“No! Christ, you think I need leeches? I’m not the sort of devoted parasitologist who attaches parasites to his own hide!” Martine backed away, an expression of disgust creasing his face. But then he began to look puzzled. “Of course, it’s true, I probably couldn’t even get one of these new jobs off the ground, I haven’t flown a plane in sixteen years. . . . I’d have to have somebody along to run it. . . .”
“Let me do it,” Theo pleaded. “I’ll get you there.”
Martine began to see the amusing side of the idea: “It would be an interesting experiment. The world’s greatest mass murderer applying for Mandunji citizenship! . . . I warn you, though: if you want to complete your birth and become a man, you may have to come back here, back to the scene of the crime. You’ve got a big debt to work off, just as I have. . . . All right, it’s settled. How do we proceed?”
Theo could hardly contain his joy. “Well, we’ll have to be careful. There’s no telling what the situation is over at Helder’s place. I’d better go on ahead. I’ll need about an hour—suppose you meet me in about an hour, in back of the hangar. I’ll draw a map for you.” He went to the desk, took a pencil, and began to trace the route on a piece of stationery.
“I’m glad to see,” Martine said, “that even plastic fingers can develop a tremor.”
“I’ll need a car.”
“You can take mine. I’ll scare up another one.”
Two minutes later Theo was in Martine’s car, the motor running.
“See you in an hour,” he said.
“One hour.”
A two-thousand-dollar deposit mightily impressed the motel clerk, even in his panicky state: he promptly turned over the keys of his car and no questions asked. Martine ordered ten sandwiches, wrapped and packaged, plus two containers of coffee.
Back in his cabin, fretting over the insufferable slowness with which his watch ticked away the minutes, he tried to order his scampering thoughts. There was a danger: Theo might now become addicted to him, faltering enemy of addicts. Bah. Grimaces. Would have to limber up his kicking leg—the Zen Buddhist monks used to give their disciples a swift one in the slats when they learned their lessons too well. And what did Helder have in mind about Mandunga?
But why honor the integrity of an “instrument” as lame and fumbling as the brain? Because that’s where all the secrets are. Men had looked everywhere else, in the heavens, the stars, Nature, beyond the Styx, the entrails of animals, trees and stones, geometric forms, the soul, dreams, genes, and found nothing: the search now centered on the onion. Hard for the brain to dig out its own secrets. Never know itself until it became as smooth and infallible as a calculating machine. Price of perfection is perfect robotization. But: no secrets in a robot brain worth knowing. . . . And, after all, is the perfect brain the most desirable one? It’s the infirm one, full of migraine, anticipatory and anxious, riddled with ambivalence, stuffed with memories forever lost to recall but echoing hauntingly through the circuits, caught up in a welter of conflicting tropisms, a-tremble always because the feedbacks never fully work, producing tonus and more tonus throughout the uneasy body, fluttery, sabotaged constantly by the fifth-column prefrontal lobes, hacked, slashed, as fragmented as the disorderly spattered multiverse it finds itself in and with which it must constantly cope somehow—it is this fantastically sick instrument, a blob of 10,000 million neurones torn from each other and trying desperately to get together, which in its never ceasing turmoil has produced all the arts and games and enthusiasms and ecstasies man has known—along with the migraine, to ease the migraine: produced them, and maintained the quivering consciousness, and the still more quivering unconsciousness, with which to enjoy them. Perfect it? The price would be the esthetic quality in life. For the esthetic is the crumb this aching old onion tosses itself in the morass of anticipatory anxiety; and to eliminate it would mean to eliminate all the uneasy sense and savor of life. No more neurosis, maybe. But something else is amputated too, humanness. And, with it, laughter. Laughter: the psychic snake oil which keeps the all too human brain from grinding itself to bits. The esthetic: a form of laughter, designed to take the sting out of ineradicable pain. Masochism, on the other hand, is a humorless reveling in the pain. . . . The robot never laughs at itself. Who can giggle at perfection? Which is why Hell, in the theological literature, always in the end sounds more inviting—as well as more painful—than any serene, vapid, machine-perfect Heaven. No wonder Mann always had his artist-heroes making pacts with the Devil, then agonizing through to a twisted-lips sort of wry holy laughter. Better to have one’s heaven and hell right here on earth: the human condition in all its ambivalence, its ingredients not divided neatly into good and bad and then projected out of time and humanity, the one into the skies and the other into the bowels of the earth—better that than to become the infallible know-it-all-and-titter-at-nothing robot. The great lesson of cybernetics: the perfect machine never has the jitters—and never laughs. Cost of perfection would be super-boredom. Worst of all, the perfect robot wouldn’t even know it was bored. . . . But Theo, the perfect God, was now becoming perfectionistically absorbed in Martine. And Helder, perfect Dog, was becoming perfectionistically interested in Mandunga. Why? Leg needed limbering. . . .
