“I strode down slowly from the Captain’s turret that day, stood for awhile in the door to survey the autumn weather, drew myself up to my full height, my shoulders so broad then in my uniform in the time of my splendor, my chest so full and rib-sprung as to seem almost unreal. I stood looking at the local dignitaries and knew they were seeing a god. Then—” His mind surely reeled and almost faltered to blankness in recalling what he had done. Although it was clearly written that every Captain of Crew held the invested right, the thing was not a thing to be done. “After standing for awhile godlike before them and surveying the autumn metal, I patted my night-black gauntlets together in a moment of unseemly contemplation, walked leisurely down the ramp, saluted in a manner of calculated cynicism and then—and then I issued the strange terrible order!”
He looked at them and saw they were wide awake now and wide-eyed with fear, for, after twenty recitals, they knew when the story was ending. He rushed to them, and he started to beat them with his green and red striped swagger stick loaded with lead, as they expected him to do, as he always did in his wrath just before the end of the story. As he whacked them, they kept dutifully asking, hoping for easier blows, “What did you do—what was the strange terrible order?” But he did not answer at once; he was enjoying too much the bludgeon-blows he was raining down on these flinching and shivering men. After awhile each one lay in a fine pool of blood, gasping and miserable at the foot of some metal plant. And through the froth bubbles on each man’s quivery lips it was evident that they were still framing the proper and dutiful question, as they knew they should do, as they knew he required of them, “What did you do—what was the strange terrible order?”
Then in that icy-calm-stillness which always followed his awesome display of wrath, he gave the cold-steel order for each prostrate and blood-soaked man to resume his feet and his stem-and-bulb duties at once. And as he moved to a table to fill out the required and proper forms for them each, after duty hours, to appear at Central Whip for punishment due (“for blood stains on uniform”), he answered their question, recited like litany the scope and terrible depth of his fall: “I once questioned LOCAL DECISION for fairness; I once issued the order for JUSTICE; I once dillydallied before grinding men.” And as, idly, musingly, he wrote and underlined twice, heavily, on each man’s proper form, the reason for punishment due at Central Whip—“Careless and excessive bleeding on uniform without proper cause”—Blonk suddenly knew he was cured. He had the hang of it again! By the great god MAC, if he could only get them to believe him up there! He was ready for topside and the world of MEN again!
SURVIVAL PACKAGES
NEVER before had a species faced with extermination prepared so elaborately for survival. All over the world they came up that spring, burst through our plastic yards, spread confusion around our Great Walls, even broke out in our very forts if that was where they happened to have been planted.
Our Warners were helpless out on the Early Line. They came from underground! We had to depend on the “ears” of our Strongholds for warning, and that meant the Boxheads were sometimes less than yards away at the first alert. The “ears” of my Stronghold are big velvety cone-balls with millions of tiny reactors set in the cones. These hover in orbit—some dozens of them—over my fortress permanently, and they listen day and night for even the tiniest variation in the normal sound-buzz. When things are usual there is a quiet humming emanates from the gently-working mechanisms of the automation that serves me, and the cone-balls ride in their glinty majesty like big silvery eyes whirling, testing always for my safety. The Warning Room sleeps quietly with the big screens empty then, and the megaphones gape silent. Then all is well.
But the day that crunching rending sound came from below! One of the cone-balls froze in its orbit and hung there sending the dread signal of invasion through the speakers in the Warning Room. I rushed all my available weapons men to the indicated place at once, and I brought the walking missiles down with great dispatch. I wheeled in the White Witch rockets and deployed them, and I thumbed back the doors where the hand bombs were, all as I had rehearsed it many times in my war games. On top of all this I opened the speaker tube to the demolition box in the Mountain of the Lost Hope Stand. In other words, in the ultimate contingency when all seems otherwise at length but really lost, I’ll whisper the Word into the speaker tube, and that will signal the demolition box far away in the Mountain of the Lost Hope Stand. Then my fortress will blow—I, my enemy, everything. I do not intend to lose alone, you see.
