“Shocking!” declared a rock star who preferred to remain anonymous. “These groupies should be setting an example for our impressionable police. Do they treat their fathers like that?”
Scenario Six:
War is any means of breaking the will of the enemy. Guilt is a means of waging war. A guilt-war breaks the will of the enemy through remorse. In a guilt-war, the enemy is defeated when his remorse for the actions he is committing is greater than his fear of the consequences of defeat
The Arsenal of Entropy
Shit is a substance easily obtained by anyone, it is neither colorless, odorless, nor tasteless. Its odor, taste, appearance, and concept provoke severe disgust in many people, including police, public officials, and military personnel.
UNIVERSITY DEMANDS DEMONSTRATOR CONTROL OF POLICE
Berkeley, Calif. At a news conference called after the latest Berkeley riot, the Chancellor of the University of California demanded tighter demonstrator control of police. “The situation would never have gotten out of hand if the police had been forced to summon demonstrators ear-tier,” he declared. “It’s time the anarchists stopped coddling the police.”
Scenario Seven:
War is any means of breaking the will of the enemy. Reality-alteration is a means of waging war. A reality-alteration-war breaks the will of the enemy through alienation. In a reality-alteration-war, the enemy is defeated when his fear of alienation from the current reality is greater than his fear of the consequences of defeat.
IF YOU CAN’T SEAT ’EM EAT ’EM IF YOU BEAT ’EM YOU CAN’T EAT ’EM IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ’EM YOU CAN’T EAT ’EM
MUGGER CLEARED OF POLICE BRUTALITY RAP
New York, N.Y. Superior Court Judge Arthur Cranz today dismissed charges of intent to commit police brutality against Herbert Smith, 29. Smith, a member of the International Brotherhood of Muggers, had been accused of police brutality against Patrolman David MacDougal of the New York City Vice Squad, when the latter’s nightstick was buggered during a routine mugging in New York’s Central Park. Judge Cranz ruled that since both men were under the influence of capitalist propaganda at the time, intent could not be proven. However, all three paternity suits arising out of the incident are still pending in civil court.
Scenario Eight:
War is any means of breaking the will of the enemy. Identity is a means of waging war. An identity-war breaks the will of the enemy through absorption. In an identity-war, the enemy is defeated when his degree of merger with the enemy is greater than his fear of the consequences of defeat.
SECRETARY OF TREASURY ABSCONDS
New York, N.Y. The Secretary of the Treasury today announced his formal abscondence with the National Debt at a press conference held in a Wall Street crash-pad. He told reporters that he planned to sell the Debt to the Mafia as a tax-loss, deposit the proceeds in municipal bonds, and accept a Presidential appointment to the Mothers of Invention.
Scenario Nine:
War is any means of breaking the will of the enemy. Chaos is a means of waging war. A chaos-war breaks the will of the enemy through entropy. In a chaos-war, the enemy is defeated when further action on his part becomes the consequences of defeat.
BECAUSE WE LOVE EACH OTHER, THAT’S WHY!
Reno, Nevada. At a press conference in Reno today, the President and the Vice President announced that they had been married during the night in a private ceremony conducted by the Chief of Naval Operations.
“I just don’t see what all the fuss is about,” the Vice President said. “We’re just two people in love, that’s all.”
“This time it’s for keeps!” the President assured reporters as the newlyweds left for a two-week honeymoon in Niagara Falls.
Introduction to
The Big Flash
This story came close to being suppressed for the sake of the body politic. Hot off the typewriter, I had sent it to Damon Knight, both as a submission to Orbit and as a workshop story for the imminent Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference.
When I got to Milford, Damon greeted me with an evil look in his eye, and ushered me into the kitchen, cackling maniacally. There on the countertop he had arranged a display for my amusement. He had gone into the woods and picked several radioactive-looking toadstools and lettered the words “Do It” on each mushroom cap.
