THE DEFECTION started on a drowsy early-summer Monday. One of the lesser metal-and-people people of Moderan (a peotal) found a soul. Or rather, to be quite correct, it was only a piece of a soul. It was not even a very good piece of a soul, perhaps, having been lost in Moderan for quite a few long years. But it was what it was, and it set the others searching. They looked beneath the plastic yard sheets and under the iron pear trees and around the spots where the steel pansies came through the garden holes. And every once in awhile they would in fact, or imagining it, turn up another piece of soul. These were exciting things to find, or even imagine, because they were so intangible and different there among the iron power-towers, the whirling precise gogos and the shining accurate monster gears that drove the complicated apparatuses of this land.
They played all day with the pieces they had found of souls. They would toss them up in the air and catch them and wear them on their sleeves for awhile, or in their buttonholes for a space, and think at them and gaze and gaze. The peotals who had found pieces of soul did this. Other peotals, who had not found pieces of soul, came over and looked through the sparkling green-hued air that was controlled to a precise humidity and a precise temperature and a precise flavor by a gigantic air-conditioning system. And these peotals could not see anything unusual except that some of their neighbors were slapping at the healthy controlled atmosphere and catching pieces of it in quite an odd way indeed in front of their bubble-dome homes.
But a soul, or even a piece of one, can be, to the finder, a very moving thing. When soulless peotals came over to ask what all the sense-less slapping and aimless hitting and lively jumping were about and were told that pieces of soul had been found, naturally these peotals said, “Hah? What’s soul? And so what if found?” And the peotals who had found the soul parts became at once evangels and told all the others about soul, speaking especially loud and clear upon significances.
Of course news of such curious nature would spread rapidly, and when it reached the Needle Building in the Pale White Capital, where the Council of the Palest Greens sat mulling, there was consternation. The Council members were all “replaced” people—graduate Stronghold masters, of course—metal except for minor flesh-strips holding them together and feeding the oversize brains held suspended in green blood in metal brain-pans. Because their flesh-strips were the smallest, their blood the palest, and because they had been longest away from souls, they were preeminent of course. But they knew about souls, from old records, and they knew how dangerous such interesting intangible things might be to this precise, mechanical, and very automatic land that was designed to be forever. So they laid their plans; they called for the counter measures. Maximum diversion! was the cry.
The Council pressed the buttons. And these were the buttons of total war on defection. The Maximum Diversion Birds arose from a million bird “boxes” on the perimeter of this land that was called Moderan. With bomb bags of blue oil and bomb sacks of pink sand the Birds started salvoing the peotals. The Birds screamed and red fluids strung from their keening mouths, and the gleam of their shiny wings all together was an awesome thing to see as they stepped higher and ever higher into the lime-vanilla air and whirled in the tight formations of the bird daisies. Far below this show in the clear air tin mandolin men strummed madly in the yards. Tinnily they yelled the go-go-go songs and brassily they hummed the try-try-try tunes about a strong state living forever where tin robots worked brother-brother together. The perfume men ran in all the streets and alleys of the bubble-dome homes, across all the yards and fields of Moderan, with the most heady of scents, with the most delicious odors yet put together. The form men shot the sky full of a panorama so diversified and delightful that its like may never be seen again, making a curtain of shapes above the Birds still frantically bombing the peotals with bags of blue oil and sacks of pink sand. Then, in a gesture that tried to fake love, some hand in the Pale Council pushed the button marked FLOWERS, and with a great rush, with a mighty whoosh, the tin blooms whoofed through the yard-holes and waved gaudy metal petals at the feet of tin mandolin players still yelling about a state of tin comrades getting along brother-brother together, without soul. And a made sun peeked pleasant speckles through the shape men’s work and the bird daisies holding their order. But all this did no good. The peotals still clutched the pieces they had found of souls and refused to be diverted. And they organized the trains, ten long jet-pushed soul movers.
Up from the south the great trains came, jet-hustled, stream-lined swifties, but loading strange cargo. All day they whistled across the land, ten great white trains. Though the Central Council of the Palest Greens broadcast an urgent plea for yet another try at pleasing the peotals, yet another chance at diversion, the doom cars came on down. And yet they were cars of hope, too.
