A Yuletide Universe Read online

  Humphrey turned in the easy chair and saw Kris.

  “Goodbye, S.P.I.DE.R.,” Kris said, and fired sleep-darts at each of them.

  Before the darts could hit, the black things scuttled, erupted and smeared. “Damn!” Kris said, and left the office without waiting for Nixon and Humphrey to regain consciousness. It would be a week or two before that happened, in any case. The Armorer wasn’t yet on-target when it came to gauging how long people stayed under with these darts. Kris left, because he knew their parts of the eight-point plan were to confuse issues, to sow confusion and dissension in the atmosphere. Johnson had told him that much. Now they would become sweet fellahs, and the president would play like he had a watchbird watching him, saying no-no.

  Christmas was fast a-coming. Kris was homesick.

  XI

  S.P.I.D.E.R. tried to kill Kris in Memphis, Detroit, Cleveland, Great Falls and Los Angeles. They missed.

  XII

  Maddox: Atlanta, Georgia

  It was too ugly to describe. It was the only S.P.I.D.E.R. pawn that Kris had to kill. With a little gold ax-handle: a souvenir of Maddox’s famous restaurant. Kris destroyed the nigger-hating machine, Maddox’s part in the eight-point plan, and ate fried chicken all the way to Montgomery, Alabama.

  XIII

  Wallace: Montgomery, Alabama

  The red-suited Santa Claus trudged across the open square in front of the Montgomery state building, clanging his little brass bell. The Santa Claus was fat, jolly, bearded, and possibly the deadliest man in the world.

  Kris looked around him as he plowed through the ankle-deep snow. The state buildings were clustered around the perimeter of the circular square, and he had a terrible prickling feeling up and down his spine. It might have been the cumbersome suit with all its equipment, so confining it made him sweat even in the midst of December 24th cold and whiteness. His boots were soaking wet from the snow, his pace measured, as he climbed the State House steps . . . watching.

  Everything was closed down for the holidays. All Alabama state facilities. Yet there was movement inside the city . . . last-minute shoppers hurrying to fulfill their quotas as happy consumers . . . children scurrying here and there, seeming to be going somewhere, but probably just caroming. (Kris always smiled when he saw the kids; they were truly the only hope; they had to be protected; not cut off from reality, but simply protected; and the increasing cynicism in the young had begun to disturb him; yet it seemed as though the young activists were fighting against everything S.P.I.D.E.R. stood for, unconsciously, but doing a far better job than their elders.)

  A man, hurrying past, down the steps, bundled to the chin in a heavy topcoat, glanced sidewise, squinting, and ignored the outstretched donation cup the Santa Claus proffered. Kris continued on up.

  The tracking devices inside the fur-tasseled hat he now wore bleeped and the range-finding trackers were phasing higher as Kris neared Wallace. It was going to be a problem getting into the building. But then, if it weren’t for problems making it necessary to carry such a surfeit of equipment in the red suit, Santa Claus would be a thin, svelte figure. “Ho ho ho,” Kris murmured, expelling puffs of frosty air.

  As he reached the first landing of the State House, Kris began the implementation of his plan to gain access. Fingertipping the suit controls in the palm of his right mitten, he directed the high-pressure hoses toward a barred window on the left wing of the State House. Once they had locked-in directionally, Kris coded the tubes to run acid and napalm, depressed the firing studs, and watched as the hoses sprayed the window with acid, dissolving bars and glass alike. Then the napalm erupted from the hoses in a burning spray, arcing over the snow and striking the gaping hole in the face of the State House. In moments the front of the State House was burning.

  Kris hit the jet-pack and went straight up. When he was hovering at two hundred feet, he cut in the rockets and zoomed over the State House. The rockets died and Kris settled slowly, then cut out the jet-pack. He was on the roof . . . unseen. The fire would keep their attention. At this stage in the eradication of the eight-point plan they would be expecting him, but they wouldn’t know it would be this formidable an assault force.

