Well!! You can see we didn’t have anything here but a lot of old Sunday school chin-ups and Epworth League reminders. I recalled the Board and let them have it straight. The kindest thing I said was, “Look: this is a war we’re getting ready for, not a slogan tryout and qualification round for good-Johnnies. Get cracking! The melting pots stand hungry and, as of this instant, you’re on top of the menu. Come up with a Plan. Or melt!”
Their buttons started to jump. From plan and think they went to think and plan and back again and back again. Then round and round over and across up and down the dazzling buttons flicked on and off, on and off, on my great Planning Board members. The lights danced, the blue fire flashed, there was life in those circuits and my men were using their programs to the top degree. Then, with the gist of a rough plan for a war of good, they went on refine, refine, refine. —They were not dumb; when they were turned on right, they were as smart as any War Planning Board automatics in the whole world. Now, in addition to being naturally smart, they were fighting for their very existences. They didn’t want to liquefy in the hot pots, and who could blame them for that?
In fairness to these, my Board members, and I do try to be fair, all ways and always, I will say that the Grand Plan they came up with, out of the dancing buttons and the flashing blue fire in the circuits, was based on the homely things implicit in those one hundred and twenty-five tight-packed pages from Olderrun. For be it for better or for worse, and I say weeeaaaooohhhaauuggh! there is nowhere in the whole Universe that I know of anywhere that is a better place to go for bright sayings on good than to those flesh bums in Olderrun. Fakes! Hypocrites! Under-achievers in good that they are. And I ought to know: I’m from there a long long time past, God help us all!
But we had Our Plan now for the war current, and that was the main thing. And all the other Strongholds, except one, had each His Plan. Not a good one in the whole lot, I hoped, except mine, but I was glad they all had Plans, if they intended to wage. Yes. I’m competitive. Isn’t man? Isn’t that the essence of man—competitiveness, combativeness, win-at-all-costs-ness, “sorry old boy, I’m greatest, you know”-ness? Well, isn’t it?
So we all had each Our Plan, except for this one little rag-tag fort ’way off over in a corner of a poor district, so I heard tell. He hadn’t, it seemed, won any war, ever, and rumor was out now that his Stronghold was so dilapidated and completely fouled that it might never be anything but a wreck. His gun tubes were all hanging, his wall all were honeycombed, and his warning devices were not up to par either. And now the word was that he’d begged off on this Good War, said he didn’t feel like a go, and just wanted to be a non-participator in any ambitious undertaking that might have the choice win, lose. Well, if that were true (and my face flesh-strips burning and stinging, embarrassed now for the whole family of man, I certainly hoped it was not) I personally thought he should have been voted out of the fraternity of man long ago; not just Moderan, but the whole League. I was all for using the big Zero Corrector on him, that machine in the North that can grind whole armies down to a powder finer than dust in almost no seconds flat. Yes! my disrespect for him almost knew no bounds at all, if you care to know it. Quitter! Non-fighter! War-evader! Danger-dodger! Yellow-stomach! No-person now!
But be that all as it may and let him rot, the non-achiever! —We had a war on! After two weeks of preparation, everybody planning and getting busily ready, each according to his own dear blueprint, the opening shots were due. And well it was for that. Such a war! You wouldn’t believe. Peace baskets, all ribbony, lobbing up in the middle of what was supposed to be a fight. Ho Ho flags on the vapor shield all over and in every color and crest. Everybody laughing with the big resounders on loud. Stronghold masters sending their full photos up in the sky and smiling those photos all over the place all the time, through beam control. Big hollow bombs up and floating, with flowers on them, painted all over, flowers! balloon bombs, really, and little mechanical birds in baskets hanging under them, the birds machined to sing of the Good War’s good. What a war! And over everything the constant showers of flowers. Well, how was one to win such a war? It was all so soft! you know. How was anyone to gain the advantage? How outsoft them? I’d thought we had it all in the bag with our Grand Plan for good. But everyone was being so nice, fighting all the time, in the Good War, but being so nice. Laughing. Smiling. Good-cheering. Slapping of backs in every way. Confusing, huh? What a man has to take in this world! Sometimes. What a man has to do and swallow to stay a winner. And that was my determination, you know it! to stay a winner—at all costs. You’d better believe it was.
