WHEN I handed that big orange switch to ON and the power grabbed our complex, it was a day for pride. Up tall. The light went on in our flag tower as our pennon seized its space high over Stronghold 10 and we were on our way, committed. And announced. Through the iron brushes on their feet, standing or walking the weapons men drew power from the power floor, my own metal began to hum and seethe, and my flesh-strips were force fed an exhilarating elixir of GO. This special moment of moving up to King can happen only once in the life of a Stronghold man; time, it will never stop by quite the same. I lived my moment to the top-top brim.
On tiptoe was I with my sense of mission and my sense of pride. To stand in the house of the mighty, to be a KING! It was a time for thinking of old defeats; it was a time for remembering all old shame; it was a time for knowing how the debts should all be paid. With shot, shell, shock and obliteration. In all good relish. Written off. YES! To be forever a metal man! with just a few flesh-strips playing my tough self down! DEATH lay defeated! TIME stood trounced, Stronghold-whipped. FEAR was a thing shot down. I would have aeons and aeons and aeons in which to shake the culprit world for its cupidity, for the fears caused, for the total aspects of doubt. I would have unlimited time in which to expend my rage, exact my revenge. And it might take that; it just might take that long.
Consider the thing that man was from the flesh-fearful day of his birth. CONSIDER. Not a second passed, not an atom moved, not an action transpired in space—ANYWHERE!—that was not totally of gross threat to man. How he cowered through the clawy world, under the giant talons of danger, pulpy, entirely vulnerable—and afraid. He could not make a move, he could not try for any prize but that the fear dogs howled and the stand-back jackals moved in to say, STAND BACK! NOT FOR YOU! And the more he tried to win and the harder he strove to effectively attack, the faster he moved deeper in toward the total defeat of his grave. There was no victory! I envied the rocks, in those days; I envied stone pillars; I envied old bones; I envied the very air. I envied animals, even, for they did not know, I thought, how total was to be their defeat on the bonepile of death. Only man knew. HE KNEW! And yet he threw himself again and again and again upon the iron gates of assured disaster in the little life that he steered. Admirable? Not at all! Stupid? YES! Incomprehensible. Uncalled for. Why do it?
I had no answer in my pulpy days. I had only fears. Long fears. Short fears. Medium fears. Parts of fears. Total fears. Fragmented fears. Figments of fears. Unreasoned fears. Unreasonable fears. All the kinds of all the fears.
And yet—and yet, I had a kind of courage in those days. Oh, yes. A kind of bravado. Don’t tell me that I did not. To go to sleep at night sometimes took all the courage that I could find in all my total pack. To face that dark, not knowing, silent and asleep, without my usual sensory sentinels out, more vulnerable, if possible, than all my waking total vulnerability—oh total TOTAL risk. And yet I went to sleep almost every night at one hour or another. So I faced Death every night. Night, each night, my little death to face. Don’t tell ME I didn’t have problems in those days. And then to awake. Oh, what a relief, for just an instant, to find I had not died. Don’t tell ME I didn’t have my victories in those days! But then the defeats closed in quick-following on the instant, all old and sad and black, accumulated defeats, to slam me back to non-victory. Let once ten pulses quick-falter in the shaky house of man’s blood and see what shows up next. A coffin edged in black and a man the main star in it on a coffin day. What monster god of chance put together this faltering contrivance, designed to fail and fail and fail and fear-shake us through the taloned days and the doubly-taloned nights? Where laughs he now and why?
WHERE LAUGHS HE NOW AND WHY? He does not laugh now, not at me! and I’ll tell why. I am a Stronghold master, BIG, in the armor plate of total invulnerability. My ammo is stacked in heaps roundabout, and I can win ANY war. My blasters stand itchy on the GO pad, ready, at the speed of a metal thought, to launch for TOTAL SMACK. As it whirls the world in space our planet stands out bold now and surely indestructible, coated as we have plasto-coated it, with nothing to grind it away at the big middle and nothing to wear it out at the far hubs. And I do not have to envy stones now, nor stone pillars. Nor animals either. I am harder than the stones were and more mind-set than the animals. SCIENCE HAS MADE A MAN! NEW-METAL MAN! Science has coated and made clean the dirty EARTH-ball for him to stand on.
YAH! good Science plan, come bring your old white head and let me shake your grip. You’ve lifted me from the pit. You’ve saved me from the gummy dark, the ground-wet and the worms. I’m honored to be MAN now, new-metal MAN. Whereas once I was dishonored to be man, mocked at, jeered at, put upon by a god or gods who sat out laughing somewhere in a mystic mystery sky or high on smoky mountain tops and jotted me down in ledgers of harsh light. The balance to be used against me as I crept toward Judgment. And I once believed all that!? And let it be said forever to the total credit of man that though he believed these primitive and freaky things and counted the hopeless odds, he came out fighting, every time! Truly something indestructible in man must have saved him for this complete victory that I know now, the triumph of new-metal, the godhead of the chosen few, the total forever-security of the “replacement” Kings! (Too scared to leave, too scared to stay, caught on untenable ground, he gulped the air for battle in the spitting mouths of death, knotted his courage to all the fists he owned and prayed for endings that would not be unbearable. And sometimes, quite surprisingly, he won a little skirmish, even in the inkiest night of his despair. Sometimes he came through with flags flying and trumpets blasting to look the winner for sure. And sometimes he made speeches to say it was all feasible and worthwhile. But mostly it was not feasible, and never worthwhile. And you flesh-bums out there know what I mean. All victories to you must be hard-won and temporary, and hardly worth the candle. For down from it all looms the biggest, the most unwinnable, the most conclusive battle of all battles. Any win claimed there HAS to be conditional and entirely smoky lanterns surrounded by the blackest black of dark. FORGET IT, you flesh-bums. YOU won’t win there, and you know it. In the deepest marrow of your trembly fear-sick bones, you know you won’t win the Battle of Death—not even if you’re Pope.)
But now we do not have to win the Battle of Death. That battle for us will never be waged—NEVER, for we have overwhelmed the Adversary ahead of the battle he planned. YES! We are the moving, functioning substance of the Moderan Dream. Long ago our scientists, those great clear-eyed Kings of the laboratories, where theories were put to the test-tube test, saw that flesh life and plant life were essentially intolerable, improbable, implausible and probably impossible on our Earth-ball home. If we had not had these cool clear-eyed men growing along with the puddlers and the muddlers and the myth magicians that were our other vaunted progress, I do not, quite frankly, know what we should ever finally have done. Here on this ball that was our threatened, improbable, unpredictable and near-impossible home.
But now we’re in the clear, thanks to science, our once-dirty Earth-ball clean now, coated with plastic, our hardly-used air, mostly a decoration now, colored in beauty with a different hue each month (oh, lovely vapor shield!), our once garbage-wrecked oceans frozen to solid, with any surplus space-hauled long ago, and our temperatures as quiet and as changeless as ever we want them to be, through Season Control in Central. And the birds! The birds are colored tin now! And the animals all are engined. While the trees in ersatz leap through the planned Earth holes and bloom us up “real” leaves that last the course. AH MODERAN! Land where leaves do not drop; land of the plasto-coated land—sweet sweet my shard-hard home.