The Big Fix!
Date: 2022-03-10T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Drug addicts -- Fiction; Gladiators -- Fiction

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Big Fix!

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Title: The Big Fix!

Author: Richard Wilson

Illustrator: Robert Engle

Release date: March 10, 2022 [eBook #67602]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Royal Publications, Inc, 1956

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67602

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BIG FIX! ***

The Big Fix!

By RICHARD WILSON

Illustrated by ENGLE

As a drug, uru was a junkie's dream.
As a planet, Uru was paradise. But
combined, the two became a living hell!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity Science Fiction, August 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"I read about a drug called yage.... Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke. Yage may be the final fix."—William Lee, Junkie.

I was meeting The Man in a cafeteria on West End Avenue—the rundown part of the avenue south of 72nd Street where all the garages and auto parts places are.

I didn't need a fix. I'd been off the junk for three months and I was all right. I was drinking a lot, but that was all.

The meet in the cafeteria was set up by an old connection of mine who'd heard I was interested in this new stuff. My connection's name was Rollo, sometimes called Rollo the Roller because he rolled lushes in the subway.

Rollo and I had coffee while we waited for The Man.

"He's a funny one," Rollo said. "Not like any other pusher I ever dig."

"You sure he's straight?" I asked. "He wouldn't be one of The People, would he?"

"Nah, he's no agent. Don't you think I can make a cop or a Federal by now?"

"All right. I wasn't trying to insult you."

We sipped our coffee and talked in low voices. The cafeteria wasn't a regular joint. It might be in time, and then it would be one till it got too hot, but it wasn't now.

I didn't see the guy come in. The first thing I knew he was standing at the table over us. Tall, wearing a black suit like an undertaker or a preacher, but with a dark blue shirt and a white tie. He had a young-old face and his skin was a light tan. Not the tan you get at Miami Beach or from a sun lamp, but as if he had Chinese or Malay blood in him somewhere.

Rollo jumped a little when he noticed him at his elbow.

"Oh, hello, Jones. Creepin' up on people again. Sit down. This is Barry."

I acknowledged the introduction. I was sure Jones wasn't his real name any more than Barry was mine. I asked him if I could buy him a cup of coffee and he said no, and then Rollo left. Rollo'd mumbled something about business, but I got the feeling he didn't like being around Jones any more than he had to.

"I understand you are interested in my product," Jones said. He had dark brown eyes, almost black. He didn't talk like a pusher, but you can't always make generalizations.

"I don't want to score any," I said. "At least not right now. I'm off the stuff, but I take a sort of philosophical interest in it, you might say."

"I could not sell you any at the moment, in any case," Jones said. "I do not make a practice of carrying it on my person."

"Of course not. But what is it? Rollo tells me it's not the usual junk. I wondered if maybe it was yage."

Yage was something you kept hearing about but never saw yourself. It was always somebody who knew somebody else who'd tried it. Yage was the junkie's dream. You never caught up with it, but you heard hints in conversation.

An addict would give himself a fix of Henry, sliding the needle into the vein, and later, as his tension relaxed, he'd say to his connection, "I hear yage is the real kick—they tell me that compared to yage, heroin is the least." And the connection would say, "That's what they tell me, but I never seen any of it myself. They have it in the Amazon or someplace, I hear."

It's always hearsay. But after a while you hear so much about it that you believe it's got to be around somewhere, so you keep asking. I asked Jones.

"I could show you yage," Jones said, and I felt a tingle, like a kid promised his first kiss. "But it would disappoint you."

"Why?"

"It is like peyote—just another herb. It has a similar effect to that of the Mescal cactus button, but since you would not seem to be a devotee of the Sun Dance I do not think it would interest you."

I went into a slump again when I heard him run down yage. I knew what peyote was. It might be all right for Indians, but it just made the average junkie sick to his stomach.

"What would interest me, then?" I asked him.

"I have a certain amount of a substance called uru," he said. "It is—and I do not exaggerate when I say this—the most."

I couldn't help grinning. Jones had been speaking the store-bought English of the educated foreigner and then he came out with this hep expression.

"Tell me more, professor," I said. "You're ringing my bell."

"You tell me more, my friend," he came back. "What is your great interest in this will-o'-the-wisp yage that so excites you, although you claim to be 'off the stuff'?"

I could almost hear the quotation marks he put around the phrase.

"Okay," I said. "I'll tell you."

So I went into the crazy old dream—the feeling that there's something better someplace, something you can take or leave alone, that doesn't leave you with that wrung-out, hopeless horror of junk sickness when you can't get the stuff.

I told him about the other addicts—how they feel this kinship that's not like any other relationship anywhere—how you have that exalted feeling of mingled hope and despair when another junkie is coming with a fix for you—and how by just drifting around in a strange city you find yourself drawn to the right district to score the stuff. How it's almost telepathic.

