Sometimes, from the brink of our great involvements, we move in our minds back to remember things of seemingly small-bore significances that loom, in the recalling times, extra-large. The day I crossed over, the day I went into Moderan, out of the rolled and graded fields, far as the eye could reach, were these long-legged tamping machines. Essentially they were huge black cylinders swung spinning between gigantic thighs and calves of metal. There seemed an air of casualness about these strange black monsters as they loafed on their tall-thighed legs and twirled their cylinders about in what appeared to be, at times, almost totally contrived, excessive, and meaningless nonchalance. Then, at no signal that I could detect, at no prompting that I could learn of, one or another of the machines would rush right over to a spot of ground and, seeming to bend forward a little at the waist, unleash the fury of its cylinder at the fresh earth underneath as though in great glee and highest concentration. The two-legged machine, once started, would really pummel that spot of earth with the front end of its cylinder for upwards of, say, thirty minutes or maybe even three-quarters of an hour, increasing its battering motion as the minutes passed. Then, appearing to know without any guessing when enough was plenty, and withdrawing a dirt-caked cylinder-end, the machine, as it erected to full height from its leaned position, would wander away and rejoin other loafing, waiting machines as though nothing of any consequence had really occurred at all.
Once two machines started for the same spot of earth, and it was quite a show to watch them both hunch into battering position at the same time, take aim at the same place, and start battering each the other’s cylinder almost as much as they pummeled the ground. An overseer for tamping machines watched this ridiculous punching contest for a while before he went over and drummed each machine on the rump just enough to break up the rhythm of their misdirected jab-jab-jab and send them both packing off twirling their cylinders as though they hadn’t really wanted to use them anyway. The job was awarded to a third machine, a troubleshooter reserve type who soon hunched into position and went about poking away at the place as though the world were entirely new and jolly to him and heigh-ho, jig-jig, holiday, holiday, go Go GO!
“What goes WHAT GIVES!?” I asked the overseer of tamping machines, my voice with wonder like a child’s, my eyes surely bulged out like, in the Old Days, a frog’s.
“Time goes, life stays, heigh-ho heigh-hey,” he recited. And then he said, “What are you, some kind of a humorist, or something? What do you mean, ‘what goes, what gives’?”
“What goes, what gives? Explain these grim, grotesque, and altogether hilarious actions. I wish to be instructed. I want to understand. I see nothing but burlesque here. Is there more?”
“Is there more!? Man, is there more!!” Then he looked at me closely. “Why! you’re from Out There! Old Times!” he ejaculated. “Perhaps you really do not understand at all. Maybe you really do mean, ‘What goes, what gives?’ ”
“I mean WHAT GOES, WHAT GIVES!” My fists were doubled by now and I saw I could easily go into my punch-now talk-later mood for sure.
“Travel far?”
“I came far enough. In miles. In time. In blasted hopes and withering dreams. In tears I came. In trouble. YES, I came far enough. And now to find, near the place of my chartered destination, if I came on course and if I drew my lines correctly on the charts they gave, a kind of antic Silly Far. Where big two-legged machines that are essentially, as I see it, just contrivances for carrying around those big proddy rammers, at wholly random instances and to no practical purpose at all, try to have sexual intercourse with the soil.”
“You’re quite a talker. Why don’t you cut through, more? Go direct to your statement and pummel your meaning? Be more like these machines? You can see, when they get that signal, they don’t beat around the bush. They go right over there and then it’s just phoo phoo phoo, jig jig jig, bam bam bam, until the job’s done.”
“WHAT JOB? WHAT’S DONE?”
“The solution is to cover the pollution. The answer is to get rid of the cancer. Ho ho ho.”
I moved in on him and I was ready to punch him down. Then I saw he had a strange look. He stared me back with gleaming, beaming, funny eyes, and there was about him something of the manner of, not a man, but more a machine-man. “This is Moderan,” he said. “We’re building New Land here. When these misters detect a soft place in our soil, they rush right over and batter it into submission. They look random and nonchalant. I know. But really they’re not. When they seem to be just standing, they’re sampling things from way off, maybe. You see, they own very sensitive feet. It’s built in. If there’s a soft place in their sphere of detection, they’ll get it through these sensitors in the feet. Treading here, they’ll get a vibration from a hollow place out there. They’re programmed to hate hollow places. They rush right over and stick in the jammy-ram cylinder when they get wind of a hollow place. By hollow place, I mean a piece of the land surface that isn’t as hard as it should be.”
“Oh yes! And that’s important!?”
“VERY.” Then he looked at me cold-eyed. “Maybe you’d better come with me. I can leave these machines for a while. These jammy-rams are programmed so that really all I have to do is put in my time. And take care of unusual occurrences, like when two signals cross at the juncture of spheres and detection. This happens but rarely, but when it does, whooee! look out! we have, as you saw, the strange, hilarious, and altogether inefficient phenomena of two jammy-rams going for the same hole. (By hole, I mean a piece of the land surface that isn’t as firm as it should be.) Very hard on jammy-rams and also it doesn’t make for a good tamping job at the hole either. And when you’re building for forever, that’s one of the things you really do want and must have—a good tamping job at the hole.” He wasn’t kidding. I saw he wasn’t kidding.
