edited by TERRY CARR
Doubleday &
Company, Inc.
GARDEN CITY, NEW
YORK, 1976
designed by laurence alexander
isbn: 0-385-11413-3
Library of Congress Catalog
Card Number 75-21216 "The
Wine Has Been Left Open
Too Long
and the
Memory Has Gone Flat"
by Harlan
Ellison. Copyright © 1976 by
Harlan Ellison. Appears with permission of the Author and
the Author's
agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd., New
York, N.Y. Copyright © 1976 by
Terry Carr
all
rights reserved printed in the united states of america
first
edition
All of
the characters
in this
book are fictitious, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead,
is purely
coincidental.
Journey to
the Heartland
BRIAN W. ALDISS
1
What Did
You Do
Last Year?
GORDON EKLUND & GREGORY BENFORD
34
Custer's Last
Jump
STEVEN UTLEY & HOWARD WALDROP
49
The Wine Has Been Left Open
Too Long
and the Memory Has
Gone Flat
HARLAN ELLISON 87
Under the Generator
JOHN/SHIRLEY 99
Stars and
Darkness
GLENN CHANG
130
Shifting Parameters in Disappearance
and Memory
CHARLIE HAAS 151
Brian
aldiss, whose
novels include Greybeard
and Frankenstein Unbound, is one of the most important science fiction
writers of the past decade—not only because of his great talent, but because he
has continued to explore new fictional
territory year after year.
Here,
in his first story for Universe,
he tells an absorbing tale
of research into human consciousness, of the discovery that different
time-flows run concurrently in the brain. It sounds like a terribly serious,
significant story, and it is . . . but Aldiss makes of it something more, a
wry, even playful commentary on
people.
Journey
to the Heartland
BY BRIAN W. ALDISS
At certain times of
day the
campus was full of people.
Stu-X dents and college
professors alike paraded in the
sunshine, talking, calling, flirting,
reading—a bright flock almost as
migratory as birds. Five minutes
later, they would all be
gone to classroom or playing field
or canteen,
leaving the area deserted.
The windows of the
Dream Research Unit looked down
on the parade. Andrew Angsteed looked
down through the windows. He
was head
of the
unit. He was tall, casually
dressed; his hair was graying. People
found him remote. The hubbub
from below rose to
his ears.
On the
whole, he preferred the campus empty.
Behind him, in the laboratory, his three assistants worked, transcribing and
codifying the previous night's work.
Angsteed walked past the
row of
caged cats with their shaven
heads. A thin beam
of sun,
slanting in the end window,
lit the
last cage; its occupant
rolled over on her back,
purring as
Angsteed passed. He went
to the
window and drew down the
blind.
Then he retreated into his office
and put
his head
between bis hands.
Rose-Jean Dempson
was awakened
by the
yellow buzzer.
She opened her eyes.
The scene
that drifted in on her
senses was without meaning, an affair
of walls,
angles, and corners in which she
was not
remotely interested, so vivid remained
the perspectives in which
she had
just been moving namelessly.
Moving carefully so as
not to
detach electrodes, she pulled herself onto one elbow and
reached for a microphone by the bedside.
"4:17. I dreamed I was on
a train
in the
Jurassic Age. It was a funny
train, all full of beautiful
furry surfaces. They were like big
moths. I don't think they
were alive. I wasn't scared of them. It didn't
seem to be Jurassic time
outside, at least not at first.
"My husband was in
the dream.
We had
been to a party with a lot of people.
Maybe it was somewhere under
ground. I had left without him
to catch
the train.
Yet he
was also
on the
train. That sounds confusing,
but it
wasn't in the dream. He
was at the party and he
was also
on the
train. I kept wondering how I could save
him. I loved him best
in the
world and I wanted to be
perfectly possessed by him; but
he would
not come all the way toward
me. That
was why
I was
having to go into the Jurassic,
I think.
"Someone was arguing with me. It
was a
ticket collector. He was old and
gray but very solid, very
fatherly. He did not seem to
see my
husband. He was telling me
to get
off the
train.
"I said, "There are things which
have never been done before.
I have
to tell
my husband
to let
go of
his strict
self-control. He has
to reject
all the
things he thinks he loves,
or else
he will die. He
must be more random, as
these moths appear to be.'
"But I knew that
was wrong,
somehow. The ticket collector would not let me explain
properly. He shook his head
and said something like, "The essence
of human
life can only be a
matter of cyclic repetition.'
"I was trying to explain to
people that my madness, my
wish to roam, was
a special,
life-giving quality. My husband had to admire, accept, and
emulate it. I knew this
meant suffering for him,
but only
in that
way could
he make
his inner life flower. Everything else in the compartment
was flowering, the upholstery
and everything,
but he
sat there
almost like a pile of
luggage. I must have identified
with him in some way, because I also felt
like a thing all of
a sudden.
"There were strange lumpy people moving
along the corridor of the
train.
"When I lay down on the
seat, I realized it was
night outside. We were gliding
through the outer suburbs of
a huge
city. The train was
a blaze
of flame
and foliage
and bright
things. Just above the
rim of
the window,
I saw
cold lights that fled by in
the dark—white,
white, white, white, white, repetitive, chilled nine hundred times.
Very threatening. They were lighting wide
deserted roads. Then there were
dark houses. Then spots of sodium
lighting, threaded out thin. Then country. Blackness.
"A different blackness from
my blackness.
Mine was rich and warm, personal,
unregulated. The outer darkness had
been chilled by the
little urban lights. I tried
to explain
to my
husband that the mad
and the
sane met here, that the
lights were the lights of the
sane—in those two camps of
the world,
the sane were winning
by sheer
force of numbers, pushing their cold little nonradiant lights out into the
countryside.
"There was a terrific noise as
we went
over a bridge. I was
excited because I thought
we were
getting near the Jurassic. The moths were very thick
and bright.
"Then the
bell rang."
Rose-Jean looked about the
laboratory, thick with mute noises of machines. Then she
settled her dark head down
on the pillow and fell asleep.
Ninety-two minutes later, the yellow
buzzer roused her again.
Andrew Angsteed
and Rose-Jean
Dempson walked back from town. The
sun was
low, casting long poplar shadows
across the fields toward
the university,
where a few windows were already lit against dusk.
"I'm going to be away next
week," Angsteed said. "Or did
I already tell you that? Do
you want
a break
from work, Rose-Jean?"
"No, I'm
not tired
at all.
Besides, I'm off duty tonight."
"But you've been on
nights for six weeks now,
going on seven."
"I can't exactly explain, Andrew, but
I'm refreshed
by my
dreams. Since you've been
recording them, they have become
much more vivid. I
feel as if—as if a
whole new side of my
personality was coming into
being."
A silence between them.
Before it could grow too
long and awkward, Angsteed said, "You've
become my star guinea pig,
Rose-Jean. As you know,
our interest
on the
project is simply to categorize, not analyze, dreams. We've
identified three main types, or think
we have—sigma,
tau, and ypsilon, and over a
five-year period we are specializing
in the
tau-type, which is a
phenomenon of median second-quarter sleep. In other words, we
are concerned
with classification, not with the
dream content per se. What is
beginning to emerge is that
the tau-type is a more multilayered
dream than the other kinds.
But your dreams—your tau dreams, Rose-Jean .
. .
well, I happen to find them
extraordinarily beautiful, interesting, and significant.
I mean
nothing personal—"
She looked up at
his face
and said,
"Dreams aren't exactly personal,
are they?"
"No, let me finish! Just because
I'm in
charge of the project, I
may seem
remote at times. You know
that our findings are being challenged
by Dr.
Rudesci in St. Louis." He paused. "Have I said
this to you before?"
"No. Well—yes,
in a
way. Sometimes. People have been
known to repeat themselves,
Andrew, especially if it is
something that is worrying them."
They had come to the gate
into New Buildings. He paused
and took her hand.
"Don't let's go in yet! I
have to talk to you.
Rose-Jean, I have fallen completely for you. You must
have noticed. You're so beautiful and
your dreams are so beautiful.
I've never been so close to
anyone's inner world. . .
."
She looked searchingly at him, so that
he could
devour once again the sight of
that perfect conjunction between nose,
nostrils, upper lip, and
mouth, and the unique placement
of her eyes, eyes that he
had so
often surreptitiously gazed on when, closed
and inward-gazing,
they were merely the most
entrancing part of his
research project.
"You'd better come up
and have
coffee in my room, Andrew," she said.
Hers was
the ordinary
untidy room of a young
faculty teacher. He noted
books on her shelves that
one might
find in any of twenty adjacent
rooms: Tilbane's Lord of the Rocks; The Grand Claim of Being; Sex in Theory and Practice;
Orlick's After the Post-Renaissance; his own Sense and the Dreaming Self; What I Know
About Mars; Loupescu on Time; Krawstadt's Frankenstein Among the Arts; and others.
There were also drawings
and gouache
paintings scattered about.
By the window was a framed
photograph of her with a
man, laughing.
He picked up one
of the
gouaches. It showed a girl
sitting decorously nude against
a panther.
"Did you do this?" he asked. The colors were
crude.
"Please. It's
not finished.
Besides, it isn't very good."
He watched her push
her paintings
away in a locker. She
was right, that must
be admitted;
the painting
wasn't very good; her dreams were
much more striking.
Straightening, she
said, "I keep painting the
same picture over and over again,
as if
that one image is all
I have
to offer,
I don't know why.
It's as if my essence
was just
repetitive."
"The essence of human
life can only be a
matter of cyclic repetition, since all
generations are similar, have similar
archetypal experiences."
"I meant repetitive within myself. Maybe
all my
dreams would boil down to repetition,
if they
were analyzed."
He suspected she was
trying for pathos. He replied
with a great effort at warmth,
"I would not think that at all. There are always certain
recurrent archetypes in dreams, but
much of the other content of
your dreams I find highly
original and thought-provoking."
"Is that really so? What sort
of things—I
mean, may I ask—?"
"Take your last dream, the one
about traveling by train into
the Jurassic. I've played
your report over several times.
I found it interesting the way
you contrasted
the mad
and the
cold sane. Your sympathies
were with the mad. You
evidently see our urban culture, nominally
built by the sane, as
a sinister
thing—a threat to true sanity, which is allied to madness."
She put her hand over her
mouth. "Do I really? Did
I say
that? Oh, it sounds
very profound. . . .
My subject's
really domestic science. .
. .
Maybe I should get us
some coffee, would you like that?"
"The dream world—right at its heartland
lies an extraordinary amalgam of
sanity and madness. . .
." His attempt at explanation hung in the silence
of her
banal room.
He watched her preparing
coffee, dearly wishing that she
would offer him whiskey.
He recalled
that she did not touch
alcohol. Perhaps he could
change that, given time.
She looked so cool,
so lovely,
in her
simple outfit of slacks, blouse, and suede waistcoat. He went over to
her and
put an
arm around her.
"Rose-Jean, the
work has taken on new
meaning for me since you joined
our unit
as a
volunteer." As he
said the words he thought how
pedestrian they sounded. The language
of dreams was so
much more eloquent than the
poor, defaced coinage of waking.
She took the opportunity to ask,
"What do you hope to
find out from these researches? You must believe in
them—you've dedicated so much
time to them."
"There are things that have never
been done. Haven't I said
this to you before?
It's some while since it
was discovered
that there were different kinds of
sleep. Now we are sure
that there are different kinds of
dreams—although the situation
looks more complex than when I
launched the project, nine years
ago. I think at last I
have the answer. . .
."
"And what's
that? What sort of answer?"
"Oh, forget it. Let's
not talk
shop. Rose-Jean!" He grasped her and tried to kiss
her. She struggled in his
arms but he would not let
her go.
She submitted,
bringing her lips to his.
Although she stood unyieldingly,
after a second she parted
her lips slightly, so
that he could taste the
warmth rising from within her, the
furnace of her. He cupped
her left
breast with one hand before letting
her go.
She retreated,
hand up to mouth again.
"Andrew, I'm not psychologically prepared for
this kind of assault!"
"'Assault'!"
"As you may know, I'm living
separate from my husband, but he is still around
and—I may as well tell
you this—he
still occupies much of
my thoughts.
Now, please let me pour
you some coffee."
He clutched his head.
"As I say—the essence of
human life is cyclic—archetypal
emotions, sensations, experiences.
They don't change. . . .
Sometimes I feel that the
whole reality of modern living is
a fraud,
a distraction
from some deep and living thing. Maybe we help
release that in our work."
He laughed, half angrily.
She gave him a
mug full
of black
coffee, looking at him curiously.
"You were
saying you have an answer
to your
work problems. Can you tell
me? I
have a fascination for science,
so I
am genuinely interested, you know."
"Are you? Do you care about
me at
all? Could you ever love me?"
"Could you ever love me, Andrew?
Or is
it just
my dreams
that you care about?
I sometimes
think my husband never cared about the real me.
My dream
side is surely impersonal —it contains all kinds of
fascinating—snippets, I guess,
from God knows where. The collective
unconscious, I guess. But the real
Rose-Jean Dempson only surfaces in
waking hours."
He looked at his
watch. "Listen, I'll tell you
what I've told nobody. I think
the unit
is on
to something
really big. There are things which
have never been done before,
and we
could be on to one of
them.
"Scientific thought
is finally
acknowledging the complexity of a human
being. As usual, the biological
side has had to come first,
with its gradual revelation of the intricately different times and
cycles kept by the physical
body. Since then, there's been progress
in other
directions, all reinforcing the same pattern.
"The further we probe
into sleep and dreams, the
more actual becomes the vast,
rich complexity of the mind.
It sometimes
feels like—I sometimes feel like
an explorer,
trembling on the brink of an
unknown world."
"That must be a wonderful experience,
Andrew. I'm truly glad for you."
"We've had a whole year of
frustrations. The work's got nowhere.
Our findings
have been challenged, as you
know. Now we recognize that our
earlier interpretation of the evidence
was incorrect. We were
working with a too-simple model of the mind. At
last I can understand that we are on
the threshold
of something
of much
more startling import than I
ever expected. Your dreams
have helped me toward an
understanding of that
something."
"Oh, how
totally thrilling! And what is
that?"
He set his mug down and
said, slowly, "Rose-Jean,
I can't
expect anyone but myself
to grasp
the entire
picture yet, but I have discovered
that there are several different
time-flows running concurrently in the
brain." "I don't understand.
Time-flows?"
"We all occasionally acknowledge
different time-flows, despite the horrible
supremacy of clock-time in the
modern world—the clock-time I believe you were
escaping from in your last dream.
That's why I think you
are like
me. There's
the light, slow time-flow
of childhood,
the heavy,
sluggish time-flow of the
mentally deranged, the time that
lovers appear to abolish, the
speeded-up time of drunks, the
suspended time-flow of catastrophe,
and others.
They're not imaginary, they're genuinely different
internal circuitry. I believe I
shall soon have proof of that,
proof that many different time-flows
exist within any one
mind, in the same way
that various time-mechanisms
coexist in the body."
Angsteed went
to the
window, absorbed in his vision.
The campus, glimpsed here from an
angle, was brightly lit. Several
people were about. Some
strolled leisurely, some walked briskly, one or two were
running. Some went in groups and pairs. Many were solitary. Some
chose the light areas, some
the shadows.
She was
looking at him wide-eyed. There was something curious in her manner.
"Do you
mind if I draw the
drapes?"
She crossed to the
window. It was sunrise outside
and a
terrific noise was going
on. The
field was full of people.
He understood
that they were watching a
comet which blazed in the
sky. Attempts were being
made to capture the comet
in some
way, in order to
harness its energies for fuel.
He said,
"They are going to harvest
its energies."
She said, "It is not time
for the
harvest yet." He noticed that her husband was beside
her, a small man standing
behind some kind of flower arrangement.
Someone was
asking what time the harvest
was.
She came
out from
behind a rocking chair, smiling
and saying
that she had a record
she wanted
to play
them over and over again.
It was already playing. It brought
them all happiness. He danced with
someone in the room, but
it was
not her.
The room vanished.
They were outside, under the stars
and a
comet like a great biblical sheaf of wheat.
The yellow
buzzer sounded.
Angsteed roused,
staring around the familiar laboratory
without raising his head
from the pillow. He regularly
used himself as his own guinea
pig, and had determined to do so again directly
after his evening with Rose-Jean.
He reached
out almost
automatically for the microphone and began to record the
details of his dream, after
noting the time. Early, 1:56.
He completed the report,
added the words "Typical sigma dream, preoccupied
with digesting the experiences of the day," and settled
his head
back on the pillow. Then
he sat
upright.
The interpretation of the
dream flashed upon him. It
had signaled itself as a special
dream by the hint to
begin with: the drawing of the
curtains symbolized the closing of
his eyes.
And the rest. .
. well,
he needed
to talk
to someone
about it. Rose-Jean! Why not? He
had a
pretext for visiting her at
night.
Going to the dressing room, he
pulled on some clothes and
slippers and shuffled out
of the
labs. He crossed to her
block. Nobody was about, although a
light shone here and there
where a student hunched
over a book or talked
to or
seduced another student. The
moon shone. It was a
perfect night. He could hear the
continuous rumble of traffic from
the freeway.
Before Rose-Jean's door, he
hesitated, then tried the handle.
The door
opened—somewhat to his
surprise, for warnings about theft
were posted on every residential
floor. He entered. This was
the room
in which
he had
kissed her only a few hours
earlier. The experience came so
freshly back to him that time
seemed to be annihilated.
Angsteed stood there, taking in the
scents and impressions of the room
before moving toward the bedroom
door. Opening it, he called
softly, "Rose-Jean, are you awake?
It's only me, Andrew?"
He knew immediately from her tone
that she had been awake. In her voice was
a note
almost of panic.
"Andrew? You can't come in here.
It's the middle of the
night. What the hell
do you
want?"
"I've had a dream. A revelation.
I want
to discuss
it with
you. I promise I'll only talk.
Can I
put the
light on?"
"No! No, I forbid you to
put the
light on. Please go, Andrew—we can talk in the
morning. I was asleep."
"But listen, darling—suddenly I've seen my way
ahead, and you gave me the
clue in a dream. There
was a
comet in the sky, and you
said—"
"Andrew, will you please get out
of my
room before I call the porter?"
He went nearer to the bed
and sat
down on it, reaching for
her hand. "Please attempt to listen to
me. I
didn't come here to seduce you!
This is something really important.
You know
how on medical reports it is
now considered
vital to record at what precise
time drugs are administered? The time is recognized
as being
as important
as the
amount. Because the same dosage can have widely different
effects at different times of
day. You told me
in my
dream that you had a
record which was played over and
over. That refers to the
record of all dreams kept by
the unit.
We have
always entered the time of
waking in the sleep
records, but we have not
applied the time in the classificatory
data. Don't you see that
we can
check back over the last fifteen
years' records and we should
be able
to turn up the
new factor?"
She was still angry. "You're babbling, Andrew! What new
factor?"
"Didn't I say that? Look, we've
studied times of dreams only as part of how
long after the commencement of sleep they occur. But
we need
to study
them as against body-time. The dreams come at certain
regular intervals after the onset
of sleep, but what we may
have missed is that the
content of the
dreams may well be
influenced by the subject's body-time!
We can check on that. And
my dream
suggests that the answer will be epoch-making—hence, the comet.
We may
well discover that the different
sorts of dreams come from
different time-flows. In other
words, it may be possible
in the
future to key in to whatever
level of personality we require—and
of course with that new understanding,
we shall
be able
to chart
an entirely new picture
of consciousness!"
He leaned forward in
his excitement
to embrace
her. The curtains were drawn together
in the
room. He could only vaguely discern the pale outline
of her
face. As he reached toward
it, another
face materialized next to it,
and a
rough male hand thrust itself into
his face.
"You leave
my wife
alone!" a voice told him.
Next morning,
Rose-Jean went to see Angsteed.
She apologized for last
night.
"We'd better forget it,"
he said.
"And obviously you will want your
name removed from the dream
roster."
"Don't be so stuffy, Andrew. I
know you sleep around a
fair bit, or used to. My
friends told me. Don't start
being unkind to me just because
I have
my husband
in my
bed once
in a
while. If you must
know, I didn't even invite
him in
last night. I thought he was
hundreds of miles away, but
he dropped
in on me."
"I don't
want to know about your
personal affairs."
"Of course you do.
Why sulk?
Listen, Andrew, I like you
a lot. I have this thing
about my husband, but sooner
or later
I reckon I have to shake
him out
of my
system. You can help me, if
you really
wish. I'm just in no
mood for—oh, forget it!"
He stood against her and took
her hand.
"I'm sorry, Rose-Jean. Of course
I'm peeved
about last night, peeved with
you and with him—and jealous,
of course—and
most peeved with myself. I'll get
over it. Let's be friends.
I need
you. Think what my life has
been, stuck in dreary research
institutes— before I was
here, I was studying dying
flies and making moth pupae abort in order to
learn about circadian mechanisms. A life for science! Well,
it's been a living death.
Your dreams have revived me, given
me new
imaginative insight. I really think I'm on the brink
of a
major breakthrough, and I'd like
you to get some of the
excitement too."
She kissed
him then.
"How's that
for excitement?"
"Great. There
are things
which have never been done
before, but they have no
power to alter the essence
of things."
"I don't quite see
what you mean."
He looked at her
in puzzlement.
"Have I said that before?
Your dreams have altered
something in my essence, brought
me to life in some inner
way."
"I find that hard to believe;
I'm so
unimportant. Yet, why not? I feel
refreshed by my dreams myself,
as maybe
I told
you. Maybe the essence
of one
human life is cyclic in
nature, and a new season is
about to dawn in both
our psyches,
if that
isn't too fanciful!"
"And a new comet
in both
our skies!"
At last
he had
broken the spell. He took
her powerfully
into his arms. Their mouths met.
After a moment they settled
down on Angsteed's plum-colored sofa.
The yellow
buzzer woke Rose-Jean Dempson at
2:11 a.m.,
activated by
her REMs.
Pulling the microphone toward her, she
said, "Two-eleven. There was
an earthquake,
and the
university was in ruins. Everyone
else seemed to have gone.
It was
night, and I wasn't at
all frightened.
"I ran out across the field.
The layout
of everything
was different. I saw
a broken
clock lying on the ground.
It had
stopped at. . .1
believe it was ten minutes
past six. Evidently it had fallen
off a
ruined tower.
"I went toward the line of
poplars. The sky was curiously
bright and there seemed
to be
creatures running about near me. One of the poplars had fallen over. I
appeared to climb along its horizontal trunk. Then I was looking down at its
roots, which were earthy and dangling in the air. I could see something
gleaming in the hole. It was a gold casket, but when I lifted it out it had
blood on it, so I gave it to someone who was beside me.
"Then
it seemed that I was riding a horse. I was very excited. Maybe there was
another earth tremor. It sounds silly, but the whole landscape was coming along
with us. The horse started galloping around in circles.
"Reindeer were running nearby, beautiful
creatures, brown and white, with terrific antlers. They ran with their heads
down, breath pouring like steam from their nostrils.
"I was full of delight because in the
morning the world was going to begin anew. I guess it all sounds like a typical
ypsilon dream, I'm afraid."
Rose-Jean looked about the laboratory, thick
with the dusk of shaded lights and the caterpillar sounds of machines. Her
eyelids closed, shutting it all away. Her head went back on the pillow and she
slept. Ninety-five minutes later, the yellow buzzer roused her again.
In the morning, Rose-Jean went to see her
closest friend on the faculty, Alice Butley. Alice was head of the philosophy
department, a stringy woman in her mid-fifties with a lot of life and humor in
her. Rose-Jean had liked her from their first meeting, although Alice was
almost twice Rose-Jean's age.
"Care for a drink,
Rose-Jean?"
"Just a Coke,
maybe."
"It's three quarters of an hour before
the time for my first martini, but I guess I could run forty-five minutes ahead
of schedule for once. Though 'for once' is certainly not the phrase I should
use there. Drinking early is getting to be a repetitive event. ... I can stand just so much of this place.
. . . You aren't coming to tell me you're quitting?"
Rose-Jean laughed. "Far from it. I'm
just getting interested.
But I guess I was wanting
to talk
to you
about a repetitive event."
"Go ahead!
This dump is stocked with
nothing else but. . ." "Alice, you'll laugh
when I tell you." "Try me."
"I think I'm falling in love
with Andrew Angsteed, the head
of the Dream Research Unit. Now—I
know your opinion of him is
mixed, and he surely does
seem a bit dull at
first, but when you get to
know him better, why, he's
just great. He's so understanding, and the work he's
doing is just fascinating."
Alice brought over the
drink. "It's not the work
in your
man's life, it's the
man in
your life's work that counts.
Andrew's nearer my age
than yours. Still, when could
one ever say that and expect
a hearing?"
"He really is tremendous,
Alice. He's had a dull
life, but now he feels that
everything is going to change.
I feel
just the same way. Really new
things are about to happen!"
Raising her glass, sipping, Alice said,
"Well, there are things which have
never been done before, events
that have never taken place, but
they have no power to
alter the essence of things. You
may or
may not
resent that, according to temperament."
"I don't follow you. You're saying
the essence
of things
is repetitive?"
"No, but the essence of human
life experience is largely a matter of
repetition—or cyclic in nature, let's
say, since generations do not
differ in that respect, suffering
the same
miseries and pleasures, the same emotions, the
same realities of birth, death, love,
and so
on. .
. .
Not forgetting
boredom —it's a worser killer than
death, as my old pop
used to say."
Her phone warbled. She walked over
to the
desk and cut it off.
Perching on the edge of a
chair, Rose-Jean said, "But these
cycles—they aren't concentric, are they? I mean,
otherwise the same events would happen
over and over again, without
the participants being aware
of it."
"Well, don't
they, damnit!"
Rose-Jean's gaze dropped to the floor.
Then she laughed. "Maybe,
I guess.
At least—oh,
I don't
know. You're the philosopher, Alice. You see, I
did want
to talk
to you
about a repetitive event. You know
the last
place I was in, the
University of Catrota, well, I
also fell in love with
a man
there. He was very intelligent but sort of a
hippie. No, not a hippie,
but at least a potential dropout
from society. He didn't accept
the way society was run, any
more than Andy does, in
a different
way. His name was
Allan Dempson. We got married.
I told
you about it."
"Sure. You
told me it didn't work
out."
"Oh, we tried, but it was
just impossible. He was gorgeous,
but so tyrannical. Andrew's quite different
I had
to leave
Allan and Catrota. He's
given up his job there
too. He's working as a
long-distance truck driver, when he
works at all."
"Now you're afraid you're
going to make a mess
of things
all over again with
Andrew Angsteed?"
"I don't know. You said it
yourself, the major events of
life occur over and over again.
Still, Allan and Andrew are
so different. I guess Allan just
had one
major obsession, the state of society."
Alice looked
at the
younger woman meditatively. "I'd say
that hit off Andy
pretty accurately, too. He's obsessive,
if ever
I saw it."
"Oh—I don't know ... I just
find him so fascinat-mg. . . .
Alice took
her arm.
"Honey, you spend too long
on that
dream machine. You're still
married to Allan, right? So
you can't marry Andrew. That takes
care of that."
"But I can divorce
Allan. He said I could."
"In order to marry Andrew? Maybe
your trouble is that you are
pursuing archetypes, not real people.
That's when the going really gets
difficult and events really start
to repeat
themselves. Let me lend
you Anna
Kavan's Ice to read; then you'll understand what I
mean by pursuit of archetypes.
You are seeing Andrew generically when you should view
him as
an individual. Let's talk
again about this—I must go
and see
old Birkett. We've got
a deal
of trouble
regarding the appropriations fund."
"You've nothing
against Andrew?"
Alice looked
away. "No. I'm very fond
of Andrew."
Angsteed shut
himself in his office and
played back to himself the
casette on which he had
recorded Rose-Jean's dream from the master
tape. The master tape was
university property; the casette was
his property.
He now
had records
of 174
dreams dreamed by Rose-Jean
Dempson. In the work files
of his department, all dreams contributed
to the
bank by all volunteers were anonymous, and elaborately
cross-filed in the computer according to
dream-type, content, key-symbol, and so on.
Now they
were all being additionally classified according to time
of dream.
All that was impersonal, and routine.
Angsteed's private collection of Rose-Jean's dreams was both private
and personal.
He let his mind wander as
her sleepy
voice reached him through the earphone
in his
ear. Her dream territory had
become more and more familiar
to him.
He, possibly
more than any other man alive,
was able
to chart
that territory. In every dream he could tell his
whereabouts in her psyche, in
which quadrant, how deep
he was.
He knew
the colorations,
he had
come to recognize various
meta-continents, in each
of which
certain archetypal emotion events
prevailed. All was cloudy, ever-changing, but he
no longer
went in fear of losing
his orientation.
As his
knowledge and sensibility increased, he grew to comprehend something about the different
time-flows of the different meta-continents.
Gradually, and without being aware of
it, he
was coming
nearer to the Heartland,
that interior which no conscious
thought—not even Rose-Jean's—had ever penetrated. The interior
was beset
with mystery and guarded with
barricades, the greatest of
which was the attenuation of consciousness into sleep. The
effect came like an enchantment
as one
approached, and the brainwaves
which it radiated served as
tsetse fly in maintaining
the territory
intact and virginal. But Angsteed was learning to move
in ever
deeper.
During the lunch hour, he retired
to his
room, taking the casette to add
to his
growing collection. He moved slowly
and somnambulistically, often ignoring
the greetings
of his
fellows.
He had plans for writing a
ballet, for making a film,
for painting a picture, which would
embody the inner world of
which he was the.
sole explorer. As yet only
a few
notes and diagrams existed. Sometimes Angsteed
sat before
his typewriter,
sometimes he sat with his
gouaches on the desk before
him. Rarely did he
do more
than gaze into perspectives of which only he was
aware.
When his phone warbled he picked
it up
and spoke
inattentively.
It was
Rose-Jean.
At once
he became
more alert.
"We both have the night free
of the
lab. Let me drive you
into Goadstown and we'll
have a meal together. You
might even remind me how to
dance. How's about it?"
"Why, that
would be fine, Andrew, but—"
"No buts, honey! Let me for
once pose as a man
of action.
Be round at my
apartment at six, and we'll
have a drink before we
go. I
had a
letter this morning that I'd
like you to cast an eye
over. Things are going to
change from now on, and
you're a part of
it."
"Oh, okay,
Andrew, whatever you say. Thanks."
Although he set the phone down
briskly, the smile on his
face faded into abstraction,
and he
sat where
he was,
gazing into his own personal distance.
He was lying on his bed
with the same expression on his face when Rose-Jean
arrived that evening, brightly dressed
for the trip to
town.
"I'd meant to be showering, but I got lost
in a
fit of
abstraction. I'm not always quite
so absentminded."
He kissed
her rather formally.
"You'd better
go and
shower now, then. I came
at six,
as you asked." She was piqued
that he offered no compliments
about her appearance after the long ritual
she had
subjected herself to before
her mirror.
"Sure, sure. Won't be long! Grab
yourself a Coke out of
the icebox. Have a look at
my books."
She did as she was bid,
mooching back and forth before
his well-worn collection of hardcovers and paperbacks with a
glass in her hand.
She saw
no titles
that particularly took her fancy, except for some egghead
movie paperbacks. The directors discussed were Bunuel, Jancso,
Tarkovsky, and Bergman. Since the latter
was the
only one she had heard
of, and
his films bored her, she shoveled
the volumes
back into their shelf. She put
a Bonzo
Dog Band
record on the record-player instead.
Just as Angsteed reappeared, looking unfamiliar
in a
gray suit, the doorbell rang. Alice
Butley entered.
"Hi, Rose-Jean, you're looking
great. I've picked a bad
time to call, Andy—I
can see
you're going out. I only
dropped in for an
idle chat. I'll call around
some other time."
"Don't go. Great to see you
again, Alice. I'm just getting
myself a martini—let me make you one."
"I can
resist anything but temptation. Set 'em up."
When they were drinking, Angsteed said,
"Alice, things are most definitely going to be different,
radically different, around here.
We're on the move at
last. The psyche is going
to expand in a
big way.
Believe me, I'm on to
something really new, aren't I,
Rose-Jean?"
"Oh, I do hope
so."
"Well, there are things that have never been done
before, though most of
them are powerless to alter
the essence
of existence,"
Alice said.
"What about a new thing that
goes directly to the essence
of existence?" He grinned
and looked
at Rose-Jean
for her
approval.
"The essence of the
human life experience is largely
a matter
of repetition.
It's cyclic in nature, at
the least,
with every generation suffering
the same
miseries and pleasures."
"Oh, sure,
we all
enjoy the same emotions, the
same realities of birth and
death, love, desire, hate. Haven't
I said
that to you before?"
Rose-Jean perched on the
edge of Angsteed's sofa and
said, "These cycles, Alice—at
least they can't be concentric,
or else
the same events would
happen over and over again
without the participants being aware of
it." She passed her hand
across her brow, as
if brushing
away a hair.
Alice laughed. "So they
do happen
over and over again! I
guess reason suggests otherwise,
but reason
is fallible
in these
matters."
"A fine thing for a philosopher
to say!
You've no proof of this repetition."
She spread her hands
and offered
him a
face of innocence. "The
major events of life occur
over and over, perpetually. Rose-Jean agrees with
me, don't
you, Rose-Jean?"
But Rose-Jean had walked
over to the window and
was pressing her forehead against the
glass. Angsteed went quickly across to
her and
put an
arm around
her shoulders.
"What's the
trouble, honey? You okay?"
"I'm okay. I just hate what
we're talking about. Sometimes I get an awful sense
of déjà vu. Let's go
out; if we're going out
—can we, do you
mind?"
"Just say
the word,
sweetheart."
"I can take a hint," Alice said. She shot
Angsteed a significant and warning look,
but he
chose not to heed it.
Toward midnight,
they finished up at Luigi's,
where the juke-box was loud, the
lamps were encased in lead,
and the
waitresses wore green leather
pants and little else. Beyond
the pool tables was a space
for dancing.
Angsteed was drunk enough to try
a few
steps. He enjoyed the music
and the
noise and the people.
"Too long
since I did this!" he shouted to her.
"It does rather look that way,
Andy. Wouldn't you rather sit down?"
"Come on,
girl, I'm only just getting
going! You know your trouble?"
"What is
my trouble?"
He started to laugh
as he
swayed. "You're just a babe-inarms.
You should
learn to drink, that's what
you should
do! Coke's a kid's drink."
"I happen
to like
it."
"Okay, you like it. I tell
you what—let
me get
you a
Coke with rum in it. How
about that?"
"No, thanks,
alcohol is a drug and
I'm not
having any."
He stopped dancing. "What's
wrong with you, Rose-Jean? What was that you said
the other
day about
not being
a person?
Alcohol never did anyone any
harm in moderation. Now come on,
come and have a Coke
and rum.
What do they call it? A
Cuba Libre! I'll have a
Cuba Libre with you!"
He dragged her away
to a
table, shouting for a waitress.
Finally, two Cuba Libres were
brought and set before them.
"I'm not going to drink it,
Andy, so you'd better make
up your mind."
"What you afraid of? Come on,
pour it down, honey! More
where that came from!"
He started
his own
drink, and continued until his
glass was empty. Some of
the liquid
ran down
his chin and onto his shirt.
He wiped
his chops
with a grand gesture.
She clutched his arm.
"Andy, let's get out of
here. I see my husband over by the bar,
and he
can be
real mean."
"Leave it to me. I'll take
care of that bastard! Where
is he?
Which one's him?" He stared pugnaciously at the throng of
people by the bar.
"I'm not having any fighting. I
thought he was a thousand
miles away. Let's get
out of
here fast and back home,
if you're
sober enough to drive."
"Balls, go
and tell
him to
join us. Let's buy him
a drink."
She put her face closer to
him and said, "Andy, if you don't
come out to the
car this
instant, I swear to you
that everything is over between us
from this moment on, and
I will
never speak to you again. I
know my husband better than
you do,
and I'm telling you
to come
on out."
"All right,
all right,
I heard,
relax! He won't kill us!"
"You'd be surprised!" She put her
arms around Angsteed and dragged him
through the crowd and out
of the
saloon, keeping her face
away from the bar. Angsteed
tried to determine whom they
were avoiding, but, as far
as he
could see, none of the people
at the
bar were
taking any notice of them.
Outside, they made their way through
the parking
lot to
Angsteed's car. Angsteed was
argumentative and wanted to return to
give Dempson a going-over; Rose-Jean had some difficulty in getting him into
the driving
seat.
"Please drive
carefully, Andy! Oh, you look
so wild!"
He steered a way
slowly through the lot and
toward the main entrance. As they
came under the fake carriage
lights at the gate, Rose-Jean cried
that she could see Dempson,
head down, walking toward the exit.
With a roar, Angsteed threw the
vehicle forward. Rose-Jean screamed. A
man in
their path turned and jumped
to one
side, and the off-wing
of the
vehicle rammed a brick pillar.
Sounds of falling glass
as one
of the
headlights went out. Automobiles behind began hooting. Both
Angsteed and Rose-Jean jumped out
to inspect
the damage.
"You were
going to run him over,
you madman!"
"No, I wasn't. I
only meant to give him
a scare."
"When I got a
proper look at him I
saw it
wasn't Allan anyway."
In her
arms later, the drink still
in him,
he cried
in self-hatred,
"What sort of a man
am I?
Is there
a curse
on me,
something I can't get
free from? How wretched, how
circumscribed, my goddamned
life is!"
"Don't talk so loud, Andy! You'll
give me a bad reputation."
"I love you, Rose-Jean, you're marvelous,
you're natural in a way I
could never be. I want
to please
you, yet all I do
works against our relationship.
A repetitive
event, like Alice says. Anything I love, it dies on me. Even
now, even saying what I am saying, I'm conscious that I may be driving us further
apart."
"I
love having you in my bed, Andy. It gets lonely. Did you ever make love to
Alice?"
"What
the hell kind of question is that? What's that got to do with what we're
talking about?"
"What
are we talking about? I don't know. I'm not really intellectual, as you seem to
think. I mean, people are what they are, aren't they?" She started to
stroke him. Finally, her hands and her kisses had their proper effect, and they
filled her narrow bed with loving.
She
fell asleep before he did. Angsteed lay huddled against her, claustrophobic in
her narrow room, yet relishing the experience of having his head on the same
pillow as that other head, which contained—or projected—a world he regarded as
much more splendid than reality.
Gradually,
eyes still open, he built up, in his dream cartography, a misty globe not
unlike a celestial globe, with quadrants, sectors, and mythological figures
scrawled over it, every one with its own intense magic. This was Rose-Jean's
personal globe. What puzzled him was how it related to her personally, how far
it was beyond her or even antithetical to her, how far it was on completely
another plane from her own Umited consciousness. That puzzlement faded as he
lowered himself into the unlimited globe; his own reactions were dimmed out
under the kaleidoscope of emotions in which he found himself moving.
