by John Sladek
‘FALL IN AT ATTENTION!’
‘All right, men.’ Wes began to pace, avoiding certain configurations in the carpet pattern. ‘We know who’s with us and who’s agin now, don’t we? Like the Klan. Look what they did to Merle and them boas. You know why? I’ll tell you.
‘Because under them fancy hoods, the Ku Klux Klan is nothing but a bunch of full blood niggers!’
‘Sir?’
‘I know it’s hard to believe, but there’s no other explanation.
Besides, I got proof. Documentary evidence that the Klan numbers among its members no fewer than fifty coal-black leaders! I got their names right here!’
What he waved was the hotel menu, but since his men were all at attention, they couldn’t gaze directly at it. He paced the entire pattern three times, then turned to face them again.
‘I’ll tell you something else I know. I know there is a nigger in this very room, passing for one of us!’
Everyone jumped.
‘Is it me, Wes?’ ‘Who is it, Wes?’ ‘A real nigger?’ ‘’Tain’t me, is it, Wes?’
‘SHUT UP AND GET BACK TO ATTENTION!’
Pete Willis, a sickly smile on his narrow head, stepped forward. ‘Is it me, Wes?’
‘Yep. It purely is, Pete. But I’m not letting anyone take my word for it. I’m going to show you all scientific proof!’
Wes strode over and grabbed a handful of Pete’s thick blond curls. ‘First, kinky hair!’
‘But Wes, I ain’t…’
Without warning, Wes threw his hardest punch. The taller man staggered back, blinking. Blood spurted from his nose.
‘Second, no bone in his nose!’
At a signal, someone laid a piece of pipe across the small of Pete’s back. As he fell to his knees, his hands went out instinctively. Wes seized one and held it bent back, thumb in the palm to keep the fingers fanned. ‘Third, take a look at them fingernails. Purple fingernails are a scientific proof of black blood.’
The men all looked, imagining purple in Pete’s quite ordinary fingernails.
‘Take this nigger and throw him out the window. I MEAN RIGHT NOW!’
They obeyed. Wes turned away and pretended to study a wall map. Not that he didn’t want to watch it. It was just that he had a little smile to hide. The whole fingernail business had been a ruse, but with a purpose.
It stood to reason the niggers would have put more than one spy among his key officers. And only a fool could have not noticed how many men, as soon as he mentioned purple fingernails, looked at their own hands!
It was nearly dawn, and still no one stirred in the headquarters of Cumminism. But it was a cinch that Pé had to come out of there sometime.
It was a cinch they had to go away sometime. It was still the same car, the same people. That meant they were working alone. For the time being no one else knew they were working on the case. Whenever they left to get a meal, he’d be ready.
Fouts settled his crinolines about him, peeled an Almond Joy, and watched the Early Bird movie, Blowup.
At dawn, Grover noticed for the first time Amy’s new glasses. Their pearly frames gave a softness to her sleeping face, and brightened her lovely eyes when she awoke.
Or maybe it wasn’t the glasses at all. He leaned toward her, feeling the warmth of her leaning toward him…it wasn’t hard, in this fresh light, to pretend they were kids again…in Dad’s car…
His elbow brushed the radio button.
‘…tional emergency. President Reagan has already been evacuated from the city. There is a strong possibility that if the riot is not brought under control by noon, General Weimarauner will call for artillery and bombing.
‘Now I’ll turn you over to Bill Burgens, who I think is somewhere by the banks of the Potomac. Bill?’
‘…noise down here is terrific, Dave…you hear is the…playing Dixie. The whole city seems to have gone mad, and even the Army doesn’t seem to…from where I’m standing I can see the whole shopping district ablaze, that’s about…miles away, so you can imagine…and here come two soldiers carrying a color TV set. I guess they confiscated it from looters, but it’s hard to…and say, here’s a lady whose entire family was killed by a grenade. Husband, brother, and…how many children was it, ma’am?’
‘Yes.’ A tiny, exhausted voice.
‘How many was it? Four or five?’
‘Four or five, what difference does the number…?’
‘And how do you feel about this, ma’am? I’ll bet you just feel terrible, don’t you? Must be a great shock.’
