I AWOKE to the light of a gleaming 10. The sharp rays from the great numeral kicked my face hard and whammed me up to consciousness there where I lay on the plastic, surrounded by my equipment and the several maps and instructions. Gaudy night-sight arms on the small face of my wrist-based etern-tell proclaimed that it was not yet midnight. So it was still the seventh day of great August, my day of days! in my month of months! the time I began the Battle. And now to move into a new phase, clothed in steel and ready READY. . . .
The bedlam ripping and screaming, I hove in close, plop-plip-plap-plop over the homeless track. Had ever a King moved in more ignominiously? On his birthday!? Had ever a King on any day moved in more determinedly, or with better armor to last him through the long fray? The armor was I, in this case, new-metal the bulk of my bodily splendor, with flesh-strips few and played-down. The bedlam was the warning devices screaming and crying that some unidentified object was moving in toward Stronghold 10’s outermost wall. And that unidentified object had well better be no worse than neutral when it reached the “warning of the line” or it would be less than NOTHING in less time than flunking of it would require in the fastest new-metal brain.
I was SOME better than neutral! I was the owner of Stronghold 10. I WAS STRONGHOLD 10!—in a certain manner of thinking, according to the Moderan plan. But how tell them? GOD, let us not be losing this battle before an issue was joined. GOD, let us not be felled in front of the castle, shot and shelled, Dear God, to ultimate riddled NOTHING for nothing; let us not be blown to high skies and all winds before we have seen our throne. My thoughts started working the chances; my brain started sloshing hard. Why had the doctors not told me? Had I missed some instructions? Was it a trick? Was it some grim coalition of Fate and Mischance meant to undo me before I should be a King?
I saw myself dead, just for a moment, a scrap pile done and down cold in front of the Promise, a sprawled wronged voyager, innocent killed, misjudged. It was tempting. YES! it was tempting to let them do it. Self-pity was working hard. Oh, something there is within us sometimes, in each of us, that makes us WANT to fall mangled before the foe, to just lie there, to let the just world come and cry at the wrong, the terrible wrong. The whitest knight of them all down on sword and shield, the shadowy things laughing and all the decent world doing its tears—how satisfying! To think of for a little while. Then my real rock self came back, the granite cliffs closed ranks, all the ledges, precipices, boulders, and big saw-toothed outcroppings stood up in thunder to be counted to the world and shadows were cast and lours big and dark as they could be were done while I push-button roared HELL’S FIRE! and HELL’S FIRE! In this case there wouldn’t be anything to weep over, nothing tangible in front of the guns, when the terrible blasting was done. And even should there be, they’d just scoop me into some old disposal pot for scrap metal for a flesh-strip cook-off boil. To keep up and moving; never fall to the ground; never let them see any sign of a weakness—that’s the only way to deal with this real world of evil, danger and antagonism most sore.
I came back to the self that had bluffed them all the long way, that had stood them off in their cowardice all the miles up to Landry and beyond. I filled the breath bags full as they would stick of the scarlet vapor-shield air, worked hinges and braces of legs to stand me to tallest tall, brought the wide-range Moderan vision down to alternate pinpoint scowl and arrogant look of dare-you-now, flexed my new-metal flailers in purest nonchalance, like the champion boss cat on the block lazily blinking and shooting his claws in and out of sheath in the Old Days, toyed a bit at my breastplate door, meaning to hint that dire things of havoc might be there stored, and moved on down toward the “warning of the line,” knowing full well that it was high noon in my career now and the sun now could set very fast and send my future to the dark . . . Did I hear a titter somewhere of new-metal robots laughing?
The “warning of the line” was coming up COMING UP—NOW. I had read enough about Moderan to know what that meant. It meant the last chance to turn back, if you were alone and vulnerable. If you had great power behind you, somewhere over the way, anticipatory, sneak-placed, back of a hill, it was the time to beam them there that secret signal and the exact coordinates to thump the foe, then stand aside while your blasters took out this arrogance that had dared to confront you with a “warning of the line.” If you were alone and vulnerable you might just stop and stare for awhile, a safe distance back, give them some minor obscene gesture that probably wouldn’t be enough to prompt them to wipe you out, and then perhaps you could pop up a taunt balloon you had taken out of the baggage space just under your breastplate door and let them know you’d be back with the blaster battalions later and two hand guns of your own, at some subsequent time—CREEPS, SCUM, COWARDS! YES!
