“OH! NO,” I said involuntarily, with the phfluggee-phflaggee almost off the dial on LOUD, “That’s for Stronghold men, not for birds. We’ll do the fighting!”
“But just suppose,” he pursued, “that by some simple wrong calculation, or some very complex, completely right calculation, HA HA! you Stronghold masters all gun one another down to the plastic yard sheet ground at the precise same instant. I mean, you really smear each other. Rub each other in the rubble, as it were! Nothing left! Then at just that precise same instant in history the Spacehop troop bowls come blasting in backed up by their gun saucers from Out There, fixed to really tear old Earth down to its underdress, ha ha. Wouldn’t it be good to know we had the capability of peppering them with a little bird shot just then, just to give you gun guys a little time in which to rebuild your sets and repel the upstarts with your blasters? But if you’re going to make condor time in Twelfth, you’d better blast your tail, man! I mean NOW! I mean hurry! I can’t hold up too long. We’re really, as I’ve hinted, on rather complex maneuver time every time we launch.”
“Don’t hold up condors another micro-instant!” I yelled. And I left then, headed back for my guns, not sure that I’d ever bother to try to intercept any other kind of Beauty ever again.
BUBBLE-DOME HOMES
THE BUBBLE-dome home, the live-alone houseball, was as much a part of the total Moderan scene as was, say, a Stronghold. Or a flesh-strip. Or a roll-go. The bubble-dome home was for underprivileged country, where lived until they died, the millions on millions who had not qualified for Stronghold country. As has been told before, only the elite-elite went up to that big-deal scene where the defense complexes were eleven steel walls thick, where kill-kill of all description swung easy and handy-down under the gun lids, and the cone-balls rolled all day all night high in the vapor shield over the Strongholds, testing for danger, testing for war! NO! not everyone could qualify for that scene. Only the young males, usually, the finest of the breed, moved up to that chance. The old ladies, the middle ladies, the young girls, the maimed men, the weak and the weary men of all description—all lived in mediocrity, each in his or her own live-alone houseball, watching the days go, seeing a life ebb, knowing that the course had to be collision with the Terrible Date. For not one of these rabble people had qualified for enough of the operations to be of and for forever.
It was a waste. All pandering to weakness is a waste. What a country We could have had in Moderan, what greatness and what Joy, had it been all the elite-elite up in Stronghold country firing those big guns at each other, the high exhilaration of war broken only for small truces and great Joy.
But Central was weak. Ruthless Central was weak, here—once. Those nine old shells, with their flesh-strip percentages that could equal or outdo any Stronghold master’s (in fact, they had all been Stronghold masters before their elevation; I expect in due time to be elevated) were weak. I can imagine how they chewed at their smoke ropes long and long up there in the L-Towers of the Needle Building that day, how they spat at the gold-banded jeweled cone spittoons all day up there, how they argued and almost fought in their frustration. Nine old men, nine old shells—faced with a battle that they could not win.
Of course the flesh-strips of humanity told these nine high ruling judges to save the people, let them live, build them homes, give them the operations to the very limits of their capacities to absorb and survive those operations. But the new-metal steel charisma of these leaders placed most high must have argued for sanity. And the sane course had to be to let these people die. At once! They could never excel; they had not, not one of them, even the smallest slightest chance of ever absorbing enough operations to be of the elite-elite. They could only clutter the Moderan Dream. With one important exception. The young boys! YES! They would, some of them, surely grow up to challenge us in their turn. And that might have been the one overriding consideration, the young boys, that caused those nine old hulls when Moderan was a very new country to render that hard-argued five-to-four decision: LET THE COMMON PEOPLE LIVE.
It was a bum decision! That was my unqualified sane opinion at the time, and I think it had to be the unqualified sane opinion of anyone who was already at the top, a Stronghold master. Who needed more people? Not us, and that was for sure. We were already set in our Hate Leagues, we had just enough for dandy wars all of the time, with the exception of the small time outs for truces and Joys, and we were designed for forever. That seemed a set and final fine set of conditions, so far as I am concerned.
