“And tell her not to wait for me / For I'm not coming home,” sang PFC Jennings softly.
“The order will be the rifle shot of PFC Redwolf,” said the Lieutenant. “Corporal Mueller has already given him his target. Have you still your eye on your man? Then aim quickly and fire. Now move, men, move. And don't worry about a thing.”
Redwolf killed the Hard Head behind the kapok tree with a good shot, and then things began to pop. The old devil was unchained and all sorts of things began to come out of the pit. Mueller, Redwolf, and Cross hunched down behind the crest, and the remaining patrolmen crawled and stumbled and ran low, down the gully. Mueller and his two men could probably have held the end of the gully for several minutes, except that they would be outflanked in a matter of seconds.
For the trigger had set the whole jungle into motion. The hills rose like green waves, and the earth burst open. The jungle-line ejected more than a hundred of the enemy, green-brown men, moving like sure animals. No ribbon clerks these. They were the old Hard Heads, the killer soldiers who struck like a giant rat pack, all musk-animals, meaner than men, sharp pack-running killers.
And, as the fifteen patrolmen stumbled down the gully, those Hard Heads charged at them with a loose crackle of fire, came across that green-purple meadow rapidly, more than a hundred of them with less than seventy-five yards to go. Not over ten seconds for it. They came in a black rush like the teeth of one great cutter blade. They came light and fast. And then, somehow, heavy and fast.
They charged to take the fifteen men strung out single, crawling on their bellies down the narrow ditch. Fifteen men with not over fifteen inches of cover, and no firing room at all. Sitting ducks. Lying down ducks. Plain dead ducks.
“Somehow I never intended to die on my belly like a snake,” said Meadows. He was nicked, and he watched a spate of red and black blood mix with the green hot mud in a pattern that was also a premonition. He wasn't nicked badly, but then he hadn't raised up very high. He had always hated to crawl on his belly.
The last seconds of one's life tick off loudly and with finality. Two. Three. Four. But slowly now as though the hands of the clock were mired. The attackers were halfway across, a black-green row of them that filled exactly half the world.
Five. Six. These may have been the longest seconds ever. They were unnaturally long. They were grisly, hot, weird, seconds.
Time itself had slowed down.
Then it stopped completely.
The Hard Heads stumbled heavy-footed. They were a study in slow motion. These death-bringers worked it out with horrible delay. It was eerie that the last scene in life should be run in slow motion. There was something obscene about it. The Hard Heads wallowed, floundered, and panicked.
And they began to go down.
It is incredible the way a little mud can swallow a man, or a clutch of men. The heat was now unbearable, and again not all of it came from the sun. The piled-up air shimmered and shattered the vision. It is possible that this was all a mistake of blurred sight and that the impossible thing was not happening at all. The earth does not commonly devour a group of men like that. And yet, in the blinding heat and the wavering air, it seemed to do so. If those Hard Heads weren't sinking out of sight in the mud, it was a very nightmarish sort of mirage.
“I saw a cow go down once,” said Pop Parker. The way he said it, it was the most profound statement in the world.
But they didn't make too much fuss about dying, those hundred Hard Heads. A little protest, a little argument. Yet mud is very unsatisfactory to argue with. A little screaming and chatter, that was all.
It was the eighteen men who watched it who felt a sense of sickness and shock. It was like the shock of the small boy who, for the first time, sees the bull-snake begin to swallow that ground bird.
“I always said I'd never do it,” said that tough Cajun Hebert. “I've never been sick before in my life, but now I've just brought it up green.”
“Santa Maria, Madre di Dios—,” said Private Girones.
“—ruega por nosotros pecadores—,” said Private Munas.
“—ahora y en la ora de nuestra muerte,” said Private Villareal.
After the Hard Heads were chest-deep and really frightened, it seemed that the pressure made it impossible for them to scream loudly. But they knew that they were being buried alive and that the hot sky was inexorable. And the eighteen patrollers watched the enemy disappear with plain horror. “If it would rain,” said Crandall, “it wouldn't be so hot. And it wouldn't seem so bad.” Why had he said such a silly thing as that? His mind was in a state of shock and his stomach was tied in green knots. But they all of them spoke inanities when they spoke.