We got into his flap-hap airabout scoot that he used to check on plans and we went up high. And far as the eye could gaze I saw the flats. All dotted with jammy-ram monsters was about three-quarters of this far-as-I-could-see area of the flats, brown-black scraped-off earth speckled with the darker, wandering, and nonchalant spots that were machines doing, I had just been told, a very efficient and important piece of detection work and finalization execution at the hole. Then far down near the horizon, and at the edge of the dots that were jammy-rams, I saw how the browny-black changed to a blur that was gray or grayey-white. He slipped me a pair of the long-rangers for the eyes and I zeroed in on the blur. “The new ice age!”
“Not at all!” he returned. “Or maybe just precisely, if you want to see it so. But this ice age, if you want it so—go ahead, call it that!—is for the species, not against it. You’ll never see this ice age rolling up boulders or creeping along with mammoth bones in its teeth. This ice age is covering up dirt, not just rearranging it. That’s plastic you’re looking at, man! I’m out here as an advance guard for plastic. It’s a friendly deadly-competitive hell-for-plastic devil-take-the-hindermost race between my jammy-rams and me on one side and that creeping gray edge on the other. And we’re gaining!” He smirked with satisfaction. And if I hadn’t already decided he was some kind of a Great One, I would have suspected right now that he was just some kind of a small jackass overseer type taking a lean satisfaction from staying on top of his small-small job. But surely not. Surely this was a Planner, a mover, a shaker, and a rearranger of the World Scheme. At least a mover, a shaker, and a rearranger of the surface of the earth.
“Why—what—?” I sputtered. Yes! I was snowed in just now, as deep back in the murk as I ever like not to be.
He looked hot-eyed with little bulbs at me. He really bored in hard. He seemed to be making some kind of a tough decision about whether I really existed or not. Anyway, I got that impression, so hard was his bright-bulb stare. “Say, you are cleared for this,” he finally said, “aren’t you?”
I remembered some gates and some guards I had passed many days and many many miles long back. Far down at the edge of the place where things were old and wrecked, I remembered that hard cross-questioning, and the lie detectors, and the probing, the probing in— “I think I’m cleared,” I answered. “Would I have got this far if I had not been? Some things like tin eagles have hung over me all the long way, as it is, circling, circling, as I came slowly on my tired shank’s mare….I take it you people are taking no chances whatsoever with what you’ve got down there.”
“We take no chances! Show me if you’ve got it!”
I rolled up my sleeves and showed him the two bright-orange M’s that had been stamped on my lower arms, at the clearing gates a long while back. I thought that might be what he wanted to see, and it was. “You’re cleared! And you’re a whole lot more than that!” He peered more closely at the M’s. “You probably don’t know it now, but you’re a whole lot more than just cleared!” There was in his voice a note of admiration that I couldn’t believe was faked. Yes, he meant it. He pointed at some small symbol under each M. “You probably don’t know exactly what those mean,” he mused, “but I do. I really do.” Then he shook his head in what I had to read as sadness, and he seemed to slip in memory a long way down. “Too old,” he muttered, “too old and too many bridges gone crackling down in the floods, the flames, and the always-present wrecking of the days, before this thing came up for me. But you—you’re just right! You’re young and apparently you passed your tests with colors flying, really whipping out there in the breeze. I bet you’re stamped just about all over! under your clothes!”
“Yeah, they stamped me up pretty well. Then they told me to get going. Pointed me to a road, gave me maps and charts, and said, ‘Get on up there. They’re a-building and you’re sure to be in time.’ Is that what they meant?”
“NOOO. Not for you! This is what I qualified for. I was a Moderan Early-Early. But I was too old and time-ravaged and event-hurt before this gold chance came up for me. But you, you’re young and right and on the mark. I can tell you now, you’ll be a Stronghold master, one of the elite-elite, if you can stand those operations. And there’s no reason why you can’t. I stood what ones they allowed me to, in good shape. And you’re to be allowed the maximum. I can read it by those small marks under the M’s. CONGRATULATIONS!” Impulsively he let go of the controls of the flap-hap and grabbed my right hand with both of his hands. I really got a steel handshake that day!
After a while we landed, back at the place where we had started, and there were two jammy-rams going for the same hole again, so it was altogether to the good that we had arrived back at this station when we did. He rushed right over and straightened things out by slapping the two silly rammers on their rumps, with a certain rhythmic beat, as I had seen him do in that other instance. “A very bad spot, this here,” he announced, coming back. “Something about the spheres of detection right here at this locale, which you’ll notice is a little bit of a depression, taken on the large, causes tangling of the spirals. Really not the fault of the machines, not at all, for they just do what they’re programmed for and that’s it.”
“You really know how to do it!” I exclaimed, for something intuitively told me now that here was just a little serving man, really, a victim, who could do with some praise.