He told me he loved the story, that he was going to buy it, and he thought his little fungus display was very funny. I thought it was funny too, uh, sort of, I was glad he liked the story, and happy that he was going to buy it. But somehow I was beginning to feel a little peculiar…
When the story was workshopped, Damon joined in the general literary admiration, and said that he thought he was going to buy it, but…
But he wasn’t so sure the story ought to be published at all. After ail, look what it had caused a relatively sane person such as himself to go out and do! Was this story constructed with such artful evil that publication of it might tend to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Well, okay, maybe he did have a point, but was I going to let that stand in the way of a sale? Besides, it was pointed out by myself and others that a fictional catharsis might contrariwise defuse the awful reality.
So free press and commerce triumphed and Damon published the story in Orbit 5.
A few months later the Jefferson Airplane’s new album appeared. There was a great big ecstatic atomic mushroom cloud on the cover. It was called “The Crown of Creation.”
The Big Flash
T minus 200 days… and counting…
They came on freaky for my taste—but that’s the name of the game: freaky means a draw in the rock business. And if the Mandala was going to survive in L.A., competing with a network-owned joint like The American Dream, I’d just have to hold my nose and out-freak the opposition. So after I had dug the Four Horsemen for about an hour, I took them into my office to talk turkey.
I sat down behind my Salvation Army desk (the Mandala is the world’s most expensive shoestring operation) and the Horsemen sat down on the bridge chairs sequentially, establishing the group’s pecking order.
First the head honcho, lead guitar, and singer, Stony Clarke—blond shoulder-length hair, eyes like something in a morgue when he took off his steel-rimmed shades, a reputation as a heavy acid-head, and the look of a speed-freak behind it. Then Hair, the drummer, dressed like a Hell’s Angel, swastikas and all, a junkie, with fanatic eyes that were a little too close together, making me wonder whether he wore swastikas because he grooved behind the Angel thing or made like an Angel because it let him groove behind the swastika in public. Number three was a cat who called himself Super Spade and wasn’t kidding—he wore earrings, natural hair, a Stokeley Carmichael sweatshirt, and on a thong around his neck a shrunken head that had been whitened with liquid shoe polish. He was the utility infielder: sitar, base, organ, flute, whatever. Number four, who called himself Mr. Jones, was about the creepiest cat I had ever seen in a rock group, and that is saying something. He was their visuals, synthesizer, and electronics man. He was at least forty, wore early-hippie clothes that looked like they had been made by Sy Devore, and was rumored to be some kind of Rand Corporation dropout. There’s no business like show business.
“Okay, boys,” I said, “you’re strange, but you’re my kind of strange. Where you worked before?”
“We ain’t, baby,” Clarke said. “We’re the New Thing. I’ve been dealing crystal and acid in the Haight. Hair was drummer for some plastic group in New York. The Super Spade claims it’s the reincarnation of Bird and it don’t pay to argue, Mr. Jones, he don’t talk too much. Maybe he’s a Martian, We just started putting our thing together.”
One thing about this business, the groups that don’t have square managers, you can get cheap. They talk too much.
“Groovy,” I said. “I’m happy to give you guys your start. Nobody knows you, but I think you got something going. So I’ll take a chance and give you a week’s booking. One a.m. to closing, which
is two, Tuesday through Sunday, four hundred a week.”
“Are you Jewish?” asked Hair.
“What?”
“Cool it,” Clarke ordered. Hair cooled it. “What it means,” Clarke told me, “is that four hundred sounds like pretty light bread.”
“We don’t sign if there’s an option clause,” Mr. Jones said.
“The Jones-thing has a good point,” Clarke said. “We do the first week for four hundred, but after that it’s a whole new scene, dig?”
I didn’t feature that. If they hit it big, I could end up not being able to afford them. But, on the other hand, four hundred dollars was light bread, and I needed a cheap closing act pretty bad.
“Okay,” I said. “But a verbal agreement that I get first crack at you when you finish the gig.”
“Word of honor,” said Stony Clarke.
That’s this business—the word of honor of an ex-dealer and speed-freak.