According to his watch he had twelve minutes to get to the airport: just about what he needed. He slipped on his jacket—the gun was still in the pocket—gathered up his valise, his notebook, the carton of sandwiches, and went out to the clerk’s car. Great pall of smoke over the horizon to the south. When he got on the highway he did not even think of using the robo-drive.
The field was almost a mile from the cluster of ranch houses, it seemed quite deserted. Seven silvery jets of various sizes were lined up on the concrete apron in front of the hangar, upended, ready for vertical take-off; like a row of stubby cigars wrapped in tin foil, gleaming in the moonlight. Martine parked his car behind a small water-pump shed, walked over to the grassy strip at the rear of the hangar. Nobody there.
He strained to hear: a chilling, muffled sound. Choked, panting—the sort of moan one would expect from an animal, but undoubtedly coming from a human throat: not a sound that antedates words, like an animal cry, but one which, like Oedipus’s shriek, has gone far beyond the paltry Apollonian syllables of known words to the expression of ultimate Dionysian wordless pain. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh”—in broken rhythm, syncopated by torment.
It stopped: a sudden piercing scream, swallowed abruptly at the soaring end. Then the chesty chugging sound again.
Martine ran toward the front of the hangar, in the direction of the sound. When he rounded the corner he saw Theo, stretched out on the concrete.
Something grotesque about the way he was lying—limbs twisted and curled, bent at points where there were no joints: a thigh changing direction midway between hip and knee, a foot veering off almost at right angles to its leg. Here and there in the mauled limbs bulbs were flickering fitfully although Theo was not moving, apparently could not move. Intense yellow fumes rising from the pros; a sizzling sound, they were cooking in their own heat. Theo’s sleeves and trouser legs had been burned away—the thumb and forefinger of the left hand had melted off, they lay on the concrete, smoking.
“Uh,” Theo barked through his teeth. “Uh. Uh. Uh.” He seemed to be grinning like a movie star—teeth clamped together, lips curled back. His wild eyes darted to Martine, bulged. “Help me!” he screamed. “Take them off!”
Martine bent over. “All right, just—”
“I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it! Please take them off!”
“All right, I’m going to—Ow!”
Martine jumped back, shaking his hand. The limbs were scorching hot, he’d burned his fingers merely by bringing them close. He saw that the surface of the arm, the one he’d started to reach for, was bubbling.
“Take them off. Take them off or shoot me. Please. Shoot me. I’m not a coward but I can’t stand it you must shoot me please. . . .”
“Wait,�
�� Martine said. “Just a minute.”
He ran into the hangar, looked around wildly, spotted a tool bench over in the corner. On the bench several heavy blocks of wood. He snatched up two of these blocks and ran back to Theo. Holding the blocks in both hands, using them as a pincers, he got a firm grip on the upper part of Theo’s left arm and twisted as hard as he could, the wood crackling as it burned—the arm came off, he threw it on the grass. Three more wrenches and the other limbs were off too.
Gasping sound, a weird hilarity.
“Water,” Theo gasped.
Martine found a tin cup inside, filled it at a spigot, brought it back and fed some of the water in little sips to Theo, holding his head up. With what was left he soaked his handkerchief and wiped Theo’s cheeks and forehead.
