The last was the miracle. Miracle in a tube.
He fingered it almost reverently, then unclipped it in a moment’s frenzy, still immobile to the robot’s “eyes.”
He held it at his side, away from his body a fraction of an inch, pointing up over the bulge of his spacesuited leg.
If the robot looked at him, all it would see would be the motionless bulk of his leg, blocking off any movement on his part. To the machine, he was inert. Motionless.
Now he thought wildly, where is the brain?
If it is behind the relay machines, I’m still dead. If it is near the refrigerator, I’m saved. He could afford to take no chances. He would have to move.
He lifted one leg.
The robot moved toward him. The humming and sparking was distinct this time. He dropped the leg.
Behind the refrigerator!
The robot stopped, nearly at his side. Seconds had decided. The robot hummed, sparked, and returned to its niche.
Now he knew!
He pressed the button. The invisible beam of the flashlight leaped out, speared at the bulkhead above the refrigerator. He pressed the button again and again, the flat circle of light appearing, disappearing, appearing, disappearing on the faceless metal of the life hutch’s wall.
The robot sparked and rolled from its niche. It looked once at Terrence. Then its rollers changed direction and the machine ground toward the refrigerator.
The steel fist swung in a vicious arch, smashing with a deafening clang at the spot where the light bubble flickered on and off.
It swung again and again. Again and again till the bulk-head had been gouged and crushed and opened, and the coils and plates and wires and tubes behind it were refuse and rubble. Until the robot froze, with arm half-ready to strike again. Dead. Immobile. Brain and appendage.
Even then Terrence did not stop pressing the flashlight button. Wildly he thumbed it down and down.
Suddenly he realized it was all over.
The robot was dead. He was alive. He could be saved. He had no doubts about that. Now he could cry.
The medicine chest grew large through the shimmering in his eyes. The relay machines smiled at him.
God bless you, little life hutch, he thought, before he fainted.
A smartass once accused me of being subtle. I decked him with a short right over the heart and an elbow in the trachea. The prison is the structure of bigotry, the prisoners mouth sentences of machinegun polemic, and the story is about as subtle as a turd in a punchbowl. You’ll pardon all the hair-chested masculine talk, incidentally, but I bought Mailer’s new collection today, and as he puts it, it is as full of shit as a Yule-tide turkey, yet the references to life being one big prizefight arena, and all the studied vulgarity, they’re catching. And since I want to truly become a Writer of Stature, like Algren and Mailer and Steinbeck and Hemingway and Irwin Shaw, it looks as though I’ll have to cultivate all them crudities of sweaty body-contact sports that prove my credentials for writing ballsy stories are the size of my genitalia. It ain’t easy, troops. I find fooball a drag, basketball is dumb, baseball lost me around 1948 after the Indians copped the Series, two pithe-canthropoids in a ring getting their snouts turned to Smucker’s jelly and their cerebrums mixmastered into Mrs. Grass’ noodle soup turn me off, and I am not presumptuous enough to think I’m in competition with Jimmy Baldwin or even Mr. Mailer, whom I think I can cut, most of the time. Even so, even taking this shocking inadequacy into account, the question of “race” boils my blood. So I’ll let Norman work it out his way and I’ll talk about a
Battle Without Banners
WHEN THEY FIRST broke out of the machine shop, holding the guards before them, screwdrivers sharp and deadly against white-cloth backs covering streaks of yellow, they made for the South Tower, and took it without death. One of the hostage guards tried to break free, however, in the subsequent scuffle to liberate the machine gun from its gimbals and tracks, and Simon Rubin was forced to use the screwdriver on the man. They threw the body from the Tower as an example to the remaining three hostages, and had no further difficulties. In fact, the object lesson was so successful that it was the guards themselves that carried the cumbersome machine gun, with all its belts of ammunition, back down into the yard. The Tower was an insecure defensive position, interlocked as it was with the other three Towers and the sniping positions on the roofs of the main buildings. They had decided in advance to make it back down into the yard and there, with backs to the wall itself, to take their stand for as long as it took the second group to blow the gate.