At
first, it was as if he were running amid a herd of reindeer in a storm—either a
snow blizzard or a sand storm. Glittering particles obscured almost everything.
Shaggy things stood to one side, fir trees of which neither boles nor crowns
were visible. The eyes of the reindeer were yellow in their melancholy faces.
The
colors blended perfectly. He was moving nearer the source. Currents of heat
served as compass-bearings. Somewhere ahead were the mountainous heartlands,
living under different times, different suns.
People and animals were transformed
there.
Already the process was happening about
him. As he bent his head
to climb,
the reindeer
were going into people, the
people going into animals,
coming out, going in again,
eating and being eaten, diving into
what appeared to be the
ground, springing up again
like divers, their movements beautiful
and horrific. He tried to look
into the faces of the
people, which somehow eluded him. He
could tell that some were
unaffected by the majestic process and
walked with sunshades or in
flowing robes.
Someone was
running beside him, matching him
stride for stride. Under the jogging
hair, eyes, lambent. A hint
about the mouth of—what? Joy, lust,
laughter, despair? Together, they came to
a narrowing
way, where windows loomed above
them like the luminif erous eyes
of fish.
He felt his heart hammering as
darkness, heat, walls confined him. Now
he was
in a
house, and someone was explaining—or attempting to explain—that this house was all
there was, anywhere, that
it was
coextensive with the universe. The being beside him
was denying
the explanation.
"It's the
other way about—the universe is
in the
house."
They sat down, on furniture scarcely
indicated, and a woman entered the
room. She was tall, she
came toward them bearing a precious
gift, something that changed shape
so that
they hardly comprehended. The woman's motion also
set into
being other shape changes.
The room
itself, responding to her, began to
grow tremendously tall and the
walls to become soft, so that
he clenched
his hands
and felt
the pulse
in them
like a spring.
She came and looked him in
the face.
The other
had gone.
The room was more
like the hollow trunk of
a tree—and
more and more, until
her eyes
and face
seemed like leaves and he became
part of her and they
were both merely patterns on
the sinuous green growth.
"Just a minute," Alice mumbled. "Who is
it? What
time is it?"
She threw
on a
gown and padded over to
her outer
door. Rose-Jean was standing
there. Night lay behind her
in the
corridor.
"Rose-Jean? What's
the matter?
I feel
such a mess. What time is
it?" The girl was near to
tears.
"Oh, Alice, I'm in
such trouble! It's Andrew, please
help me. He's unconscious or something
and I
can't wake him up. Maybe he's
dying. I've tried pouring water
on his
face and everything."
"Jesus Christ, child, try
whiskey, try the college quack,
or the shrink, or the fire
department—just don't try
me. Andy's
not my responsibility!"
"But he
may be
dying. People do die!"
"You don't have to wake me
in the
small hours to tell me
that. I know people
die. That's never been news!"
She backed into her
room and started to search
for cigarettes.
Rose-Jean followed her around. Darkness
lay outside
the windows.
"The trouble is, Alice—I
had to
come to you. I'm in
trouble. Andrew's blacked out in
my bed."
She laughed
feebly, in apology.
Alice looked at her.
Still looking at her, she
lit a
cigarette, sucked in the
smoke, began to laugh and
cough. Finally she managed to speak.
"Gee, that's sweet, that's
just sweet! Oh, Rosie, you
kill me! Poor Andy was never
too much
of a
lover, and I guess you
just wore him out. He's catching up on his
beauty sleep, that's all. Now you
trot on back to him and leave me to my beauty
sleep—if that's the phrase
I'm looking
for any
longer."
"Alice, please—there's something really
wrong with Andy. I know it."
"There's something wrong with
him, all right," Alice said,
as she stared down at Angsteed
a few
minutes later. She lifted one of his eyelids and
watched it fall back into
place. "Did you hit him?"
"Of course
not. At least he's not
dead. Is he dying, do
you imagine? How are we going to get him to his
room without anyone seeing us?"
"Can't
be done. I'll phone Dr. Norris for you. He's a nice discreet guy."
Angsteed
lay curled in Rose-Jean's bed, his face colorless, his lips slightly parted,
hardly seeming to breathe.
"Catatonia
if I ever saw it," Dr. Norris said when he arrived. He rolled Angsteed
over onto his back. Angsteed lay awkwardly in the new position, unmoving.
"What happened to
him?" Rose-Jean asked.
"Can't say yet. We'll
have to get him to the hospital."
"Seems
a pity," Alice said. "Must be something two women could do here with
an absolutely helpless man. I'm sure we'd think of something."
three interviews
Interview
A. Mrs. Rose-Jean Dempson. interviewer: Mrs. Dempson, Andrew Angsteed has now been
in a condition of schizophrenic withdrawal for forty-one days. On occasions he
shows some awareness of his surroundings, but he will not communicate. We hope
by talking to some people who know him well that we may be able to help him.
Did you at any time hear him say anything which led you to suspect that he was
suffering from mental stress? rose-jean: Why, no, he was perfectly fine, I mean he
was so intellectual that I doubt if I—well, he could be violent, I suppose.
But what's violent? It's a violent world, isn't it? interviewer: In what way was he violent? Did he hit you?
rose-jean: Hit me? What makes you say that? I don't give anyone cause to hit me.
Besides, Andy was pretty gentle, I guess. Too gentle, really; he was sort of
withdrawn, now that I come to think of it—not in any nasty way, of course. But
I wouldn't call him violent. He ran his automobile into a gatepost, that I do
know. Broke the headlights on the driver's side.
interviewer: Was
that an accident?
rose-jean: No, that
was deliberate!
(Laughs) You see,
he was drunk that night. We
were driving out of a
nightclub and he thought he saw
my husband—did
I tell
you I
was married?
My husband and I
live apart. I told Andy
it wasn't
Allan. I said, "Allan's in Detroit,
you loon!"
but he
was drunk,
and he
drove the car at
the man.
The man
jumped clear and Andy ran into
the gatepost.
Just an accident, of course.
interviewer: Was
Angsteed often drunk? rose-jean: Not
to my
knowledge. He was too wrapped
up in
the dream project. I
don't drink at all myself.
He was
on the
verge of a breakthrough
when—when this happened. He was on a verge of
a breakthrough
that was about to change
the world, so he said.
interviewer: Do
you know
what he imagined this breakthrough
to be?
rose-jean: It
was going
to be
something entirely new. I think
he said he wanted
to alter
the essence
of things.
Could a new thing alter the
essence of things? I seem
to remember
somone telling me that
human life was cyclic. (Pause) Anyhow, about
this breakdown, this breakthrough, I mean,
of Andy's,
he had
some new idea about
timing people's dreams in relation
to their circadian mechanisms. That was
somehow going to show that we
have all sorts of different
times going on in our
heads at once. I forget the
details, but that was it
in general.
interviewer: Did
you regard
this as a feasible idea?
rose-jean: I used to
contribute my dreams. I was
one of
his guinea pigs. That was how
we met,
really. interviewer: Did
you believe
in Andrew's
theories or did you think they might be illusions?
rose-jean: Oh,
he didn't
know that himself. He was
just working along a scientific hypothesis. I guess a
lot of
things sound nutty before they're proved,
don't they? Like people didn't used to believe in
acupuncture, except for the Chinese,
I mean, until modern
science showed how it all
worked. But Andy's ideas weren't way-out
to me.
I went
to Europe
for vacation once, and got most terrible jet lag,
so I know there are different times in the body. Maybe Andy found a time he
liked best and settled for that. Maybe we shouldn't disturb him.
interviewer: You
think he is happy as he is?
rose-jean : Golly, who's ever happy? I just meant—well, I don't know what I meant.
I mean, maybe Andy isn't sick— maybe he made his breakthrough. You people at
the mental hospital ought to see how his brain waves register. But just don't
fool around with him. I'd say—I know you don't want my advice—but I'd say let
him be as he is. He could be happy, who knows, properly looked after. Gosh, I'm happy, don't think I'm not, but—well, it's nice to be looked after,
isn't it?
Interview
B. Miss Alice Butley.
interviewer: It's good of you to see me in your lunch
hour, Miss Butley.
alice: Who wants to hang around this place? What
can I tell you about Andrew Angsteed? He's real sick, is he? interviewer: We are curious to know why he went into a
state of complete withdrawal just when he was excited by new things he was
discovering.
alice: "New" is a relative term. As a
philosopher, I distrust it. Everyone's hot for the new, the novel. I'll tell
you what my old man used to say—I've got a great admiration for my old man, and
I don't care who hears me say it—he used to say, "Boffers (that was his
nickname for me, kind of a baby-name), Boffers, if it's new, it won't last, and
if it's lasted, then it's not new." Andy wanted to find something new,
something to weary people's minds with. I told him, nothing new is going to
alter the essence of things.
interviewer: I believe that Angsteed claimed his
discoveries could affect the essence of things.
alice : Don't make the mistake he made. Say what
you will, the essence of the human experience is cyclic. It's largely a matter
of repetition, with every generation suffering the same basic joys and sorrows.
interviewer: You're
not suggesting
that Angsteed has suffered from
this sort of withdrawal before? alice: How
do I
know? I haven't known him
all that
long or all that well.
interviewer: But
you were
lovers at one time? alice
: Be
your age! Does that have
to mean
I know
him well?
He was always a closed guy.
He never
knew me, never took any interest
in me
as a
person. Yet I was prepared
to love
him —my mother died when I
was just
a girl,
so I
was always
chock full of love
to give
to the
right person, don't believe otherwise. And we did have
a bond
in common.
... Oh
well. . .
interviewer: You
were going to say? alice: Things
sound silly in daylight to
strangers that seem important whispered in
bed at
night. The idea of philosophy
is to knock the silliness out
of things.
But why
not say
it? Andy had an older sister
die when
he was
eight years old. She drowned in a lake at
a summer
camp. He always said it
marked him for good.
He really
loved that sister. Still—not quite so much drama in
that as losing your dear
old Ma,
even if she did tan your
hide, is there? (Pause) I guess
we'd all like to withdraw at
times—on full pay, of course.
Was Andy's
trouble sexual or to
do with
his work?
Or both?
interviewer: We
hoped you'd tell us. alice: Well,
I don't
know. Is that thing switched
off? Maybe I shouldn't suggest this,
but all
this business with dreams, it
could have become obsessive
with Andy. Who knows, maybe
he vanished into the
recesses of his own mind.
Maybe he's happy
where he
is! (Laughs)
interviewer: Mrs.
Dempson suggested the same thing.
alice: She did? She's hardly the
person to know about such
things. A little immature
for such
speculations, wouldn't you say?
Interview
C. The A uthor.
interviewer: Mr.
Aldiss, the interviews with Miss
Butley and Mrs. Dempson didn't get
us very
far. Don't you feel both
ladies could have been
more revealing?
author: No. I thought they
were very revealing about themselves.
I agree
they produced no astonishing revelations about Angsteed,
but then
that's the way life goes.
interviewer: This
is a
story, not life. Do you
intend to finish the story
without telling the reader what
happened to Angsteed? Did he have
some sort of personality collapse, or did he actually
find his way into a
dream world? author: It's
a good
question. You are asking me,
in effect,
whether this is a
sad story
or a
happy one. I believe you
are also asking me whether it
is a
science fiction story or not. interviewer: I wasn't aware
of so
doing. Like Miss Butley and Mrs. Dempson, you wish
to talk
about yourself? author: Not
at all.
Unlike those ladies, I am
intensely interested in Angsteed as
a person.
You see,
I know
him. He is an actual person,
although I have changed a
few details
to protect
the parties
involved, as they say. And
I have
a particular
reason for ending the
story here and now: because
the real
Angsteed is still in
his state
of schizophrenic
withdrawal, or however you care to
label it. So the resolution
has yet
to come.
interviewer: May
I say
on behalf
of the
reader that I think it might
have been a better story
if you
had waited
till the resolution came?
author: Ah,
but then
the quality
of my
interest would change and you would
get a
different story. A science fiction
writer is like a journalist in that respect—he gets hooked on something
that is still happening. The mystery intrigues him
just as much as the solution.
However, I have no wish
to cheat.
Far from it. Let
me give
you not
one but
two possible
endings, just briefly. Okay? interviewer:
Go ahead.
author: Right
First the sad ending, the
non-SF ending.
Eventually, Angsteed is brought
out of
his withdrawal.
He seems not quite as he
was before,
and is
reluctant to return to the university.
He is
kept on at the mental
institution for some while, but shows
little interest in the outside
world. His prognosis is not
favorable. As for the diagnosis,
while it is couched in abstruse
and precise-sounding
terms, it actually reveals little.
Angsteed, it says, has suffered a
mental collapse caused primarily by overwork. Rose-Jean has
inadvertently brought about the crisis point.
Angsteed wanted her love, while
realizing that he and she
were nevertheless incompatible.
His "case history," slowly compiled from various
sources, reveals a number
of affairs
over the years with older
women, Alice Butley being his most
recent involvement. Rose-Jean,
a younger woman, is identified in his mind with
his dead
sister. The terms "incest fixation" and "guilt association" are bandied about.
interviewer: And
Angsteed's promising line of dream
research?
author: There
was no
promising line. The dream research
was getting nowhere; Angsteed's
fantasies of imminent revolutionary discoveries were to protect
himself from knowledge of yet another
failure. The unit is closed
down shortly after his breakdown and its appropriations reassigned. interviewer: There
had been
other failures in his life?
author: The essence of human experience
is cyclic,
you know.
interviewer: Do things work
out better
in the
alternate ending?
author: Oh,
much better. The first story,
you see,
is just
a little downbeat study of character.
Whereas the science fiction story, the story with the
happy ending, is an upbeat
study of ideas. Whereas Angsteed's theories prove, in the
first story, to be just a
paranoid fixation, in the SF
story they are proved to
be true.
interviewer: True?
author: Yes,
true—part of the external world.
A whole
range of SF stories operate like
that: the screwy ideas, instead
of being
certifiable, turn out to mirror
true reality. The hero is
proved right and everyone
else is proved wrong, from
Aristotle onward. Paranoia triumphs, logic
is defeated.
That's one of the reasons why
outsiders believe SF to be
a load
of nonsense.
Why did
Angsteed so enjoy Rose-Jean's dreams? Because they strengthened
his growing
conviction that the "cold sane," as he
called them, were deluded and
that the mad were really the sane.
interviewer: Yes,
but that
was just
his interpretation
of her
dreams.
author: That's
what I'm trying to say.
To my
mind, interpretation is everything—and not merely in my
story. However, here's how the second
version goes.
Angsteed comes out of his withdrawal
in a
few weeks.
He remains quiet and reserved, but
is again
in control
of himself.
Since his post remains
open for him, he returns
to the
university.
He is
as convinced
as ever
that he has—no, I'd better
phrase this with care—he
is aware
that his consciousness penetrated into Dream Time. "Dream
Time" is his phrase for
it Dream Time is obviously akin to Jung's "Collective Unconscious."
The place he went to was
no particular
place—not in Rose-Jean's mind, not
his own
mind, although her dreams gave
him the key
he needed.
He regards
that as important: that he
was in some impersonal place.
He feels sure that many other
people have been there, often
maybe in one form
or another
of madness,
where time-displacement is a familiar
phenomenon; but those people were
unable to recognize where
they had been.
"My conception of a
dream globe enabled me to
navigate, and to control my consciousness
deeper into the Heartland than anyone else had ever
been," he says. "I return
just as out of madness, as
a person
reborn. I feel older, wiser,
replenished at source, as
people do after sleep and
dreams."
"You're a real pioneer, Andy," says Rose-Jean. "An astronaut,
no less!"
"In a sense I've discovered nothing new," he says.
"Yet I know that when I
come to publish my findings,
a slow
revolution in human thought will
be set
in motion,
a unifying revolution that will make us revise
our ideas
about the unity of
33
JOURNEY TO THE
HEARTLAND
human life,
not only
in waking
and sleep,
in madness
and sanity,
but one
with another. Eventually, everyone will
be able
to visit the Heartland and replenish
themselves."
"The problem with the
human race is that it
needs to wake up, not go
further asleep," says Alice. "'Sing
heigh-ho, the wind and the roses,
This life damn soon closes!'.
. ."
"It won't be like that, Alice.
We will
no longer
be cut
off from our inner beings. It's
nearer immortality than death, believe
me! Maybe
madness and psychosis and neurosis
and the
rest will fade away
in a
couple of generations. Why the
human race was barred
from its own Heartland for
a million years, we
don't know. Maybe we'll find
out now.
Maybe it was necessary for growing
purposes—like an adolescent's quarrel with his family. Now we're
back, back to an entirely
new vision
of reality.
At last
we're going to be able
to change
the essence
of things."
"It sounds
marvelous," says Rose-Jean.
She hugs
him.
"Sounds too
good to be true," says Alice. She laughs.
She pours them drinks. Martinis for
her and
Angsteed, a Coke for Rose-Jean.
The
wonders of new technologies are given first to the rich, and only after the
jet-set has sampled them do prices come down to a level most of us can afford.
Which means that the rich serve as technology-tasters for us in much the same
way servants were once used to make sure their monarchs" food wasn't
poisoned. Considering that too rich a diet of new wonders can cause the disease
of ennui, maybe we should be thankful for this situation. See, for instance,
the following pungent serving of technology
on wry.
Gordon
eklund and Gregory
benford have
published two previous collaborations in Universe; the
most recent was their Nebula Award-winning novelette in $4, If The Stars Are Gods.
What
Did You Do Last Year?
BY GORDON EKLUND
& GREGORY BENFORD
They waited impatiently, David Golden and his
young bride, Melody, beneath the colossal
dome. Their table was private,
away from the rabble.
Overhead were stars, drifting slowly
through a swirl of
color. David drummed his fingers,
wishing his sister Carol would arrive
with her lout of a
husband.
Melody's head craned back, watching the
display in the dome and oblivious
to the
low murmur
of voices.
David nudged his chair and it
said, "—in the central region.
Blue from hydrogen, red from oxy
radicals. This is an emission
nebula, its fluorescence fed by ultraviolent from the young, hot stars embedded in the
dust. Explorers—"
He wasn't sure this
new place,
the Castle
Orion, was going to work out
at all.
God, what confusing stuff. He
ignored Melody, still looking, and
searched the crowd for Carol,
his twin.
January 31, she couldn't
have forgotten. And if she
had—was it calculated? No, no one
forgets his birthday.
"You must
be really
eager," Melody said. Her excited
gaze flickered past the
undisciplined mass of human flesh
that circulated through the public
portion of the ballroom. "David,
tell me, how long
has it
been? Not a whole year?
You two
must have so much
to say."
"No, nothing." He glanced
up to
where, upon the black interior
of the
dome, a glittering message was
burning into existence. "Not that
I can
think of."
"Well, I certainly am," Melody said,
gazing up too. But it
was only a commercial.
Tomorrow, come noon, an electrical
man would implode himself.
Seats were available on a
strictly reserved basis, wiih
priority going to the better
listings. David burped. He hzd witnessed so many electrical men imploding
themselves that he was
afraid to start counting.
He drank
his liquor
through a pale thin straw.
"The time?" he asked, as two
nearly naked men—one in hot
pursuit of the other—crossed the top
of their
table.
"Nearly eleven," said Melody
when the men had passed.
"David, are you sure
they haven't—"
"Oh, Lord, they're here," he said,
waving into the shifting crowd that dangled in the
public air. Carol came floating
toward them. Except for a
neat triangle of painted breasts
she could have been him. Even
their hair—midnight-black and
trimmed exactly to the
shoulders—was the same. Behind her
Carol drew a large
hairy man dressed in African
jewelry. Otherwise naked, the
man was
artificially enhanced, a huge thing dangling past the kneecap.
"Is that—"
Melody said, refusing to conceal
her astonishment.
"For God's
sake, sit down," David said.
"It's Garth—yes."
"Why, they're
. .
. they're
marvelous."
"I hadn't noticed." Deliberately he turned away,
facing the floorshow. A man in
uniform holding a long bloody
sword was disemboweling a naked child.
A historical
spectacle. Good God! How
many times had he seen
this one before?
"Carol," he
murmured, turning back.
"Happy, happy,
happy," Carol said, touching David's
mouth. Their hps, identical
in shape
and color,
slid neatly together.
Distantly, Melody cried her
approval. Drawing back from his sister,
David mechanically said, "Shut up, Melody."
"No!" Carol
cried. She pointed across the
table. "David— don't tell
me. Is
that her?"
"So they
tell me."
"Oh, but, David, why did you
do it?
Wasn't there any other way?"
Melody was chattering at Garth, who
slowly stroked his forearm hair with
a white
fish-skeleton comb. His massive, animal
silence made Melody speak faster.
David made an effort to deflect
the conversation:
"I see Garth hasn't changed."
"Should he? But her. Her? Why
her? David, surely you didn't—"
"I did." Calmly he
removed a cigarette from his
tin nose.
"Advancement. Her father happens—"
"Oh, him—her." Carol wiped
a tear
from her eye. "Oh, Christ, David, I'm sorry—I forgot."
"So what
did you
do last
year?" Carol asked David. All
four were seated at
the table.
Garth fingered Melody's silvered dorsal fins in explicit invitation,
using his thumbnail to advantage.
"Not much.
It was—"
"We had a marvelous time on
our honeymoon,"
Melody interrupted. "It was really
fun, wasn't it?"
Carol cocked an amazed
eyebrow at David, who shrugged.
"Dr. Divine," he said.
"The teledream
treatment."
"You've heard
of him?"
he asked,
surprised.
"Hasn't everyone?"
Again Melody interrupted. "Dr. Divine shot us
both full of wild, wild dope.
And hypnosis.
You wouldn't
believe his eyes. They were like—like
big black
swimming pools. And his —yipe."
Garth had
bitten her nipple off.
David, shrugging apologetically, went on: "Some old story. Pure fiction. Where
does he get them? I
was the
Pope and Melody—"
"A wild robot." Escaping Garth, she
had risen
above the table, where she drifted,
hands flashing excitedly. "I was
really him—the robot—and
he wasn't
even a real person. We
fought sword duels and
rode donkeys and you couldn't
tell it wasn't real life."
"And you, David?" Carol asked. "You
were involved in this too?"
"Yes," he
said defensively.
"And was it the way Melody
describes?" She made
no effort
to keep the sarcasm
from creeping into her tone.
"Was it marvelous? Fantastic? Was it utterly real?"
"It was,"
David said, "an absolute bore."
"Of course."
Carol giggled.
"And"—getting up
his nerve—"and
you, Carol? What did you do
last year?" "Dr. Divine."
"The same?" He allowed
himself a brief, relieved smile,
though not yet triumphant.
"How was it? Which story
did you
live?"
Carol turned away, distracted.
Following her gaze, David caught sight of Garth and
Melody taking the tumble slide
through the ice-crystal clouds above. A hollow
gong; the crystals dissolved into
a rain
of acrid
fire.
"Story? Did you say story? David,
David." Reaching out, she patted his
hand tenderly. "That was ages
ago when
they were doing stories. It's people
now—real people. Dr. Divine transmits your soul into another
body. Garth and I were—can
you fashion it?—a San
Francisco streetcleaner and his mistress.
Oh." She rocked in her
chair, nearly laughing. "It was
tremendously amusing."
Tilting forward,
shoving her hand aside, he
cried: "You mean to say you
liked it?"
She laughed
in high,
shrill, stuttering giggles. "Oh, God,
David,
how could I? Streetcleaning—oh, oh, oh." She giggled on. "It was a
dreadful bore."
"I
see." He drew back. Above, Melody, losing her balance, toppled down toward
the tabletop. The brittle plastic shattered easily. Drinks, food,
candlesticks—everything flew into the orange cloud forming for the next slide.
The table collapsed. Gratefully, David sank to his knees in the soft carpet
and stayed there.
"It's nearly twelve," Carol
announced when the new table arrived. "We'd better vault." She
fluttered immediately into the air, calling back to David, "See you
there."
Gulping his drink, Garth
hurried after her.
"Now what?" Melody asked,
wide-eyed.
David
shook his head, remembering how Dr. Divine had assured him that the teledream
treatment was a secret process. The filthy liar. "We vault."
"To where? Where
now?"
"Chicago," he
said, staggering to his feet.
She bounced up to join him.
"Why there?"
"Because
it's eleven o'clock there." Together they were passing through the crowd.
"Then, in an hour, we go to Denver. Then San Francisco. Anchorage.
Honolulu. And so on."
"That's marvelous. How
long can it last?"
"As
long as you want it," he said glumly. They had reached the vaulting
booths. He spied Garth's hairy flanks disappearing inside one sealed cage. But
a long line stretched ahead of him and Melody.
"And then what?"
she said.
"Then you go
home."
"Home?"
"Yes."
He added, pleasantly, "With Garth." "No!" Her terror was
genuine. "Me—with him?" "Oh, he's as tender as a lamb,"
David assured her. "As gentle as a child." "But what—?"
"About me?" David said,
substituting his own question for her unspoken one. "Well, I'll tell
you." Her vulgarity, after all, deserved some reward. Why should he suffer
alone? "I'm going to take Carol home with me. It's a tradition with us— an
old family tradition."
"I've really been looking forward to
tonight," Melody confessed as she and David passed through the thick,
shifting mob of the memorial ballroom. "Last year was fun."
"You enjoyed it?"
"Oh, yes."
"Does
that mean you enjoyed Garth?" He smiled pleasantly at her.
"Oh"—she looked
deliberately away—"frap you."
He laughed. The size of the crowd here
tonight depressed him. The Castle Orion had become increasingly common as its
popularity grew. Some of the people he saw here tonight were incredible in
their base coarseness. Compared to them, Melody might be elected to serve as a
symbol of elegant sophistication. "Float up and see if they're
here," he told her, but as soon as he spoke he spotted Carol and Garth
seated at a table in the private section of the room. Swiftly he and Melody
slid into the chairs reserved for them.
"Happy, happy,
happy," Carol said, meeting his lips.
A
moment later Melody darted off, murmuring something. Garth polarized himself
into two fundamental colors and blended instantly with the dank, humid jungle
that was forming around their table. A panther snarled. David saw the cat eyes
gleaming beneath the folds of a wet elephant-ear leaf. The fern trembled and he
saw that it was Garth, seeking Melody.
"Some
things never seem to change," Carol said. "You must mean
Melody." "No better?"
He
shrugged. "I think she's hopeless." "Oh, David." Carol
grabbed his hand, pressing fervently. "You have to keep trying. Otherwise,
what's the use? Live
each moment of your
life to its fullest. Never
do anything
twice because there isn't
enough time to do it
all once.
I know
I told you last year—I sense
a real
core of seriousness below all that
vulgar veneer." "I remember,"
he lied.
"But—tell me—what
have you been doing this
year?"
It had
come too quickly for him.
He took
a deep
sour breath, hoping she failed to
detect the depth of his
anxiety. A water sphere burst nearby
and Melody
dropped beside him. Her presence served
only to deepen his fear.
"Dr. Divine—"
Melody suddenly began.
David couldn't help himself.
Her words—
He struck
her viciously across the face. A
white spot formed on her
cheek. A scarlet trickle of blood
ran from
her nose.
"Oh, David," she said, burying her
face in the white tablecloth.
"For Christ's
sake, quit whimpering," he said.
"You didn't
answer my question," Carol said.
He waved
at Melody
"She already did. Dr. Divine.
But"— he tried to inject a
note of confidence into his
voice—"it was different."
"How so?
Real people?"
"Oh, that was last year. This
year we were—" He paused
for effect.
"Monsters," Melody
concluded, holding her bleeding nose
between two fingers.
"She means
aliens," he added quickly.
"Oh, really?"
Carol said. "And how was
that?"
"Interesting," he
said, choosing his language with
care. "The soul is
transported across space. We spent
a few
months on a dust planet. A
real place, too. We read
the expeditionary
report first."
"It was
fun?" Carol asked coldly.
"Yes," Melody
said. She breathed out, spattering
her face
with tiny droplets of
blood that quickly turned brown.
She ignored
it, but
her chin
trembled. "So—so different."
"I see,"
Carol said.
"It was
a bore,"
David said. "Awful."
He affected
a weary
laugh. "Slithering through the
hot sand
like worms. Ugh."
'Then," said Carol, "you missed the
real excitement last year."
"I did?"
David said.
"Oh, yes. Haven't you heard? The
starlanes are finally open, really open.
Garth and I had seats
on the
first flight. Quaint places, I can
hardly recall the names. Oh,
Sirius—a big star. The light hurts
your eyes. Some had aliens
like yours. Interesting, yes
. .
. but,
well, stupid."
"Some alien
races are quite intelligent," Melody said.
"Are they?" Carol said.
"If you want, you might
be able
to get reservations. See for yourself."
"Not this
year," David said.
"Oh, David,"
Melody cried. "Couldn't we?"
"David," said
Melody, sighing peevishly, "why won't
you tell her? I think it's
mean of you to make
her wait."
Melody's hands glowed brightly.
She was
wearing a pair of electronically
enhanced gloves—a rage only slightly
out of
fashion—and they had so
far proven
useful in keeping Garth at a
distance. Presently he writhed on
the floor,
clutching his genitals with both hands.
"It was a marvelous time
we had.
Don't be ashamed."
"I loathe this place,"
David said, concentrating upon Carol
to the exclusion of all else.
"Next year, we go somewhere
else."
"That's next
year," Carol said. "I want
to know
what you did last year." "Oh, please tell
her," said Melody. "We took a
spaceride," he said.
"Oh," Carol
said, plainly disappointed. "You mean
the stars." He nodded.
"Garth and
I did
that too." She waved a
hand. "Ages ago, of course." "We didn't really
go to
the stars,"
he said.
"You were
lying to me?"
"No, not
really. We went through the
stars—not to them. We went—"
"To where there is nothing," Melody said, her voice
filled with awe.
His glare silenced her. "To the
edge of the universe," he explained. "Where there is nothing. The
stars got redder and redder. There were galaxies going
by. Everything
was older
and fainter. Murkey. They
told us we were approaching
the edge of the observable universe, out beyond where
men can
see—"
"Why can't
you see
farther?" Carol said.
"Something, I didn't catch
it. Some
jargon, you know. We left a
week after last birthday—it takes that long. We
arrived home two days ago."
"It was
unbelievable," Melody said.
"Utterly."
"It was nothing," David said. "Utterly."
He laughed.
"But isn't that the
whole point? The edge of
the universe—nothing.
The trip was interesting,
though the service was poor,
the food crude, the robots sloppy.
The actual
arrival was a monstrous letdown. What can you
do with
nothing?"
"It was
scary," Melody said, shivering.
David nodded, as if
agreeing, then reached over and
touched the control that
powered her gloves. Immediately, the light went out. In
response, Garth bounced off the
floor. He growled and sprang at
Melody. Shrieking, she danced away.
Garth flew after her.
David, smiling
sourly, continued: "Nothing."
But Carol was no longer Ustening.
"We had a vaguely interesting
time ourselves. But we're through
with space. Now it's time instead."
"Time?"
"Travel. Haven't you heard?
Dr. Proteus
in Rio.
Oh"—her smooth face wrinkled
in anxious
thought—"I just can't
remember where. Or when. The
past is like a lunar
landscape. All craters look
the same.
Wars, plagues, assassinations,
earthquakes, scandals, floods. Who
cares? Dr. Proteus wanted to send
us to
old America
but I
said no to that. I
think we went somewhere in France.
It was
just what I expected. Peasants
gathering faggots, and who needs
that?" "Yes," David said.
"But I am beginning to worry
about you. David, I want
you to tell me the truth.
Is it"—she
lowered her voice to a
confidential whisper—"her? Does
she force
you?"
"What?" He
didn't understand.
"Is it
her who
makes you take all these
absurd trips?"
"No," David
said dully. He stood up,
scanning the room. "Melody never forces
me to
do anything."
The four
of them
sat around
a small,
stained wooden table. Between them, untouched,
sat four
mugs of dark, odiferous beer. The room was barely
occupied. A shabby trio clustered
near a table in one shadowed
corner. The air held the
flat, oily memory of yesterday's fried food. The bartender
held his post at a crude
barswell. Behind the bar, fastened
to a
cloudy mirror, a sign said:
we reserve the
right to refuse serviceto anyone.
Reading the
words aloud, Carol giggled. "Do
you suppose,"
she asked, "they mean us?"
David blushed.
"I thought it would be
a change."
"Oh, it
is." She turned her head
slowly, as if dazzled by
the atmosphere. "It is."
"I mean—"
"Six months
ago it
would have been all right.
But, David, these places are too
blatantly quaint. They never were
able to catch on."
"It is
nice," Melody said. "Sort of serene. Even Garth
is quiet."
"That," Carol
said, "is because he's falling
asleep—from boredom."
"I was
sick of the Castle Orion,"
David said. "I couldn't stand that place another year."
"Oh, they've improved it,"
Carol said. "Finally. It's much
more exclusive now. The
ax fell
last month. Why, David"— she laughed gaily—"I'm
not even
sure you could get in
now."
"Don't say that. Just—just shut up."
He pouted,
turning sullen.
Carol patted his hand.
"Oh, oh, oh," she said
softly. "But" —she smiled—"no
matter. In an hour, Chicago.
Before then, though, I want to
know what you did last
year."
"Dr.—"
"Not Divine?"
He shook
his head.
"Proteus."
"Oh, him," Carol said,
covering her lips. "Garth, you remember. When was
it we—?"
David hurried on: "We
went all the way back."
"Cave men?" "Before
that."
"Dinosaurs?" '
"Before that." "Well, when?"
"Past the edge of time. To
the dawn
of creation.
We saw
the earth being born."
"It was—" Melody began,
but, catching a glimpse of
David, she fell silent.
"Well," said
Carol, "tell me. How was
it?"
"Gas," David
said, recollecting slowly. "Swirling mists. Everything a dull
red, like embers. Interesting—in an intellectual way—but—"
She sighed. "It was
the same
with Garth and me. We
died."
"What?" cried
Melody. "You died? Do tell
us." "Yes," David said
painfully, "do."
"A new technique. Dr. Divine. You
die—and it isn't pretty —he guarantees that—what a morbid
imagination—and then you are
revived. How many times did
we die,
Garth? Eight? Nine?"
"And was it interesting?" David said,
his tone
almost ugly. "Did you have a
simply lovely time?" Carol
ignored his mood. "Being reborn was rather fun,"
she
said, "but dying—" She made an ugly
face. "It's something I could've lived without." She laughed
joyously and David swallowed a fierce
gulp of beer. Suddenly, swiveling
in her
chair, Carol threw her
arms around Melody's bare shoulders
and kissed her hps.
"Oh, Melody," she cried, jumping
up. "You and David are my
two favorite
people. Hurry, hurry." She
tugged Melody with her. "We
don't want to be late."
"I can't see them," Melody said
flatly. "They're here," David said.
"I still don't see them." They stood side by
side upon the memorial-ballroom
floor of the Castle Orion.
Gazing around —his view distinctly limited—David was appalled. The
room was densely packed. The customers
seemed lower than any he
remembered from the past.
"Let's find
our table,"
he said.
"They may be there."
"All right."
She shrugged.
"If you insist."
He stopped and glared.
"What do you mean by
that? What do you think we
should do? Just turn around?
Go straight
home?"
"I couldn't
care less."
"Last year
you seemed
to care."
"Oh, oh, oh," she said softly.
"You were the one who
chose the beer garden."
"But you
chose to go home."
"David, David," she cried,
laughing shrilly. Suddenly, stretching
forward on tiptoes, she patted
his pale
cheek. "Wasn't he tender
as a
lamb? Wasn't he gentle as
a child?"
"Leave me
alone. You'll never understand."
They had barely reached the edge
of the
public arena. Melody abruptly darted
away into the crowded sky,
slipping between a writhing quartet
of air-lovers.
David would not follow. As
he walked
he passed
through private clouds, becoming
a flitting
intruder in a courtyard; a dungeon; star cluster; a
swirling air fight between winged
demons; an accountant's office.
In the
aisle he met a grinning
panda bear with a tennis racket,
but waved
away the animal's whispered proposition. Someone offered
him a
drink; he slid it into
his wrist. A plasma frog was
rushed ahead of him. They
only lived three months, so he
supposed the practice was justified.
A coronal discharge covered
a shriek,
a gurgle,
some muffled struggling. When
he reached
the table
he found
Melody sitting alone.
"What a stupid trapping waste that
was," he said. "What was?" she asked innocently. "Your flying ahead
to see
her first."
"Oh, David." She flung
both hands into the misty
air. "You know I loathe walking."
Silently, through a pale
thin straw, he drank his
liquor. Maybe she was right. Maybe
this whole birthday celebration had degenerated into a hopeless
waste. For weeks before and
after, he was good
for nothing
else.
"Just remember what I
said," he warned her.
"Oh, frap you." \
"Just don't forget."
"Oh, frap."
Soon enough,
they came. Garth, ageless, appeared
first, dressed in his
usual glittering array of raw
jewelry. Shortly afterward Carol materialized
at his
side, oddly stark naked, no
bodypaint, no cosmetics, only a tiny shapeless
pair of flesh-tinted breasts. But
she carried
herself divinely. He couldn't resist gazing in open admiration.
Carol smiled back and mouthed a greeting. He drew
forth a chair and gestured
at her
to sit beside him. Garth tried
to bound
across the table but went limp
in mid-air
and fell
in a
heap beside Melody's chair.
"Garth is
ill," Carol said, gazing straight
across the table at Melody. "Something is wrong with
him inside—it's all rotten."
"Can't they do anything for him?"
David asked. Carol shook her head,
continuing to stare at Melody.
"And you?" she said.
"How have you been?" "So-so," said Melody.
"But what
have you been doing? What
did you
do last
year?"
Melody shook
her head.
"I'm not supposed to tell
you that." "Why not?"
"Because he"—she pointed at
David—"said I shouldn't."
Carol scowled and started
to speak
but David
managed first:
"We went
to Tibet."
"You shut up," Carol said. "I
asked Melody." "But—"
"No—I want Melody to tell me.
Everybody knows how you feel. It's
her I
want to hear." "He
has to
say I
can," Melody said. "Tell
her," Carol commanded him. "Talk," David said
weakly. "We went to
Tibet," Melody said.
David groaned and dropped
his chin
to his
chest. How could she fail to
destroy him utterly?
"Lhasa?"
"No. Up. Way, way up. Into
the mountains.
The ones
with the funny name. A shriveled
bald monk lives up there.
Brother Cupid. He's just
like Christ and the others.
You know."
"Yes," Carol
said. "But what can he
do?"
"Lots." Melody
ticked off the wonders on
the fingers
of one
hand. "He can show
you heaven.
And hell.
He can
show you the places that lie
in between.
And he
can show
you the
meaning of life—its real
significance." She shook
her head.