I told him what they said about yage, that some South American croaker had isolated from it a fix he called telepathine. How it was supposed to be some kind of miracle dope that you could take when you wanted it without actually needing it, and it would open up the world for you so you'd be close, really close, to others like you. So your mind would be their mind. A union more terrific than any other kind—as far beyond even the ideal sexual climax, for instance, as sex is beyond a bow or a handshake. So there'd be a togetherness you couldn't achieve any other way. So you wouldn't be so ... alone.

I felt embarrassed after talking like that, even though Jones listened as sympathetically as anybody could, so I got up to get another cup of coffee at the counter.

"Okay," I said defensively as I spooned in the sugar. "I've told you about me. Now what about that stuff of yours—what do you call it again?"

"Uru," he said. "It is what yage is said to be, but is not. You would like it. But you tell me you are 'off the stuff'."

"Off the old stuff. It's no good and I've licked it. Off with the old," I said, beginning to feel a little high already, "and on with the new. Uru, eh?"

This might be it. The most. The big fix. I had to have it.

"You shall try it," Jones said. "You shall judge for yourself. Then if you want more I will provide it for you. There will be no charge."

Right away I got suspicious. Nobody gives anything away. It could be a come-on. Jones might figure I'd like it so much I'd have to have more and then I'd pay and pay. But on the other hand maybe he figured wrong. Nothing is habit-forming once. I didn't know anything about this uru, but I knew all there was to know about everything else.

"Okay," I said. "When?"

"I will call you," Jones said.

I gave him my number.

He had a place on East 45th, a ratty old brownstone. It didn't look as if he'd lived in it long. But that was to be expected; if you were a pusher you had to keep on the move. After a while a landlady got suspicious about all the queer characters visiting this one guy and the next step was the cops.

Jones had called me the day after our talk in the cafeteria, setting up a meet for that afternoon. I'd had a dream about uru, a wild and wonderful dream that made it impossible for me not to go. I'm a hunch-player, anyway. So I went.

But I was cautious enough to leave my money home and not to wear my best clothes. Then if it turned out that Jones was pulling a lush-worker switch, feeding junkies a knockout fix and rolling them, I wouldn't lose much.

He was wearing the same black suit. His closet door was open and I could see that there were no clothes hanging in it. Maybe he hadn't unpacked yet, though I didn't see a suitcase anywhere.

I didn't think much about these things at the time. Jones smiled and shook hands with me. Then he excused himself and went out into the hall. So far so good. No smart pusher keeps the stuff in his room. Possession carries a stiff rap.

I had my works with me—needle and eye-dropper—but Jones told me I wouldn't need it. I was surprised. If his place wasn't a shooting gallery, what was it? A weed joint? Weed was no good—that was fag stuff. Marijuana, bennies, goof balls, nembies—that stuff was nowhere for a cat who'd been mainlining it for a decade. I told that to Jones.

He smiled and told me to relax. He meant it literally.

"Lie down on the bed," he said. "Take your coat off. No, don't roll up your sleeve."

He pulled down a blue shade over the single window and the room got dim. Sunlight squeezed through the cracks at the edges and made shimmering little patterns on the walls and ceiling.

He took a cigaret holder out of his pocket. It was green, like jade, and carved around its fat middle was a design of some kind. I couldn't make it out, even when I held it in my hand.

Jones put a cigaret in the holder. It looked like an ordinary king-size smoke and I told him so.

"That is correct," he said. "It is not the cigaret that provides the effect, but the uru in the holder. The smoke travels over the uru and activates it. Enough of it is absorbed by the warm smoke for the desired result. Do not inhale too deeply the first time."

I took a short drag, half suspecting he was conning me. Nothing happened right away. It didn't taste any different from any cigaret smoked through a holder. I took another drag, deeper this time.

I was off.

I became a tiny replica of myself, swimming effortlessly within my own eyeball, looking down the length of that other me lying on the bed. My feet looked a mile away. I moved them and it seemed to take almost a minute for the impulse to communicate itself from my mind along the vast body.

Then I lost interest in my body as the flecks of sunlight on the ceiling became tiny planets, whirling in perfect, intricate orbits around a fiery blue-white sun.

The smoke in the room climbed up in a graceful dance and became a dust-cloud in the sparkling solar system. The dark head of Jones came into view among the tiny worlds, not obscuring them. The little jewel-like planets were a shimmering crown hovering about him.

He spoke then, and his words echoed to me as if through the vastness of infinity itself.

"Barry," the voice said, powerful but warm, far away but deliciously close, awesome but comfortable. "Barry, my good friend."

I could see the great face, both with my real eyes and with the eyes of that tiny other me swimming within. It was a mighty face, but reassuring—the face of a kind father and loving wife and adoring son all in one. The face was smiling, a dear familiar smile.

