published by
Belmont/Tower Books
185 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10016
Copyright: Thief of Thoth © MCMLXVIII by Lin Carter
Copyright: Doomsman © MCMLVIII by Greenleaf
Publishing Co.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
HARLAN ELLISON:
"His writing deserves nothing
but praise for its power,
originality of ideas and great
sense of conviction and identity."
-Los Angeles Free Press
DOOMSMAN
By Harlan Ellison
WHEN THEY brought him to the School, from his home in
the Pampas, Juanito Montoya was a thin, sallow-faced
youth with a twitch to his eyelids and a feral stealthiness
to his manner. He had lived-an orphan at the age of
nine-off the land, with no one's help, but simply the
fleetness of the young and the rapacity of the ever hun·
gry. The Seekers had found him sleeping in the bombedout shell of a cathedral in a wasted little village deep in the heart of Argentina; and since he had killed two of their
number with sling and dart in an effort to avoid capture,
they refrained from burning him to ashes. He barely spoke,
even during the struggle, but short, tiny animal sounds came
through the layers of dirt that covered his face. So they
kept him alive, they captured him with the evening twilight
covering them, feeling he was a definite posSibility, that he
would fit in to the ways of the School And they brought
him in.
Trussed, gagged, and impounded in a force mesh.
There had been no trouble spiriting the boy out of Ar·
gentina; not so much because it was merely another sec·
tion of Am.ericaState, but because the Seekers were beyond petty boundaries and interests.
They were the Seekers from the School.
Without the School, who knew what might happen in
the world?
So they had had no difficulty bringing pipe-limbed and •
furious Juanito Montoya to the School.
All the way in the night-shrouded black jetcopter, the
boy struggled in his invisible force bonds, struggled in his
DOOMS MAN
wrist-slicing wire trusses, struggled against the mask
adhesive that covered his lower face. Impotently he
seethed, and the fear mounted in him like a crazy red
monkey, gibbering along his nerves till he felt faint with
to the tiny village? He could see only their little scarlet
eyes through the slits in the hoods, and the sight made
him dizzy, fascinated with the dizziness. Who were
they-and his eyes widened over the adhesive--where
were they taking him?
Juanito was not old enough to be a coward. Far from
it; indeed, he had seen too much, lived too fast and too
wildly to have even become one, had he known the way
of going about it. But this was the unknown. This was a
nightmare spawned from up North, where things always
happened with evil ways.
The jetcopter sped on silently through the night. And
soon passed into dawn and later, the day.
Juanito was a perceptive boy. At fifteen he could effectively disable a column of foot-soldiers while sniping from cover, with his sling and dart. He knew the best ways to
skin a rabbit and eat it without getting sick. He knew
what fire could do, and he knew what smoke could do.
He knew the whys and bows and wheres of looting,
skulking, hiding . . . surviving.
In a country devoid of warmth or culture or freedom
for nearly eighty years, Juanita had done remarkably well
for himself. He had neither been caught nor killed. He
did not even have a red flag on his dossier at America
State Records.
In point of fact, he did not even have a dossier.
He was a cipher to the great State. Thus, he was perfect fodder for the School. Young, quick-witted, fit to survive, able to murder without compunction, unknown and most important-in the grip of the Seekers. His trip to
the School was a long one, but uneventful.
High in the Rockies, the School stood grey and silent
from without-if seen at all-while within it was light
and efficiency and the sounds of training. It had been
built to withstand the winds of time, thrust into the
DOOMS MAN
straight-walled neck of a volcanic chute. A tube of rock,
thirty feet thick was the neck of the tube, and like a pencil stuck down inside a roll of notepaper, the School had been built within that chimney rock. Its walls were molybdenum steel, reinforced with cross-grained layers of duroplast and concrete blocks within. It was solid, and invisible from any angle, save above. But even from above it was protected, for a force bubble and a spy net had been
erected over the mouth of the tube, and any foreign matter-as large as a bomber, as small as a gnat-passing over the tube without beamed permission, was automatically destroyed by the polarized energy force beams from a battery below. The School stood as solid as the Earth
beneath it; quiet outside, anxious within, and constantly
working, turning out its students with regularity and
thoroughness.
This was AmericaState's little-known, deeply feared
School-for assassins.
