After that, just say all the legions were committed, all the ships sailed and the skies were filled with airplanes. We kept back nothing in the grim encounters that our love was, for remember we were flesh that year, all dream-bothered flesh; we moved in to destroy each other with more than usual fervor, for our passion was great and most unique in Olderan that season. Or so at least we thought it. But there were no winners. Are there ever?
Came the time, far down the days of agony of our trial by love, when I had sickened. The long months of pursuit, the heart palpitations, the doubts, the searing hopes, the prizes thrust out to dangle and then be denied by littles—that whole grim business—had worn me thin. We both saw how it was. She for pity married a business man who owned five factories, a private road, ten cars and a railroad train. And I, seeing my chances and sensing the way the winds of progress were listing, set sail with all remaining energy and fastest possible speed to join the Bangs to fight the world wars that were just then forming up. After the great loss at Landry and the end of our world as we knew it I came out of the bomb smear, the havoc far and everywhere, to have myself done over right down to a minimum of flesh-strip holding me in shape. I not only got rid of all the love-befuddled tissue, I went much further and had healthy flesh snipped out for “replacement” until finally, testing out at almost ninety-two and one-half per cent good new-metal steel, I knew I was SOLID!
She and the factory owner have been dead many many years, let me say. Even their flesh ways of living have mostly been bypassed by progress now, and their land has been invaded and transformed by steadily growing, massively encroaching, Great New Processes Land. His factories have been converted to warehouses; they store parts for men now. I, in on the ground floor by being a New Processes Early, have climbed a mountain of greatness I never thought I’d approach. I am respected and powerful. My blasters, armed with the latest in megatons, are ready to flip their volcanoes around this world and any nearby others in times of war. In times of peace I may sit in a hip-snuggie beach loafing chair beside a pool of clear colorless oil, the paddling and wading-sports place of the New Processes new-metal man whose status is good.
Butch is my new-metal dog now. Sometimes I activate him and he’s ready then to chew the world down to comfortable dog-size pieces. But most times I just leave him hunched up by the wall, as cold and dead then as a turned-off launch site, a memento of the past.
And love? We have no trouble with love in Great New Processes Land and never use it except as a diversionary time in Joys. And if a Joy grows tedious we know what to do with Joy; we give it to the torches; we turn the life switches to OFF on the gleaming New Processes maidens, the chic and capable mistresses with the lustrous string-metal hair. And if a form still haunts us, if a steel smile yet seems sweet and troublesome and stuff for dreams to hurt on, we fill the air with flame throwers; we cut them down like enemies, press on the phfluggee-phflaggee buttons, pump up and down on our new-metal all-weather knee joints and laugh and laugh . . . while they burn. And sometimes, as I said, I get so happy . . . with my steel condition . . .YES!
REMEMBERING
SO, AFTER a fighting year, the autumn came. Finally. The tin birds screamed south under the orange vapor shield and a made moon floated splendiferously over our land. The trees folded up and collapsed into the yard-holes, and the big bags went aloft from Central, the big brown leaf-filled bags floating high in the air and ready to shower us with ersatz autumn at the press of a switch in Seasons. And those brown bags, emptied and collapsed, would float to earth and, looking like the biggest of all fallen leaves, perhaps be found by tin men, or Go-Now men, or strange bleary mutant men roaming the homeless plastic.
And then the winter passed in a flutter of made snow and crystal, and the men in Seasons, working hard and over-stepping the bounds of good taste, I thought, went far back and made us a Christmas. It was a simple thing, but hard work, and withal poor taste, I felt, this clothing the regular trees with a sheath of green plastic and springing them up in the yard-holes in December with a strange-haloed star. Who could care? Oh, who could care?
And then it was spring again. And I knew how much I had lost. Through the tag-end days of summer, through the autumn, through powdery winter—my Stronghold on Automatic, my needs expertly served by the self-run ever-ready Gad-Goes—I had sat in my hip-snuggie chair watching the months go, watching the antics of Central. Not even bored; not even amused. For I had set my blood to low-low and my flesh-strips to dormant, and I had remained the long days through almost as quiet in every part of the new-metal in all my “replacements.”
