SURE, we didn’t have to run from hearses then or speculate on coffins. See a flesh kid dragging his playmate through the streets and pounding him down with a bat, we didn’t care. So who’s to die and what’s to go? Not us, we thought. Let all flesh-land fall on stones and cut its noses on razors—good riddance! We’d just pump up and down on our all-weather new-metal knee joints, push the phfluggee-phflaggee button on our talkers at them each and every one and laugh and laugh. And anytime we wanted to, we could pull back over the line into Our Country, sit in our hip-snuggie chairs in a Stronghold and gloat upon our buttons, Good-Gadget buttons.
And then it happened. Just when you think you’ve got it made, all nailed up and zippered down, the thing starts pulling loose at the hinge-joints. Take us, for instance. We’d fought to a fine standstill and a victory conclusion, we thought, the dread human idea that, soon or late, all humans had to die. I think our bold defiance of this concept and our attempted solution of the problem should rank with some of science’s better things. Or at least I thought that before. But now—!
Well, what are you going to do when everything goes black, when the bright dream fades and the dark cover pulls over your guide stars? Try again? Sure! That’s the human way. Be sorry you laughed when the flesh kid died in the streets? Be appalled that you just yawned when the big fat milk horse at the noonday curb was half halved by that runaway factory wagon? Well, perhaps be sorry. But not too much time to be sorry over the mishaps of flesh-land. What’s to gain by being sorry?
And speaking of mishaps—If you have not by this time seen someone half eaten by our new-metal all-metal metal eaters, you have missed one of the world’s stark horrors. You cannot say, “I have seen deep tragedy.” You have seen nothing! By comparison all other mishaps must seem but soft landings and easy fractures. Or at least it seems so to me. But then, I might be prejudging in favor of my own condition. You be the judge.
You see, we had it made in steel-topped Moderan, the country of the peotals, where metal-and-people people lounged in Stronghold homes with their Good-Gadget buttons. There is to that no reasonable doubt to have—we had it made. We’d had ourselves done over. Long ago. After that, standing around in a truce time in our new-metal alloy “replacements,” our bulk like new-metal armor, our flesh-strips few and played-down, couldn’t we spit at time then, couldn’t we laugh it down? Our organs made up of tireless gadgetry, hearts like little engines, lungs like accordion boxes, flexi-flex new-metal bellows—couldn’t we max out of a dormant whenever we chose for a spree, couldn’t we push buttons and flick switches on a big-daddy go!? And food—that introven! purer than fresh mountain snow and GOOD! great for a flesh-strip feed. Oh things were fine indeed then, and no hurry in steel-topped Moderan where the plastic yard sheets covered our sterilized acres. Germless as new mountain snowballs in Old Times we had eternity! all sacked and tied and slung upon our backs like golden apples in a bag.
And then they came, low like damp dark smoke over the metal flowers, dropping in out of nowhere one spring day. Others were riding the air high up like eagles floating in Old Times. A million of them perhaps would, lumped, make a speck as big as a small-small pencil dot. Under our powerful lenses they had jaws and teeth like ocean sharks of Old Days. Just say they were the dread metal fly-fleas, strangest mutants of all time. So what’s to tell? Just tell that they ate us? Oh, how portray the horror?
One moment, say, you’re sitting outside the eleventh, outermost Wall of your Stronghold. It’s between wars, a fine June Tuesday, and your Warner hangs dormant while the cone-balls that are your ears for danger go silent round-and-round in a slow circling above your armor in this pleasant time of truce. And then the cloud flings up, small, far out, where the flower tops meet the vapor shield, grows and keeps on coming. And it hits. In an incredibly short time, under your Warner’s heavy and helpless danger clangor, it lands with a small-small sound like the buzz a very fine sleet might make tack-tacking against a window. In Ancient Weather. You feel nothing, being mostly that hitherto all-protective invincible survival metal, but you see the deep black film settle, shift, go up and down and across you. You try to wipe it off. Ha. There is no method. You try to think of things. You try to pretend that nothing is happening. You sit and sing. You speculate on a Max Fire to blast his threat when it’s winging. Ho! Did you ever try to fell a cloud—or bring down smoke—with rifle fire? —After a while the deep black film lifts with a tiny sound, like small-small sand falling across a rock. There is a darkness in the air for a fleeting instant. You watch the darkness go. You try to sing. You try to pretend nothing has happened. But something has happened! You’re smaller by a little than you had been. For you have just had your visit from the new-metal all-metal metal eaters, deadliest mutants ever known.
And all over Moderan it goes on, this thing. The dark droning clouds rage up countless times in the morning, countless times in the afternoon, sweep in upon us and chop out a metal fill. Or if it’s a time of war, and we’re inside tending to launcher buttons, the clouds film across our Strongholds and eat there on the roof. We or our Strongholds, it is the same, in time it is the same. Inexorably they will eat all.
And so we who once had forever, Eternity, like a bright wish tied down, feel the great thing go little by little in a black film drifting over us from time to time. And when the wings fan up of the shark-jawed atoms, loaded and going away, and we fling a pocko-scope viewer up to our wide-range mechanized eyes for a better peep at our tormentors, and see them so magnified, sometimes we think of a black drift of condors all plated with terrible scales. It is then that we know, and we see how we stand. They go away on a Joy-flight digesting a little of us on the wind each day, each day. And so we are mortal after all, to a degree as vulnerable as any in simple flesh-land? Is it only a question of time?
But the dream! The magnificent dream lives on and feeds upon eternity—or the quest for that. It clothes its bones in hope again and comes out fighting. Perhaps it is only a minor setback after all, this of the metal “fleas.” Perhaps tomorrow, some shiny-new tomorrow, we shall “replace” ourselves with the pure dream—a thing like rubber, maybe. Yes! a new-cell rubber alloy, that could be the answer. And the metal metal eaters will starve then, their vile steel bellies sucked up in terrible tiny ribs and mouths chopping hard in a foodless hopeless time. They will drift out to die, as all things shall and must that have annoyed king Man. YES!