  The geigers were giving a hot reading from the North Wing of the State House. His seven-league boots allowed him to leap over in three strides, and he packed plastic charges along the edges of the roof, damping them with implosion spray so the force of their blast would be directed straight down. Then he set the timer and leaped back to the section of roof where his trackers gave him the strongest Wallace reading. Extending the hooks in his mittens, he cut a circular patch in the roof, then burned it out with acid. It hung in its place. Suddenly, the plastic charges went off on the roof of the North Wing, and under cover of the tumult, he struck! He used the boot-spikes to kick in the circular patch he’d cut in the roof. The circular opening had cut through the roofing material; now he used the flamethrower to burn through the several layers of lath and plaster and beaming, till all that stood between him and entrance was the plaster of the ceiling. He withdrew a grenade from the inner pockets of the capacious suit, pulled the pin, released the handle, and dropped it into the hole. There was a sharp, short explosion, and when the plaster dust cleared he was free to leap down inside the Alabama State House.

  Kris jumped, setting the boots for light bounce.

  He jumped into a readily waiting group of green-suited zombies. “Ho ho ho!” Kris chortled again, opening up with the machine guns. Bodies spun and flopped and caromed off walls, and seconds later the reception squad was stacked high in its own seepage of blood.

  They had barricaded the doors to the room. Kris now had no time for lockpicks. He pulled off his red rubber nose and hurled it. The doors exploded outward in a cascading shower of splintered toothpickery. He plunged through the smoke and still-flying wreckage, hit the hallway, turned to follow the pinging urgency of his trackers. Wallace was moving. Trying to get away? Not unlikely.

  Hauling out the bolo knife, he dashed forward again. Green-suited zombies came at him from a cross-corridor and he hacked his way through them without pause. A shot spanged off the wall beside his ear and he half-turned, letting a throwing-knife drop into his hand from its oiled sheath. The marksman was half-in, half-out of a doorway down the corridor. Kris let the knife slide down his palm, caught it by the tip, and in one quicksilver movement overhanded it. The knife just scored the edge of the doorjamb and buried itself in the zombie’s throat. He disappeared inside the room.

  The trackers were now indicating a blank wall at the end of a cul-de-sac. Kris came on at it, full out, his suit’s body armor locked for ramming. He hit the wall and went right through. Behind the blank face of the cul-de-sac was a stone stairway, leading down into the darkness. Zombies lurked on those stairs. The .30 cal’s were good enough for them; Kris fled down the stairs, firing ahead of him. The zombies peeled away and fell into darkness.

  At the bottom he found the underground river, and saw the triangular black blades of shark dorsals.

  Still murmuring ho ho ho, Kris dove headfirst into the stygian blackness. The water closed over him, and nothing more could be seen, save the thrashing of sharks.

  Less than an hour later, the entire Alabama State House and much of the public square went straight up in a hellfire explosion of such ferocity that windows were knocked out in slat-back houses of po’ darkies in Selma.

  XIV

  She was lightly scraping her long painted fingernails down his naked back. He lay prone on the bed, occasionally reaching to the nightstand for a pull on the whiskey and water. The livid scars that still pulsed on his back seemed to attract her. She wet her full lips, and her naked, large-nippled breasts heaved as she surveyed his body.

  “He fought to the end. The sonofabitch was the only one of the eight who really liked that black thing in his head. Really, genuinely evil. Worst of the bunch; no wonder S.P.I.D.E.R. picked him to ramrod the eight-point plan.” He buried his face in the pillow, as th
ough trying to blot out the memory of what had gone before.

  “I waited three and a half months for you to come back,” the blonde said, tidying her bosom. “The least you could do is tell me where you were!”

  He turned over and grabbed her. He pulled her down to him and ran his hands over her lush flesh. She seemed to burn with a special heat. Much, much later, some time in mid-January, he released her, and said, “Baby, it’s just too goddam ugly to talk about. All I’ll say is that if there had been any chance of saving that Wallace mother from his own meanness, I’d have taken it.”

  “He was killed?”

  “When the underground caverns blew. Sank half the state of Alabama. Funny thing was . . . it sunk mostly Caucasian holdings. All the ghettos are still standing. The new governor—Shabbaz X. Turner—has declared the entire state a disaster area, and he’s got the Black Cross organized to come in and help all the poor white folks who were refugee’d by the explosion. That bastard Wallace must have had the entire state wired.”