In three minutes, there was no sign of the Hard Heads. More than a hundred of them had gone down there, and the Marsilia had already begun to sew up its wounds, oozing its clover-leafed foliage again over the greenish sand.
“I will never love it again,” said the Lieutenant. “It is really a sacophag, a flesh-eating plant. But it's quite bland to look at. It is hard to believe that its enticement is intentional.”
“Lieutenant,” said Sergeant Rand after a decent period of silence, “did you know that that was quicksand?”
“Sergeant, get the men started back. Some of them may be a little queasy after what they have seen, and I believe that they should have some movement to settle them down. We can be at Blind Creek Point in an hour and a half. They can take the last of their rations then and rest till sundown. Then we will move them again, and should be in our own bivouac area by midnight. Now move them, Sergeant, and waste no time about it.”
“Yes, sir.”
But, when they were resting at Blind Creek Point, the Sergeant asked again.
“Lieutenant, did you know that that was quicksand?”
“Certainly. Didn't you? I explained that the Marsilia Vogelkopiensis invariably has a morasmal underlay.”
“Yes, sir. So you did. I wasn't paying attention.”
Lieutenant Littlejohn was sketching again as they waited for the sun to go down. He was sketching a crow in the sky. But now, strangely, it was not a boyish hand that showed in the sketch. The strokes had boldness and force to them that they had lacked before. It was the hand of a sure and canny man that drew that stark crow in the sky.
Bequest Of Wings
“Do you have to play that damned wind-harp in here every evening?” Potter Firmholder complained to his skinny daughter. “I don't, no. I'm not here every evening, dear Potter,” the daughter Angela said. “You yourself say that I'm never here. Oh, Potter, I need seven hundred and twenty dollars for a pinion-pick for this harp. It does save the pinion bones, you know.”
“Oh, Skinny Angel, you could get a gold pick for that,” said Peggy Firmholder, her mother.
“Well, of course it will be gold,” Angela said. “Should I have a pot-metal pick when all the other kids have gold ones?”
“You must think money grows in the clouds,” Potter grumbled. “You young people have got to come down to Earth.”
“Potter Firmholder, give the child the money!” Peggy said. “Everything has gone up.”
“It's the things that have gone up unnaturally that disrupt me,” Potter still complained. “Here, Angel, here's the money. I'm sorry I was cranky. What, off again? You'd better eat something before you go.”
“I'll catch something on the wing,” Angela said. She swept out with the wind-harp and the money, and it was plain that she was on her way to Cloudy Joe's Drug Store. Cloudy Joe had gold picks for wind-harps. He had ‘wing-glo’ wash. He had struts and canvas and tar, and white condor feathers, and pinion wires, and airplane glue; even food and drink and tapes and magazines, and cloud moss, and wax-bug candles, everything that one might want.
“I don't like her hanging around Cloudy Joe's Drug Store so much,” Potter Firmholder told his wife. “There's something a little bit wrong with that place.”
“When you were that age, you hung around Ace Whizz-Bang's Tave
rn,” Peggy said. “And, Potter, there was more than a little bit wrong with that place. Cloudy Joe's is a cult spot.”
“So is Ace Whizz-Bang's,” said Potter. Used to hang around Ace Whizz-Bang's? Potter still did. It was better than Cloudy Joe's Drug Store with all those high-flying young people crowding into it.
“I don't even know how Cloudy Joe's stays there,” Potter said. “It's against all common-sense rules.”
“Oh, Potter, I've explained it to you a dozen times, and so has Angela,” Peggy said. “It's held up there by the new mathematics, by a Fortean Vector Value. Between the Euclidean and the Einsteinian universes there are thin intrusions known as the Fortean Universe. And Fortean Universe Vectors are strong enough to hold almost anything up, if they don't have to hold it up too far. Yeah, that's the patter for it, but I don't know what holds such places up either. They weren't up there before people discovered those vector values. Would they fall down again if people forgot the vectors? Poor Angela's getting more and more fearful as the time runs out on all of it. They're allowed six weeks of it after full sprout, and the time's nearly up. Young people have a very hard time of it nowadays; the ‘lightest and brightest’ of them do anyhow.”