But the spring—something happens in spring. The world slips round to unrest and something dormant shakes off the cold coils, slithers up and stares you silly with beady eyes. Or did a tin man, while I slept, jog a bit at my heart switch? It is a thing I cannot tell you, truly. One month I’m sitting calm as a cold ball of lead, thinking on Universal Deep Problems, my heart pistoning a slow steady Moderan rhythm designed to last me forever, my world a flat sea of smooth-time for me to float on. The next I’m in the crash waves, my heart pistoning a blast-beat, my thin green blood coming up to swell the tubes in my throat and choke me. I am thinking of her! And the summer day that she left me.
Or was it night? I have not been so well since she has gone. Or is it pride? Who can say, on such things, what would mean anything to another?
Sometimes I think I will rise to power in this land. Why not? I’ll make scientists out of my weapons men. And the tin men. We’ll throw this Stronghold into one grand laboratory of experimentation. We’ll come up with an Ultimate Contingency weapon to make other Ultimate Contingency weapons look like toyland fuzz bombs. We’ll come up with such a blaster that just by thinking into the ON-OFF place I can obliterate whole countrysides. And then I’ll say to Central, “Central,” I’ll say, “you have given me your last hard time. No more spring, see. Likewise, no more summer, see. Check?” And check they better will, or else. Oh, after that, I’ll be a benevolent ruler. We’ll sit in autumn and winter, all of us. For spring and summer are really dead, you know. All gone. But perhaps I do not make myself clear. Who can, perhaps, to another?
At other times I think I’ll make snakes. I have the blueprints. I’ll throw my Stronghold into one big green-plastic snake factory. And let them crawl all over a gaunt land. Snakes! That is the symbol. What better to say what I have to say to all the world? And I’ll train one special one to go and sit upon the roof which she is under. With him.
But perhaps all this will make you think that I am mean. Or jealous. It is not that—not that at all. But I am outraged by her stupidity, and I am hurt by something that moves and turns in the cold sections of my heart box when it comes spring in the wheel of the world’s sad journey. I think it is mostly her stupidity that so outrages me. You see, she left me for one much inferior to me! You must take my word for that. You must, you must—
It was not that I did not treat her well. She was my new-metal mistress for many a happy month. And then, as such things go, I guess she learned to love me. And I cannot blame her for that. Certainly that was not part of her stupidity. But, as women will, she wanted more and more, more and more of the time. What I mean to say is, she wanted to share my life, even help run, or perhaps run! the Stronghold. She wanted me to leave her life-switch to ON! But I explained patiently, as to a child, how it was better for her to have her life-switch to ON only while we were loving. And then we could flip it to OFF when we were not loving and she could go to lie under the bed and rest there like a stick of steel, or old plastic shoes, until I needed her again most sorely. Any other arrangement, as I explained to her time and time again, would perhaps lead to a lessening of my mind-force in Universal Deep Thinking. I thought she understood.
And then one day—it was summer, the heavy flowers were up all about and the ersatz baby robins were testing their tender wings and throbbing little new-learned songs—that day I grew careless. I guess I left her life-switch to ON when we were
through. I remember it was a time of heavy thinking. There was terrible trouble again in the Out World on the space run to Marsoplan, and the Red Galaxy was again posing problems. I guess I left her life-switch to ON. Or perhaps one of the tin men . . . But I must not grow too suspicious. Even now it seems that every eye I look into is somehow guilty. Sometimes I wonder if they were not all making love with her when my back was turned in thinking. And when I think this, the green blood comes up in my flesh-strips so hotly that it is all I can do not to blast the countryside with a Maximum Weapons Fire just to let off my feelings.
But the upshot was, she left me that day while I was in my thinking room, busy. I know they must have helped her get over my Stronghold’s eleven steel walls. They must have. I am, even now, still thinking up punishment for those traitor servants, and no punishment seems big enough to fit them. When I find out who they are—Oh, my revenge-needs grow and grow and overwhelm me.