  “Sounds dreadful.”

  “Dreadful? You know what that fink had as his part of the eight-point plan?”

  The girl looked at him wide-eyed.

  “I’ll tell you. It was his job—through the use of tremendously sophisticated equipment—to harden the thought-processes of the young, to age them. To set their concepts like concrete. When we exploded all that devil’s machinery, suddenly everyone started thinking freely, digging each other, turning to one another and realizing that the world was in a sorry state, and that what they’d been sure of, a moment before, might just possibly be in question. He was literally turning the young into old. And it was causing aging.”

  “You mean we don’t age naturally?”

  “Hell no. It was S.P.I.D.E.R. that was making us get older and older, and fall apart. Now we’ll all stay the way we are, reach an age physically of about thirty-six or -seven, and then coast on out for another two or three hundred years. And oh yeah, no cancer.”

  “That too?”

  Kris nodded.

  The blonde lay on her back, and Kris traced a pattern on her stomach with his large, scarred hands. “Just one thing,” the blonde said.

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “What was S.P.I.D.E.R.’s eight-point plan all about? I mean, aside from the individual elements of making everyone hate everyone else, what were they trying for?”

  Kris shrugged. “That, and what the name S.P.I.D.E.R. means, we may never know. Now that their organization has been broken up. Shame. I would’ve liked to’ve known.”

  And you will know, a voice suddenly said, inside Kris’s head. The blonde rose up, off the bed, and withdrew a deadly stinger pistol from beneath the pillows. Our agents are everywhere, she said, telepathically.

  “You!” Kris ejaculated.

  Since the moment you returned, after Christmas. While you were recuperating from your wounds, lying there unconscious, I slipped in—having trailed you from Alabama—that’s why you never found evidence that Wallace’s symbiote had self-destructed—I slipped in and invaded this poor husk. What made you think you had beaten us, fool? We are everywhere. We came to this planet sixty years ago—check your history; you’ll find the exact date. We are here, and here we stay. For the present to wage a terrorist war, but soon—to take everything for ourselves. The eight-point plan was our most ambitious to date.

  “Ambitious!” Kris sneered. “Hate, madness, cancer, prejudice, confusion, subservience, smog, corruption, aging . . . what kind of filth are you?”

  We are S.P.I.D.E.R., the voice said, while the blonde held the needle on him. And once you know what S.P.I.D.E.R. stands for, you will know what our eight-part plan was intended to do to you poor, weak Earthmen.

  Watch! The voice was jubilant.

  And the S.P.I.D.E.R. symbiote crawled out of her ear and darted for Kris’s throat. He reacted instantly, spinning off the bed. The symbiote missed his throat by micro-millimeters. Kris hit the wall, shoved off with a bare foot and dove back onto the bed, scrambling around the blonde, grabbing her hand, and directing the needle of the weapon at the symbiote. It scuttled for cover, even as the lethal blast seared across the bedsheets. Then Kris grabbed for the deadly nightshade, on the bedstand beside him, and hurled it.

  Instantly, all of the underground toy-making complex was awash in darkness.

  He felt the blonde jerk in his grasp, and he knew that the S.P.I.D.E.R. symbiote had fled back to its one place of safety. Inside her. He had no choice but to kill her. But she threw the needle away, and he was locked there in eternal darkness, on the bed, holding her body as it struggled to free itself; and he was forced by his nakedness to kill her using the one weapon God had given him when he came into the world.

  It was a special weapon, and it took almost a week to kill her.

  But when it was over, and the darkness had cleared, he lay there thinking. Exhausted, ten pounds lighter, weak as a kitten, and thinking.

  Now he knew what S.P.I.D.E.R. meant.

  The symbiote was small, black, hairy, and scuttled on many little legs. The eight-point plan was intended to make people feel bad. That simple. It was to make them feel simply crummy. And crummy people kill each other. And people who kill each other leave a world intact enough for S.P.I.D.E.R.

  All he had to do was delete the periods.