"He says that and—well—I
guess he's right."
"So what
is it?"
Carol asked eagerly.
This is all wrong, David thought.
Melody had forsaken the drama. All that remained was
cold, crude fact. This time
he had been destined for success
and she
had destroyed
it for
him.
But Melody was laughing.
"You can't put something like
that into words. If
you could,
then everybody would know."
"I see. But how—tell
me—how did it affect you?"
Melody shook her head, leaning back. Shutting
her eyes, tossing her head, she spoke without hesitation: "Nothing."
Her eyes flew open. "It was just—just dull."
"No!" Carol cried.
"Yes,"
Melody said triumphantly. "That's exactly how it was. An utter, utter
bore."
It was nearly twelve. David, who had waited
until now, refused to remain silent a moment longer. Turning to Carol, he
coldly demanded: "And what did you do last year?"
"Me?"
Carol asked vaguely. Melody drew away from Carol's embrace and reached down to
rouse Garth. David sat alone on the opposite side of the table.
"Yes, you," he said. "Who
else?"
"I—I wouldn't
know."
"You do have to tell us," Melody
said. "We really have to know." "But I. . ." Carol began. "Yes?" said David.
"Well,
nothing. I didn't do . . . anything." "You liar!" he said.
"No.
I—" She stood up, spreading her
arms. "I really did nothing. We stayed home. I couldn't—"
"And
how did you enjoy it?" Melody prodded. "Tell us that."
"I—we—" Carol hesitated. Her body
stiffened. She stood straight up, balancing upon the tips of her toes, nearly
leaving the floor, trembling as though striken by some awesome force from
without. "It was wonderful!" she cried. "It was marvelous! Oh,
David, I never knew before! I couldn't have guessed. It was so great—so
grand!"
"No!" David shouted.
He sprang to his feet.
"Oh,
yes," Carol insisted, staring straight through him. "But
you"—she laughed shrilly—"you'll never know."
Reaching out, she grabbed
Melody warmly by the hand.
Here's
another collaborative team, two young men from Texas who have both begun
selling science fiction stories in the past few years. Together steven
utley and Howard
waldrop have
produced a fascinating novelette of an alternative time-stream in which George
Armstrong Custer lost his final battle to the Plains Indians Air Force—six
fighter planes expertly piloted by such warriors as Crazy Horse and Black Man's
Hand.
For
details on the battle and how it came about, see the following documents. (And
if you should wonder how heavier-than-air craft could have been in military use
as early as the Civil War, look carefully through the list of references at
the end.)
Custer's
Last Jump
BY STEVEN UTLEY &
HOWARD WALDROP
Smithsonian Annals of Flight, vol. 39: The Air War in the West
chapter 27: The
Krupp Monoplane
INTRODUCTION
Its wings
still hold the tears from
many bullets. The ailerons are still scorched black, and
the exploded
Henry machine rifle is bent awkwardly
in its
blast port.
The right landing skid is missing,
and the
frame has been restraightened.
It stands
in the
left wing of the Air
Museum today, next to the French
Devre jet and the X-FU-5 Flying Flapjack, the
world's fastest fighter aircraft.
On its rudder is the swastika,
an ugly
reminder of days of glory fifty
years ago.
A simple plaque describes
the aircraft.
It reads:
CRAZY HORSE'S
KRUPP MONOPLANE
(Captured at the raid on Fort Carson, January
5,1882)
GENERAL
1. To study the history of this plane is to
delve into one of the most glorious eras of aviation history. To begin: the aircraft
was manufactured by the Krupp plant at Haavesborg, Netherlands. The airframe
was completed August 3, 1862, as part of the third shipment of Krupp aircraft
to the Confederate States of America under terms of the Agreement of Atlanta
of 1861. It was originally equipped with power plant $311 Zed of 87V4
horsepower, manufactured by the Jumo plant at Nordmung, Duchy of Austria, on
May 3 of the year 1862. Wingspan of the craft is twenty-three feet, its length
is seventeen feet three inches. The aircraft arrived in the port of Charlotte
on September 21, 1862, aboard the transport Men-denhall, which had suffered heavy bombardment from GAR
picket ships. The aircraft was possibly sent by rail to Confederate Army Air
Corps Center at Fort Andrew Mott, Alabama. Unfortunately, records of rail
movements during this time were lost in the burning of the Confederate archives
at Ittebehayin March 1867, two weeks after the Truce of Hal-demanwas signed.
2. The aircraft was damaged during a training
flight in December 1862. Student pilot was Flight Subaltern (Cadet) Neldoo J.
Smith, CSAAC; flight instructor during the ill-fated flight was Air Captain
Winslow Homer Winslow, on interserv-ice instructor-duty loan from the
Confederate States Navy.
Accident
forms and maintenance officer's reports indicate that the original motor was
replaced with one of the new 93 Vi horsepower
Jumo engines which had just arrived from Holland by way of Mexico.
3. The aircraft served routinely through the
remainder of
Flight Subaltern Smith's training. We have records141, which
indicate that the aircraft was one of the first to be equipped
with the Henry repeating machine rifle of the chain-driven
type. Until December 1862, all CSAAC aircraft were equipped
with the Sharps
repeating rifles of the motor-driven,
low-voltage type on wing or
turret mounts.
As was the custom, the aircraft
was flown
by Flight
Subaltern Smith to his first
duty station at Thimblerig Aerodrome in Augusta, Georgia. Flight
Subaltern Smith was assigned to
Flight Platoon 2, 1st
Aeroscout Squadron.
4. The aircraft,
with Flight Subaltern Smith at
the wheel,
participated in three of
the aerial
expeditions against the Un-
ion Army in the
Second Battle of the Manassas.
Smith distin-
guished himself in the
first and third mission. (He
was assigned
aerial picket duty south
of the
actual battle during his second
mission.) On the first,
he is
credited with one kill and
one
probable (both bi-wing Airsharks).
During the third mission,
he destroyed one aircraft
and forced
another down behind
Confederate lines. He then
escorted the craft of his
immediate
commander, Air Captain Dalton
Trump, to a safe landing
on
a field controlled by the Confederates. According to Trump's
sworn testimony, Smith successfully
fought off two Union craft
and ranged ahead of
Trump's crippled plane to strafe
a group
of Union soldiers who
were in their flight path,
discouraging
them from firing on
Trump's smoking aircraft.
For heroism on these
two missions,
Smith was awarded the Silver Star and Bar with
Air Cluster.
Presentation was made on March 3,
1863, by the late General
J. E.
B. Stuart,
Chief of Staff of the CSAAC.
5. Flight Subaltern
Smith was promoted to flight
captain on
April 12, 1863, after
distinguishing himself with
two kills
and
two probables during the
first day of the Battle
of the
Three
Roads, North Carolina. One
of his
kills was an airship of
the
Moby class, with crew
of fourteen.
Smith shared with only
one other aviator the
feat of bringing down one
of these
diri-
gibles during the War
of the
Secession.
This was the first action the
1st Aeroscout
Squadron had seen since Second Manassas,
and Captain
Smith seems to have been chafing
under inaction. Perhaps this led
him to
volunteer for duty with Major
John S. Moseby, then forming what would later become Moseby's Raiders.
This was actually sound military strategy: the CSAAC was to send a unit to
southwestern Kansas to carry out harassment raids against the poorly defended
forts of the far West. These raids would force the Union to send men and
materiel sorely needed at the southern front far to the west, where they would
be ineffectual in the outcome of the war. That this action was taken is pointed
to by some142 as a sign that the Confederate States envisioned
defeat and were resorting to desperate measures four years before the Treaty of
Haldeman.
At
any rate, Captain Smith and his aircraft joined a triple flight of six aircraft
each, which, after stopping at El Dorado, Arkansas, to refuel, flew away on a
westerly course. This is the last time they ever operated in Confederate
states. The date was June 5, 1863.
6.
The Union forts stretched from a medium-well-defended line in Illinois, to
poorly garrisoned stations as far west as Wyoming Territory and south to the
Kansas-Indian Territory border. Southwestern Kansas was both sparsely settled
and garrisoned. It was from this area that Moseby's Raiders, with the official
designation 1st Western Interdiction Wing, CSAAQ, operated.
A
supply wagon train had been sent ahead a month before from Fort Worth, carrying
petrol, ammunition, and material for shelters. A crude landing field, hangars,
and barracks awaited the eighteen craft.
After
two months of reconnaissance (done by mounted scouts due to the need to
maintain the element of surprise, and, more importantly, by the limited amount
of fuel available) the 1st WIW took to the air. The citizens of Riley, Kansas,
long remembered the day: their first inkling that Confederates were closer
than Texas came when motors were heard overhead and the Union garrison was
literally blown off the face of the map.
7.
Following the first raid, word went to the War Department headquarters in New
York, with pleas for aid and reinforcements for all Kansas garrisons. Thus the
CSAAC achieved its goal in the very first raid. The effects snowballed; as soon
as the populace learned of the raid, it demanded protection from nearby
garrisons. Farmers' organizations threatened to stop shipments of needed
produce to eastern depots. The garrison commanders, unable to promise adequate
protection, appealed to higher military authorities.
Meanwhile,
the 1st WIW made a second raid on Abilene, heavily damaging the railways and
stockyards with twenty-five-pound fragmentation bombs. They then circled the
city, strafed the Army Quartermaster depot, and disappeared into the west.
8. This second raid, and the ensuing clamor from
both the public and the commanders of western forces, convinced the War
Department to divert new recruits and supplies, with seasoned members of the
18th Aeropursuit Squadron, to the Kansas-Missouri border, near Lawrence.
9. Inclement weather in the fall kept both the
18th AS and the 1st WIW grounded for seventy-two of the ninety days of the
season. Aircraft from each of these units met several times; the 1st is
credited with one kill, while pilots of the 18th downed two Confederate
aircraft on the afternoon of December 12, 1863.
Both
aircraft units were heavily resupplied during this time. The Battle of the
Canadian River was fought on December 18, when mounted reconnaissance units of
the Union and Confederacy met in Indian territory. Losses were small on both
sides, but the skirmish was the first of what would become known as the Far
Western Campaign.
10. Civilians spotted the massed formation of the
1st WIW
as early as 10 a.m. Thursday, December 16, 1863. They
headed northeast, making a leg due north when eighteen miles
south of Lawrence. Two planes sped ahead to destroy the tel-
egraph station at Felton, nine miles south of Lawrence. Nev-
ertheless, a message of some sort reached Lawrence; a Union
messenger on horseback
was on
his way
to the
aerodrome when the first
flight of Confederate aircraft passed
overhead.
In the ensuing raid, seven of
the nineteen
Union aircraft were destroyed
on the
ground and two were destroyed
in the
air, while the remaining
aircraft were severely damaged and
the barracks and hangars
demolished.
The 1st WIW suffered one loss:
during the raid a Union
clerk attached for duty
with the 18th AS manned
an Agar
machine rifle position and
destroyed one Confederate aircraft. He was killed by machine
rifle fire from the second
wave of planes. Private Alden Evans
Gunn was awarded the Congressional
Medal of Honor posthumously for his gallantry during
the attack.
For the next two months, the
1st WIW
ruled the skies as far north
as Illinois,
as far
east as Trenton, Missouri.
THE FAR
WESTERN CAMPAIGN
1. At this juncture, the two
most prominent figures of the
next nineteen years of
frontier history enter the picture:
the Oglala Sioux Crazy Horse and
Lieutenant Colonel (Brevet Major General) George
Armstrong Custer. The clerical error
giving Custer the rank
of Brigadier
General is well known. It
is not common knowledge that Custer
was considered
by the
GenerakStaff as a candidate
for Far
Western Commander as early as the
spring of 1864, a duty
he would
not take
up until
May 1869, when the
Far Western
Command was the only theater of war operations within the Americas.
The General Staff, it
is believed,
considered Major General Custer for the
job for
two reasons:
they thought Custer possessed those qualities of spirit
suited to the warfare necessary
in the Western Command, and that
the far
West was the ideal place for the twenty-three-year-old Boy General.
Crazy Horse, the Oglala
Sioux warrior, was with a
hunting party far from Oglala territory,
checking the size of the
few remaining buffalo herds before they
started their spring migrations. Legend has it that
Crazy Horse and the party
were crossing the prairies in early
February 1864 when two aircraft belonging to the 1st WIW passed nearby.
Some of the Sioux jumped to the ground, believing that they were looking on the
Thunderbird and its mate. Only Crazy Horse stayed on his pony and watched the
aircraft disappear into the south.
He
sent word back by the rest of the party that he and two of his young warrior
friends had gone looking for the nest of the Thunderbird.
2. The story of the 1st WIW here becomes the
story of the
shaping of the Indian wars, rather than part of the history of
the last four years of the War of the Secession. It is well
known that increased alarm over the Kansas raids had shifted
War Department thinking: the defense of the far West
changed in importance from a minor matter in the larger
scheme of war to a problem of vital concern. For one thing,
the Confederacy was courting the Emperor Maximilian of
Mexico, and through him the French, into entering the war on
the Confederate side. The South wanted arms, but most nec-
essarily to break the Union submarine blockade. Only the
French Navy possessed the capability.
The
Union therefore sent the massed 5th Cavalry to Kansas, and attached to it the
12th Air Destroyer Squadron and the 2nd Airship Command.
The
2nd Airship Command, at the time of its deployment, was equipped with the small
pursuit airships known in later days as the "torpedo ship," from its
double-pointed ends. These ships were used for reconnaissance and light interdiction
duties, and were almost always accompanied by aircraft from the 12th ADS. They
immediately set to work patrolling the Kansas skies from the renewed base of
operations at Lawrence.
3. The idea of using Indian personnel in some
phase of
airfield operations in the West had been proposed by Moseby
as early as June 1863. The C of C, CSA, disapproved in the
strongest possible terms. It was not a new idea, therefore,
when Crazy Horse and his two companions rode into the
airfield, accompanied by the sentries who had challenged
them far from
the perimeter.
They were taken to Major
Moseby for questioning.
Through an interpreter, Moseby learned they
were Oglala, not Crows sent to
spy for
the Union.
When asked why they had come
so far,
Crazy Horse replied, "To see
the nest
of the
Thunderbird."
Moseby is said to have laughed143
and then
taken the three Sioux to see
the aircraft.
Crazy Horse was said to
have been stricken with awe when
he found
that men controlled their flight.
Crazy Horse then offered Moseby ten
ponies for one of the
craft. Moseby explained that
they were not his to
give, but his Great Father's, and
that they were used to
fight the Yellowlegs from the Northeast.
At this time, fate took a
hand: the 12th
Air Destroyer
Squadron had just begun
operations. The same day Crazy
Horse was having his
initial interview with Moseby, a
scout plane returned with the news
that the 12th
was being
reinforced by an airship combat
group; the dirigibles had been
seen maneuvering near the
Kansas-Missouri border.
Moseby learned from Crazy
Horse that the warrior was
respected; if not in his
own tribe,
then with other Nations of
the North. Moseby, with an eye
toward those reinforcements arriving in
Lawrence, asked Crazy Horse if
he could
guarantee safe conduct through
the northern
tribes, and land for an
airfield should the present
one have
to be
abandoned.
Crazy Horse answered, "I can talk
the idea
to the
People; it will be for them
to decide."
Mosby told Crazy Horse that if
he could
secure the prom-—ise, he would
grant him anything within his
power.
Crazy Horse looked out the window
toward the hangars. "I ask that you teach me
and ten
of my
brother-friends to fly
the Thunderbirds. We will
help you fight the Yellowlegs."
Moseby, expecting requests for
beef, blankets, or firearms was taken aback. Unlike the
others who had dealt with
the Indians,
he was
a man
of his
word. He told Crazy Horse
he would ask his Great Father
if this
could be done. Crazy Horse left, returning to his village in the middle
of March. He and several warriors traveled extensively that spring, smoking the
pipe, securing permissions from the other Nations for safe conduct for the Gray
White Men through their hunting lands. His hardest task came in convincing the
Oglala themselves that the airfield be build in their southern hunting grounds.
Crazy
Horse, his two wives, seven warriors and their women, children, and belongings
rode into the CSAAC airfield in June, 1864.
4. Moseby had been granted permission from
Stuart to go
ahead with the training program. Derision first met the re-
quest within the southern General Staff when Moseby's pro-
posal was circulated. Stuart, though not entirely sympathetic
to the idea, became its champion. Others objected, warning
that ignorant savages should not be given modern weapons.
Stuart reminded them that some of the good Tennessee boys
already flying airplanes could neither read nor write.
Stuart's
approval arrived a month before Crazy Horse and his band made camp on the edge
of the airfield.
5. It fell to Captain Smith to train Crazy
Horse. The Indian
became what Smith, in his journal,144 describes as "the best
natural pilot I have seen or it has been my pleasure to fly
with." Part of this seems to have come from Smith's own mod-
esty; by all accounts, Smith was one of the finer pilots of the
war.
The
operations of the 12th ADS and the 2nd Airship Command ranged closer to the
CSAAC airfield. The dogfights came frequently and the fighting grew less
gentlemanly. One 1st WIW fighter was pounced by three aircraft of the 12th simultaneously:
they did not stop firing even when the pilot signaled that he was hit and that
his engine was dead. Nor did they break off their runs until both pilot and
craft plunged into the Kansas prairie. It is thought that the Union pilots were
under secret orders to kill all members of the 1st WIW. There is some evidence145
that this rankled with the more gentlemanly of the 12th Air Destroyer
Squadron. Nevertheless, fighting intensified.
A flight of six
more aircraft joined the 1st
WIW some
weeks after the Oglala
Sioux started their training: this
was the first of the ferry
flights from Mexico through Texas
and Indian territory to reach the
airfield. Before the summer was
over, a dozen additional
craft would join the Wing;
this before shipments were curtailed
by Juarez's
revolution against the French and the
ouster and execution of Maximilian and his family.
Smith records146
that Crazy Horse's first solo
took place on August 14, 1864,
and that
the warrior,
though deft in the air, still
needed practice on his landings.
He had
a tendency
to come in overpowered and to
stall his engine out too
soon. Minor repairs were made on
the skids
of the
craft after this flight.
All this time, Crazy Horse had
flown Smith's craft. Smith, after another week of hard
practice with the Indian, pronounced
him "more qualified than most
pilots the CSAAC in Alabama turned out"147
and signed
over the aircraft to him.
Crazy Horse begged off.
Then, seeing that Smith was
sincere, he gave the captain many
buffalo hides. Smith reminded the
Indian that the craft
was not
his: during their off hours,
when not training, the Indians had
been given enough instruction in military discipline as Moseby,
never a stickler, thought necessary.
The Indians
had only
a rudimentary
idea of government property.
Of the
seven other Indian men, three
were qualified as pilots; the other
four were given gunner positions
in the
Krupp bi-wing light bombers
assigned to the squadron.
Soon after
Smith presented the aircraft to
Crazy Horse, the captain took off
in a
borrowed monoplane on what was
to be
the~~daily weather flight into
northern Kansas. There is evidence148
that it was Smith who
encountered a flight of light
dirigibles from the 2nd
Airship Command and attacked them
single-handedly. He crippled one
airship; the other was rescued when two escort planes
of the
12th ADS came to its
defense. They raked the
attacker with withering fire. The
attacker escaped into the clouds.
It was not until 1897, when
a group
of schoolchildren
on an outing found the wreckage,
that it was known that
Captain Smith had brought his crippled
monoplane within five miles of
the airfield before crashing
into the rolling hills.
When Smith did not return from
his flight,
Crazy Horse went on a vigil,
neither sleeping nor eating for
a week.
On the
seventh day, Crazy Horse
vowed vengeance on the men
who had killed his white friend.
6. The devastating Union raid of
September 23, 1864, caught the airfield
unawares. Though the Indians were
averse to fighting at night, Crazy
Horse and two other Sioux
were manning three of the four
craft which got off the
ground during the raid. The
attack had been carried out
by the
2nd Airship
Command, traveling at twelve thousand
feet, dropping fifty-pound fragmentation
bombs and shrapnel canisters. The shrapnel played havoc with
the aircraft
on the
ground. It also destroyed the mess
hall and enlisted barracks and
three teepees.
The dirigibles turned away
and were
running fast before a tail wind
when Crazy Horse gained their
altitude.
The gunners on the
dirigibles filled the skies with
tracers from their light .30-30 machine
rifles. Crazy Horse's monoplane
was equipped
with a single Henry .41-40
machine rifle. Unable to
get in
close killing distance, Crazy Horse
and his companions stood off beyond
range of the lighter Union
guns and raked the
dirigibles with heavy machine rifle
fire. They did enough damage to
force one airship down twenty
miles from its base,
and to
ground two others for two
days while repairs were made. The
intensity of fire convinced the
airship commanders that more
than four planes had made
it off the ground, causing them
to continue
their headlong retreat.
Crazy Horse and the others returned,
and brought
off the
second windfall of the
night; a group of 5th
Cavalry raiders
were to have attacked the airfield in the confusion of the airship raid and
burn everything still standing. On their return flight, the four craft
encountered the cavalry unit as it began its charge across open ground.
In three strafing runs, the aircraft killed
thirty-seven men and wounded fifty-three, while twenty-nine were taken prisoner
by the airfield's defenders. Thus, in his first combat mission for the CSAAC,
Crazy Horse was credited with saving the airfield against overwhelming odds.
7.
Meanwhile, Major General George A. Custer had distinguished himself at the
Battle of Gettysburg. A few weeks after the battle, he enrolled himself in the
GAR jump school at Watauga, New York. Howls of outrage came from the General
Staff; Custer quoted the standing order, "any man who volunteered and of
whom the commanding officer approved," could be enrolled. Custer then
asked, in a letter to C of S, GAR, "how any military leader could be
expected to plan maneuvers involving parachute infantry when he himself had
never experienced a drop, or found the true capabilities of the parachute
infantryman?"149 The Chief of Staff shouted down the protest.
There were mutterings among the General Staff150 to the effect that
the real reason Custer wanted to become jump-qualified was so that he would
have a better chance of leading the Invasion of Atlanta, part of whose
contingency plans called for attacks by airborne units.
During
the three-week parachute course, Custer became acquainted with another man who
would play an important part in the Western Campaign, Captain (Brevet Colonel)
Frederick W. Benteen. Upon graduation from the jump school, Brevet Colonel
Benteen assumed command of the 505th Balloon Infantry, stationed at Chicago,
Illinois, for training purposes. Colonel Benteen would remain commander of the
505th until his capture at the Battle of Montgomery in 1866. While he was prisoner of war, his command was given to another, later to
figure in the Western Campaign, Lieutenant Colonel Myles W. Keogh.
Custer, upon successful completion of jump
school, returned to his command of the
6th Cavalry
Division, and participated throughout the remainder of the
war in
that capacity. It was he
who led
the successful
charge at the Battle of
the Cape Fear which smashed Lee's
flank and allowed the 1st
Infantry to overrun the Confederate
position and capture that southern leader. Custer distinguished himself and his command
up until
the cessation
of hostilities
in 1867.
8.
The 1st WIW, CSAAC, moved to
a new
airfield in Wyoming Territory three
weeks after the raid of
September 24. At the same time,
the 2nd
WIW was
formed and moved to an
outpost in Indian territory.
The 2nd
WIW raided
the Union
airfield, took it totally
by surprise,
and inflicted
casualties on the 12th ADS and
2nd AC
so devastating
as to
render them ineffectual. The 2nd WIW
then moved to a second
field in Wyoming Territory. It was
here, following the move, that
a number of Indians, including Black
Man's Hand, were trained by Crazy Horse.
9.
We leave the history of the
2nd WIW
here. It was redeployed for the
defense of Montgomery. The Indians
and aircraft in which they trained
were sent north to join
the 1st
WIW. The 1st WIW
patrolled the skies of Indiana,
Nebraska, and the Dakotas. After the
defeat of the 12th ADS
and the
2nd AC, the Union
forstalled attempts to retaliate until
the cessation of southern hostilities in 1867.
We may at this point add
that Crazy Hose, Black Man's
Hand, and the other
Indians sometimes left the airfield
during periods of long
inactivity. They returned to their
Nations for as long as three
months at a time. Each
time Crazy Horse returned, he brought one or
two pilot
or gunner
recruits with him. Before the winter
of 1866,
more than thirty per cent
of the 1st WIW were Oglala,
Sansarc Sioux, or Cheyenne.
The South, losing the
war of
attrition, diverted all supplies to Alabama and Mississippi in the fall of
1866. None were forthcoming for the
1st WIW,
though a messenger arrived with orders for Major Moseby
to return
to Texas
for the
defense of Fort Worth, where
he would
later direct the Battle of
the Trinity. That Moseby
was not
ordered to deploy the 1st
WIW to that defense has been
considered by many military strategists as a
"lost turning point" of the
battle for Texas. Command of the
1st WIW
was turned
over to Acting Major (Flight Captain) Natchitoches Hooley.
10. The loss of Moseby signaled the
end of
the 1st
WIW.
Not only did the
nondeployment of the 1st to
Texas cost the
South that territory, it also left the
1st in
an untenable
posi-
tion, which the Union
was quick
to realize.
The airfield
was
captured in May 1867
by a
force of five hundred cavalry
and
three hundred infantry sent
from the battle of the
Arkansas,
and a like force, plus aircraft,
from Chicago. Crazy Horse,
seven Indians, and at
least five Confederates escaped in
their
monoplanes. The victorious Union troops were surprised
to
find Indians at the
field. Crazy Horse's people were
eventually
freed; the Army thought
them to have been hired
by the
Con-
federates to hunt and
cook for the airfield. Moseby
had pro-
vided for this in
contingency plans long before; he
had not
wanted the Plains tribes
to suffer
for Confederate
acts. The
Army did not know,
and no
one volunteered
the information,
that it had been
Indians doing the most considerable
amount
of damage to the
Union garrisons lately.
Crazy Horse and three of his
Indians landed their craft near
the Black Hills. The
Cheyenne helped them carry the
craft, on travois, to caves in
the sacred
mountains. Here they moth-balled the planes with mixtures
of pine
tar and
resins, and sealed up the caves.
11. The aircraft remained stored
until February 1872. Dur-
ing this time, Crazy
Horse and his Oglala Sioux
operated, like
the other Plains Indians,
as light
cavalry, skirmishing with the
Army and with settlers
up and
down the Dakotas and Mon-
tana. George Armstrong Custer
was appointed
commander of
the new 7th Cavalry
in 1869.
Stationed first at Chicago (Far
Western Command headquarters) they later moved to
Fort
Abraham Lincoln, Nebraska.
A column of troops
moved against Indians on the
warpath in the winter of 1869.
They reported a large group
of Indians
encamped on the Washita
River. Custer obtained permission for the 505th Balloon Infantry
to join
the 7th
Cavalry. From that day on, the
unit was officially Company I
(Separate Troops), 7th U.
S. Cavalry,
though it kept its numerical
designation. Also attached to the
7th was
the 12th
Airship Squadron, as Company
J.
Lieutenant Colonel Keogh, acting
commander of the 505th for the
last twenty-one months, but who
had never
been on jump status, was appointed
by Custer
as commander
of K
Company, 7th Cavalry.
It was known that only the
505th Balloon Infantry and the
12th Airship Squadron were
used in the raid on
Black Kettle's village. Black
Kettle was a treaty Indian,
"walking the white man's road." Reports have become garbled
in transmission:
Custer and the 505th
believed they were jumping into
a village
of hostiles.
The event remained a mystery until
Kellogg, the Chicago newspaperman,
wrote his account in 1872.1B1
The 505th,
with Custer in command, flew the
three (then numbered, after 1872, named) dirigibles No. 31,
No. 76,
and No.
93, with
seventy-two jumpers each. Custer
was in
the first
"stick" on Airship 76. The three sailed
silently to the sleeping village.
Custer gave the order
to hook
up at
5:42 Chicago time, 4:42 local time, and the 505th
jumped into the village. Black
Kettle's people were awakened when
some of the balloon infantry
crashed through their teepees,
others died in their sleep.
One of the first duties of
the infantry
was to
moor the dirigibles; this done, the
gunners on the airships opened
up on
the startled
villagers with their Gatling and
Agar machine rifles. Black Kettle himself
was killed
while waving an American flag at Airship No. 93.
After the battle, the men of
the 505th
climbed back up to the moored
dirigibles by rope ladder, and
the airships
departed for Fort Lincoln. The
Indians camped downriver heard the shooting
and found
horses stampeded during the attack.
When they came to the
village, they found only slaughter.
Custer had taken his dead
(3, one
of whom
died during the jump by being
drowned in the Washita) and
wounded (12) away. They left 307
dead men, women, and children,
and 500 slaughtered horses.
There were no tracks leading in
and out
of the
village except those of
the frightened
horses. The other Indians left
the area, thinking the
white men had magicked it.
Crazy Horse is said162 to have
visited the area soon after
the massacre. It was this action
by the
7th which
spelled their doom seven years later.
12. Black Man's Hand joined Crazy Horse;
so did
other for-
mer 1st WIW pilots,
soon after Crazy Horse's two-plane
raid
on the airship hangars at Bismark,
in 1872.
For that
mission,
Crazy Horse dropped twenty-five-pound
fragmentation bombs
tied to petrol canisters.
The shrapnel
ripped the dirigibles, the
escaping hydrogen was ignited
by the
burning petrol: all—
hangars, balloons, and maintenance
crews—were lost.
It was written up as an
unreconstructed Confederate's sabotage; a somewhat ignominious
former southern major was eventually hanged on circumstantial evidence. Reports by sentries that they heard aircraft
just before the explosions were discounted. At the time,
it was
believed the only aircraft were those belonging to the
Army, and the carefully licensed
commercial craft.
13. In 1874, Custer circulated rumors that
the Black
Hills
were full of gold.
It has
been speculated that this was
used to
draw miners to the
area so the Indians would
attack them;
then the cavalry would
have unlimited freedom to deal
with
the Red Man.183 Also that year, those
who had
become
Agency Indians were being
shorted in their supplies by
members of the scandal-plagued
Indian Affairs Bureau under
President Grant. When these
left the reservations in search
of
food, the cavalry was
sent to "bring them back."
Those who
were caught were usually
killed.
The Sioux ignored the miners at
first, expecting the gods to
deal with them. When
this did not happen, Sitting
Bull sent out a party of
two hundred
warriors, who killed every miner
they encountered. Public outrage
demanded reprisals; Sheridan wired
Custer to find and punish
those responsible.
14. Fearing what
was to
come, Crazy Horse sent Yellow
Dog and Red Chief
with a war party of
five hundred to raid the rebuilt
Fort Phil Kearny. This they
did successfully,
capturing twelve planes and fuel
and ammunition
for many
more. They hid these in the
caverns with the 1st WIW
craft.
The Army would not have acted
as rashly
as it
did had
it known the planes pronounced missing in the reports
on the
Kearny raid were being
given into the hands of
experienced pilots.
The reprisal consisted of
airship patrols which strafed any
living thing on the
plains. Untold thousands of deer
and the
few remaining buffalo were
killed. Unofficial counts list as
killed a little more
than eight hundred Indians who
were caught in the open during
the next
eight months.
Indians who jumped the agencies and
who had
seen or heard of the slaughter
streamed to Sitting Bull's hidden
camp on the Little Big Horn.
They were treated as guests,
except for the Sansarcs, who camped
a little
way down
the river.
It is
estimated there were no
less than ten thousand Indians,
including some four thousand warriors,
camped along the river for the
Sun Dance
ceremony of June 1876.
A three-pronged-pincers
movement for the final eradication
of the Sioux and Cheyenne worked
toward them. The 7th Cavalry, under Keogh and Major
Marcus Reno, set out from
Fort Lincoln during the
last week of May. General
George Crook's command was
coming up the Rosebud. The
gunboat Far West, with three hundred reserves and supplies,
steamed to the mouth of the
Big Horn
River. General Terry's command was
coming from the northwest. All Indians they encountered
were to be killed.
Just before the Sun
Dance, Crazy Horse and his
pilots got word of the movement
of Crook's
men up
the Rosebud,
hurried to the caves, and
prepared their craft for flight.
Only six planes were put in
working condition in time. The
other pilots remained behind while Crazy
Horse, Black Man's Hand, and
four others took to
the skies.
They destroyed two dirigibles, soundly trounced Crook, and chased
his command
back down the Rosebud in a
rout. The column had to
abandon their light armored vehicles and
fight its way back, on
foot for the most part, to safety.
15. Sitting Bull's vision during
the Sun
Dance is well
known.154 He told it
to Crazy
Horse, the warrior who would
see that it came
true, as soon as the
aviators returned to camp.
Two hundred fifty miles
away, "Chutes and Saddles" was sounded on the morning
of June
23, and
the men
of the
505th Balloon Infantry climbed aboard the
airships Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, John
Hancock, and Ethan
Allen. Custer was
first man on stick one
of the
Franklin. The Ethan Allen carried a scout aircraft which could
hook up or detach in flight;
the bi-winger
was to
serve as liaison between the
three armies and the
airships.
When Custer bade goodbye
to his
wife, Elizabeth, that morning,
both were in good spirits.
If either
had an
inkling of the fate which awaited
Custer and the 7 th
three days away, on the bluffs
above a small stream, they
did not
show it.
The four
airships sailed from Fort Lincoln,
their silver sides and shark-tooth mouths gleaming in the
sun, the eyes painted on the noses looking west.
On the
sides were the crossed sabers
of the
cavalry; above the numeral 7;
below the numerals 505. It is
said that they looked magnificent
as they
sailed away for their rendezvous with destiny.155
16. It is sufficient to say that
the Indians
attained their
greatest victory over the
Army, and almost totally destroyed
the 7th Cavalry, on
June 25-26, 1876, due in
large part to
the efforts of Crazy
Horse and his aviators. Surprise,
swift-
ness, and the skill
of the
Indians cannot be discounted, nor
can the military blunders
made by Custer that morning.
The
repercussions of that summer
day rang
down the years, and
the events are still
debated. The only sure fact
is that
the U.
S.
Army lost its prestige, part of
its spirit,
and more
than four hundred of its finest
soldiers in the battle.
17. While the demoralized commands were
sorting themselves out, the Cheyenne
and Sioux
left for the Canadian border.
They took their aircraft with
them, on travois. With Sitting
Bull, Crazy Horse and his
band settled just across the
border. The aircraft were
rarely used again until the
attack on the camp by the
combined Canadian-U. S. Cavalry offensive
of 1879. Crazy Horse
and his
aviators, as they had done
so many times before, escaped with
their aircraft, using one of
the planes to carry
their remaining fuel. Two of
the nine
craft were shot down by a
Canadian battery.
Crazy Horse, sensing the
end, fought his way, with
men on
horseback and the planes
on travois,
from Montana to Colorado. After learning of the
death of Sitting Bull and
Chief Joseph, he took his small
band as close as he
dared to Fort Carson, where the
cavalry was amassing to wipe
out the
remaining American Indians.
He assembled his men
for the
last time. He made his
proposal; all concurred and joined
him for
a last
raid on the Army. The five
remaining planes came in low,
the morning
of January 5, 1882, toward the
Army airfield. They destroyed twelve aircraft on the ground,
shot up the hangars and
barracks, and ignited one of
the two
ammunition dumps of the stockade. At this time, Army
gunners manned the William's machine cannon batteries (improved by
Thomas Edison's contract scientists)
and blew
three of the craft to
flinders. The war gods must have
smiled on Crazy Horse; his
aircraft was crippled, the machine rifle
was blown
askew, the motor slivered, but he
managed to set down intact.
Black Man's Hand turned away; he
was captured
two months
later, eating cottonwood bark in the
snows of Arizona.
Crazy Horse jumped from his aircraft
as most
of Fort
Carson ran toward him; he
pulled two Sharps repeating carbines
from the cockpit and
blazed away at the astonished
troopers, wounding six and
killing one. His back to
the craft,
he continued
to fire
until more than one hundred
infantrymen fired a volley into
his body.
The airplane was displayed
for seven
months at Fort Carson before
being sent to the Smithsonian
in Pittsburgh,
where it stands today. Thus passed
an era
of military
aviation.
lt. gen.
frank luke, jr.
USAF, Ret.
From the December 2, 1939, issue of Collier's Magazine
Custer's Last Jump? by
a. r. redmond
Few events in American
history have captured the imagination
so thoroughly
as the
Battle of the Little Big
Horn. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong
Custer's devastating defeat at the hands
of Sioux
and Cheyenne
Indians in June 1876 has
been rendered time and
again by such celebrated artists as George Russell and
Frederic Remington. Books, factual and
otherwise, which have been
written around or about the
battle would fill an entire library
wing. The motion picture industry
has on numerous occasions drawn upon
"Custer's Last Jump"
for inspiration; latest in
a long
line of movieland Custers is
Erroll Flynn [see photo],
who appears
with Olivia deHavilland and newcomer Anthony
Quinn in Warner Brother's soon-to-be-released They Died With Their Chutes On.
The impetuous and flamboyant
Custer was an almost legendary
figure long before the Battle
of the
Little Big Horn, however. Appointed to
West Point in 1857, Custer
was placed in command of Troop
G, 2nd
Cavalry, in June 1861, and participated
in a
series of skirmishes with Confederate
cavalry throughout the rest
of the
year. It was during the
First Battle of Manassas, or Bull
Run, that he distinguished himself. He continued to
do so
in other
engagements—at Williamsburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg—and rose rapidly through the ranks. He was
twenty-six years old when he
received a promotion to Brigadier
General. He was, of course,
immediately dubbed the Boy
General. He had become an
authentic war hero when the
Northerners were in dire need
of nothing less during those discouraging
months between First Manassas and Gettysburg.
With the cessation of hostilities in the East when
Bragg surrendered to Grant at
Haldeman, the small hamlet about
eight miles from Morehead, Kentucky, Custer
requested a transfer of command. He
and his
young bride wound up at
Chicago, manned by the
new 7th
U. S.
Cavalry.
The war in the West lasted
another few months; the tattered
remnants of the Confederate Army staged last desperate
stands throughout Texas, Colorado,
Kansas, and Missouri. The final struggle
at the
Trinity River in October 1867
marked the close of
conflict between North and South.
Those few Mexican military advisers left
in Texas
quietly withdrew across the Rio Grande.
The French,
driven from Mexico in 1864 when
Maximilian was ousted,
lost interest in the Americas when they became embroiled
with the newly united Prussian states.
During his first year in Chicago,
Custer familiarized himself with
the airships
and aeroplanes
of the
7th. The only jump-qualified general officer of the
war, Custer seemed to have
felt no resentment at the ultimate
fate of mounted troops boded
by the extremely mobile flying machines.
The Ohio-born
Boy General eventually preferred traveling aboard
the airship
Benjamin
Franklin, one of the eight craft assigned
to the
505th Balloon Infantry (Troop
I, 7th
Cavalry, commanded by Brevet Colonel Frederick
Benteen) while his horse soldiers
rode behind the very
capable Captain (Brevet Lt. Col.)