He swelled a lot with good pride as his chest came up a notch. “You know, I developed that technique myself—slapping them on the rump that way with a certain beat. Breaks up their rhythm, jiggles the connections, and they just wander away for a while, not knowing what in hell else to do. After a short time, though, they settle right back down again, the rhythm of their programming is restored, and they’re good serviceable jammy-rammers once more.”
“Anyway, I think that’s neat, slapping these big earth fornicators on the rump that way to send them off just twirling their dirty cylinders at the air, all puzzled and deranged. Sort of shows man’s mastery somehow. Yet—huh?”
“YEAH! Thought it up myself, kind of by accident really. Saw it’d work when my foot slipped and I fell against one of them one time, flailing my arms for balance. Adopted the method. All against procedures, naturally. SAY! you should see what I’m really supposed to do when something like this comes up. About twenty-five to thirty forms to fill out giving the pinpoint time and place and my ideas on why the foul-up. I’m furiously filling out the forms, see, after I’ve immediately and at once sent in the signal to headquarters that two jammy-rammers are at the same hole, COME WITH ALL SPEED! About sixteen big shots hop off their new-metal mistresses up at headquarters, their secretaries, you know, jump in their flap-hap airabout jet scoots, and slam off out here as though hell itself were inside coming out. All this time the two poor jammy-rams with their signals crossed are beating hell out of each other’s rammers, making a bigger scarred-up soft place in the graded surface than there was before, and generally compounding futility to the top degree. But the big shots get there fast, in about two to five minutes—I will say this for them, they’re prompt—and they rush out of their jet-slap airabout scoots and have their big cigars fired up and are clearing their throats and considering things almost before the two mixed-up jammy-rams are scarcely one-third through with their programmed cycle of earth ramming. Which makes it harder, really, because naturally being big-deal men of action, these headquarters fellows (do something, even if it’s wrong! you know) signal off out there at once for the Separator task forces, which come in on the heavy transports in about ten minutes more, and these Separator troops throw big chain links around the intensely working jammy-rams and drag them away from the hole, the jammy-rams still fighting to finish the cycle, naturally, of course. Ever try to pull a jammy-ram by force away from the hole before he’d finished his cycle?”
“No, never did that.”
“No,” he laughed, “course you didn’t. But it can be done with enough horsepower pulling at the jammy-rams and strong enough chains. Tears up the jammy-rams, though, and causes them to have to be sent away many many miles to the repair stations. Then I just complete the filling out of the forms, and procedures are maintained, and everything’s unstrained, happy, and satisfied with the hardware boys.”
I laughed. He laughed. “Yeah, if I hewed to the line of procedures in every way, that long ice-edge of the plastic would be covering me up completely! Along with my jammy-rams, in no time at all. I run my show out here, the big-deal headquarters men can log more time on their new-metal secretaries, I stay ahead of the plastic, and who’s to care if I cut a few procedural corners right in twain?”
“Nobody should care,” I agreed.
He looked at me, and a half-smile toyed at the corners of his mouth, this proud, vain, little man. “You know, what’d happen if they found out, if they ever found out how I slap those jammy-rammers on the rump with a certain beat to shortcut the procedures? Why, I’d be riding out of here in chains in just minutes, that’s what’d happen. Yeah! Procedures are the god in New Land. It’s got to be that way, of course—but still, once in a while, I think a practical mind is best. I usually give those jammy-rams a little extra oiling, or a polish-and-pet with the ‘slick up, shine up’ kit to help them get back straight and forget their humiliation, and it works out.” And suddenly, I had a dazzling flash of insight. This man was really pretty usual! Procedures were for everyone but him. All at once I found myself not admiring his cunning little rump-slapping transgression of the rules quite as much as I thought I would. But then, as I’ve found out in the past, all people disappoint me, soon or late. They just don’t measure out. “What about that plastic? What about those jammy-rams for that matter?” I yelled. “You’ve flown me over wide expanses of scraped and graded earth swarming with milling, wandering, and soil-fornicating jammy-rams. You’ve also flown me over wide areas of whitey-gray plastic that was smooth and cold as ice from where I sat. There’s some reason for all this? You seem to think it’s important. Outside of being your job, is it important?”
