Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

  “Your first assignment is to intercept this missile before it can spread unapproved thinking to Nazi Socialist space, and beyond, and to destroy it.”

  There was a blackout; four signs were illuminated, one after the other:

  Three Go Out.

  One Gets Killed.

  One Goes Mad.

  One Doesn’t Come Back.

  The first two signs were lit. In the darkness, Zero is in a balsawood framework shaped like a small rocket. To his uniform has been added a bent coat hanger representing a space helmet.

  His voice is roaring, he is determined. The band is raucous behind him but his singing overpowers it.

  “Target in sight!

  It’s easy, all right!

  Just line up the guns and watch all the fu—

  Ooops!”

  A papier-mâché meteor, painted red and trailing smoke vertically, comes out of the darkness. It smashes into Zero’s ship, which flies to flinders. Zero, his coat-hanger helmet now gone, floats up into the air on wires in the dark, a hideous grin on his face.

  The spotlit placard: One Goes Mad.

  Shemp’s balsawood spaceship. Zero floats directly in front of it. “Whoa!” yells Shemp. He punches things on his instrument panel, running his hands over his coat hanger. “Eeep Eeep Eeep Eeep!” Then he sits bolt upright, unmoving except for the lips, making perfect sense in a monotonous voice, reciting the successive graph plots on a Fibonacci curve, as he and his ship, trailing vertical smoke, are pulled by ropes out of the light into the darkness at the back of the stage.

  The spotlight searches around, finds the sign: One Doesn’t Come Back. Peter in his ship. He is mumbling the Soldier’s Creed. At the other side of the stage, light comes up on a toy rocket. Peter takes out a dart gun, fires twice at the toy, his arm outside the ship’s framework as he reloads the rubber-tipped darts. One finally hits the toy rocket—it explodes like a piñata.

  Then an oogah klaxon horn is blown backstage, causing the audience to jump, and Peter’s ship is bathed in flickering red light. “Uh-oh,” he says. “Trouble.” Then the band begins to play softly, and he sings “I Wonder What Deborah’s Doing in Festung Amerika Tonight?”

  The ship tilts downwards.

  Blackout. A sign: Mars.

  When the lights come back up the stage is clear. A red silk drop cloth covers the ground. For a full minute, nothing happens. Then Peter’s balsawood ship, him inside, flies out of the wings and he lands flat on his ass, legs straight out while pieces of wood bounce all over.

  He stands up, brushes himself off. As he does so, stagehands begin to ripple the red silk, making it look like drifting, gently blowing sand. Peter takes off his coat hanger, takes a deep breath. A book falls from above, bounces at the rear of the moving red stage. Then another follows. Peter looks up. A book slowly lowers toward him on a wire. He reaches up and plucks it from the air. Others fall around him occasionally throughout the scene. Peter begins to read. His eyes widen even more. He looks up at the audience. He reads more. Then he stands up. “Holy dialectical shit!” he says.

  Then the lights came up, and the chorines, stagehands, actors, ushers and dishwashers came in, taking their bows. Zero floated down from the ceiling on his wires, blowing kisses. Then the Madame came out, glaring at Zero, turned and took a bow to the audience for having survived Brecht.

  Then they all passed among the tables, holding out baskets for donations.

  * * *

  Brettschneider stayed at his table drinking, while the audience mingled with the members of the Ensemble. He noticed that he’d written nothing in his notebook since the couple of entries just after intermission. When he saw Peter take something from Madame, put on his coat and go out the door, Brettschneider wrote: Suspects then all followed their usual routines. Then he gathered up his own things, nodded to Caspar who was still tending bar, and went back to his home and to bed.

  * * *

  Christ, it’s even colder than this morning, thought Peter. He turned off the main avenue, went down a side street. The snow, which this morning had seemed so white and pure, was now gray, crusted ice. Even so, as he turned into a small courtyard, he saw that only a few sets of footprints had come and gone that way the whole day.

