PLAYERS AT THE GAME OF PEOPLE by John Brunner Read online

  PLAYERS AT THE GAME OF PEOPLE

  John Brunner

  The air was literally filthy. Godwin Harpinshield passed his tongue across his lips and it reported to his teeth and palate grit: dust from the daytime air raid which had not yet settled. And now, again, already, sirens were caterwauling under a darkling summer sky.

  There was a slight ache in his right leg, but it was not unbearable. Rather, it was almost pleasant, indicative of a healing wound. He had on too many clothes for such warm weather; his feet sweated in tightly laced black shoes, while on his head was a cap with a stiff peak. He was, to be precise, wearing an RAF officer’s uniform with—he glanced at the cuffs—flight lieutenant’s badges of rank. On his left breast were pilot’s wings. His left palm and fingers were sticky, holding a pair of obligatory brown leather gloves. Smoke made his eyes and nose tingle, but a breeze was disturbing the still air as the sun went down.

  Not that it could be seen from here, for he stood between double ranks of tenement houses that had known better days, faced partly with brick, partly with blue and yellow tile. Their windows were taped with brown adhesive paper and their doorways were labyrinthed with high walls of khaki sandbags. Here and there bites had been crunched out of their upper stories, as though a crazy aerial dog had clamped enormous jaws on what it mistook for food, then spat out disgusting rubble on the roadway. Prompted by the sirens, people could be seen turning lights off and drawing thick blackout curtains. None of the streetlamps was on.

  Picking its way among piles of débris, here came a lumbering double-decker bus with its headlights masked. He stood at a bus stop, a temporary post on a street too narrow for public transport to use under normal circumstances, even though not a single car or van was to be seen parked along it. The reason for the detour was made plain by signs at the street’s two ends: DANGER—BOMB DAMAGE—NO RIGHT / NO LEFT TURN.

  Respectively.

  A resigned voice said, “Oh, damn. Just when a Number Eight finally turns up.”

  There were others waiting at the bus stop: a tired elderly couple, two teenage girls with teeth like discolored tombstones.

  Overhead a night fighter left a faint straight vapor trail from west to east. A searchlight beam sprang up and swiveled in great jerky arcs. At one point in its traverse it touched the silvery side of a barrage balloon, creating a fragment of artificial moon. Behind the sirens a drone began, the sound of several hundred bombers.

  One of the girls said, “They’re coming back, then,” as flatly as though making a comment about the weather.

  Almost in the same second there were soft crumping explosions: the reports of ack-ack shells far to the east, from ground batteries in Kent and along the Medway. The bus halted, but not to pick up passengers, only to discharge those it had. The driver stopped his engine and scrambled to the ground, cursing. Not yet middle-aged, he looked old. His flesh was pulpy, testimony to years of a diet based on bread and marge and bacon.

  Even as the passengers descended, grousing but not objecting, half a dozen boys and elderly men appeared from nearby doorways, donning tin hats marked fore and aft with the letters ARP, standing for “air raid precautions.” The same acronym could be seen on numerous posters giving advice about what to do when the Luftwaffe struck at London. In an area where most people could scarcely read their own names, all those lines of close black print were clearly fruitless. The people milled about like frightened ants as they spilled into the roadway.

  The ARP wardens did their amateur best, shouting through cupped hands that in the next street, out of sight but there all the same, a basement had been designated as an official shelter. But moving that way meant heading east, toward and not away from the noise of gunfire and by now probably the first salvos of bombs, and they were overwhelmed as the other occupants of the buildings came flooding forth. At first a trickle, then a spate of families with small children, led by women because almost all active men had already gone to war, rushed headlong toward the more credible sanctuary of a tube station a few hundred yards to the west.