And then I had this Little Plan. To go with and top out and accentuate my Good War Grand Plan as drawn up by my gold-plated War Planning Board. —It stopped the show, what I did, I’ll tell you plain. It really stopped the show. —I went to my World Hook-Up Announcement Room, where I, triggering things, can shoot my picture up into the air all over the world and make my image stick in the vapor shield just anywhere I want to, aye, in every foot of the sky. And I blared out to all of them, I really let them have it, my great inspiration, with my best smile vibrant before them on every foot of their Views. —(Sometimes, rare rare instance! the man, the thought and the instant all intersect at one grand gilded point in man and thought and instant to bring a Happening. Then surely, in spite of everything, something great and good journeys out from man to all the limits, even unto the limitlessness of all of all.) This was, I believed (and still believe), potentially such an occasion and as such should make great and worthwhile our war, and, just incidentally, make me the winner of that war.
So imagine how it was, my picture all over the skies of all the Moderan world, my voice coming from those smiling smiling pictures, through my World Hook-Up Announcement Room, and I saying this magnificent offer to all peoples everywhere: “Hear, everybody! and hear right! —I’ll agree, and really believe it, that each and every man in all the universe is as good and deserving a man as I am, and I’ll hold to it for ten full minutes, timed off on the etern-tells of the World. —Or any ten-minute timing you want.” Well, there it was! That should get that old human ego on the run—cause of the majority of human interrelationary problems—really sandblast it and send it home on its shield. And, just incidentally, win for me the Good War. —It did seem an ultimate thing, this statement, this stratagem, and as I let them have it, I knew it must surely end the show. It did. Everyone was stunned by the enormity of it when they turned each their thought buttons to it and went on max-think. And there I stood for the full ten minutes, ten big ones in the full urgency of time, ticked off on my etern-tell and etern-tells all over the world, my picture up and out for them all and I really believing, as I had said I would, and according to Stronghold honor (which everyone knows is sacred and holds dear) honor-bonded to that belief that every man in all the world for that ten minutes was as good and deserving a man in every way as I was.
Now, that’s a humbling thing, I’ll tell you here and now, and I wouldn’t go through it again I just wouldn’t. I felt, for those ten minutes, about as important and manly as a mangy bug crossing a decorated elephants’ parade. In the Old Days. A very small, lean, short, unimpressive, sickly bug, at that. But when it was over, I knew I had won the war, and that was enough for me. Any way to win? yes! any way to win. —The war was over. The ribboned baskets came down; the balloon bombs all went home. What more was there to do?
How could anyone top it, what I had done, in under-competitiveness, open-hands friendliness and complete world camaraderie, unless he said, “than I every man is better”? And that would just ring of such a contrived piety and such a hollow falsity as to bring the laugh machines out everywhere. No, for a human statement, I had stepped to the very outer limits of credibility and had paused there for ten full Earth-stopping minutes. While the world gasped. Past that? Nowhere to go. All the competing Stronghold masters seemed to know that, and they quit. Yes! It was all over now but the counting of points and ultimately the awarding
of the plaques. To me!
But hey now! and here now! You know what? All anger aside, all disappointment aside, all justice on its side with spears in it, bleeding and done, defiled, killed, found out, left homeless and forlorn—all justice down and wet and cold and blue, you know what? I didn’t win! I didn’t win!! You know what? All justice aside, all done done . . . You know what? I didn’t win the war. I lost!! the war!!
I appealed the decision. I railed at the injustice. I lined my War Planning Board members up and kicked them at night. I cried to the walls at noon. I threatened to organize the Strongholds and tear the L-Towers down all over the world some louring day. I was so angered I spat steel. Flecks from my iron windpipe came up and formed a froth necklace on my outraged new-metal lips, so great was my ire.