It had been erected shortly after the War, when the
great AmericaState that stretched from one end of the
continent to the other had discovered a million little
dynasties founded and festering within its very bosom.
The School had been founded and the men had been
trained on sound principle: with that many small monarchies flourishing from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow, from Pernambuco to San Francisco, the thought of sending the worn and decimated AmericaState armies to
grind them out and do away with their leaders, was beyond consideration. It was lions chasing shadows, tiring the lions till they lay easy prey for the shadows, who were
truly maggots and hyenas and vultures.
The jobs could be done by one man each, if they were
the right kind of men. If they were killers, if th
ey knew
every means of torture and murder ever conceived, and if
they conceived a few of their own when they needed
them. Then the State could be kept in its stability of
power, and the War would not rage again. If the men
were assassins.
So the School had been founded and the men had been
trained. Trained for their work with one philosophy hard
as diamond, cold as snow, constant as life, final as death.
Death was important to them; they lived with it, and their
DOOMSMAN
work was dedicated to it. Their philosophy: death is
preferable to failure. Get in, kill, and get out fast!
- The School had been built. It had been doing its work
with unbelievable thoroughness for over seventy years. To
the School for Assassins they brought fifteen year old
Juanita Montoya. That was in 2179. Time went swiftly.
2184.
"Down on your stomach!"
"Yo! Up on your feet!"
"Run in place!"
"Flip over!"
"Up, without hands!"
"Run in place!"
"Cutaway! Drop damn you, I said cutaway!"
"Up!"
"Cutaway!"
"Up!"
"Cutaway, cutaway, cutaway, cutaway, break time!''
Thirteen (who considered his name good luck, as com-
pared to little Seven in the Apprentice Class who had an
affinity for accidents despite his supposedly luck-filled
name) met Twenty-two outside the gym.
Thirteen was a tall, slim boy with wedge-shaped hands,
so excellent for night work such as strangulation, bearwalking over hot coals on an approach route, underwater demolition and strangulation. That was important,
strangulation. They had heard in the School only last
week that a man who had been Fifty-five in Class 338
had disposed of a Regent General in the ridiculous Court
of Harper, somewhere in Oklahoma using his hands
alone. Strangulation was important; hadn't the man received a posthumous plaque on the memory wall in the Chapel?
Thirteen was proud of his hands. He flexed them
constantly, while talking, and though he was inordinately
vain about them, manicuring them and looking at them,
and though he was a bit on the simpering side, occasionally speaking with a lisp, his abilities with his hands kept all laughter from his classmates' lips.
DOOMSMAN
Twenty-two was shorter, nearly a head shorter, with
the dark, wavy hair and snapping ebony eyes of the
Latin. Though he spoke with the soft lilt of the Latin,
also, and made sharp, small, evocative gestures with his
slim hands, he had nothing of the fragile gentleness of the
inner Latin spirit. Nor did he have the fiery outer appearance. He seemed something quite set apart, with a twitch to his eyelids. A nervous flicker that was heat lightning on
the horizon. Here and there and gone and only partially glimpsed.
He was not well liked in his class, for his eyes were too
hungry, his manner too brisk. He walked close to walls,
and talked with his back to one,constantly. He walked as
though he were about to be attacked, and his manner of
speaking made it perfectly clear that he suspected you
had just that in mind. But Thirteen was his friend, for
they were nothing alike, and that will happen.
Thirteen was a born clown who had been reeducated
as a killer. Twenty-two was born to rip and tear, a natural instinctive killer.
But now both were killers. In that they were alike, but
otherwise they were opposites.
"I wish to God they'd spread that gravel. on the gym
floor without so damned many sharp rocks in it," Thirteen grumbled, picking tiny bits of stone from his palms.
"Those cutaways are murder in a rock field."
Twenty-two smiled quickly, thinly. "You beef too
much, Jock."
He caught himself, and turned white. Thirteen gripped
him, hard. Thirteen angled him into the alcove, hand on
bicep. The alcove was shallow, where the water cooler
hung from the ceiling, but it was out of the way of the
hordes of students, rushing down the corridor. "Juanita,
you've got to remember! They're cracking down on using
proper names. I know it's just a new idea they've started
this year, but they want it that way, and you can't buck
them. I thought you'd stopped using names months ago.
