by Larry Doyle
Rusty cosied up next to J!m.
“Pick me up at eight?”
Jelly slung his arms around the two, perfusing the space between them.
“Colossal!”
Chapter 8
One Name Stands out as the Epitome of Evil!
“history,” the teacher said, “is written by the winners.”
The quotation appeared on the blackboard behind him.
“George Orwell.”
The blackboard corrected the attribution to UNKNOWN.
Tom Gray laughed, which teachers at this school did not do. “Uh-oh,” he said. “A hole in the PLEX.”
There were no holes in the PLEX. Everything was there, with access to all, if one knew where to look, and had appropriate access. But it was fashionable among adolescents, and adults who wanted to be liked by adolescents, to bash the PLEX, upon which every aspect of their lives depended, in ways they would never suspect.
Tom Gray was liked by his adolescents. They liked that he was young, and dressed like they did, and could talk like them without sounding like a Simulant. The females also liked his hair.
“So,” the teacher said, a boyish blond lock falling across his forehead, “as you watch this mandatory viz today, I want you to keep the words of Eric Arthur Blair in mind: ‘History is written by the winners.’ ”
Which was true, as far as it went, but better amended, “. . . by the most recent winners.”
Tom Gray walked down the aisle, tapping heads. “Everybody,” with suspect solemnity, “screw on your thinking caps and crank the bullshit detector up to nine.”
The students laughed obligatorily at the light profanity, which Lewis Seuss would have to report forthwith, as much as he liked Mr. Gray as a person.
In the front row, Marie mimed screwing on her thinking cap. J!m again sat several rows behind her, and, again, was doing very little beyond watching her.
Tom Gray waved the lights down. The students put on their 3-D glasses.
The Presidential Seal appeared, stately, staid, and abruptly spun directly at them, the eagle flinging arrows right into their minds’ eyes. A couple of students gasped, exhibiting a frightful lack of jadedness.
The President, his jet-black hair slicked back, his mustache well-trimmed, sat behind a desk, fingers tightly interlaced. His presence indicated an occasion; he was not often seen, even on viz, a security measure that extended to the inutterance of his given name, so long in place most of the students didn’t know who he was. The precise nature of the security threat that necessitated these precautions was never explained, or questioned.
The President stared at them for several seconds before beginning, “What you are about to see will upset you,” in a brisk Texas twang. “It will terrify you. It may make you cry, or puke. But you kids are old enough to know the truth.”
The President stopped, stared. As the viz faded to black, his right cheek spasmed.
Out of the blackness came bits of light, resolving into a night sky. Urgent words loomed up to adamant orchestration:
j!m festered, watching Marie up there being studious, oblivious to the rift she had torn in the time-space continuum. He turned to Jelly, seated behind him.
“Gimme your plex.”
Jelly, in re the viz: “You’re missing the bullshit.”
J!m grabbed the wristplex and dragged it through Jelly’s arm, separating his hand. The fingers twiddled in the air and hightailed it back in place.
With a few gestures, J!m vizzed Marie.
Marie glanced at her wrist, back at J!m. She ducked her head and brought the plex up to her mouth.
J!m’s screen was filled with Marie’s lips, dark and shadowed, bigger than life, and, in isolation, quite biological.
“Jim?” the lips whispered.
The surge in J!m’s hypothalamus shorted his optic nerves, and when his sight came back on, the wristplex was gone.
“After class,” Tom Gray said, redirecting J!m to the viz. “You need to see this.”