T minus 199 days… and counting…
Being unconcerned with ends, the military mind can be easily manipulated, easily controlled, and easily confused. Ends are defined as those goals set by civilian authority. Ends are the conceded province of civilians; means are the province of the military, whose duty it is to achieve the ends set for it by the most advantageous application of the means at its command.
Thus the confusion over the war in Asia among my uniformed clients at the Pentagon. The end has been duly set: eradication of the guerrillas. But the civilians have overstepped their bounds and meddled in means. The generals regard this as unfair, a breach of contract, as it were. The generals (or the faction among them most inclined to paranoia) are beginning to see the conduct of the war, the political limitation on means, as a ploy of the civilians for performing a putsch against their time-honored prerogatives.
This aspect of the situation would bode ill for the country, were it not for the fact that the growing paranoia among the generals has enabled me to manipulate them into presenting both my scenarios to the President. The President has authorized implementation of the major scenario, provided that the minor scenario is successful in properly molding public opinion.
My major scenario is simple and direct. Knowing that the poor flying weather makes our conventional air power, with its dependency on relative accuracy, ineffectual, the enemy has fallen into the pattern of grouping his forces into larger units and launching punishing annual offensives during the monsoon season. However, these larger units are highly vulnerable to tactical nuclear weapons, which do not depend upon accuracy for effect. Secure in the knowledge that domestic political considerations preclude the use of nuclear weapons, the enemy will once again form into division-sized units or larger during the next monsoon season. A parsimonious use of tactical nuclear weapons, even as few as twenty one-hundred-kiloton bombs, employed simultaneously and in an advantageous pattern, will destroy a minimum of two hundred thousand enemy troops, or nearly two-thirds of his total force, in a twenty-four hour period. The blow will be crushing.
The minor scenario, upon whose success the implementation of the major scenario depends, is far more sophisticated, due to its subtler goal: public acceptance of, or, optimally, even public clamor for, the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The task is difficult, but my scenario is quite sound, if somewhat exotic, and with the full, if to some extent clandestine, support of the upper military hierarchy, certain civil government circles and the decision-makers in key aerospace corporations, the means now at my command would seem adequate. The risks, while statistically significant, do not exceed an acceptable level.
T minus 189 days… and counting…
The way I see it, the network deserved the shafting I gave them. They shafted me, didn’t they? Four successful series I produce for those bastards, and two bomb out after thirteen weeks and they send me to the salt mines! A discotheque, can you imagine they make me producer at a lousy discotheque! A remittance man they make me, those schlockmeisters. Oh, those schnorrers made the American Dream sound like a kosher deal—twenty percent of the net, they say. And you got access to all our sets and contract players; it’ll make you a rich man, Herm. And like a yuk, I sign, being broke at the time, without reading the fine print. I should know they’ve set up the American Dream as a tax loss? I should know that I’ve gotta use their lousy sets and stiff contract players and have it written off against my gross? I should know their shtick is to run the American Dream at a loss and then do a network TV show out of the joint from which I don’t see a penny? So I end up running the place for them at a paper loss, living on salary, while the network rakes it in off the TV show that I end up paying for out of my end.
Don’t bums like that deserve to be shafted? It isn’t enough they use me as a tax-loss patsy; they gotta tell me who to book! “Go sign the Four Horsemen, the group that’s packing them in at the Mandala,” they say. “We want them on ‘A Night with the American Dream.’ They’re hot.”
“Yeah, they’re hot,” I say, “which means they’ll cost a mint. I can’t afford it.”
They show me more fine print—next time I read the contract with a microscope. I gotta book whoever they tell me to and I gotta absorb the cost on my books! It’s enough to make a Litvak turn anti-semitic.
So I had to go to the Mandala to sign up these hippies, I made sure I didn’t get there till twelve-thirty so I wouldn’t have to stay in that nuthouse any longer than necessary. Such a dive! What Bernstein did was take a bankrupt Hollywood-Hollywood club on the Strip, knock down all the interior walls, and put up this monster tent inside the shell. Just thin white screening over two-by-fours. Real shlock. Outside the tent, he’s got projectors, lights, speakers, all the electronic mumbo-jumbo, and inside is like being surrounded by movie screens. Just the tent and the bare floor, not even a real stage, just a platform on wheels they shlepp in and out of the tent when they change groups.