The thing came through while we watched the spot under the warning cone-ball between my Tenth and Eleventh walls. With a crash like house sides falling, the floor of my fort lifted up between the two walls and, as the floor shattered, a square metal head, followed by massive shoulders and arms of what seemed tubular steel, came through a hole in the ground. It did not seem warlike, but who could know what the tricks, what the awful slyness and the terrible intents afoot in that box-shaped head? It squatted by the hole and dropped its hands inside. The hands, which were made of huge hinged rods, grasped something, and the tubular arms and shoulders heaved strongly until a capsule came through. The capsule was about the size of a one-man space boat, and in shape it was not much different, with the cylindrical form and beautiful lines of a sun rocket.
My weapons men stood nervous. All my metal parts clanked and zinged, and the flesh-strips holding me together flooded cold sweat. Though my entire fortress was alerted, and at a nod from me, I felt, this visitor and his capsule could be shattered, I was scared. I wanted to give the signal to blast him at once, yet something stayed me. Perhaps it was the way he worked, this Boxhead, so sure, so preplanned seeming, so inevitable. There is something chill, something particularly arresting about any behavior that proceeds without deviation, completely oblivious to surroundings and as though part of a destiny. When he had the full long length of the capsule out of the hole, he laid the ponderous object down gently on a level stretch of plastic. Then he went back to the hole, peered inside and seemed to be signaling. I grabbed two weapons men for support and stood with the horror beating about me. And then the second one climbed through, a carbon copy of the first Boxhead. They exchanged no word or greeting that I noticed, but turned at once to the capsule. After a short while of testing for center they went one to each end and, twisting opposite ways, gently they opened the capsule into two parts. From the front part of the halved capsule they extracted a cylinder of a clear wax-like substance containing what looked to be a misshapen flesh-colored ball with shriveled flesh-colored attachments. Working on without a pause in their peculiar hitch-jerky motions the two Boxheads found tools in the lower half of the capsule with which to chip away the wax and free the strange shriveled object from its waxy bed. When they had the misshapen ball and its attachments like some small weird scarecrow of the Old Days full-length along the plastic, they returned to the lower half of the capsule and, hitch-jerky, inexorably, unstoppable-seeming, they extracted many smaller objects. With things from these smaller objects—fluids, pumps and gases—they went to work inflating the scarecrow form.
I watched them patiently. I let them alone. I was not scared now. Something old in my mind was remembering a year long ago when man had accepted Doomstime. I was young then, a mere child just starting to be conditioned by the blasting, when the “things” were planted down. But I remembered. YES! When the Boxheads were through I signaled them to bury the capsule, fix back the plastic yard sheets as best they could and go. I let them out through the Eleventh Gate into the void of our plastic-yard-sheet world, and deep in my flesh-strips I almost felt tears turn to rain as three things wandered away, two Boxheads and between them a weird plump scarecrow, dazed, blinking and, I suspected, sore afraid.
And this went on all over the world that spring, in every quarter of our plastic globe. The Boxheads came through like flowers, one might say, like spring flowers used to come bursting up through the vulgar soil. Of course now, thanks to the bulb-bummers, w
e bloom flowers up through the lidded yard-holes at a nod from the Central Commission for Beauty, push-button them up when it’s time, and they nod on spring-metal stems in the plastic fields of summer until it’s autumn.
But these—oh, so grimmer than flowers—were man’s hope at Doomshour, planted away in the time capsules and swung between two powerful robots, sunk deep down in the earth and set in the tapes of the robots to come up after a sleep of a hundred years. All the lands of the earth had done this, that is all of the lands that were sophisticated enough in their sciences to have the robots, the timed tapes and the time capsules. Those that were not sophisticated went on lying in the sun on small islands, perhaps, or puttered about in the snow in far northern places, maybe, or slept in the jungles trees, not knowing or caring how unsophisticated they were, how out of the race they were, how terribly blank were their zeros in the great advancement of man. While the advanced ones, the sophisticated ones, after planting the capsules down, made last minute check on their blasters, thumbed the lids back from their silos, issued their ultimatums and sprang the war birds up, screaming, SCREAMING!! For the Great Five Minutes of War.