But the lips were not moving. The voice was that of a mind, reaching out through vastness and into my own thoughts.

"You are not alone," the mind-voice said, and it was what I had been waiting to hear. "You are one with all good things. The door you have been seeking is open. You have only to walk through."

I had been swimming, but now I walked. It was like no other kind of walking. It was like ice-skating in a way, a smooth, effortless glide. The tiny me walked, glided, out of my body and up, up in a curl of smoke, across a million miles of blackness toward the shimmering worlds.

"I found the door," I thought, and knew the words were being communicated to him. "I thank you and I am walking through. It is a beautiful world you have. It sparkles so. I love it."

I could say these things to him with my mind, meaning them, unashamed of the innermost feelings that would have been throttled off unspoken if I'd had to use the vulgarity of speech.

He understood that, too, and his smile became warmer. There was a bond here I'd never experienced, a warm gushing of myself to him and to this world he'd opened for me. The warmth was reciprocated instantly. His face showed it, his mind told me and the glittering worlds seemed to join in his message of esteem and one-ness.

There was more; but later I couldn't remember it all. The beauty of a thing can't be recreated in its absence. Only the memory of it lingers. But the memory of an exalted experience has a beauty of its own.

After a while I came back. Back to my gross self lying on the bed, the jade-green cigaret holder in my fingers, a long ash on the end of the cigaret. So I had been away only a minute or two in our time. It had seemed hours in his.

Gradually the sparkling worlds reverted to patches of sunlight and the dust-cloud to tobacco smoke.

Jones stood near the bed. Gently he took the holder from my fingers and snuffed out the cigaret in the ashtray.

"You are pleased," he said, speaking with his voice now. "You have told me that."

"Yes," I said. "Oh, yes." I wanted to say much more, but the inhibition of speech was on me now.

"I understand. Do not talk. You are still too close to it. The change is too great. But some of it remains with you, does it not?"

I nodded. It did. There was no great letdown. No harsh awakening to the detested world of everyday. It must have been because I carried over with me enough of the memory to cushion the shock of adjustment. I sat up. I felt fine.

"You have had only a glimpse," he said. "You must go now. But perhaps you will come back?"

"Please," I said.

"Of course. I will call you."

He helped me on with my coat. I went down the stairs and out into the sunlight.

Jones didn't call for days. I hardly left my room, waiting for the phone to ring. Once I walked over toward 45th Street, but I turned back before I got there. Jones had said he'd call me and I didn't want to get him angry with me.

Rollo came over to my place one night. He had some junk left over from scoring and offered me a fix. I didn't want it.

"Still off the stuff?" he asked.

"Off that stuff," I said. "That stuff is nowhere."

"You sound like you're somewhere else. Did The Man make it for you on the yage kick?"

"Yage's over the rainbow," I told him. "Uru is here and now."

"Uru. Is that what Jones serves? Never heard of it. Mind if I shoot a little old-fashioned horse here? I got trouble finding a vein lately. Maybe you'll help me."

He rolled up his sleeve and took out his equipment. He tied a handkerchief around his arm to make the veins stand out and I helped him locate one. I cooked up the stuff and shot it home for him. He cleaned out the needle under the faucet and we sat down and had cigarets.

"So tell me about this uru," Rollo said.

"It's truly the most, man," I said.

But I couldn't go on. Rollo was a lush-worker, a cheap hood. I'd feel self-conscious trying to describe how it was. Telling him would be like dirtying it up. So I generalized.

"It's a real bang," I said. "A speedball with a jet assist. It's gone, brother. It takes you there, but there."

"You sound like a teahead," he said. "Is that what it is, tea?"

So I told him that was about right and he went away feeling superior. He used the white stuff and I was only a viper. So he thought. Let him think what he wanted. I'd been with it; I knew, and that was enough. It was like being one of the elite.

The phone rang and sweat came out in my palms as I picked it up.

It was Jones, asking if I wanted to travel with him again.

Travel. That was a new one. But it certainly described it. I told him yes, trying not to let him know how eager I was. But I had the feeling he understood, even over the phone. And it didn't matter. I didn't have anything to hide from him. He was my friend.

I went over to his place, prepared to travel.

It was the same thing again, to start with. The cigaret in the jade-green holder and lying down on the bed and relaxing.

But this time I seemed to reach the glittering worlds a lot sooner. Then one of the worlds spun closer. It loomed bigger and its surface separated into oceans and continents. Unfamiliar ones.

There was a rushing, roaring sensation as I turned over and over, and then I was walking along a lane in a peaceful countryside, with Jones beside me.

"Do you like it?" he asked, without speaking the words.

My mind answered, "It's beautiful. This isn't our world."

"This is Uru," he said. "It is my world."

