THE BIG FLASH

by Norman Spinrad

Nebula 1969 Nominee Novelette

Proofed By MadMaxAU

T minus 200 days … and counting …

They came on freaky for my taste-but that’s the name of the game: freaky means a draw in the rock business. And if the Mandala was going to survive in LA, competing with a network-owned joint like The American Dream, I’d just have to hold my nose and out-freak the opposition. So after I had dug the Four Horsemen for about an hour, I took them into my office to talk turkey.

I sat down behind my Salvation Army desk (the Mandala is the world’s most expensive shoestring operation) and the Horsemen sat down on the bridge chairs sequentially, establishing the group’s pecking order.

First the head honcho, lead guitar and singer, Stony Clarke-blond shoulder-length hair, eyes like something in a morgue when he took off his steel-rimmed shades, a reputation as a heavy acid-head and the look of a speed-freak behind it. Then Hair, the drummer, dressed like a Hell’s Angel, swastikas and all, a junkie, with fanatic eyes that were a little too close together, making me wonder whether he wore swastikas because he grooved behind the Angel thing or made like an Angel because it let him groove behind the swastika in public. Number three was a cat who called himself Super Spade and wasn’t kidding-he wore earrings, natural hair, a Stokely Carmichael sweatshirt, and on a thong around his neck a shrunken head that had been whitened with liquid shoe polish. He was the utility infielder: sitar, bass, organ, flute, whatever. Number four, who called himself Mr. Jones, was about the creepiest cat I had ever seen in a rock group, and that is saying something. He was their visuals, synthesizer and electronics man. He was at least forty, wore Early Hippy clothes that looked like they had been made by Sy Devore, and was rumored to be some kind of Rand Corporation dropout. There’s no business like show business.

“Okay, boys,” I said, “you’re strange, but you’re my kind of strange. Where you worked before?”

“We ain’t, baby,” Clarke said. “We’re the New Thing. I’ve been dealing crystal and acid in the Haight.

Hair was drummer for some plastic group in New York. The Super Spade claims it’s the reincarnation of Bird and it don’t pay to argue. Mr. Jones, he don’t talk too much. Maybe he’s a Martian. We just started putting our thing together.”

One thing about this business, the groups that don’t have square managers, you can get cheap. They talk too much.

“Groovy,” I said. “I’m happy to give you guys your start. Nobody knows you, but I think you got something going. So I’ll take a chance and give you a week’s booking. One A.M. to closing, which is two, Tuesday through Sunday, four hundred a week.”

“Are you Jewish?” asked Hair.

“What?”

“Cool it,” Clarke ordered. Hair cooled it. “What it means,” Clarke told me, “is that four hundred sounds like pretty light bread.”

“We don’t sign if there’s an option clause,” Mr. Jones said.

“The Jones-thing has a good point,” Clarke said. “We do the first week for four hundred, but after that it’s a whole new scene, dig?”

I didn’t feature that. If they hit it big, I could end up not being able to afford them. But on the other hand $400 was light bread, and I needed a cheap closing act pretty bad.

“Okay,” I said. “But a verbal agreement that I get first crack at you when you finish the gig.”

“Word of honor,” said Stony Clarke.

That’s this business-the word of honor of an ex-dealer and speed-freak.

T minus 199 days … and counting …

Being unconcerned with ends, the military mind can be easily manipulated, easily controlled, and easily confused. Ends are defined as those goals set by civilian authority. Ends are the con-ceded province of civilians; means are the province of the military, whose duty it is to achieve the ends set for it by the most advantageous application of the means at its command.

Thus the confusion over the war in Asia among my uniformed clients at the Pentagon. The end has been duly set: eradication of the guerrillas. But the civilians have overstepped their bounds and meddled in means. The Generals regard this as unfair, a breach of contract, as it were. The Generals (or the faction among them most inclined to paranoia) are beginning to see the conduct of the war, the political limitation on means, as a ploy of the civilians for perform-ing a putsch against their time-honored prerogatives.

This aspect of the situation would bode ill for the country, were it not for the fact that the growing paranoia among the Generals has enabled me to manipulate them into presenting both my scenarios to the President. The President has authorized implementation of the major scenario, provided that the minor scenario is successful in properly molding public opinion.

My major scenario is simple and direct. Knowing that the poor flying weather makes our conventional airpower, with its dependency on relative accuracy, ineffectual, the enemy has fallen into the pattern of grouping his forces into larger units and launching punishing annual offensives during the monsoon season.