Myles Keogh.
The War
Department in Pittsburgh did not
know that various members of
the Plains
Indian tribes had been equipped
with aeroplanes by the
Confederates, and that many had
actually flown against the Union
garrisons in the West. (Curiously
enough, those tribes which
held out the longest against
the
Army—most notably the Apaches
under Geronimo in the deep Southwest—were
those who did not have
aircraft.) The problems of transporting and hidirg, to say
nothing of maintaining planes, outweighed
the advantages.
A Cheyenne
warrior named Brave Bear is
said to have traded his
band's aircraft in disgust to
Sitting Bull for three horses.
Also, many of the Plains Indians
hated the aircraft outright, as
they had been used by the
white men to decimate the
great buffalo herds in the early
1860s.
Even so, certain Oglalas, Minneconjous, and Cheyenne did reasonably well in the aircraft
given them by the C.
S. Army
Air Corps Major John
S. Moseby,
whom the Indians called "The Gray White Man" or
"Many-Feathers-in-Hat." The Oglala war chief Crazy Horse
[see photo, overleaf] led the
raid on the Bismarck
hangars (1872), four months after
the 7th Cavalry was transferred to Fort Abraham Lincoln,
Dakota Territory, and made his
presence felt at the Rosebud
and Little Big Horn in 1876.
The Cheyenne
Black Man's Hand, trained by Crazy
Horse himself, shot down two
Army machines at the Rosebud,
and was
in the
flight of planes that accomplished
the annihilation
of the
505th Balloon Infantry during
the first
phase of the Little Big
Horn fiasco.
After the leveling of Fort Phil
Kearny in February 1869, Custer was ordered to enter
the Indian
territories and punish those who had
sought sanctuary there after the
raid. Taking with him 150 parachutists
aboard three airships, Custer left
on the trail of a large
band of Cheyenne.
On the afternoon of February 25,
Lieutenant William van W. Reily, dispatched
for scouting
purposes in a Studebaker bi-winger, returned to
report that he had shot
up a
hunting party near the Washita River.
The Cheyenne,
he thought,
were encamped on the
banks of the river some
twenty miles away. They appeared not
to have
seen the close approach of
the 7th Cavalry as
they had not broken camp.
Just before dawn the
next morning, the 505th Balloon
Infantry, led by Custer, jumped
into the village, killing
all inhabitants
and their
animals.
For the
next five years, Custer and
the 7th
chased the hos-tiles of the
Plains back and forth between
Colorado and the Canadian border. Relocated
at Fort
Lincoln, Custer and an expedition of horse soldiers, geologists,
and engineers
discovered gold in the Black
Hills. Though the Black Hills
still belonged to the
Sioux according to several treaties,
prospectors began to pour into
the area.
The 7th
was ordered
to protect
them. The Blackfeet, Minneconjous, and Hunkpapa— Sioux who had
left the warpath on the
promise that the Black Hills, their sacred lands, was
theirs to keep for all
time— protested, and when
protests brought no results, took
matters into their own hands. Prospectors
turned up in various stages
of mutilation, or not
at all.
Conditions worsened over the
remainder of 1875, during which time the United States
Government ordered the Sioux out of
the Black
Hills. To make sure the
Indians complied, airships patrolled
the skies
of Dakota
Territory.
By the end of 1875, plagued
by the
likes of Crazy Horse's Oglala Sioux, it was decided
that there was but one
solution to the Plains Indian problem—total
extermination.
At this
point, General Phil Sheridan, Commander
in Chief
of the United States Army, began
working on the practical angle of this new policy
toward the Red Man.
In January 1876, delegates
from the Democratic Party approached George Armstrong Custer at
Fort Abraham Lincoln and offered
him the
party's presidential nomination
on the condition that he pull
off a
flashy victory over the red
men before the national
convention in Chicago in July.
On February 19, 1876,
the Boy
General's brother Thomas, commander
of Troop
C of
the 7th,
climbed into the observer's cockpit behind Lieutenant James C. Sturgis and
took off on a routine patrol.
Their aeroplane, a Whitney pusher-type,
did not
return. Ten days later its
wreckage was found sixty miles west
of Fort
Lincoln. Apparently, Sturgis and Tom
Custer had stumbled on
a party
of mounted
hostiles and, swooping low to fire
or drop
a handbomb,
suffered a lucky hit from one
of the
Indians' firearms. The mutilated remains
of the two officers were found
a quarter
mile from the wreckage, indicating that they
had escaped
on foot
after the crash but were caught.
The shock of his brother's death,
combined with the Democrat's offer, were
to lead
Lieutenant Colonel G. A. Custer into
the worst
defeat suffered by an officer
of the
United States Army.
Throughout the first part of 1876,
Indians drifted into Wyoming Territory
from the east and south,
driven by mounting pressure from the
Army. Raids on small Indian
villages had been stepped up. Waning
herds of buffalo were being
systematically strafed by
the airships.
General Phil Sheridan received reports of tribes gathering in
the vicinity
of the
Wolf Mountains, in what is
now southern
Montana, and devised a strategy by which the hostiles
would be crushed for all
time.
Three columns were to
converge upon the amassed Indians
from the north, south,
and east,
the west
being blocked by the Wolf Mountains.
General George Crook's dirigibles, light tanks, and infantry were
to come
up the
Rosebud River. General Alfred Terry
would push from the northeast
with infantry, cavalry, and field
artillery. The 7th Cavalry was
to move
from the east. The
Indians could not escape.
Commanded by Captain Keogh, Troops A,
C, D,
E, F,
G, and H of the 7th—about
580 men,
not counting
civilian teamsters, interpreters, Crow and Arikara scouts—set
out from Fort Lincoln five weeks
ahead of the July 1
rendezvous at the junction of the
Big Horn
and Little
Big Horn
rivers. A month later, Custer and
150 balloon
infantrymen aboard the airships Franklin, Adams, Hancock, and Allen set out on Keogh's trail.
Everything went
wrong from that point onward.
The early summer of 1876 had
been particularly hot and dry in
Wyoming Territory. Crook, proceeding up the Rosebud, was
slowed by the tanks, which
theoretically traveled at five miles per
hour but which kept breaking
down from the heat and from
the alkaline
dust which worked its way
into the engines through chinks in
the three-inch
armor plate. The crews roasted. On
June 13, as Crook's column
halted beside the Rosebud to let
the tanks
cool off, six monoplanes dived out of the clouds
to attack
the escorting
airships Paul Revere and John Paul Jones. Caught by surprise, the two dirigibles
were blown up and
fell about five miles from
Crook's position. The infantrymen watched, astonished, as the
Indian aeronauts turned their
craft toward them. While the
foot soldiers ran for cover,
several hundred mounted Sioux warriors
showed up. In the
ensuing rout, Crook lost forty-seven
men and all his armored vehicles.
He was
still in headlong retreat when the Indians broke off
their chase at nightfall.
The 7th Cavalry and the 505th
Balloon Infantry linked up by liaison
craft carried by the Ethan Allen some miles southeast of the hostile
camp on the Little Big
Horn on the evening *of June 24. Neither they,
nor Terry's
column, had received word of Crook's
retreat, but Keogh's scouts had
sighted a large village ahead.
Custer did not know that this
village contained not the five
or six hundred Indians expected, but
between eight and ten thousand, of whom slightly less than half
were warriors. Spurred by his desire
for revenge
for his
brother Tom, and filled with glory
at the
thought of the Democratic presidential nomination, Custer
decided to hit the Indians
before either Crook's or Terry's columns
could reach the village. He
settled on a scaled-down version of
Sheridan's tri-pronged movement, and dispatched
Keogh to the south, Reno
to the
east, with himself and the 505th
attacking from the north. A
small column was to wait downriver
with the pack train. On
the evening of June 24, George
Armstrong Custer waited, secure in the
knowledge that he, personally, would deal the Plains
Indians their mortal blow
within a mere twenty-four hours.
Unfortunately, the
Indians amassed on the banks
of the
Little Big Horn—Oglalas, Minneconjous, Araphao, Hunkpapas, Blackfeet,
Cheyenne, and so forth—had the
idea that white men were on the way. During the Sun Dance
Ceremony the week before, the Hunkpapa chief Sitting Bull had had a dream about
soldiers falling into his camp. The hostiles, assured of victory, waited.
On
the morning of June 25, the Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Ethan Allen drifted
quietly over the hills toward the village. They were looping south when the
Indians attacked.
Struck
by several spin-stabilized rockets, the Samuel Adams blew
up with a flash that might have been seen by the officers and men riding behind
Captain Keogh up the valley of the Little Big Horn. Eight or twelve Indians
had, in the gray dawn, climbed for altitude above the ships.
Still
several miles short of their intended drop zone, the balloon infantrymen piled
out of the burning and exploding craft. Though each ship was armed with two
Gatling rifles fore and aft, the airships were helpless against the airplanes'
bullets and rockets. Approximately one hundred men, Custer included, cleared
the ships. The Indian aviators made passes through them, no doubt killing
several in the air. The Franklin and
Hancock burned and fell to the earth across the river
from the village. The Allen,
dumping water ballast to
gain altitude, turned for the Wolf Mountains. Though riddled by machine rifle
fire, it did not explode and settled to earth about fifteen miles from where
now raged a full-scale battle between increasingly demoralized soldiers and
battle-maddened Sioux and Cheyenne.
Major
Reno had charged the opposite side of the village as soon as he heard the
commotion. Wrote one of his officers later: "A solid wall of Indians came
out of the haze which had hidden the village from our eyes. They must have
outnumbered us ten to one, and they were ready for us. . . . Fully a third of
the column was down in three minutes."
Reno,
fearing he would be swallowed up, pulled his men back across the river and took
up a position in a stand of timber on the riverward slope of the knoll. The
Indians left a few hundred braves to make
certain Reno did not escape
and moved oft to Reno's right
to descend
on Keogh's
flank.
The hundred-odd parachute infantrymen
who made
good their escape from the airship
were scattered over three square
miles. The ravines and
gullies cutting up the hills
around the village quickly filled with
mounted Indians who rode through
unimpeded by the random
fire of disorganized balloon infantrymen.
They swept them up, on
the way
to Keogh.
Keogh, unaware of the
number of Indians and the
rout of Reno's command, got as
far as
the north
bank of the river before
he was ground to pieces between
two masses
of hostiles.
Of Keogh's command, less than a
dozen escaped the slaughter. The actual battle lasted about
thirty minutes.
The hostiles left the
area that night, exhausted after
their greatest victory over
the soldiers.
Most of the Indians went
north to Canada; some
escaped the mass extermination of their race which was
to take
place in the American West
during the next six years.
Terry found Reno entrenched on the
ridge the morning of the twenty-seventh.
The scouts
sent to find Custer and
Keogh could not believe their eyes
when they found the bodies
of the
7th Cavalry six miles
away.
Some of the men were not
found for another two days,
Terry and his men
scoured the ravines and valleys.
Custer himself was about
four miles from the site
of Keogh's
annihilation; the Boy
General appears to have been
hit by
a piece
of exploding rocket shrapnel and may
have been dead before he
reached the ground. His
body escaped the mutilation that befell most of
Keogh's command, possibly because of
its distance
from the camp.
Custer's miscalculation cost the
Army 430 men, four dirigibles
(plus the Studebaker scout from
the Ethan Allen), and its prestige.
An attempt
was made
to make
a scapegoat
of Major Reno, blaming his alleged
cowardice for the failure of
the 7th. Though Reno
was acquitted,
grumblings continued up until the turn
of the
century. It is hoped the
matter will be settled for all
time by the opening, for
private research, of the papers of
the late
President Phil Sheridan. As Commander
in Chief, he had
access to a mountain of
material which was kept from the
public at the time of
the court
of inquiry
in 1879.
Extract from Huckleberry Among the Hostiles: A Journal
by mark twain, edited by
bernard van dyne
Hutton and Company, New York, 1932.
editor's note: In
November 1886 Clemens drafted a
tentative outline for a sequel
to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which had
received mixed reviews on its
publication in January 1885, but which
had nonetheless
enjoyed a second printing within five
months of its release. The
proposed sequel was intended to deal
with Huckleberry's adventures
as a
young man on the
frontier. To gather research material
firsthand, Mark boarded the
airship Peyton in Cincinnati, Ohio, in mid-December
1886, and set out across
the Southwest,
amassing copious notes and reams
of interviews
with soldiers, frontiersmen, law enforcement officers, ex-hostiles,
at least two notorious outlaws, and
a number
of less
readily categorized persons. Twain had
intended to spend four months
out West. Unfortunately, his wife, Livy, fell
gravely ill in late February 1887; Twain returned to
her as
soon as he received word in Fort Hood, Texas.
He lost
interest in all writing for
two years after her
death in April 1887. The
proposed novel about Huckleberry
Finn as a man was
never written: we are left with
110,000 words of interviews and observations, and an incomplete
journal of the author's second
trek across the American West.—BvD
Feb.
2: A more
desolate place than the Indian
Territory of Oklahoma would be impossible
to imagine.
It is
flat the year 'round, stingingly cold in winter, hot
and dry,
I am
told,
during the summer (when the land
turns brown save for scattered
patches of greenery which serve
only to make the landscape
all the
drearier; Arizona and New Mexico
are devoid
of greenery, which is to their
credit—when those territories elected
to become
barren wastelands they did not
lose heart halfway, but followed their
chosen course to the end).
It is easy to see why
the United
States Government swept the few Indians
into God-forsaken Oklahoma, and ordered
them to remain there
under threat of extermination. The word
"God-forsaken" is the vital
clue. The white men who
"gave" this land to
the few
remaining tribes for as long
as the
wind shall blow—which it certainly does
in February—and
the grass shall grow (which it
does, in Missouri, perhaps) were
Christians who knew better
than to let heathen savages
run loose in parts of the
country still smiled upon by
our heavenly
malefactor.
February
4: Whatever I may have
observed about Oklahoma from the
cabin of the Peyton has been reinforced by a view from
the ground.
The airship
was running
into stiff winds from the north,
so we
put in
at Fort
Sill yesterday evening and are
awaiting calmer weather. I have
gone on with my work.
Fort Sill is located seventeen miles
from the Cheyenne Indian reservation.
It has
taken me all of a
day to
learn (mainly from one Sergeant Howard,
a gap-toothed,
unwashed Texan who is apparently my unofficial guardian angel
for whatever
length of time I
am to
be marooned
here) that the Cheyenne do not care much for
Oklahoma, which is still another
reason why the government keeps them
there. One or two ex-hostiles
will leave the reservation
every month, taking with them
their wives and meager belongings, and Major Rickards will
have to send out a detachment
of soldiers
to haul
the erring
ones back, either in chains or
over the backs of horses.
I am
told the reservation becomes particularly annoying in the winter
months, as the poor
boys who are detailed to
pursue the Indians suffer greatly
from the cold. At this,
I remarked
to Sergeant
Howard that the red man
can be
terribly inconsiderate, even ungrateful,
in view
of all
the blessings
the white
man has
heaped upon him—smallpox, and that French disease,
to name two. The good sergeant
scratched his head and grinned,
and said, "You're right, sir."
I'll have
to make
Howard a character in the
book.
February
5: Today, I was taken
by Major
Rickards to meet a Cheyenne named
Black Man's Hand, one of
the participants
of the
alleged massacre of the 7th
Cavalry at the Little Big
Horn River in '76. The
major had this one Cheyenne
brought in after a
recent departure from the reservation.
Black Man's Hand had
been shackled and left to
dwell upon his past misdeeds in
an unheated
hut at
the edge
of the
airport, while two cold-benumbed privates stood on guard
before the door. It was evidently
feared this one savage would,
if left
unchained, do to Fort
Sill that which he (with
a modicum
of assistance from four or five
thousand of his race) had
done to Custer. I nevertheless mentioned to Rickards that
I was
interested in talking to Black
Man's Hand, as the Battle
of the
Little Big Horn would perfectly
climax Huckleberry's adventures in
the new
book. Rickards was reluctant to
grant permission but gave in abruptly,
perhaps fearing I would model
a villain
after him.
Upon entering the hut
where the Cheyenne sat, I
asked Major Rickards if it were
possible to have the Indian's
manacles removed, as it makes
me nervous
to talk
to a
man who
can rattle his chains
at me
whenever he chooses. Major Rickards said no and troubled
himself to explain to me
the need for limiting the movement
of this
specimen of ferocity within the walls
of Fort
Sill.
With a sigh, I seated myself
across from Black Man's Hand
and offered him one of my cigars. He accepted
it with
a faint
smile. He appeared to
be in
his forties,
though his face was deeply lined.
He was dressed in ragged leather
leggings, thick calf-length woolen
pajamas, and a faded Army
jacket. His vest appears to have been fashioned from
an old
parachute harness. He had no hat,
no footgear,
and no
blanket.
"Major Rickards,"
I said,
"this man is freezing to
death. Even if he isn't, I
am. Can
you provide
this hut with a little
warmth?"
The fretting major summarily
dispatched one of the sentries
for firewood and kindling
for the
little stove sitting uselessly in
the corner of the
hut.
I would have been altogether comfortable after that could
I have had a decanter of
brandy with which to force
out the
inner chill. But Indians
are notoriously
incapable of holding liquor, and I
did not
wish to be the cause
of this
poor wretch's further downfall.
Black Man's Hand speaks surprisingly good English. I spent an
hour and a half with
him, recording his remarks with
as much attention paid
to accuracy
as my
advanced years and cold fingers permitted.
With luck, I'll be able
to fill
some gaps in his story before
the Peyton resumes its flight across this griddlecake countryside.
Extract from The Testament of Black Man's Hand
[note : for
the sake
of easier
reading, I have substituted a number of English
terms for these provided by
the Cheyenne
Black Man's Hand.—MT]
I was
young when I first met
the Oglala
mystic Crazy Horse, and was taught
by him
to fly
the Thunderbirds
which the one called the Gray
White Man had given him.
[The Gray White Man—John S. Moseby,
Major, CSAAC—MT] Some of the older
men among
the People
[as the
Cheyenne call themselves, Major Rickards explains;
I assured
him that such egocentricity
is by
no means
restricted to savages—MT] did not think
much of the flying machines
and said,
"How will we be able to
remain brave men when this
would enable us to fly
over the heads of
our enemies,
without counting coup or taking
trophies?"
But the Oglala said, "The Gray
White Man has asked us
to help him."
"Why should
we help
him?" asked Two Pines.
"Because he rights the blueshirts and those who persecute
us. We have known for many
years that the men who
cheated us and lied to us
and killed
our women
and the
buffalo are men without honor, cowards
who fight
only because there is no other
way for
them to get what they
want. They cannot understand why we fight with
the Crows
and Pawnees—to
be brave, to win honor for
ourselves. They fight because it
is a
means to an end,
and they
fight us only because we
have what they want. The blueshirts
want to kill us all.
They fight to win. If we
are to
fight them, we must fight
with their own weapons. We must fight to win."
The older warriors shook their heads
sorrowfully and spoke of younger days
when they fought the Pawnees
bravely, honorably, man-to-man.
But I
and several
other young men wanted to leam
how to
control the Thunderbirds. And we
knew Crazy Horse spoke
the truth,
that our lives would never
be happy as long
as there
were white men in the
world. Finally, because they could
not forbid
us to
go with
the Oglala,
only advise against it
and say
that the Great Mystery had
not intended us to fly, Red
Horse and I and some
others went with Crazy Horse. I
did not
see my
village again, not even at
the big camp on the Greasy
Grass [Little Big Horn—MT] where
we rubbed out Yellow
Hair. I think perhaps the
blueshirts came after I
was gone
and told
Two Pines
that he had to leave
his home and come
to this
flat dead place.
The Oglala Crazy Horse
taught us to fly the
Thunderbirds. We learned a
great many things about the
Gray White Man's machines. With them,
we killed
Yellowleg flyers. Soon, I tired
of the waiting and the hunger.
We were
raided once. It was a
good fight. In the
dark, we chased the Big
Fish [the Indian word for dirigibles—MT]
and killed
many men on the ground.
I do not remember all of
what happened those seasons. When we were finally chased
away from the landing place,
Crazy Horse had us
hide the Thunderbirds in the
Black Hills. I have heard the
Yellowlegs did not know we
had the
Thunderbirds; that they
thought they were run by
the gray
white men only. It did not
matter; we thought we had
used them for the last time.
Many seasons
later, we heard what happened
to Black
Kettle's village. I went to
the place
sometime after the battle. I
heard that Crazy Horse
had been
there and seen the place.
I looked for him but he
had gone
north again. Black Kettle had
been a treaty man: we talked
among ourselves that the Yellowlegs had no honor.
It was
the winter
I was
sick [1872. The Plains Indians
and the U. S. Army alike
were plagued that winter by
what we would call the influenza.
It was
probably brought by some itinerant French trapper.—MT] that I
heard of Crazy Horse's raid on the landing place
of the
Big Fish.
It was
news of this that told us
we must
prepare to fight the Yellowlegs.
When I was well, my wives
and I
and Eagle
Hawk's band went looking for Crazy
Horse. We found him in
the fall.
Already, the Army had killed
many Sioux and Cheyenne that
summer. Crazy Horse said
we must
band together, we who knew how
to fly
the Thunderbirds.
He said
we would
someday have to fight the Yellowlegs
among the clouds as in
the old
days. We only had
five Thunderbirds which had not
been flown many seasons. We spent
the summer
planning to get more. Red Chief
and Yellow
Dog gathered
a large
band. We raided the Fort Kearny
and stole
many Thunderbirds and canisters
of powder.
We hid
them in the Black Hills.
It had
been a good fight.
It was at this time Yellow
Hair sent out many soldiers
to protect the miners he had
brought in by speaking false.
They destroyed the sacred
lands of the Sioux. We
killed some of them, and the
Yellowlegs burned many of our
villages. That was not a good
time. The Big Fish killed
many of our people.
We wanted to get
the Thunderbirds
and kill
the Big
Fish. Crazy Horse had us wait.
He had
been talking to Sitting Bull,
the Hunkpapa chief. Sitting
Bull said we should not
go against the Yellowlegs yet, that
we could
only kill a few at
a time. Later, he said, they
would all come. That would
be the
good day to die.
The next year, they came. We
did not
know until just before the
Sun Dance
[about June 10, 1876—MT] that
they were coming. Crazy Horse and
I and
all those
who flew
the Thunderbirds went to
get ours.
It took
us two
days to get them going again,
and we
had only
six Thunderbirds
flying when we flew to stop
the blueshirts.
Crazy Horse, Yellow Dog, American Gun,
Little Wolf, Big Tall, and
I flew
that day. It was a good
fight. We killed two Big
Fish and many men and horses.
We stopped
the Turtles-which-kill
[that would be the light armored
cars Crook had with him on the
Rosebud River—MT] so they
could not come toward the
Greasy Grass where we
camped. The Sioux under Spotted
Pony killed more on
the ground.
We flew
back and hid the Thunderbirds near camp.
When we returned, we told Sitting
Bull of our victory. He
said it was good,
but that
a bigger
victory was to come. He
said he had had
a vision
during the Sun Dance. He
saw many
soldiers and enemy Indians
fall out of the sky
on their
heads into the village. He said
ours was not the victory
he had
seen.
It was some days later we
heard that a Yellowlegs Thunder-bird had been shot
down. We went to the
place where it lay. There was a strange device
above its wing. Crazy Horse
studied it many moments. Then
he said,
"I have seen such a
thing before. It carries Thunderbirds beneath one of the
Big Fish.
We must get our
Thunderbirds. It will be a
good day to die."
We hurried to our
Thunderbirds. We had twelve of
them fixed now, and we had
on them,
besides the quick rifles [Henry machine rifles of calibers
.41-40 or .30-30—MT], the roaring spears
[Hale spin-stabilized rockets,
of 2Vi
inch diameter—MT]. We took
off before
noonday.
We arrived at the
Greasy Grass and climbed into
the clouds, where we scouted. Soon,
to the
south, we saw the dust
of many men moving.
But Crazy
Horse held us back. Soon
we saw why; four Big Fish
were coming. We came at
them out of the sun. They
did not
see us
till we were on them.
We fired
our
roaring sticks, and the
Big Fish
caught fire and burned. All
except one, which drifted
away, though it lost all
its fat.
Wild Horse, in his Thunderbird, was shot but still
fought on with us that morning.
We began
to kill
the men
on the
Big Fish
when a new thing happened. Men
began to float down on
blankets. We began to kill them
as they
fell with our quick rifles.
Then we attacked those who reached
the ground,
until we saw Spotted Pony
and his
men were
on them.
We turned
south and killed many horse soldiers
there. Then we flew back
to the
Greasy Grass and hid
the Thunderbirds.
At camp,
we learned
that many pony soldiers
had been
killed. Word came that more soldiers
were coming.
I saw, as the sun went
down, the women moving among
the dead Men-Who-Float-Down, taking
their clothes and supplies. They covered the ground
like leaves in the autumn.
It had been a good fight.
"So much
has been
written about that hot June
day in
1876, so much guesswork
applied where knowledge was missing.
Was Custer
dead in his harness before
he reached
the ground? Or did he stand
and fire
at the
aircraft strafing his men? How many
reached the ground alive? Did
any escape
the battle itself, only
to be
killed by Indian patrols later
that afternoon, or the
next day? No one really
knows, and all the Indians are gone now, so
history stands a blank.
"Only one thing is certain: for
the men
of the
7th Cavalry
there was only the
reality of the exploding dirigibles,
the snap
of their chutes deploying,
the roar
of the
aircraft among them, the bullets, and
those terrible last moments on
the bluff.
Whatever the verdict of
their peers, whatever the future
may reveal, it can be said
they did not die in
vain."
—The Seventh Cavalry: A History
e.
r. burroughs
Colonel, U.S.A.,
Retired
anonymous.
Remember Ft. Sumter! Washington: War Department Recruiting
Pamphlet, 1862.
---------- .
Leviathans of the Skies. Goodyear
Publications, 1923.
---------- . The Dirigible in War and Peace. Goodyear Publications,
1911.
---------- . Sitting Bull,
Killer of Custer. G. E. Putnam's, 1903.
---------- . Comanche of the
Seventh. Chicago: Military Press, 1879.
---------- . Thomas Edison and the Indian Wars. Menlo Park, N.J.:
Edison
Press, 1921.
--- . "Fearful
Slaughter at Big Horn." New York: Herald-
Times, July 8, 1876, et passim.
---------- .
Custer's Gold Hoax. Boston: Barnum Press, 1892.
---------- . "Reno's
Treachery: New Light on the Massacre at The
Little
Big Horn." Chicago: Daily News-Mirror, June 12-19, 1878.
---------- . "Grant
Scandals and the Plains Indian Wars." Life,
May 3,1921.
---------- . The Hunkpapa Chief Sitting Bull, Famous Indians Series
#3.
New York: 1937. Arnold,
henry h. The
Air War in the East, Smithsonian
Annals
of Flight, Vol. 38. Four books, 1932-37.
1.
Sumter To Bull Run
2. Williamsburg to Second Manassas
3. Gettysburg to the Wilderness
5. The Bombing of Atlanta to Haldeman ballows,
edward. The
Indian Ace: Crazy Horse. G. E. Putnam's, 1903.
benteen,
capt. Frederick. Major Benteen's Letters to his Wife.
University
of Oklahoma Press, 1921. brininstool, a.
e. A Paratrooper with
Custer, n.p.g.,
1891. burroughs, col. e. r. retired. The Seventh Cavalry: A History.
Chicago: 1931.
clair-britner,
edoard. Haldeman:
Where the War Ended.
Frankfort
University Press, 1911. crook, general
george c. Yellowhair: Custer as the Indians
Knew Him. Cincinnati Press, 1882.
custer, george a. My Life on the Plains and in the Clouds. Chicago: 1874
---------- and custer, Elizabeth. 'Chutes and Saddles. Chicago:
1876.
Custer's Luck, n.a, n.p.g., [1891]
de camp, l. sprague and pratt, Fletcher.
Franklin's Engine: Mover oj
the World. Hanover
House, 1939.
de
voto, Bernard. The Road From Sumter. Scribners, 1931.
elsee, d. v. The Last Raid oj Crazy Horse. Random House, 1921.
The 505th: History From the Skies. DA Pamphlet 870-10-3 GPO Pittsburgh, May 12,
1903.
fm
23-13-2 Machine Rifle
M3121A1 and M3121A1E1 Cal. .41-40 Operator's Manual, DA FM, July 12, 1873.
goddard,
Robert h. Rocketry: From 400 B.C. to 1933. Smithsonian Annals of Flight, Vol. 31, GPO
Pittsburgh, 1934.
Guide
to the Custer Battlefield National Monument. U. S. Parks Services, GPO Pittsburgh, 1937.
The Indian Wars. 3 vols, GPO Pittsburgh, 1898.
kalin,
davtd. Hook
Up! The Story of the Balloon Infantry. New York: 1932.
kellogg,
mark w. The Drop at Washita. Chicago: Times Press, 1872.
lockridge, sgt. Robert.
History of the Airborne:
From Shiloh to
Ft.
Bragg. Chicago: Military
Press, 1936. lowe, thaddeus c. Aircraft of the Civil War. 4 vols. 1891-96. mccoy,
col. tim. The
Vanished American. Phoenix
Press, 1934. mcgovern, maj. william. Death in the Dakotas. Sioux Press,
1889.
morison,
samuel eliot. France
in the New World 1627-1864. 1931.
myren,
gundal. The
Sun Dance Ritual and the Last Indian Wars. 1901.
patton,
gen. george c. Custer's Last Campaigns. Military House, 1937.
paul, winston. We Were There at the Bombing of Ft. Sumter.
Landmark
Books, 1929. payley, david. Where Custer Fell. New York Press, 1931. powell,
maj. john Wesley.
Report on the Arid Lands. GPO,
1881.
Proceedings, Reno Court of Inquiry. GPO Pittsburgh, 1881.
86
UNIVERSE 6
Report on the VS.-Canadian Offensive against
Sitting Bull, 1879.
GPO Pittsburgh, War Department, 1880. sandburg,
carl. Mr. Lincoln's Airmen.
Chicago: Driftwind
Press, 1921.
settle, sgt. maj. winslow. Under the Crossed Sabers. Military Press, 1898.
Sheridan,
gen. phillip. The
Only Good Indian . .
. Military House, 1889.
singleton,
william warren. J.
E. B. Stuart, Attila of the Skies. Boston, 1871.
smith, Gregory.
The Grey White Man:
Moseby's Expedition to the Northwest 1863-1866. University of Oklahoma Press, 1921.
smith,
neldoo. He
Gave Them Wings: Captain Smith's Journal 1861-1864. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927.
steen,
nelson. Opening
of the West. Jim
Bridger Press, 1902.
tapscott,
richard d. He
Came With the Comet. University
of Illinois Press, 1927.
twain,
mark. Huckleberry Among the
Hostiles: A Journal. Hut-ton
Books, 1932.
One
of the great themes of science fiction is the desperate weariness that would
eventually wear down an immortal person: the most resourceful and inventive of
us could find enough things to do for hundreds, thousands of years . . . but
forever? "Forever is too long," as one science fiction novel was
titled a
quarter
century ago.
harlan ellison tells now of a being who had lived far too
long, who has done everything there is to do, on a cosmic scale. And of a Final
Gathering of many such people, on a world of a
far
star.
The
Wine Has Eeen Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat*
BY HARLAN ELLISON
"Taking
advantage of what he had heard with one limited pair of ears, in a single and
relatively isolated moment of recorded history, in the course of an
infinitesimal fraction of conceivable time (which some say is the only time),
he came to believe firmly that there was much that he could not hear, much that
was constantly being spoken and indeed sung to teach him things he could never
otherwise grasp, which if grasped would complete the fragmentary nature of his
consciousness until it was whole at last—one tone both pure and entire floating
in the silence of the egg, at the same pitch as the silence."
w. s. merwin, "The Chart"1
Ennui was the reason only one
hundred and one thousand alien representatives came to the
Sonority Gathering. One hundred and one
thousand out of six hundred
and eleven
thousand possible delegates, one each from the
inhabited worlds of the
stellar community. Even so, counterbalancing
the poor turnout was
the essential
fact that it had been
ennui, in the first place, that
had caused
the Gathering
to be
organized. Ennui, utter boredom, oppressive
worlds-weariness, deep heaving sighs,
abstracted vacant stares, familiar thoughts and familiar
views.
The dance
of entropy
was nearing
its end.
The orchestration of the
universe sounded thick and gravelly,
a tune
slowing down inexorably, being played
at the
wrong speed.
Chasm ruts
had been
worn in the dance floor.
The oscillating universe was
fifty billion years old, and
it was tired.
And the intelligent races of six
hundred and eleven thousand worlds
sought mere moments of amusement,
pale beads strung on a dreary
Möbius of dragging time. Mere
moments, each one dearer than the
last, for there were so
few. Everything that could be
done, had been done; every
effort was ultimately the fuzzed
echo of an earlier attempt.
Even the Sonority Gathering had been
foreshadowed by the Vulpeculan Quadrivium in '08, the tonal
festival hosted by the Saturniidae of Whoung in '76,
and the
abortive, ludicrous Rigellian Sodality "musical
get-together" that had
turned out to be
merely another fraudulent attempt to
purvey the artist Merle's skiagrams to
an already-disenchanted
audience.
1 From "The Chart"
by W. S. Merwin, in The New Yorker, Oct 22, 1973. |
Nonetheless (in
a phrase
exhumed and popularized by the
Recidivists of Fornax 993-X),
it was
"the only game in town." And so, when the
esteemed and shimmering DeilBo devised the Garnering, his reputation
as an
innovator and the crush of ennui
combined to stir excitement of a sluggish sort
. . . and one hundred
and one
thousand delegates came. To Vindemiatrix 5 in what had
long ago been called, in
the time
of the heliocentric arrogance,
the "constellation"
of Virgo.
With the reddish-yellow eye of the
giant Arcturus forever lighting
the azure
skies, forever vying with Spica's
first magnitude brilliance, 5's deserts
and canyons
seemed poor enough stage setting for
the lesser
glow of Vindemiatrix, forever taking
third place in prominence to its brawny elders.
But 5,
devoid of intelligent life, a
patchwork-colored world arid
and crumbling, had one
thing to recommend it that
DeilBo found compelling: the finest acoustics
of any
world in the universe.
The Maelstrom Labyrinth. Remnant of volcanic upheavals
and the retreat of
oceans and the slow dripping
of acid
waters, 2 boasted a grand canyon
of stalagmites
that rose one hundred and
sixty kilometers; stalactites
that narrowed into spear-tip
pendants plunging down over ninety
kilometers into bottomless crevasses;
caverns and arroyos and tunnels
that had never been plotted; the
arching, golden stone walls had
never been seen by
the eyes
of intelligent
creatures; the Ephemeris called it the
Maelstrom Labyrinth. No matter where one stood in the
sixteen-hundred-kilometer sprawl of
the Labyrinth, one could
speak with a perfectly normal
tone, never even raise one's voice,
and be
assured that a listener crouching deep in a cave
at the
farthest point of the formation
could hear what he
said as if beside him.
DeilBo selected the Maelstrom Labyrinth as
the site
for the
Gathering.
And so
they came. One hundred and
one thousand
alien life-forms. From what
the primitives
had once
called the constellations of Indus
and Pavo,
from Sad al Bari in
Pegasus, from Mizar and Phecda, from
all the
worlds of the stellar community they came; bearing with
them the special sounds they hoped would be judged
the most
extraordinary, the most
stirring, the most memorable:
ultimate sounds. They came, because they were bored and
there was nowhere else to
go;
they came, they wanted to hear
what they had never heard
before. They came; and they
heard.
".
. . he domesticated the elephant, the cat, the bear, the rat, and kept all the
remaining whales in dark stalls, trying to hear through their ears the note
made by the rocking of the axle of the earth."
w. s. merwin, "The Chart"
If she
had one
fear in this endless life,
it was
that she would be forced to
be born
again. Yes, of course, life
was sacred,
but how long, how ceaselessly, repetitiously long did it have
to go
on? Why were such
terrible stigmas visited on the
relatives and descendants of those who
simply, merely, only wished to
know the sweet sleep?
Stileen had tried to remember her
exact age just a few
solstices ago. Periodically she tried
to remember;
and only
when she recognized that it was
becoming obsessive did she put
it out of her mind. She
was very
old, even by the standards
of immortality of her
race. And all she truly
hungered to know, after all those
times and stars, was the
sweet sleep.
A sleep
denied her by custom and
taboo.
She sought
to busy
herself with diversions.
She had devised the system of
gravity pulse-manipulation that had
kept the dense, tiny worlds
of the
Neer 322 system from falling into their
Primary. She had compiled the
exhaustive concordance of extinct emotions
of all
the dead
races that had ever existed in
the stellar
community. She had assumed control of the Red Line
Armies in the perpetual Procyon
War for over one hundred solstices,
and had
amassed more confirmed tallies than any
other commander-in-chief in the War's long
history.
Her insatiable curiosity and
her race's
longevity had combined to provide
the necessary
state of mind that would
lead her, inevitably, to the sound.
And having
found it, and having perceived what it was, and
being profoundly ready to enjoy
the sweet sleep, she
had come
to the
Gathering to share it with
the rest of the
stellar community.
For the first time in millennia,
Stileen was not seeking merely to amuse herself; she
was engaged
on a
mission of significance . . .
and finality.
With her
sound, she came to the
Gathering.
She was ancient, deep yellow, in
her jar
with cornsilk hair floating free in
the azure
solution. DeilBo's butlers took her
to her assigned place in the
Labyrinth, set her down on
a limestone
ledge in a deep cavern
where the acoustics were particularly
rich and true, tended to
her modest
needs, and left her.
Stileen had time, then, to dwell
on the
diminished enthusiasm she had for
continued life.
DeilBo made
the opening
remarks, heard precisely and clearly throughout the Maelstrom. He used no known
language, in fact used no
words. Sounds, mere sounds that
keynoted the Gathering by
imparting his feelings of warmth
and camaraderie to the
delgates. In every trench and
run and
wash and cavern of
the Maelstrom,
the delegates
heard, and in their special ways
smiled with pleasure, even those
without mouths or the
ability to smile.
It was to be, truly, a
Sonority Gathering, in which sounds
alone would be judged.
Impressed, the delegates murmured their pleasure.
Then DeilBo offered to
present the first sound for
their consideration. He took the
responsibility of placing
himself first, as a gesture of
friendship, an icebreaker of a
move. Again, the delegates were pleased
at the
show of hospitality, and urged DeilBo
to exhibit
bis special
sound.