Then I noticed that he wasn't dressed the same. Instead of the black suit and the blue shirt and white tie, he was wearing knee-length shorts, blue, topped by a wide belt of metallic-looking leather. He wore a thin circlet of the same material around his head. It held in the center of his forehead a heraldic device, as if it were a mark of rank. Except for sandals he wore nothing else. His body was a light tan.

I noticed then that I was dressed similarly, except that there was no circlet around my head.

We went by a field under cultivation. A few people were among the rows, working easily, chatting and laughing. They waved as we passed. There was a mental exchange of greetings between them and Jones which I also heard.

We walked effortlessly, even uphill. The gravity seemed less than on Earth. The air was clean and invigorating. It was warm but not humid.

A blue-white sun was in the sky. I could look at it without hurting my eyes. It was larger, apparently closer, than Earth's sun, and I thought I could make out markings on it. Were they the same as those on the oval Jones wore on his forehead? I could not be sure.

We were coming to a city, or a big town.

"Urula," Jones told me. "Our capital."

He had been out of communication with me since we passed the people in the field, though I felt that my thoughts were being transmitted to him. It was as if he knew all my thoughts but permitted me to know his only when he wished. Or it might have been that I was so engrossed in my new experience that he had let me enjoy it without interfering, by keeping his thoughts neutral.

"Where is Uru?" I asked then.

He showed me a mind-picture so vast I could not fully comprehend it. He showed me the sky of Earth, with the moon low on the horizon. Then up beyond the moon, so that the Earth was in eclipse behind it. Then farther still, and the mighty sun faded into insignificance among other stars.

I was whirled around in the opposite direction and rushed through space as the stars ran together and melted into a shivering puddle of luminescence which instantly flew apart into stars again, leaving one of them closer than the others. It grew in size, became blue-white, and five planets came into view, circling it in precision, equal distances away.

One of the planets began to swell and again I saw the continents and oceans of Uru and was whisked to its surface, and again I was walking along the lane toward the city.

"It is far, you see," Jones told me.

I nodded, dazed.

The city, Urula, was impeccably clean. It had a feeling of openness about it; it didn't close in and tower over you like Earth cities.

The streets were wide and landscaped with shrubs and trees. The walks were of turf and the lush trimmed grass provided a pleasant cushion for the feet. The buildings were low and rambling, set well back from the walks. There was no lack of room to force them up into the air beyond a story or two.

People passed us occasionally, never in crowds, radiating cordiality as they nodded to Jones and me. Other people lounged idly on benches or on the lawns in front of the buildings. I couldn't tell whether they were homes or business offices, or a combination of both.

I looked in vain for factories, for ugly smokestacks thrusting into the clean sky. Nor were there any automobiles, railroads or machines of any kind to foul the air with their exhausts or rend it with their din.

I asked a mental question and Jones said they had none of these things simply because they weren't needed. If one wanted to go somewhere he walked. There was no exertion and there was never any hurry. As for traveling to another city, there was no need to; one city was exactly like another. Each was self-sufficient and there was no trade among them. If one wished to see a friend in another city, why, the journey was a pleasant one, and since it was a pleasure trip it didn't matter whether the journey took a day or thirty days.

Because there were no factories or railroad yards there were no slums where people lived a marginal existence between the animal and human levels.

We turned off the main street and up a wide path to a building set back under tall shade trees.

"My home," Jones said.

We sat on the broad porch and a servant appeared, carrying delicate bowls on a tray. The bowls, cool to the touch, held a dark liquid that was better than any good thing I had ever drunk, without being in any way recognizable.

I sent a thought of thanks to the servant, an old white-haired man with a lighter skin than Jones', but he did not reciprocate it. For an instant, when the old man was facing me with his back to Jones, I caught a curious expression in his eyes, a combination of warning and beseeching. There was also the beginning of a message, I felt, but instantly it was swept away and Jones' thoughts came.

"You are wondering why we went so far in our star journey—from Uru to Earth."

I had wondered about that earlier, when Jones showed me the mind-picture of the vast rushing through space.

"Yes," I said, and the old servant, his face impassive again, trudged back into the house.

Jones showed me another picture of travels from Uru to the other four worlds of Uru's blue-white sun. I could not make out the type of craft, if a craft was used. The older worlds seemed the same, but death was on them. Man could never live there, Jones showed me, because of poisonous atmosphere, or unstable boiling land, or forbidding ice-locked vastness, or impenetrable fog. Only Uru, of the five, had evolved in a way harmonious to man.

Then I traveled with him farther from Uru's sun to other suns and explored their planets. But they held only desolation and potential death for a colonizer. Again the stars ran together in that glittering display of luminescence that I was allowed to understand now was the effect of crashing through the barrier of hyperspace. Only then did Earth's sun come into view. And then her planets. And then Earth herself.

I felt a foreboding now and tried to communicate it to my companion, but Earth came inevitably closer.