Construction on the new drainage system had been underway for only two days, and the great sheets of corrugated sheet metal, the sandbags, the picks and shovels, all were stacked under guard near the wall. They were forced to gun down the man on duty to get into the shelter of the piles of materiel, but it didn’t matter either way—if he lived or died—because they were going to take as many with them as they could, breakout or not.
Nigger Joe and Don Karpinsky set up the big-barreled machine gun and braced it sides as well as fore and aft with sandbags, digging it in so the recoil would not affect its efficiency.
Gyp Williams, who had engineered the break, took up a solid rifleman’s position, flat out on his belly with legs spread and toes pointed out, the machine rifle braced against right shoulder and left elbow dug deep into the brown earth of the yard, supporting the tripod grip. His brown eyes set deep into his black face were roaming things as he covered the wide expanse of the yard, waiting for the first assault; it had to come; he was the readiest ever.
Lew Steiner and the kid they called Chocolate made up the rest of the skirmish team, and they were busily unloading the home-made grenades and black powder bombs from the cotton-batting of the insulated box…when the first assault broke out of cover around the far wall of the Administration Building.
They came as a wave of white-winged doves, the ivory of their uniforms blazing against the hard cold light of the early morning. First came the sprayers, pocking the ground with little upbursts of dirt, and shredding the morning silence with the noise of their grease guns. Then a row of riflemen and behind them half a dozen longarms with grenades, if needed.
“Away, they comin’!” Gyp Williams snapped over his shoulder. “Dig, babies!” and he got off the first burst of the defense, into their middle. Three of the grease gunners went down, legs every whichaway and guns tossed off like refuse clattering and still chattering on automatic fire, pelting the wall with wasted lead. The second wave faltered an instant, and in that snatch of time Nigger Joe fed the belts to Karpinsky, who swung the big weapon back and forth, in even arcs, cutting them down right across the bellies. None of the riflemen made it a fifth of the distance across the empty yard. One of them went down kicking, and Karpinsky took him out on the next, lowered, arc.
“I am,” Lew Steiner screamed, arching high to toss a black powder bomb, “home free!” It hit and exploded fifteen yards too short, but the effect was marvelous. The longarms caught up short and tried to turn.
“Bang
“Bang
“And bang,” Gyp Williams grinned and murmured as he snapped off three sharp, short bursts, ending it for a trio of grenade carriers. And it was over that quickly, as the remaining grease-gunners and three longarms fell, clambered, tripped, sprinted, raced back around the building.
“We done that thing,” Gyp Williams rolled over on his back, aiming a thumb and finger pistol at his troops. “We sure enough, we done that thing.”
“Send those guards outta here,” Chocolate nodded his head at the hostages. Gyp agreed with a small movement of his massive head, and the three white-jacketed guards were shoved around the side of the enclosure, out into the open. For a moment they tensed, as though they expected to be shot down by the men in the tiny fort, but when no movement was made, they broke into a dead run, across the yard, arms waving, yelling to their compatriots that they were coming through.
The first burst o
f machine gun fire came from the North Tower and took one of them in mid-stride, making him miss his footing, leap and plunge in a half-somersault to crash finally onto the ground, sliding a foot and a half on the side of his face. The second burst cut down his partners. They tumbled almost into a loving embrace, piled atop one another.
Chocolate expelled breath through dry lips and asked, “Who’s got the cigarettes?” Simon Rubin tossed him the pack and for a while they just lay there, smoking, alert, watching the bodies of the dead white guards who had been shot by their own men.
“Well,” Gyp Williams commented philosophically, after a time, “everybody knows a white cat gets around niggers is gonna get contaminated. They just couldn’t be trust, man. Dirty. Dirty.”
“And kikes,” Lew Steiner added. “Ding ding.”
They settled down for the long wait, till the second group could blow the wall. They watched the shadows of the sun slither across the yard. Nothing moved. Warm, and nice, waiting. Quiet, too.
“How long you been in this prison?” Chocolate asked Simon Rubin. There was no answer for the space of time it took Rubin to draw in on the butt and expell smoke through his nostrils; then his long, horsey face drew down, character lines in the bony cheeks and around the deep-set eyes mapping new expressions. “As far back as I can remember,” he replied carefully, thinking about it, “I suppose all of my life.” Chocolate nodded lightly, turning back to the empty yards with a thin whistle of nervousness.