His eyes went hard-bright. He was not a friendly man just then. But soon he relaxed, when something had clicked in his mind, I guess. “Sure,” he answered, “it’s very much of importance. But being so lately from Old Land and coming a far way from where all is wrecked and cindered, as I understand it, I guess you wouldn’t know. Forgive me. I was getting a little flame-hot at you just then. I thought you were ridiculing. But I know now, remembering your background, it’s ignorance. And ignorance can be admirable, if the person came by it honestly. Flippant, flyblow, half-baked wiseacring is about the worst thing in the world, compared to honest ignorance.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Now, to answer your question about the scraped-off rolled-down land, the jammy-rams, and the plastic: You see, we’re moving down toward where you came from. We’ll get it all in time. Surely you must know that the earth is poisoned. From what I’ve heard, where you are from is not only poisoned, but wrecked and cindered as well. We stopped just short of that havoc up here; therefore there is this place for you from Old Land to come to. But our land was poisoned by science ‘progress’ as much as yours was. So we’re covering all with the sterile plastic, a great big whitey-gray envelope of thick tough sterile plastic over all the land of the earth. That’s our goal. It’s a mammoth task, but for mammoth tasks man has behemoth machines. The mountains go into the valleys, the creek banks go into the creeks, the ditch sides go into the ditches, the golf courses are smoothed, the mine tailings are scattered—and all is coated. At the necessary places we make the reservoirs for runoff and freeze it solid. The oceans we will deal with in our own time, our own time and well enough. There are several plans, one being to use our scientific knowhow to freeze the oceans solid, another being to shoot the oceans out into space in capsules and be done with all that surplus water forever. The new-metal man, which I am to a degree, and which you are to become to a much much higher degree, will need very little water….But now it’s the land we’re doing. The water is a later task. But when we get all through, I visualize an earth of such tranquility and peace in nature that it must be the true marvel of all the ages. The surface of our globe will be a smooth, tough grayey-white hide. When our water plans are finalized the rainfall will be no more. No more will man be fleeing floods anywhere in the world. In cloudless heavens the winds will have died in our even temperatures; no more will man go sky-high in the twisters. The air will hang as a tranquil envelope over essentially a smooth gray ball, the smoothness being broken only by the Strongholds and the bubble-dome homes. Trees, if we want them, will spring up from the yard holes at the flick of a switch. The flowers will bloom just right and on time in wonderful bloom-metal. Animals—there will be no animals, unless we should want a few tigers and lions and such, all mechanical of course, for a staged jungle hunt. Yes! it will be a land for forever, ordered and sterilized. That’s the Dream!”
“But you still haven’t told me why those jammy-rams ram at the soil in such a ridiculous way!” Yes, I could listen to the grandest plan in all the universe and still feel the bones of a jagged ragged uncomfortable question nag at my dissenting throat. And anyway, I felt he owed me an answer on less grandiose terms. Anyone could have a big puff-ball dream about how to make the earth into such an ordered place as almost to stump the imagination. But would it ever happen? Well, I for one would call it more than a small cosmic miracle if man, a spark of life tediously evolved from the dead cold elements himself, should so organize his forces as to rearrange those elements to have essentially a dead cold planet again before he departed. It would seem to me a dismal, and more than a little depressing, closing of the ring, for sure. “Tell me about the jammy-rams!” I shouted.
“Well, as you should have guessed a while back, the jammy-rams are just clever and sophisticated machines, science’s marvels, you might say, for making sure that the surface we’re coating is packed and solid everywhere. We want no cracks or sagging in the plastic. The mammoth graders and rollers do the big smoothing and packing jobs, and they’re now miles on beyond. And miles back the other way, as we saw in our flap-hap airabout scoot ride, is the ice edge of the plastic this whole thing is all about. And my jammy-rams and I are in between, the artistic effort really, the ones who care, seeing that the whole thing comes not to naught because of small soft places left untended to make an improper bedding for the plastic. YES! we’re the crux of it!” I could see that his was a proud calling.
I looked about and far and wide strolled still on that smoothed and rolled-down earth the tall cylinder-carrying monsters, and many was the jammy-ram that was hunched into the position and having a go at the jug-jug-jug, phoo-phoo-phoo, bam-bam-bam that was its main mission. “How long will I be in that hospital,” I asked abruptly, thinking now of my future and many things.
“Nine months,” he answered at once, gently rump-stroking a nearby jammy-ram that was having a go at a soft place in the hard hide of the soil. “That’s the full transformation, and you’re scheduled for it, from the markings I read under the orange M’s.” He stuck out a hand, and I shook it, felt its cold steel. “Good luck, boy, with the operations. When we meet again, if we meet again, you’ll be a Stronghold master, one of the elite-elite. Youth will be served. I missed my chance, failed my hunt, ordered my gray battalions on to the impossible fields too late and lost—due to no fault of my own. It was age—and fate.” He turned away, and I knew he was fighting a battle.
I went on up toward the place where the operations were nine months long, where according to rumor, iron nurses, sterile and capable, ran on spur tracks up to the edges of beds, where a man, if of the CHOSEN, might receive enough part-steel to be a king in his times.
Out of the hospital, out of the nine-months mutilation, out of the nine-months magic, released and alone. The steel-spliced doctors knew they had made a monster. They were proud of me, their monster, as doctors must always be proud of successes in their field; but they knew that now I was a kind of king, and they were merely doctors. Their arrogance was small-town lording now, their lording outlorded, as it were. No matter how born or made, a king WILL be a king. They got rid of me. They loaded me out. They quick-shifted me into the seething yeasty world; and with almost no parting ceremony. And with the very minimum of instructions and equipment (which was load plenty-enough) to stand me down on my trip. But somehow a king must be a king, know how to behave as a captain of his times and domesticate his wild situations, no matter what the odds.
With my portable flesh-strip feeder, my book of instructions for new-metal limb control, my plastic mechanical tear bags (for even a king must sometimes cry, you will allow), and all the other paraphernalia to get me started, or at least to sustain me until I should attain my Stronghold sanctuary, I sailed out from the hospital steps, the arrogant doctors watching. Something like a small iron frigate from the Old Days, I guess I was, loaded to the gunwales and standing forth on end.