The four pros lay on the grass, fizzing. Yellow vapors streaming from them.
“What happened?”
“Uh. Uh. . . . I was attacked.”
“Vishinu’s men?”
“No. Uh. Helder’s.”
“Helder’s? How the hell—?”
“About fifteen. Knew several, Olympic athletes, on training cruise with me. Arrived few minutes after I got here. They didn’t know about Helder being dead, acted friendly. Uh. Uh.” Theo stopped talking for a few seconds, panted, sucking in air like a greedy child lapping at an ice cream cone.
“What were they doing here?”
“I asked where they were going. They were in a great hurry. Said they were on a confidential mission for Helder. Going to the Mandunji island. To the Mandunji island to get important documents.”
“But Helder’s dead! How could he—”
“Think I know. While I was in his office yesterday, after you left, he kept writing memos and dropping them into the suction-tube slot. One of them must have had the orders for this mission.”
“Theo!” Martine stood up, panicky, pressed his hands together and rocked them back and forth in dismay. “Oh, God, they’re after the Mandunga files. . . . But why? What would Helder have wanted them for?”
“They hinted at that too. From Helder’s instructions they got the idea this information was about a revolutionary technique for cutting aggression out of the brain. Helder thought that if he could get the dope fast enough he might be able to use it in the war. On captured Unioneers. He has his agents planted everywhere in the Union—figured he might be able to capture some of their key men, maybe even Vishinu. Then carry out this operation on them and produce them in public, put them on the television or something, and have them talk about the terrible aggressive things they did. . . . These men even talked about a plan for setting up flying surgery units that would roam up and down just behind the front, operating on all captured military personnel. New humane pacifist way of ending a war, no more killing the enemy, just what Immob needed. . . .”
“So.” Martine closed his eyes and rubbed the lids with his fingers; he felt dizzy. “He wanted to make a weapon out of lobotomy too. Let children play with knives. . . . They mustn’t get my documents! What about these men—did they leave?”
“About fifteen minutes ago. I pleaded with them not to go. Tried to stop them—that’s when they attacked me. They knew exactly how to cripple a pro. I think they must have been trained. . . .”
Martine looked down at the absurdly small figure on the concrete. He pointed toward the planes squatting on their tails on the launching ramp. “We’ve got to get moving. Can we take one of these ships?”
“The end one, on the far left. It’s the latest model, fastest supersonic job we have.”
“But I can’t fly it! And you—without arms and legs. . . .”
“That’s easily fixed. There are always spare pros stocked in every plane’s equipment, in case of emergency. Carry me to the plane, we’ll find them.”
Martine stooped, slipped his arms under Theo’s body, one under the buttocks, the other under the neck. Cradling Theo as he would a baby, he lifted. He swayed, almost fainted: he was back eighteen years, back in the Congo encampment, lifting this body from the operating table—light as a sack of potatoes, it sent a spurt of nausea all through him. Theo was even lighter now. . . .
He shook his head clear, hurried to the plane. There he had to sling Theo over his shoulder in order to climb the ladder which ran from the entry hatch straight up through the ship. Grunting, he reached the cockpit, eased Theo down in one of the swivel chairs. As soon as he caught his breath he hurried down and sprinted to the car to get his luggage, returned in a couple of minutes.
“Where are the spare pros?” he asked.
“The storeroom, just below. Go down the ladder about five steps, you’ll see the door.”
Martine found the door, yanked it open, inside there were some twenty arms and legs of various sizes, neatly racked. He pulled down two of the largest arms and two of the largest legs—making a face when he touched them: the rubbery softness outside, the suggestion of steel under the give—and brought them to Theo. He had to fumble with the first arm until he had it fitted into the socket of Theo’s right stump; then, using this hand, Theo expertly attached the other three limbs himself. His face was twisted in pain: beads of sweat on his forehead.
“Are you all right?”