A moment later I was again in Jones' dingy room, lying on his bed with the jade-green cigaret holder in my fingers.

I felt cheated and frustrated.

I tried to take another puff, to return to Uru, but Jones took away the holder.

"I am sorry," he said, "but only so much time is permitted for your visits—unless you decide to join us permanently."

This was new. I hadn't even considered the possibility. I suppose I'd been thinking of these uru smokes as nothing more than pipe dreams—exciting and logical, even consecutive, but still only figments of the poppy ember.

But apparently uru was merely the key that opened the door to the real world for which it was named, a finite and beautiful planet spinning in a vastly distant galaxy at the other side of the spacial barrier. A world that Earthmen would never reach in this lifetime without the invitation and assistance of a native of that world who had developed mental powers beyond our comprehension.

And Jones, not only a native but apparently a noble of Uru, was extending that invitation to me.

Me, a dope addict, temporarily between kicks. Me, a dreg of humanity.

Why?

Jones was following my thoughts, I knew, but he only smiled and said I would have to leave. He would call me again. In the meantime I must consider his invitation. He had not made it frivolously, but had weighed all factors. If I accepted, it would have to be unquestioningly, trusting him as my brother.

And it would be permanent. Once I chose Uru, there would be no returning to Earth.

"Until we meet again," he said.

I walked out into the street, pondering my choice.

My place depressed me.

I poured myself half a tumbler of whiskey and walked around, holding the drink in my hand. I opened the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and looked at my works—the hypo, the eye-dropper and the old spoon, blackened on the bottom, in which I'd cooked so many batches of heroin. Sooner or later I'd go back to it, I knew, even though I kidded myself into thinking I might be off the stuff for good.

Then the old round would begin again. The frantic search for a pusher when my supply ran low. Setting up a meet in some cafeteria or lunch counter to get the stuff. Rushing back to my place, with every stranger looking like a copper ready to tap me. The search in my poor scarred arm for a vein that hadn't withdrawn out of sight. Maybe even the necessity for a messy skin injection. The fleeting relief.

And then the anxiety of no money. A dirty job, possibly washing dishes in some greasy kitchen if the heat was on. Or risking a stint of lush-working in the subway, haunted by copper jitters and five-twenty-nine—five months and twenty-nine days in the workhouse—if they nabbed me "jostling" a drunk.

I couldn't go back to that life. I couldn't—but I would. I always had. You reach a point where you can't change any more. It's too late—you're too old—you don't know anything else—you've got no connections outside the squalid circle of users, pushers, teaheads, queers and petty crooks who are nowhere and never will be anywhere.

It was a limbo, a hell on Earth.

I swallowed my drink in burning gulps.

But Uru was paradise. And through Jones—The Man—the archangel?—I could achieve it. All I had to do was make up my mind.

But why had he chosen me to make the trip with him, past the place where the stars melted together in the speed of our journey through mental space, to the planet that was named for a drug or gave its name to a drug?

Since uru was a drug maybe it was only natural that Jones' first contact would be with users of narcotics. The natives an explorer first meets in a new land are not necessarily people of the highest class. He meets the adventurers, the ones with spirit enough to canoe out to meet his ship.

So with Jones, perhaps. He would meet the others eventually—the normal, respectable people to whom we users were a despised, hunted minority. And when he had met the normal people, and through them Earth's leaders, it was possible he would have no further use for me and my kind. It was more than possible; it stood to reason.

If that was the case I had better grab my chance while I could—while Jones still thought of me as his brother.

He had already bypassed one level of our outcast society—the stratum typified by Rollo, habitual user and cheap crook—to reach me. I didn't have to flatter myself to know I was better than Rollo and his kind. I'd had some education, I avoided crime except when necessary, and I had the will power to quit the stuff at least occasionally.

Was this mere rationalization? I didn't think so. But whatever it was I would do well to accept Jones' offer without further demur and give up Earth for life on Uru. I could start out fresh there, make a clean break with my sordid past, and live the life of serenity and good will he had shown me.

I made my decision.

The telephone rang and I knew before I picked it up that it was Jones calling.

"I know your choice, my brother," he said, "and I am pleased. We will travel immediately."

A great joy surged through me. Here was the Messiah to deliver me from the slavery of my Earthbound existence to the paradise of Uru.

"I'm on my way!" I cried. I shut the door of my squalid room without a backward glance or a moment of regret.

Life was even more beautiful in Urula than I had dared hope. I had my own home and a man-servant. I ate the finest foods, drank choice liquors.

I learned the written language and read the great literature of Uru.

I met the charming, intelligent, nubile women of the society that had adopted me.

I also practiced the Sport of Uru, in which Jones was my teacher. I called him Joro now; that was his real name, and my name had become Boru.

As Boru I was something of a celebrity in my adopted world. When I went to the great gamesward, for the Sport, they cheered and often crowded around to press gifts on me.