J!m slid down in his desk, his head against the chair back. He closed his eyes.
he did not need to see this. Nobody did. Every student in this class knew what was in it, had known since the fifth grade, its legendary horrors passed along by older siblings and spread on playgrounds and PLEX nodes. And while the earliest reports, that it included scenes of soldiers being eaten by giant mammaries, were later discounted, the overwhelming consensus was that this infamous viz was the most graphic, must-see version of a story they had all heard a thousand times before:
in fairy tales, “The Three Little Pigs and the Big-Brained Wolf” and “Goldilocks and the Three Big-Brained Bears,” uninspired adaptations that at least restored the Grimm Brothers’ Sturm und Blut;
in children’s viz, Magilla Gorilla, Mutant Killer, and Scooby’s Doo’s Mystery Mission, which wasn’t much of a mystery, since the villain was always revealed to be a big-brained alien named Hank or Gil;
in literature, Action Comics #242, The Super-Duel in Space, with the thinly veiled Brainiac fighting Superman, an invader from space himself, from a planet whose true inhabitants were sulfurous trolls with no power other than the ability to bring any party to an irreversible halt;
in the Next Testament of the Bible, or amongst Adventists, the Book of Demons.
J!m knew the story, by heart and in rhyme, and did not need to see or hear it again. He tried to block out the narrator, the esteemed Shakespearean actor Vic Perrin, going on about what a wonderful world it once was: all nations were at peace, men wore jackets to dinner, there was a country named France, etc.
A low, rolling timpani evinced a change in mood.
The narrator, solemn: “October 3, 1951.”
J!m opened one eye.
the film was black-and-white, fuzzy and flickering, like the memory of a childhood dream. People cheered. A man sold peanuts. A child wore a cap.
J!m was not a baseball fan, but he recognized the Polo Grounds.
“America at leisure,” the narrator said, “enjoying the national pastime. . . .”
The Giants’ number 23 approached the plate.
“Bobby Thomson . . . up there swingin’.” The grainy viz was matched to scratchy aud of the Giants’ radio announcer, R. P. Hodges. “One out, last of the ninth. . . . Brooklyn leads it 4–2. . . .”
The narrator interjected, “It would be the shot heard ’round the world.”
Dodgers relief pitcher Ralph Branca was on the mound, checking his runners.
“Hartung down the line at third, not taking any chances,” called Hodges calmly, believing only the pennant depended on this at-bat. “Lockman with not too big of a lead at second, but he’ll be runnin’ like the wind if Thomson hits one. . . . Branca throws—”
Thomson swung.
The crowd was on its feet.
“There’s a long drive,” Hodges’s voice rising, verging on unprofessional. “It’s gonna be, I believe . . .”
Dodgers left fielder Andy Pafko ran to the wall, watched the ball, sailing—
A bolt of light, a shower of sparks.
The radiant horsehide fell into Pafko’s glove.
“Something has—” said Hodges, puzzled, then livid. “That’s interference! That’s interference!”
Pafko plucked the smoking ember from his glove and held it over his head triumphantly. It was hotter than he anticipated, and he soon dropped it, along with his thumb and forefinger.
“Not an out! No sir!” shouted Hodges, working himself into a lather. “That’s a ground-rule double. Hartung and Lockman will score. This is a tie game!”
The crowd remained on its feet, looking up.
Hodges, too: “What is that thing?”
The answer wiped across the screen:
A brilliance hovered over the field. The players scattered as it lowered onto the pitcher’s mound.
Hodges had lost all comportment. “A silver saucer, big as . . . It’s big . . . It’s coming, and this blame place is going crazy!”
The saucer’s outer energy ring powered down and retracted into the craft, leaving a polyhedral sphere, composed of a lattice of triangular elements too complex for discussion here, and too much for a fellow paid to describe sport.
“This is R.P. Hodges, WMCA-AM, signing off.”
At the center of the sphere was an eye-shaped portal. It illuminated, revealing the silhouette of a heart-shaped head, forming a kind of iris.
A large triangular door slid open.
His silvery skin glittered in the sun. He wore an impeccably tailored gray flannel suit.
He raised his palm, and spoke with a proper British accent.
“I come in peace.”
“Piece of this!” Russ Ford returned the salute, closing his fingers into a fist. His crew laughed, at the gesture more than the wordplay, since none of them were aware there was wordplay.