Walking was easy, really. Plop-plip-plap-plot—one foot in front of the other, pick-them-up-and-plunk-them-down, toggle your hinges and braces, go with the arm swing for balance, flail the air with those blades when you go to tumble down—determine, determine, DETERMINE! determine that you will move along. Go for the tear bags when things get too uncertain, stop—think—cry (oh yes, a king can cry), curse if you want to, and hate, hate, hate. But keep on walking, don’t let those steel-spliced doctors see, don’t let anyone see how it is.
GOD! Being a new-metal man wasn’t going to be easy. Let me tell you here and now, being a new-metal man was going to take some swinging. BUT I WOULD.
According to the little packet of special maps and instructions the steel-spliced ones had slung around my neck at our parting, I was to be Stronghold 10. I looked at that number and at first it meant nothing. Nothing at all. Then I thought more, the new green juices in the fresh-made brainpans sloshing and fuming, and I thought, STRONGHOLD 10! YES! STRONGHOLD 10 FOREVER! Stronghold 10 must never disgrace Moderan. Stronghold 10 must achieve. Stronghold 10 must win honors. Stronghold 10 must be heroic. Stronghold 10 must be brave. Stronghold 10 must be the strongest, toughest, meanest, most hateful, most arrogant, loudest-mouthed, most battle-hungry hellion-hearted Stronghold in all the wide wide world. YES!
But first, just right now, soon, THE NEXT ORDER OF BUSINESS! Stronghold 10 must find his Stronghold.
After five hours of walking hard and going perhaps a stingy mile and a half, and some of that in circles, I stood lost in a little plastic draw, and quite bewildered. The vapor shield was scarlet August that burning month, the tin flowers were up in all the plastic plant holes, the rolling ersatz pastures were all aflutter with flash and flaunt of blooms. A sheen was in the air, a shimmer, and a million devils of heatstroke walked out and wrapped me close in my shell. And I was lost on this seventh day of hot August.
I’ll always remember him, the way he came walking, a big man all shrunken in the torso, all bent down along the back curve, all sere and wrinkled in the face areas, so very terribly black-brown, like meat cooked too long on the bone. He had surely been through some maximum havoc—fire maybe, maybe fire and wind together, maybe flood too, wife-trouble and relatives thrown in could be, almost surely a war, possibly all standard disasters known to man, and some not so standard. He looked that bad. Yes, truly. THE WAR mostly—probably. And when he talked, I knew some problem surely had wrecked him even past what showed. Perhaps he had lost some parts that really counted one time. Anyway, his voice was a womanly squeak now as he said, “Lost, mister?”
I swiveled to take him in fully, practicing coming down to hard-stare with my new wide-range Moderan vision, and I thumbed at the book, seeking the page on speech. (Oh, remember, I was new new-metal and the hospital had not kept me over for many practice runs. Not in any phase, let alone speech.) But it wasn’t so hard really. NO! of course not. All one had to do was be a mechanical genius to run oneself, a broadcaster speech specialist in order to talk, and a few other things to be able to operate as a new-metal man smoothly and with élan. Mostly, for just right now, forget the refinements and just try to find the right buttons. When I pushed the phfluggee-phflaggee too hard and it shouted, I mean shouted, “SURE AM,” he jumped about five feet in the air. I could guess he wasn’t used to that voice-button shouting, and I could also suppose he expected lip movement (I learned to do that later) and maybe better inflection too (which I learned later, as well). I tried again and said, passably I hoped, phfluggee-phflaggee voice going smoother, “I’m looking for Stronghold Ten. I AM Stronghold Ten. When I get there.” Then I tried a little voice-button laugh, just for kicks, and it came out “HA! Huk!”
“OH!” he said, wet slop slopping, gristle-meat tongue doing a dance, wind in the windpipe working, GOD! what an old-fashioned method just to communicate a few verbal salutes. Hadn’t we needed improvement for quite a long time there? “I think I know,” he finished, squeak-voiced and all, and still scared, “but you look so funny! Like a polished-up scrap heap, sort of. And all that load!” His fried-like wrinkled cheeks puffed then and he was consumed for a while with a tiny squeaky belly laugh.
“Well, I’m not funny,” I snapped, furiously working the buttons, “not funny at all. I’m to be a king. I AM A KING! If I can just find where. And this stuff is all stuff I need to get me started, be sure of that.”
“I guess I know,” he piped up, stopping the laugh off tight. “I mean, you said Stronghold Ten. And well, there’s a big pile up there of stuff. I mean, it’s a castle, really. WOW! I mean it’s like nothing I ever saw!” And he stood entranced, thinking, I had to guess, on what he’d seen.
“HOO! It’s got a big ten on it that shines out day and night. That ten must be in jewels. Or maybe just some kind of paint. But it’s too much for me. I’ve walked by just to look at that ten sometimes. And usually things would happen. Or I should say ALWAYS, here of late, things would happen. I guess they’ve got all that BLAM! stuff working and perfected now. And all those walls and towers.”