But the decision was rendered; we had to live with it. Oh, there was talk of marching on the Needle Building, of firing at the L-Towers, and a lot of other wild irresponsible letting off of steam, talkwise, was done. But nothing came of any of it, finally. The Moderan Dream was left irrevocably saddled with these rheumatic old ladies, these bummy old men, these meaningless-futured young girls and all the rest of the under-par ragtag of humanity. Until they should die. Which they would, eventually, because they were not physically strong enough to stand that battery of operations that would move them up to the land of the forever Dream. But these nine old human hulls in a five-to-four further dog-fit of humanity had decreed that all these people should not only be allowed to live out their natural spans, but should also be certified to receive the Moderan operations to the physical limits of their capabilities to receive them and to absorb them. WHOOFF! Thus compounding and prolonging the blot on the Moderan Dream for ages and ages.
Oh, so easily could this all have been taken care of directly. To mollify their outdated feelings of humanity these nine old nut hulls could have, after voting more realistic convictions, appended this Order from the Court: LET THEM GO GENTLY. In a trice these people could have gone then. Oh, it would have taken but the very minimum of planning. BEAUTIFUL! Central could have decreed a compulsory Joy Day for all the underprivileged people in the land. Then all over Moderan gigantic Joy Stadiums could have been thrown together, hurriedly made and of the very flimsiest of construction materials. For a one-time use. On Joy Day they would have come in their thousands then to the Joy Stadium of their choice, usually, of course, the one nearest them. Not one of the underprivileged people would have been excused from participation in this massive Joy Day celebration. The common people—men, women and children in out-of-bed health, the bedridden, the wheel-chaired, the halt, the blind, all of them, even the criminals from their prison cells—all would be transported in for Joy. At a common instant, at a signal from some watch-ball on high perhaps, a steel finger in Central would touch a small jolly-color orange button marked GO GENTLY. Each Joy Stadium and its thousands of celebrators then would simply in a twinkling be a POUFF! a FLASH! and then a small black smudge-blot on the plastic. Which smudge-blot could be easily and simply wiped off by a steel roving-custodian of the Land Surface Upkeep Forces. BEAUTIFUL! YES! We have the know-how for such solutions.
Then, and also, we have nine old nut heads scratching, very reluctantly, I’m sure, a flesh-strip small itch of conscience. So, as a result, in their millions and millions the bubble-dome homes, the live-alone houseballs, housing for the mediocre millions, sprang up all over stern and mighty Stronghold-centered Moderan, in almost any spot that wasn’t in direct interference with the firing periphery of a Stronghold.
YES! What a waste! All that time, all that energy, all that expenditure—oh, think what it could have meant toward the betterment of our life, the advancement of the Moderan Dream, if it all could have been used correctly! Better defense, maybe, swifter-firing Strongholds, almost surely, or perhaps even experimentation and study for a science breakthrough for more steel in the elite-elite new-metal man, and less flesh-strip—this always core and central to the Moderan Dream. There was a lot of time, energy, expense and know-how went into those bubble-dome homes, and don’t you ever think otherwise!