All that hard effort for good in the Good War and that supreme humbling for ten minutes at the end, and still no winner’s circle. No! They gave it—Oh, how can I bear it to tell it? The pain burns long and deep, to tell of another’s in . . .They gave it to that little, that meager, that nothing, that no-achiever, that quitter, that withdrawer, that dormant non-doer, that resigner, that low unspeakable one, that one who wouldn’t . . . Since he wouldn’t . . . they said . . . he was . . .
Oh! Oh! —My brain still reels . . . to remember . . . I set my fort on the status of continuous blast, programed it to destroy the world fifty-five straight times without stopping, took to my bed and slept through fifteen world gun-downs with automatic shoot-outs of max-destruction to annihilation. Before I could get even a little bit resigned to my loss of the war.
IN THE LAND THAT AIMED AT FOREVER
THE VAPOR shield was basic brown that month, with overtones that made it almost golden at times and at other times almost gray and grayish black. And though this was usual vapor for October, there was this autumn, grimly, a difference. From somewhere far removed, far out from this Land That Aimed at Forever, a pall of melancholy came, a feeling of closure, of things finished and going into a last white wintertime. (Ah yes, winter still came to the Land That Aimed at Forever, in spite of all the warm vapor shields that were meant to control the sky.)
And though the State set all its tin mandolin-men to playing in yards across the land, and ordered all its happy color-throwers wherever they might be to shoot diversion hues up at the basic brown shield, and though the perfume-men, their atomizers armed with every pleasant scent, ran spraying across the plastic fields and through the yards of towns, and though at night, with the vapor shield ebbed in, the shape-men threw the great pattern panoramas up into the bland, though chilling now, October sky, there was, despite all this, no surcease. The thing that had upset them all was there, continuing, dread in its verdict.
The Council met to hear a fateful proposal put in the form of motion. Stalog Blengue, sitting like a stone near the center of the Council, remote and metal-fogged but clear as to their need, clattered to full stature on his gold-and-silver-and-iron “replaced” legs to put the awful question before them all. Then they asked in their hearts and they asked each other, “Is this that maximum thing for which we have so long waited and feared? Is this that degree of ultimate contingency for which we have, at almost unheard-of expense, built and equipped and maintained the Maximum Diversion Birds? Shall the Birds go now to distract the fearful people?”
The debate raged in Council for five contestful days. Meanwhile, the people drew what comfort and diversion they could from the magic in the yards, the color-throwers, the perfume-men, the pattern display in the black-blue October nights, and sometimes, feeling great pity for the shaken people, the Central Station would throw the switch and press the button that would spring up the pansy lids. Then all over that broad land, in all the plastic yards, in all the fields of fall, flowers would leap through the yard-holes and wave a bit of May on spring-metal stems, even though grimly it was October. And through it all, in the very most central province of the Land That Aimed at Forever, that dread reality lay—yes, lay and mocked them all in the shack of stubborn old Grandpa Zagk.
