ALL WINTER they worked in those far-flung mechanism-clogged tunnels under the land, four bulb-bummers for a district repairing spring. Slogging around in their space boots down there in the dark and cold they were fixing the broken leaves, adding new flips to the root stocks and retouching iron petals so that all would be in readiness in their sector for a perfect automatic season to leap through the yard-holes at a nod from the Central Commission for Beauty. They hated the unmanly work, and they did not love one another. But they loathed one another with a sufferance that allowed for an exchange of agonies. All four of them had fallen from something, and he had fallen farther than any of them.
Today, for perhaps the twentieth time this winter, he felt he must out with his story, for sometimes to live, after the fall, is a thing past quiet bearing. They paused by a leaf they were mending, and the others extended him deference, for there lingered with them still the reminder of what he had once been above ground, as well as the fact that he was Captain here.
“To have fallen to leaf mender,” he said. “To have toppled to bulb duty and stem repair! Oh MAC, MAC!” He cried it in anguish, and MAC was the three-letter deity, origin shrouded in mystery, antiquity and a thousand conflicting legends, but perhaps it was merely a short saying of machine. “As you know, I was once of the proud Population Fixes,” he bragged, recovering his composure somewhat. He let the bright buttons on his space jacket tighten as his chest heaved full and he took that special relaxed guardsman’s stance in his glistening patent space high-tops. “My service, called Grinder Control, and more usually just the Grinders, was top glamour, there’s no doubt. Now, let us pause here by this leaf to be mended and review my fall.” They could but comply since he was a Captain for Spring Mending, in other words the straw boss of this grubby detail. The other three, in their less well-cut space jackets and their shorter boots of the fall from the lesser commissions, stood like sullen dogs. Had he come to crying on such shoulders? Oh yes!
“It was in autumn,” he began. “A time for falling? YES! I had worked up through the advancements until now I commanded a big Grind-5, the largest and finest of the machines for controlling the populations, as you know. I had worked hard, and while in the ranks I thought I was ‘proofed’ against temptation. But perhaps the leisure of command gave me too much time.” He looked down the rows of the leaves; he regarded the metal calyxes. He came back to the silent three, standing like sullen dogs still, but he knew they were enjoying not working. “Somewhere I softened!” He cried it in truest agony.
“It was in autumn, as I have said, but a bright day. It was one of the most beautiful automatic autumn days that we have ever had in this land, thanks to a strong administration in Central Season Control that year. The metal geese were moving—South, just right, with that special honk-squawk in their tapes; the leaves were all painted. There was a tang to the air, and once, calling up a far-back memory, I thought I smelled chilled apples on a tree, and I’m sure, unless my senses played me tricks, we rolled between two fields of metal pumpkins. Either I was dreaming or the Autumn Commissions had really gone all-out. But anyway, somehow I’m sure my senses received false stimuli and I softened.”
The three stood abject and silent, still facing a broken leaf, and for a moment he even suspected they were sleeping. He wanted to rush to them and slap them until their faces broke. He wanted to pull their eyes out an extra inch, cup their ears to megaphones and set the three of them up on metal flowers to listen to him. He wanted to cry, “Regard! you ears and eyes and brains of blockheads who have fallen from nowhere, regard and respect a giant fallen to ‘die’ among you!” But they nodded after awhile, ever so slightly, all three of them, to show that they were still with him, and he let it go. “We were getting behind! They were increasing so fast! Maybe it was the strain of duty.” And he remembered that black bright day.
“We had received a call to ‘fix’ a district, delinquent in the southern-west, a district so overcrowded that the surplus people were starting to get in the way of the operation of the machines. My crew was chosen because we had the best record, measured in the only way such records can be measured, in pounds delivered to Central Meat. Our Grind-5 rolled out on those big balloon-ball wheels that day, quiet as a rubber cat padding through rubber leaves. We homed in on the delinquent district, all six-man crew of us, and I was the Captain. The decisions were mine!” His flat space-guardsman’s stomach knotted in pain anew and fresh-remembered remorse was his for all the lost opportunity, all the fallen prestige, gone with everything those last four words implied: “The decisions were mine.”
In the delinquent district, as he related, the preliminary work had already been done (as was usual) and the candidates for Grind were preselected, courtesy of the local administration. The victims were being held in a gray building of bare plastic walls reinforced by viciously barbed steel rods, and a shimmer of fight all around the inside of the prison room, keeping prisoners well back from the walls, told where meshed knife blades whirled like banks of fans. Not a reassuring place in which to stand accused! NO! Presumably the people selected to go were those who had made the lesser contribution to living in a crowded land. They were the delinquents who, in the opinions of local officialdom, had not paid for their living space by inventing enough time-saver devices. As goes without saying, time-saver devices were the main obsession as people flaunted their space clothes and space blue prints and dreamed of the Conquest. Baffled and turned back still, they longed for the big Space Victory and went on filling a small crowded planet with petty gad-goes.
