WE CALLED it new-metal and sometimes new-metal steel. Was it some sorcerer’s dream come actual? pure magic turned true-real? or was it science all the way? I think it was some of all three, but mostly, and grandly! science-all-the-way. It was our god. It was the substance, really, of the Moderan Dream, that and plastic. But plastic was not magic. Plastic was mundane. Plastic was merely the workhorse everyday foundation that gave our Earth-ball its tough gray pearly hide of sterilized beauty for us to stride on.
But new-metal steel was us, so much of the bulk of us, the moving living substance of the Dream that had Time standing back, Time with its scythe blade broken, Time with its white flag up, head-hung, death-beaten on the silent Field of Surrender. Yah! new-metal man, give old Time a kick! New-metal would never become as living flesh, OH NO!, and that was well, for our strength and our durability were mainly founded on our lack of flesh and our abundance of “replacement.” New-metal steel had this main wonderful wonderful quality. Up in the big-engine parts of us, where were housed the mighty apparatuses of our existence—the lungs, the heart, the guts big and small, the liver, the kidneys and all the rest—new-metal could fuse with the flesh and “replace” us down to a minimum of flesh-strip holding our forms in shape and keeping us linked to the human. The mighty-engine parts of our existence, placed in this flesh-strip and new-metal housing, were simply, in the parlance of the day, implants. They were new-metal everlast engines—the flexi-flex new metal lungs, the bang-boom heart with the changers, the kidneys with the vapor drain, and all the rest. The legs and arms, the feet and hands were new-metal too, but with a different ratio of new-steel. When we flailed by with our arms clanging, our steel boots on our steel feet moving over the plastic, ta-rap ta-rump ta-rump tump tumpa tump, no one and not anything questioned our passage. Yah! new-metal man, the living moving substance of the Dream come actual.
Oh, we could have been all weapons men, and that easily, those meaningless mechanical apparatuses that looked and walked and talked like men but were no more than metal monsters, though necessary and most useful to our plan. Most wonderful in a way they were, efficient and brave in invasion, tenacious and utterly implacable in a siege, and not at all inclined to cut and run or give up hope when outnumbered and under fire from far out; or close in, being surrounded and pounded, they stood their ground well enough. Yah! new-metal monsters, our wonderful weapons men.
But we were MEN! and a gulf of cosmic distance swung between and was the difference that existed between a new-metal monster and a new-metal man. When our beautiful plans for war went alive in the world and roared aloft in tangible reality—the White Witch rockets firing, the wow bombs grandly falling, the wreck-wrecks trajectoring, the missiles far and wide homing and all the other hardware of our Joy-at-War beautifully functioning—we knew what we were doing. We lived, we felt, we responded to the emotions of it all. But the weapons man did not. He was simply a cold lump at plain killing, an unfeeling clod at general carnage, and as for the destruction and flattening of Strongholds he brought to that game none of the warm human emotions at all. Blah! New-metal monster, you weapons man, you have no soul at all!
So, though we could all have become, and easily—through our sciences—mechanical men, with engines in us that would have talked and smiled and swore for us, that would have made all the human gestures far and wide for us and that would have been able to repair themselves and build their kind all new for us, what would all that have proved? It would have proved that man had developed a very clever and sophisticated batch of science know-how indeed. And for sure!
But we didn’t want it that way. Fists knotted at the sky, eyes all wild and hammers pounding the earth of our base and our subjection, we did not want it that way. By God, we’d take God into custody with our efforts and our cunning ways as men. We’d see Him bow, hear Him cry out, “My children have outdone me! While I slept away, they have moved each to a godhood of his own, everlasting and timeless all! My work is done.”