J!m had not seen his father in a while. Pictures and viz of him were available in the PLEX but restricted to adults who didn’t mind visits from the FBI. The reasons for the restrictions were themselves restricted, though most people believed it was because J!m’s father possessed a charismatic depravity of such bewitchment that mere exposure to his image or ideas would pervert unsolidified minds. It was only in this controlled academic setting, in which he could be placed in blood-curdling context, that mature teens could look into the face of evil and not run out and form fan clubs.
There was that picture in the kitchen, the one hidden behind Mr. Christ. J!m had long known it was there, but hadn’t looked at it since he was twelve, the year he also stopped spending any time with his mother’s underwear.
Seeing his father’s face now, J!m thought it wasn’t nearly as ghastly as he remembered, not remembering that the photo in the kitchen didn’t show his father’s face.
the viz asked, disingenuously.
“He said he was here to serve us.”
Illustrated by old newsreels, infoviz, of J!m’s father shaking hands with President Truman, riding in a ticker-tape parade, posing with a towheaded boy and his dog.
“He offered us untold scientific and technological advances . . .”
J!m’s father, electricity jumping between his fingers, illuminating his face from below, not his best angle.
“. . . if only . . .”
U.S. Army General Walter Ford, his corncob pipe fully erect, leaning against a 31-kiloton Mark IV named Rita, the Fat Lady who sang for Shanghai.
“. . . we agreed to destroy our atomic weapons.” The image inverted, black to white, a sustained dominant seventh overscoring the editorial position of the vizmakers.
Most of the boys and a few of the girls booed the disarmament talk.
“He seduced the weak minds of Hollywood . . .”
J!m’s father holding court at Musso and Frank’s, seated with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, a bald man with sunken eyes—a writer—and, clinging to his father’s arm, a young Norma Baker, then an actress.
“. . . and the eggheads of Academia.”
J!m’s father at a blackboard, amazing Dr. B. “Buck” Roberts, a bespectacled iconoclast in an unwarranted lab coat, followed by a shot of J!m’s father walking down a hallway, talking to a tiny man with wild white hair.
Predictable derision greeted the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, since dismissed as a treacherous appeaser, the man who gave them the atomic bomb and tried to take it back: Benedict Einstein, Dr. Alienstein, and a few less literate ones.
Jelly put on the old man’s face and, with comic retardation, singsang, “Eiiiiiiinsteiiiiinnnnnn!”
He knew his audience.
J!m watched his father walk. He was so . . . upright.
J!m slouched further into his seat.
An American flag billowed bravely to the foreboding of African drums.
“But when our leaders smelled a rat, the creature showed his true face.”
The face of J!m’s father floated in smoke, his voice thundering.
“Destroy your weapons or you will be destroyed!”
The class turned toward J!m in uncertain accusation, as if the threat were hereditary.
J!m was elsewhere.
“Creature?” he mumbled.
and here it came, what they all had been waiting for, the fabled gore, the promised horror, the smut of history.
More aged infoviz, of wobbling saucers, bobbing balls of light, jerky cigar-shaped objects . . .
. . . buildings folding like cardboard, bridges collapsing like toothpicks, tanks glowing briefly before vanishing . . .
. . . crowds fleeing, humans screaming, dogs barking, a knocked-over tricycle . . .
This was hugely disappointing, after all these years. Nobody watched anything in black and white anymore except for old people and J!m, and this alleged reality lacked the meaty verisimilitude they had come to expect from watching commercial viz. It was hard to care about a world in peril in which people died without saying anything remotely funny.
The face of J!m’s father, up close, laughing at half speed to fiendish effect, and also African drums.
“While his minions attacked from space, the creature unleashed an unholy army of monsters and mutants by land and sea.”
These were the nightmares of their youth, the terrible lizards that would stomp into their sleep, uproot their schools and shake them out, gobbling each and every one, no child left behind. Yet in reality, and from the distance of time, they were ineffective monsters, clumsy lumbering giants unleashing immaterial destruction and repetitive terror: Gojira destroying Tokyo for the first time; his evil American twin, Gigantis, doing much the same; their British cousin, Behemoth, knocking down Big Ben; the Dane Reptilicus sliming Copenhagen; Ogra, a different English dinosaur, knocking down Big Ben again while looking for her baby, Gorgo, kidnapped for a London circus, the Brits having learned nothing; an unnamed beast from 20,000 fathoms and a giant Gila monster wrecking Coney Island and eating promiscuous teenagers, et al.