“But my course was plain that day in the southern-western district; I was the Captain and duty was routine. All I had to do was spring down in my black guardsman’s boots and my space jacket colored like night, with all my achievement and extra poundage medals gleaming like stars, and salute the local dignitaries with the proper deal of snap and preciseness. Then my men would know what to do; they would set up to sausage the people who stood accused of not inventing enough gadgets. I would not have even to murmur the orders.” He looked to the three not-listening dogs for a sign of sympathy and found none. But he did not care now.
“The rest is history. All of you know, have read how Blonk’s Grind-5 stood for three full days idle in a delinquent southern-western district. While some of the best execution potential of all times—my crew—worked like women, searching through papers and records. Before grinding a single man! And how the poundage was under for that mission, and how the quota had to be revised in all the other districts, and how some men had to go to the Grind who were not listed by LOCAL DECISION. And of course you know, have read, have heard! how I was removed—Blonk, once the most awesome of all the Captains with the poundage record gleaming on his chest—drummed out! For what they called ‘Unseemly vacillation and indecisiveness.’ Oh, for one soul-struck moment, to lose all. What happened? MAC, MAC! what happened?”
He rushed over to the three sleeping knaves, who had fallen from lesser things, and he shook them to awareness. Blinking and yawning there in the gloom, there among the rootstocks, the metal leaves and the buds of the automatic season they were fixing, one of them said the cue, asked the question, and by a great strength of will he refrained from beating them with his green and red striped swagger stick loaded with lead. “What did you do?”
Again he relived that moment, that bright black day in the autumn season, and the autumn—nay! winter, as it turned out—of his glory. “The big Grind-5 was drawn up near the gates of the compound—polished to gleaming as befit the machine of the Grinder ace, he who had stormed the very gates of fame’s splendor with his good records. My men were in their special blue uniforms of the ace crew of the Grind, with the unit citation in the form of a startling red jewel, shaped like a falling blood drop, pinned to their tunics. And I was in my high boots and the night-black garb of the Captain with the efficiency record gleaming in gold. What did I do!?
“I strode down slowly from the Captain’s turret that day, stood for awhile in the door to survey the autumn weather, drew myself up to my full height, my shoulders so broad then in my uniform in the time of my splendor, my chest so full and rib-sprung as to seem almost unreal. I stood looking at the local dignitaries and knew they were seeing a god. Then—” His mind surely reeled and almost faltered to blankness in recalling what he had done. Although it was clearly written that every Captain of Crew held the invested right, the thing was not a thing to be done. “After standing for awhile godlike before them and surveying the autumn metal, I patted my night-black gauntlets together in a moment of unseemly contemplation, walked leisurely down the ramp, saluted in a manner of calculated cynicism and then—and then I issued the strange terrible order!”
He looked at them and saw they were wide awake now and wide-eyed with fear, for, after twenty recitals, they knew when the story was ending. He rushed to them, and he started to beat them with his green and red striped swagger stick loaded with lead, as they expected him to do, as he always did in his wrath just before the end of the story. As he whacked them, they kept dutifully asking, hoping for easier blows, “What did you do—what was the strange terrible order?” But he did not answer at once; he was enjoying too much the bludgeon-blows he was raining down on these flinching and shivering men. After awhile each one lay in a fine pool of blood, gasping and miserable at the foot of some metal plant. And through the froth bubbles on each man’s quivery lips it was evident that they were still framing the proper and dutiful question, as they knew they should do, as they knew he required of them, “What did you do—what was the strange terrible order?”
Then in that icy-calm-stillness which always followed his awesome display of wrath, he gave the cold-steel order for each prostrate and blood-soaked man to resume his feet and his stem-and-bulb duties at once. And as he moved to a table to fill out the required and proper forms for them each, after duty hours, to appear at Central Whip for punishment due (“for blood stains on uniform”), he answered their question, recited like litany the scope and terrible depth of his fall: “I once questioned LOCAL DECISION for fairness; I once issued the order for JUSTICE; I once dillydallied before grinding men.” And as, idly, musingly, he wrote and underlined twice, heavily, on each man’s proper form, the reason for punishment due at Central Whip—“Careless and excessive bleeding on uniform without proper cause”—Blonk suddenly knew he was cured. He had the hang of it again! By the great god MAC, if he could only get them to believe him up there! He was ready for topside and the world of MEN again!