But I had a “different” problem. I had a problem that was for laughs, really, except it was the kind of predicament that could get one pulverized, and that with no reconsiderations at all. Perceiving the bristling gun lids raised, the launchers poised all ready and all the walls alive with jumping strident wailing of warning and threat, I decided not to laugh. But being a person aware of the basic comedy in all things in this ridiculous world, I couldn’t help a tight little smite on thinking how things were. Here was I, Stronghold 10 itself in a certain manner of thinking, according to the Moderan plan, part and parcel of the threat that now stood me off, moving in on myself and being held at bay by myself, perhaps to be blown to NOTHING by this self if I persisted in my defiant forward march toward myself. A man killed by his own self before he could reach himself, stood off and threatened in front of the glorious union of selves. Well, that has happened, and often, I suppose. But this seemed, at least potentially, a little different kind of killing of one’s self. And yet, could I retreat from myself now, and ever face myself again in any mirror anywhere? Chancing, in the long years to come, by reservoirs for run-off, say, the water calm and placid, fixed for mirrors, what would I do? Run screaming? Turn off my head? Switch my eyes dark? Oh, when one cannot face the mirrors anywhere, what of a man is left?
So I kept walking, moving in on myself, moving down toward Stronghold 10, inching inexorably toward the “warning of the line.” The bedlam intensified as I moved nearer, the high loud alerts increased in number until they meshed and were a strange piercing buzz. Oh, weird unearthly high drone like no sound ever that I had ever heard before. What a music to die by! It lifted me in spirits and resolve until I accepted my death and thought of its appropriateness dispassionately. A man moving down to himself, defying all his warnings to retreat, go back!—something about that moved me in my motion, tightened my lips for the grim and final smile, and sent me on, oh, so happily! into the warn-wail and the guns.
YES! we moved on toward the “warning of the line,” fixed in mind and all resolve to die. It might be long and tedious tedious years—wild crying, much praying, high yelling in the night and the gut-sickening fears that claw the hours—before we would attain this readiness again. So I increased the tempo of my going, set my hinges and braces to MAX and moved on to seize THE MOMENT at the “line” of Death. OH GOD . . . I was ready to KNOW. . . come zump-blaster, come walking doll bomb, come high-up weird screaming wreck-wreck, come Death . . . come DEATH. . . .
And do you know what they did? Just as my lead foot lurched into the area of the “line,” just touching the out-guard orange stripe, my mind set to drink finality to the very lees, arms a little spread to receive now the last GREAT VISITOR and his embrace, eyes and face lifted skyward from an old conditioning, THEY filled the air with soft eagles, bright rubber spheres, little feather-bright warblers and flowers, flowers everywhere, flowers spewing from the gun lids, flowers erupting from the launch slings, flowers cascading from the parapets. Not tin flowers, not at all; flowers made of velvet, flowers made of stuffed satin, flowers made of all the soft and costly fabrics and gold, I learned later. FLOWERS! FLOWERS! Balloons! birds! flowers! Well! what does one do now?
I just stood there, right at the edge of the “line,” that same little smile on my face that I had fixed for death, my pose as kingly as I could make it, while the flowers fell and fell, velvet flowers, silk-satin flowers, other flowers, until flowers almost covered a steel man. Amidst the soft soft fall of the blossoms ultimately I became aware that the noise of warning had stopped, and there was almost dead silence now as I stood and received my floral homage while the gaudy gas bags ascended toward heaven until at a certain height they each stopped to add each its own color and mass to a balloon-cloud canopy of brightest hues under which soft eagles flew above small warblers flitting and flitting EVERYWHERE!
A speaker finally said, its amplified voice cracking wide a general stillness, playing a tape of vast somber volume through musical tones: WELCOME, STRONGHOLD 10, TO STRONGHOLD 10, YOURSELF, MOST WELCOME TO YOURSELF, TO OCCUPY NOW YOURSELF, OUR LEADER MAGNIFICENT AND MAGNIFIED, MAN-AND-FORTRESS, ONE-FORTRESS-MAN, ONE-MAN-FORTRESS, THE SAME AND INSEPARABLE FOREVER AND FOREVER, TO RULE BY THE GRACE OF OUR GOD, MAKER, THAT MASSIVE STICK OF NEW-METAL, ON THE GREAT PLASTIC PLAIN OF THE REALIZED DREAM, PLACED WHEN MODERAN WAS NEW. . . .
The next thing I knew a thread of deep red was spilling toward my stance. Out of the very lips of Stronghold 10, it seemed, a red softness spewed and fell, rolled down, tumbled down, flooded down the slope of the sturdy hill at the foot of which I stood. There was a sudden snap, and the tumbling red invasion smoothed until the edge of it just touched the foot that I had extended to the out-guard edge of the “warning of the line.” Such precision! Of course it was grandly but the mechanical red carpet of WELCOME sent out to get me, and soon it rolled me home.
(Later I was to learn that the steel-spliced doctors had beamed the tin men inside my fort the news that I was completed and on the way. In other words, be on the alert for a metal King made of walking steel and trying to deliver himself to the glories of his reign. The bedlam and threats of harm were parts of a little joke traditionally played on a Stronghold master nearing his fort for the first time. When he reached the “line,” the WELCOME unrestrained and totally elaborate, prepunched in the tapes, flooded out and brought him home to his due.) YES!