But somewhere and many-wheres was blunder. Missiles wandered away and did not home in on their towns. Minds faltered at the critical second-of-GO-zero. Ships-Captains slid underseas in their crafts with the missiles and took stock of terrible choices, and some dilly-dallied. Manned warbirds found themselves somehow late at the right places of drop and at the wrong places early. And key men in command posts all over the world cracked just a little with the awesome weight of it all. In short, the beautiful precision that was blueprinted to destroy the world in a clean five minutes of blasting was bungled. Man, at his own funeral, was late and unsure and imprecise and unreliable, as usual. The Great Five Minutes, boggled, dragged on into Five Terrible Years, five years shaking the world with demolition. And man changed in those five years. And the world changed. You may even say there was progress. But—well . . . ? Just say things moved . . . on.
Flesh and blood became commodities of the impossible past almost, what with all the pollution of the air, sea and soil. We “replaced” the human body after the Big Five Years, when we found flesh that was properly conditioned by explosions. Even vital organs could be replaced we learned, down to a minimal amount of the flesh-strip, or shored up and made to last with new-metal. We fed ourselves introven, and it worked! Our small hard hearts became engines that drove a thin green blood through tube-miles in thin flesh-strips. Sentiment was soon quite gone from us, and our souls, if ever we had them, were surely now no more. But fears we retained—they were with us large and small and LARGE. YES! We kept normal fears and abnormal fears and normal desires and abnormal desires. We desired to live; we feared to die. We desired to kill; we feared to die. We defended ourselves. We did live!
After the Big Five Years only those could go on who had been revised of course. And our planet—we could part with much of it now. Being creatures of only a little flesh and blood we had small use for the seas and even smaller use for the air. We space-signaled the Martians our willingness to part with most of our atmosphere any time they found a way to space-lift it up to their place. And the bulk of the oceans would have been up for grabs except we might need them for certain minerals and to keep us balanced as we should be in the System. The polluted soil we of course covered—hills and valleys and plains—with cool white plastic. YES! Ours is a clean place now, except for the contaminated purplish air and the poisoned green-black seas, which we are freezing.
The plump scarecrows between the twin robots all over the world that year? Children! SURVIVAL CHILDREN! All of us remembered them when they came bursting up that spring, remembered how a chosen few million, their blood drained, their lives made dormant, had been planted away in the wax, like strange seeds, that time so long ago when man had accepted Doomshour. But we had forgotten them in the years since of our fears and our constant watchfulness. They were children, strange, from another century. We tried, but we found we could not help them. Their flesh had not been seasoned enough by the explosions. They would not fit into our Program. With their robots they wandered homeless over our white land, strange children born twice into a terrible place, confused, and a century out of their time, until death overtook them. And now only the robots wander, in strange twos, up and down; and sometimes, true to something punched in a metal brain long ago, you will see the twin robots carrying the complete bones of a child between them, wandering—wandering far and wide. And they go confused. It will pass. The metal punched in their brains must sooner or later give way. It was metal of a century ago. Then not even the robots will wander. And we will be left to only our own fears and only our own Deep Thinking, each in our own fortress Walls, warily watching each other, half expecting a sneak fatal attack from a neighbor at any time, but “knowing” a massive overwhelming space-strike from some far galaxy may be our final fate, after all. But living! LIVING! And dedicated to the survival of man at all costs.
NEW-METAL
WE CALLED it new-metal and sometimes new-metal steel. Was it some sorcerer’s dream come actual? pure magic turned true-real? or was it science all the way? I think it was some of all three, but mostly, and grandly! science-all-the-way. It was our god. It was the substance, really, of the Moderan Dream, that and plastic. But plastic was not magic. Plastic was mundane. Plastic was merely the workhorse everyday foundation that gave our Earth-ball its tough gray pearly hide of sterilized beauty for us to stride on.