Grover switched it off. ‘We’re too late, Amy. It’s the end!’ Tears ran down the tributaries under his eyes. Shaking his fist at the building, he screamed, ‘You win, Russky! You win, JOE STALIN AND BENEDICT ARNOLD!’
‘Grover, we still have What’s In The Safe.’
He thought about it a moment, regaining his natural color. ‘What a grand idea, Amy. They may get us in the end, but mean- while we’ll blow that traitor soldier and all his secret codes and radios to aitch ee double toothpicks!’
It was the first time he’d ever sworn or cursed in front of her, and Amy realized what a strain Grover must be under.
‘But how can we go and get What’s In The Safe?’ she asked. ‘Our quarry might fly.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘It isn’t really in the safe at all, it’s right here in the car! I moved it yesterday—had a feeling it might come in handy!’
And so saying he hugged her till she gasped, and grinned so hard she thought his dentures would explode in her face.
The two little sisters of the Amish conferred over their patient.
‘I’ve seen a lot of labors,’ said Sister Mary Jane firmly, ‘and that woman isn’t having a baby.’
‘But how can you be sure? Maybe with big people it’s different.’
Without going into physical details, which she could not delicately do, Sister Mary Jane could not explain. ‘There’s no—dilation,’ she said finally. “Nothing at all. What’s more, I have a feeling that woman is dying.’
‘Dying! We must save the child!’
‘Impossible. A Caesarian without instruments? What’ll I use, a steak knife?’
‘Nothing is impossible with God, little sister,’ said the older woman patronizingly. ‘However, there is one alternative we haven’t mentioned.’
‘Luckily we’ve brought a syringe.’
The hijacker introduced himself as Vladimir Barnes, a Soviet agent. Bert and Marilyn tried once more to explain it to him: there just wasn’t enough fuel to get to Cuba. Hal, the pilot, showed him the fuel gages and some calculations.
‘That’s all we have, honest, mister. About enough to get us as far as Atlanta—with a lot of luck. Cuba’s just too far away! Why didn’t you grab a plane going to Miami?’
The hijacker stopped smiling. ‘I’m not accountable to you!’ he snapped. ‘Fly the damned plane to Cuba and no excuses!’
Bert tried again. ‘Look, we’ll make you a deal. We’re almost over Washington now. Let us set down there, and we’ll forget all about that gun—and everything you said. What could be fairer than that?’
‘CUBA!’
‘But you could hijack another plane out of Washington…’
‘I GOTTA BE IN HAVANA BY TONIGHT!’
Marilyn wept, leaning her forehead against Bert’s wings. ‘Are we really out of fuel?’ she whispered.
‘Yeah. We’ve been circling Washington for an hour already. I don’t know whether this guy’s stupid or just nuts.’
Vladimir Barnes wondered if the crew were stupid or just nuts. Clearly they were unused to taking orders. How to make them understand that he had to be in Havana by eight p.m.; that he had no money to get on another flight? But they would probably offer him money, and then, after they were safe on the ground, turn him in to the authorities. No, there was no way but to make them press on southward.
For months he had been hanging around Minneapolis trying to get a lead on a certain CIA man, of whom Barnes
knew only that he was a chess player and an assassin. Now, at the last moment, he learned the CIA man was in Cuba, and within hours of assassinating one of the most valuable men in the world—the Albanian naturalist, Prof. Aa, a chess Grand Master.
At eight o’clock, in the ballroom of the Hotel Hoy No Hay in Havana, the finals of the Communist International Chess Tournament would begin. It was there (if Barnes’s information was correct) that the CIA man would try to murder Aa—thus destroying Albania’s chess prestige in the eyes of the world.
The plan was simple: Aa always opened with the ‘Albanian Defense’ opening, moving the queen’s knight first. Knowing this, the CIF man would have substituted for the piece a tiny, live, envenomed seahorse.
Diabolical! Vladimir Barnes shuddered to think of the scene in the ballroom if he should not arrive in time…
Prof. Aa, an enormous, beef-colored man with white cropped hair, sits down with difficulty. The gilt chair keeps trying to skid away from under his roundness. The other man, ‘Air CIA’, whose face is featureless, makes a pretense of being finicky. He must adjust all the pieces and dust them off before the game commences. And makes the sinister substitution. He has drawn black. Now, polite and expressionless, he waits for Aa to begin.