However, these larger units are highly vulnerable to tactical nuclear weapons, which do not depend upon accuracy for effect. Secure in the knowledge that domestic political considerations preclude the use of nuclear weapons, the enemy will once again form into division-sized units or larger during the next monsoon season. A parsimoni-ous use of tactical nuclear weapons, even as few as twenty 100 kiloton bombs, employed simultaneously and in an advantageous pattern, will destroy a minimum of 200,000

enemy troops, or nearly two-thirds of his total force, in a twenty-four hour period. The blow will be crushing.

The minor scenario, upon whose success the implementation of the major scenario depends, is far more sophisticated, due to its subtler goal: public acceptance of, or, optimally, even public clamor for, the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The task is difficult, but my scenario is quite sound, if somewhat exotic, and with the full, if to-some-extent-clandestine support of the upper military hierarchy, certain civil government circles and the decision-makers in key aerospace corporations, the means now at my command would seem adequate. The risks, while statistically significant, do not exceed an acceptable level.

T minus 189 days … and counting …

The way I see it, the network deserved the shafting I gave them. They shafted me, didn’t they? Four successful series I produce for those bastards, and two bomb out after thirteen weeks and they send me to the salt mines! A discotheque, can you imagine they make me producer at a lousy discotheque! A remittance man they make me, those schlockmeisters. Oh, those schnorrers made the American Dream sound like a kosher deal-20% of the net, they say. And you got access to all our sets and contract players, it’ll make you a rich man, Herm. And like a yuk, I sign, being broke at the time, without reading the fine print. I should know they’ve set up the American Dream as a tax loss? I should know that I’ve gotta use their lousy sets and stiff contract players and have it written off against my gross? I should know their shtick is to run the American Dream at a loss and then do a network TV show out of the joint from which I don’t see a penny? So I end up running the place for them at a paper loss, living on salary, while the network rakes it in off the TV show that I end up paying for out of my end.

Don’t bums like that deserve to be shafted? It isn’t enough they use me as a tax loss patsy, they gotta tell me who to book! “Go sign the Four Horsemen, the group that’s packing them in at the Mandala,” they say. “We want them on A Night With The American Dream. They’re hot.”

“Yeah, they’re hot,” I say, “which means they’ll cost a mint, I can’t afford it.”

They show me more fine print-next time I read the contract with a microscope. I gotta book whoever they tell me to and I gotta absorb the cost on my books! It’s enough to make a Litvak turn anti-Semite.

So I had to go to the Mandala to sign up these hippies. I made sure I didn’t get there till 12:30 so I wouldn’t have to stay in that nuthouse any longer than necessary. Such a dive! What Bernstein did was take a bankrupt Hollywood-Hollywood club on the Strip, knock down all the interior walls and put up this monster tent inside the shell. Just thin white screening over two-by-fours. Real shlock. Outside the tent, he’s got projectors, lights, speakers, all the electronic mumbo-jumbo, and inside is like being surrounded by movie screens. Just the tent and the bare floor, not even a real stage, just a platform on wheels they shlepp in and out of the tent when they change groups.

So you can imagine he doesn’t draw exactly a class crowd. Not with the American Dream up the street being run as a network tax loss. What they get is the smelly hard-core hippies I don’t let in the door and the kind of j.d. high-school kids that think it’s smart to hang around putzes like that. A lot of dope-pushing goes on. The cops don’t like the place and the rousts draw professional trou-blemakers.

A real den of iniquity-I felt like I was walking onto a Casbah set. The last group had gone off and the Horsemen hadn’t come on yet, so what you had was this crazy tent filled with hippies, half of them on acid or pot or amphetamine or for all I know Ajax, high-school would-be hippies, also mostly stoned and getting ugly, and a few crazy schwartzers locking to fight cops. All of them standing around waiting for something to happen, and about ready to make it happen. I stood near the door, just in case. As they say; “the vibes were making me uptight.”

All of a sudden the house lights go out and it’s black as a network executive’s heart. I hold my hand on my wallet-in this crowd, tell me there are no pickpockets. Just the pitch black and dead silence for what, ten beats, and then I start feeling something, I don’t know, like something crawling along my bones, but I know it’s some kind of subsonic effect and not my imagination, because all the hippies are standing still and you don’t hear a sound.

Then from monster speakers so loud you feel it in your teeth, a heartbeat, but heavy, slow, half-time like maybe a whale’s heart. The thing crawling along my bones seems to be synchronized with the heartbeat and I feel almost like I am that big dumb heart beating there in the darkness.

Then a dark red spot-so faint it’s almost infrared-hits the stage which they have wheeled out. On the stage are four uglies in crazy black robes-you know, like the Grim Reaper wears-with that ugly red light all over them like blood. Creepy. Boom-ba-boom. Boom-ba-boom. The heartbeat still going, still that subsonic bone-crawl and the hippies are staring at the Four Horsemen like mes-merized chickens.