  Near the middle was a rusty iron gate. He went in with a loud groaning squeal from the metal. On the wall was a brass plate that said Union of Soviet Republics Consular Offices. Peter went to the mail drop, took the envelope out of his thin overcoat pocket. On the outside, written in Madame’s florid script was From Your Comrades at the Cabaret Kropotkin. Peter tore open the envelope, took out a few hundred francs, slapped some medical adhesive tape over the torn flap, tied it around twice with some twine, and dropped it in the slot.

  As Brecht had said: First the beans, then the morals. He went back up the avenue, crunching through the frosty ice on the way. The night was still clear, bitterly frigid. He looked up at the winking stars, and saw the slow-moving dot of Space Platform #6 on its two-hour orbit.

  He heard a streetcar bell. He knew of a place he could go and get a cup of real coffee and watch a fireplace burning for an hour or two, where the thought of Herr Brecht would never cross his mind. He began whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

  Introduction: All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past

  THIS IS THE OLDEST STORY in the book; in fact it’s the second story I ever sold. And “sold” and “sold.” It was written on April 10, 1972. It finally got into print in April of 1981, nine years almost to the day.

  It first sold for an eighty-seven dollar advance (when that was a month’s rent anywhere) to a David Gerrold anthology in 1973, to be published in 1975. The publisher had a reshuffle, three anthologies were squashed into two, etc. Rights were returned in 1976; I updated it a little; it was “sold” to a magazine; the two editors had a punch-up; it was on its own again. Finally it was sold and paid for (sixty dollars this time) and appeared in Shayol #4, and was the title story of my second collection in 1987.

  The genesis: I was in the Army, doing my bit as The Reluctant Draftee. (A little after Gardner Dozois and Joe Haldeman did theirs—one of the many jobs I had in the Army was sitting at the same desk the comic-book writer Bill Dubay had sat in two years before me. . . .) The night before this story was written, I was on guard duty. It was a weekend. You were on for twenty-four hours; instead of the usual two hours on, four hours off in four shifts, we asked the Officer of the Day if we could do eight-hour shifts and get it all the hell over with at once. Since what we were guarding was an empty PX (site of a former PX, but since it hadn’t been taken off the list of active buildings, it had to be guarded—such is the fine logic of the military mind . . .), he didn’t give much of a whoop either. So there I was with my clipboard, my flashlight, and my nightstick, walking endlessly around a deserted building for eight long hours. . . .

  The idle mind is the devil’s playground, and boy was mine idle.

  It occurred to me: What would happen if there were suddenly a Giant Bee Emergency on the East Coast? I would be one of the poor dogfaces to have to fight the nectar-hungry sumbitches! There’s a scene in every Big Bug SF movie of the 1950s when things get out of hand: All Sheriff Jonson’s deputies are eaten, Martial law’s declared, and the Army’s called out, to great cheers from the audience—tanks come out, jeeps with 75mm recoilless rifles screech around corners, caissons go rollin’ along. Goodbye, Mr. Six-or-Eight-Legs; eat napalm dropped by Clint Eastwood! (See “French Scenes” later.)

  Me! It would be Me! Fighting Them!

  I went home after roll-call and wrote the story.

  (What everybody missed in Joe Dante’s Matinee was that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the last time the U.S. Military was looked on as the Good Guys—that’s why he used “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” twice—once as a lullaby for the younger, scared brother during the Crisis; the second time—over a shot of a hovering helicopter, when the immediate threat’s over—as a warning. That lion wasn’t asleep in t
hat jungle—it was going to eat us up and tear apart the fabric of American Society—once again, US against THEM. . . .)

  And if you haven’t, I suggest you go out right now and buy both volumes of Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! (MacFarland, 1982 and 1986)—simply the most comprehensive, indispensable, thorough, and entertaining work ever on SF films of 1950–1962. I wish it had been around when I wrote this story, but as usual, I’d seen all the movies anyway, growing up and later.

  Come with me for a trip down double-feature shock-o-rama Memory Lane . . .

  All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past

  IT’S ALL OVER FOR HUMANITY, and I’m heading east.

  On the seat beside me are an M1 carbine and a Thompson submachine gun. There’s a special reason for the Thompson. I traded an M16 and 200 rounds of ammo for it to a guy in Barstow. He got the worst of the deal. When things get rough, carbine and .45 ammo are easier to find than the 5.56 mm rounds the M16 uses. I’ve got more ammo for the carbine than I need, though I’ve had plenty of chances to use it.