How did CIA get here? He is himself a chess genius. Some months ago, he slipped into the Soviet Union and entered the first playoffs. Calculating each step, he deliberately draws a game or two to put himself in different ‘rounds’—moving inexorably up the long branched chain of games to face Aa in the finals.
Aa punches the clock. His pink sausage fingers hover over the queen’s knight—but then perhaps choose a conventional king’s pawn opening.
CIA is in trouble. He must now quickly force the master to move that knight. Already it is beginning to wilt—will it still be standing and alive in four or five moves?
The game draws on; the: knight continues to wilt. Other players at other tables are taking the full time limit over their moves; not so the CIA man. Aa moves quickly, too, confident by now that he is up against a rank amateur. The idiot seems to be offering piece after piece for the taking, without gaining any any visible advantage.
Finally, on the eighth move, CIA offers his queen to the Albanian’s knight. Aa hesitates. Can this be a trick? He runs through the possibilities like a computer sorting punched cards. Finally, too bored to go on, he seizes the knight.
‘Aa!’
The gilt chair goes over, skidding across the parquet to clatter against a potted palm. Aa leaps to his feet holding the wriggling knight up to the light.
‘Hippocampus…’ he muses, and sprawls across the board.
Then CIA—does what? Pretends concern? Tries to slip away? Draws a gun and shouts (unnecessarily, to the roomful of immobile, engrossed men), ‘Nobody move!’
Marilyn sighed. ‘Guess there’s only one thing to do.’ Unbottoning her uniform jacket, she walked toward the muzzle of Barnes’s gun.
‘Mr Barnes, J want to make a deal with you. If you’ll let us land in Washington…’
When she was fully naked except for her cap the hijacker grinned again, showing his full pink gums. ‘A good idea, miss. I won’t guarantee anything…but we’ll see.’ He started unhooking his cummerbund—an easy job, for it was turned around back to front.
‘But, Wes, we known old Travis a long time. Hell, he was our old buddy in Mud Flats..’
‘Skeeter, you just shut your mouth and throw that body out the window. He was a nigger and you know it.’
‘But Wes! We done kilt near the whole general staff of the White Shirt organization. Ain’t nobody left now but you and me. Are you sure they was all niggers?’
‘No back talk, Skeeter!’ Wes picked up his automatic. ‘Else I might get to wondering why you are such a stubborn, nigger-loving son bitch.’
And of course he was wondering that already.
The battle of Dresden was going badly. Blücher had hoped to regroup his forces while Napoleon was otherwise occupied, but the wily Frenchman had turned twice from Dresden to engage him. He did this without little hope of victory, however, and its effect was nil. Napoleon had fought two indecisive battles and was weakened, while Blücher was as strong as ever.
‘Grid-phone call, sir. Pentagon. Will you take it in the summer-house?’
‘Unh?’ With effort, Weimarauner wrenched himself out of the character of Napoleon (a lead figure, two inches high, leaning over a postage-stamp map inside a tent the size of a toy drum) and into the character of Chief of Staff. ‘Oh, fine.’
As he strode across the artificial landscape, stepping here and there to avoid an army, the wind snapped his robe and silk pajamas. The summerhouse was fragrant with climbing flowers, and translucent brown bees nudged among them. It was the general’s favorite spot. He sat down and pushed the scrambler button on his grid-phone. A weak, blocky line drawing of Brigadier General Garner appeared on the screen.
‘Sir, what the hell is going on? How come you shoved this pansy outfit in here on us? Them Pink Brassieres are only making things worse around here.’
‘What seems to be the trouble?’
‘Sir, they make me sick, that’s what’s the trouble! They make everybody sick!’
Weimarauner opened an icebox under the table and probed it. He removed a mango yoghurt and made a leisurely breakfast. When he had finished, he fitted a cigarette to his holder, lit it, and leaned back to contemplate once more the grid-screen. ‘General Garner, you know that that is the idea. They do indeed make everybody sick. Like a gas.’