  XV

  The time/motion studies came in the next week. They said that the deliveries this past holiday had been the sloppiest on record. Kris and PoPo shuffled the reports and smiled. Well, it would be better next year. No wonder it was so sloppy this year . . . how effective was a Santa Claus who was really an imposter? How effective could Santa Claus be when he was PoPo and CorLo, the one standing on the other’s shoulders, wearing a red suit three sizes too big for them? But with Kris laid up from saving the world, they had had no choice.

  There were complaints coming in from all over.

  Even from Hilltop.

  “PoPo,” Kris said, when the phones refused to cease clanging, “I’m not taking any calls. They want me, they can reach me at Antibes. I’m going off to sleep for three months. They can reach me in April sometime.”

  He started out of the office just as CorLo ran in, a wild expression on his face. “Geeble gip freesee jim jim,” CorLo said. Kris slumped back into his seat.

  He dropped his head into his hands.

  Everything went wrong.

  Dasher had knocked up Vixen.

  “The shits just won’t let you live,” Kris murmured, and began crying, softly yet manfully.

  Historical Note: The astute reader will be quick to notice that though Mr. Ellison’s story was written prior to November 1968, and was published early in 1969, it has only one small flaw in it. The insidious eight-point plan totally ignores the Republican vice-presidential candidate at the time, Mr. Spiro Agnew who, though elected, was later sentenced to prison for criminous acts, left office in disgrace, and has since become an icon for mendacity. Apparently the author forgot him. Apparently the author was not the only one. Go figure.

  O Come Little Children . . .

  Chet Williamson

  * * *

  It even smells like Christmas,” the boy told his mother, as they strolled down the narrow aisles of the farmer’s market. That it looked and sounded like that happiest of holidays went without saying. Carols blared everywhere, from the tiniest of the stand-holder’s transistor radios to the brass choir booming from the market’s PA system. Meat cases were framed with strings of lights, a myriad of small trees adorned a myriad of counters across which bills the color of holly were pushed and goods and coins returned, and red and green predominated above all other hues. But it was the odors that entranced: the pungency of gingerbread, the sweet olfactory sting of fresh Christmas cookies. There were mince pies and pumpkin pudding, and a concoction of cranberry sauce and dried fruit in syrup whose aroma made the boy pucker and salivate as though a fresh lemon had brushed his tongue. The owner of the sandwich stand w
as selling small, one-dollar, Styrofoam plates of turkey and stuffing to those too rabid to wait until Christmas, three long days away. The smell was intoxicating, and the line was long.

  The boy’s mother, smiling and full of the spirit, bought many things that would find their way to their own Christmas table, and the sights and sounds and smells kept the boy from being bored, as he usually was at the Great Tri-County Farmer’s and Flea Market.

  It was on the way out, as he and his mother walked through the large passage that divided the freshness of the food and produce stands from the dusty tawdriness of the flea market, that the boy saw the man dressed as Santa Claus. At first glance he did not seem a very good Santa Claus. He was too thin, and instead of a full, white, cottony, fake beard, his own wispy mass of facial hair had been halfheartedly lightened, as though he’d dipped a comb in white shoe polish and given it a few quick strokes. “There,” the boy’s mother remarked, “is one of Santa’s lesser helpers.”

  The boy was way past the point where every Santa was the real Santa. In truth, he was just short of total disbelief. TV, comic books, and the remarks of older friends had all taken their toll, and he now thought that although the existence of the great man was conceivable, it was not likely, and to imagine that any of these kindly, red-suited men who smiled wearily in every department store and shopping mall was the genuine article was quite impossible.

  Even if he had believed fully, he doubted if anyone under two would have accepted the legitimacy of the Santa he saw before him. Aside from the thinness of both beard and frame, the man’s suit was threadbare in spots, the black vinyl boots scuffed and dull, and the white ruffs at collar and cuffs had yellowed to the color of old piano keys. His lap was empty. The only person nearby was a cowboy- hatted man sitting on a folding chair identical to that on which the Santa sat. A Polaroid Pronto hung from his neck, and next to him a card on an easel read YOUR PICTURE WITH SANTA—$3.00. The $3.00 part was printed much smaller than the words. The boy and his mother were nearly by the men when the one in the red suit looked at them.