  Knowing when they were beaten, the wardens tried at least to keep the fugitives orderly. But the children, roused from bed and hastened into the street in nightclothes or tattered underwear, were frightened. They cried. Some of them screamed. Urgency threatened to turn into panic. The wardens shouted, but could not make the crowd obey. There was too much noise; there was the wail of sirens like banshees riding an invisible storm; there were ever more explosions, some of which by now must be from bombs dropped on Port of London, because the racket of enemy aircraft was almost deafening—well over a hundred in this wave alone, each with a pair of thousand-horsepower engines; also there were shrill police whistles and the bells of fire engines and ambulances and the grinding slump as structures of brick and tile and concrete were laid low by the devastating onslaught.

  Abruptly a vast redness lit the eastern sky. A heartbeat afterward there followed a puff of hot sound. Something very burnable had been hit: oil, wax, maybe even munitions. The people’s cries and fears redoubled as they arrived at the tube station and realized how narrow the entry was, how steep the stairs beyond.

  At least the station staff were having the grace not to insist on the legal penny-halfpenny fare from every adult, though they were in duty bound to do so. Some duties, their humanity advised, must take precedence over what was officially laid down. These people, Godwin thought with a glow of pride, could never staff extermination camps…

  But mere goodwill was not enough. Here was a crowd on the point of becoming a leaderless mob. Suppose a child tripped and was trampled to death!

  Godwin took mental stock of his condition. The pain in his leg indicated one potential weakness, for it came from a bullet wound. But it was nearly healed. In contrast, the fact that he wore this of all uniforms would stand in good stead. Much publicity had made the world familiar with such a shade of gray-blue, and with RAF wings… even though he was already being looked at resentfully by some, as though his presence—that of a warrior armed against the foe—might conjure down a doom on this street rather than another.

  Alternatively: what’s he doing here instead of flying his plane and killing Jerries?

  Then the thrill of a right decision reached ran through his spare frame.

  A few paces ahead of him was a woman wearing a gray coat over a nightdress, clutching a baby and trying to keep track of three little girls, all blond, all thin, all peaky from the undernourishment which had beset this nation during the Depression and which careful rationing of food had not yet rectified. Aged perhaps three, five, and seven, they gazed about them in dumb and wide-eyed wonder, as though fancying they were still in dreamland, where parents’ orders did not have to be attended to.

  The ground shook. Flakes of brick and mortar shivered from the façades of nearby buildings. Also the eastern sky was aflame as more and more incendiary bombs planted the seeds of inferno across the city.

  Already the people converging on the station entrance were elbowing each other and shouting insults. In a minute there might be a fight. Wildfire was among the ancientest of terror-symbols; what to take as a symbol of calm?

  That wizened three-year-old: she would do perfectly. With a stride and a wince and a stride Godwin was beside her, sweeping her into his arms as though he were her father.

  “Come on now, you men!” he barked in his most parade-ground tone. There were some men helping to jam the stairs, and they were old enough to recall the other war. “Women and children first! Here, make sure these little girls are safe!” And he disposed of his own load—not unthankfully, for her
hair and her very clothes were greasy to his touch—to the tallest man within reach on a lower step, and turned to pick up her sister.

  It worked. The panic halted. They handed the children over their heads at first—and some giggled and squealed, but at least they weren’t screaming in terror—and the dense press of people lessened as those below dispersed along the platforms, soothing the youngsters. In a moment or two it was possible for women to follow, the men standing aside to let them through. Backs straightened. There were smiles, especially from the wardens overjoyed at this helpful intrusion on the part of a member of the officer class, this renewed proof that it was always safe to rely on Squire.

  Later, of course, nightly descents into the bowels of London would become commonplace, but now it was weird and incredible that one should lie on hard, cold platforms among neighbors who until today were strangers. The Germans had only just shifted their attention from airfields to cities; the name “Battle of Britain” was freshly coined. It was a beautiful summer and should never have been despoiled by those clouds of smoke, those pillars of rising dust.

  Certain policemen were hovering, who had orders from Whitehall to refuse admission to the tubes during a raid. They were embarrassed, and shuffled their feet, and made no move to comply with their instructions. As soon as they had an excuse to move off, like the shrill of ambulance bells, they seized it gratefully and disappeared.