‘Yeah? Well everybody is tearing the shit out of them.’ The features of the line drawing tried a placating smile. ‘Sir, I’m not complaining. I know these—boys—are supposed to be good psychological warfare. Only they’re getting massacred, and my men are bitching about having to help them out.’
Weimarauner waved, dismissing both Garner and a bee that was investigating the yoghurt dish. ‘All right, all right. Get some of the boys to draft some orders. We’ll send them out to Southeast Asia—to whatever Enemy we’re fighting out there right now. By Container freight of course.’
‘Of course, sir. By the way, Jarmoss of the computer department wants a word with you urgently.’
‘Switch me over to him, will you?’
In a moment the screen drew an approximate sketch of worried Col Jarmoss. The sine waves in his forehead and the parentheses around his tight mouth were a trifle blocky—the grid screen worked only in verticals and horizontals—but nevertheless stood very well for Jarmoss’s typical distressed expression.
There was no particular reason to communicate by grid-phone with his subordinates, but Weimarauner liked it that way. It was nice not to have to deal with them as humans. No matter how personable they tried to be—and none tried harder than Jarmoss—they remained so many little crude drawings, little animated cartoons.
‘How’s the battle of Dresden going sir?’
‘Fine, Colonel, fine.’ Weimarauner looked out the vine-bordered doorway, across the landscape lawn. Every detail of the landscape around Dresden had been faithfully copied at a scale of 1:36. The earth had been replaced with plastic, the grass was nylon plush. Japanese dwarf trees stood at proportional heights, in their proper positions. The model Germans were defending their town with cannon the size of cigars.
‘I got that piece of land I needed for the river area,’ he said in no hurry to hear the colonel’s complaint. ‘You’ll be happy to know.’
The drawing tried to smile. ‘That’s lucky, General.’
‘Yes, luck and aggressive thinking, the marks of a good military man. The farmer didn’t want to sell. I finally requisitioned his farm in the interests of National Security. It is, too. My work here may not seem it, but it is in the interests of National Security, all of it.’
‘Yes sir. Now about…’
‘You believe that, don’t you, Colonel?’
‘Oh, yessir. Sir, we’ve got a few problems here…by the way, we’ve ordered the Pink Ba
rrettes to Southeast Asia, as you requested.’
‘Fine, fine. What’s the problem?’
‘Our computer has been fouling up something awful. Operation Modulog is in one hell of a mess. The trouble seems to be in the tape unit…’
‘Spare me the technical details, Jarmoss. I’m an eighteenth-century man. Do whatever needs to be done. Get a new tape unit or whatever.’
‘Yes sir. Another thing: a couple dozen civilians came around earlier, asking about the tape. Some kind of legal thing. I told them to come out and see you about it, sir, since we’re not authorized to talk about the Müller-Fokker tape. I hope you’ll let them have it, sir. We’re sick of it.’
‘Very unwise, Colonel. I hate hacking about with legal nonsense.’ He broke the connection and went back to Dresden.
Later the platoon of lawyers showed up. Most of them represented MacCormick Hines, president and owner of the National Arsenamid Corporation. One of them represented a Mr Robert Etwall Shairp.
‘I’m serving you with this writ of habeas corpus. General, and demanding that my client be released.’
‘Gladly, gladly. But I’ve never heard of your client. Robert Etwall Shairp? Is he a prisoner taken in the Washington conflict? A soldier?’
‘No, General. The pink tape you are using in one of your Pentagon computers,’ said the lawyer. ‘That is my client.’
Spot seated himself in that portion of the Capitol lawn that was shaped like a keystone. After making sure he was unobserved, he unscrewed the lid of a can of gas and poured it over himself.
The riot was about over; the cops were getting back into their bus. Spot struck a match, but the drops of gasoline running down his hand put it out.
A tall man in Indian beads stepped from behind a tree. His face, a palimpsest of scars, showed no surprise at seeing a gasoline-soaked boy lighting a match.
‘We know few quail before lunch,’ he said.
‘I’m killing myself.’ Spot tore out another match. ‘In protest against Mom and Dad.’ He struck it.
Wise Bream acted instinctively at the sight of the flame. Hauling out Baal, he quenched it with an enormous stream.