And yet—and yet all honesty, even here by my Wall of Steel, makes me confess a thing. Some nights, in a time of quiet, when the high cone-balls of my warning compl
ex twirl round and round and say nothing, when every battle flag hangs limp on its pennon pole, when the weapons men, having no duties whatsoever to perform, make not even the smallest scratch-scratch sound of metal moving on metal within my Walls, I think stark thoughts. I think of people in their live-alone houseballs enjoying the services of gad-goes, waited upon by automatics, and fighting each his own personal unwinnable Battle of Time. I think of my father and mother and five sisters somewhere OUT THERE, each one in a personal bubble-dome home. I think of two little children, Little Brother and Little Sister. And ultimate ultimate piercing thought—That Woman! in White Witch Valley. I walk my mile in the night then—pounding, ringing, clattering across the silent battlements, round and round on the lookout ledge of my Stronghold’s highest roof. And sometimes in the moon-show—cold and weird and cluttered now with conquest, that pale chill light wan through the vapor shield—I ask myself THE QUESTION. And sometimes, rather than answer THE QUESTION, I lift a truce up early and gun in all the Strongholds for a big Max-Up of Hate. But sometimes I answer THE QUESTION, and the answer makes me sad. No, I answer, very softly, no and no. Very softly. I pound my flesh-strips then, I claw at my soft percentages, I wish for more steel! But it’s still NO. No, I wouldn’t have voted with the minority up in that L-Tower. I too, finally, would have voted to give the common sub-par people more time to think about, and try to get ready for, each his own personal Terrible Date. And thus the failure of it all and the Dream diminished by even me, until I can get more steel—MORE STEEL!
ONE FALSE STEP
ALL WINTER they worked in those far-flung mechanism-clogged tunnels under the land, four bulb-bummers for a district repairing spring. Slogging around in their space boots down there in the dark and cold they were fixing the broken leaves, adding new flips to the root stocks and retouching iron petals so that all would be in readiness in their sector for a perfect automatic season to leap through the yard-holes at a nod from the Central Commission for Beauty. They hated the unmanly work, and they did not love one another. But they loathed one another with a sufferance that allowed for an exchange of agonies. All four of them had fallen from something, and he had fallen farther than any of them.
Today, for perhaps the twentieth time this winter, he felt he must out with his story, for sometimes to live, after the fall, is a thing past quiet bearing. They paused by a leaf they were mending, and the others extended him deference, for there lingered with them still the reminder of what he had once been above ground, as well as the fact that he was Captain here.
“To have fallen to leaf mender,” he said. “To have toppled to bulb duty and stem repair! Oh MAC, MAC!” He cried it in anguish, and MAC was the three-letter deity, origin shrouded in mystery, antiquity and a thousand conflicting legends, but perhaps it was merely a short saying of machine. “As you know, I was once of the proud Population Fixes,” he bragged, recovering his composure somewhat. He let the bright buttons on his space jacket tighten as his chest heaved full and he took that special relaxed guardsman’s stance in his glistening patent space high-tops. “My service, called Grinder Control, and more usually just the Grinders, was top glamour, there’s no doubt. Now, let us pause here by this leaf to be mended and review my fall.” They could but comply since he was a Captain for Spring Mending, in other words the straw boss of this grubby detail. The other three, in their less well-cut space jackets and their shorter boots of the fall from the lesser commissions, stood like sullen dogs. Had he come to crying on such shoulders? Oh yes!
“It was in autumn,” he began. “A time for falling? YES! I had worked up through the advancements until now I commanded a big Grind-5, the largest and finest of the machines for controlling the populations, as you know. I had worked hard, and while in the ranks I thought I was ‘proofed’ against temptation. But perhaps the leisure of command gave me too much time.” He looked down the rows of the leaves; he regarded the metal calyxes. He came back to the silent three, standing like sullen dogs still, but he knew they were enjoying not working. “Somewhere I softened!” He cried it in truest agony.
“It was in autumn, as I have said, but a bright day. It was one of the most beautiful automatic autumn days that we have ever had in this land, thanks to a strong administration in Central Season Control that year. The metal geese were moving—South, just right, with that special honk-squawk in their tapes; the leaves were all painted. There was a tang to the air, and once, calling up a far-back memory, I thought I smelled chilled apples on a tree, and I’m sure, unless my senses played me tricks, we rolled between two fields of metal pumpkins. Either I was dreaming or the Autumn Commissions had really gone all-out. But anyway, somehow I’m sure my senses received false stimuli and I softened.”