  There are fifty gallons of gasoline in the car, in cans. I have food for six days (I don’t know if that many are left).

  When things really fell apart, I deserted. Like anyone else with sense. When there were more of them than we could stop. I don’t know what they’ll do when they run out of people. Start killing each other, maybe.

  Meanwhile, I’m driving 160 kmph out Route 66. I have an appointment in the desert of New Mexico.

  God. Japan must have gone first. They deluged the world with them; now, it’s Japan’s turn. You sow what you reap.

  We were all a little in love with death and the atom bomb back in the 1950s. It won’t do us much good now.

  The road is flat ahead. I’ve promised myself I’ll see Meteor Crater before I die. So many of them opened at Meteor Crater, largest of the astroblemes. How fitting I should go there now.

  In the back seat with the ammo is a twenty-kilo bag of sugar.

  * * *

  It started just like the movies did. Small strangenesses in small towns, disappearances in the back woods and lonely places, tremors in the Arctic, stirrings in the jungles.

  We never thought when we saw them as kids what they would someday mean. The movies. The ones with the giant lizards, grasshoppers, mollusks. We yelled when the monsters started to get theirs. We cheered when the Army arrived to fight them. We yelled for all those movies. Now they’ve come to eat us up.

  And nobody’s cheered the Army since 1965. In 1978, the Army couldn’t stop the monsters.

  I was in that Army. I still am, if one’s left. I was one of the last draftees, with the last bunch inducted. At the Entrance Station, I copped and took three years for a guaranteed job.

  I would be getting out in three months if it weren’t for this.

  I left my uniform under a bush as soon as I decided to get away. I’d worn it for two and a half years. Most of the Army got torn away in the first days of the fight with the monsters. I decided to go.

  So I went. East.

  * * *

  I saw one of the giant Gila monsters this morning. There had been a car ahead of me, keeping about three kilometers between us, not letting me catch up. Maybe a family, figuring I was going to rob them or rape the women. Maybe not. It was the first car I’d seen in eighteen hours of dodging along the back roads. The car went around a turn. It looked like it slowed. I eased down, too, thinking maybe it wasn’t a family but a bunch of dudes finally deciding to ambush me. Good thing I slowed.

  I came around the turn and all I could see was the side of an orange and black mountain. I slammed on the brakes and skidded sideways. The Gila monster had knocked the other car off the road and was coming for me. I was shaken, but I hadn’t come this far to be eaten by a lizard. Oh no. I threw the snout of the M1 carbine out the window and blasted away at the thing’s eyes. Scales flew like rain. It twitched away then started back for me. I shot it in the tongue. It went into convulsions and crawled over a small sandhill hissing and honking like a freight train. It would come back later to eat whatever was in the other car. I trundled back on the road and drove past the wreck. Nothing moved. A pool of oil was forming on the concrete. I drove down the road with the smell of cordite in my nose and the wind whipping past. There was Gila monster blood on the hood of the car.

  * * *

  I had been a clerk in an airborne unit deployed to get the giant locusts eating up the Midwest. It is the strangest time in the history of the United States. The nights are full of meteors and lights.

  At first, we thought it was a practice alert. We suited up, climbed into the C-130s with full combat gear, T-10 parachutes, lurp bags and all. At least the others had chutes. I wasn’t on jump status so I went in with the heavy equipment to the nearest airbase. A lot of my buddies jumped into Illinois. I never saw them again. By the time the planes landed, the whole brigade was gone.

  We landed at Chanute. By then, the plague of monsters was so bad I ended up on the airbase perimeter with the Air Policemen. We fired at the things until the barrels of the machine guns moaned with heat. The locusts kept coming, squirting brown juice when they were hit or while killing someone.

  Their mandibles work all the time.

