I ALWAYS carried one; I had them in every size. I had the special everyday-war size, one that I carried two at a time, each on either side, slung down, low and handy-down easy, like old gunfighter guns just nudging the tips of my steel fingers where they swung when I, plop-plip-plap-plop, walked over the homeless plastic. Then I had the little friendly size, the dress-up Sunday size, I guess we would have said in the Old Days, a compact somewhat inconspicuous thing that I carried one at a time in my steel Sunday belt and which would, if necessary, and swung right, slice a small bit of a man down, a bit about the size of half an ordinary man’s face. It would not do, as you can see, for heavy disagreements. But for a Sunday stroll it was, I thought, just fine. Then I had, and inevitably we must come to this, my war hammer, the special offense-defense instrument, a device that came apart, had spare parts, and could be fitted and adjusted to the occasion. I carried a cart load of these in a special-tracked vehicle called, after the Old Day’s weapons carrier, the hammer carrier, and had ten weapons men to sponsor these when I passed through heavy country. In a truce time!
YES! let it be known, they gave wide berth to The Hammer. Even on a Sunday they (“my friends”) usually waved only from the tops of hills or from other and sundry wide distances, and that usually upon the point of just separating away.
JUST THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. COULDN’T HAVE BEEN BETTER. YAY! FOR THE HAMMER.
And sometimes in a kind of celebration I would make a heap of all my hammers, the Stronghold would be emptied, every nook and cranny would be outsearched for them and my weapons men would come carrying hammers to make that lovely mound of thousands of these in orange. And while the Big-Punch missiles swung slow and easy in the launch slings and all the other dread devices of my dominance and danger rested dormant for a Truce, I’d dance around my hammers, the tripping, but necessarily heavy, dance of the wonderful new-metal man.
Why hammers? Why the celebration? Two reasons, and perhaps more. One reason, and perhaps the most enjoyable—when I had my shriek-orange hammers all out, mounded on display and I dancing around them, with all my weapons men polished and drawn up for a review, there was no doubt that a shudder went through all the neighboring Strongholds that viewed this as symbolic and a preparation, as some great American Indian Chief of the Old Days might hold a war dance, with his face painted, just prior to Scalp Harvest.
YES! another reason. To me bladed hammers are quite emblematic of a considerable quantity of all man’s great progress to his GREAT TOP place of today. Take away the cutting and pounding, implicit in the symbolic cutting hammers, my own special symbol, and, without it, see how much would be forever given away. Left out! Have we not cut and pounded (and fitted) our ways to the top? YAY! cutters, pounders and fitters, give old defeat a kick. You’ve won the game!
And on the TOP what happens? We sit there and kick our heels of steel at all the world. On TOP we snarl. We dare them to come get us. We lay plans to go for them. It is all conflict. The living time of man is conflict and essentially nothing else. The living time of any life is conflict and essentially nothing else. By even the littlest wriggle into the most rudimentary “becoming” of life the substance that wriggles had issued the biggest challenge of all up to the universe. This substance that wriggles has designed to be able to get up and move itself across its environmental space and place, all against the meant stability-instability of its environmental home. Even a tree and even the smallest smallest plant struggling toward the sky fit this. In other words a new and VERY STRANGE force had entered the seethe and writhe and twist and change of the cosmic dead things that moved to their own lawed pattern. Life truly is the outlaw, the cosmic maverick, and, being so, its time must be forever a fleeing of the dread sheriffs of dead-substance laws, those constables of the dead lawed order-disorder of the Universe that could not have foreseen this VERY STRANGE accident.
So we (THEY, our wonderful science-men) have picked up the VERY STRANGE accident (life) at its highest development (man) and have turned it to its ultimate durability, which is the eternity-durability of new-metal man. YES! We (THEY) caught it just in time, those science-men. How lucky we to have had those top-dog giants waiting in the labs at that grand time in history to pick up the VERY STRANGE accident (life) at its ultimate flesh-needs development (man) and freeze it for all times. YAY! good science plan, take your bows now, you good old Saviour Men, you’ve won the game for sure.
Now, to turn tedious for a time, this is what happened. Flesh-man had developed to that place on his random Earth-ball home where it was to be the quick slide down to oblivion. All the signs were up, the flags were out for change for man and the GO was DOWN. To ENDING. Flesh-man was at the top, far as he could climb as flesh-man, and from there he was certainly due to tumble. But he had the luck to have these brave good white-maned men in the white smocks, the lab giants, the shoulders, and great-bulged thighs of our progress (what matter if they were weazened, probe-eyed, choleric, scheming, little men sometimes—more often than not, REALLY?!), authors of so much of man’s development and climb to that place where he was just due to die, expire, destroy himself and his home. These great good lab giants then froze man and his Earth-ball home at this grand stage of development to make new-metal man and set him in the Strongholds upon the plasto-coated Earth that had once been man’s random and inefficient home. New-metal replaced the flesh (down to the few flesh-strips and those, we hope, may soon be gone), the bones were taken out and new-metal rods, hinges and sheets put in (it was easy!) and the organs all became engines and marvelous tanks for scientifically controlled functional efficiency forever. YAY! Don’t you see?! Our scientists made of life-man (the VERY-STRANGE-accident man) essentially a dead-elements man, one who could now cope with eternity, but he certainly was not a dead man. AH! heavens no! He was alive! with all the wonderful science of the Earth ages, and just as functional as anyone could wish. YAY! science, take your plaudits now! You’ve shown what was meant from the beginning for the VERY-STRANGE-accident man.
But I imagine God stands stunned at your successes, your versatility, not to mention your audacity. And if God should happen to be dismayed and displeased too much, I further imagine you could just dismiss him, write him out of the sky, pull his plugs, as it were. You then could make your own very personal God, out of rods and sheets and those wonder chemical changes you are so capable of, as, for instance, the brain pans of man. But who needs a God, other than “our god,” that massive stick of new-metal placed, when Moderan was very new, on the great plastic plain of the Dream Realized? We’re all gods now, or parts of—new-metal gods! I stand a-tiptoe in my optimisms now and I touch all the stars. We’ve got it made, you good old leaned-down dogs, you relentless racers of scientific knowledge, you keen thin blade-sharp minds of elemental thought, you keen kings, you lab technicians! I thank you for the death of my “life” (my poor-flesh weaknesses) and I commend you for the resurrection of my essence in steel. You kept the main essence of man—man the fighter—and now we’ll prove that good hard worth through all eternity. WE’LL FIGHT! We’ll fight each other. We’ll make harsh monsters, set them loose and fight such monsters across all our space. We’ll move with engines and hard, programmed thoughts. We’ll make all manner of dragons for our involvement, and we’ll overcome them. For we’ll program the conquests a little more carefully than we’ll feed in the threats. But mostly we’ll just fight each other—each other and ourselves, the truly tireless enemies.
AH SCIENCE! AH MAN! AH ETERNAL STRIFE, life of our life. In Moderan. . . .