And when I find her! which I will! I hope I have my revenge schedule ready. My “boys” are out even now infiltrating all the neighboring Strongholds, where the inferior masters are, to find out which inferior master was the nature of her stupidity. And when I find her!!!
But you know, I have a hope. Even in this heart-hurt spring, flat place in the wheel of the sad world’s journey, I have a hope. That she’ll come back? Ah, no. I have a hope that she’ll be found outside a Stronghold. Maybe wandering over the homeless plastic, saying my name. Or perhaps “living” in some yard-hole for trees, hoping I’ll come to her to say, “Come back!”
But would I take her back? Could I take her back? There seems a guilt in every eye I look into. I’m caught with my green blood. I think of snakes, and will—until I know. And who can know? About such things? So it is full ahead with all my punishment schedules. And when she’s found—and she will be found!—I hope it does not find my schedules wanting. I’ll rush that new machine through to completion. I’ll leave her life-switch to ON! I’ll let her “live” while this new machine hammers her “life” down to jellied atoms. For stupidity—well, stupidity is a most terrible thing, you know—especially in the judging of ME against another—and must have a massive pounding.
A LITTLE GIRL’S XMAS IN MODERAN
IT WAS in Jingle-Bell weather that Little Sister came across the white yard, the snow between her toes all gray and packed and starting to ball up like the beginnings of two snowmen. For clothing she had nothing, her tiny rump sticking out red-cold, and blue-cold, and her little-jewel knees white almost as bones. She stuck up ten stiff fingers, and she said, “Daddy! Something is wrong at my place! Come see!” She lisped a little perhaps and did not say it all as precisely as grownups, because she was just past four.
He turned like a man in the bottom third of bad dreaming; he pointed two bored eyes at her. Damn the kid, he thought. “What the hell deal has Mox got us into now?” he said. And he sang the little rhyme that made the door come open. Then as she stepped toward him he saw the snowballs on her feet. They were melting now, making deep furrows in the green rug spread across his spacious thinking room. The tall nap, like flooded grass now along little canals bending away from her feet, was speckled white here and there with crumpled paper balls. His trial plans and formulas peeped out like golf balls.
Coming back across the iron fields of nightmare that always rose to confront him at such times, he struggled to make the present’s puzzling moment into sense. Damn the kid, he thought, didn’t wipe her feet. All flesh, as yet—her own—and bone and blood, and didn’t wipe her feet. The snow melts!
He motioned her to him. “Little Sister,” he began in that tired dull-tinny voice that was his now, and must be his, because his larynx was worked all in gold against cancer, “tell me slowly, Little Sister. Why don’t you stay in your plastic place more? Why don’t you use the iron Mox more? Why do you bother me at all? Tell me slowly.”
“Daddy!” she cried and started to jig up and down in the fits that he hated so, “come over to my place, you old boogie. Something needs fixing.”
So they went across the big white yard to her place, past Mother’s place, past Little Brother’s place, with her snow-hurt limping and naked, and him lumbering in strange stiff-jointedness, but snug in a fire-red snuggie suit of fine insulation with good black leather space high-tops. Arrived at her place he whistled at the door the three sharp notes. The door moved into the wall and Mox the iron one stood sliding the iron sections of his arms up into one another until he had only hands hanging from shoulders. It was his greeting way. He ogled with bulb eyes and flashed his greeting code.
“What would you have done,” her father said, “if I had not come with you? You brought no whistle for the door.” Three sharp notes sprang at him from the normal holes of her head, and the heavy door rolled softly out of the wall until it shut them in the gay red-carpeted room with a Xmas tree—the father, the naked little girl and the iron Mox. And she was impishly holding the whistle between her teeth, grinning up at him. “I had it all along,” she said and dropped the whistle into the tall red grass of her room’s carpet.
She wiped the waning snowballs from her feet and sidled her icy-cold rump over toward the slits where the heat came through the wall, soft and perfumed like an island summer. Her knees turned knee-color again and her rump became no longer vari-colored cold. It became the nicest of baby-pink little-girl rumps, and she stood there a health-champion of a little miss, all flesh and bone and blood—as yet—pointing at an angle toward the ceiling. “The star!” she said. “The star has fallen down.” And he noticed that she was pointing toward the tree.