Something should happen. They all wanted it.
“When the hell they gonna blow that gate?” Nigger Joe murmured. He had been biting the inside of his full lower lip, chewing, biting again. “I thought they was gonna blow it soon’s we got a position here? What the hell they doin’ back in there?”
Gyp Williams motioned him to silence. “Quiet, willya. They’ll get on it, you take it easy.”
“I’m really scared,” Don Karpinsky added a footnote. “It’s like waiting for them to come and kill you. My old man told me about that at Belsen, how they came around and just looked at you, didn’t say a word, just walked up and down, gauging you, looking to see if there was meat on you, and then later, boy oh boy, later they came back and didn’t have any trouble picking you out, just walked up and down again, pointing, that one and that one and…”
“Can it,” Gyp Williams hushed him. “Boy, you sure can talk!” He was silent a second, scrutinizing the young man, too young to need a shave every day, but old enough to be here behind the wall with them. Then, “What you in for, boy?”
Don Karpinsky looked startled, his face rearranging itself to make explanations, excuses, reading itself for extenuating circumstances, amelioration. “I, I, uh, I hurt some people.”
Gyp Williams turned toward him more completely (yet kept a corner of his eyes on the empty yard, where the bodies remained crumpled). “You what, you did what?”
“I just, uh, I hurt some people, with a, uh, with a bomb, see I made this bomb and when I tossed it I din’t know there was any—”
“Whoa back, boy!” Gyp Williams pulled the young man’s racethrough dialogue to a halt. “Go on back a bit. You made a what? A bomb?” Karpinsky nodded dumbly: It was obvious he had never thought he would be censured here.
“Now what’n the hell you do that for, boy?”
Don Karpinsky turned to the belts of long slugs, neatly folded over themselves, ready for the maw of the machine gun. He would not, or could not, answer.
Simon Rubin spoke up. He had been listening to the interchange but had decided to let the young Karpinsky handle his own explanations. But now it needed ending, and since the young man had confided in him one rainy night in their cell, he felt the privileged communication might best be put to use here. “Gyp,” he called the big black man’s attention away from Karpinsky. It served to halt the next words from Gyp Williams’ mouth.
“He bombed a church, Gyp. Some little town in Iowa. The minister was apparently some kind of a monster, got the local Male White Protestants convinced Jews ate goyishe children for Passover. They made it hell on the kid and his family. He was a chemistry bug, made a bomb, and tossed it. Killed six people. They threw him in here.”
Gyp Williams seemed about to say something, merely clucked his tongue, and rolled over once more into a firing position. The only sound in the enclosure was the metallic sliding of the machine rifle’s bolt as Gyp Williams made unnecessary checks.
Lew Steiner was asleep against the wall, his back propped outward by a sandbag, a black powder bomb in each hand, as though in that instant of snapping awake, he might reflexively hurl one of the spheroids more accurately, more powerfully than he had in combat.
“Waddaya think, Gyp?” Chocolate asked. “You think they gonna try an’ take us in daylight, or wait till t’night?” He was as young as Don Karpinsky, somewhere under twenty, but a reddish ragged scar that split down his left cheek to the corner of his mouth made him seem—somehow—older, more experienced, more capable of violence than the boy who had bombed the small Iowa church.
Gyp Williams rose up on an elbow, gaining a better field of vision across the yard. He talked as much to himself as to Chocolate. “I don’t know. Might be they’d be careful about waiting till dark. That’s a good time for us as much as them. And when the other boys make the move to blow the gate, the dark’ll be on our side, we can shoot out them search-lights…”
He chuckled, lightly, almost naively.
“What’s so funny?” Nigger Joe asked, then turned as Simon Rubin asked, “Hey, Joe, I got a crick in my back, here, want to rub it out for me?” Nigger Joe acknowledged the request and slid across the dirt to Rubin, who turned his back, indicating the sore area. The Negro began thumbing it smooth with practiced hands, repeating, “Gyp, what’s so funny?”