In the debate in Council almost every speaker, whether for or against the proposal to use the Birds, took the opportunity to describe in oratory each tedious detail of the maximum things he thought the Birds could do. It was told by one Council member how, from the giant “cages” on the perimeter of Preparedness Field, the Birdmen would spring them up, how the vapor shield would be special-brown that day, how the silver of two million great wings all together would make a blinding show as soaring they rode quietly in the searchlights for a moment just above the buildings. Then, as at a signal, they would in a compelling show of raw power flap a cadenced rhythm to step into the brown autumnal sky, all for the height of perhaps a quarter of a mile, and they would open their mouths then all at once, with a bright fluid streaming out to form the figures of people in the vapor shield, brighter red than the blood that used to be and grotesque beyond all common imagining. Following that would come the sense-chilling noise, a special shrill and grating cry from the throats of a million birds, and then, with little brown sacks of oil, they would start bombing the people, all out in the yards now to watch the Birds. Following the oil bombardment there would come more intensive bombing with small bags of common sand and other grimes and grits that had been swept up by Central Sweep in the daily rounds and packaged in the neat gritty-grime bombs. Then, after the last sand bomb and the last neat gritty-grime bomb had tumbled from the sky, the dead cold moment of silence would come, just before all the Birds, having changed their tapes, would sing forth happy tunes of celebration and dancing. Compelled by the happy tunes to jump and pirouette in the streets of their own special City of Joy the hapless people of the State That Aimed at Forever would be completely diverted, what with the oil from the sky dripping from them, and the sand and other grimy quantities quite covering them and working into their metaled joints and grinding at the join cracks between flesh-strip and “replacement.” For these people, you must know, were not usual in the Land That Aimed at Forever. Eternity for them had been plotted by a science that worked full days and went that “extra mile” in discoveries; through “replacement” they were designed for forever. And who could say that it was not great and who could say that it was not possible? After the last of the last flesh-strip had been taken by new-metal? Their scientists said yes—yes! And time, the last lone counting arbiter, had not as yet convinced them how harshly it must finally deal with such upstart and impossible dreams and such arrogant aspirations.
After five minutes of spirited dancing by all the captive folk, according to the fanciful legislator, the Council would broadcast a short announcement advising the people to again take up their courage, go home, clean off the oil and grime as best they could and resume their normal everlasting lives for the glory of the State. Toward the end of the announcement, in a voice of casual afterthought, high points from the News-of-the-Day would be given. A careful and clever allusion would be made, hinting that in the interests of research—do not fret—things were as they were and should be in the house of Grandpa Zagk.
Some members were inclined to titter at this view of Maximum Diversion as given by one legislator. But no one tittered, I believe, at the gravity of the problem they all faced. However, in the end, after all the debate, and by the narrowest of margins, it was decided not to use the Maximum Diversion Birds. Quiet on their pads they stayed, like giant monuments to waste and fanciful expenditures, in the huge Bird “cages” at Preparedness Field.
Quite another course was taken finally to shield the people from worry about the dread condition that lay at Zagk’s house. The Central Council took measures, such as declaring a government preserve of all the fields and yards immediately adjacent to the house of this wilful and stubborn old man who had upset the plans and calculations of an entire state. On the perimeter of this restricted space, giant sun-scopes and reflectors were installed to make, on vaporless days when the sun was allowed to shine, such a ring of heat and light around the new government pres
erve that no one dared to look in that direction. At night or on days when the sun was not allowed to shine, the eyes of the curious were barred from prying at Grandpa Zagk’s house by light beams of such candle power that he who looked more than a glance that way was never able to see again, and all the parts of his eyes that were not “replaced” became black and dead. But the basis of the problem was not attacked at all, for the cold real truth is this: even the Central Council, with its giant brains searching steadily through the green liquids in the metal brain pans, was starkly and chillingly stalemated. Nowhere could they find a way to regain for themselves and for their country what Grandpa Zagk had lost for them all.
Stalling for time the Council broadcast bulletins daily to the effect that all was well with Grandpa Zagk. The reflectors and sunscopes, the light and power of the searing beams—all were explained as tribute to a hero, a kind of perpetual adulation. He was pictured as a “first,” the earliest man of history to get the Certificate of Complete Replacement and be destined to live an active corporeal life forever. Then statues, life-size, almost exact replicas of Grandpa, began to spring up all over that plastic land.
It was during this period of statues that hints began to come in the news, subtle suggestions that rounded out the Council’s plans for a final solution, so far as they would ever be capable of a final solution, of the Grandpa Zagk question. In the most oblique of ways and by the most tangential of methods it was hinted that it was not entirely alien to possibility, even probability, that Grandpa Zagk might be leaving on a trip. Any day now. Yes! He might yield to popular galactic demand and go away to other peoples, and for a long time, to show them at first-hand the wondrous reality of himself, the all-replaced new-metal forever-man. If he went, he most surely would go alone in a bright new, most gleamy, wonderful and fast, latest fashion in space boats. Yes!
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