“I ache all over, even the plate in my skull feels hot. When pro cooling units break down it really messes up the nervous system some. I’ll be all right. The shock generally wears off in a few days.”
“Take this,” Martine said. “It’ll kill the pain.” He slipped one of the pencils from his pocket, drew out the eraser, handed it over; Theo swallowed the liquid.
“All set?” Theo said.
Martine nodded. Theo pressed a button on the instrument board: the ship shuddered, roared, reluctantly rose a few feet in the air—then began with incredible acceleration to bullet up. The ground fell away, suddenly the hangar was a toy block below them.
“Think we’ll make it?” Martine said.
“There are some things in our favor,” Theo said. “They’ve got about a thirty-minute head start. All right. But they had to take a bigger plane to accommodate their party, it’s an older job. Then, too, we’ve got a much lighter load. Besides, I know some special tricks with the atom power plant—I’ve kept up with things. . . . I can’t promise anything, but we’ve got a chance.”
Theo gradually eased off from vertical to horizontal flight, their chairs swiveling smoothly as the angle changed. There was a weird whistling, the whole atmosphere suddenly seemed to have the jumps, a fluttering, a groaning—then they were through the sonic barrier and gliding like silk on silk.
“Is there a radio?” Martine said. “Let’s find out what’s happening.”
Theo fiddled with a couple of dials. A voice boomed out: “. . . where he is. There has been no communiqué from Brother Helder for almost twelve hours. Brother Theo has not been heard from either. Efforts to reach them at the capitol have proved useless. . . . But the news elsewhere is encouraging. Reports from the fronts indicate that the enemy advance has been halted in many places, the Union forces are beginning to fall back. . . . And the long-awaited crisis in the Union has been reached! Ladies and gentlemen, according to word received just a few minutes ago, the loyal Immobs in the Union are on the march—key installations have been destroyed in New Surabaya and New Pyongyang, New Saigon is reported to be badly hit, many sections of New Tolstoygrad are in flames. . . .”
“Plan C,” Martine said. “And twenty-three letters to go.”
“Here’s a flash!” the announcer shouted. “Oh, this is spectacular! Ladies and gentlemen—Vishinu is dead! He was killed just forty minutes ago, in his office in New Tolstoygrad! It looks like the tide is beginning to turn—Vishinu was shot with a rifle-arm by one of the members of his own Olympic Team—the winner of the d-and-d’s in the recent Olympic Games, a Negro émigré from the Strip who remained true to Immob and decided to invoke the Assassination Clause against his false leader. . . .
“But wait! Something’s happening!”
The announcer’s voice veered from joy to horror. “I can’t tell—there’s a peculiar rumbling—from our studios here in L.A. I can see out across the city—my God, everything’s shaking, I just saw a ten-story tower fall over, just like that! Oh—there goes the capitol building! Everything’s shaking—why, ladies and gentlemen, the whole town’s shaking—there goes another building, I don’t understand it—the rumble—oh—”
They could hear it over the loud-speaker: an incredible groan from somewhere at the profound heart of things, a stretching of cosmic vocal cords, the earth itself yawning. Louder; louder still, mounting to a roar—and then nothing. Silence. The radio gone dead. And—
It was as though a giant hand suddenly caught up their plane from underneath and tossed it into the troposphere—they zoomed straight up for a distance of several hundred feet, bobbling crazily. Then dropped. The plane continued its forward rush but with jerks and flutters now: the silken atmosphere was suddenly hammered into a corrugated sheet, creased with invisible buttes and coulees across which they lurched drunkenly.
“It’s Los Alamos!” Theo shouted, pointing down. “Something-look!”
Los Alamos was stretched out directly below them. It seemed to be seething, writhing, through its whole length; a convulsive boil ran through the toy city, the building blocks jiggled.
Then—the whole city disappeared.
Fell in on itself. Collapsed into the earth from which it had sprung. One minute a city—the next, nothing but a tremendous fissure, a trench cutting across the moon-bathed desert, and in that great slit a city swallowed. Only the suburbs remained, landscaped leftovers.
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