With each new and less petrifying wave, a palpable fear began to spread through the class that they were going to be tested on this.
A parade of nature’s smallest, enlarged: jumbo ants, spiders, leeches, mollusks, etc.
The class was unfrightened by the scale and unbothered by the perversion of the nature, but some of the girls screamed nonetheless, due to the bugs.
A motley assortment of unnaturals, humans crossbred with other mammals, reptiles and insects, including a brief shot of a young Miss Mantis, holding something black and sticky in her pincers, like a ball of hair;
and the many and varied atomic mutants, turning incorporeal or interdimensional, extrasensory or cycloptic, growing colossal or shrinking incredibly.
As a young and newly humongous Allison Douglas tore up a Fissionaire showroom, demanding workmen’s comp, Sandra Jane lowered her head, pretending to be taking notes. Marie looked up from hers, her thinking cap engaged. She knew these mutants, knew them not as evil henchmonsters but as parents and teachers and other low-level service employees, the unfortunate victims of mankind delving into mysteries it wasn’t meant to know, unleashing fearsome forces beyond understanding.
What did this have to do with J!m’s father?
She was bright, that one.
J!m himself was far beyond excrement detection, and, having run out of expressions of reproach, alternated between scoffing and scowling, more or less randomly.
The rest of the class was listless, surreptitiously checking the PLEX for fresh waste on their peers, so inured were they to a long past apocalypse in which they did not personally die.
A savage and radiant ape livened up the room a bit, leaping out of the viz with lighted eyes, making full use of the dimensional technology. Even Johnny flinched, though his fear was more personal, and confirmed, when the viz ape grabbed a human female, who, Johnny had to admit, was every bit as beautiful as his mother said she once was. She screamed at his father with a vitality Johnny had never seen, and as the ape scampered away with the girl over his
shoulder, Johnny got the urge to vault into the viz after her, damn the paradoxes.
Barbara Payton, overcome with a vivid imagining of the savage sweet ravaging that awaited Johnny’s mother, sharply inhaled and fell out of her seat, landing in Johnny’s lap. He eased her off onto the floor.
“Monkey see, monkey screw!” Jelly japed, his comic mugging disrupted when his eyes splashed, leaving in their wake a pair of dice, the only thing Johnny had to throw besides Barbara Payton, which he’d considered. Until that moment, Jelly had not connected the twenty-year-old viz of a radioactive ape with a captive woman and his nineteen-year-old half-human radioactive ape friend. He smiled contritely, and coughed out snake eyes.
A pause, and:
“Ooooh,” said Jelly, wishing he had popcorn, picking through the folds of his clothes for anything organic he might have left there, a long shot.
Teenage girls rushed screaming from a ladies’ room. The door burst open and a prodigious magenta mass flowed out. Its surface formed a ravenous and familiar face.
A couple of girls glanced in Jelly’s direction, revolted and, worse, unimpressed.
Jelly wiped his face clean, and, unable to think of a suitable replacement, sunk the whole mess into his shirt.
There was strong sentiment in the room for yes, please, and soon.
“We gave our blood, sweat and tears. But in the end, only one thing could stop him. . . .”
Lots of atomic explosions.
“The tiny atom. That which the creature said would destroy us became our savior.”
Many more atomic explosions, growing in intensity and annihilistic pop.
This, finally, was the pleasing the crowd had been promised. Russ and his crew pumped fists and cheered as whole space armadas were wiped from the sky and various bêtes noires atomized, along with acceptable swaths of surrounding countryside.
The revelry carried over to the courtroom scene, particularly the image of J!m’s father standing in a crystal chamber, awaiting judgment. Composed of a golden isotope of the superactinide element 126, the booth was there to prevent premature execution, but also made J!m’s father look like a very dignified bug trapped in amber.