So you can imagine he doesn’t draw exactly a class crowd. Not with the American Dream up the street being run as a network tax loss. What they get is the smelly, hard-core hippies I don’t let in the door and the kind of j.d. high-school kids that think it’s smart to hang around putzes like that. A lot of dope-pushing goes on. The cops don’t like the place and the rousts draw professional troublemakers.
A real den of iniquity—I felt like I was walking onto a Casbah set. The last group had gone off and the Horsemen hadn’t come on yet. So what you had was this crazy tent filled with hippies, half of them on acid or pot or amphetamine, or, for all I know, Ajax, high-school would-be hippies, also mostly stoned and getting ugly, and a few crazy schwartzes looking to fight cops. All of them standing around waiting for something to happen, and about ready to make it happen. I stood near the door, just in case. As they say, “The vibes were making me uptight.”
All of a sudden the house lights go out and it’s black as a network executive’s heart. I hold my hand on my wallet—in this crowd, tell me there are no pickpockets. Just the pitch black and dead silence for what, ten beats, and then I start feeling something, I don’t know, like something crawling along my bones, but I know it’s some kind of subsonic effect and not my imagination, because all the hippies are standing still and you don’t hear a sound.
Then from monster speakers so loud you feel it in your teeth, a heartbeat, but heavy, slow, half-time, like maybe a whale’s heart. The thing crawling along my bones seems to be synchronized with the heartbeat and I feel almost like I am that big dumb heart beating there in the darkness.
Then a dark red spot—so faint it’s almost infrared—hits the stage which they have wheeled out. On the stage are four uglies in crazy black robes—you know, like the Grim Reaper wears—with that ugly red light all over them like blood. Creepy, Boom-ba-boom. Boom-ba-boom. The heartbeat still going, still that subsonic bone-crawl, and the hippies are staring at the Four Horsemen like mesmerized chickens.
The bass player, a regular jungle bunny, picks up the rhythm of the heartbeat. Dum-da-dum. Dum-da-dum. The drummer beats it
out with earsplitting rim shots. Then the electric guitar, tuned like a strangling cat, makes with horrible, heavy chords. Whang-ka-whang. Whang-ka-whang.
It’s just awful, I feel it in my guts, my bones; my ear-drams are just like some great big throbbing vein. Everybody is swaying to it; I’m swaying to it. Boom-ba-boom. Boom-ba-boom.
Then the guitarist starts to chant in rhythm with the heartbeat, in a hoarse, shrill voice like somebody dying: “The big flash… the big flash…” And the guy at the visuals console diddles around and rings of light start to climb the walls of the tent, blue at the bottom becoming green as they get higher, then yellow, orange, and, finally as they become a circle on the ceiling, eye-killing neon-red. Each circle takes exactly one heartbeat to climb the walls.
Boy, what an awful feeling! Like I was a tube of toothpaste being squeezed in rhythm till the top of my head felt like it was gonna squirt up with those circles of light through the ceiling.
And then they start to speed it up gradually. The same heartbeat, the same rim shots, same chords, same circles of light, same “The big flash… the big flash…” Same base, same subsonic bone-crawl, but just a little faster… Then faster! Faster!
Thought I would die! Knew I would die! Heart beating like a lunatic. Rim shots like a machine gun. Circles of light sucking me up the walls, into that red neon hole.
Oy, incredible! Over and over, faster, faster, till the voice was a scream and the heartbeat a boom and the rim shots a whine and the guitar howled feedback and my bones were jumping out of my body—
Every spot in the place came on and I went blind from the sudden light—
An awful explosion sound came over every speaker, so loud it rocked me on my feet—
I felt myself squirting out of the top of my head and loved it.
Then:
The explosion became a rumble—
The light seemed to run together into a circle on the ceiling, leaving everything else black.
And the circle became a fireball.
The Star-Spangled Future Page 17