But new-metal steel was us, so much of the bulk of us, the moving living substance of the Dream that had Time standing back, Time with its scythe blade broken, Time with its white flag up, head-hung, death-beaten on the silent Field of Surrender. Yah! new-metal man, give old Time a kick! New-metal would never become as living flesh, OH NO!, and that was well, for our strength and our durability were mainly founded on our lack of flesh and our abundance of “replacement.” New-metal steel had this main wonderful wonderful quality. Up in the big-engine parts of us, where were housed the mighty apparatuses of our existence—the lungs, the heart, the guts big and small, the liver, the kidneys and all the rest—new-metal could fuse with the flesh and “replace” us down to a minimum of flesh-strip holding our forms in shape and keeping us linked to the human. The mighty-engine parts of our existence, placed in this flesh-strip and new-metal housing, were simply, in the parlance of the day, implants. They were new-metal everlast engines—the flexi-flex new metal lungs, the bang-boom heart with the changers, the kidneys with the vapor drain, and all the rest. The legs and arms, the feet and hands were new-metal too, but with a different ratio of new-steel. When we flailed by with our arms clanging, our steel boots on our steel feet moving over the plastic, ta-rap ta-rump ta-rump tump tumpa tump, no one and not anything questioned our passage. Yah! new-metal man, the living moving substance of the Dream come actual.
Oh, we could have been all weapons men, and that easily, those meaningless mechanical apparatuses that looked and walked and talked like men but were no more than metal monsters, though necessary and most useful to our plan. Most wonderful in a way they were, efficient and brave in invasion, tenacious and utterly implacable in a siege, and not at all inclined to cut and run or give up hope when outnumbered and under fire from far out; or close in, being surrounded and pounded, they stood their ground well enough. Yah! new-metal monsters, our wonderful weapons men.
But we were MEN! and a gulf of cosmic distance swung between and was the difference that existed between a new-metal monster and a new-metal man. When our beautiful plans for war went alive in the world and roared aloft in tangible reality—the White Witch rockets firing, the wow bombs grandly falling, the wreck-wrecks trajectoring, the missiles far and wide homing and all the other hardware of our Joy-at-War beautifully functioning—we knew what we were doing. We lived, we felt, we responded to the emotions of it all. But the weapons man did not. He was simply a cold lump at plain killing, an unfeeling clod at general carnage, and as
for the destruction and flattening of Strongholds he brought to that game none of the warm human emotions at all. Blah! New-metal monster, you weapons man, you have no soul at all!
So, though we could all have become, and easily—through our sciences—mechanical men, with engines in us that would have talked and smiled and swore for us, that would have made all the human gestures far and wide for us and that would have been able to repair themselves and build their kind all new for us, what would all that have proved? It would have proved that man had developed a very clever and sophisticated batch of science know-how indeed. And for sure!
But we didn’t want it that way. Fists knotted at the sky, eyes all wild and hammers pounding the earth of our base and our subjection, we did not want it that way. By God, we’d take God into custody with our efforts and our cunning ways as men. We’d see Him bow, hear Him cry out, “My children have outdone me! While I slept away, they have moved each to a godhood of his own, everlasting and timeless all! My work is done.”
OF HAMMERS AND MEN
I ALWAYS carried one; I had them in every size. I had the special everyday-war size, one that I carried two at a time, each on either side, slung down, low and handy-down easy, like old gunfighter guns just nudging the tips of my steel fingers where they swung when I, plop-plip-plap-plop, walked over the homeless plastic. Then I had the little friendly size, the dress-up Sunday size, I guess we would have said in the Old Days, a compact somewhat inconspicuous thing that I carried one at a time in my steel Sunday belt and which would, if necessary, and swung right, slice a small bit of a man down, a bit about the size of half an ordinary man’s face. It would not do, as you can see, for heavy disagreements. But for a Sunday stroll it was, I thought, just fine. Then I had, and inevitably we must come to this, my war hammer, the special offense-defense instrument, a device that came apart, had spare parts, and could be fitted and adjusted to the occasion. I carried a cart load of these in a special-tracked vehicle called, after the Old Day’s weapons carrier, the hammer carrier, and had ten weapons men to sponsor these when I passed through heavy country. In a truce time!
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