“Bat-wings, bat-wings!” jeered Ace Whizz-Bang as some of the Bat-Wing gang swooped by his front door. “Do you know, 'Mealyous, bat wings used to be cited against the old Natural Selection theory?” (They called Potter Firmholder 'Mealyous at Ace Whizz-Bang's and at other places.) “For a great evolutionary change to come about, it was argued, there had to be some advantage offered at every step on the way to that change, or how would the change be carried through? But where was the every-step advantage when a mousey rodent was growing wings and turning into a bat? Where was the advantage during those several million years when the changing thing wasn't wing enough to fly with and was too elongated and spread in the fingers to be used as a hand or a foot or a claw? It couldn't be walked on. It couldn't be manipulated. It couldn't be flown with. Why have it for a million years then? But now the main arguments against Natural Selection are that it didn't happen, and that there just isn't time to wait for it in a busy world.” “And the main arguments against Sudden Mutation are that it does happen, and that there just isn't time to get used to it even in a fast-moving world,” 'Mealyous Firmholder said. “It's hard on the young people, the high-flyers of them, and it's hard on their parents too. It was once said that the great menace hanging over mankind was the mushroom cloud. I suppose that wasn't true, since nobody really paid any attention to it. But now the greatest menace hanging over these lightest and brightest of the young people is the bolt-cutter. And they just can't avoid paying attention to it.”
“Aye, they live on the sky-brink for a while, and then they fall off it,” Ace Whizz-Bang said. “I was too old for it. It hadn't appeared yet in my youth (Oh, I guess there were a few dozen or so cases in California), so my youth had to be complicated by lesser things. Even today you will seldom see a ‘stubby’ who's more than twenty-eight or thirty years old. And the older uncropped ones are still younger than that. They get ungainly and crash-prone and they die within five years of their escaping the bolt-cutter. Now even the flyers say that they're not supposed to escape it. They say that their failures are bringing the full thing nearer every day.”
“It's easy enough to set them down as trivial and flighty,” Firmholder said. “Of course they are. They are young and ignorant, and extravagant in their views. But they seem to have a genuinely beautiful and thrilling mystique.”
“Fragile though,” Whizz-Bang said. “It's pathetic really. And it'll be traumatic to them in later life likely, though none of the afflicted ones have had a later life yet. There's only two things we can do about it. We can live with the sorrowful situation, or we can destroy the ‘lightest and brightest’ of the children as soon as they can be spotted.”
“They're hard to spot before they're about fifteen years old and start to sprout,” Firmholder said. “And a person rather hates to kill his fifteen year old son or daughter, whatever the logic of the situation.”
“Nah, that wouldn't bother me much,” Ace Whizz-Bang said. “A bunch of pupa-stage punks is what they are. One good thing about it all, though, you can really make bar glasses shine with that ‘wing-glo’ wash they've brought out.”
Well, Angela Firmholder grew pale and wan during the crisis weeks. “Aren't you rather overdoing the ‘touch of death’ role, Angie,” her father tried to josh her once, to lift her out of her sadness. But Angela burst into tears and flew off.
“You shouldn't have said that, Potter,” Peggy told him. “It's so terrible a thing for children of that age.”
“Oh, I know it, I know it, Peg. I was just trying to jolly her a little bit. When we were young people, we were motorcycle nuts, and we loved the speed and noise. Now they go much faster, but they're not half as noisy about it.”
“It must be horrible to be clipped,” Peggy said, “and to be a ‘stubby’ and a ‘nubby’ for the rest of one's short life. They have to continue in such clumsiness of hands with only a little improvement. And they lose their beauty of voice and are adept at so few things. And it's only the lightest and the brightest who are afflicted so far. All their lives they will seem awkward, even to those more awkward and slow-witted ones who never were light and bright.”
“I still wish that she wouldn't hang around Cloudy Joe's Drug Store so much.”