  “Thanks very much, sir,” said a warden from under the shadowing brim of his helmet. “We needed somebody to take charge.” He moved slightly to let latecomers go by; now there was a steady, controlled, regular flow descending the stairs, and someone was trying to start a singsong with “Roll Out the Barrel.”

  “Last night,” he added, “my old woman fell down and got ‘er arm broke. Wouldn’t ‘ave been too much worse off if Jerry’d got ‘er,” he appended with a wry attempt at humor. “You from around ‘ere, are you, sir?”

  “My parents were,” Godwin said, not looking at him. “I’m on convalescent leave, you see. Came to visit them today. But when I got there… Ruins. Rubble.” He gave a shrug.

  “Bastards, aren’t they?” the warden said with enormous feeling. “Ruddy bastards! Well, I think we can go down now and join the others.”

  But his last word was cut short even as he and Godwin made to do so.

  A salvo of bombs was being shed by an aircraft driven off the course of the main raid, perhaps evading a searchlight—now a dozen were weaving back and forth overhead—or chased by one of the pitifully few night fighters the RAF could muster to zero in on the attackers as darkness thickened. Jettisoned or aimed, those bombs were doing damage. The noise was like the crushing sound of a giant’s boots as he marched over the fragile, contemptible creations of humanity.

  “Down!” Godwin yelled, and hurled himself flat on the pavement, bringing the warden with him.

  A vast detonation rent the air, and even before their tortured eardrums recovered from the blast, their exposed skins were peppered with tiny fragments of masonry. That one had struck within fifty yards or so, probably in the street the fleeing crowd had left mere minutes before.

  And the rumble of collapsing walls was followed by a scream.

  “Greer! Greer! Where’s my Greer?”

  Here, fighting her way back up the staircase without her baby, was the mother of the family Godwin had singled out. She clutched at his arm, whimpering.

  “Greer, my oldest!” she babbled. “Myrna’s there and Bette’s there and Merle’s there—but where’s my Greer? Where’s my oldest? I did wake her up, I swear I did, but she was in the other room and—ohhh!”

  Her coherent words dissolved into sobbing.

  Simultaneously, a sound of crunching mixed with the hiss of a gas main taking fire indicated that a block of flats just out of sight was being destroyed: maybe hers.

  “I’ll find her for you,” Godwin promised. He spun on his heel, the ache from his leg wound instantly forgettable.

  “Stop! Stop!” shouted the warden, who was portly and middle-aged and exempted from military service. After a pause to decide whether he might safely so address an officer, he added, “You bloody fool!”

  But Godwin was already rounding the corner. There was nothing for it but to set out after him, at a waddling run.

  The sky glowed redder and the air grew dirtier and the stench blew fouler and there were more and more horrible, hideous, gut-wrenching crump-crump-crump sounds as the metal birds overhead shat their loads of ruin on what had once been the richest city of the planet.

  Godwin’s thin leather shoe-soles reported every lump and bump of the rubble-strewn road. Also his trousers were of a coarse emergency material and rubbed his calves and he had dropped his gloves somewhere on the way and his underpants chafed his crotch and his silly stiff-peaked cap kept trying to fall off, although he managed to keep it in position with reflex tosses of his head until he was back in the street where the temporary bus stop stood. There he lost it as he stumbled over an unseen block of debris that did his injured leg no good at all.

  Still, he was able to pull himself upright and survey the scene.

  The bomb had fallen, not on the tenement from which the family with film stars’ names had come pouring out (what would the baby be called, who wearing only a vest was obviously a boy? Cary? Gary? Van?), but straight through the roof of the next building but one, and had exploded at basement level. Walls which had been upright canted insanely around him, uttering creaks and showers of dust. Taking a single step seemed like a terrifying commitment, not solely because glass and brickwork crunched at every move, reminding him of the image of the trampling giant (but the aircraft were swerving away, lightened and quickened by the disposal of their bomb loads), but because those tall façades of masonry had been rendered precarious, the element of choice removed from them in favor of something random, something hazardous, something impervious to reason and to prayer…

  Godwin had never been so exhilarated in his life.