And this is the sound, the
ultimate sound, the very special
sound he had trapped
for them:
On the eleventh moon of the world called
Chill by its inhabitants, there is a flower whose roots are sunk deep, deep
into the water pools that lie far beneath the black stone surface. This
flower, without a name, seems to be an intricate construct of spiderwebs.
There are, of course, no spiders on the eleventh moon of Chill.
Periodically, for no reason anyone has ever
been able to discern, the spiderweb flowers burst into flame, and very slowly
destroy themselves, charring and shriveling and turning to ashes that lie where
they fall. There is no wind on the eleventh moon of Chill.
During
the death ceremonies of the spiderweb flowers, the plants give off a haunting
and terrible sound. It is a song of colors. Shades and hues that have no
counterparts anywhere in the stellar community.
DeilBo
had sent scavengers across the entire face of Chill's eleventh moon, and they
had gathered one hundred of the finest spiderweb flowers, giants among their
kind. DeilBo had talked to the flowers for some very long time prior to the
Gathering. He had told them what they had been brought to the Maelstrom to do,
and though they could not speak, it became apparent from the way they
straightened in their vats of enriched water (for they had hung their tops
dejectedly when removed from the eleventh moon of Chill) that they took Deil-Bo's
purpose as a worthy fulfillment of their destiny, and would be proud to burn on
command.
So
DeilBo gave the gentle command, speaking sounds of gratitude and affection to
the spiderweb flowers, who burst into flame and sang their dangerous song of death.
. . .
It
began with blue, a very ordinary blue, identifiable to every delegate who heard
it. But the blue was only the ground coat; in an instant it was overlaid with
skirls of a color like wind through dry stalks of harvested grain. Then a sea
color the deepest shade of a blind fish tooling through algae-thick waters.
Then the color of hopelessness collided with the color of desperation and
formed a nova of hysteria that in the human delegates sounded exactly like the
color of a widower destroying himself out of loneliness.
The song of colors went on
for what seemed a long time, though it was only a matter of minutes, and when
it faded away into ashes and was stilled, they all sat humbled and silent,
wishing they had not heard it.
Stileen revolved
slowly in her jar, troubled
beyond consolation at the first
sound the Gathering had proffered.
For the
first time in many
reborn lifetimes, she felt pain.
A sliver
of glass driven into her memories.
Bringing back the clear, loud
sound of a moment
when she had rejected one
who had
loved her. She had driven him
to hurt
her, and then he had
sunk into a deathly melancholy, a silence so deep
no words
she could summon would serve to
bring him back. And when
he had gone, she had asked
for sleep,
and they
had given
it to
her . . . only to
bring her life once again,
all too
soon.
In her
jar, she wept.
And she longed for the time
when she could let them
hear the sound she had found,
the sound
that would release her at last from the coil of mortality
she now
realized she despised with all her
soul.
After a time, the first delegate—having
recovered from DeilBo's offering—ventured
forth with its sound. It
was an
insect creature from a world
named Joumell, and this was
the sound it had brought:
Far beneath a milky sea on a water world of
Joumell's system, there is a vast grotto whose walls are studded with multicolored
quartz crystals whose cytoplasmic cell contents duplicate the filament curves
of the galaxies NGC 4038
and NGC
4039. When these crystals
mate, there is a perceptible encounter that produces tidal tails. The sounds
of ecstasy these crystals make when they mate is one long, sustained sigh of
rapture that is capped by yet another, slightly higher and separate from the
preceding. Then another, and another, until a symphony of crystalline orgasms
is produced no animal throats could match.
The insect Joumelli had brought eleven such
crystals (the minimum number required for a sexual coupling) from the water
world. A cistern formation had been filled with a white crystalline acid, very
much like cuminoin; it initiated a cyto-taxian movement; a sexual stimulation.
The crystals had been put down in the cistern and now they began their mating.
The
sound began with a single note, then another joined and overlay it, then
another, and another. The symphony began and modulations rose on modulations,
and the delegates closed their eyes—even those who had no eyes—and they basked
in the sound, translating it into the sounds of joy of their various species.
And
when it was ended, many of the delegates found the affirmation of life
permitted them to support the memory of DeilBo's terrible death melody of the
flowers.
Many did not.
".
. . the frequencies of their limits of hearing . . . a calendar going forward
and backward but not in time, even though time was the measure of the
frequencies as it was the measure of every other thing (therefore, some say,
the only measure) . . ."
w. s.
merwin, "The Chart"
She remembered
the way
they had been when they
had first
joined energies. It had
been like that sound, the
wonderful sound of those
marvelous crystals.
Stileen turned her azure
solution opaque, and let herself
drift back on a
tide of memory. But the
tide retreated, leaving her at the
shore of remembrance where DeilBo's
sound still lingered, dark and terrible.
She knew
that even the trembling threads of joy unforgotten could not sustain her,
and she
wanted to let them
hear what she had brought.
There was simply too much pain
in the
universe, and if she—peculiarly adapted to contain
such vast amounts of anguish—could
not live with it. . .
there must be an end.
It was
only humane.
She sent out a request to
be put
on the
agenda as soon as possible and DeilBo's butlers advised
her she
had a
time to wait; and as her
contact was withdrawn, she brushed
past a creature reaching out for
a position
just after hers. When she
touched its mind, it
closed off with shocking suddenness.
Afraid she had been
discourteous, Stileen went away from
the creature quickly, and did not
reach out again. But in
the instant
she had
touched it, she had glimpsed
something ... it would not hold.
. .
.
The sounds continued, each delegate presenting a wonder to match the
wonders that had gone before.
The delegate
from RR Lyrae IV produced
the sound
of a dream decaying in the
mind of a mouselike creature
from Bregga, a creature whose dreams
formed its only reality. The
delegate from RZ Cephei
Beta VI followed with the
sound of ghosts in the Mountains
of the
Hand; they spoke of the
future and lamented their ability to
see what
was to
come. The delegate from Ennore
came next with the sound
of red,
magnified till it filled
the entire
universe. The delegate from Gateway
offered the sound of
amphibious creatures at the moment
of their mutation to fully land-living
vertebrates; there was a wail of
loss at that moment, as
their chromosomes begged for return to the warm, salty
sea. The delegates from Algol
C XXIII gave them the sounds
of war,
collected from every race in the
stellar community, broken down into
their component parts, distilled,
purified, and recast as one
tone; it was numbing. The
delegate from Blad presented a
triptych of sound: a sun being bom, the same sun
coasting through its main stage
of hydrogen burning, the
sun going
nova—a shriek of pain that phased
in and
out of
normal space-time with lunatic vibrations.
The delegate
from Iobbaggii played a long
and ultimately
boring sound that was finally
identified as a neutrino passing through the universe; when
one of
the other
delegates suggested that sound,
being a vibration in a
medium, could not be produced by
a neutrino
passing through vacuum, the Iobbaggiian responded—with pique—that
the sound
produced had been the sound
within the neutrino;
the querying
delegate then said it
must have taken a very tiny microphone to pick up
the sound;
the Iobbaggiian
stalked out of the Gathering
on his
eleven-meter stilts. When the uproar
died away, the agenda was moved
and the
delegate from Kruger 60B IX
delivered up a potpourri
of sounds
of victory
and satisfaction
and joy and innocence
and pleasure
from a gathering of microscopic
species inhabiting a grain of
sand in the Big Desert
region of Catrimani; it was a patchwork
quilt of delights that helped knit together the Gathering.
Then the delegate from the Opal
Cluster (his specific world's native
name was taboo and could not
be used)
assaulted them with a sound
none could identify, and when it
had faded
away into trembling silence, leaving
behind only the memory of
cacophony, he told the Gathering that
it was
the sound
of chaos;
no one
doubted his word. The
delegate from Mainworld followed with the sound of a
celestial choir composed of gases
being blown away from a blue
star in a rosette nebula
ten light-years
across; all the angels of
antiquity could not have sounded more glorious.
And then
it was
Stileen's turn, and she readied
the sound
that would put an
end to
the Gathering.
"And
beyond—and in fact among—the last known animals living and extinct, the lines
could be drawn through white spaces that had an increasing progression of their
own, into regions of hearing that was no longer conceivable, indicating
creatures wholly sacrificed or never evolved, hearers of the note at which
everything explodes into light, and of the continuum that is the standing still
of darkness, drums echoing the last shadow without relinquishing the note of
the first light, hearkeners to the unborn overflowing."
w. s. merwin, "The Chart"
"There is
no pleasure
in this,"
Stileen communicated, by thought
and by
inflection. "But it is the
sound that I have found, the sound I know
you would
want me to give to
you
. . . and you must
do with
it what
you must.
I am
sorry." And she played
for them
the sound.
It was the sound of the
death of the universe. The
dying gasp of their worlds and
their suns and their galaxies
and their
island universes. The death
of all.
The final
sound.
And when the sound was gone,
no one
spoke for a long time, and Stileen was at
once sad, but content: now
the sleep
would come, and she
would be allowed to rest.
"The delegate
is wrong."
The silence hung shrouding
the moment.
The one
who had
spoken was a darksmith
from Luxann, chief world of
the Logomachy. Theologians, pragmatists, reasoners sans appel, his words
fell with the weight of
certainty.
"It is an oscillating universe," he said, his cowl
shrouding his face, the words emerging
from darkness. "It will die,
and it will be reborn. It
has happened
before, it will happen again."
And the tone of the Gathering
grew brighter, even as Stileen's mood spiraled down into
despair. She was ambivalent—pleased for them, that they
could see an end to
their ennui and yet
perceive the rebirth of life
in the
universe —desolate for herself,
knowing somehow, some way, she
would be recalled from
the dead.
And then the creature she had
passed in reaching out for
her place on the
agenda, the creature that had
blocked itself to her mental touch,
came forward in their minds
and said,
"There is another sound
beyond hers."
This was the sound the creature
let them
hear, the sound that had always been there, that had
existed for time beyond time, that could not be
heard though the tone was
always with them; and it could
be heard
now only
because it existed as it
passed through the instrument
the creature
made of itself.
It was the sound of reality,
and it
sang of the end beyond the end, the final and total
end that
said without possibility of argument, There will be no rebirth because we have
never existed.
Whatever they
had thought
they were, whatever arrogance
98
UNIVERSE 6
had brought their dream
into being, it was now
coming to final moments, and beyond
those moments there was nothing.
No space, no time,
no life,
no thought,
no gods,
no resurrection
and rebirth.
The creature let the
tone die away, and these
who could
reach out with their
minds to see what it
was, were turned back easily. It
would not let itself be
seen.
The messenger of eternity
had only
anonymity to redeem itself ...
for whom?
And for Stileen, who did not
even try to penetrate the
barriers, there was no pleasure
in the
knowledge that it had all
been a dream. For if it
had been
a dream,
then the joy had been a
dream as well.
It was not easy to go
down to emptiness, never having
tasted joy. But there
was no
appeal.
In the
Maelstrom Labyrinth, there was no
longer ennui.
So
many people talk about our energy crisis, so many suggestions are made, from
installing offshore windmills to tapping the thermal heat produced by animal
droppings . . . yet no one {until John Shirley) has suggested that we use the
most reliable form of energy in the universe: entropy. Here he tells of a
future world in which death-energy has at last been harnessed for living. Of
course, there are complications. . . .
john shirley is a graduate of the Clarion SF Writers'
Workshops and has sold stories to Clarion, New Dimensions, and others. He writes with an original voice, and you'll be seeing
much
more from him.
Under
the Generator
BY JOHN SHIRLEY
Looking into the eyes of the
woman who sat across from
him in the crowded cafeteria, he was reminded of
the eyes
of another
woman entirely. Perhaps there were
secret mirrors hidden in the
faces of the two women.
He remembered
the other
woman, Alice, when she
had said:
/ just can't continue with you if you insist on
keeping that damn job. I'm sorry, Ronnie, but I just can't. My personal
convictions leave no room for those inhuman generators.
He reflected, looking into
the eyes
of the
second woman, that he could have
quit the job for Alice.
But he
hadn't. Maybe he hadn't actually wanted
her. And he had gone
easily from Alice to Donna. He
resolved not to lose Donna
too because
of his
work with the generators.
"I used to be an actor,"
Denton said. Swirling coffee in
his cup, he shifted uncomfortably in the cafeteria seat
and wondered
if the
plastic of the cup would
melt slightly into the coffee. . . . Working
at the
hospital, drinking coffee every morning and noon out of
the same
white-mold sort of cups, he
had visions of the
plastic slowly coating the interior
of his
stomach with white brittle.
"What happened to acting
and how
far'd you get?" Donna Farber asked with her characteristic
way of
cramming as much inquiry
as she
could into one line.
Denton frowned, his wide
mouth making an elaborate squiggle across his broad, pale
face. His expressions were always
slightly exaggerated, as if he
were an actor not yet
used to the part of Ronald
Denton.
"I was working off-Broadway, and I
had a
good part in a play I
wrote myself. An actor can
always play the part better
if he wrote it. The play
was called
All Men Are Created
Sequels. Tigner produced it."
"Never heard
of it."
"Naturally it
fell flat after I pulled
out."
"Naturally." Her
silver-flecked blue eyes
laughed.
"Anyway, I felt that acting was
stealing too much of my
identity. Or something. Actually, I'm not sure
just why I quit. Maybe it was really stage
fright."
His unexpected candor brought
her eyes
to his.
He remembered
Alice and wondered how to
discover just how Donna felt about his job, if
she felt
anything at all.
But the subject was primed by
his black
uniform. "Why did you quit acting
to work
in the
generators?"
"I don't know. It was available
and it
had good
hours. Four hours a day, four
days a week, twelve dollars
an hour."
"Yeah . . . but it
must be depressing to work
there. I mean, you probably still
haven't been able to give
up acting
entirely. You have to act like
there's nothing wrong around people
who are going to
die soon."
There was no indictment in her tone. Her head
tilted sympathetically.
Denton just nodded as if he
had found
sorrowful virtue in being the scapegoat.
"Somebody has to
do it,"
he said.
Actually, he was elated. He
had been
trying to arouse interest from
Donna for a week.
He looked
at her
frankly, admiring her slender hands wrapped
around her coffeecup, the soft
cone of her lips blowing to
cool the coffee, close flaxen
hair cut into a bowl behind
her ears.
"I don't entirely understand,"
she said,
looking for a divination in her coffee, "why
they didn't get the retired
nurses or someone used to death
for the
job."
"For one thing, you need a
little electronic background to keep watch
on the
generators. That's what got me
the job.
I studied electronics before I was
an actor."
"That's a strange contrast.
Electronics and acting."
"Not really. Both involve
knowledge of circuitry. But anyway,
not even
experienced nurses are used to
sitting there watching
people die
for four
hours at a time. They
usually let them alone except when
administering—"
"But I thought you said all
you had
to do
was sit
and check
the dials every so
often. You mean you have
to watch?"
"Well. . . you can't help
it. You
sit right
across from the patient. Since you're
there, you look. I'm aware
of them,
anyhow, because I have to
make sure they aren't dying
too fast
for the machine to
scoop."
She was silent, looking around the
busy lunchroom as if seeking support from the milling,
wooden-faced hospital employees. She seemed
to be
listening for a tempo in
the clashing
of dishes and the
trapped rumble of conversations.
Denton was afraid that he had
offended her, giving her the
impression that he was
a vulture.
He hoped
that she wasn't looking around for
someone else to talk to.
. .
.
"I don't like it in here,"
she said,
her voice
a small
life to itself. "I think
it's because in most kitchens
you hear
the clinking
noises of china and glass.
Here it's scraping plastic." One side of her mouth
pulled into an ironic smile.
"Let's go
outside then," Denton said, a
trifle too eagerly.
They discarded their trays
in the
recycling chute and walked to the
elevator. Denton was silent as
they rode to the ground floor of the huge
hospital; he didn't want to
converse, irrationally afraid that
the giddy
elevator box might trap their
words in the sliding
doors, to carry them off
to strangers.
They emerged
into the pastel curves of
the hospital
lobby, walking between artificial
potted palms and people waiting
with artificial expressions concealing worry. They went
out the sussurating front doors, from
the odor
of disinfectant
into June sunlight and the warm
breathing of air-cars.
"I'm glad all the engines are
turbines now," she remarked. "They're so quiet.
No tires
on the
street squealing and no growling pistons and just air
to wash
my face
in. All
the noise
of traffic used to
scare me when I was
little." They talked quietly of cars
and the
city and their jobs until
they came to the park.
Sitting under a tree, plucking absently
at the
grass, they were silent for a
while, feeling the ambience of
the bustling
park.
Until without provocation Donna began: "My parents
died five years ago and—" Then she stopped and
looked at him sideways. She shook
her head.
"Were you
going to say something else?"
She shook her head again, too
quickly. He wanted to ask
if they had put generators over her parents before
they'd died; but he decided that
the question
might put him in a
bad light.
They sat in the park and
watched bicyclers and children sift
through the plasphalt paths.
After a while a slush
vendor rolled a sticky white cart
past, and Denton got up
to buy
two drinks. He was just returning
from the vendor, about thirty
feet from where Donna
waited under the tree, when
someone put a hand on his
right arm.
"Can I talk to you?" A subdued tone. "Just
for a
minute?" It was a
boy, perhaps sixteen, but at
least three inches taller than Denton. The boy kept
opening and closing his mouth
pensively, questions anxious to
spring from his hps. He
was dressed in a denim body
suit. His hands were thrust
deep into his side-pockets, as if
leashed. Denton nodded, glancing at
the slushes to make certain that
they wouldn't melt on his
hands. Probably the kid
was proselytizing
for one
of the
burgeoning Satanic cults.
"You're a generator guy,
aren't you? A compensator." Denton nodded dumbly
again.
"My father's
under a generator; he's dying.
And he
ain't old or useless yet. He's
still . . . needed."
He paused
to steady
himself. "Can you .
. .
Maybe you could help him,
turn off the machine for a
while?" It was obvious that
the boy
wasn't used to asking favors. He
resented having to ask Denton
for anything.
Denton wished that he
hadn't worn his uniform out of the hospital.
"I can't do anything for your
father. I'm not a doctor.
And there are dozens of generators
in use
at the
hospital now. I've probably never seen
your old man. Anyway, it
isn't true that the generators steal strength from patients.
It's an old wive's tale. It wouldn't do your
father one bit of good
if I
turned it off. Sorry—" He began
to walk
toward Donna.
"What's your name?" the boy asked
from behind, all respect gone
from his tone. Denton could
feel the boy's eyes on
his back. He turned
half around, miffed.
"Denton," he
replied, immediately wishing that he
had given a false name. He
turned his back on the
boy and
walked back to Donna. He could
feel an icy trail of
slush melting over his hand.
"What did that kid want?" Donna asked, sipping her
slush. "Nothing. Directions to . . .
the auditorium.
He said
he was going to the Satanist/Jeezus
Freak confrontation." "Really? He didn't look to
be armed."
She shrugged.
The boy was watching
them.
Some of the slush had spilled
onto Denton's leg. Donna wiped at the red stain
on his
black uniform with a
white handkerchief.
He didn't
want to think of work
now. He had a date
to take
her to the Media Stew tonight.
Finally: the first relationship he'd attempted since Alice.
But Denton decided it
might be better to keep
his mind
on work. If he thought about
her too
much he would be nervous
and contrived when he
was with
her. Maybe blow it. He
tightened the belt around his
one-piece jet uniform and went
quietly into the arbiter's
office. The arbiter of compensators
was short, Jewish, and
a compulsive
caviler. Mr. Buxton smiled as Denton
bent over the worksheet titled
week of june 19 through 26,1986.
"What's your hurry, Denton? You young
cats are always in a hurry.
You'll be assigned soon enough.
You might
find it too soon. I haven't written
you into
the chart
yet."
"Leave me on Mr. Hurzbau's generator,
sir, if you would. I
get along well with
Hurzbau."
"What is this "get along' junk?
We bend
the rule
a little
that says no fraternizing
with the patients under generators
. . . but familiarity is strictly
verboten. You'll go nuts if
you—"
Not wanting to become
embroiled in another of Buxton's
lectures, Denton quickly capitulated.
"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't
mean to imply we
knew each other well. What
I meant
was, Hurzbau doesn't worry me much,
or talk
to me
past the usual amenities. Could I
have my assignment now? I
don't want the unwatched generator to
overload."
"Somebody's watching
the generator
all the
time, naturally. It can't over—"
"That's what I mean," Denton interrupted
impatiently. "The guy who's
watching it is going to
overload if he has to
work past his shift.
He'll blame me."
"You should cultivate patience.
Especially with your job." Buxton shrugged his wide shoulders
and put
a thick
hand on his paunch. He regarded
the chart,
yawned, scratched his bushy black mustache,
and began
to fill
his pipe.
Denton, still standing, shifted uncomfortably. He wanted to get his
shift over with.
Buxton lit
his pipe
and blew
gray smoke at Denton.
"Durghemmer today,"
Buxton said.
Denton frowned,
dismayed. Durghemmer the leech.
"Durghemmer . . ."
Denton spoke the name into
the air
so that it would permanently leave his lips. "No.
No, really,
Buxton, I—"
"Just as
I thought.
Another weakling. I can never
find anybody willing to take
care of Durghemmer's generator, but Til be damned if
I'll end up doing it
myself. So, Denton—"
"I can't. Really. I
have a date tonight. Very
delicate Psychological Balance involved. Durghemmer
would ruin me." Denton looked with
all his
actor's pathos into his supervisor's
eyes. Buxton stared at
his hands,
then relit his pipe.
"Okay. This time I let you
off," he said. "Take Hurzbau. But don't talk to
him unless
it's absolutely necessary. I'm not
supposed to, but I'll
put Durghemmer's
generator on automatic for tonight.
It's dangerous but what the
hell. But— Everybody's got to
circulate sooner or later, Ron."
"Sure," said
Denton, relieved. "Later."
He took
his punch-card
from the rack on Buxton's
office wall.
Denton read
the dials
punctiliously, reminding himself
that this particular generator provided power
for at
least three hundred people. Amplitude was
climbing. Poor Hurzbau. But thoughts like those, he told
himself, were precisely the sort
he didn't want. Good luck to
Hurzbau.
Denton adjusted the position
of the
scoop over the bed. The
scoop of the generator
was a
transparent bell enclosing the bed upon
which Hurzbau rested. It was
made of nonconduc-tive fiberglass, veined with copper and
platinum wiring which converged in a
cable at its peak and
twined like a thick metal
vine through branches of
metal supports into an opening
in the cylindrical crystal in the
generator's flat top.
The bulk of the rectangular generator transformer was opened in a honeycomb of
metallic hexagons of the side
facing the bed. On the
other side Denton sat in
his swivel
chair, in his black uniform, in
his controlled
aplomb, behind his desk of dials
and meters.
Denton was officially the compensator, adjusting the rise and fall of
energy absorbed by the generator so that a steady,
predictable flow went out to
the electrical transmitters.
Having checked the meters,
Denton tried to relax for
a while. He looked abstractedly around the room. The
chamber was small, all white, with
only the few paintings which
Hurzbau's relatives had hung to
cheer him up. The paintings
were of pastoral scenes from places
mostly now entombed in plasphalt.
Denton wondered why anyone
had bothered
with the paintings. Hurzbau couldn't
see them
except as vague blurs through the plastic scoop. Nothing
extraneous to the function of the generator was allowed
under the scoop. Not even
bedclothes. Hurzbau's naked, cancer-eaten body was kept warm
with heaters.
Half of Hurzbau's face was eaten
away by cancer. He had
once been overweight. He had gone from
220 pounds
to 130
in four months. The
right half of his face
was sunken
in to
a thin mask of skin clinging
to the
skull, and his right eye
was gone, the socket stuffed with
cotton. He could talk only
with difficulty. His right
arm was
withered and unusable, though his left was strong enough
to prop
him up
on his
elbow, allowing him to seek
Denton's attention.
"Compensator . . ."
he rasped,
barely audible through the plastic. Denton switched on the
intercom.
"What can I do for you,
sir?" he asked, a trifle
brusquely. "Would you like
me to
call the nurse? I am
not privileged
to give out medical aid personally.
. .
."
"No. No
nurse. Denton? That your name?"
"Yes. Ronald Denton. I
told you yesterday, I believe.
How are—" He'd almost
forgotten, but he caught himself
in time.
He knew
how Hurzbau
was ...
the invalid
was in
constant pain with six weeks to
live, optimum. "Do you want
to take
some metrazine? That I
can get."
"No. You know what, Denton?" His voice was a
raven's croak.
"Look, I've
been told I'm overfraternizing with the patients. That's not really my job.
We have
a capable
staff psychiatrist and a priest and—"
"Who says you're not a priest,
Denton? The other compensators don't talk to me
at all.
You're the only one who
says a damn thing to me.
. .
." Hurzbau swallowed, his dessicated
features momentarily contorting so that the left
half of his face matched the
malformation of the right. "You
know, Denton, I could have
gotten the cancer vaccine but
I thought
I'd never have need for it.
Not me." He made
some sandpapery noises which
might have been akin to
laughter. "And it's a sure thing
if you
get the
cancer vaccine you can't get cancer, and I turned
down a sure thing. Too
much bother."
Denton suddenly
felt cold toward the dying
man. He recoiled inwardly, as if
Hurzbau were a deformed siren
trying to lure him under the
scoop. It was true in
a way:
Hurzbau wanted sympathy. And
sympathy would mean that Denton
would have to imagine
himself in Hurzbau's place. He
shuddered. He had worked at
the generator
for six
months but never before had a
patient confided in him. He
had to
cut it
off, even if it
was at
Hurzbau's expense.
But he was deterred by a
look in the old man's
eyes: a red light from the
burning, blackened wick of Hurzbau's
nerve-endings.
"Denton, tell me something. . .
." An almost visible wave
of pain swept over
Hurzbau's shrunken body; the parchment-thin
skin of his face twisted
as if
it were
about to rip. "Denton, I want to know.
The generators,
do they
make me weaker? I know they
. .
. take
energy . . . from
my dying.
. .
.Do they
. .
. feed
off me?
Do they
make me die so that—"
"No!"
Denton was
surprised at the stridency of
his own
exclamation. "No, you've got it
turned around. It takes energies
emitted because of your
dying, but it doesn't come
directly from you."
"Could you—" Hurzbau began,
but he
fell back on the bed,
unable to keep himself
propped up any longer. Drawn
by inexplicable
impulse, Denton got out of
the control
seat and walked around to the
end of
the bed.
He looked
down into the fading man's eyes,
judging the advance of histolysis
by the
growth of an almost
visible smoldering glow of pain.
Hurzbau's mouth worked silently, furiously.
Finally, tugging at the intravenous feeding tube imbedded in
his left
arm, he managed: "Denton . . . could
you fix
the generator
if it
broke down?"
"No. I don't know how it
works. I just compensate for metrical oscillation—"
"Uh-huh. Then can you really say
that it doesn't take away
from my life if
you don't
know for sure how it
works? You know what they tell you. But how do you know
it's the truth?"
Hurzbau began to choke, spitting up
yellow fluid. A moisture detector
at the
bedside prompted a plastic arm
to stretch
from the table of
automatic instruments ensconced left of
Hurzbau's head. The arm
swabbed the pillow and Hurzbau's
lips with a sponge.
The light
flared faintly in the dying
man's eyes and with his good
arm he
swiped angrily at the mechanical
swab.
"Damn, damn," he muttered,
"I'm not a pool ball."
The plastic strut fled back to
its clamp.
Denton turned away, deliberately
breaking the minor rapport developing
between the two of them.
But doubts
insinuated through his stiffly starched
black uniform. Maybe Hurzbau had been
a criminal
whom they'd deliberately infected as
an energy
reserve— But no, Durghemmer had been a respected politician, never convicted of
anything; so how could one explain
his interment under
the generator?
The man under the generator on
the floor
below had been a policeman.
No. The principle
behind the generators was taught
in high school, and
there were classes on the
inner construction of the machines
in vocational
schools. There would be no way
for the
arbiters to hide anything from
anyone. . . . There was
no secret.
But he
understood Hurzbau's apprehensions.
Even from his vantage point,
perpetually on the bed, Hurzbau could
see the
two red
dials side by side like
mocking eyes, their needles
climbing visibly whenever he got
weaker.
He got
weaker, the machine got stronger.
"Maybe it's something they're keeping under
wraps, Denton," Hurzbau ventured suddenly.
He spasmed
then, rising almost to a
sitting position, every muscle strained
so that
his skin was elasticized vitreously taut, making his withered
frame mottle red. From
between gritted teeth came Hurzbau's
whisper, slightly metallic through
the intercom:
"How is there room for this much pain in this
little body? There's enough to
fill a warehouse. How does it
all fit?"
Denton turned off the intercom.
He rang for the nurse. The
old man
fell back, relaxing. Without
wanting to, Denton glanced at
the needle
on the
generator facing. It was climbing.
He could
hear the scoop humming. He
ran around
to the
control panel and dialed to
compensate for the upsurge in
entropic energy. When the machine
took in a great
deal of energy at one
time, it reacted with a
high-frequency oscillating tone, very
much like shrill laughter.
The generator chuckled, the
old man
grew weaker, the needles jumped higher.
Hurzbau's body began to jerk
and with each erratic rictus Denton's
stomach contracted with revulsion.
He had
thought he was used to
the onset
of death.
Denton tightened
the arm
draped casually about Donna's creamy shoulders. She was asleep,
or pretended
to be.
His casual
posture lied about his inner
turmoil. Inside, he seethed, remembering Donna's long
boyish body like a graceful
jet of
water, thrashing with his.
She'd responded only to the
lightest touches. The visions
of Donna
alternated with memories of Hurzbau which Denton strove to
suppress. But Hurzbau had thrashed in agony as she
had writhed
in ecstasy.
Denton sat abruptly up to light
a cigarette,
throwing a tobacco smokescreen between himself
and the
recollection of the dying man.
He glanced
down at Donna, saw her
looking at him out of
slitted eyes. She smiled
hastily and looked away. "What time is it?" she
asked, her voice weary. "One-A.M."
"What was
your play about, anyway?" "Do you want
to read
it? I
have a copy—" "No."
Then she added, "I'm interested, but I don't like
to read much these days. I
had to
read immensely before my internship.
Medical textbooks ruined my appetite.
I like
live plays better. Why don't you
perform it for me?"
He raised a hand
melodramatically over her
head and with an exaggeratedly visionary look that made
her laugh,
he quoth:
" 'We
have come to bury Caesar,
not to
praise him. . .'" "Oh, I see. That's from
your play? You wrote that,
eh?" "Well, it's one
I wrote
a few
centuries ago—" "SHUT UP
IN THERE
I GOTTA
GET SOME
SLEEP! YOU ALREADY MADE ENOUGH NOISE
GRUNTIN' TO KEEP THE WHOLE BUILDING
AWAKE TILL DECEMBER!" a male
voice shouted from the next
apartment.
"The walls are thin," Denton whispered
apologetically. But Donna was
crying. She was sitting up,
taller than Denton by half a
head, rocking back and forth.
He put
an arm
on her
leg but she pushed
away and got out of
bed, throwing the bedclothes askew.
"Listen," Denton
said frantically, "I'm sorry about
that creep next door. Let's go
somewhere—"
"No, it's okay. I'm going home.
I had
a good
time and all that, you're a
good lover, only . .
."
"Only what?"
She had her suit on already,
she was
putting on her shoes. He wondered
what he had done. Better
stop her before she gets dressed
or she'll
feel obligated to leave once
she's gone that far. She was
putting on her coat.
"What is it?" he asked with
growing anxiety. "What did I do
wrong?"
"Nothing. I just don't
know why I came here,
really. I don't need anyone to
tell me I'm human. It's
not good
to get
attached, anyway." She was heading
toward the door as she
spoke.
"SHUT UP IN THERE ALREADY!" the man next door
shouted.
"GO TO HELL!" Denton shouted back.
He pulled
on one
of his uniforms. She went out
the door,
leaving him alone with all the
noises of the city night,
rumbling through the open window like a hungry belly.
"Damn!" Denton said
aloud, fumbling at buttons.
Suddenly, apartments
on three
sides erupted, combining to grind the
quiet evening into fine dust.
"ALL OF
YOU CUT
IT OUT!"
"I'LL BURN THIS HOLE TO THE
GROUND IF YOU—"
"I'M GONNA
CALL THE PIGS!"
Donna was stepping primly into the
elevator just as Denton closed the door to his
apartment behind him. He ran
to the
stairs and jogged swiftly
down three flights, his footsteps
echoing in the deserted concrete
stairwell like the laughter of
the generator.
He ran into the empty street.
The night
was muggy,
warm with summer smugness. He spotted
Donna halfway down the block to
his left.
He ran
after her, feeling foolish, but
shouting "Hey, wait! It's
not that
easy!"
She passed a black
alleyway, turned the corner. He
scuffled across the mouth
of the
alley, saw her disappear around
the corner—
—something kicked his legs
out from
under him. He threw up his
arms, felt the concrete edge
of the
curb crack an elbow, romancandling his arm; cheek striking
the gutter
grate: pain with snapping
wires, cracking bullwhips. A hand
pulled him roughly onto
his back
and he
was looking
at the
twisted face of a
teenage boy, ugly from barely
repressed hatred. Someone else
behind jerked Denton to his
feet. His right eye was swelling
and it
hurt to squint, but with
the other
eye he saw that there were
four hoods in all, each
wearing transparent plastic jackets
under which they were nude,
muscular, and bristling with dark
hairs. In sharp contrast to
their hirsute lower parts, their faces
and heads
were shaved absolutely hairless. Their
eyes burned with amphetamines. The drug made their maneuverings
slightly spastic, like children flinching from expected blows.
Two of them held Denton's arms
from behind. A third stepped in close with a
knife. All four were strangely
silent, almost pious. Denton
saw the
knife gleaming near his throat.
He was paralyzed, numbed by what
should have been
unreality. He was watching
viddy, he thought desperately. A commercial would come on
in a
moment. But one of the
boys pulled Denton's head back by
his hair
with a violent twist that
sent spotlights of pain
into the growing darkness in
his skull.
The darkness congealed into
abject fear. He was without
volition. He remembered Donna. He
looked around desperately without
moving his head. Had she
deliberately brought him here to meet
these men? Had she set
him up?
What would they do with the
knife?
One of the boys flicked quick
fingers to unbutton Denton's shirt. He parted the folds
of the
black uniform slowly, almost formally, as if he were
undressing a lover. Denton knew
the night was warm but he
felt the air in his
open shirt cold as a
knife blade. If he
shouted for help they would
probably kill him right away. The
streetlight overhead hurt his eyes;
his arms were cramping uncomfortably behind him. He tried
to change position and was rewarded
with a kneejab in the
small of his back.
He looked
around for Donna as the
knife cut open his undershirt (a very sharp knife,
he noted;
the fabric
parted easily, as if it
had been
unzipped). Then he felt the
knife on his navel,
pain like a tiny point
of intense
light flaring up, and a trickle
of warm
blood. Already the warmth of shock
enveloped him in surrender. He closed his eyes
and bit his lips against the
sting near his navel. The
pain made him open them again.
The boy with the knife closed
his eyes
as if
in anticipation
of sybaritic satisfaction.
A blur
of movement—
Then the boy with the knife
screamed, his head snapped back, his mouth gaping, his
back arched; he went rigid,
yelling,"Damn! Who—"
He fell and Donna jumped easily
aside and turned to face
another. Denton felt the
grip at the back of
his neck
relax as the boy behind him
ran to
aid his
companion lying on the ground in front of her.
Donna shot her booted foot,
heel first, straight up and out,
catching the third tough in
the throat.
She was tall and her long
legs held her in good
stead as the other two tried
to get
in close
with their knives. The first
two were
lying almost like lovers
on the
ground; the boy who'd threatened
Denton with the knife lay
with his eyes wide open,
unblinking, staring upward. He
was perfectly
still. The other was on his
hands and knees, coughing blood
onto his supine companion, one hand
on his
own crushed
windpipe, his face staring and fascinated,
as if
he were
tasting real pain for the
first time, exploring it
as a
new world.
Stopping another with a
shoe-point in the groin, Donna
spun and, without wasting
momentum, came forward onto the
foot and transferred the motion to her
arm, striking the knife from his hand. The knife
rang on the concrete, rolling
in front
of the boy with the crushed
throat.
Denton was breathing in huge gulps,
still unable to act: he
was sure that he
would only run up against
a television
screen if he tried to intervene.
But without
a weapon,
the last
standing tough turned and fled
into an alley.
The other boy was still clutching
his groin,
rocking back and forth on his
haunches, moaning, his face draining.
Donna regarded him for
a moment,
then said in a low,
calm voice:
"I suppose I should
try to
undo what I've done now.
I've got some first-aid stuff in
my purse.
If I
can find
it. .
." Kneeling before the boy
who still
rocked, she looked with anomalous tranquility at the place
between his legs where she'd kicked him.
Denton took a long breath, relaxing
from his paralysis, an actor between
scenes.
He put a hand on Donna's
shoulder, felt her stiffen beneath
his touch. He put
his hand
in his
pocket, asking, "Where did you go
when they jumped me?"
"I hid in a doorwell. I
thought they were after me.
When I saw them surround you
I went
around to the other side
of the
alley and came through
it, and
up behind
them."
She turned
from him to face the
boy. "Why?" she asked.
Through grated
teeth the boy answered, "Hurzbau
. .
."
The name
made Denton realize where he
had seen
the leader of the gang before:
in the
park, the boy who had
asked about his father under the
generator. He stepped toward the
other tough, demanding, "Hurzbau what?"
"Hurzbau's father's
in the
hospital. Under the generator. He made us do it.
He's our packleader. He said
you were
a vampire killing his father. He
watched you, followed you. . .
."
Donna screamed
shortly, the cry becoming a
sigh as Denton heard her
body hit the concrete sidewalk
even before he turned around. A
knife's black hilt protruded from
her side,
stuck from the back
by the
boy who
stood, wavering, ready to fall, still
coughing blood. Denton recognized Hurzbau's son, and he wondered:
Why her instead of me?
The boy
collapsed, crumpling limply, blood sliding
between his skin and the transparent
suit, the plastic making the
blood seem orange and artificial.
Denton felt empathic pain in his
own side
as, sobbing,
he ran to Donna. She was
still breathing but unconscious. The knife was in to
the hilt.
He was
afraid to pull it out
and perhaps
allow too much blood
to escape.
"Here. Call
an ambulance."
The boy
who had
spoken before was standing, one
hand still on his crotch,
something like regret in his face.
He handed
Denton a public pocket-fone. Denton fumbled frantically to punch
for emergency.
A small
metallic voice responded, and he
gave directions. When he had done
he looked
up and
down the street, wondering that it was so
deserted after all the noise.
There were three bright street lights
on the
block. Denton, Donna, and the
remainder of the gang
were visible and starkly outlined
in the
pool of light under
the crowded
skyscraper apartments lining both sides
of the
street.