Oh, I was well regarded. I had been assimilated. I, Boru. Boru the Fighting Man.

Twice I had engaged in hand-to-hand combat, as Joro's Fighting Man, in the Annual Sport—the wars between the cities. Twice I had fought, and now one contest remained.

I had a long ugly scar on the inside of my right arm. My left foot was prosthetic from the calf down. My right eye was gone; I wore a false one next to the cheekbone that had been restored by a series of grafts. Flesh healed quickly and bone knitted fast in Uru. The Uru doctors could heal anyone who lived.

But they could not heal the dead and there was no quarter in the Sport. I expected none for myself as I had given none to the two men I had killed. Two down and one to go. If I won the third I'd be a noble like Joro, my patron, my fighting days over. If I didn't I'd be dead.

Joro had started me out in the back rank, where the danger was least. But I moved up fast, and fought.

Again I was in the back rank, because of my old wounds—but I knew I'd move up this time, too, though there were two good men ahead of me. Like me they were Joro's men, each of us equipped for the Sport.

The equipment:

Steel-claw appendages on our hands.

Feet shod in hooves, sharpened to razor-edge.

Teeth fitted with fangs.

A diagram explained the pattern of battle better—U for Urula, T for Tara. Us against Them, even as in Madison Square Garden or the San Francisco Cow Palace:

T   T   T   T   T
T   T   T   T   T
T   T   T   T   T
U   U   U   U   U
U   U   U   U   U
U   U   U   U   U

Joro's men were in the file at the extreme right. I, Boru, was in the southeast corner, standing in the crowded arena naked except for armor at my loins and the fearful appendages of hand, foot and mouth.

At last the ceremonial speeches and blessings were over. Joro took his place to our rear, on a high seat, our coach and our mentor. There was a clang of great cymbals and the battle was joined.

I watched tensely as the first man in my file advanced to meet his opponent in the Circle of Death. To their left, in the other four circles, similar battles were taking place, but I had eyes only for the struggle in my own file.

Rans, our lead-off man, was down! Before he could recover, his opponent had slashed his neck with a razored hoof and Rans was dead.

Rans was dragged off and our file moved up, as the other battles continued. Now the man ahead of me, Karn, was in the Circle of Death with Rans' killer. Karn of Karna, whose planet was as far from Uru as my own and who, fleeing Karna's law when Joro found him, had been as glad to come as I had been. And poor dead Rans, from still a third world among the galaxies that Joro had explored to recruit his Fighting Men.

Karn, toe to toe with his tiring opponent, feinted and enticed his man to lunge. Karn sidestepped and his steel claws raked the other from neck to waist. A pivot then, a well-placed kick and Karn alone still lived in the Circle of Death.

The blood had sickened me a little. I turned to Joro, sitting high behind me, his glance darting from one circle to another. Joro's face reflected his swiftly-changing emotions. He was fighting five battles at once, vicariously, directing his men by concentration of will. His thoughts flicked to mine for an instant.

Courage, Boru! The game goes well!

And so it did. There was a roar from the crowd as Karn won again. Now only one of the enemy remained in our file. When he was disposed of our job would be done for another year—and mine forever.

But Karn was weary and his opponent fresh. Clumsily Karn tried a slash at the other's eyes. The other dodged and struck, his fanged teeth closing on Karn's wrist. A wrench, and Karn stood dazed, his arm hanging loose while blood gushed over his steel claws. Then a quick horrible thrust and Karn was down, dying slowly.

Another great roar came from the crowd and I saw that the battles in the other files had ended. Joro's men had won two and lost two. It was in my file that the Sport would be decided. It was no longer us against them. It was the most primitive of all contests—him or me.

I had a moment to look out across the gamesward as they removed poor lifeless Karn. Festive pennants flew. The blue-white sun was high, serene in a cloudless sky. The field was green and soothing, except in the blood-stained Circles of Death.

In two of the circles stood Joro's men, proud in victory. In two others stood victorious men of Tara. In the fifth stood the man who had killed Karn—the man I must kill if I was to live.

The crowd was in a frenzy, the blood lust on them now. I understood for the first time the purpose of the Sport. It was a purge of emotion.

Once a year the thousands gathered in the cities and satisfied their primitive instincts. They were more than spectators: they were vicarious participants in each battle. Their telepathy identified them completely with the Fighting Men of their city.

Their empathy was such that they felt every blow, exulted in animal passion when their fighter retaliated and drew blood. In the course of an afternoon all their base instincts were satisfied. They knew violence, pain, triumph, death.

It was an orgy of absolution that ended with a maximum of fifteen deaths a year, instead of the thousands or hundreds of thousands that would occur on the battlefields if they themselves fought.