“YEAH?” I phfluggee-phflaggeed. “Really?”
“Yeah! Last time I’s by—yesterday, it was, late, I mean—they must have had ALL of it systems-GO! When I move in close I activate something. I’ve found that out, found it out months past, and I’ve been teasin’ ’em for months, too. But I guess they didn’t mind, ’cause it gave ’em a chance to test. And practice. And yesterday, WHEE! I have to believe everything was ready. Such a bedlam, such a warning display, such a response for just a harmless lost human wreck-pile like me, who’s ‘ad it and ‘ad it really. I mean, I’m done. THE WAR, you know. And all.”
“Sorry,” I push-buttoned at him the very best that I could. “Really sorry. But go on about what happened. The response, I mean.”
“The response?—YEAH! Well, if you were in THE WAR, we have some background for conversation. Were you in THE WAR?”
“Yes, VERY!”
“Were you in on the response at Landry, say, or the push-button flattening of Whay? Happened all in just seconds, you know. That’s where I got it, got it bad and really—at Landry, and lost the parts that, being gone, cause me to squeak at my conversation just right now. Know what I mean?”
“Know what you mean. And yes, I was in on the things you mention. In fact, I was the young Bangdaddo, the Commandaddo, the Chief-in-Chief of the Bangs, who pushed the buttons on Whay. My job, you know, just doing my job.” God, maybe I was the one who had ripped him.
He looked at me straight on and a sun came out of either eye just then and shone at me with a million warm pats of adoration. “YOU’RE HIM!” he squeak-voice shouted. And I thought I knew what he meant. Yes, I had been very BIG at the response on Landry and the push-button flattening of Whay. I had been the First Bangdaddo, THE COMMANDADDO.
“And now they’ve fixed you to be one of the BIG ones here! That figures.”
“I’m lucky. And I’m sorry you got it, got shot up so badly. Truly sorry. No one won, finally, you know. NO ONE. Maybe they can fix you.”
“Nah. Once gone like this is gone GONE. For me it’s downhill to the bone hill. But I’m staying as long as I can!” And I had to admire him for that last little singing out of the bones-in-the-teeth determination. “Just to see what happens to you guys who made it,” he finished.
“But now,” I asked, “would you be kind enough to lead me to my castle? So I can get started on whatever it is I’m supposed to be. I’d be ever so grateful to you.”
“I’ll do it, and gladly. And if you don’t know by now why GLADLY, I guess you never will.” He looked at me with not a begging look, just a quiet questioning look from eyes that didn’t waver now, and I guessed that within this wreck pile there had once been a very proud human being. Something about that stance, the set of the once-champion shoulders, the head lowered a little more now with the eyes peep-glaring out, the fists ready to hammer the world down to tiniest wreck-size pieces—and a bulb flashed on, far deep in the reaches—“MORGBAWN!” I shouted, hitting all the phfluggee-phflaggee buttons I had, and suddenly we were clasping each other while time had rolled quite away. “Oh God, what happened HAPPENED?”
I remember him as he had not-too-long-ago been, a man quite up among men, tall and giant-seeming in his neat uniform of the BANGS, just before Landry, where everything for him and for me went wrong. I had lost him, my great second in command, in the hell and the flame and the noise of Landry, where I thought he had been blown to high skies and all winds. I had escaped by the merest chance of a miracle myself, to try the retrieval of all on Whay. There was no retrieval of anything that war, and especially not on Whay. YES! I had flattened it with the launchers and the big zump-blasters, but the other side took me out just as badly. And right after that all the world seemed to turn to flame as everyone gunned in.
“To start again!” I said to Morgbawn. “Maybe we can both start again.”
“No,” he replied in the very smallest of piping voices, quite eerie, “I’m nothing but the dust now. Essentially. It’s just a matter of a very small small while until whatever I was must lie and lie and lie, grave-housed—FOREVER. The battles can never be joined again for me.”
Then an idea took me, a great boiling steaming kind of thought, the kind that could, when I was all flesh in the Old Days, give me goose crinkles along the brain. My new-metal shell now rasped and wrinkled and roared in my flesh-strips and new green blood reacted while the brainpans steamed. “Come be my weapons man!” I cried with the button-crying, “and we’ll flatten the world! as we once hoped we could do it when we were fresh and deadly in our new uniforms of the BANGS. It’s a chance to fight again and maybe win it all, maybe make up our losses.—Every Stronghold master, as I understand it, has a head weapons man. You’ll be my lead!”
The look from his haggard killed fried-meat face was wan and wintry through storms of glooms. And yet, I thought I detected a very tiny pinpoint spark of yearning hope too, deep back, struggling behind his gaze. But he said, “Ah no, I’ve been here long enough to know what a weapons man is in Moderan. He’s a moving bit of mechanical servant nonsense meaning nothing, nothing at all. I think I’d rather lie out in my grave than to rejoin the battles that way. Not even one flesh-strip!”
“I’ll see that you get one. I swear it. One of mine!”