The events
of the
past few minutes caught up
with Denton when he felt blood
warming the hand resting on
Donna's still leg. He looked up
at the
boy who
just stood there, face blanked.
"All of
you are
going to regret this, kid,"
Denton said in what he hoped
was a
steely, uncompromising tone. The
boy just
shrugged.
He couldn't
go to
work now, to watch a
man die
under a generator scoop knowing that
Donna was dying under one
just like it. He
pondered the idea of quitting
his job.
Somehow he felt that losing his
job at
the generator
would be a self-betrayal. It brought him a strange peace, as
he sat
in full
health watching the patient
wilt under the glass scoop
like an ant burnt by a
magnifying glass. Saying to himself:
I'm still strong, it passed me by.
He decided not to
go to
work. He kept seeing Donna's
name on the shift
chart. They had expected him to tend her generator. No. No. He
couldn't visit her, even, while
off duty.
She was in a
coma. He had to get
his mind
off it.
He hadn't
slept at all that
night and his eyes burned
with exhaustion. He would go out
and get
something to eat and if
Buxton decided to fire him because of his absence then the
decision to leave the job would
be made
for him.
He walked through the
hospital lobby and into the
glaring sunshine reflecting off the white buildings
of the
hospital complex. A growing
tension was surmounting his composure.
But he was an actor so
no one
could tell.
Not even Alice. Alice was standing
on the
steps to the hospital, handing out
pamphlets. She saw him immediately,
seeing first the black uniform
she hated,
and then
her once-lover interred inside.
Denton hoped to avoid her, but
before he could turn away
she ran to him
and, thrusting a pamphlet in
his hand,
embraced him. He pulled away,
embarrassed, feeling tension about to break
loose. The glare seemed to
intensify, magnifying glass hovering over
the ant.
Alice laughed.
"Still working there? I
think you must really like
your job, Ronnie."
His mouth
worked but his lines wouldn't
come. He shook his head and
finally managed, "I'd like to
talk to you about it.
Uh—welcome your opinion. But I've gotta
go start
my shift."
He turned and hurried
back into the coolness of
the hospital,
feeling her smug smile
hanging on to the back
of his
neck.
It was suddenly important to him
that he go to work.
He had nothing to expiate.
In the elevator, alone, he glanced
at the
crumpled pamphlet. He read:
"... if it is inevitable that a man must
die, let him do it
with dignity. Death has
long been a gross national
product, especially since United
States intervention in the Arab-Israeli
conflict. But a bullet
through the heart kills quickly;
death under the generator comes
tediously. The common fallacy that
entropic generators promote death
has been
proven untrue, but
what do they do to ease or inhibit death? The presence
of a generator is psychologically damaging to the dying,
causing them to give up the
fight for recovery before they
normally would. . ."
He remembered Hurzbau's words:
Can you say it doesn't take
away from my life if you don't know how it works?
"Mr. Buxton?
Can I
talk to you?"
Hardly looking up, Buxton
demanded, "Well? What are you doing
here? You were supposed to
be in
four-fifty-six twenty minutes ago."
"I want you to explain the
principles of the entropic generator
to me.
I think
it's my responsibility to know."
"Oh hell," Buxton spat,
disappointed, "is that all? Look
it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica."
"I did. It was all in
jargon. And they told us
briefly and none too clearly when
I was
being trained for this job.
But I
never really cared to
understand till now. But a
. .
. friend
of mine is under—"
"Under the generator, right? And now you want to know. I've heard that
one before
too many
times. Okay, Denton. I'll explain. Once. And you are
going to be docked for
the time
it takes me to explain and
the time
you weren't
working."
Denton shrugged,
sat down
across from Buxton. He felt
like a boy going to confession.
Buxton sighed and began,
playing with a pencil as
he spoke: "The word entropy, literally translated,
means turning toward energy. From our
relative viewpoint we usually define
entropy as the degree
of disorder
in a
substance. Entropy always increases and
available energy diminishes. So it
seems. From our point of view,
when we see someone's system
of order decaying it seems as
if the
growth of entropy means a
drop of energy. It
appears that something is going
away from us." He paused to
organize his thoughts, began to
doodle on scratchpaper.
Denton tapped his fingers
irritably. "Yeah? So what? When
people die they lose
energy—"
"No, they don't lose it in
the sense
we're concerned with, and SHUT UP
AND LISTEN
because I'm not going to
explain this to you twice.
This is already the fourth
time this month I've had to
go through
all this.
. .
. Now,
when you get old, your eyesight
fails so it appears as
if you
see less
and less all the time. Things
in this
world are blotting out, blurring
up. Actually, you're seeing
something more than you could
see before your eyesight
failed. When your eyesight dims
your entropy-sight increases. Objects look that way,
blurred and graylike, in the other
dimension, because they possess a
form defined by where they are
not rather than
where they are."
"What dimension?"
Denton was
lost.
"The dimension manifested concurrent with the accruence
of entropy. We used
to think
entropy undid creation and form, but
in its
total sense, entropy creates a
form so obverse to ours that
it appears
not to
be there.
It creates
in a
way we
don't really understand but which we've learned
to use."
He cleared his throat, embarrassed by his lapse into
erudition. "Anyway, the universe
is constantly
shifting dimensions. From entropic
focus to our type of
order and back again. When you get old and
seem to be feeling and
hearing and seeing less, you
are actually
perceiving the encroachment of that
other universe."
They were silent for five breaths.
The taciturn
old Jew
tapped his pencil agitatedly.
Denton wondered if his
inability to comprehend stemmed from his youth. He wasn't
decayed enough yet.
"What I'm trying to say," Buxton went on wearily,
"is that entropy is a progression
instead of a regression. When someone is walking
past you it seems like
they're regressing, in a relative way, because they are
walking toward where you have
already been, to what
is behind
you. But to them, they
are progressing. There are
two kinds
of known
energy, on a cosmic scale: electrical-nuclear energy
causing form, and the negative
energy of antiform. Nothing is
really lost when you die.
What occurs is a
trade."
"You mean like water displacement? Going into there, some of it is forced into here?"
"More or less. The generators change the energy of
death into usable electric power."
"But if you take energy from
a dying
person, doesn't that make them die
faster?"
"WILL YOU PAY ATTENTION, FOR GOD'S
SAKE!" Buxton was determined
to get
through. 'Wo. It doesn't take
anything from a dying
person. It accumulates energy that's
radiated as a result
of dying.
The negative
energy is released into the inanimate
environment whether the generator is
there or not. The scoop doesn't
come into contact with the
patient himself ... it
reacts only to the side-effect
of his
biological dissolution." He took
a deep
breath. "The main idea is
that entropy is not the lack
of something,
not a
subtraction, but an addition. We learned
how to
tap it
because the energy crisis forced us to put up
with the temporary discomfort—purely psychological and rather
silly—of having the scoop directly
over a dying person. When it
comes my time to go,
I'll be damn proud to contribute
something. None of my life
is wasted that way, not even
its end.
One individual
causes a remarkable amount of
negative energy to be radiated
as he
dies, you know. We've only been
using it practically for five
years and there are still a
lot of
things we don't understand about it."
"So why
do it
to people?
Why not
plants?"
"Because various organisms have
variegated patterns of radiating negative energy.
We don't
know how to tap all
of them yet. We can do
it with
cattle and people now. We're
working on plants."
"I don't know, I, uh .
. ."
Denton stumbled over his words,
knowing that Buxton would
be infuriated
by the
objection. "But couldn't a generator
damage the morale of a
person dying? Make him believe it's
too late
and prematurely
give up? I mean, susceptibility to disease is largely
psychological, and if you're
under pressure by being under
the scoop—"
He cut short, swallowing, seeing Buxton's
growing anger.
Hot ashes sprayed from Buxton's wagging
pipe as he spoke. "Denton, all that
is a
lot of
conjectural hogwash. And it is
pure stupidity to babble
about it in the face
of the
worst energy crisis the world
has ever
known. We may have the
energy problem licked forever
if we
can learn
to draw
negative energy from the dying
of plants
and small
animals and such. But people like you might just
ruin that hope. And I
want you to know, Denton, that
I'm going
to seriously
consider letting you go, so if
you don't
want to clinch my decision
you'd better get the hell to—"
"I can't go to my assigned
shift, sir. I know the
girl under that scoop."
"Okay then, that leaves Durghemmer. Take it or no
more job."
Feeling drained,
Denton nodded dumbly and left
the office.
Durghemmer could wait. Denton
called hospital information and was
informed that Donna was still
unconscious.
Denton went
to see
his only
close friend. He took the
bus to
Glennway Park.
Donald Armor was a cripple in
one sense
and completely
mobile in another. He
had been
a pro
race-car driver for six years, several times taking national
honors. During the final lap of
the 1983
Indy 500 (the last one
before the race was outlawed), while in second place,
Armor's car spun out and
bounced off the car
behind it and went into
the grandstands,
killing five onlookers, maiming four. When gas-cars
were banned and electric air-cars instituted
in 1986,
the authorities
made an exception in
Armor's case. He was allowed
to drive
his own car, the
only vehicle on the streets
with wheels, because he could
drive nothing else. Part of
the firewall
of the
racing car had been
ripped loose by the impact
of the
accident, slashing deep into Armor's
side, partially castrating him on the
way and
cracking his spine. Doctors could
not remove
the shred without killing
him.
Armor was a rich man and
he had
a car
built around him, customized to his
specifications. It was
a small
sports car, but with the cockpit,
firewall, steering wheel, and dashboard
of the original Indy racer. He
was now
a permanent
organ of the vehicle, living in
it day
and night,
unable and unwilling to leave. Until
he died.
Excreting through a colostomy bag,
eating at drive-ins, he was
aware of the absurdity of
his existence
but he considered his predicament appropriate to the society
in which he lived.
Denton sat
in the
seat next to Armor and,
as usual,
tried not to look at the
thirteen inches of ragged steel
protruding for the driver's
right side to run to
a ball-joint
connecting him with the dashboard. The ball-joint gave him
limited freedom within the car.
Armor had rudimentary use of his
scarred and twisted legs, enough to gun the car
down the boulevard with a
speed and fluidity which never failed
to amaze
Denton. Armor drove without hesitation or false starts, always
twenty miles in excess of the
speed limit, knowing that no
policeman would give him a ticket.
They all knew him. Armor
was famous,
and he
was dying. He had less than
a year
to live
(long-range complications of the accident)
but they
could never install a generator
over a moving car. He
was the
source of livelihood for some reporters
who spent
all their
time trying to get interviews
and photographs of him. He
had no
comforts; no radio or
tape deck or juice dispensers. He didn't drink and
he couldn't
have sex.
"What's eating you today,
Ron?" Armor asked in a
voice like the distant rumble of
a semitruck.
He was
dark and raw-boned and his
bushy black brows sprouted alone
on a
scarred bald head. His hard gray
eyes were perpetually lost in
the spaces between the white dashes
marking the abdomen of the
road. "Something's messing you
up," he said.
They had been friends since before
Armor's accident. Armor knew Denton almost
as well
as he
knew the road. Denton told
him about
Donna and his doubts concerning
the generator.
Armor listened without comment.
His eyes
didn't leave the road—they rarely did—and
his features
remained expressionless aside from slight
intensifications when the
road called for more concentration.
Denton concluded, "And I
can't bring myself to leave
the job. Donna is still in
the coma,
so I
can't talk to her about
it. I
almost feel like I'm
working against her by continuing
there. I know it's irrational. . . ."
"What is
it you
like so much that you
can't quit?"
"It's not
that. I. . . well,
jobs aren't easy to find."
"I know
where you can get another
job."
He eased
the car
to a
halt. They were parked in
front of
tremmer and
fleisher slaughtering/processing. Below
the older
sign was, newly painted in
black: generator
annex.
"My brother Harold works
here," Armor said. He hadn't
turned off the engine.
He rarely
did. "He remembers you. He
can get you a
job here.
Go on
up to
the personnel
office. That's where he
works. You might like this
job better
than the other, I imagine." He turned uncompromising eyes from the hood of
the car
and looked
at Denton
with a five-hundred-horsepower
gaze.
"Okay." Denton
shrugged. "Anything you
say. I can't go back to
work now anyway." He opened
the car
door and got out, feeling his
back painfully uncramping after the
restriction of the bucket
seat. He looked through the
open door. Armor was still watching
him.
"I'll wait
here," Armor said with finality.
The bright
light hurt Denton's eyes as
he followed
Harold Armor, brother to Donald, into
a barnlike
aluminum building labeled slaughterhouse
generator annex i.
Inside, the
sibilance of air-conditioners was punctuated
with long bestial sighs
from dying cattle. There were
two long
rows of stalls, a
bubble of the generator scoop
completely enclosing each prostrate
steer. The top of each
scoop ducted into a thick vitreous
cable joining others from adjoining
stalls in a network of silvery
wire like a spiderweb canopy
overhead.
"Now these cattle here—well, some of
'em are
cows what got old—they have a
generator for the whole lot
of 'em,
and one compensator for every three
animals," Harold intoned
proudly. "And we've got
some we've maintained there at
just the right level of decay,
you know,
for six
to eight
months. And that's just plain difficult.
They die a lot on
us, though.
A lot of 'em dying of
old age.
Most of 'em we bleed
to death."
"You bleed them?" Denton was unable
to conceal
his horror.
Seeing Denton's reaction, Harold stiffened
defensively.
"Damn right we do. How else
can we
keep them at the right
level of decay and
still keep them alive long
enough to produce? Sure, I
know what you're going to
ask. Everyone does when they first
come here. The government shut the ASPCA up because
of the
power shortage. And of course
part of your job as compensator
here is you'll have to
learn how to adjust their bleeding and feeding so
they die at the right
speed. It's a bit more work
than at the hospital, where
they die for you naturally. But it pays more
than at the hospital. All
you have
to remember is that
if they
sneak back up on you
and recover
too much, you either
have to bleed them more
or feed
them less. Sometimes we poison them
some too, when they first
come here, to get
them on their way."
Denton stood
by one
of the
cells and observed a fully
grown bull with ten-inch horns, massive
rib cage
rising and falling irregularly,
eyes opening and closing and
opening and closing. . . .
"Now that
one," Harold
droned, "hasn't been here but
a week and he ain't used
to it
yet. Most of them just
lay there
and forget they're alive
after a few weeks or
so. See,
you can
see marks on the
stall where he's been kicking
it and
his hoof
is bleeding—we'll have to
patch that up, we don't
want him to get an infection.
Die too
soon that way. You can
see he's
going to come along
good cuz his coat is
gettin' rough and fur startin' to come off. .
. ."
The trapped beast looked
at Denton
with dulled eyes devoid of fear.
It was
lying on its side, head
lolling from the stall opening. Three thick plastic tubes
were clamped with immovable iron bands to its
sagging neck. The steer seemed
to be in transition between instinctual
rebellion and capitulation.
Intermittently it twitched and
lifted its head a few
inches, as if trying to recall
how to
stand.
From the
New York
Times review of
Ronald Denton's only play, All Men Are Created Sequels:
". . . like all so-called
absurdism, Denton's play was an
inert corpse albeit a
charming one. This state of
inflexible down beat was
probably intentional, and so, like
all cadavers,
the play began to
decay well before the second
act, as perhaps it was supposed
to. By
the end
of the
second act, the stage was a
figurative miasma of putrid flesh,
squirming with parasitic irrelevancies.
The least
Mr. Denton
could have done would have been
the courtesy
of a
generator scoop hooked up to the
audience so that we could
glean something of value from
the affair as the
audience died of boredom."
Denton was
looking out the window, wondering
at the
gall Armor had exhibited in arranging
for him to see the slaughterhouse. He had
known—
Durghemmer interrupted
his thoughts.
"Come here,
kid!"
Denton didn't
want to go around to
the other
side of the generator. He didn't
want to look at Durghemmer.
"Comere, boy!"
Denton sighed
and stood
up. "Yes?"
Durghemmer's face was round and robust.
His eyes
were bright buttons sewn deep in
the hollows
over his cheeks. He had a
miniature round mouth, a wisp
of white
hair, and minimal chin. His
jowls shook when he laughed.
He pointed
at Denton with a stubby finger.
"You skeered of something, kid?"
"Shouldn't you
be asleep,
Mr. Durghemmer?
It's past nine."
"Shouldn't you be asleep, kid? Sleep?"
He laughed
shrilly, cowbells filtering through
the plastic
bell of the scoop. He
half sat up, grimaced, fell back.
Emanuel Durghemmer had come
to the
hospital three years before, dying of
meningitis. He had been too
far along
for help; they had expected him
to die
within a week. A generator
was immediately placed over
him. He went into
a month-long
coma. When he woke,
the needles
jumped. According to the meters, he had come a
substantial step closer to death
by regaining consciousness. And according to
hospital legend, he had sat up
directly upon awakening from the
coma, and laughed.
The generator
again had registered a drop
in life-force
and a
corresponding gain in entropic energy.
Each week for three years Durghemmer
had shown
signs of being on the
verge of death. Always
in pain,
he delivered
more negative energy than any other
individual in the hospital. And
he had
developed a corrosive bedridden
manner to counteract the doctors' bedside manners.
Denton was disquieted by Durghemmer's paradoxical joviality. But
Denton had two hours left
of his
shift. He decided to make
the most
of it,
find out what he could.
Somehow Durghemmer's attitude made
Donna's imminent death seem ludicrous.
"You're wondering, aren't you?"
Durghemmer asked, as if he were
still a politician casting rhetoric.
"You're wondering how I stay alive."
"No. I don't give
a damn."
"But you
do. You
care for the simplest of
reasons. You know you're going to
die someday
and you
wonder how long you'll last under
the generator
and what
it will
be like
watching the needle go
up and
down. Or maybe—if it's not
you, is it someone
else? Someone close to you
dying, kid?"
No surprise that Durghemmer
knew. The old parasite had
been in the hospital
for three
years, a record by two
and a
half years for being under the
generator. He could smell death
a long way away.
"All right, but so
what?" Denton said impulsively. "So you're right. It's girl
friend."
"She got cancer between the legs?"
Hollow laughter reverberated inside the
scoop. Lines of mirth on
the old
man's face meshed indistinguishably
with lines of pain.
Denton wanted to smash
the plastic
of the
scoop to get at the old
politician's sour mouth with his
fist. Instead, he said coolly: "No. She was knifed.
I've got to see her.
I heard
she came around for a while
this afternoon. Maybe I can
. .
." He shrugged. "I've got to
explain things."
"May as well write her off,
kid. Nobody but me has
ever figured out how to use
it. I
had training
when I was mayor." He guffawed, coughing phlegm.
"What did
you do
to Burt
Lemmer?"
"That kid that resigned? He was
a short
spit, only on my generator three weeks. Usually takes
them at least a month."
He closed his eyes.
In a
low, tense voice: "You know,
sometimes pain sharpens things for
you. It kind of wakes
you up
and makes you see
better. You ever notice when
your gut hurts and you feel
like every sound and sight
is too
loud or bright for you to
stand it? Everything makes you
feel sicker because you're seeing it
so well,
so clearly.
Sometimes people who haven't done anything
with their lives become good
painters when they get
sick because the hurt makes them look at things. And
sometimes—" He drifted
off for
a full
minute, his eyes in Umbo. Then
he spoke
conspiratorially, whispering more to himself than to
Denton, "Sometimes I see things
in the blossoms of pain. Useful
things. Peeks into that other
world. I go into
it a
little ways, then I come
back here and I'm on solid
ground. And I see these
invisible wires connecting each man to
the others,
like puppet strings all mixed
up."
Denton had lost interest in the
old man's
ramblings. He could see Donna's eyes
smoldering with pain like the
red dials
of the generator.
Durghemmer's generator hummed into
life as it began to
absorb a flood of
negative energy. The old man
was tiring.
The machine began to
chuckle to itself. Durghemmer lay composed, a faint smile
lost in the mazelike etchings
of his
face.
"Durghemmer," Denton
said, standing. "I've got to
see that
woman. I've got to
make sure she's all right.
Now look,
if I
go, would you refrain
from calling the nurse when
I go
out unless it's an absolute emergency?
I've got to—"
"Okay, kid. But you can write
off your
girl friend. She hasn't lived long
enough to learn. . .
." He had spoken without
bothering to open his eyes.
Denton was
alone with Donna; he had
bribed the scheduled compensator.
He peered
through the scoop at her
nervously, irrationally afraid that
she might
already be dead. Her elfin
features, unconscious, blinked in
and out
of shadow
with the strobing of the generator
lights in the darkened room.
Denton checked the dials,
rechecked them, found a compensating
factor he had missed the
first time. He adjusted the
intake of the scoop.
She was
dropping. The needles were climbing.
He flipped on the
intercom, walked around to the
other side of the bed. "Donna?
Can you
hear me?" He glanced at
the meter. It jumped. She was
coming around but it took
strength from her to awaken. Maybe
talking to her would make
her weak, perhaps cause her death,
he thought
abruptly. Something he should have
considered sooner. His heart was
a fist
pounding the bars of
his chest.
Her eyes opened, silver-blue platinum, metal
tarnished with desperation.
He spoke
hastily: "I'm sorry about everything,
Donna. I don't know how you got involved
in my
problems. . . ." He
waved his hands futilely.
She looked at him
without comprehension for a moment,
then recognition cleared her
eyes.
"I shouldn't bother you
now," he added gratuitously, "but I had to talk
to you."
It came to him that he
really had no idea what
he wanted
to say.
"Get out of here, Ron .
. .
you came
for yourself,
not for
me." Her voice was
thin as autumn ice. And
like being awakened with ice-water, Denton was shocked into
realization: It was true, he
had been
more worried about his own
feelings than hers.
"You came here to apologize. Big deal. Maybe you
should apologize to that
Hurzbau kid. I heard that
he died.
I'm not
moralizing. We killed him
together." Her eyes
fluttered.
"Donna?" She
was giving
up. Her
voice trailed off. Get her
attention, make her fight
her way
back. He buzzed for the
nurse and shouted, "Donna!" His voice
stretched wiry from hysteria.
She opened her eyes
a crack
and murmured,
"They took a psychological test for
you, didn't they? They tested
you and
knew you were right
for the
job."
The nurse bustled in then and
Denton pressed the green button that lifted the scoop.
As he left he saw the
needles, still rising. Rapaciously, the generator giggled.
He shuffled
with great effort through the
halls, two days' lack of sleep
catching up to him. His
arms and legs seemed to
be growing softer, as
if his
bones were dissolving. He came
to the window overlooking the parking
lot. As he expected, Armor was waiting for him
below, driving around and around and around without pausing,
circling the parking lot in a
loop of abeyance.
Denton left
the window.
He couldn't
face Armor now. He scuffled down the antiseptic hallways. He fancied that
he felt
negative energy radiating from
him like
a dark
halo. The penumbra grew darker as
he sank
deeper into exhaustion. His throat contracted
till he could hardly breathe.
He had
memorized the exact shape
of the
trickle of blood on Donna's chin, the last thing
that had caught his attention
before the nurse had made
him leave.
It had
runneled down from her nose onto
her cheek,
splitting into forks, a dark
lightning bolt. He pictured
the fine
branchings of red multiplying in the atmosphere around him as if
the air
were filled with a skein of
ethereal blood veins. The red
lines connected the spectral orderlies and
nurses rushing past, like the
wires Durghemmer had described
connecting the heads of everyone
in the city. Denton walked slowly,
plowing through molten wax to Durghemmer's
room.
"I want to know,
Durghemmer, "he
said to the old man,
as he entered the sterile chamber.
"I know you steal the
negative energy of the
scoop for yourself. I want
to know
how."
The old man grinned toothlessly. His gums were cracked
and dried, making his
mouth into the crumbling battlements
of a ruined city. He sat
up, and
the needles
rose again.
Denton leaned wearily on
the generator,
determined to come to terms with
death.
"I figured you'd want
to know,
Denton." Durghemmer laughed, moths
tumbling dustily in his throat.
"I can see just by looking
at you
that the girl died."
Denton nodded. The movement
might have been made by
a scarecrow swayed by a breeze.
"Sure, lad, I'll show you just
how I
thrive in this hole. Til
show you how I
keep an even keel under
this scoop like a pheasant under glass. I'll show
you just
exactly and honest to God. You
just watch me now."
"Watch you?
You mean
I can
see how you
do it?"
"Sure. You
just watch now."
The dark room seemed to congeal
with grains of opacity. The generator hummed happily to
itself. Denton leaned for-
129
under the generator
ward, hands on the control panel,
tired eyes locked desperately onto Durghemmer.
The decaying politician lay back and folded
his hands
on his chest. Then, he began
to chuckle.
Denton was completely baffled. As far
as he
could see, the old man was
doing nothing at all. .
.
. . . except
laughing.
In
the long voyages between stars, people are going to need psychological
safeguards to protect their sanity: strict rules, carefully planned
recreations. Because a starship is a self-enclosed prison amid light-years of
empty blackness—and there will be no escape if something goes wrong, and
madness
invades such a ship.
glenn chang is a young man from Hawaii who now lives in
Oregon. He's another Clarion alumnus, but he'd sold his first story (to If Magazine) before attending Clarion.
Stars and Darkness
BY GLENN CHANG
"Dying, we live," I say, raising
the scalpel.
"Living, we only see pain. Isn't
that right, Yamada?"
I look down at Yamada. Beneath
my other
hand, his body spasms in agony.
"Stop it, Yang," he says. His
words are barely intelligible. "Stop it."
"But I don't want to," I
say. "And neither would you
want me to. Not really." I reach up and
grasp his face. "Sweet pain, Yamada. Do you feel
it? Does
it send
you into
fits of ecstasy? Jar you into
new heights
of awareness?
It should,
if what
your 'confidential' file says
is true.
Repressed masochism, if I recall
correctly. Is that right,
Yamada? Are you a repressed
masochist?"
I squeeze his jaw
suddenly, and I can feel
the broken
crowns of his teeth
rip the
inside of his check. A
tortured gurgle escapes his hps.
I straighten. "So. You
are not.
You do
not cry,
'Yes, Yes, it is beautiful.' Because it is not.
Life is not beautiful for
you, Yamada. All it holds for
you is
ugliness."
I bring
my face
close to his and the
blade of the scalpel to
his chest. "Then perhaps I should end
it for
you," I whisper, slowly moving the
blade in circles on his
skin, leaving fine lines that well
into thick trails of blood.
"I will end your miserable
life. Because I hate you,
Yamada. I always have. Nothing
would please me more than
to see
you dead,
your body hang'ng from its heels
on meathooks
and your
throat cut, standing by like a
side of beef to be
quartered." I raise
the scalpel and bring it behind
his ear.
His body
struggles, but the straps hold him
tight; I hold his head
steady with my other hand.
"Please," he
manages to say, almost sobbing.
"Enough. End this, Yang. Please."
"All right,"
I say
softly, "I will. Now." And I plunge the
scalpel in, and jerk
it in
an arc,
and his
life spills out in a
bubbling crimson stream, and
I close
my eyes
and feel
the gratification slipping over
me, carrying
me into
sweet unconsciousness—
Until I open them
again and see that I
am awake.
As usual, I am
first. I blink several times
and stare
upward through the clear
viewplate at the featureless ceiling. Then the sensors note that I am
fully conscious, and I hear
the hiss
of the lid rising, and I
clamber out of the foam-lined
coffin, naked and trembling, the sensor
disks popping off my skin
and the cords hanging over the
edges.
I look at myself and see
my skin
shiny with sweat. As usual.
It takes a few
minutes to get my breathing
down to normal and my legs
steady. I glance at the
other pod and see Yamada
there, still asleep—and unmarked. And alive. I
shudder involuntarily and step through
the short
corridor to the shower stall.
The warm
water is good on my
skin, washing off the sweat
and the dregs of
dreams and guilt. The cycle
is finished
when I am finished, and the
blasts of warm air dry
me quickly.
I find my suit and slip
it on.
When I reenter the
dream-room, Yamada is awake, sitting
on the side of his pod,
still nude. His eyes when
he looks
at me are full of fear
and hatred.
Like all the others before.
I ignore
him, and walk over to
the indicator
panels.
"How many shall we say went
through it this time?" I ask, my back to
him, reaching for the microcircuit
boards. "Ten? Twelve?"
"You bastard," Yamada says.
His voice
quavers, barely under control.
"Let's say twelve. A little more—there."
I replace
the circuit
board with the proper jimmied
one, then walk along the
other ten pods designated,
reaching under the controls on
each one and adjusting
them.
I walk back
toward him, trying not to
look at him, though I
can feel his eyes
on me.
He tries
to stand,
finds himself unsteady, and quickly
sits down again.
"Why?" he
asks, breathing hard. "What reason is there to
hate me?"
I stop and look at him. "None
that I know of," I
say patiently.
"You know that. Some deep-rooted
reason, obscure or ridiculous to our
conscious minds, that I cannot
get at
because it's hidden by guilt,
or self-disgust,
or the
like. The dream-machine is the only
thing that can reach beyond
these layers, to the subconscious, to our deepest urges.
But ask
me what these urges are—" I spread my hands
outward. "As well ask me how
it felt
to be
born."
"But—" he
stammers. "But we should try
to uncover
these feelings, to cure
them. The flight depends on
our cooperation,
our—our survival. If one
of us
is sick—"
"Oh? And
how would
you tell
the others
you discovered
one of us was sick? By
violating the Rules, and by
using the machine for a dual
rather than in a group,
without the guidance of a
Stable? No. If we want
to keep
using it for our purposes,
we must
keep silent. You know the
penalty for breaking any Rule;
do you
want to end up as
fertilizer for the hydroponics tanks?"
Yamada shakes
his head.
"I don't understand,"
he says,
his voice plaintive. "It wasn't like
I thought
it would
be. Not
at all."
I shrug. "That's the risk you take.
It all
depends on whose is the more
dominant personality. And whose is
weaker."
Yamada stares downward, his
face rigid. "I won't do
it again," he says
with determination.
"Oh, you will," I say, turning
to leave.
I stop
to give
him a
parting word. "You'll come back. You'll do
this over and over again—because one of these times
you might be
able to kill me." Then I leave.
It is
the machine
that keeps us sane. It
takes our minds off the long
trip, releases the emotions and
frustrations that build up, in ways
that the tapes, or the
prescribed mental exercises, or the recreational
games never could. All those
things are for the limited, the
weak-minded. But the dreams, the
worlds the machine leads us to
. .
. how
can anything
compare with them?
But the others don't know. They
can't understand. They stay in their
safe, ineffectual little activities. Like Sedjayev and Pruitt, playing
their silly fugue-chess games at
every leisure period.
"Back two
milliseconds," Pruitt says.
"Up four
minutes." Sedjayev moves
his dial.
"Hmm, let's ... no. All right.
Up two."
Pruitt studies the tallies closely.
"Two back."
"Up three."
"Back five."
They hunch forward, eager and
feral. "Up six—no, I
mean—"
"Too late. Coalescence and fugue." The board glows red
and tallies the points
for Sedjayev.
He smiles
and leans
back, basking in his victory.
I sneer at them both. "Stupid,"
I say.
"Stupid games you play. Why bother
wasting your time with this?"
But they ignore me, as they
always do. Well, let them.
Let them all.
I look
around the recreation chambers, at
the others
trying to relax. McAdams putters with
the synthetron;
Hadig reviews the theater tapes; and,
here, and there, they recline,
chatter, play the games, and stare
up at
the ceiling
in their
private musings. And how
many more occupy the bedchambers—
how many couples lie
beyond those innocuous metal doors,
grasping at each other
in their
fumbling sweaty embraces?
Simpleminded pursuits. Animal passions.
They are unthinking sheep. I
despise them all.
I see Yamada before a game
console, working the controls with a tight-lipped frustration. I go over to
him.
"Hello, Yamada," I say.
"Trying to relax? Easing your
mind?"
His hands jerk, startled; he looks
up at
me, then
at the
board, then curses and
strikes it with his fist.
But the
screen is quite strong—protected
by transparent
duraplast—and remains unharmed. The
glow from the word error
filling the
screen continues to bathe
Yamada's face.
"Stupid game," he mutters.
"Stupid. Like everything else here."
"That's right," I say.
"Good that you've finally realized
it. Better that than the mindless
existence these others lead."
I reach
out to
him, but he spins out
of my
grasp and faces me.
"The others. Yes, what
about the others?" His expression
is a mixture of rage and
frustration. "Must I stand apart?
Must I always remain aloof? Isn't
there a way I can
be closer
to them?"
"Not if
they continue to be blind
to the
truth."
"Truth? What do you
mean when
you say
'truth'? This flight is the
truth. We're here on this
ship for a purpose; we
have to face that.
In order
for the
mission to succeed, we need
to maintain balance and
harmony, and to cooperate—"
"Don't tell me about this mission."
I speak
with contempt. "They've fooled
us all,
putting us on a journey
to nowhere.
Where does this flight
take us? Do you know?
Does anyone?
No, only the Stables. They're our
gods, ruling our lives, our
sleeping hours, even—yes, even
our dreams.
And we
obey them, oh so meekly and
without question.
"But no more. Not if we
become aware. Like me. And
you. And the others before you.
We don't
have to follow their orders
anymore. We can do as
we please.
Isn't that better than before, Yamada?" I lean close
to him,
grinning, with that last question.
He stands
up abruptly,
backing away from me. "I
don't know—I have to think." His hands flutter in
agitation, and he glances at the
floor, his head jerking back
and forth
nervously. "I have to—to—" But he doesn't finish—only
leaves the recreation chambers, all the
others staring after him.
"Yes, Yamada," I say.
"Think. But not for long.
You'll be back." And I laugh
out loud,
and don't
care whether they stare at me
or not.
The flight.
The great
metal idol of the Ship.
The hallowed
Rules. Of what importance
are they
to me?
To any
of us?
Here we sit in
the Ship's
swollen belly, held in gestation
until it sees fit to give
us forth
in birthing
when we reach the end
of our journey. And where will
it end?
We don't
know. The all-powerful directors haven't
deemed us worthy of that
information. Final destination, calculated flight time—all that is
locked in nonretrievable memory cores. And in
the memories
of the Stables.
They are our surrogate directors, these Stables. They assign
our tasks, schedule our
hours, adjust our leisure periods,
correlate our data—moving us about
like robots in a shadow
play, while they hide
their tank-grown bodies behind code-locked
doors and govern us from
the safety
of their
vats.
Our only refuge is the dream-sessions.
There we can let our
fantasies come to life—but
only if they are safe,
and harmless,
and able to be
integrated with those of the
others in the session. And
even here we are all
under the careful watch of
a Stable.
Careful watch,
indeed. How laughable that is—that
a blob
of gray matter, floating
in nutrient
juices and with a hundred
sensory wires trailing from
it, could
have the capacity to observe
and understand
us. That is what makes our Rules. That is what we have to answer
to for
any violations.
Maintain the balance, it tells us—the
homeostasis necessary for optimum probability of success of mission.
Any upsetting
factor will be eliminated; any deviant
crew member goes into the
tanks. The safety of the flight
is all-important.
How I despise them.
If they only knew what really
goes on. But they don't—and
they never will, as
long as I continue to
take the necessary precautions
with every dual I undertake.
There are only a few of
us now.
But eventually
I will
indoctrinate all the crew members—and make them all dependent
on me.
No longer
will I have to endure their
contempt—people like Lopez,
and Andresen, and Mogotu, sitting there
at mealtime,
sipping their fizz and ignoring me.
Me.
"Words associate,
feelings culminate," says Lopez.
"We wait, not late, for the
bait at eight," says Andresen
in turn.
"Come sit by the furnace with
your feet in your ears,"
Mogotu says triumphantly, falling off his chair,
and they
all convulse into laughter.
Yamada and I sit at the
next table—I quiet and serene,
he morose and pensive on my
left.
I lean over and whisper, "Perk
up, my
friend. Let the fizz work. Enjoy. Have fun. Live
your life to the fullest."
He swirls his glass
of fizz,
still untouched, and stares into
it. "How can I when I
died the other day?"
"No matter. It'll probably
happen again. Besides, it's only
a dream, isn't it?"
"But it was real—so real. I
could feel the pain, and
my life
just ebbing away. I—"
He abruptly
brings the glass to his
lips, but changes his mind and
lowers it.
"You can
always decide to stop," I say.
He looks
at me
for several
seconds. "I won't stop," he says. His voice is
low and
flat. "Not until I get
you. And I will, someday."
"What is this, Yamada?" calls Lopez
from the other table. "Talking to yourself
again, eh?"
Yamada's head jerks in the direction
of the
others, then he curses, rises suddenly,
and stalks
off.
"Oh ho," Lopez says,
eyes wide to mock surprise.
"The delicate one."
Their rude laughter fills the dining
chamber, but I say nothing and sip my drink.
Go on,
I think.
Ignore me. You won't be blind
long. Your time will come.
Later, Yamada pleads with
me to
undertake yet another dual session.
"No," I say. "It's
too soon
for you.
You've hardly recovered from the first
one. Look at yourself. See
how badly
it's affected you."
"Damn you," he shouts,
his voice
ringing along the corridor. He lowers his voice
and says,
"You owe this to me.
You owe me another chance."
"In time," I say.
"Do you think you're the only one? There were others before you."
"What do I care about them?
It's my chance I'm talking about." His
words become more and more
vehement.
"That bad?" I say,
feigning concern. "The dull life
of the
Ship routine getting to
you? The larger sessions too
tame?"
"Yes. Yes!"
"Poor, unbalanced Yamada," I say, shaking my
head. "You're no different
from the others. Don't you
see? All of you have these
basic weaknesses that can only
be satisfied
in an unrestricted fantasy. It was
so simple
to pick
you out
during the normal sessions. But
you'll do everything my way,
or not at all, for I
hold the key."
Yamada mutters
something, then suddenly lunges at
me. But I quickly sidestep him,
and he
whirls to face me, breathing
hard.
"Watch it,
friend," I say. "I can
easily deny you any time
at all."
"What's to stop me from trying
it with
someone else?" he says with barely
controlled fury.
"The fact that only I know
how to
readjust the settings. I'm your only
partner. Keep that in mind,
till the next time. If
there is one." And I turn and
walk away.
What fools
they all are! What arrogance
they have! Yamada is no different.
They all feel that way—superior,
stronger, full of conceit.
There is no outlet for
them to display their bright qualities,
except for the duals I
set up.
How easy
it is to appeal to their
vanity, then to turn their
dreams back on them by playing
on their
hidden fears. I can only
think of them with contempt, and
it is
with contempt that I treat
them, until, in the end, there
is nothing
left to do but kill
them.
"Flex," I say, pulling
the cord
tighter around her neck. "Move your hips—faster now. Yes,
that's it."
I watch the muscles spasm in
Fletcher's back and the shuddering
in her
splayed buttocks as I pump
myself in and out, methodically carrying out the sodomy.