It was a solution to war, this Annual Sport. Only then did I realize it fully. Besides purging the emotions, it was a way of settling disputes that were matters of honor transcending the courts. Once a year the disputes were settled on the gamesward, the miniature battleground, a concentration of blood and death that permitted them to avoid the greater vulgarity of war.

And I was part of their mass catharsis, one of the hired instruments of their annual exorcism. For an instant I saw the tiers of humanity as a great analyst's couch, and the gamesward as the unlocked unconscious where ugly passion was set free.

This fancy passed and I found myself staring at a woman in a box at the edge of the field near me. Her face was contorted and almost unrecognizable as that of a charming hostess whose guest I twice had been—and whose guest I would be tonight at a fashionable, dignified reception if I lived. Fiendish delight now twisted her usually serene features and I had a quick flash of her thoughts projected into mine, urging me to kill the enemy, kill, kill, and in doing so to rend his body most abominably.

But then the great cymbals clashed and her face receded to a blur in the crowd. It was time for me to kill or be killed.

I strode forward confidently, giving no sign that one of my legs was false. I held my head high and tilted slightly to the right so that my good left eye could do part of the work of its missing fellow.

At the edge of the Circle of Death I stopped and bowed stiffly to my opponent from Tara. I studied him as he returned my bow. I had never seen him fight and didn't know if any of his limbs were false, like mine.

But then I knew. The left forearm of the man of Tara was prosthetic and it would be useless to try to draw blood from it. I knew because Joro was in my mind now, directing my thoughts, just as the noble from Tara was in the mind of my opponent, directing his. Now Joro would live every blow, feel the pain of wounds, smell the blood and sweat and experience the exhilaration of battle, even as I. But if I lost I would die, not Joro. He would withdraw and live to fight another time, in another hired body.

Yet while he guided and directed me he would have the same urgency to live, the same fear of death.

I stepped into the circle now and there was an animal roar from the crowd. Tara's man did a vicious little dance step and kicked. As I leaped aside his left hand slashed at my face. I dodged the blow and blocked the right that followed it. There was a tinkle of steel on steel as our fingers met.

We circled then, each of us seeking a weakness in the other. I had a glimpse of Joro, tense in concentration at the edge of his high seat. It was odd to see him at a distance and at the same time to know he was inside me, fighting my fight.

I felt the power of his mind and doubled over to avoid a slash that had been aimed at my eye. Then, with my opponent off balance, Joro directed a blow at his shoulder. I felt my claws dig into the man's flesh and he went down on one knee. Quickly I kicked and saw my steel hoof slice his ear so that it dangled by a thread of flesh. Before I could follow through for the kill Tara's man was up with a thrust that sought to disembowel me. I stepped back in time.

But I was shaken. His sharp claws had brushed my belly. An inch more and I would have been bleeding my life out, red on the green of the gamesward. I felt nauseated. The noise of the crowd was like the surf, rolling in over me, but dirty, filled with garbage.

Barbarians! I thought.

Suddenly I didn't want to win. I didn't want to die, either, but the price for that was to kill this other man with whom I had no quarrel.

He was facing me again, his ear hanging down grotesquely, and throwing a series of orthodox feints with his left to set me up for a right cross. He had a strange expression on his contorted face.

"... television," I heard him grunt.

It was clearly that word—that Earth-word. I had to give him a word he'd recognize in turn as non-Uru.

"What channel?" I said. "What channel was that on?"

He looked at me in surprise.

"Any channel that had one," he said. "I was telling myself how I used to scream for blood when I watched fights on television. Crazy. Who the hell are you?"

I swung a slow-motion left that missed by eight inches. He sent out an uppercut that missed by as much.

"New York," I said. "I wish I was back."

"Me too, pal," he said. "Chicago was never like this."

"Rome was, though," I said, doing fancy footwork and throwing punches at the air. "And one of us is going to be carried out."

"I was looking for yage on South State Street." He weaved and shadow-boxed, not touching me.

"And they gave you uru. The big fix. We're fixed, all right."

"It's the least, Dad," he said. "Believe me."

There was a voice inside my skull. "Boru!" it said. It was Joro's, or Jones's.

"The Man is complaining," I said to Chicago. "The Man named Jones, an uru pusher. Thinks we're not giving the customers their money's worth." I crouched and tapped him lightly on the chest.

"Bleed on the bleeding customers," he said, nudging me gently on the shoulder. "English expression."

"Boru!" the voice in my skull said again. "Barry! What has happened? Fight, man, for the honor of Urula!"

"He wants me to kill you," I told Chicago. "But maybe he can't make me." I had thought Jones was in complete control.

"Mine, too," Chicago said. "Pusher name of Robinson. He's popping his cork but I think I can stand him off." I got a light punch in the ribs and retaliated with a caress to the jaw.

"Sorry about the ear," I said.

"Forget it. Where do we go from here? We can't waltz forever."