The three stood abject and silent, still facing a broken leaf, and for a moment he even suspected they were sleeping. He wanted to rush to them and slap them until their faces broke. He wanted to pull their eyes out an extra inch, cup their ears to megaphones and set the three of them up on metal flowers to listen to him. He wanted to cry, “Regard! you ears and eyes and brains of blockheads who have fallen from nowhere, regard and respect a giant fallen to ‘die’ among you!” But they nodded after awhile, ever so slightly, all three of them, to show that they were still with him, and he let it go. “We were getting behind! They were increasing so fast! Maybe it was the strain of duty.” And he remembered that black bright day.
“We had received a call to ‘fix’ a district, delinquent in the southern-west, a district so overcrowded that the surplus people were starting to get in the way of the operation of the machines. My crew was chosen because we had the best record, measured in the only way such records can be measured, in pounds delivered to Central Meat. Our Grind-5 rolled out on those big balloon-ball wheels that day, quiet as a rubber cat padding through rubber leaves. We homed in on the delinquent district, all six-man crew of us, and I was the Captain. The decisions were mine!” His flat space-guardsman’s stomach knotted in pain anew and fresh-remembered remorse was his for all the lost opportunity, all the fallen prestige, gone with everything those last four words implied: “The decisions were mine.”
In the delinquent district, as he related, the preliminary work had already been done (as was usual) and the candidates for Grind were preselected, courtesy of the local administration. The victims were being held in a gray building of bare plastic walls reinforced by viciously barbed steel rods, and a shimmer of fight all around the inside of the prison room, keeping prisoners well back from the walls, told where meshed knife blades whirled like banks of fans. Not a reassuring place in which to stand accused! NO! Presumably the people selected to go were those who had made the lesser contribution to living in a crowded land. They were the delinquents who, in the opinions of local officialdom, had not paid for their living space by inventing enough time-saver devices. As goes without saying, time-saver devices were the main obsession as people flaunted their space clothes and space blue prints and dreamed of the Conquest. Baffled and turned back still, they longed for the big Space Victory and went on filling a small crowded planet with petty gad-goes.
“But my course was plain that day in the southern-western district; I was the Captain and duty was routine. All I had to do was spring down in my black guardsman’s boots and my space jacket colored like night, with all my achievement and extra poundage medals gleaming like stars, and salute the local dignitaries with the proper deal of snap and preciseness. Then my men would know what to do; they would set up to sausage the people who stood accused of not inventing enough gadgets. I would not have even to murmur the orders.” He looked to the three not-listening dogs for a sign of sympathy and found none. But he did not care now.
“The rest is history. All of you know, have read how Blonk’s Grind-5 stood for three full days idle in a delinquent southern-western district. While some of the best execution potential of all times—my crew—worked like women, searching through papers and records. Before grinding a single man! And how the poundage
was under for that mission, and how the quota had to be revised in all the other districts, and how some men had to go to the Grind who were not listed by LOCAL DECISION. And of course you know, have read, have heard! how I was removed—Blonk, once the most awesome of all the Captains with the poundage record gleaming on his chest—drummed out! For what they called ‘Unseemly vacillation and indecisiveness.’ Oh, for one soul-struck moment, to lose all. What happened? MAC, MAC! what happened?”
He rushed over to the three sleeping knaves, who had fallen from lesser things, and he shook them to awareness. Blinking and yawning there in the gloom, there among the rootstocks, the metal leaves and the buds of the automatic season they were fixing, one of them said the cue, asked the question, and by a great strength of will he refrained from beating them with his green and red striped swagger stick loaded with lead. “What did you do?”
Again he relived that moment, that bright black day in the autumn season, and the autumn—nay! winter, as it turned out—of his glory. “The big Grind-5 was drawn up near the gates of the compound—polished to gleaming as befit the machine of the Grinder ace, he who had stormed the very gates of fame’s splendor with his good records. My men were in their special blue uniforms of the ace crew of the Grind, with the unit citation in the form of a startling red jewel, shaped like a falling blood drop, pinned to their tunics. And I was in my high boots and the night-black garb of the Captain with the efficiency record gleaming in gold. What did I do!?
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