The bass player, a regular jungle-bunny, picks up the rhythm of the heartbeat. Dum-da-dum.

Dum-da-dum, The drummer beats it out with earsplitting rim-shots. Then the electric guitar, tuned like a strangling cat, makes with horrible heavy chords. Whang-ka-whang. Whang-ka-whang.

It’s just awful, I feel it in my guts, my bones; my eardrums are just like some great big throbbing vein.

Everybody is swaying to it, I’m swaying to it. Boom-ba-boom. Boom-ba-boom.

Then the guitarist starts to chant in rhythm with the heartbeat, in a hoarse, shrill voice like somebody dying: ” The big flash … The big flash . . .”

And the guy at the visuals console diddles around and rings of light start to climb the walls of the tent, blue at the bottom becoming green as they get higher, then yellow, orange and finally as they become a circle on the ceiling, eye-killing neon-red. Each circle takes exactly one heartbeat to climb the walls.

Boy, what an awful feeling! Like I was a tube of toothpaste being squeezed in rhythm till the top of my head felt like it was gonna squirt up with those circles of light through the ceiling.

And then they start to speed it up gradually. The same heartbeat, the same rim-shots, same chords, same circles of light, same” The big flash … The big flash …” same bass, same subsonic bone-crawl, but just a little faster… . Then faster! Faster!

Thought I would die! Knew I would die! Heart beating like a lunatic. Rim-shots like a machine gun.

Circles of light sucking me up the walls, into the red neon hole.

Oh, incredible! Over and over faster faster till the voice was a scream and the heartbeat a boom and the rim-shots a whine and the guitar howled feedback and my bones were jumping out of my body-Every spot in the place came on and I went blind from the sudden light-An awful explosion-sound came over every speaker, so loud it rocked me on my feet-I felt myself squirting out of the top of my head and loved it.

Then:

The explosion became a rumble—

The light seemed to run together into a circle on the ceiling, leaving everything else black.

And the circle became a fireball.

The fireball became a slow-motion film of an atomic bomb cloud as the rumbling died away. Then the picture faded into a moment of total darkness and the house lights came on.

What a number!

Gevalt, what an act!

So after the show, when I got them alone and found out they had no manager, not even an option to the Mandala, I thought faster than I ever had in my life.

To make a long story short and sweet, I gave the network the royal screw. I signed the Horsemen to a contract that made me their manager and gave me twenty percent of their take. Then I booked them into the American Dream at ten thousand a week, wrote a check as proprietor of the American Dream, handed the check to myself as manager of the Four Horsemen, then resigned as a network flunky, leaving them with a $10,000 bag and me with 20% of the hottest group since the Beatles.

What the hell, he who lives by the fine print shall perish by the fine print.

T minus 148 days … and counting …

“You haven’t seen the tape yet, have you, B.D.?” Jake said. He was nervous as hell. When you reach my level in the network structure, you’re used to making subordinates nervous, but Jake Pitkin was head of network continuity, not some office boy, and certainly should be used to dealing with executives at my level. Was the rumor really true?

We were alone in the screening room. It was doubtful that the projectionist could hear us.

“No, I haven’t seen it yet,” I said. “But I’ve heard some strange stories.”

Jake looked positively deathly. “About the tape?” he said.

“About you, Jake,” I said, deprecating the rumor with an easy smile. “That you don’t want to air the show.”

“It’s true, B.D.,” Jake said quietly.

“Do you realize what you’re saying? Whatever our personal tastes-and I personally think there’s something unhealthy about them-the Four Horsemen are the hottest thing in the country right now and that dirty little thief Herm Gellman held us up for a quarter of a million for an hour show. It cost another two hundred thousand to make it. We’ve spent another hundred thousand on promotion. We’re getting top dollar from the sponsors. There’s over a million dollars one way or the other riding on that show.

That’s how much we blow if we don’t air it.”

“I know that, B.D.,” Jake said. “I also know this could cost me my job. Think about that. Because knowing all that, I’m still against airing the tape. I’m going to run the closing segment for you. I’m sure enough that you’ll agree with me to stake my job on it.”

I had a terrible feeling in my stomach. I have superiors too and The Word was that A Trip With The Four Horsemen would be aired, period. No matter what. Something funny was going on. The price we were getting for commercial time was a precedent and the sponsor was a big aerospace company which had never bought network time before. What really bothered me was that Jake Pitkin had no reputation for courage; yet here he was laying his job on the line. He must be pretty sure I would come around to his way of thinking or he wouldn’t dare. And though I couldn’t tell Jake, I had no choice in the matter whatsoever.

“Okay, roll it,” Jake said into the intercom mike. “What you’re going to see,” he said as the screening room lights went out, “is the last number.”

