I THINK most of us knew that to face Eternity on its own terms we’d need a host of gimmicks, or one BIG never-failing master gimmick to see us through. That’s a lot of time out there—forever! Of course we had our new-metal mistresses, the diamond-tooth tiger cubs and the new-metal kittens to fight them, the skirmish trees that came through the yard-holes and fought each other for supremacy, the steel birds of Moderan (with war heads substitutive for bird heads), the different-colored vapor shields and a clutch of other diversionary phenomena to grab the mind and make for us variety times in Joys.
But we needed really some bread-and-butter diversion to ease us across the long haul, something that we could do or watch or count or accomplish or make love to over and over and over and it would all still seem fresh and rewarding. New-metal mistresses are fine. They’re just great little sports and they add a bit of Joy and groovy-goo to even the most cold and metallic of situations. Their settings are various and they can be arranged and rearranged to suit any man’s taste and changing taste as to size, vital-statistic measurements, color of hair, general deportment and overall love technique. And when you consider the super-luxury special-made new-metal mistress kit—WOOOO WOOOO WOW WOW WOW WOWEEE!!!!!!
STILL, I do not think making love to a tin can, no matter how great and versatile and playful the tin can is, can, by itself, see a man through the long-haul of Eternity. The only thing, we finally decided, that would see us through was war, total and continuing war. Plotting for each the other’s total destruction and coming up with countermeasures to protect each his own new-metal hide at all costs are the kinds of human enterprises that put the human animal up close to godliness. Gods, as everyone knows, are both destructive and creative. On destruction we have always been strong qualifiers. And the only kinds of beings that can actually cope with Eternity on anything like easeful and self-assured terms are gods. So we must destroy and create as gods.
YES! we lived each as a god in a great steel-and-concrete redoubt. We hurled the thunderbolts and took on the task of trying to destroy everything but ourselves, with great relish. There were no lengths to which we would not go if we thought we could do even a new-metal flea’s worth toward destroying a neighborhood man and establishing our own supremacy. Even though our own Strongholds might be severely damaged in the process. Then, to be creative, we’d all start shoring up and rebuilding in a truce time.
Actually, as steel men we were essentially but extensions of what man has always been. The essential man had been extended, I’m trying to say. The essence of normal man was and is and always will be the feeling of, “I AM the greatest and most deserving thing in all the Universe and I should have preference wherever I go.” This is true collectively and it is equally true individually. There was never normal man so lowly but what he, if given the smallest smallest chance to rise, would start regarding himself as a winner for sure. The domain of his aspirations will have no NO ceiling and no NO walls. The whole universe will be his pumpkin, his and his alone. A ghastly, slimy, ungodly contrivance he, in many ways, is. But he has, let’s face it, one saving grace. He is to be counted on to be his ghastly, rotten, slimy, true-bad self until the end. He is reliable, let us say, in that his total badness is assured. And in that he is godly.