Stalog Blengue, peotal first-class, flesh-robot overseer of a block of air-conditioning machines for many a soul-lost year struggled up to a train. “How we have used ourselves!” he shrieked. “How we have been put upon by ‘discoveries.’ ” He tore off a piece of “replacement” and held it up in tin fingers. The green blood seeped from the arc where the “replacement” alloy had joined flesh. “Under sentence of life forever!” said Stalog Blengue. “Or so the Pale Council thinks. Ha. Ha. If that’s life I’ve lived for these many soulless years—for my work, watching these tin air digesters sort the natural air for flaws; for my pleasure, oiling my metal joints so I’d not creak when I hovered pipe-wrench watchful among the tin air sorters; for my food sticking myself with the introven, putting the complicated fluids in all the poor-flesh places—if that’s life I’ve lived for these terrible, inhuman years—” He fell to shrieking then in a kind of fit as he tore himself apart.
The peotals then, with a stripped-down Stalog Blengue yelling in the lead engine, ran the soul trains down to the cold white capital city. They let the soul trains stand all day in front of the Needle Towers of the ice stark government palace of the cold white capital city of the Palest Greens. Near the end of the day, when the shrinking colding sun was falling down the last stretches of the lime-vanilla air over Moderan, Stalog Blengue walked his iron shoes toward the tallest blankest door of the ground floor of the Capitol Building. The metal parts of him clanked eerily; the green blood of his flesh-strips boomed urgently around the tin parts of his ears. “Hello, the Capital,” he called at the blank of the tallest door. “Hello, the Council,” he cried, and a sound like striking a hollowed anvil crept up a long time out of him and up through the hollow spaces of the tall spires of the Capitol Building, for the voice of Stalog Blengue had been worked long ago in iron, against cancer, in a “discovery.”
Slowly the long door opened and the “giant” standing there was so tall he had tiptoed to try average height. Back of this doorman, in the reflectors, the Council of the Palest Greens sat sorting their brains in tin brain-pans, many stories away. “I wish to see the Head Man!” cried Stalog Blengue.
When he arose from the honored place of the raised dais of chairmen, splinters of wan green stars seemed to fall from him for a time. A sheen of emerald flashes was all about him palely. And this at last was the very palest of the Palest Greens! He said no word at all, but, skimpy and clanking metal, he stood just right for the reflectors to send his image down through all those stories to Stalog Blengue.
“We have come with our once discarded souls,” explained Stalog Blengue. “It is our fondest wish that you shall go at once so that we may start the long job of repairing these weathered souls and the world. If you choose to stay, you leave us no hard decision; we’ll but run our soul trains through your buildings and smash you down! With soul power! So choose.”
The palest of the Palest Greens said nothing, indeed, gave no token of hearing, except there was the recorded sound of the merest clink of one tin brain-pan going against another, high and far away, and the eyes gleamed in the big reflectors green and cold and entirely evil for a little while. And Stalog Blengue knew the message had been received where the brains swam in their tin brain-homes. “We will wait no longer than midnight of this must day for you to go,” the hollowed-anvil voice said and withdrew.
Stalog Blengue clanked his iron shoes back to the trains of his soul-strong friends. “He heard,” said Stalog Blengue. “The head pale-pale man heard. I could tell by the way his eyes gleamed in the big reflectors, green and cold and very evil for a little while, that he heard. He’ll tell the others and I think, seeing all the hands moving on the walls, they’ll go. All of them MUST go!” A great cheer went up from the soul-strong people then from all the ten soul trains. After awhile Stalog Blengue lifted a misty hand up high and asked for silence. “Now,” said Stalog Blengue, “let us begin to be ourselves again, ourselves with good souls. With hard trying and hard praying let us make for our souls good homes, even here hard embattled as we are in these steel times. And perhaps with ten million years of good effort we and the world can begin to hope to be allowed to start in to come back toward that place all of us left on the way of our wrong ‘discoveries.’ At least we are not without hope, for our souls have again been taken up. . . .”
And all the trains cheered again. . . .
Next day, early, meaning business, the Birds went up again—this time wing loaded to optimum with Final Arguments. The trains simply left high-skyward in the flimsiest gas imaginable—from direct hits from the Arguments—enough bubble-dome homes were leveled to merely smudge marks on the plastic to be example, and this silly sad talk of soul was never heard from again in Moderan.