I slide
one hand
over her slick skin, lingering over
the swell
of her
breast, her soft side, and the
curve of her hip. With
the other
I jerk
up the
cord, and her face
twists to the side. It
is mottled
blue, and her tongue hangs out
of her
mouth. I can hear her
trying to gag.
"Scream," I say, thrusting
hard. "Cry out. Let me
hear your pain." I feel something
give, and I know that
I have
torn her inside. "Isn't
this what you've dreamed of?
What you've wondered about? This
must be truly exciting for
you, Fletcher."
No answer. I shrug
and renew
my efforts,
until her final choking gurgle comes,
and I
come, and then I release
the cord
and smile at her
bloated face, the eyes open
and staring.
When we
wake, she is inarticulate with rage and hatred.
"Kill
you," she screams, teeth bared.
Her fingers
swoop for my eyes. "Kill you for that. Filth.
Pervert."
I grab
her hands
and bend
her back
over the pod, holding her immobile with my body.
"You had your chance in
the session,"
I say.
"What kind of perversions did you have in
mind for me? What kind of
grisly death would I have
undergone? Look to your
own mind
first for the signs of
sickness."
I release her and
step back. She still glares
at me,
but does
not attack.
"Don't give me that," she says.
"You're the one who's sick.
I should report you—"
"And yourself? And all
the others?
No. They
won't punish me alone."
"This isn't worth it," she says,
shaking her head. "It's not what I want." She looks at me
accusingly. "All because of you. You
twist around everything to the
way you
want it. You give us nothing
of what
we want."
"Just a case of the dominant
mind assuming control. If you
want your world, you
have to work for it.
Be thankful
you have the chance to try
at all."
I rise
and turn
to leave.
"Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm
tired."
They are
becoming bothersome, those like Fletcher
and Yamada. I can feel their
eyes watching me all the
time, even in the crowds at
leisure or mealtime. They sit
together and whisper, casting glances my
way. Or they accost me
in the
deserted corridors or between
portals, begging for another dual. It has become an
addiction for them; the dream-sessions
are their only desire.
How pitiful
to watch
them degrade themselves.
It has become so bothersome that I must escape
their pawing advances from time
to time,
to go
where it is quiet and
I can be alone. Down below
the living
quarters, among the catwalks running
alongside the food tanks and
the humming
energy converters—no one goes there
except the technicians, checking
the dials
twice every shift. It is
restful here; the only sounds are the purring of
machinery and the whispers of
my soles along the floor.
But I am not
alone this time. Ahead of
me, someone
bends over the indicator dials, jotting
down figures on her tally
sheet. I don't recognize
who it
is in
the darkness,
until her face is iUurnined by
the glow
from a panel— Ah. It
is one
of us.
I walk up to her and
stop. "I see they keep
you busy,
Ho-taling," I say.
"Not an exciting task they've
selected you for, is it?"
Hotaling continues to record
the readings
as if
I weren't
there.
"Don't play coy games," I say,
suddenly angry. "I know you
too well."
She looks up, then at me,
as if
for the
first time. Finally she says, "Who
are you?
I don't
recall seeing you in the
dining hall."
"And the sessions? Our duals? I
suppose you don't remember those,
either?" I am shouting at
her now.
"Sessions? What
are you
talking about?" Genuine
puzzlement appears on her
face. "Who are you?" she says again, stepping toward
me. "What
is your
station? Your job?"
"I don't have to tell you
that," I say. "What my job is is
my concern . . ." But
my voice
trails off, as I suddenly
think: Job? What is my job?
I must
have one. But what is
it?
No good.
I can't
remember.
I back
away from her. "Sorry," I say. "My error.
I mistook
you for
someone else."
"Wait," she
says, walking faster. "What did you mean—" But I turn and run
away from her, away from
her calls,
and
I don't
slow down until they have
long faded away.
One hundred
twenty-eight crew members. Sessions held
every forty hours, in
rotating groups of ten or
more. There are eight of us
altogether. The others: Lee, Ostermeyer,
Macomb-ray, Sedjayev, Fletcher, Yamada. And
Hotaling. I am sure of it.
Yet Hotaling
does not remember. Is she
deceiving me? But her ignorance seems
authentic. Could it be possible
I imagined
a dual
with her?
And there is myself. Why can't
I remember
my job,
even now? Surely I have one.
But on
the other
hand, I can remember a
dual with Hotaling that might
not even
have taken place.
I don't
know what it means.
It doesn't
matter. All is lost. I
am discovered.
Stupid Yamada. All his
fault, wanting another session long
before he was ready.
But so
insistent I gave in just
to be
rid of
him. So it went
thus:
He was stronger than before, much
stronger. Driven by vengeance perhaps, surely
by madness.
And this
time he forced his world on me.
I parried a sword
blow, just in time, though
its force
knocked me to the
ground. I looked up to
see him ready to plunge the
bayonet in. I rolled out
of the
way; the long steel blade sank into the ground
next to me. I got
to my
feet, facing him, and ducked under
the whistling
steel net. I flattened to
the ground again and
felt the wind from his
battleax as it arced through the
space where my head had
been.
I felt anger and frustration. This was what they
all must
have felt before. Now
it was
happening to me, and I
didn't like it.
"Enough," I said, furious.
"This must stop."
Yamada's face wore a death's-head grin. "The words I
said last time," he said. "But
now from
you." He began whirling the bolo in his hand.
"All right. I'll end it.
The way
you did
for me." He hurled
the bolo
and moved
forward, a dagger appearing in his other hand.
But I moved quickly, ducking under
again, and appeared behind him. A
kick, and he dropped the
dagger, then to his knees. I grasped Mm about
the neck.
All the
surging passions —anger, fear, hatred—seemed to overwhelm me.
"Die," I said, clubbing
him with
my fist.
"Die. Die." My words became shouts,
then incoherent screams in time
with my blows smashing his teeth,
his nose,
cracking the cheekbones and the
jutting jaw, turning his face
into shapeless pulp. Over and over
I struck
him, my first rising, falling,
rising—
I sit up against the open
pod, my arm upraised, sweating
and gasping for air.
The sudden
coolness is like a shock
against my skin. The
heavy silence screams at me.
I look at Yamada's pod. The
cover is ajar. His hand
juts out from under it.
I walk over to it, lift
the cover,
and look
down at him. Into his open
staring eyes, wide with—horror? shock? surprise? The muscles are
twisted as if in agony.
His body
is arched
and stiff. I check his pulse
and respiration.
He is
dead.
"In there. I heard
a shout."
The voice
comes from outside. I hear fumbling
at the
locked door.
I look here and there wildly.
What to do? Where to
hide? I try behind a pod.
No good.
No room.
"Come on,
get it
open."
"I'm trying, damnit. Somebody's
put on
the triple
security lock." Now I
hear a babble of voices,
many people trying to get in.
There, behind the console.
I squeeze
through the space behind the metal
shelf, mindful of the metal
leads and the sharp edges against
my skin.
I press
my back
against the wall, sticking as if
my perspiration
were glue.
"Okay, it's open." I hear the
door slide, and the voices
now in full chorus.
"Look, someone's
in the
pod—"
"It's Yamada."
"Come on,
Yamada, what are you—"
"He's dead."
"What!"
More babble.
"How did—" "What's
he doing—"
"By himself? Can't—" "Look, another pod's open." "Someone else,
then?" "Come on, let's
look."
I hear
them searching behind the pods,
through the showers, their voices rising
and falling
as they
pass. I press harder back, trying
to blend
into the wall and become
featureless metal. "No one here."
"Wait. What
about behind there?" I hold my
breath.
"I'll check."
Steps come closer, fast.
They stop by my hiding place.
Something blocks the light to the
side. I can only stare,
wide-eyed, not even able to
breathe, as Lopez's head
pokes in, and his eyes
peer into the darkness. The light
flicks on and its beam
catches me full in the face.
He looks.
Straight at me. Straight through
me. And finally turns. "No one
there," he says, and the
beam is gone.
"All right. Keep looking,"
I hear
someone say. The babble grows, becomes fainter, and then
all is
silent again after they leave.
I ease out of the space
and stand
there, trembling. It is several
minutes before I can think
clearly.
Even then, I can't quite comprehend
what has happened. They heard us;
they discovered Yamada dead. But
they did not see me. Lopez
has no
reason to cover up for
me. To
him I actually did not exist.
I am grateful for that, to
be sure.
My apparent
invisibility barely saved me
from Elimination. But underneath my gratitude, I feel
uneasy about it, for it
is still
another strange circumstances I can't
explain.
They must have some explanation—some end, some purpose. But
what is it?
To those
not part
of our
little group I am, in
effect, invisible. But the others
can still
see me.
They must be careful now
that no outsiders are
around when they talk with
me. That
is, if they talk with me
at all.
"Hello, Macombray. What's new?"
I slide
into the chair next to him
at the
rear table of the dining
hall.
He is
startled at my presence, then
looks quickly to either side. "What do you want?"
he says,
in an
undertone full of malice.
"Why, just to make conversation," I say, spreading my
hands. "Small talk. Passing
some time. You know."
"Get away from me. You're poison
now." He turns his back.
"Now that's not a
nice thing to say," I say in an
aggrieved tone. "You might
hurt my feelings. Then who'll
have duals with you?"
He turns back to me slowly.
"You unspeakable monster. You
killed Yamada in the dual
session, and you expect us
all to go on as if
nothing happened? How can you
be so
inhuman?"
I shrug. "He
had a
weak mind. Too weak to
take the risk or the consequences.
I have
no patience
with anyone like that."
"This is a human life you're
talking about," he says with
barely controlled rage. "Don't
you feel
any guilt?
Don't you have any feelings?"
"Why should I? He
knew it was dangerous. We all do. He
just wasn't equipped to
handle it, that's all."
"You'll get
caught. Don't worry about that."
"How?" I say, leaning
forward. "They can't see
me. They found no traces of anyone else
in the
dream-chamber. They didn't even find the settings changed.
As far
as they are concerned, I don't
exist. Better this way, too.
It'll make our arrangements easier."
"You actually expect us
to go
on?" Macombray looks at me
with astonishment.
"Of course. You just
do as
I say,
and everything
will go smoothly."
"There will be no more duals."
He spoke
in a
determined tone.
"That's what you say. Let's see
how long
you can
stay away."
"No. No more," he repeats—but I can see the
conflict on his face.
"Think about
it," I say, and get
up and
leave.
Perhaps they
do feel
that way—afraid, scared off. But
their need is greater. Though some
will stay away, there are
still others who will go on.
Whether it is because of
their need, or perhaps a thirst
to strike
a return
blow, it doesn't matter, as
long as they come
back.
And later, when Fletcher
accosts me in a darkened
corridor, tight-lipped but assenting, I know I am
right.
"You believed,
didn't you?" I say. "You
actually thought you could win this
time. Oh, you had some
good moments, that's true. But you
proved wrong in the end.
Do you
realize that now?"
Fletcher can only moan. Her mouth
gapes open, revealing the blackened cavity
where her tongue used to
be.
"What? I can't understand you, dear
Fletcher." I edge
the knife blade a little deeper,
scoring along the edge of
her rib
cage. I thrust myself
up into
her rhythmically,
hypnotically. Her body jerks
and writhes,
and her
hands clench in the tightly knotted ropes above her
head.
"I must keep this calm and
methodical," I say
to myself.
"No fiery emotions. No
fits of passion. Clinical and
meticulous, that's what I must
be."
Fletcher does
not answer.
I continue.
But when
I wake,
I find
it has
happened again, and Fletcher's corpse is
sprawled half out of the
coffin. I can only dress hurriedly and flee.
Running. Hiding.
They all search for me
now, all those I once dominated.
I have
avoided them up to now,
but who
knows how close they
are on
my heels?
Two deaths—
awakened their sense of
decency, it seems. They will
have no more of me.
Decency? In
them? I could laugh.
But not now. No time for
that. Only for reprisal and
what they call justice.
There—the dream-room. —No. First
place they'd look. Someplace else, but
where?
"There he
is. Get
him!" Footsteps coming quickly.
I dodge around the corridor as
Sedjayev appears at the other end.
"Come on, he's getting away."
But I
don't see them as I run
wildly to the staircases, then duck inside and
slam the security locks tight behind
me.
I hear their muffled blows on
the other
side of the door. "Open up, Yang." "Try it."
"No good." "To the records.
Get the correct sequence. Hurry!" I hear their voices,
too, but I don't answer. I'm
too busy
throwing back the safety hatches;
once those are open,
I climb
through, and begin descending toward the inner core of
the Ship.
The stairs stop at
the catwalks,
and I
walk among the humming machines
again. I feel more secure
here—doors and hatches locked behind me,
none of the technicians able to see me, except
for that
damnable Hotaling. But it's not
her shift
now. Safe, yes. Safer
than if I locked myself
in my—
Room? Where is my room? I can't remember the
number. I can't even remember what
it looks
like.
Again this uncertainty. What is this?
Why can't
I remember?
Calmly now. Take my name: Yang,
first name—what? Occupation—what? Pre-Ship life—what?
I feel panic now, and sudden
sweat on my forehead and
under my arms. My
hands tremble almost uncontrollably, and I want to scream.
Steady. Easy now. I force
the fear
down, with great effort. At last
the trembling
stops, and I breathe more easily, leaning on the
catwalk rail for support.
I try to think clearly. Facts.
I need
some to hold on to,
to prove my own existence to
myself. Ship name? Voyager I. Remember that.
Launchtime—unknown. Try another.
Duration time? I check
my chronometer.
Between forty and fifty— forty-seven. Yes. Forty-seven periods Ship-time.
I have
that, at least. That must be
how long
since launch-time, then. Converting back into earth years,
that's—
The sound of slamming metal, and
I start
at the
sudden beam of light down the
catwalk. "Yes, I heard him
going down here—" One voice comes,
out of
a loud
babble. They have found me again.
I turn and run. The narrow
catwalk curves and swoops around the great metal bulks;
my fleeing
footsteps ring in the cavernous engine chambers, along with
their pursuit. I glance back at every turn, wasting
a precious
fraction of a second each time. They are gaining
on me.
Damn them
and their
conspiracy! I can only think
that as I whip past branching
corridors, their lighting blinking on
my dark path like beacons. I
don't know where I'm going—or
do I? I haven't been here
before, I'm sure, but I
am heading
somewhere definite. Where, I
don't know; I don't think
about that—only about getting
away.
There. That corridor. Down four doors,
left at the next branch. I hear them still
behind me. Four more doors,
through the double palmprint-activated
hatches—then unlocking the four
complicated locks on the door
with the
title NO
ADMITTANCE OF UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
Never mind that. The locks spring
open at my bidding, almost
magically. As the door whirs
open, they appear at the
end of the corridor. "There! He's going in!" "Stop
him!" they shout as they rush
forward.
But they are too slow. Quickly
I am
inside, and the door booms shut on them, and
I reset
the locks
from the inside. Sudden exhaustion overcomes me, and I
have to lean against the door; I feel their
ineffectual poundings as slight tremors
through the thick metal.
It goes
on and
on, but
it doesn't
matter. They can't get in.
I am
safe.
Exhaustion gives way to elation, and
I begin
to laugh,
shortwinded as I am.
"Fools," I shout.
"Go ahead. Keep pounding. You'll never
get in."
Still laughing, I turn—and the
laughter dies away, as
I see
where I am.
The room is high, not wide,
and softly
lit. Against the walls on either
side are enclosed rows of
tanks, the glassteel banded by protecting
metal. Within are solutions, bubbled through with gas feed
lines. Floating in them are
gray shapeless lumps, each with many
wire leads going back and
away: the Stables.
I've done it. I've found the
Stables' chambers—the room of our rulers.
The room
of my—
My—
Something strange, rising in
me. It
reaches my throat, becoming a moan,
then a groan, and then
I am
screaming, over and over
again. I claw at the
door, scratching to get out,
to get away from them, those
horrible gray lumps, throwing the relays, spinning the locks
wildly until I hit the
right combination and the door
slides open and I tumble
out into
the midst of the others, who
instinctively back away.
I get to my feet. "Stay
back," I say. My voice
quavers uncontrollably. "Don't
come near me."
They circle around me,
wary, ever watchful. They look
at me with—fear? No. A wide-eyed
horror and fascination. And something akin to—pity.
"Poor little
phantom." I can
hear it in Macombray's voice.
"What do you mean by that?"
I demand.
"What are you going to do?"
"Nothing. Nothing
at all."
Macombray points at me. "Do
you know who you
are? What you are?"
"What is
this? I'm Yang. A crew
member, like you."
"Are you? What happened in there?"
He points
to the
chamber behind me. I
fight a horrifying urge to
look back.
"Nothing. A queasiness. Don't come closer." I back up against the door for support.
"Don't you think we heard the
screams?" Ostermeyer says. "Would the sight of
the Stables
be that
horrible to a crew member? Or did you react
like that because you couldn't
face yourself?"
"What kind of idiocy is this?"
I say.
"I'm as much a crew
member as the rest
of you.
I came
on board
forty-seven periods ago, just like
you did—"
"Forty-seven?" Ostermeyer
turns to Lee. "Tell him."
Lee says, "I checked records for
the hatch
locks. I also called for the
roster. There is no Yang
on it."
"No," I say. "Impossible."
"And Ship launch was fifty earth-years
ago, real time. On this Ship,
the equivalent
of seventy-eight
periods."
"Liar," I say angrily,
and swing
at Lee.
But my
hand—my arm—they pass right
through him. He stands there,
untouched.
"That's right," he says,
smiling sadly. "We know you
now. And because we do, you
become less effective. And less
real."
I feel confusion and terror like
a whirlpool
around me. "But then—what—"
Macombray points behind me
once more. "Look again," he says. "Face yourself this
time."
And turn. I do not want
to look,
but I
turn anyway. Against my will, I
look again into the shadowy
chamber, and see myself—
I am a great gray shapeless
thing, grown in
vitro from tissue
cultures, kept in a
saline nutrient solution maintained at thirty-seven degrees
plus or minus point two
degrees Centigrade, sustained by external
voltage of seven plus or
minus point one millivolts and by
oxygen bubbler kept constant at
thirty dynes per square
centimeter pressure. I am used
as guidance, intellect, psychologist/psychiatrist,
and for
datastorage, computation, Ship maintenance, and all cognitive functions. I am
responsibile for maintenance of the
internal, adiabatic world of
the Ship
on its
years-long journey to other stars. Responsible for well-being of crew members, keeping
them as close to
psychological and social norms as
possible, and eliminating all aberrant factors.
In short,
a Stable.
No.
"A figment of a
Stable's imagination. Maybe too much
oxygen pressure, or a fluctuation
in solution
pH. No
matter. We've located the defective Stable.
We should
have known it before, with your
access to 'confidential' files, and
how easily
you were able to
readjust the machines . .
." Lee shakes his head.
"But what
now?" I plead. I can
only plead, now. "We deactivate you. After a while."
"What do
you mean?"
I say
with apprehension. They all look at
me. Accusers.
"You treated us like
things," Lee says. "You took
advantage of us—of our weaknesses—playing
with them and toying with us for your own
perverted games. But you're only
a phantom. We, on the other
hand, are human. We feel. When you took us into dream, we
felt all the pain and
terror and agony you wanted us
to feel.
After all that, we could
hate, and ache for revenge.
"That's what we're going to do
now: take a little revenge.
And we have you to thank
for showing
us the
way." They all turn and begin
to leave.
"Wait," I say, reaching
for them.
"What do you intend to
do?"
Lee turns.
He is
smiling. "We're going to have
a little
dream," he says. "But
don't feel left out. You'll
be in
it." "No," I say.
"No. No!"
But it's no use. I can't
stop them. All I can
do is
wait, huddled with fear, until they
come for me, and take
me, and—
Strap me to the table, split
my belly
open with knives, and pull the
organs out—
Whittle my limbs slowly down to
stubs with glittering blades—
Tear my skin off with snapping
bullwhips— Shoot me— Brain me—
Castrate me— Disembowel me—
Again and again. A hundred times,
a thousand,
until I beg for it to
end, for them to stop.
But it
doesn't stop. Oblivion doesn't come.
They Med. They're going to torture
me forever.
As I
used them, so they're now using
me. And
I can
do nothing
except die, over and over again.
They've learned
well.
As
our technology continues to grow and proliferate, permeating every corner of
our society, it opens new possibilities for everyone: new careers, new
abilities . . . and new crimes. It may soon be possible (if it isn't already)
for an industrial spy with the key information to steal every bit of
computerized data a company has stored—and he could do it with the same ease
with which he might tap a phone. Then there are the other capabilities that go
along with such technological crime. . . .
Charlie haas was born in Brooklyn in 1952, studied writing
at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has sold stories to the men's
slicks. At last report he was working on a historical
novel.
Shifting
Parameters in Disappearance and
Memory
BY CHARLIE HAAS
ONE
"A
big change came into my life at that point, because I was suddenly deluged with information—information about life in
general."
—jimmy webb, songwriter,
interviewed in The New Yorker, January 9, 1971
The second call had me expecting something
out of an espionage movie: At 2:13
in the same diner as last time you'll get directions to a noisy bar in an Asian
port where the fat man with the ginger-colored beard and the eyepatch will hand
you a tan briefcase, electronically sealed, containing five forged telegrams, a
yellow capsule, a thermos of vodka martinis.
Work on your silence. Anyone who
needs you can spot the
rolling, aikido-tempered walk, the
all-but-obsolete precision tailoring, the apparent
vague distaste around the nose
and mouth—a grimace, actually, of jet-lag
and near-deaths
catching up with you, drying
remote tissues. They're watching and
they're fast, how fast
we can't
say, but this is how
it always
is, passing overnight from each smoky
city to the next without
a trace.
But the third call dispelled that,
and I
didn't think that way again for
a few
weeks. The phone rang twice
before I got to it
but only because I
stood up and walked around
the counter
when I could have reached. I
was in
the breakfast
nook, a half-room with dimmer-switch lighting, where high-backed wrought-iron chairs with
thin round avocado-colored cushions on
their seats and backs surrounded
a short
white counter. The catalog
had listed
the cushions
in avocado,
bone, brandywine, and flamenco.
The chairs
came high-backed or low-backed,
and with
the cushions
you could
go for
your circle or your soft-cornered
square. By nature I am
a friend
to catalogs. But I am an
enemy of multiplicities generated solely
to fake freedom of
choice, a runoff of pointless
options in which the colors take
code names and seek cover
in print.
The carpet was sherry, which was
red. The house, my house,
was in Beverly Hills, and the
tan telephone,
one of
those new rectangular instruments with the dial on
the underside
of the
receiver, looked like an
iced maple bar from Mr.
Donut. I had two such maple
bars cued up on a
plate on the counter; that's
how I noticed. The plate was
Malibu, blood-red with a double
black racing stripe. The
stripes were parallel chords of
varied thickness, which extended
the plate's
area, while the concentric version, also available, confined it.
"Hello?" I said.
"This shouldn't be difficult."
A young
male voice, long distance.
"Should I get a
pencil?"
"You know
Sacramento airport?"
"No," I said.
"Can you
fly up
tonight?" "Which flight?"
"Anything that
gets in early, like before
ten." "Who are you?"
I said.
"Steve Golden will come
out and
pick you up. He should
be there about then, about ten,
but if
he doesn't
show up after a while you
could call him. You just
wait in the coffee shop."
"What's his
number?"
"It would be in the phone
book. It's on S Street.
That's where you're going. Or you
could call information, it might
be new."
"Okay."
"Only it
might not be under his
name. Oh no, yeah it
would, yeah. For sure."
"And he plans to
get me
at ten?"
"Well, he might be doing something
first, but he'll get over
there if his car
is okay.
You should
use a
different name when you buy the
ticket. You need anything?"
I picked up a
maple bar. "I don't think
so," I said. He hung
up. That was the
third call, the last one.
The second
call, which had set me up
for intrigue,
came about half an hour
earlier in the same
room.
"We really like what
you did,"
the girl
said when I answered the phone.
"You said
that before," I said. "Who
is this?"
"Have you
figured out what to do
next?"
"No," I said, holding
the receiver
with my shoulder, picking up a Ho Ho and
unwrapping it. This was before
I found
the maple bars in a bag
in the
breadbox.
"We can
get you
out of
there," the girl said.
"Who are
you?"
"You want
to get
out for
a few
weeks?"
I was licking the icing on
the Ho
Ho and
holding it too tightly. Flakes of
chocolate fell on the counter.
"To where?" I said.
"We'll just put you up in
this house with some people
up here and you can just
stay there for a few
weeks, okay?"
"How?"
"We'll call you back," she said,
and hung
up. I
finished the Ho Ho in four
bites, then made the fallen
flakes stick to my thumb and
licked them off.
The first call came about twenty
minutes before that, upstairs. The same girl said
they liked what I had
done and then hung up right
away. I went downstairs to get something to
eat.
I put
the second
maple bar back in its
bag and
put the
bag in one of the side
pockets of my carry-on suitcase.
After I finished packing I drove
out to
the swimming
club where my wife, Elaine, was
swimming with my children, Aaron
and Kimberly, and left a note
under the windshield wiper of
her car.
In May 1968, in Los Angeles,
you could
subject your skin and throat to
the air
for hours
and get
no reading
at all:
it was
still more like remembering
heat than being in it.
The reason
you feel so unsupported,
so singled
out, by the spring and
summer weather there is
that the brightness and dryness
have taken all the presence out of
the air
and what
you wind
up with is essentially static, stubbing
your lungs on each thin
sample.
I put the car in long-term
parking and made a six-thirty
flight, reading the L.A.
Times late edition
and eating
Zaanland chocolate from the
gift shop all the way
to Sacramento. There was
nothing about me in the
Times that day, but
it took
me a
long time to get through
it because
I was
blocking, which I do
sometimes. I see a headline,
such as park board asks $ two
million, and
my concentration
is too scattered to register it,
so without
thinking about it I find
myself abstracting it further
and silently
hearing some variation like They want the two million, or The parks are asking for the dollars now, great, or even
Where am I going to get two
million dollars?, all part of an intensive involuntary
program aimed at the sense.
Meanwhile there's the guilty sensation
of trying
to repair
something by forcing it, the
one method you're never supposed to
use. It does make the
newspaper last longer, and I
love the paper as much
as anyone,
so maybe that's the cause. Except
that I don't apply it
to just
the newspaper, but to
my situation
as well.
At least
once a day the surroundings and circumstances blank, like
a word
spoken several times so
that first its meaning goes
and then
even its existence is implausible. Apart from the immediate
problems, this is exactly
what was responsible for my
taking the nearly empty jet to
Sacramento in the first place.
I'm neither
slow nor stupid and I mean
to understand,
but in
numerous cases the interference has been
prohibitive. And it's not just
me, it's
everybody, restating most of
what comes in and waiting
for something to click.
In Sacramento
I bought
a Time at the airport newsstand and took it
to the
coffee shop, where I ordered
a roast
beef sandwich, cole slaw,
cherry pie, and coffee. I
couldn't start eating or reading for
a few
minutes after I got the
food, though, because a string arrangement
of "Wichita
Lineman" started on the
airport Muzak and I had
to listen
to it.
This was right in the middle
of the
period when Jimmy— Jimmy L. Webb,
the Los
Angeles songwriter—had so many songs being played on the
radio at once. I don't
imagine that I was hearing them
unusually often, since they were
hits, but the frequency of chance
encounter was working out to
about once every two days, what
wiLh the Glen Campbell and
Fifth Dimension things catching
on almost
simultaneously, and then Richard
Harris right on top of
that with his all-Jimmy album. In Los Angeles you're
dealing with a radio economy,
which is to say
that radio is assumed into
the atmosphere
as a
commonly negotiable presence independent
of its
own content.
In no
other city do you undergo
as many
air minutes
a day, invited through your own
receiver or enforced by others,
nor can you hear
station preferences defended as heatedly
by as many laymen. In big
places there is always the
need for private entertainment along with the fear
of missing
something, but the biggest
consideration where these station loyalties
are concerned is format. Not just
format in the sense of
voice preference and jingle
preference, which do exist, but
in the
sense that some programming
practices involve more listener risk than others. Meaning: in
its simultaneity
of production
and consumption, radio has
the means
of abrogating
your right to screen by bringing
to your
attention what you'd rather let go. Sometimes format knows
best, and sometimes the most
pressing matters will find
their own channels. In my
own case,
for example, I wasn't
much concerned with music and
not at
all with the music
industry, but the Jimmy Webb
songs became important immediately, the first time I
heard "By the Time I Get
to Phoenix."
I was
in the
middle of changing stations in
the car,
Glen was in the middle
of the
second stanza, my hand dropped, and
my voluntary
and involuntary
facilities chose up sides
then and there and have
never really reconciled since.
Immediately I heard myself thinking:
What am I doing listening to this,
to this
gummy, gleaming International Harvester of a song, with
some moping hayseed counting off
the names of bus-station cities, shipping
out from
one to
the next?
But at the same moment my
heart locked on that sound
and it was literally all I
could do to remember that
I was
driving. Not only was I transfixed,
not only
did I
sense correctly that I was committing
the song
and Glen's
arrangement to permanent memory on
first hearing, but I could
feel some awful jamming
applied to my veins, glands,
and organs,
a battery
of interior gushes and starts such
as I'd
never before had and no
music should have produced.
My eyes
lost focus, and while I
could concentrate on the
song enough to know that
I Shouldn't have liked it, I
was unable
to think
of anything
else until it was over and
my tissues,
liquid and solid, had been
shunted back into place
inside. The overriding impression, even then, was that I
had been
listening to something I wasn't
supposed to have heard,
that a serious mistake had
been made. When the same thing
happened with "MacArthur
Park," "Up, Up, and
Away," and the others, I
started an active file of
the titles
on a
Wil Wright's
bag and
had soon
isolated the composer as the
unifying factor. I had no
information on him beyond that
when I arrived in Sacramento.
I'd been doing nothing about my
reaction to the songs, just
waiting it out, even though
I'm fat
so these
physical things scare me and "Up,
Up, and
Away" had been picked up
and adapted
as an airline commercial, pushing the
incidence up a little.
So I was understandably interested to see, when the
song was over, that there was
an article
about Jimmy in the Time I'd bought, called "Up,
Up, &
Away in 18 Months." Raised in Oklahoma and Texas,
Beatle-coifed tunesmith Webb, twenty-one, had studied music at
San Bernardino
Valley College but dropped out because
of his
mother's death and because he
was—quoting the article—"struggling to sort
out his
life." Then he broke
up with
this girl he'd met at
San Bernardino
Valley and wrote "By
the Time
I Get
to Phoenix,"
his first
hit, about the experience. Smashes became
a matter
of habit
for the youthful cleffer, and now
his twenty-two-room
house in Hollywood was—quoting
again here—
a raucous rehearsal hall
for clients
and colleagues.
Self-possessed amid the
noise and confusion, he still
manages to get to his Yamaha
concert grand or his electric
organ to work on new music,
sometimes with incredible facility (he
wrote "Up, Up, and Away" in 35 minutes).
Everything written about Jimmy
during that period calls attention
to this
thirty-five-minute business, and
I've made a point of seeing
all the
literature on him. The piece
in Time also quoted some lyrics
from "MacArthur Park,"
which was just starting to make
new friends
for the
heartbroken fireball then ("MacArthur
Park is melting in the
dark,/All the sweet green icing flowing
down . . ."), and
said that these were "typical of his personal and
provocative imagery."
Then, in the Business section, there
was an
article about me, "Vacco and TTW:
On the
Blink," saying I had
simply stopped
coming to work early last
month, leaving senior
staffers at
TechTron West no choice but
to declare
his snug
$30,000 annual
berth as Executive Vice-President temporarily
—but alarmingly—open.
Phone calls to Vacco's
Beverly Hills home only deepened
the
mystery, according
to Creative
Head Marvin Loewinson, who shares credit with the absentee VP—a balding, taciturn, 46-year-old
former Wesleyan physics professor—for shaping TTW into a "little
giant" in the systems implementation area.
"We'd
call him up," Vacco's colleague told a Time reporter, "and as soon as he heard it was one of us on the phone—
[Chairman Lewis] Brophy and I were calling a few times a week—he'd start
playing these crazy tape recordings into the phone, just weird sound
assemblages, pieces of old radio dramas and news broadcasts and whatnot. He's
got quite a library of tapes out there, so I guess he's been spending a lot of time splicing them together and so on,
I don't know." Visits to Vacco's house proved no less frustrating, with
Vacco greeting guests cordially, then refusing to discuss any subject but the
Los Angeles Dodgers' pennant prospects in the current season. "That's the
other strange thing," Loewinson mused at week's end, "Justin was
never what you'd call a big baseball fan. I don't even look to them as
contenders myself."
Pieces into place
Indeed,
if Vacco had leisure interests, he kept them to himself during his seven-year
tenure at TTW, maintaining a low personal profile and garnering a reputation
for fair but firm decision-making in a field characterized by fast shifting of
costs and prices against a free-swinging competitive backdrop.
Vacco's
colleagues at TTW and elsewhere in the mini-mushrooming industry were ready to
write off his actions as an aberration of personal behavior, until an
investigatory audit last week revealed that over $600,000 in corporate funds
had been "abstracted"—Chairman Brophy's euphemism for the complex and
as-yet still-to-be-unraveled financial gymnastics which allowed the money's
disappearance to go unnoticed for so long, and its actual whereabouts to remain
a stern cipher at press time. Vacco's antics are being watched more seriously
now, and TTW lawyers have advised him that a full investigation, spearheaded by
the firm in cooperation with IRS, SEC, and U. S. Attorney's Office personnel,
begins next week.
"Once you see the disappearance of the
funds," Loewinson observed darkly, "pieces start falling into
place." Well, okay. Actually there's misinformation there, and Tm not
concerned as much about the kind you can pinpoint and refute on
a factual
basis as I am about
the over-all
miscarriage of meaning. The people
who write
news put a lot of
emphasis on accuracy in regard
to specifics,
which diverts attention from their
real problem. If you talk
to the
individuals whose moves have
been the subject of any
reporting that is in the least
interpretive, or who were present
at reported
events, their final assessment is almost
always the same: even when
the details are right,
even in accounts by participants,
the feeling
at the
event and the feeling given
off by
the record
don't match up. The reporter's empathy and understanding may be perfect, but the
essence's resistance to being caught
is better
than perfect, is magnetic,
is beyond
his control,
and so
reliably it will steal a nuance
and ruin
him. The honest reporter knows
he can't be honest.
Not that specific incorrect statements are any help. I
played one of my tapes over
the phone
only once, when Lewis Brophy called up, and at
that point I was still
frightened. It was only a week
after I'd stopped coming to
work. I handled the other phone
calls pretty well, I thought,
showing interest in office social life,
asking smart production questions. They seemed like fairly pleasant
phone calls to me; at
least / made an effort to
be pleasant.
So that's
where I started getting uncomfortable
about the article, and then
this thing about the Dodgers. The only time I
brought up the Dodgers was
when Marv Loewinson came out one
evening in the third week,
and then only because he was
too embarrassed
to carry
on a
normal conversation and I know
he likes baseball.
The other
thing is that even
then I wasn't "balding," but bald.
I had
no hair on my head. That's
it. Bald.
Bingo. But as I say,
what frightens me most
is the
estrangement from the real feeling,
and that's harder to
track. Take this first thing,
"simply stopped coming to
work." In the computer industry,
nobody simply stops, even if they
think they have. How could
they? Once you're using a programmed
symbolic language like that you don't
just turn your back on
it and
go quiet
when you want out. You owe that system something. Think of what it's
done for you, for
all the
people who worked where I
did: it gave them the privilege,
the opportunity,
to get
their hands on signals, frequencies, vibrations, the same stuff
that's within them, an opportunity to increase rarity and
preciousness. Predictably, they refused to
recognize that, insisting instead on
acting as if it
were all numbers. This way
they get to have mature responses, something they
always wanted. You can tell
they were once quiet
kids who tinkered, because some
of them
are still a little
creepy, but in any case
there's very little that's beyond their capacity to accept
and account
for. If something is beyond them,
they're pretty calm about that
too, because it's not in their
area and nobody's going to
bother them about it. Meanwhile their
areas are shrinking. But what
good is an expert's knowledge without
an expert's
attitude? Knowing the implications
of what
you're doing makes all the
difference in the world. What you
owe the
system, when you're ready to
go, is the respect indicated by
your expertise, the comprehension needed to invade
all areas
simultaneously and plot
the reaction.
So I
sat it
out until
I was
good enough, reading sales reports
and newspaper
headlines every day and seeing
the meanings squirm and tease like
code. When the code broke
was when I went
to Sacramento.
The last
bits of information I looked up
were two names in the
phone book, a first one
and a last one. I used
them to get out.
But remember what a
factor interference is, for the
Time people as
well as for me. Later
that year, around Christmas, Newsweek did a piece on
Jimmy, called "Webb of Music."
It mentioned that he had "developed
expensive tastes in clothes, his wardrobe running from a
$1,000 spotted silver sealskin coat to Italian hiphuggers and brown pigskin bell-bottomed
pants." But what you
want to watch are the
contradictions with the Time article. The lost girl friend who
touched off "By the Time I
Get to
Phoenix" was now the drill-team
captain at Jimmy's high school instead
of a
college classmate, and the reason for quitting college in
this version was that his
"music professor said, 'Why
don't you do yourself and
the college
a favor and try to become
a songwriter
in LA.'"
Newsweek also said "MacArthur
Park" was "overblown,"
which moves the contradictions
to the
critical level.
So it's not hard to see
how these
things get scrambled, and in one
sense it's all for the
best. One condition under which
Jimmy operates is that
his material
be strongly
sentimental, and he's in
contact with it all the
time; it gets all over
him. So hopefully he can contain
several legends. I was in
the business
of permutations, and wanted
no less
for myself.
Already there were two versions, mine
and theirs.
Let's take that into account.
Because we're going at an
elegant problem here. We can start
thinking of these discrepancies as increments
of romance. Does that help?
I sat
there, in my Navy chinos,
white polo shirt and white
canvas deck shoes, eating
my white
salad in the fogbound airport
and waiting
for my
ride. First I worried about
whether he'd show up and then
about whether he'd be a
safe driver, because I'm frightened of accidents. But as
it turned
out the
kid had a convincing
style. I asked him if
he'd been Hstening to jazz and
he said
yes. He had a jazz
system, immediately distinguishable
from rock driving, which is
what you see so much of
in LA.
The rock
driver, trusted with a standard
shift, automatically regards the
top end
of each
gear as a climactic dominant chord preceding a break
and leans
on it
for several
bars of crescendo before
he upshifts.
With Steve Golden there were no such cheap releases,
but an
extended flexibility of speed and steering
that dealt with each dark
street on its own terms. I got comfortable and then I got
sleepy. In half an hour
we were there, a
two-story white frame house on
S Street.