“Ah no, what could it mean? One flesh-strip. HA-ha. Why, a person has to have a whole network, with the blood coursing, to be anything. Otherwise it means nothing. You have to admit it, God still made the best people. One flesh-strip! HA! Why, I’d have to have a built-in pickle jar to keep it alive.”
“We’ll do it. A built-in pickle jar!”
“Ah, no.” But there was still that tiny spark of hope, and I thought I detected it stronger now. YES! I was beginning to wonder if Morgbawn wasn’t finding it a worlds better idea, that of being up and moving with even just one flesh-strip in a pickle jar rather than to lie totally quiet out there, the Battles finally and forever completely renounced for him.
“How about it?”
“Maybe!” he said. “I don’t know. Come find me where I fall. We’ll keep in touch, maybe. It shouldn’t be long now. When I feel myself finally going, wherever I am, I’ll head for your place. I’ll struggle in as close as I can get. Come find me—” His face retreated and commenced to break up then, he started to move away, and I think in that one anguished moment I understood just a little better than I ever had before what it might be like to be, as Morgbawn surely was, at the very brink of the Forever Total Dark. He was far down the plastic draw, the heart-rending wreck of my once great second in command, before I came back to the moment of now and remembered that he could have helped me find my way home. Ah well, it was near. He had said so. And maybe, after nightfall, that glowing 10 he had told me of would reach out and beam me in. I turned all the settings on LOW, fixed the alarm at a time for awakening, and, surrounded by my equipment and instructions, simmered into sleep right there on the plastic that very hot summer eve, to awake, I hoped, in the light of a gleaming 10.
I had just nailed the mice down lightly by their tails to the struggle board, was considering how happy is happy, and was right on the point of rising from my hip-snuggie chair to go fetch forth the new-metal cat when my warner set up a din. I raced to my Viewer Wall, where the weapon thumbs all were; set the peep scope to max-sweep; and looked out, wide-ranging the blue plastic hills. And I saw this guy, this shape, this little bent-down thing coming not from the Valley of the White Witch, my main area of danger now, but coming from the Plains of Far Wide, from which I had not had a visitor for nigh on to five eras.
Was he sad, oh, was he sad! He came on, this little toad-down man, tap-tap, mince-mince, step-walk-step, but with tense carefulness in his slowness, as if every inch-mince were some slipping up on a bird. It made me itch just to see him, and to think how walking should be, great striding, big reaching, tall up with steel things clanking long-down by your side and other weapons in leather with which to defy your world. And your wagons coming up with maces and hatchets on end. Though I go not that way myself, truth to say, for I am of Moderan, where people have “replacements.” I walk with a hitch worse than most, an inch-along kind of going, clop-clip-clap-clop, over the plastic yards, what little I walk, for I still have bugs in the hinges. I was an Early, you know, one of the first of Moderan. But I remember. Something in the pale green blood of my flesh-strips recalls how walking should be—a great going out with maces to pound up your enemies’ heads, and a crunchy bloody jelly underfoot from the bones and juices of things too little even to be glanced at under your iron-clad feet.
But this guy! Hummph. He came like a lily. Yes, a white lily with bell-cone head bent down. I wondered why my warner even bothered with him. But yes, I knew why my warner bothered with him. My warner tells me of all movement toward my Stronghold, and sometimes the lilies—“Stand by for decontamination!” He was at my Outer Wall now, at the Screening Gate, so I directed my decontaminators and weapons probers to give him the rub-a-dub. To be truthful, two large metal hands had leaped out of the wall to seize him and hold him directly in front of the Screening Gate, so my call to “stand by for decontamination!” was merely a courtesy blab. When the Decontamination and the Weapons Report both gave him a clean bill I thumbed the gates back in all my eleven steel walls and let the lily man mince through.
“Hello, and welcome, strange traveler from Far Wide.” He stood trembling in his soft-rag shoes, seeming hard put on how actually to stop his inch-mince walk. “Forgive me,” he said, “if I seem nervous.” And he looked at me out of the blue of his flesh-ball eyes while he tugged at a cup-shaped red beard. And I was appalled at the “replacements” he had disallowed, the parts of himself he had clung to. For one wild blinding moment I was almost willing to bet that he had his real heart, even. But then I thought ah, no, not at this late year and in Moderan. “This walking,” he continued, “keeps going. You see, it takes a while to quiet. You know, getting here at last, I cannot, all of me, believe I am really here. My mind says yes! My poor legs keep thinking there’s still walking to do. But I’m here!”
“You’re here,” I echoed, and I wondered, What next? what goes? I thought of the mice I had nailed and the new cat waiting and I was impatient to get on with my Joys. But then, a visitor is a visitor, and a host most likely is a victim. “Have you eaten? Have you had your introven?”
“I’ve eaten.” He eyed at me strange-wide. “I didn’t have introven.”
I began to feel more uneasy by the minute. He just stood there vibrating slightly on thin legs, with those blue-flesh-ball eyes peeking my way, and he seemed to be waiting for me to react. “I’m here!” he said again. And I said, “Yes,” not knowing what else to say. “Would you wish to tell me about your trip,” I asked, “the trials and tribulations?”