The crowd was catching on. I'd heard boos like that in the Garden and Ebbets Field. They must have known by now that the big fight was a fake and that the boys in the ring were a couple of bums anxious to get to the showers.

The crowd might not have known exactly what was up but Chicago's manager and mine did. I could feel Jones probing around in my mind, trying to re-establish control and rekindle the blood lust. But apparently he had no power to direct my actions except when I cooperated. He could still read my mind and communicate with it. He could cajole, threaten and curse, but he couldn't make me kill Chicago.

Jones came down from his high seat and started toward me. I stepped back to the edge of the circle and Chicago did the same. His man was also on the way over. The crowd was having a fit.

Chicago winked at me. "I guess it's a draw. The customers are going to start tearing up the seats."

Joro-Jones and his opposite number met near the circle and bowed stiffly to each other. They said nothing, but from the expressions on their faces I gathered that they were having a rip-roaring telepathic conversation. Finally they bowed again and Jones took my elbow to lead me back to the sidelines.

"So long, Chicago," I called. "Good luck."

"Thanks," he said. "Same to you. See you around, maybe."

One of the officials was trying to make an announcement to the outraged crowd as Jones and I went under the stands to the dressing room.

Sorrow and shame seemed to be Jones's chief emotions as he helped me off with my steel claws and the other lethal paraphernalia.

"I suppose this is worse than if I got killed," I said.

"Infinitely," he said. "Never before has cowardice besmirched the Sport."

"You know it wasn't cowardice," I told him. "Your honor would have been intact if you hadn't run in one of my own people to the slaughter. I'd always done your dirty work before."

"You knew the rules," he said sadly. "The traditions, the hazards, the rewards. You accepted them. But now, by having rejected them, you've put yourself in limbo. You are no longer Boru the Fighting Man. You can never achieve the nobility that your prowess could have brought you. Now you are Barry the Alien, and there is no place in our world for you."

"Then I'm fired?" I asked.

"A man in disgrace should be less facetious. There should be a penalty for what you have done, but it was unprecedented. There is only one thing to do. You must be deported."

"To Earth?" All at once this was what I wanted.

"Yes," he said. "To the ugly planet from which you came. It is no more than you deserve. I sorrow that you were not worthy of us."

I felt like making a speech then, about my land and my people. About the Earth being a thousand Earths—a million—two billion—meaning a different thing to every individual whose home it was. How Jones, with his uru drug, roaming the underworld of one city, had naturally seen only the dregs of its society—the users and pushers, the grifters and dreamers, the seekers after the big deal, the short cut, the unearned reward, the big fix. He hadn't seen the Earth I'd known once, the clean and straight world where you earned your way with dignity and integrity....

I didn't make the speech. I didn't have to, of course, because he read it all in my mind. I doubt if it meant anything to him.

"Here," he said.

He handed me a bowl of pungent green liquid. I didn't ask what it was. It was bitter and sickeningly warm but I drank every last drop. Jones watched me sadly. For just a moment I felt ashamed for having let him down.

Then the whirling rushing took me up and flung me into space and the stars ran together as before.

I suppose Earth is the same as it ever was. Yet it seems to me now to be an infinitely better place than I remembered.

Of course my viewpoint is different. Though I see out of only one eye now, I see much more. It is possible to look beyond the petty circle of addicts that had been my world. I am ashamed that I once was one of those poor deluded creatures, the cravers of the quick kick and the brief relief. They are noplace, going nowhere.

They still talk of yage, the unreachable pie in their murky sky. They want to be up there, out and away, anywhere but here. They are fools. Uru taught me that. There is no real escape from here and now. Therefore that is the thing to embrace. The inner propinquity of the here, the time-extended everlastingness of the now.

Crazy, Jack?

No. I've gone scientific. I've gone back along the dreamy trail and found the place where I took the wrong fork. I'd followed that fork a little way but then turned back without giving it a fair shake.

Peyote's what I'm talking about, friend. The thing Jones ran down. Mescalin. That's right, back to the Indians.

Only it's gone respectable since I've been away. They don't call it a fix, big or otherwise. Not the serious group of investigators I work with. It's called the Huxley effect.

It's the study of isness, if you know what I mean; the hereness and nowness that is the all of everywhere within. It's the slowing of time's rush to a standstill so you can spend a century studying the intricate truth-in-beauty of a detail in the wallpaper or the eloquent message of a rose petal.

And if that's good enough for Aldous, Jack, it's good enough for me.

I look and describe, and my one eye becomes a thousand. I talk and they tape-record. They publish and compare the perceptions with those of other subjects in other groups.

Once I saw the blue-white sun of Uru in a delft vase. This excited them because there had been a similar perception by a subject in Chicago. It excited me too. I'm glad he got back all right.

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Table of Contents

- The Big Fix!

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE