Alternate Heroes

by Gregory Benford

  They get off good.

  Meanwhile, Bill Burroughs is slacked back in his rocker, refixed and not quite on the nod because he’s persistently irritated, both by the thought of the hydrogen bomb and, more acutely, by the fly-buzz derry Times Square jive of the jabbering teaheads. Time passes, so very slowly for Sal and Dean, so very fast for William Lee.

  So Doctor Miracle and Little Richard are barreling along the Arizona highway, heading east on Route 40 out of Vegas, their pockets full of silver cartwheels from the grinds they’ve thimblerigged, and also wallets bulging with the hi-denom bills they demanded when cashing in their chips after beating the bank at the roulette wheels of six different casinos with their unpatented probabilistic scams that are based on the vectors of neutrons through six inches of lead as transferred by spacetime Feynman diagrams to the workings of those rickety-clickety simple-ass macroscopic systems of balls and slots.

  Doctor Miracle speaks. He attempts precision, to compensate for the Hungarian accent and for the alcohol-induced spread in bandwidth.

  “Ve must remember to zend Stan Ulam a postcard from Los Alamos, reporting za zuccess of his Monte Carlo modeling method.”

  “It woulda worked even better over in Europe,” goes Little Richard. “They got no double-zero slots on their wheels.”

  Doctor Miracle nods sagely. He’s a plump guy in his fifties: thinning hair, cozy chin, faraway eyes. He’s dressed in a double-breasted suit, with a bright hula-girl necktie that’s wide as a pound of bacon.

  Little Richard is younger, skinnier, and more Jewish, and he has a thick pompadour. He’s wearing baggy khakis and a white T-shirt with a pack of Luckys rolled up in the left sleeve.

  It is not immediately apparent that these two men are ATOMIC WIZARDS, QUANTUM SHAMANS, PLUTONIUM PROPHETS, and BE-BOPPIN’ A-BOMB PEE AITCH DEES!

  Doctor Miracle, meet Richard Lernmore. Little Richard, say hello to Johnny von Neumann!

  There is a case of champagne sitting on the rear seat in between them. Each of the A-scientists has an open bottle from which he swigs, while their car, a brand-new 1950 big-finned land-boat of a two-toned populuxe pink-’n’-green Caddy, speeds along the highway.

  There is no one driving. The front seat is empty.

  Von Neumann, First Annointed Master of Automata, has rigged up the world’s premier autopilot, you dig. He never could drive very well, and now he doesn’t have to. Fact is, no one has to! The Caddy has front- and side-mounted radar that feeds into a monster contraption in the trunk, baby cousin to Weiner and Ulams’s Los Alamos MANIAC machine, a thing all vacuum tubes and cams, all cogs and Hollerith sorting rods, a mechanical brain that transmits cybernetic impulses directly to the steering, gas, and brake mechanisms.

  The Trilateral Commission has ruled that the brain in the Cad’s trunk is too cool for Joe Blow, much too cool, and a self-driving car isn’t going to make it to the assembly line ever. The country needs only a few of those supercars, and this one has been set aside for the use and utmost ease of the two genius-type riders who wish to discuss high quantum-physical, metamathematical, and cybernetic topics without the burden of paying attention to the road. Johnny and Dickie’s periodic Alamos-to-Vegas jaunts soak up a lot of the extra nervous tension these important bomb builders suffer from.

  “So whadda ya think of my new method for scoring showgirls?” asks Lernmore.

  “Dickie, although za initial trials vere encouraging, ye must have more points on the graph before ye can extrapolate,” replies von Neumann. He looks sad. “You may haff scored, you zelfish little prick, but I—I did not achieve satisfactory sexual release. Far from it.”

  “Waa’ll,” drawls Lernmore, “I got a fave nightclub in El Paso where the girls are hotter’n gamma rays and pretty as parity conservation. You’ll get what you need for sure, Johnny. We could go right instead of left at Albuquerque and be there before daylight. Everyone at Los Alamos’ll be busy with the White Sands test anyway. Security won’t look for us till Monday, and by then we’ll be back, minus several milliliters of semen.”

  “El Paso,” mutters von Neumann, taking a gadget out of his inner jacket pocket. It’s—THE FIRST POCKET CALCULATOR! Thing the size of a volume of the Britannica, with Bakelite buttons, and what makes it truly hot is that it’s got all the road distances from the Rand McNally Road Atlas data-based onto the spools of a small wire-recorder inside. Von Neumann’s exceedingly proud of it, and although he could run the algorithm faster in his head, he plugs their present speed and location into the device; calls up the locations of Las Vegas, Albuquerque, El Paso, and Los Alamos; and proceeds to massage the data.

  “You’re quite right, Dickie,” he announces presently, still counting the flashes of the calculator’s lights. “Ve can do as you say and indeed eefen return to za barracks before Monday zunrise. Venn is za test scheduled, may I ask?”

  “Eight A.M. Sunday.”

  Von Neumann’s mouth broadens in a liver-lipped grin. “How zynchronistic. Ve’ll be passing White Sands just zen. I haff not vitnessed a bomb test since Trinity. And zis is za biggest one yet; zis bomb is, as you know, Dickie, za Ulam cascade initiator for za new hydrogen bomb. I’m for it! Let me reprogram za brain!”

  Lernmore crawls over the front seat while the car continues its mad careening down the dizzy interstate, passing crawling tourist Buicks and mom-‘n’-dad Studebakers. He lugs the case of champagne into the front seat with him. Von Neumann removes the upright cushion in the backseat and pries off the panel, exposing the brain in the trunk. Consulting his calculator from time to time, von Neumann begins reprogramming the big brain by yanking switchboard-type wires and reinserting them.

  “I’m tired of plugging chust metal sockets, Richard. Viz za next girl, I go first.”

  Now it’s night, and the stoned beats are drunk and high on bennies, too. Neal, his face all crooked, slopes through Burroughs’s shack and picks Bill’s car keys off the dresser in the dinette where Joan is listening to the radio and scribbling on a piece of paper. Crossing the porch, thievishly heading for the Buick, Neal thinks Bill doesn’t see, but Bill does.

  Burroughs the beat morphinist, whose weary disdain has shaded catastrophically with the Benzedrine and alcohol into fried impatience, draws the skeletized sawed-off shotgun from the tube of hidden gutterpipe that this same Texafied Burroughs has suspended beneath a large hole drilled in the eaten wood of his porch floor. He fires a twelve-gauge shotgun blast past Neal and into Neal’s cleaned and twisted box of Mary Jane, barely missing Jack.

  “Whew, no doubt,” goes Neal, tossing Burroughs the keys.

  “Have ye hard drink, mine host?” goes Jack, trying to decide if the gun really went off or not. “Perhaps a pint of whiskey in the writing desk, old top? A spot of sherry?”

  “To continue my afternoon fit of thought,” says Burroughs, pocketing his keys, “I was talking about thermonuclear destruction and about the future of all humanity, which species has just about been squashed to spermaceti in the rictal mandrake spasms of Billy Sunday’s pimpled ass-cheeks.” He pumps another shell into the shotgun’s chamber. His eyes are crazed goofball pinpoints. “I am sorry I ever let you egregious dope-suckin’ latahs crash here. I mean you especially, jailbird con man Cassady.”

  Neal sighs and hunkers down to wail on the bomber Jack’s lit off a smoldering scrap of shotgun wadding. Before long he and Jack are far into a rap, possibly sincere, possibly jive, a new rap wrapped around the concept that the three hipsters assembled here on the splintery porch ‘neath the gibbous prairie moon have formed or did or will form or, to be quite accurate, were forming and still are forming right then and there, an analogue of those Holy B-Movie Goofs, THE THREE STOOGES!

  “Yes,” goes Jack, “those Doomed Saints of Chaos, loosed on the work-a-daddy world to scramble the Charles Dickens cark and swink of BLOOEY YER FIRED, those Stooge Swine are the anarchosyndicalist truly wigged sub-Marxists, Neal man, bikkhu Stooges goosing ripeass-melons and eating fried chicken for supper. We are the
Three Stooges.”

  “Bill is Moe,” says Neal, hot on the beam, batting his eyes at Bill, who wonders if it’s time to shed his character-armor. “Mister Serious Administerer of Fundament Punishments and Shotgun Blasts, and me with a Lederhosen ass!”

  “Ah you, Neal,” goes Jack, “you’re Curly, angelic madman saint of the uncaught mote-beam fly-buzz fly!”

  “And Kerouac is Larry,” rheums Burroughs, weary with the knowledge. “Mopple-lipped, lisped, muxed, and completely flunk is the phrase, eh, Jack?”

  “Born to die,” goes Jack. “We’re all born to die, and I hope it do be cool, Big Bill, if we goam take yo cah. Vootie-oh-oh.” He holds out his hand for the keys.

  “Fuck it,” says Bill. “Who needs this noise.” He hands Jack the keys, and before you know it, Neal’s at the wheel of the two-ton black Buick, gunning that straight-eight mill and burping the clutch. Jack’s at his side, and they’re on the road with a long honk good-bye.

  In the night there’s reefer and plush seats and the radio, and Neal is past spaced, off in his private land that few but Jack and Alan can see. He whips the destination on Jack.

  “This car is a front-row seat to the A-blast.”

  “What.”

  “We’ll ball this jack to White Sands, New Mexico, dear Jack, right on time for the bomb test Sunday 8 A.M. I stole some of Bill’s M, man, we’ll light up on it.”

  In Houston they stop and get gas and wine and benny and Bull Durham cigarette papers and keep flying west.

  Sometime in the night, Jack starts to fade in and out of horror dreams. There’s a lot of overtime detox dream-work that he’s logged off of too long. One time he’s dreaming he’s driving to an atom-bomb test in a stolen car, which is of course true, and then after that he’s dreaming he’s the dead mythic character in black and white that he’s always planned to be. Not to mention the dreams of graves and Memere and the endless blood sausages pulled out of Jack’s gullet by some boffable blonde’s sinister boyfriend…

  “… been oh rock and roll gospeled in on the bomb foolishness…” Neal is going when Jack screams and falls off the backseat he’s stretched out on. There’s hard wood and metal on the floor. “… and Jack, you do understand, buckaroo, that I have hornswoggled you into yet another new and unprecedentedly harebrained swing across the dairy fat of her jane’s spreadness?”

  “Go,” goes Jack feebly, feeling around on the backseat floor. Short metal barrel, lightly oiled. Big flat disk of a magazine. Fuckin’ crazy Burroughs. It’s a Thompson submachine gun Jack’s lying on.

  “And, ah Jack, man, I knew you’d know past the suicidal norm, Norm, that it was … DeVoutie!” Neal fishes a Bakelite ocarina out of his shirt pocket and tootles a thin, horrible note. “Goof on this, Jack, I just shot M, and now I’m so high I can drive with my eyes closed.”

  Giggling Leda Atomica tugs at the shoulders of her low-cut peasant blouse with the darling petit-point floral embroidery, trying to conceal the vertiginous depths of her cleavage, down which Doctor Miracle is attempting to pour flat champagne. What a ride this juicy brunette is having!

  Leda had been toking roadside Albuquerque monoxide till 11:55 this Saturday night, thumb outstretched and skirt hiked up to midthigh, one high-heel foot perched on a little baby blue hand case with nylons and bra straps trailing from its crack. Earlier that day she’d parted ways with her employer, an Oakie named Oather. Leda’d been working at Oather’s juke joint as a waitress and as a performer. Oather had put her in this like act wherein she strutted on the bar in high heels while a trained swan untied the strings of her atom-girl costume, a cute leatherette two-piece with conical silver lamé tit cups and black shorts patterned in intersecting friendly-atom ellipses. Sometimes the swan bit Leda, which really pissed her off. Saturday afternoon the swan had escaped from his pen, wandered out onto the road, and been mashed by a semi full of hogs.

  “That was the only bird like that in Arizona,” yelled Oather. “Why dintcha latch the pen?”

  “Maybe people would start payin’ to watch you lick my butt,” said Leda evenly. “It’s about all you’re good for, limp-dick.”

  Et cetera.

  Afternoon and early evening traffic was sparse. The drivers that did pass were all upstanding family men in sensible Plymouths, honest salesmen too tame for the tasty trouble Leda’s bod suggested.

  Standing there at the roadside, Leda almost gave up hope. But then, just before midnight, the gloom parted and here came some kind of barrel-assing Necco-Wafer-colored Caddy!

  When the radars hit Leda’s boobs and returned their echoes to the control mechanism, the cybernetic brain nearly had an aneurysm. Not trusting Lernmore’s promises, von Neumann had hard-wired the radars for just such a tramp-girl eventuality, coding hitchhiking Jane Russell T&A parameters into the electronic brain’s very circuits. The Caddy’s headlights started blinking like a ftllah in a sandstorm, concealed sirens went off, and Roman candles mounted on the rear bumper discharged, shooting rainbow fountains of glory into the night.

  “SKIRT ALERT!” whooped Doctor Miracle and Little Richard.

  Before Leda knew what was happening, the cybernetic Caddy had braked at her exact spot. The rear door opened, Leda and her case were snatched on in, and the car roared off, the wind of its passage scattering the tumbleweeds.

  Leda knew she was hooked up with some queer fellas as soon as she noticed the empty driver’s seat.

  She wasn’t reassured by their habit of reciting backward all the signs they passed.

  “Pots!”

  “Egrem!”

  “Sag!”

  But soon Leda takes a shine to Doctor Miracle and Little Richard. Their personalities grow on her in direct proportion to the amount of bubbly she downs. By the time they hit Truth or Consequences, N.M., they’re scattin’ to the cool sounds of Wagner’s Nibelungenlied on the long-distance radio, and Johnny is trying to baptize her tits.

  “Dleiy!” croons Doctor Miracle.

  “Daeha thgil ciffart!” goes Lernmore, all weaseled in on Leda’s other side.

  “Kcuf em won syob!” says Leda, who’s gone seven dry weeks without the straight-on loving these scientists are so clearly ready to provide.

  So they pull into the next tourist cabins and get naked and find out what factorial three really means. I mean … do they get it on or what? Those stag-film stars Candy Barr and Smart Alec have got nothing on Leda, Dickie, and Doctor Miracle! Oh baby!

  And then it’s near dawn and they have breakfast at a greasy spoon, and then they’re on Route 85 south. Johnny’s got the brain programmed to drive them right to the 7:57 A.M. White Sands space-time coordinate; he’s got the program tweaked down to the point where the Cad will actually cruise past ground zero and nestle itself behind the observation bunker, leaving them ample time to run inside and join the other top bomb boys.

  Right before the turnoff to the White Sands road, von Neumann decides that things are getting dull.

  “Dickie, activate the jacks!”

  “Yowsah!”

  Lernmore leans over the front seat and flips a switch that’s breadboarded into the dash. The car starts to buck and rear like a wild bronco, its front and tail alternately rising and plunging. It’s another goof of the wondercaddy—von Neumann has built B-52 landing gear in over the car’s axles.

  As the Caddy porpoises down the highway, its three occupants are laughing and falling all over each other, playing grab-ass, champagne spilling from an open bottle.

  Suddenly, without warning, an ooga-ooga Klaxon starts to blare. “Collision imminent,” shouts von Neumann.

  “Hold onto your tush!” advises Lernmore.

  “Be careful,” screams Leda and wriggles to the floor.

  Lernmore manages to get a swift glimpse of a night black Buick driving down the two-lane road’s exact center, heading straight toward them. No one is visible in the car.

  Then the road disappears, leaving only blue sky to fill the windshield. There is a tremendous screech
and roar of ripping metal, and the Caddy shudders slowly to a stop.

  When Lernmore and von Neumann peer out of their rear window, they see the Buick stopped back there. It is missing its entire roof, which lies crumpled in the road behind it.

  For all Neal’s bragging, M’s not something he’s totally used to. He has to stop and puke a couple of times in El Paso, early early with the sky going white. There’s no sympathy from Jack, ‘cause Jack picked up yet another bottle of sweet wine outside San Antone, and now he’s definitely passed. Neal has the machine gun up in the front seat with him; he knows he ought to put it in the trunk in case the cops ever pull them over, but the dapperness of the weapon is more than Neal can resist. He’s hoping to get out in the desert with it and blow away some cacti.

  North of Las Cruces the sun is almost up, and Neal is getting a bad disconnected feeling; he figures it’s the morphine wearing off and decides to fix again. He gets a Syrette out of the Buick’s glove compartment and skin-pops it. Five more miles and the rosy flush is on him; he feels better than he’s felt all night. The flat empty dawn highway is a gray triangle that’s driving the car. Neal gets the idea he’s a speck of paint on a perspective painting; he decides it would be cool to drive lying down. He lies down sideways on the driver’s seat, and when he sees that it works, he grins and closes his eyes.

  The crash tears open the dreams of Jack and Neal like some horrible fat man’s can opener attacking oily smoked sardines. They wake up in a world that’s horribly different.

  Jack’s sluggish and stays in the car, but Neal is out on the road doing dance incantation trying to avoid death that he feels so thick in the air. The Thompson submachine gun is in his hand, and he is, solely for the rhythm, you understand, firing it and raking the landscape, especially his own betraying Buick, though making sure the fatal lead is only in the lower parts, e.g. tires as opposed to sleepy Jack backseat or gas tank, and, more than that, he’s trying to keep himself from laying a steel-jacketed, flat horizontal line of lead across the hapless marshmallow white faces of the rich boys in the Cadillac. They have a low number government license plate. Neal feels like Cagney in White Heat, possessed by total crazed rage against authority, ready for a mad-dog last-stand showdown that can culminate only in a fireball of glorious fuck-you-copper destruction. But there’s only two of them here to kill. Not enough to go to the chair for. Not yet, no matter how bad the M comedown feels. Neal shoots lead arches over them until the gun goes to empty clicks.