On the screen:

A shot of empty blue sky, with soft, lazy electric guitar chords behind it. The camera pans across a few clouds to an extremely long shot on the sun. As the sun, no more than a tiny circle of light, moves into the center of the screen, a sitar-drone comes in behind the guitar.

Very slowly, the camera begins to zoom in on the sun. As the image of the sun expands, the sitar gets louder and the guitar begins to fade and a drum starts to give the sitar a beat. The sitar gets louder, the beat gets more pronounced and begins to speed up as the sun continues to expand. Finally, the whole screen is filled with unbearably bright light behind which the sitar and drum are in a frenzy.

Then over this, drowning out the sitar and drum, a voice like a sick thing in heat: “Brighter … than a thousand suns …”

The light dissolves into a closeup of a beautiful dark-haired girl with huge eyes and moist lips, and suddenly there is nothing on the sound track but soft guitar and voices crooning low: “Brighter… Oh God, it’s brighter … brighter … than a thousand suns …”

The girl’s face dissolves into a full shot of the Four Horsemen in their Grim Reaper robes and the same melody that had played behind the girl’s face shifts into a minor key, picks up whining, reverberating electric guitar chords and a sitar-drone and becomes a dirge: “Darker … the world grows darker …”

And a series of cuts in time to the dirge:

A burning village in Asia strewn with bodies-

“Darker … the world grows darker …”

The corpse-heap at Auschwitz-

“Until it gets so dark …”

A gigantic auto graveyard with gaunt Negro children dwarfed in the foreground-

“I think I’ll die …”

A Washington ghetto in flames with the Capitol misty in the background-

“… before the daylight comes …”

A jump-cut to an extreme closeup on the lead singer of the Horsemen, his face twisted into a mask of desperation and ecstasy. And the sitar is playing double-time, the guitar is wailing and he is screaming at the top of his lungs:” But before I die, let me make that trip before the nothing comes …”

The girl’s face again, but transparent, with a blinding yellow light shining through it. The sitar beat gets faster and faster with the guitar whining behind it and the voice is working itself up into a howling frenzy:

“…the last big flash to light my sky…”

Nothing but the blinding light now-

“… and zap! the world is done …”

An utterly black screen for a beat that becomes black fading to blue at a horizon-

“… but before we die let’s dig that high that frees us from our binds. . . that blows all cool that ego-drool and burns us from our mind … the last big flash, mankind’s last gas, the trip we can’t take twice. …”

Suddenly, the music stops dead for half a beat. Then:

The screen is lit up by an enormous fireball—

A shattering rumble—

The fireball coalesces into a mushroom-pillar cloud as the roar goes on. As the roar begins to die out, fire is visible inside the monstrous nuclear cloud. And the girl’s face is faintly visible superimposed over the cloud.

A soft voice, amplified over the roar, obscenely reverential now: Brighter … great God, it’s brighter .

. . brighter than a thousand suns …”

And the screen went blank and the lights came on.

I looked at Jake. Jake looked at me.

“That’s sick,” I said. “That’s really sick.”

“You don’t want to run a thing like that, do you, B.D.?” Jake said softly.

I made some rapid mental calculations. The loathsome thing ran something under five minutes … it could be done… .

“You’re right, Jake,” I said. “We won’t run a thing like that. We’ll cut it out of the tape and squeeze in another commercial at each break. That should cover the time.”

“You don’t understand,” Jake said. “The contract Herm rammed down our throats doesn’t allow us to edit. The show’s a package-all or nothing. Besides, the whole show’s like that.”

“All like that? What do you mean, all like that?”

Jake squirmed in his seat. “Those guys are … well, perverts, B.D.,” he said.

“Perverts?”

“They’re … well, they’re in love with the atom bomb or something. Every number leads up to the same thing.”

“You mean … they’re all like that?”

“You got the picture, B. D.,” Jake said. “We run an hour of that or we run nothing at all.”

“Jesus.”

I knew what I wanted to say. Burn the tape and write off the million dollars. But I also knew it would cost me my job. And I knew that five minutes after I was out the door, they would have someone in my job who would see things their way. Even my superiors seemed to be just handing down The Word from higher up. I had no choice. There was no choice.

“I’m sorry, Jake,” I said. “We run it.”

“I resign,” said Jake Pitkin, who had no reputation for courage.

T minus 10 days … and counting …

“It’s a clear violation of the Test-Ban Treaty,” I said.

The Under Secretary looked as dazed as I felt. “We’ll call it a peaceful use of atomic energy, and let the Russians scream,” he said.

“It’s insane.”

“Perhaps,” the Under Secretary said. “But you have your orders, General Carson, and I have mine. From higher up. At exactly eight fifty-eight P.M. local time on July fourth, you will drop a fifty kiloton atomic bomb on the designated ground zero at Yucca Flats.”

“But the people … the television crews …”

“Will be at least two miles outside the danger zone. Surely, SAC can manage that kind of accuracy under

‘laboratory conditions.’”

I stiffened. “I do not question the competence of any bomber crew under my command to perform this mission,” I said. “I question the reason for the mission. I question the sanity of the orders.”

The Under Secretary shrugged, smiled wanly. “Welcome to the club.”

“You mean you don’t know what this is all about either?”

“All I know is what was transmitted to me by the Secretary of Defense, and I got the feeling he doesn’t know everything, either. You know that the Pentagon has been screaming for the use of tactical nuclear weapons to end the war in Asia-you SAC boys have been screaming the loudest. Well, several months ago, the President conditionally approved a plan for the use of tactical nuclear weapons during the next monsoon season.”

I whistled. The civilians were finally coming to their senses. Or were they?

“But what does that have to do with-?”

“Public opinion,” the Under Secretary said. “It was conditional upon a drastic change in public opinion.

At the time the plan was approved, the polls showed that seventy-eight point eight percent of the population opposed the use of tactical nuclear weapons, nine point eight percent favored their use and the rest were undecided or had no opinion. The President agreed to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons by a date, several months from now, which is still top secret, provided that by that date at least sixty-five percent of the population approved their use and no more than twenty percent actively opposed it.”

“I see … Just a ploy to keep the Joint Chiefs quiet.”

“General Carson,” the Under Secretary said, “apparently you are out of touch with the national mood.

After the first Four Horsemen show, the polls showed that twenty-five percent of the population approved the use of nuclear weapons. After the second show, the figure was forty-one percent. It is now forty-eight percent. Only thirty-two percent are now actively opposed.”

“You’re trying to tell me that a rock group-“

“A rock group and the cult around it, General. It’s become a national hysteria. There are imitators.

Haven’t you seen those buttons?”

“The ones with a mushroom cloud on them that say ‘Do it’?”

The Under Secretary nodded. “Your guess is as good as mine whether the National Security Council just decided that the Horsemen hysteria could be used to mold public opinion, or whether the Four Horsemen were their creatures to begin with. But the results are the same either way-the Horsemen and the cult around them have won over precisely that element of the population which was most adamantly opposed to nuclear weapons: hippies, students, dropouts, draft-age youth. Demonstrations against the war and against nuclear weapons have died down. We’re pretty close to that sixty-five percent.

Someone-perhaps the President himself-has decided that one more big Four Horsemen show will put us over the top.”

“The President is behind this?”

“No one else can authorize the detonation of an atomic bomb, after all,” the under Secretary said. “We’re letting them do the show live from Yucca Flats. It’s being sponsored by an aerospace company heavily dependent on defense contracts. We’re letting them truck in a live audience. Of course the government is behind it.”

“And SAC drops an A-bomb as the show-stopper?”

“Exactly.”

“I saw one of those shows,” I said. “My kids were watching it. I got the strangest feeling … I almost wanted that red telephone to ring. …”

“I know what you mean,” the Under Secretary said. “Some-times I get the feeling that whoever’s behind this has gotten caught up in the hysteria themselves … that the Horsemen are now using whoever was using them … a closed circle. But I’ve been tired lately. The war’s making us all so tired. If only we could get it all over with …”

“We’d all like to get it over with one way or the other,” I said.

T minus 60 minutes … and counting …

I had orders to muster Backfish’s crew for the live satellite relay of The Four Horsemen’s Fourth.

Superficially, it might seem strange to order the whole Polaris fleet to watch a television show, but the morale factor involved was quite significant.

Polaris subs are frustrating duty. Only top sailors are chosen and a good sailor craves action. We spend most of our time honing skills that must never be used. Deterrence is a sound strategy but a terrible drain on the men of the deterrent forces-a drain exacerbated in the past by the negative attitude of our countrymen toward our mission. Men who, in the service of their country, polish their skills to a razor edge and then must refrain from exercising them have a right to resent being treated as pariahs.

Therefore the positive change in the public attitude toward us that seems to be associated with the Four Horsemen has made them mascots of a kind to the Polaris fleet. In their strange way they seem to speak for us and to us.

I chose to watch the show in the missile control center, where a full crew must always be ready to launch the missiles on five-minute notice. I have always felt a sense of communion with the duty watch in the missile control center that I cannot share with the other men under my command. Here we are not Captain and crew but mind and hand. Should the order come, the will to fire the missiles will be mine and the act will be theirs. At such a moment, it will be good not to feel alone.

All eyes were on the television set mounted above the main console as the show came on and …

The screen was filled with a whirling spiral pattern, metallic yellow on metallic blue. There was a droning sound that seemed part sitar and part electronic and I had the feeling that the sound was somehow coming from inside my head and the spiral seemed etched directly on my retinas. It hurt mildly, yet nothing in the world could have made me turn away.

Then two voices, chanting against each other:

“Let it all come in. …”

” Let it all come out…”

“In … out… in … out … in … out . . .”

My head seemed to be pulsing- in-out, in-out, in-out-and the spiral pattern began to pulse color-changes with the words: yellow-on-blue (in) … green-on-red (out) . .

.in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out …

In the screen … out my head… I seemed to be beating against some kind of invisible membrane between myself and the screen as if something were trying to embrace my mind and I were fighting it …

But why was I fighting it?

The pulsing, the chanting, got faster and faster till in could not be told from out and negative spiral afterimages formed in my eyes faster than they could adjust to the changes, piled up on each other faster and faster till it seemed my head would explode-The chanting and the droning broke and there were the Four Horsemen, in their robes, playing on some stage against a backdrop of clear blue sky. And a single voice, soothing now: “You are in …”

Then the view was directly above the Horsemen and I could see that they were on some kind of circular platform. The view moved slowly and smoothly up and away and I saw that the circular stage was atop a tall tower; around the tower and completely encircling it was a huge crowd seated on desert sands that stretched away to an empty infinity.

“And we are in and they are in …”

I was down among the crowd now; they seemed to melt and flow like plastic, pouring from the television screen to enfold me …

“And we are all in here together. …”

A strange and beautiful feeling … the music got faster and wilder, ecstatic … the hull of the Backfish seemed unreal … the crowd was swaying to it around me … the distance between myself and the Crowd seemed to dissolve … I was there … they were here… . We were transfixed …

“Oh yeah, we are all in here together … together …”

T minus 45 minutes … and counting …

Jeremy and I sat staring at the television screen, ignoring each other and everything around us. Even with the short watches and the short tours of duty, you can get to feeling pretty strange down here in a hole in the ground under tons of concrete, just you and the guy with the other key, with nothing to do but think dark thoughts and get on each other’s nerves. We’re all supposed to be as stable as men can be, or so they tell us, and they must be right because the world’s still here. I mean, it wouldn’t take much-just two guys on the same watch over the same three Minutemen flipping out at the same time, turning their keys in the dual lock, pressing the three buttons…Pow! World War III!

A bad thought, the kind we’re not supposed to think or I’ll start watching Jeremy and he’ll start watching me and we’ll get a paranoia feedback going… . But that can’t happen; we’re too stable, too responsible.

As long as we remember that it’s healthy to feel a little spooky down here, we’ll be all right.

But the television set is a good idea. It keeps us in contact with the outside world, keeps it real. It’d be too easy to start thinking that the missile control center down here is the only real world and that nothing that happens up there really matters… . Bad thought!

The Four Horsemen … somehow these guys help you get it all out. I mean that feeling that it might be better to release all that tension, get it all over with. Watching The Four Horsemen, you’re able to go with it without doing any harm, let it wash over you and then through you. I suppose they are crazy; they’re all the human craziness in ourselves that we’ve got to keep very careful watch over down here. Letting it all come out watching the Horsemen makes it surer that none of it will come out down here. I guess that’s why a lot of us have taken to wearing those “Do It” buttons off duty. The brass doesn’t mind; they seem to understand that it’s the kind of inside sick joke we need to keep us functioning.

Now that spiral thing they had started the show with-and the droning-came back on. Zap! I was right back in the screen again, as if the commercial hadn’t happened.

“We are all in here together …”

And then a closeup of the lead singer, looking straight at me, as close as Jeremy and somehow more real.

A mean-looking guy with something behind his eyes that told me he knew where everything lousy and rotten was at.

A bass began to thrum behind him and some kind of electronic hum that set my teeth on edge. He began playing his guitar, mean and low-down. And singing in that kind of drop-dead tone of voice that starts brawls in bars:

” I stabbed my mother and I mugged my paw …”

A riff of heavy guitar-chords echoed the words mockingly as a huge swastika (red-on-black, black-on-red) pulsed like a naked vein on the screen-The face of the Horseman, leering-

“Nailed my sister to the toilet door . . .”

Guitar behind the pulsing swastika-

“Drowned a puppy in a ce-ment machine… . Burned a kitten just to hear it scream. …”

On the screen, just a big fire burning in slow-motion, and the voice became a slow, shrill, agonized wail:

“Oh God, I’ve got this red-hot fire burning in the marrow of my brain… .

” Oh yes, I got this fire burning … in the stinking marrow of my brain. …

“Gotta get me a blowtorch … and set some naked flesh on flame. …”

The fire dissolved into the face of a screaming Oriental woman, who ran through a burning village clawing at the napalm on her back.

” I got this message… . boiling in the bubbles of my blood … A man ain’t nothing but a fire burning … in a dirty glob of mud. …”

A film-clip of a Nuremburg rally: a revolving swastika of march-ing men waving torches-Then the leader, of the Horsemen superimposed over the twisted flaming cross:

“Don’t you hate me, baby, can’t you feel somethin’ screaming in your mind?

“Don’t you hate me, baby, feel me drowning you in slime!”

Just the face of the Horseman howling hate-

“Oh yes, I’m a monster, mother. …”

A long view of the crowd around the platform, on their feet, waving arms, screaming soundlessly. Then a quick zoom in and a kaleidoscope of faces, eyes feverish, mouths open and howling-

“Just call me-” -

The face of the Horseman superimposed over the crazed faces of the crowd-

“Mankind!”

I looked at Jeremy. He was toying with the key on the chain around his neck. He was sweating. I suddenly realized that I was sweating too and that my own key was throbbing in my hand alive. …

T minus 13 minutes … and counting …

A funny feeling, the Captain watching the Four Horsemen here in the Backfish’s missile control center with us. Sitting in front of my console watching the television set with the Captain kind of breathing down my neck… I got the feeling he knew what was going through me and I couldn’t know what was going through him… and it gave the fire inside me a kind of greasy feel I didn’t like….

Then the commercial was over and that spiral-thing came on again and whoosh! it sucked me right back into the television set and I stopped worrying about the Captain or anything like that… .

Just the spiral going yellow-blue, red-green, and then starting to whirl and whirl, faster and faster, changing colors and whirling, whirling, whirling… . And the sound of a kind of Coney Island carousel tinkling behind it, faster and faster and faster, whirling and whirling and whirling, flashing red-green, yellow-blue, and whirling, whirling, whirling …

And this big hum filling my body and whirling, whirling, whirling … My muscles relaxing, going limp, whirling, whirling, whirling, all whirling …

And in the center of the flashing spiraling colors, a bright dot of colorless light, right at the center, not moving, not changing, while the whole world went whirling and whirling in colors around it, and the humming was coming from the dot the way the carousel-music was coming from the spinning colors and the dot was humming its song to me… .

The dot was a light way down at the end of a long, whirling, whirling tunnel. The humming started to get a little louder. The bright dot started to get a little bigger. I was drifting down the tunnel toward it, whirling, whirling, whirling …

T minus 11 minutes … and counting …

Whirling, whirling, whirling down a long, long tunnel of pulsing colors, whirling, whirling, toward the circle of light way down at the end of the tunnel … How nice it would be to finally get there and soak up the beautiful hum filling my body and then I could forget that I was down here in this hole in the ground with a hard brass key in my hand, just Duke and me, down here in a cave under the ground that was a spiral of flashing colors, whirling, whirling toward the friendly light at the end of the tunnel, whirling, whirling …

T minus 10 minutes … and counting …

The circle of light at the end of the whirling tunnel was getting bigger and bigger, and the humming was getting louder and louder and I was feeling better and better and the Backfish’ s missile control center was getting dimmer and dimmer as the awful weight of command got lighter and lighter, whirling, whirling, and I felt so good I wanted to cry, whirling, whirling …

T minus 9 minutes … and counting …

Whirling, whirling … I was whirling, Jeremy was whirling, the hole in the ground was whirling, and the circle of light at the end of the tunnel whirled closer and closer and-I was through! A place filled with yellow light. Pale metal-yellow light. Then pale metallic blue. Yellow. Blue. Yellow. Blue.

Yellow-blue-yellow-blue-yellow-blue-yellow …

Pure light pulsing … and pure sound droning. And just the feeling of letters I couldn’t read between the pulses-not-yellow and not-blue-too quick and too faint to be visible, but important, very important …

And then a voice that seemed to be singing from inside my head, almost as if it were my own:

“Oh, oh, oh … don’t I really wanna know , . . Oh, oh, oh, … don’t I really wanna know …”

The world pulsing, flashing around those words I couldn’t read, couldn’t quite read, had to read, could almost read …

“Oh, oh, oh, … great God I really wanna know. …”

Strange amorphous shapes clouding the blue-yellow-blue flickering universe, hiding the words I had to read … Dammit, why wouldn’t they get out of the way so I could find out what I had to know!

“Tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me … Gotta know gotta know gotta know gotta know …”

T minus 7 minutes … and counting …

Couldn’t read the words! Why wouldn’t the Captain let me read the words?