“Leave it alone, Potter, and leave her alone. Cloudy Joe's is a cult place, and their cult is all they have to sustain them during the metamorphical horror.”
“Well, I wish she'd agree to have it done in a hospital where it's clean.”
“No, Potter, no. That would be uncult.”
Those lightest and brightest of the young people did have remarkably beautiful voices during the weeks of their affliction. And the wind-harps that they played upon had a full and gusty sound. The cult songs that they sang had trivial words and tunes, but their renditions were superb. It was like honey from Heaven when those sounds drifted down. They were airy songs, sky songs, soaring songs, pinnacle songs. There was a complexity to their music that wasn't to be found in even the worst of the Rocks and Grocks. The ‘brightest’ liked to perch on high pinnacles, on towers, on spires, on eagle cliffs. They held their bright and sparkling congresses in these places and in places even higher, such as Cloudy Joe's Drug Store on its Fortean sky-lodge.
A ‘flight’ of young people was mutually supporting in the terrible spiritual and physical crisis that the members were passing through. Whatever shame was in their condition was at least shared shame for members of a flight. Most of the suicides of the ‘brightest’ young people were of lone eagles, not of ‘flight’ members.
Together, the shame of eating insects and cicadas, and even small birds caught on the wing, was a mitigated shame. The appetite for these things was as relentless as it was sudden. Eat them they must, and it was better that they eat them together.
The physical clumsiness of the brightest could not be overcome singly, but in group it could be partly overcome. No afflicted person could bring his own fingers together, could bring his two hands together. But two persons might bring their now elongated thumbs together for manipulation or handling, or might bring the knobs of their pinion bones together. Tools were devised (the pinion-pick for playing the wind-harp was only one of them) to slip over the ends of pinion bones in order to push or hook or grasp.
Working together, the young people could assemble bat-wings out of struts and canvas plastered with tar, or bird-wings out of plasti-hedelion fibre and feathers. It didn't take very much manufactured equipment, slipped over newly deformed hands and arms and shoulders, to achieve conquest of the unaccustomed environment.
There was cult culture in this, cult music, achingly close cult friendships and companionships, courtships that were almost magic, and exaltation in the higher air.
There came an incredible chestiness to the young men of the afflicted cults, and an in
credible breastiness to the young women. The wing-beat muscles had developed superbly. And so had the winged voices. Their song was absolutely extraordinary, as was the orchestration of their wind-harps. Sheet music for most of this superb body of melody can be had at Cloudy Joe's Drug Store, and at other such places around the world. There is one of them in every sky.
Angela Firmholder was at one of those ‘high-places’ in the twilight meeting with other young and soaring personalities who made up her ‘flight’. Carolyn Bushbaby, Rod Murdock, Peter King-feather, Alice Tombigbee, Clyde Boggles, Hester Hilltop! They were fellow adventurers in the furthest biological adventure since the primordial clay stretched itself and breathed. They were companions of Air and Earth. They were friends and lovers. Ah, soaring and swooping in the early darkness! It was poignant that it could last only six weeks.
“It is a damnable, contagious, crippling arthritis, and it is no other thing,” Doctor Hexbird had written in Today's Future. “It strikes only adolescents of a highly sensitive and a highly talented nature. The ‘Lightest and Brightest’ designation is as much truth as poetry, but it is a tragic truth. It is the flower of the younger generation that is stricken with this dreaded and painful, and sometimes fatal sickness. “The fingers and hands become so elongated and splayed that they can no longer be used for human hands. They cannot grasp, they cannot manipulate. It would almost be better if the hands were chopped off completely. What must be chopped off, however, are two outlaw growths on each side, two very long bone spurs called the greater and lesser pinion bones. These new spur-bones change the whole deportment of the victim; this is the reason that they must be removed after they have become hard bone. They can be cut with bonesaws, but in unapproved and cultic operations they are cut with bolt-cutters. Then these bones must be pulled out of the flesh for their entire length. This bloody laying-open of breast and shoulders and neck and arms and back to get the long bones out is a traumatic horror. The thirty percent mortality in these cultic operations is outrageous.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 240