Then he started his recital. It was mostly a dreary long tune of hard going, of almost baseless hopes concerning what he hoped to find, of how he had kept coming, of how he had almost quit in the Spoce Mountains, of how something up ahead had kept him trying, something like a gleam of light through a break in an iron wall. “Get over the wall,” he said, “and you have won it, all that light. Over the wall!” He looked at me as though this was surely my time to react.
“Why did you almost quit in the Spoce Mountains?”
“Why did I almost quit in the Spoce Mountains!? Have you ever tried the Spoce Mountains?” I had to admit that I had not. “If you have never tried the Spoce Mountains—” He fell into a fit of shaking that was more vivid than using many words. “Where are all the others?” he asked when the shaking had stopped a little.
“All the others? What are you talking about?”
“Oh, yes. There must be great groups here. There must be long lists waiting.” His white cone-shaped face lit up. “Oh, they’re in the Smile Room. That’s it, isn’t it?”
My big steel fingers itched to crush him then like juicing a little worm. There was something about him, so soft, so trustful and pleading and so all against my ideas of the iron mace and the big arm-swing walk. “There’s no Smile Room here,” I blurted. “And no long lists waiting.”
Unwilling to be crushed he smiled that pure little smile. “Oh, it must be such a wonderful machine. And so big! After all the other machines, the One, the ONE—finally!”
Great leaping lead balls bouncing on bare-flesh toes! What had we here? A nut? Or was he just lost from home? “Mister,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re driving at. This is my home. It’s where I wall out danger. It’s where I wall in fun. My kind of fun. It’s a Stronghold.”
At the sound of that last word his blue eyes dipped over and down in his whitewash face; his head fell forward like it was trying to follow the eyes to where they were falling. And out of a great but invisible cloud that seemed to wrap him round his stricken mouth gaped wide. “A Stronghold! All this way I’ve come and it is a Stronghold! You have not the Happiness Machine at a Stronghold. It could not be.
“Oh, it is what kept me going—the hope of it. I was told. In the misty dangerous weird Spoce Mountains when the big wet-wing Gloon Glays jumped me and struck me down with their beaks I arose and kept coming. And on one very sullen rain-washed hapless morning I awoke in a white circle of the long-tusk wart-skin woebegawngawns, and oh it would have been so much easier, so very much less exacting, to have feigned sleep while they tore me and opened my soul case with death. But no! I stood up, I remembered prophecy. I drew my cloak around me. I walked. I walked on. I left them staring with empty teeth. I thought of my destination. And now— It was a dream! I am fooled! Take me to your Happiness Machine!”
He was becoming hysterical. He blabbed as how he wanted to go and sit in some machine gauged to beauty and truth and love and be happy. He was breaking down. I saw I must rally him for one more try, to get him beyond my walls. “Mister,” I said, “you have, no doubt, known the big clouds and the sun failing and the rain-washed gray dawn of the hopeless time. You have—I believe it—stood up in disaster amid adversity’s singing knives and all you had going for you was what you had brought along. There were no armies massing for you on other fields, no uncles raising funds in far countries across seas; perhaps there were no children, even, coming for Daddy in the Spoce Mountains, and with death not even one widow to claim the body and weep it toward the sun. And yet you defied all this, somehow got out of disaster’s tightening ring and moved on down. I admire you. I truly am sorry I do not have what you want. And though you are a kind of fool, by my way of thinking, to go running around in flesh looking for a pure something that perhaps does not exist, I wish you luck as I thumb the gates back and make way for your progress. You may find, up ahead somewhere, across a lot of mountains, and barren land, these Happiness Machines for which you cry.” He trembled when I spoke of mountains, but he moved out through the gates.
And though I was sure he would find nothing the way he was going, I have not been entirely able to forget him. What would prompt such a creature, obviously ill equipped for any great achievement, to hope for the ultimate and impossibly great achievement, happiness? And such an odd way to expect it, happiness dispensed by some magic machine gauged to beauty and truth and love. In a resplendent place at the end of a long trip.
To hear him talk you’d think happiness could be based on lily-weak things. How weird. Power is joy; strength is pleasure; put your trust only in the thick wall with the viewer and the warner. But sometimes, in spite of myself, I think of this little flesh-ridden man and wonder where he is.
And when I’m at my ease, feeding my flesh-strips the complicated fluids of the introven, knowing I can live practically forever with the help of the new-metal alloys, a vague uneasiness comes over me and I try to evaluate my life. With the machines that serve me all buzzing underneath my Stronghold and working fine—yes, I am satisfied, I am adequate. And when I want a little more than quiet satisfaction, I can probe out and destroy one of my neighbor’s walls perhaps, or a piece of his warner. And then we will fight lustily at each other for a little while from our Strongholds, pushing the destruction buttons at each other in a kind of high glee. Or I can just keep home and work out some little sadistic pleasure on my own. And on the terms the flesh-man wanted—truth, beauty, love—I’m practically sure there is no Happiness Machine out there anywhere at all. I’m almost sure there isn’t.