IN MODERAN, as I like saying, we are not often between wars . . .
It was a particularly dirty kind of war, this one to which I now refer. To deny that it was a particularly dirty kind of war would be to deny sense, and I do not believe that anyone would wish to do that. Not on a weekday, anyway.
We, the metal-and-people people of Moderan, the world’s walking durables, with the bulk of us new-metal man now and our flesh-strips few and played-down, had reached that point in our Stronghold lives where plain clean honest fighting with shot and shell, doll bombs, high-up weird screaming wreck-wrecks and the White Witch rockets firing, had grown tedious. Dull. A drag. Routine-like. We needed a change. YES. Or so the state ministers said. From their gold offices in the L-Towers all over the world.
Our world ministers negotiated and drew up some good rules for a dirty war. They said. Even a dirty war must have good rules, they said; although, frankly, I came early to believe that rules are mostly for revision, and honestly, lately I hardly ever bother to think about rules one way or another. Some live by rules; some live to break rules; and many live in the Shadow of Broken Rules. I don’t bother to vote, usually, on any of it these days, and by not becoming cluttered with little chains and tatters of conduct and opinion, and by holding unswervingly to the main beacon of all our lives, which is war, most astonishing and destructive war, I have easily become the World’s Greatest Man. I can look any situation squarely in the eyes now and tell you at a glance the best answer. The best answer is more firepower. The best answer is amazingly simple to say. But it is not nearly so simple to execute, because it implies a lot of things. It implies having the most and heaviest guns (or the most and heaviest of whatever the destructor-unit of the current moment happens to be) and having these in range, placed well, nay, not only well, THE BEST! on top of the very highest hill. It implies having the very best of first-line firepower operators. It implies having the very best of back-up firepower operators. It implies and implies. YES. But I have coped well with all the implications and by holding to the main beam of all our lives, which is war, I have, as I said, attained to the position of World’s Greatest Man.
But this was to be an entirely different kind of war, and I was edgy. And I had a right to be. I’ll tell you now, not to hold you with any cheap suspense tricks or wait-and-see anticipation, I have just lately lost that war. But I tried not to. I raised the levies, I shored the defenses and I stockpiled the means, as they say. OH YES!
I sent word to my connections in Olderrun, that little land-locked and sea-starved country far across the tall mountains, where the old-fashioned flesh people still hold away. I made the earliest arrangements possible to buy all of their stores of human excrement, animal manure, decaying flesh of anything, surplus citizens dead or alive and any other rotten concoction the Olderrun folk would agree to throw together for me, if I thought it might help me to win the Dirty War. —I wasn’t trying to play fair. Or unfair. I wasn’t even thinking about it. I was just doing my level best, as I think any living creature should, to put together the right arsenal to win whatever war might be coming up. The war-current for me, the one on my doorstep, as it were, just happened to be the Dirty War. And I was going for the victory roses, as the saying is; I meant business, I MEANT TO WIN! with that human excrement, that barnyard by-product, that rotten flesh of anything and surplus citizens dead or alive. YES. I had it all shipped in by flash car, from the edges of Olderrun. The old-fashioned flesh people brought it as far for me as their boundaries. By air. Jet freight!
We had two weeks in which to get ready for the Dirty War. I could not know what dirty things the other Stronghold masters might be doing and planning in preparation for D-day, but I saw my course clean and plain and I embarked upon it. I worked my weapons men day and night, hard around the clock I worked them, to convert my most accurate blasters to the handling of offal shots. Even my prime warhead delivery vehicle, Big Belcherine, I converted to an excrement gun; and with a simple turn of a screw, something that could be done easily by even the dullest weapons man in all wide Moderan, in even the most hectic of battle times, Big Belcherine could be converted to the handling of unclassified garbage spray shots. Along with the conversion of weapons, my vast supply of offal of all kinds was made into the right-size shot-balls, projectiles packaged to explode on impact mostly, with some timed to explode in mid-air for shower shots.
I’ll tell you in all candor, near the end of the two weeks of preparation for the Dirty War, I felt ready, felt confident, I felt sure that I would routinely win the conflict once again and be awarded the war plaque for dirtiness and the emblem of the crossed bombs for excellence. I had no other thought. I thought positively, and that’s for sure. I could even see the headlines at next news-up time in the vapor shield, the letters each twenty-five miles high, a hundred up and shimmering, studded, starred: STRONGHOLD 10 WINS DIRTY WAR. STRONGHOLD 10’s ANIMAL-OFFAL IMPACT SHOTS AND HUMAN-EXCREMENT SHOWER SHOTS AND OLD UNCLASSIFIED-GARBAGE-WITH-CADAVER SPRAY SHOTS TOO MUCH. DIRTY WAR OPPONENTS CONCEDE. JUDGES CONCUR. GOOD SHOW, STRONGHOLD 10. WE LOVE YOU!
Well, so much for positive thinking and ghost headlines. So much for phantom victory in the mind too. So much for everything. To lose is hard, even for those who lose and lose and are accustomed. For a champion to lose is walking death come down, and all things bad; it is destruction, it is wreck, it is a man on his back, it is the taste impossible—
So we opened that great day. My weapons men were up and geared for battle early, their faces in blackface, as was the custom. When the trumpet sounded they bent to their shots and I, high on a parapet, stood glued to observation screens, seeing those shots sink home all over the world, all over the enemy, shot-deserving world. My pale green blood sang dancing in its flesh-strips, as it always does when battle is joined, and I gloried in the cause—bad cause? good cause? what cause?—who could care?—we were fighting!