He led me up the stairs
to a
room with a cot. There
was also
a desk, but no chair, and
a small
table lamp with a red
lampshade on the floor
beside the bed. I went
right to sleep.
The airport was separate
from town, the distance supported
by flat farm fields.
I counted
four dead animals on the
road, a dog and three cats
or raccoons.
The fog
broke as soon as we
got away from the
airport. Steve said the airport
was in
the foggiest part of the valley,
that if there was fog
anywhere in
Sacramento on a given day, there
would be fog at the
airport. He told me the house
we were
going to had four people
living in it: himself, one other
man, and two women. He
said all four were working on
artistic and political projects. His
was devising a new reading program
for illiterate
adults. He said his household and
their friends had decided to
get me
out of
LA before the investigation
started, if I wanted to
go, because
they liked what they'd
read about me, particularly the part about playing the
tapes over the phone. The
wire services had played that up.
He laughed
about it when he mentioned
it and
turned to look at
me. I
smiled.
He found me in the coffee
shop at ten-thirty, just as
I was
about to go and
call him. He was very
tall and thin, wearing a
dark green T-shirt, blue
jeans, and black basketball sneakers. His red hair was
short and curly. He was
twenty-two or twenty-three. I immediately noticed how pleasant he
was being, and he in turn
noticed that I was relieved.
I picked
up my suitcase, the Time, and the Times, and we went out to the
car, a copper-colored Mustang,
a few
years old, and then he
drove me to the
house on S Street where
I was
going to stay with him and
his friends.
I slept
there, all night.
TWO
"I
know I need a small vacation But it don't look like rain."
—jimmy
webb, "Wichita
Lineman"
The door
to my
room opened and a boy
walked in and started taking photographs
of me
with a 35-millimeter camera. A
Pentax. He didn't knock first,
or try
to be
quiet so I wouldn't wake up;
he just
walked in, went into a
professional squat, and started
snapping. He moved the camera
away from his face between shots
so he
could size up angles without
using the view-finder while he advanced the
film with the little thumb-lever. His expression was the
anxious look of someone concentrating on detail
work, pulling his eyebrows close
together and his lower lip
between his teeth. He had
big eyes,
almost round, a short thin
mouth and straight blond hair
combed back. He was
wearing a dark blue shirt
and a
white necktie, cuffed cream
trousers and hiking shoes. He
took eight or nine pictures of
me opening
my eyes,
sitting up a little, squinting, lying down again, and
turning my face to the
pillow. His exposure was half a
second, littering the room with
short buzzes. I kept hearing them
after he took his last
picture and left.
I was staring, trying to think
of something
to say.
He was
assigning so much analysis
work to his eyes that
he never
focused on my face,
so it
was hard
to get
his attention
even though he was watching me.
I got
dressed and went downstairs. The hallway was narrow
and freshly painted light
blue. Opposite my door were
the stairs. Downstairs, on the open
left side, was a yellow
living room containing a sofa with
an Indian
bedspread on it, a brown armchair,
a table
covered with books and newspapers,
the radio, the phonograph,
and two
old floor
lamps with beige shades. To the
right of the stairs was
a wall
with a doorway in it, and
straight ahead was the front
door. The floors were clean, bare wood, and there
was a
lot of
natural light.
Through the doorway on the right,
at the
foot of the stairs, was a square orange kitchen.
The boy
with the camera sat facing
the door
at a
low wooden
table, drinking tea. To his
right was a dark pretty girl
in pigtails
whose breasts jiggled in her
Mexican blouse as she
reached for the teapot to
refill her cup.
I walked in and
stood at the other end
of the
table, near the door. She looked
up at
me.
"Hi," she
said, smiling. "I'm Pat."
"I'm Justin," I said.
The boy
looked into his teacup. "You
may remember taking my
photograph a little earlier."
He looked up, watched
me for
a few
seconds, then turned and spoke to
the girl.
"You know what you want
to do
when you go into a room
like that to shoot?" he asked her. "You
get parallel to one wall and
then pick out two or
three basic angles." Holding his
hands flat and overlapping the thumbs, he made a
rectangle with a missing side
and began
framing portions of the air
around him. His fingers swelled
slightly at the tips, forcing little
cracks between them when he
held them together. Light from
the window
behind him fell through the
cracks and hit the
table in long stripes, dimmed
and spread
a little by the distance.
He looked at me
again. "Now as a physicist,"
he said,
"you see what you're going up
against with still photography. The limitations." He
waved distractedly at the camera
in front
of him on the table. "I
wanted to get something on
your face right away, though."
"You want
some tea?" Pat asked.
"Where's Steve?"
I said.
"He's at
the reading
project," Pat said.
The boy turned toward the shelf
behind him, half standing, and brought down a blue
enameled mug from the same
set they were using. "The question
is," he said, pouring, "how
fast we can go
from stills to film."
"Film of
me?"
He nodded.
"Would you have just stayed
in LA
for the
investigation?" he asked.
"What's your name?" I said.
"Michael. You
would have been guilty, right?"
As he
pushed the cup toward
me, a
floating layer of brown residue
sifted to the bottom,
first long diamond-shaped flakes, then
threads, and finally the
loose powder. "So you couldn't
stay there."
"I guess
not," I said.
Pat saw me staring at the
tea. "It's herbal,"
she said.
It had
a raw sweet flavor and no
smell. I didn't want to
swallow the leaves. I put my
upper teeth against the edge
of the
cup to
act as a screen.
"What bothers me is
this, though," Michael said. "You
had to go into a lot
of different
computers to get the money
out, right? So there's an access
problem."
"Why computers?"
Pat asked.
"There was
no way
to get
at the
accounts for so much money except by diverting it
in the
computers," Michael said.
"So let's say you
wrote all your programs in
advance to make the changes in
the accounts."
My cup
was half
full. He refilled it and leaned
closer to me. "But it's
not just
your computer," he continued,
"that's the problem. There's the
bank, the accounting company, figure
a couple
of brokers.
So how
do you
get in?" Over his
shoulder, on the wall beside
the window,
above the stove, was
a black-and-white
mounted photograph with no border. It
was of
an overturned
highway-patrol car with broken
windows, taken on a city
street at night with a
lot of people running in the
background.
"You don't have to worry about
swallowing any of the leaves and stuff," Pat said.
"It's just herbs." Michael made
a shutter adjustment and took a
shot of me putting down
my teacup.
"But most of those computers have
the phone
terminals now, for receiving
from other units," Michael was
saying. "And they record
the entries,
which is another problem. But
what if you put
together some sort of independent
equipment of your own that got
you in
past the defenses by imitating
the authorized signal? Then
you could
put your
program through. It's all audio frequencies,
just like long distance. So
with the right whistles you can
go right
through. What we should do
now is to get as much
footage together as possible before
you have to leave the country
and I
have to go to Chicago."
"Leave the
country?" I said.
"Michael got a grant to shoot
the Democratic
convention," Pat said. "I'm
doing car pools for it."
"Which gives us about a month
to shoot
here," Michael said.
"To shoot
what?" I asked.
"Yours is our main story. Your
theft, or the technology of the theft, which is
going to be very important
soon. And I fold that in
with my convention stuff after
I edit—"
"I can't
be in
any movie,"
I said.
"Why not?"
Pat said.
"Because I'm
hiding."
"Ah," said
Michael. "That's where you need
me." "Why?" I said.
"Because you can hide things in
film that you can't hide
in stills. Film pictures don't stay
around to be investigated. Once you get in there
you can
disappear, right? It's like: how
often do you get to say
'Life has been passing me
by' and
make it stick? Does that make
sense?"
"No," I said.
"Okay," he
said without stopping, "try this.
Nobody gets to hide anymore. Physically.
I mean,
if it
was you
they wanted they'd have you; we
weren't that sneaky about getting
you up
here in the first
place."
"Was that
you on
the phone?"
I said.
"Only it's not you they're looking
for. They're looking for your signal,
which at this point is
in and
out of
circuits like nothing." He moved his
head as if watching something
very fast. "Hundredth of a second,
bang. And they can't get
it to
stand still. It's like
a moving
picture. So you're already hidden.
Now if
you want
to stay hidden, you have to keep putting
out code.
Up there."
He put
his hand
out, between the window and the
wall, then pulled it in
toward himself, so that the shadow
was sharp,
then blurry, then gone. "On
the screen."
"All I did was
leave my job," I said
absently. "Yeah, but why?"
he said.
"Because I couldn't concentrate."
I was
watching Pat. Her breasts knocked together
as she
spread some apple butter on
a piece of bread; then they
wiggled back to stillness. But forget the breasts, just
look at the action itself,
the decaying
harmonic motion. Pick a nipple,
or a
pore or something, and it's
doing it, under the
sheer white cloth of the
blouse. This is the charm that
pulls you into physics to
begin with: things know what to
do, all
by themselves.
In this
case they were dividing the motion into smaller and
smaller percentages of the original,
so that
someone can plot it and
it's perfectly regular, but that's later, after the fact.
When I was fifteen I
was reading
a book in which the author
said that some falling object,
I forget
what, "described an arc." I loved that, "described," because the
object was telling how the
arc looked
without saying anything. The pure action
has no
contents. Pat put down the
knife and it started
again.
"You think you could get that
money now," Michael was saying, "or part of it?"
"What for?"
I said.
"We'll need some equipment," he said,
"and you'll have to make some
more of your boxes if
we're going to get the
story down."
"You don't understand," I said. "I'm
not even
going to do this. I haven't
even admitted doing what you're
talking about."
He stood and picked up his
camera. "That's the end of
a roll," he said. "I have
to go
develop these. Let me make
you some prints. I'll want to
get some
more on your face before
we go into shooting," and then
he was
gone.
After all
this happened, I started seeing
literature on the so-called phone
freaks, who had figured out
that long-distance telephone calls
are connected
by computers
and that
the computers
are cued
into action by audio frequencies.
The frequencies
connected the home-phone line to
the long-distance
lines while the call was registered
for billing.
So by
imitating those frequencies, either
through human whistling or homemade
electronic boxes, the freaks
were able to bypass the
equipment. Consequently their calls seemed
to originate
not at
their own telephones but in the
unpopulated distance between terminals, popping up in the
middle somewhere and making only
the second part of
the trip.
Free service, and then the
compounded manipulation of frequencies and equipment, stacking connections
and calling
all the
way around
the world
for nothing.
Still later, it became
public knowledge that many business
computers have telephone capabilities,
set up
so that
a programmer could have access to
the memory
banks and processing facilities,
using his authorized equipment to
identify himself by producing the
right frequencies. Once he heard
the entry tone coming
back at him, he was
in, and
could then introduce or withdraw material
by continuing
to use
his equipment, which translated
his instructions
from programming language into frequencies,
which the computer could retranslate
over the phone. Soon enterprising
unauthorized individuals discovered
that the tones and equipment
could be duplicated, and they were
impersonating the password-holders, plugging information
in and
out to
alter memories. Entire programs
were being stolen. Every phone
was a
potential terminal for every computer,
given a widespread knowledge of the technical basics.
None of this should have been
surprising. Once you get used to
the idea
of everything
being made of frequencies, you can circumvent nearly any
defense, and the kind of
people who can make beeping boxes
from hi-fi scraps have been
used to that idea for years.
But when you gain entry to
one place,
you leave
another. Given that you
know what you're doing for
what it is, you finally find, without time to
gear up, that now you are the signal, with no weight,
no shape,
an instantaneous
lifespan, and almost infinite speed! Studying
the equipment
for a
long time makes the difference. The basic working part,
the place
where you spend most of your
time on the inside, is
a minuscule
chip covered with enough
tiny hardware for one operation
or storage. You can always tell
when you're in a memory,
because the turns and straightaways
are special.
That's the wonderful thing about
working with computers: that you
can distinguish
a memory
from anything else.
Not that it's all smooth sailing
out there
in the
nexus. There are these terrible searing
flashes that you recognize as
floods of electric impulses going through
at the
same time as you. But in
time you learn to recognize
other things as well, and
when you look from
overhead at a lighted city
or a
network of rivers, or through a
microscope at the compounding connections of nerves forming
up into
a brain,
you make
memory's jaunty salute, snapping
two fingers
from your forehead at the
first chill.
At any rate, what scared me
then was that Michael should
have figured out my
operation in the summer of 1968, when I was the first, when there
had been
no publicity
of any
dimension. Other systems designers eventually
unwound what I'd done, as I
knew they would, but Michael
was a
layman who could think ahead, something
I didn't
need because I'd barely started formulating the practice of
this aberrant wave of science
and already
someone was ready to apply
and appropriate
that practice on behalf
of social
theory. Einstein's dilemma, Nobel's,
spending years of their lives
trying to isolate stable solutions to contain their guilt,
generating shock waves of embarrassing
gestures, making things worse. I
went into the living room
and turned
on the
radio. In the summer of
1968, if you turned
on the
radio and waited, you would
hear either news about political rioting
of some
kind or a song by
Jimmy Webb. You almost couldn't listen
for any
length of time without hearing one
or the
other. In this case it
was "Paper
Cup," the follow-up to
"Up, Up, and Away" by the Fifth Dimension.
Jimmy was hot and was using
it on
me. That
whole week, living in that house
in Sacramento,
I knew
every move he was making without being told because
it was
coming to me on the air.
Jimmy alone, late at night,
surrounded by soft light from the pool lamps as
he tortures
chords from the electric organ in the downstairs living room of the
twenty-two-room house no more
than five miles away from
where my wife and children are sleeping. The drill
team captain and the college
classmate enter through opposite
doors, peppy ghosts moving in mirror
synch and talking with one
voice, begging Jimmy to give it
up and
come upstairs. He closes his
eyes. Later he gives them thirty-five
minutes each. But right now
he's writing. He hits a
key, cocks an ear, and
hums, stretching the pigskin along his
thigh with a fast stab
at a
pedal. Jimmy has told a newsmagazine
that he's worried about staying
fresh, about not getting into a
bag. Keeping those reporters away
from the house is
the best
insurance, but he doesn't know
that yet. It's wonderful to have
incredible facility. He still does.
He just checked. But now the
pressure is on: nobody wants
Jimmy to write an
unsuccessful song. There are friends
and colleagues everywhere now, and for their
sake he has to sand
his fingers before sitting
down to play. But what's
most remarkable is that one
problem I have, living there
in Sacramento that first week, is
this intense lethargy, a much
more serious problem than
the intermittency
of concentration
I get in LA, and I
begin to feel that Jimmy
has gotten
desperate and unscrupulous and is
tapping me.
Remember that we live in a
world arrayed by frequencies and that when we move,
we are
introducing more vibrations to a surrounding
that already resonates. Everything conveyed within the body is
by rates
of vibration,
and if
someone who appreciates all this encodes
a specific
series of signals into a
camouflage of music—well, now you have your
first link. As long as those
songs were on the radio,
in the
air, I was wide open, whether I listened or
not. And when I did
listen, the overload of directed energy
was tangible.
People seem to think that a
computer is a uniquely sterile
and impervious domain, no
noise in the programs, no
dust, no static. What they forget
is that
every system has deposits forming at points of heat
and motion.
Similarly, there are those in every
field who want to be
experts, who will take the
risk of touching the
essential material, getting light or
sound or some other vibration on
their hands. Jimmy was aiming
those songs at me,
keying them to my entry
frequencies, so that he could tap
information—comparing notes, in
effect, since we were really in
the same
field. Jimmy was a good
working model of an
expert because he understood what he was doing. The
expert is one type of
secret agent, a special case. Like the others, he
goes where nobody knows him
and where he remembers nothing, and
he takes
another name, or another form, even
if it
means becoming a physical outlaw,
a refugee from the guidelines of matter and energy—whatever's
necessary to eject himself
to the
place where he can get
at the
stuff. The findings are
in on
this one, fellas. Le deluge, c'est moi. And while the other agents have
to take
their capsules rather than tell you
anything, we are meant to
talk your ear off until we
get back
to where
we started.
Standing there
in that
living room full of morning
light as the song ended on
the radio,
I shuddered.
I was
thinking ahead. There's one
frequency, and I've known this
for as
long as I can remember, this
one frequency
by which
the cells
of the body and the objects
in the
Une of vision are held
together. And that's the one
you never
hear because you're in it,
you know that line
of reasoning?
And I
became frightened, standing in
that living room seven years
ago, by the inexplicable certainty that there exists
equipment for turning that frequency off, and that the
equipment works.
I was
sitting on the cot, eating
the second
maple bar, when Michael brought the
prints up. Being unmounted left
them open to stiff buckles and
ripples across the surface of
the paper. None of the images
took all of its sheet.
They sat at odd angles, their
edges passing into watery white
borders with only intermediary blurs. He
was doing
something wrong in the baths. You
could see it best in
those blank margins, where the set
of the
emulsion on the paper was
most clearly visible, the chemicals' arrested sliding leaving rings
like trapped cells. The sheets felt
gummy.
In the first two pictures I
turned my head from the
pillow toward the door, squinting. In the third one
I lifted
my head
and brought it forward.
I was holding them. Michael stood
at my
side, his hands hovering. He brought
a finger
down on the edge of
the third
print before I could
flip past it.
"You see
what you're doing here?" he said.
"Did you
want this much contrast?" I said.
"See the way you're bringing your head
up?" He jerked his own head
up fast,
on the
diagonal. "See how it pulls
your eyes open really wide?" I looked at my
eyes in the photograph: they were frightened, and trying
to get
me to
look into them. I closed my
eyes. "Okay, these next two,"
Michael went on, pulling away the
third print and pushing it
to the
back of the stack, holding the
fourth one above the fifth
so I
could see them both at once.
I opened
my eyes
and looked.
"Dropping the head halfway
and then
coming up again," he said.
"See what you're doing
with your neck here? I'm
going to want that."
"Let's forget
about the movie thing, okay?"
I said.
"I'm really tired." I tried
to hand
the prints
back to him.
"You can keep this set," he said. "I did
two. Look, why don't you come
downstairs and we'll screen some
pictures?" He was talking
to my
face in the fifth print,
which was at the top of
the stack.
The eyes
were closed.
Trying to
assemble a consensus on Michael's
movies, I've relied on available literature:
film journals, radical magazines, no very popular reviewers because
Michael has never had that
wide an audience. I
would have tried to do
it all
myself, but my critical language is
far from
adequate. And even though I
own prints of all
the films
and have
seen most of them fifteen
or twenty times, I
find that long sections of
each one refuse to come to
mind in any recognizable form unless they're on
the screen in front of me.
Somehow they resist not only
memorization but simple recollection.
At any
rate:
In the early pictures (everything before Cloud
Chamber), Michael establishes his comfort
with conventional rhythmic cutting
and planned
sequence, at least on a
shot-by-shot basis. Only in a larger
framework—that of plot
and continuity—is
the interference felt. In
Governments (1966), Ellen
(Cathy Lewin) tells the hitchhiker (Bobby Roy, who later
turns up in Cloud Chamber as the
guidance counselor) a story about
her having to leave a house
just as a shipment of
drugs is about to arrive there.
Then, during what we would
take to be the next
morning (the hitchhiker, who's been sleeping on
Ellen's couch, goes out;
Ellen dresses and leaves immediately
afterward), the episode she's described
as a
memory takes place in the present.
No suggestion
is made
that this is a flashback
or that she remembers either the
incident or having talked about
it. From the use
of an
omniscient viewpoint to trap her
within the action, it's unmistakable that the event she's
described and the one taking place
are identical.
Claire Clouzot wrote a
long piece about Governments for Film Quarterly, calling Ellen
a direct
representative of Michael's authority and "a fully
realized person in the director's
terms because she creates her
experience by anticipating it,"
the first
step toward creating in the
films "a disruption of sequential time only insofar as
a simultaneity,
and thus
an equality, are imparted to all
memories and events."
But in Cloud Chamber (1967), a single action—the
guidance counselor takes the list
of drug-users'
names from Celia (Sue Rice, who
is Tinda
in Apparatus of the Carnival [1969] —is staged
and filmed
four different ways. Lines are
exchanged and visual relationships reversed; the office space
contracts and expands as
Michael changes point-of-view and angle coverage
from one rendition to the
next. Sympathy, malevolence, detachment,
and cordiality
are permuted.
Increasingly, everything takes too much or
too little
time to happen, and sequence
is abandoned.
Philip T. Hartung, questioning this method, says the
"literal accumulation of alternatives fabricates a contrived
uncertainty, a forced deprivation of judgments."
In a series of five scenes
at the
end, Celia decides to leave
town after the third
confrontation between the students and
the construction crew working
in the
vacant lot across the street from the school. These
last scenes, taking about twenty
minutes, are silent (the
student ringleader, Fred Spiegel, asks
Celia earlier: "How would
you like
it if
things were quiet around here?"). In those twenty minutes,
Michael drops both minute-by-minute
time and continuity entirely. In
the middle
of a take, he lets the
camera fall, with what looks
like arbitrary abandon, into some
object or stretch of color
and lets
it rest there, insistently, for too
long; that is, until the
viewer's ability to watch
it comfortably
elapses and it has become
meaningless as an image.
The urgency
of boredom
is enforced
by the
knowledge that, all this time,
things are happening to Celia,
and we're
not seeing
all of
it. She's
changing her clothes, finding the bus
station, being stopped by Terry's
policeman father (Mark Pauley). But
our ability
to follow
her, the connection that lets us
invade her privacy, is now
faltering and discontinuous, and so we
find Manny Farber writing that
Michael has "pumped the movie full of
manufactured space, trying to liberate the
Rice character into a life
that continues when the movie is
over ... he wants to
show us that he appreciates
the transciency
of his
vision." These processes are familiar devices in Adult Mail (the changing
of the
depositions from scene to scene)
and Rotogravure, both done
in 1968, but are then applied
only transitionally in Scaled Down (1969) and
Positron (1972).
Since Governments
Michael has
had a
consistent crew and acting company, enough
of whom
can get
free for a few months at any given time
so that
he can
always start production on short
notice.This way it's possible for
each film to take place in a city where
a major
political or social crisis is
underway: the drug scandal and
sabotage of construction by the
students in Cloud Chamber, the newspaper
strike in Government,
the pornography
trial which is in the
forefront of Adult
Mail, and so
on. There
are several
uses of this motif beyond the obvious effect of
guaranteeing the inclusion of political
material. For one thing, an
attempt is made as work
on the production progresses to work
the dispute
into the plot as much as
possible, to give the characters
affiliations on one side or another,
even to have the actors
pursue these affiliations off-camera when possible. Thus Michael
insures that the true story is
mated with his outline, such
that the characters will be responsible
to unpredictable
events beyond his control. What is most striking about
this is to see the
actors involved, on film, with people
who aren't
playing parts at all.
When Michael
has a
partial script completed (usually written
by himself
in collaboration
with Spiegel or Ted Blau),
he begins watching the papers for
an accessible
city where there is trouble he
can use.
Once his decision is made,
he can
get the full company and a
van full
of equipment
to the
location within three days.
There they rent a house
they can live in for
the duration of the
production, and afterward Michael takes
the film back to
Sacramento for synching and editing.
On the first night in town,
when everyone else has begun
moving in, Michael goes
to whatever
bar or
restaurant is said to be a
hangout for one faction in
the dispute.
He picks
a table or space from which
he can
see as
much of the room as
possible, then starts circulating
and attracting
as many
people as he can back to
his position.
He buys
drinks and food. Every night he
comes back, treating people and
making friends, playing down
the film
as a
project, just asking if he
can take some pictures
at what
is expected
to be
an important
meeting or confrontation. Then he goes to
the other
side's place and does the same
thing. He finds it useful
to offer
cigarettes. He buys a pack
of unfiltered
kings, a pack of filters,
a pack of menthol filters. Smiling,
he opens
a pack
one-handed without looking, his
eyes on the door of
a bar
or a
MacDon-ald's, his thumb pulling the
red tearstrip
across the top of the
cellophane wrapper as he
watches for faces, reconstructing the clippings in his mind.
The probable reason that
I lose
parts of the films is
that I never really see them
to begin
with. What happens is that
the timing of the fight's variations
provides a way out, to
places I don't remember. To locations:
a dim
stately bar where cold glasses leave perfect water rings
on the
hand-rubbed oak; a beautiful street in
the financial
district of an old European
city where I walk,
alone, after dark; empty spotless
train stations where my only
choice is to wait. The
silence in the movies is layered
so carefully
as to
provide a cover; I learn
to fall forward again after years
of steadying
myself. It's not like being stupefied by Jimmy's songs
when they were on the
radio and it's not like traveling
by signal.
Equations don't work. But the surroundings,
including the screen in front
of me,
fold up, and I go in
slowly, brushing other lives, my
head down, my hands wrapped together
under my chin.
They smuggled
me my
mail: Gourmet, Artjorum, Business Week, Vintage, Neiman-Marcus, Hammacher-Schlemmer,
Pfaelzer Brothers, Harry and
David, Greenland Studios, the Wisconsin Cheese Man, Sunset House,
and our
house organ, TTW
On-the-Grow-Notes, published the same day the Time article came out. I looked at
the Notes for news of myself.
Michael warns that when you mention
a splice
to most
people, they think of the
tic of
light and missed syllable in
a bad
print, not realizing that
splicing is any joining of
two pieces
of film, and as such is
the basic
method of editing and composing
a finished
print. Furthermore, an expert editor
can splice
one sequence to another
with no suggestion that an
omission has occurred. When he wants
to drop
a line
of dialogue,
he connects what come before to
what comes after and when
the film is screened, the line
in question
never existed. So the general
supposition is that this technique
lowers the "stakes" of filmmaking by lessening the number
of variables
and giving
the editor the power
to regulate
the action
even after the fact.
But Michael reminds us
that the opposite is true:
splicing increases the stakes,
because the unadvised exclusion of
a breath or gesture that belongs
in the
film will disturb everyone in the audience because they
know exactly what belongs there, whether they know this
consciously or not. They know
better than the director,
and as
of that
omission he has lost them.
Michael was in his room on
the first
floor behind the kitchen, putting away
Cloud Chamber, which he
had been
showing me half an
hour before. It was the
only white room in the house.
A wire
ran overhead
with strips of 35-millimeter film clipped to it. On
the desk
were a typewriter and an
enlarger and a lot
of papers,
and on
the opposite
wall was an old porcelain sink.
"Hello?" he
said when I came in.
"I want
to see
that again," I said. "I
missed some."
But he continued putting it away.
"So now you know you're
out," he said. "Now
that you've read it, you
believe it. Without a trace."
He shook
his head.
"What do you suppose they'll
use that space for?
Someone who has no idea
what he's doing, right?"
He turned off his
floor lamp, a household bulb
set in
the kind of conical silver fixture
used for movie lighting. Now
the only light in
the room
was from
a small
desk lamp, and the shadows of
his fingers
were long on the wall
as he
put the
three reels in their
box.
"You peeked,"
I said,
sitting down on the bed.
He shrugged, then went
to a
shelf over the sink and
took down his Pentax. He flattened
his back
against the wall opposite me,
took a step forward, knelt,
and began
taking pictures.
"Won't it
be too
dark?" I said.
THREE
"I hear you singing in the wires."
—jimmy webb, "Wichita Lineman"
Very soon
now, any month, information will start disappearing from the memory banks
of all
the computers
in the
world. This won't be
a matter
of anyone
deliberately tapping or erasing the material.
It will
find its own way out.
It is
possible for holes in cards
to heal,
for leads
to lead
nowhere, for magnetic particles positioned on tape to align
themselves with silence. Those data never
wanted in to begin with,
and now,
all by themselves, they are going
to desert.
By the
process of elimination, the same few
names will come up again
and again, every day a smaller
variety of names printing out
with greater frequency of repetition until finally there are
no more
names available. I have
all this
legal pressure on me, or
I could give you the names
of people
who know
what's going to happen and are
getting out of the business
already.
I had
my first
inkling of this in a
conversation with Michael on the first
morning after I told him
we could
go ahead
with shooting. I'd gone
out in
Steve's car and gotten us
some doughnuts at a
shop on the mall, and
now Michael
was saying
that it would make
more sense to pick a
new target
for action
by signals, and to
follow that progress in the
film, than to re-stage
the action
I had
already run in LA.
"You know
what's computerized now?"
he asked
me.
"What?"
"All the
draft stuff," he said. "Including local?"
He nodded. 'The Sacramento
board just got it last
year. Pat's action group had this
girl who was clerking in
there undercover and she was
ripping off a few cards
every week to see if that
would throw it off, just
taking five or six out
at random."
"Stealing the
cards wouldn't make any difference,"
I said,
"there's an override that
goes back and duplicates the information if the
remaining cards are in sequence.
I worked
on it.
What did she do
with them?"
"What, the cards? I don't know,"
said Michael. "But you could do
the same
thing to the draft computer
that you did to the others,
mess it up so everybody
comes out ineligible or something. And then we could
make the movie around that,
just have you—"
"Aren't all
those records duplicated somewhere, though?"
He thought a minute,
spreading a dust of confectioner's
sugar on the tabletop,
then said, "Well, in order
to do
the movie with you really doing
it, you
have to make the equipment
again and make up the
programs and everything, right? So then
the movie
shows how it's done, and
we start
screenings in the fall—I mean,
this is still a movie,
it's not just a training film or anything, but
we show
basically how it's done and then
all of
a sudden
next winter you have all
these people building their own equipment
and going
into their own boards and then Rand and Dow
and all
those—"
"It'll take a couple of weeks
to make
the equipment,"
I said.
"I want
that time for preproduction anyway, and we have
to order some new
cameras and lights. A lot
of my
stuff doesn't even work now."
"Okay," I said, "are
there people who can steal
us some
printouts and things?"
What's amazing, looking back
on this—watching
for behavior
here—is that I wasn't thinking
about the politics at all.
The politics became the
pretext, retroactively, for what I'd
done, including the embezzling,
but not
until the trial got under way
in LA,
and by
that time there was the
June 20 Committee (the day I
got arrested).
All these
people say that the movie project
was a
wet dream
on Michael's
part and a bitter gesture on
mine because of being ignored
in Notes, but all I could think of then
was the
idea of having so many
strangers working from my
instructions, a new kind of
technician who—with Michael's help—would appreciate fully the implications of what they were
doing when they worked with
frequencies. That was all
I wanted.
It was
during that conversation that I
got excited
for the
first time about making all
the computers go dumb, and the
film seemed like the first
step. It's taken us seven years
to realize
that it works best when
no one pushes, that the tendency
of languages
is to
unwrite themselves, that codes will
go for
their yellow capsules rather than
be broken. But I
got very
optimistic then and told Michael
everything I was thinking. In
return he took some notes
in his
spiral notebook, nodding, tapping
the table,
taking the flow of material like a telegraph terminal.
When I was done he
put the notebook away and, looking
straight at me, said, "That's
really plausible," and then
we began
to plot
the movie.
Midday in
a rundown
part of Sacramento. Vacco (myself)
enters a phone booth
at a
gas station
and makes
two calls,
his voice lost to us through
the glass.
When he's finished he runs
across the street to
a weathered
Mustang with a young man
at the wheel. Vacco gets in.
They drive away quickly but
not recklessly. There are
no other
people in the sequence, which
consists of about ten
takes: we pan into the
booth with Vacco and stop as
he shuts
the door.
The calls
are covered
by two
alternating medium shots, one low-angle,
one head-on,
with a long establishing shot of
the block
inserted while he's dialing the second one. Then there's
another long shot for his
exit from the booth and the
run across
the street—same
scope as the establishing shot but
from the opposite angle—followed by an insert of Vacco's
hand on the car door,
a high-angle
medium of him getting
in and
sitting down, tracking forward a foot
for his
short conversation with the driver
(again, inaudible; the only sound
on the
track is wind and a
truck offscreen), switching over
to a
medium shot of Vacco from
over the driver's shoulder
as the
car starts
pulling away from the curb, and
then back to the long
shot as the car gets
two blocks away from us and
starts to turn right onto
a cross
street. It's black and
white, with good focus, too
much grain, and nice steady dollying
and panning.
The new
equipment made a big
difference, even to the point
of smoothing
out the
shooting style. The only
hand-held shot is the one
taken from over Steve's shoulder, a
shot which boxes my face
into a triangle formed by
the corner
of his
window and the line of
his jacket from his neck to
the point
of his
shoulder. There's just an instant of
camera jiggle, where my head,
a bald
ball at three-quarters to the camera,
freefloats in the dark of
the car,
then regains its equilibrium,
the up-and-down
motion settling out to an intangible
level by the last second
of the
take.
That was the only part of
the planned
movie that ever got shot. I
took the cards and printouts
from the girl who met
me at the bar so I
could look them over, but
the bar
was too
dark so she said she'd steal
some more and we'd get
that part another day.
In the rest of Michael's outline,
Vacco goes from the phone
booth to a bar
and meets
a Student
Mobe girl who gives him
stolen cards and printouts
from the draft board. He
opens an active file on the
language and hardware being used.
In an
interview, he explains which books
and journals
to read
for information
on programming
languages and how to design
programs that will introduce crippling
discrepancies into any standing program, and
how to
feed those programs to computers
over any telephone. I was
worried about this last part
because it's so much
talk and I was afraid
it would
drag, but Michael was going to
intercut portions of his Chicago
footage, which was very good,
by the
way.
At an electronics hobby shop in
the Sacramento
suburbs, Vacco buys all
the necessary
parts for his frequency-making equipment. We see
him assembling
the box
and compiling
charts that match the
draft-board computer's programming
language with tables of
frequencies. Later he sits in
an armchair, playing beeps from the
box into
a home
telephone as he reads from a
list of numbers titled "June
birthdays— flat feet."
Everything on the film was to
have been real, including that
last sequence. Our intention
was expertise,
which is why we spent almost
every minute of the two
preproduction weeks together, talking to
almost nobody else and teaching
each other all the craft we
could before shooting started. It
was no
accident that Michael was in
my room,
with a camera, when the
arresting FBI agent came
to the
house a few days after
we shot the phone booth stuff.
So Jimmy
stopped writing big hits. Very
soon after the arrest, a
matter of a few months,
his share
of airplay
dropped as quickly as it had
risen and hasn't changed much
since.
I've never believed the story about
the Student
Mobe girl being an informer, nor
do I
think it really matters. If
anything, it's my fault for
not recognizing
how much
power can go into a small
space, like three minutes of
music. The trick is that with
information you need the construction
and combination
of symbols,
which gives you that misleading
multiplicity again, but power
is a
single sustained tone with nothing
to say. You can get a
lot of
it in
a small
place. At the time of
Jimmy's hits, several of
us were
on orders
every minute. It didn't feel that
different from normal life, but
then Jimmy's technique was sophisticated and had distance as
a cover,
so it
could be forever before
we pin
it down.
What worries
me is
that he must think I'm
angry for the way he singled
me out.
I'd like
to tell
him that
I understand,
that I'm not mad,
but they
won't even let me talk
to him
on the phone. The last time
I called
up they
said he was working on a new solo album.
I have
that one. All it is
is music,
like everything else he's
done since that summer. I
don't know if anyone's done the
actual research yet of digging
out the
lyrics and melodies from during and
after that period, I mean
complete copies of both sets,
but that
would be an interesting project for someone and probably
not too
unwieldy.
Anyway he's stopped, so it's one
of two
things: either the connection left him
or he
decided he'd gotten what he
needed and it would be safest
if he
played it quiet for a
while, and if he was turning
things back over to me
there was no need to
have the waves coming
off the
radio anymore. The third possibility,
of Jimmy
running up against the program
that incurs silence, wide silence, silence
in the
balance of matter, is also
worth considering, and there's
the chance
that after he got cocky he
got scared.
Certainly, the blatancy of the
clues he was dropping at one
time is amazing: all the
lyrics to "Wichita Lineman,"
the one
about the folk technician who is "searching in the
sun for
another overload," but especially the arrangement (which one of
the newsmagazines
called "the wow-wow-wow sound
of wind
whipping through the wires" but which is in fact
the completely
wireless heartbeat of freefloating
control waves). It's clear, looking
back to that summer, that I
got the
pictures of him at work
for a
reason: they were feedback. Every transmission
has two
ends. I can understand his reason
for keeping
low profile
now. It's ridiculous to ask
him to share his findings
when he's already pointed the way to so much,
and it's
important to understand that for
someone in his position
the situation
is getting
harder, not easier. It was during
the last
part of the trial that
"Galveston," which is
"about" a Texas
boy in
Vietnam but actually is concerned with this feedback phenomenon
('7 can see her standing by
the water
. .
.") got hot. It was
the instrumental
tag, the music with
nothing said alongside it, that
stung the hardest. I should have
known exactly what was happening
the first time I heard it—out
on bail,
going to lunch in Marv
Loe-winson's car—and started crying.
So when will the real facts
become known, if ever? Should
the main signal be
closed off, who will know
how to
get from
one step to the
next? How will we know
it's happening? What are the five
danger signs of dematerialization? How do we prepare? How do we prevent?
How do
we get
back the power we must have
had once,
and need
now, to screen in advance
everything that goes on
the radio,
everything that passes a tape head,
everything that is said to
us everywhere
we go?
What happens if we
know everything we need to
know and still, in the most
crucial of instants, our concentration
slips and leaves us staring at
what we were never supposed
to see?
There's still
this difficulty with written accounts,
the real
sensations peeling off and
fluttering away, the specifics invoked
just to make encouraging noise. So let me
close with the film of the
arrest. The film per se
is only
fifteen seconds long, but I had
Michael freeze a frame in
the middle,
a process
whereby you print one frame
over and over so that
it appears
that the projector has stopped.
After the door opens and
I walk toward it, as the
man in
the suit
comes in and reaches into his pocket for the
little billfold with the badge
in it,
there's one image you'll
see for
a long
time, almost a minute. It's me and the cop—his
front, my back—both of us
from the waist up, each getting
half the frame, a moderately
low angle
so that we find
ourselves looking up into his
face. We're drawn there anyway by
that diagonal composition with the
chair behind me and
my arm
coming up. Look at his
eyes. I know there's a lot
of grain
and a
slight softening of fine due
to camera movement, which is why
I asked
Michael to stretch it out. Look
carefully at the cop's face
as he
brings his head up, the skin
stretching a little against his
jaw, his mouth bunching as he
starts to talk. I wish
we had
sound on this, because there's
a slight
crack in his voice, but
anyway: the eyes. There's an expression
of fear,
which is to be expected
because, let's face it, taking
orders when you don't know
where they're coming from is at
once the easiest and the
most exacting kind of obedience,
for me
or him or the girl
or whoever.
If you look closely at the
right eye, the one on
our left,
there's the tiniest streak of moisture
coining out of the corner
and sliding about halfway down the
side of his nose. Look
very carefully because this
is the
last information we get. Soon
the action starts again and he
turns his head away and
that's it. Can everybody see?