  We broke and ran after a while. I caught a C-130 revving up. The field was a moving carpet of locusts as I looked behind me. They could be killed easily, as could any insect with a soft abdomen. But there were so many of them. You killed and killed and they kept coming. And dying. So you had to run. We roared off the runway while they scuttled across the airfield below. Some took to the air on their rotor-sized wings. One smashed against the Hercules, tearing off part of an elevator. We flew through a night full of meteors. A light paced us for a while but broke off and flew after a fighter plane.

  We couldn’t land back at Pope AFB. It was a shambles. A survivor said the saucers hit about midnight. A meteor had landed near Charlotte, and now the Martian fighting machines were drifting toward Washington, killing everything in their paths.

  We roared back across country, looking for someplace to land where we wouldn’t be gobbled up. Fuel got lower. We came in on a wind, a prayer, and fumes to Fitzee Field at Fort Ord. I had taken basic training at Ord.

  A few hours later, I duffed.

  * * *

  I heard about New York on the radio before the stations went off. A giant lizard had come up from the Hudson submarine canyon and destroyed Manhattan. A giant octopus was ravaging San Francisco, a hundred miles north of Ord. It had already destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. Saucers were landing everywhere. One had crashed into a sandpit behind a house nearby. A basic training unit had been sent in. They wouldn’t be back, I knew. A glass-globed intelligence would see to that.

  Navy ships were pulled under by the monsters that pillaged New York, by the giant octopus, by giant crabs in the South Pacific; by caterpillar-like mollusks in the Salton Sea.

  The kinds of invaders seemed endless: Martian fighting machines, four or five types of aliens. The sandpit Martians, much different from the fighting-machine kind. Bigheaded invaders with eyes on the backs of their hands.

  A few scattered reports worldwide. No broadcasts from Japan after the first few minutes. Total annihilation, no doubt. Italy: A craft, which only existed on celluloid, brings back from Venus an egg of death. Mexico: A tyrannosaurus rex comes from the swamps for cattle and children. A giant scorpion invades from the volcanoes. South America: giant wasps, fungus disease, terrors from the earth. Britain: A monster slithers wild in Westminster Abbey, another fungus from space, radioactive mud, giant lizards again. Tibet: The yeti are on the move.

  It’s all over for humanity.

  * * *

  Meteor Crater at sunset. A hole punched in the earth while ice sheets still covered Wyoming and Pennsylvania.

  I can see for miles, and I have the carbine ready. I stare into the crater, thinking. This crater saw the last mammoth and the first of the Indians.

  The
shadow deepens and the floor goes dark. Memories of man, crater. Your friend the Grand Canyon regards you as an upstart in time. It’s jealous because you came from space.

  Speaking of mammoths, perhaps it’s our time to join old woolly in the great land of fossil dreams. Whatever plows farms in a million years can turn up our teeth and wonder at them.

  Nobody knows why the mammoth disappeared, or the dinosaur, or our salamander friend the Diplovertebron, for that matter. Racial old age. No plausible reason. So now it’s our turn. Done in by our dreams from the silver screen. Maybe we’ve created our own Id monsters, come to snuffle us out in nightmares.

  * * *

  The reason I deserted: The Air Force was going to drop an A-bomb on the Martian fighting machines. They were heading for Ord after they finished L.A. I was at the command post when one of the last B-52s went over, heading for the faraway carnage on the horizon.

  “If the A-bomb doesn’t stop it, Colonel,” said a major to the commander, “nothing will.”

  How soon they forget, I thought, and headed for the perimeter.

  The Great Southwest saw more scenes of monster destruction than anywhere in the world except Japan. Film producers loved it for the sterility of the desert, the hot sun, the contrasts with no gradations for their black-and-white cameras. In them, saucers landed, meteors hurtled down, townspeople disappeared, tracks and bones were found.

  Here is where it started, was the reasoning. In the desert thirty-three years ago when the first atomic bomb was detonated, when sand was turned to glass.

  So the monsters shambled, plodded, pillaged, and shook the Southwest. This desert where once there was only a shallow sea. You can find clamshells atop the Sierras, if you look.

  I have an appointment here, near Alamogordo. Where it started. The racial old age is on us now. Unexplained, and we’ll die not knowing why, or why we lived the least time of all the dominant species on this planet.