Well, I did not lose easily. I fought them toe-to-toe, as the saying is. If I lost with any kind of grace, it was not grace-grace, and you can count on that. I lost snarling, complaining, pleading for another shot, pleading for a recount of the votes, pleading for ANYTHING that would reverse defeat. I was burned up. Losing is not my style. My iron guts still writhe at the thought of it.
You know who won? You know how he won? No! I won’t say who won; that name and number stick on my phfluggee-phflaggee even yet, until my speech gears almost toss their teeth if I try to say who won. I hate with a very completeness, you see; I hate all winners, you see, only excepting me; in that I am man typical. But I realize I cannot, just by mouthing philosophy, get out of telling you how he won. He won with a rotten underhanded dirty trick, this vile vile man, this winner. Well, it was a dirty war, he was a dirty man, and I cannot, in honesty, say that tricks were exempt from the scheme. But I went in there straight and let them have the dirt clean; you have to say I did that. And can’t you see how I should have won? CAN’T YOU? —But it’s no use me to argue with you. I could argue a hundred pages and convince you twice, and three times and four times and a thousand times! and you still would not, could not, rise up and go and get for me those prizes—that first-place plaque, that crossed-bombs trophy. Where they hang, damn! damn! on another’s walls. OH GOD! but I hate to lose! AND DAMN! I DETEST IT!!—But calm, calm I must somehow be. After all, I have won some. Yes, I have won lots. YES! I am still the World’s Greatest Man. And I will be winner once again when we go back to straight war. I know I will be. I KNOW IT!
How did he win? He won with a trick. But I told you that. He won with a miserable trick. He won with a miserable Miserable MISERABLE trick. But it was legal. Yes, I have to admit, in a “dirty war” it was legal. Am I sorry I didn’t think of it? I’m sorry I didn’t win. Does that answer your ask-it? —You see, he converted, I figure, about half of his total of blasters to loft up flower bursts, bags of “I love you so’s” and Ho-Ho banners, beautiful pennons of colored smoke laughing in the vapor shield. Can you imagine it!? No, I know you can’t. You would have to have been there, part of this dirty war, to be able even to start in to understand really just how diverting this all could be. Amidst all the really low-down stuff the rest of us from our complexes were lofting up at each other would float his pretty “I love you so” balloons, the flower shots and the Ho-Ho flags. All sugar-lump stuff and posy-roses, see, with laughs. It hit most of the Stronghold masters right where they couldn’t comprehend it; it struck them tickle-tickle. Some of them just stood there, turned giddy on their parapets at the incomprehensibility of it all, set their phfluggee-phflaggees (voice buttons) to LOUD LAUGH and guffawed right there in the middle of a war. I? I doubled the guards, as I always do, automatically, when someone, ANYONE! starts lobbing “I love you so’s” and chum shots at me. By that I did escape complete humiliation and destruction, as I so often have at such times in times past. YES!
You see, he had converted, I would say, only about half of his blasters to the capability of “I love you so’s,” bloom and laugh shots. The other half shot hardware, and, I tell you, even now I choke on this every time I think of it; I envy his brains! He had collected vast stores of iron dust and steel filings, any fine bits of iron and steel he could find—mostly from the spare parts tooling places and the weapons man factories of Moderan—and had this magnetized. Then, using his conventional blasters, he deposited all this fine mass in bags in close range of all the enemy Strongholds, shot after grim shot sneaking through the flowers, the laugh flags and the love. Next he sent in the big walking doll bombs to walk these big loads in for the pay-off kill. The walking bombs by the millions climbed Stronghold walls by the thousands, all over the world that war, carrying bags, and settled upon hapless hopeless weapons men and surprised laughing Stronghold masters, who, everyone being almost entirely metal except for the few flesh-strips of the Commanders, were soon smeared. It was a dirty trick. It smothered them down; it encrusted them deeply. For life? Nay. Death!
I escaped because, as I’ve hinted, love and blooms and laughs are ever my rising signals for vigilance, my sharp nudges for THINK SHARP! NOW! and my perceptor buds’ high times to yell HEY! HEADS UP, YOU! GO HIDE! Not a single doll bomb penetrated at Stronghold 10; not one got over the walls with a bag. We stopped them, all right.
BUT DID I WIN? NO! He won. The war judges, state ministers, stale ministers! those little wrinkly bums with the gold offices in the L-Towers all over the world, gave him high points for dirty planning, high points for dirty execution and those big red bonus points for creative underhandedness that paid off. I? I with my clean straight-in honorable direct high-minded approach to dirt was given high points only for dirty execution. I won second. He won first. My plaques are smaller than his. To put it another way, his plaques are bigger than mine! HIS ARE FIRST-PLACE PLAQUES. Mine are second—I HATE HIM! I HATE HATE HATE EVEN THE VERY THOUGHT OF THE DIRTY WAR! I HATE HATE HATE EVERYTHING and will until I win again.
I can hardly wait until the next war starts up.