What if a proctor heard you?
"What the hell do you want to do, get us both sent to
Isolate?"
Twenty-two nudged the other off with impatient palms.
"Okay, okay-sorry, I forgot. I forget sometimes� that's
DOOMS MAN
all; listen, I wasn't born in this lousy School you know? I
lived outside once • • • not in a creche
· ·
like all the rest of
you guys."
"Yeah, and you weren't alive once," Thirteen jabbed
back roughly. "Watch yourself or you'll be back in that
condition. By way of the furnace room.."
Twenty-two nodded firmly. "Okay, okay. No proper
nam.es while we are within these hallowed walls. Two
hundred and thirty-six more days, no names. You are
Thirteen to me, sir."
"You're the strangest cat I ever knew," Thirteen said,
aiming a bolo punch at Twenty-two. It missed, for it was
intended to miss, and they walked on toward the snack
bar for a bite to eat before the next class-razors. They
grinned at each other youthfully, arrogantly.
In the snack bar, the sounds of the monolog for today
rolled hypnotically from the wall speakers. It was a lecture on makeshift bludgeons for emergency occasions:
". • • across the bridge of the nose will smash the
bone structure and send splinters into the brain, bringing
instantaneous death, if the blow is sharp and inward.
Should no such heavy weapon be at hand, a newspaper
may be folded the long way four times, folded over across
the front, and folded once more to make a tight wedge.
This wedge, when held firmly in the hand, with the folded
end protruding, has the effective impact power of an M-5
blackjack. A stocking, filled with gravel, dirt-tightly
packed--or coins, will serve approximately the same purpose, with the warning that such utensils are not reliable for more than a momentary stunning, if any point of impact but directly behind the right ear is used. In the event . • • "
Twenty-two ignored the monolog as best he could; it
was gauged on all mental bands to impress itself onto the
core of memory in each student's mind. It was not necessary to be listening to the monolog, for it reached beyond mere awareness. This was one of the primary training aids used in the School. By day or night, sleeping or eating, at work or during proscribed play times-the
monologs went on. A new one each day. Marksmanship,
proper use of collodin for disguises, how to wire a jetcopter to time-explode, nine hundred and forty gases that can
DOOMS MAN
cripple without killing, the Maori methods of inducing a
prisoner to speak his mind, native and abnormal
psychology; the subjects were endless and with each new
day a new spool was strung into the sono-box, and the
monolog began, long before the students were out of their
hammocks, long after they had retired to them again.
So it was not precisely "ignoring" that Twenty-two
managed. It was more nearly relegation to a sub-level of
attention. While he shoved his way through the off-class
crowds in the snack bar, he kept watch for Thirty-eight in
class 401. That was one class further along than Juanita's
own 402. Thirty-eight would be graduating day after
tomorrow. Before that happened, Juanito knew he must
worm the name from the student assassin.
He had encountered Thirty-eight at a Combats Meet
over a year ago; he had been teamed with the stout assassin in the lectro-whip event, and between bouts, when they had been getting their bodies greased with
nonconducting swabbing oils, they had talked.
Juanito remembered that discussion well. It had gone:
"My name is Grice. John Grice from Rio Cuerto;
that's in Argentina."
It had been inevitable, actually. The Seekers covered a
great deal of territory. They took many men from many
parts of AmericaState. It was, in fact, a curious thing that
Juanito had not met a fellow areaman sooner. But he had
perked up, then. He had been in the School for slightly
less than four years at that time. He had been miserable,
and elated at the same time, all during those years. For
he was a creature of freedom, and the restricted, martial
life of the School gnawed at his sense of dignity and roving desires. Yet he was joyful to be in the School, for he was learning what he most wanted to learn. How to kill.
He had lived in the ruins too long to think success and
escape came with luck. It was stealth and skill. Here in
the School, he was absorbing the most vital and electric
ways of pouncing and preying. He had vowed when he
was graduated he would take his first assignment, and the
School would never hear of him again. With the School
training he could surely elude or outfox or outfight any
Seekers who came after him.
But that had been years before, and now four years
DOOMSMAN
later, here was an areaman. An Argentinian, and from so
close to JWmito's old environs.