And that voice inside me: “Gotta know … gotta know … gotta know why it hurts me so.. ..” Why wouldn’t it shut up and let me read the words? Why wouldn’t the words hold still? Or just slow down a little? If they’d slow down a little, I could read them and then I’d know what I had to do… .

T minus 6 minutes … and counting …

I felt the sweaty key in the palm of my hand … I saw Duke stroking his own key. Had to know!

Now-through the pulsing blue-yellow-blue light and the unreadable words that were building up an awful pressure in the back of my brain-I could see the Four Horsemen. They were on their knees, crying, looking up at something and begging: “Tell me tell me tell me tell me . . .”

Then soft billows of rich red-and-orange fire filled the world and a huge voice was trying to speak. But it couldn’t form the words. It stuttered and moaned-The yellow-blue-yellow flashing around the words I couldn’t read-the same words, I suddenly sensed, that the voice of the fire was trying so hard to form-and the Four Horsemen on their knees begging: “Tell me tell me tell me …”

The friendly warm fire trying so hard to speak-

“Tell me tell me tell me tell me… .”

T minus 4 minutes … and counting …

What were the words? What was the order? I could sense my men silently imploring me to tell them.

After all, I was their Captain, it was my duty to tell them. It was my duty to find out!

“Tell me tell me tell me . . .” the robed figures on their knees implored through the flickering pulse in my brain and I could almost make out the words … almost …

“Tell me tell me tell me …” I whispered to the warm orange fire that was trying so hard but couldn’t quite form the words. The men were whispering it too: “Tell me tell me …”

T minus 3 minutes … and counting …

The question burning blue and yellow in my brain: WHAT WAS THE FIRE TRYING TO TELL ME?

WHAT WERE THE WORDS I COULDN’T READ?

Had to unlock the words! Had to find the key!

A key … The key? THE KEY! And there was the lock that imprisoned the words, right in front of me!

Put the key in the lock … I looked at Jeremy. Wasn’t there some reason, long ago and far away, why Jeremy might try to stop me from putting the key in the lock?

But Jeremy didn’t move as I fitted the key into the lock… .

T minus 2 minutes … and counting …

Why wouldn’t the Captain tell me what the order was? The fire knew, but it couldn’t tell. My head ached from the pulsing, but I couldn’t read the words.

“Tell me tell me tell me …” I begged.

Then I realized that the Captain was asking too.

T minus 90 seconds . . . and counting …

“Tell me tell me tell me . . .” the Horsemen begged. And the words I couldn’t read were a fire in my brain.

Duke’s key was in the lock in front of us. From very far away, he said: “We have to do it together.”

Of course … our keys … our keys would unlock the words!

I put my key into the lock. One, two, three, we turned our keys together. A lid on the console popped open. Under the lid were three red buttons. Three signs on the console lit up in red letters: “ARMED.”

T minus 60 seconds … and counting …

The men were waiting for me to give some order. I didn’t know what the order was. A magnificent orange fire was trying to tell me but it couldn’t get the words out… . Robed figures were praying to the fire…

Then, through the yellow-blue flicker that hid the words I had to read, I saw a vast crowd encircling a tower. The crowd was on its feet begging silently-The tower in the center of the crowd became the orange fire that was trying to tell me what the words were-Became a great mushroom of billowing smoke and blinding orange-red glare…

T minus 30 seconds … and counting …

The huge pillar of fire was trying to tell Jeremy and me what the words were, what we had to do. The crowd was screaming at the cloud of flame. The yellow-blue flicker was getting faster and faster behind the mushroom cloud. I could almost read the words! I could see that there were two of them!

T minus 20 seconds… and counting …

Why didn’t the Captain tell us? I could almost see the words!

Then I heard the crowd around the beautiful mushroom cloud

Shouting: “DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!”

What did they want me to do? Did Duke know?

9

The men were waiting! What was the order? They hunched over the firing controls, waiting… . The firing controls … ?

“DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!”

8

“DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!”: the crowd screaming.

“Jeremy!” I shouted. “I can read the words!”

7

My hands hovered over my bank of firing buttons… .

“DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!” the words said.

Didn’t the Captain understand?

6

“What do they want us to do, Jeremy?”

5

Why didn’t the mushroom cloud give the order? My men were waiting! A good sailor craves action.

Then a great voice spoke from the pillar of fire: “DO IT…DO IT … DO IT. …”

4

“There’s only one thing we can do down here, Duke.”

3

“The order, men! Action! Fire!”

2

Yes, yes, yes! Jeremy-

1

I reached for my bank of firing buttons. All along the console, the men reached for their buttons. But I was too fast for them! I would be first!

0

THE BIG FLASH

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