“What star?” he started to say, across the fog that always smelled like metal in his mind these last few years, and then he thought, Oh hell, she means the Xmas star. “You came across all that yard,” he asked incredulously, “to annoy me with a thing like that, when Mox—?”
“Mox wouldn’t,” she broke in. “I asked him and asked him, but he wouldn’t. It’s been down since the fifteenth. You remember when those dumb students went home in their jets early and fast and broke the rules and shook the houses down. BOOM! and the star fell down. Just like that. Well, he’d just do silly when I asked him, like you just now saw him, just shake his arms up into his shoulders and ogle. Pretty darn dumb, if you ask me.”
“But what about your mother?”
“I asked her when I was over to her place, over a week ago. But she’s been too busy and tired. You know how Mama is, always having that plastic guy rubbing parts of her, that she says hurt, and jumping on the bed at any little thing. Sometimes I think that guy’s in love with Mama. What’s love?”
“What?! What’s love? Should I tell you, did I know? Love is—is not an iron ceiling on a plastic . . . But—oh, never mind! Hell!—How’s her star?”
“Twinkle twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are, up above the world so high, like a mama in the sky. Heard that on the programs advertising diamonds.”
“Just answer the questions. How’s her star?”
“Up real shiny, last I saw. But heck, Mama probably never even looks at her star, because that plastic guy—”
“And Little Brother’s star?”
“Humph, Little Brother! Beat his star up about a week after we put ’em up. Said it was just what he needed for the rear end of his space tube. You know how Little Brother is about space.”
“And so yours is the only star that has fallen. Mother’s is still up, though she doesn’t have time to look at it, you think. Little Brother took his down in the interest of space. Yours just fell.”
“Daddy, where is your star, Daddy?”
He looked at her, and he thought, Damn these little girls. Always so much sentiment. And so schemy, too. He said “I had Nugall store my star away. It’s somewhere with the tree, in a box. It interfered with my deep thinking. I’ve got to have entirely a bare room, so far as Xmas trees are concerned, for my deep thinking, if you don’t mind.”
For just a moment he thought she was going t
o get the sniffles. She looked at him, float-eyed, her face ready to buckle and twist into tearful complaint. But she held and stared at him more sternly, and he said, “Sure I’ll fix the damned star for you. Drag me a chair over. And then I must rush right back to my place.” (Dangerous, this being together too much. And so old-fashioned. And besides, he had been really cooking on a formula when she burst in.) So he stood on the chair she dragged to him, and he fixed the frosti-glass star to its hook in the iron ceiling and he adjusted the star until it was almost impossible to tell that it wasn’t attached to the green plastic tree. Then he whistled at the door.
Just as he was passing through the opening, leaving, he felt something tug at a leg of the fire-red suit. Damn! It was she again. “What now?” he asked.
“Daddy!” she piped, “you know what, Daddy? I thought, what if we’d go over to Mother’s and Little Brother’s places, since it’s Xmas. And you’ve got on your red suit. Isn’t this a very special day? I’ve been hearing on the programs—”
“No,” he said, “it isn’t a very special day. But if you want to—and you’d probably do a fit about it if you didn’t get to—come on.” So after she had put on a green snow suit, they trudged across the white yard, a strange study in old Xmas colors, and they stopped first at Little Brother’s place, who was just past five.
Dressed in a pressure suit and sturdy beyond all sense, from the weight lifting and the vitamin taking and the breakfast-of-champions eating, he wanted to know what the hell all the nonsense of a visit was about so early. And he let them know that Nogoff, his iron man, was taking care of everything at his place very well, thank you. Then he strode about in his muscles, sturdy beyond all meaning, and he showed them the new jet tube part he had hammered out of the star, and they left pretty soon from his surliness. On the way over to Mother’s place Little Sister suggested that she thought Little Brother thought too much about rockets and jets and space. Didn’t Father think so? Father agreed dully that maybe he did, he didn’t know, but really, could one ever think too much about rockets and jets and space?
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