  One wall in particular was clearly about to collapse: the frontage of the building where (if she still lived) little Greer must be hiding. Apart from having shed all its glazing, it was rayed by huge irregularly slanting cracks, springing from door- and window-corners. It was dark; the darkness stank; the air was dry and dried out the mouth, the gullet, the guts of Godwin Harpinshield so that like a desiccated sketch for a reed pipe he sang unbearable chants of delicious agony to the basso continuo of the falling bombs and the rising shells and the tormented city.

  Transfixed by the experience, he was a collected butterfly on the stark, bare mounting board of time.

  A flare, or a flash from reflected searchlights, lent a gleam of whiteness to the world. Abruptly he saw a child clearly in the maw of the sandbagged entry: skeletally thin limbs poking out from a cotton nightdress much too small for her, peaked on her rib-ridged chest by fist like breasts achieving the status of a nipple/knuckle, an O-wide mouth and O-wide eyes, obviously screaming… but the sound was drowned out by other and more awful noise. Now the building adjacent was a light from basement to attic and the flames created a blowtorch roar, the hiss of a dragon closing on his virgin prey. So much oxygen was being sucked from the air, it was growing hard to breathe.

  Calm, Godwin assessed his chances, surveying the piles of rubble. The odds were bad but not prohibitive. Decision reached, he darted forward with the erratic, jinking run of a rugby three-quarter, treating the obstacles as though they were only opposing players. And the wall to the left, and then the wall to the right, began to buckle, dislodging bricks clunk, clunk.

  “Stop!” howled the warden following Godwin. And, invoking the most powerful charm he knew: “Stop, sir!”

  Godwin paid no heed. His leg was hurting worse at every step, but it would last long enough. Greer rushed toward him. He seized her in both arms, spun around and fled back the way he had come, carrying her as lightly as a mere football. Only twenty yards to the corner… ten…

  The shock of y
et another bomb, falling a street or so away, was too much for the wall of the burning tenement. It opened brick-dribbling jaws at first-floor level, sliding, grinding, settling in a torrent of sparks, a wave of flames.

  “Hurry!” the warden screamed, and Godwin lunged forward as though hurling his body across a goal line, the child thrust out before him at full stretch. He was not quite fast enough to save himself. A chunk of masonry hit him on the right arm, and he heard as much as felt the bones snap. But before pain wiped away consciousness he was able to register that he had saved the little girl, who could, he now realized, be no older than ten. She was staring at him by the flame light with huge, dark, somehow hungry eyes, as though to eat the very image of her rescuer.

  She was there also, with her mother and sisters and baby brother, in the crowd that lined the pavement to watch heroes arriving for the following week’s royal investiture. The high iron railings before the palace yard had been taken away to build fighters, but loyal citizens would not have dreamed of venturing uninvited into the grounds.

  It was curious, Godwin thought as he marched smartly forward at the calling of his name and gave an awkward salute with his left arm because the right was in a sling—it was curious and also somehow a little disappointing that this king was not majestically tall as children would have wished, but only of average height, and that his queen should be of such a comfortable housewifely plumpness… But it was a moment to be treasured forever when those thin, uncertain fingers lifted the George Medal—named after a saint, and himself—from the red velvet cushion on which it was proffered by an equerry and pinned it below the wings which he himself did not display, even though he wore the uniform of a Marshal of the Royal Air Force.

  “Congratulations, Squadron Leader,” he said. The promotion had been gazetted while Godwin lay in the hospital. “By the way, yours is an unusual name. Irish, one presumes?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” A little dryly, a little deprecatingly. “I’ve always been told—excuse me—we were descended from the High Kings of Erin.”