Gyp Williams’ ruggedly handsome face went into a softer stage. “I remember the night they came for us, the caravan, about fifteen twenty cars, came on down to Littletown, all of them with the hoods, lookin’ for the one who’d grabbed a feel off the druggist’s wife. Man, they were sure pretty, all of them real black against the sky, just them white hoods showing them off like perfect targets.
“They’s about ten of us, see, about ten, all laid out like I am now, out there on a little hill in the tall grass, watching them cars move on down. Showoffs, that’s what they was. Showoffs, or they wouldn’t’ve sat up on the backs of them convertibles, where we could see ’em so plain. No lights on the cars, all silent, but the white hoods, as plain as moonlight.
“We got about thirteen or fourteen of them cats before they figured they’d been ruined. I was just thinkin’ ’bout it now, thinkin’ ’bout them searchlights when they come on. Those white uniforms gonna be might fine to shoot at, soon’s it gets dark.” Then, without a break in meter, his tone became frenzied, annoyed, “When the hell they gonna blow that goddam gate?”
As if in reply, a long, strident burst from a grease gun sprayed from the roof of the Administration building, pocked the wall behind them, chewing out irregular niches in the brick. They were spattered with brick chips and mortar, dirt and whizzing bits of stone. Lew Steiner came rigidly awake, grasped the situation and ducked in a dummy-up cover, imitating the other five defenders.
They were huddled over that way, when they heard the whispering, choking whirr of helicopter roters chewing the air. “They’re coming over the wall in a ’copter!” Don Karpin-sky shrieked.
Gyp Williams turned over, elevating the machine rifle, bracing it on an upright sheet of corrugated metal. “Lew! Get set, them bombs…they comin’ over…Lew!”
But Steiner was lost in fear. It was silence he heard, rather than the commanding voice of Gyp Williams. His buttocks stared out where his face should have been, and Gyp Williams cursed tightly, eyes directed at the wall, scanning, tracking back and forth for the first sight of the guard helicopter, coming with the tear gas or the thermite or a ten-second shrapnel cannister. “Joe, do somethin’ about him, you Joe!”
Nig
ger Joe slid across the ground, grasped Lew Steiner by the hair, and jerked him out of the snail-like foetal position he had assumed. Steiner still clutched the black smoke bombs, one in either fist, like thick, burned rolls, snatched from an oven.
The colored man was unconcerned with niceties. He slapped Steiner heavily, the sound a counterpoint to the copter’s rising comments. Lew Steiner did not want to come back from wherever he had gone to find peace and security. But the black man’s palm could not be ignored. He bounced the work-pinkened flesh off Steiner’s cheeks until the milky-blue of sight unseen had faded, and Steiner was back with them.
“Them bombs, Lew,” Nigger Joe said, softly, with great kindness. “They comin’ over the wall right’cheer behind us.” Steiner’s defection was already forgotten.
No more was said as Steiner rolled over, ready to meet the helicopter with his bombs. Chocolate and Don Karpinsky stayed with the fixed machine gun, prepared for a rear guard attack in the face of the aerial threat. Nigger Joe and Simon Rubin lay on their backs, rifles pointed at the sky.
The whirlybird came over the wall fifty feet down the line, and Gyp Williams quickly readjusted himself for its approach. The machine was perhaps twenty feet over their heads, and came churning toward them rapidly, as though intent on low level strafing. Gyp Williams loosed his first burst before the others, and it missed the mark by two feet. The helicopter came on rapidly, steadily. The six men lay staring at it, readying themselves, trying at the same time to find places for their naked bodies in the earth.
When it was almost directly overhead, Lew Steiner rose to a kneeling position and hurled first one black powder bomb, then the other, with tremendous force. The first bomb went straight, directly up into the air, passed over the cockpit of the machine, and tumbled back wobbling, to hit the top of the wall, bounce and explode on the other side. The reverberation could be felt in the wall and the ground, but no rifts appeared in the brick. The second bomb crashed into the side of the machine and a deafening roar split up the even sussuration of the ’copter’s rotors. The machine tottered on its course, slipped sidewise and lost minor altitude, but was compensated, began to climb, and just as it hurled itself away in a slanting curve, a projectile tumbled dizzily, end-over-end from the machine.
From the Land of Fear Page 7