by John Sladek
But Milo was not listening; he lay back and resumed crying. ‘Nails, screws, bolts, saws, keys, hammers, tongs, axes, files, rifles, knives, hooks, shotguns, pistols, axes, guns, knives, bombs, daggers, death …’
‘There now,’ said Beele, edging out the door. ‘Hang on. I’m sure help is on the way.’
The problem, he reflected, was an interesting one. No one knew what to call the invader(s). He would be able to make up a name for them, perhaps add a word to the language. Say, Uncrobs (Unidentified Creeping or Crawling Objects).
He filed it way along with the news story about Milo.
HARDWARE STORE
—
Greedy gadget bites nails, chisels
Before him a little girl sat on the sidewalk, weeping. A naughty dog, she told him, had bit her where she sat down. Moreover she had lost her baby—her 7-transistor radio-doll, that is—to a great big giant. Beele told her not to cry, and that he was sure help was on the way.
He hurried on towards the office. This would be the biggest news story ever, anywhere.
THE BOXES THAT ATE ALTOONA
—
Even the rivets of a child’s blue jeans!
A sort of typewriter passed him. It had been broken and distorted, but he could still see the name L. C. Smith on the back plate. Beele swore and broke into a run. A case of type, now became something else, waddled out of his office, brushing him aside at the door, and made its majestic way down the street.
As he entered, Beele seemed to hear the hand-press calling for help. He flung open the door of the press room and rushed in, but too late ! The press was already taking on a familiar boxy shape. As he neared it, it gave a final clank, lurched to the window, and fell through into the street. A burglar alarm went off, but was strangled at once.
PAPER RAPED !
The office was stripped clean. How ironic it was, he thought. Unwittingly the machine invaders had destroyed the only means to their justly-deserved fame. Or had they? He rushed out again.
It was after dark by the time he reached a phone booth on the highway that worked. After breaking it open for a dime, he tried to call the wire services. Each time he would get connected, and say, ‘I’m from Altoo—’, the connection would break and his
dime rattle back down. He was beginning to wonder whether he hadn’t ruined the mechanism somehow, when a highway patrol car stopped. The men in it were not highway patrolmen.
They forced open the door of the phone booth and dragged him forth.
‘Sorry to be rough with you, sir,’ said one, tipping his snap-brim hat. ‘But our nation’s security is at stake. You’re Beele, of Altoona? The editor?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘We’ve got express orders to keep this particular story quiet, Beele. I’m afraid we’ll have to either take you into custody or—’
‘Go ahead, kill me !’ he said. He, Barthemo Beele, hard-hitting young editor, was weeping. ‘I have nothing to live for, now. I’ve lost my press, type fount, wife, typewriter, everything ! Go ahead, paid assassins, hirelings of the do-nothing bureaucracy ! Kill me ! You’ve already killed the only thing that meant anything to me—my story !’
‘I was going to say, we’ll either have to take you into custody or swear you in as an agent. We often do that with newsmen, then send them off on foreign assignments. Of course we’ll have to investigate your background thoroughly—that’ll take an hour or so. What do you say? Would you like to go to Morocco?’
An agent of the CIA ! Beele could see it in his mind’s eye : palm trees, intrigue, a chance to clean up corruption at the very source !
‘I’ll take it,’ he said, smiling through his tears.
CHAPTER VII
THE GULLS OF MARRAKECH
‘They four had one likeness, as if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel.’
Ezekiel 10:10
Haroun Al Raschid was being difficult, pretending not to understand what Suggs was asking him to sell.
‘This puts me in an embarrassing position,’ he said, sighing kif smoke behind his bejewelled hand. ‘You see, M’sieur Suggs, I
do not officially even know of the French mission in this city. How can I give you the information you seek? If you used it, my reputation with the French might be—as you say—battered? I might lose friends, influence—and for what?’
‘You must help us,’ Suggs said grimly. ‘Give us the name of their man, at least. I know you know it; Haroun knows everything that goes on in Marrakech.’
Al Raschid leaned back slightly, his fat mouth rounding in a moue of disavowel. ‘You flatter me, M’sieur.’ The tight linen of his suit prevented him from sprawling on the low couch, as he so obviously wished to do; it was with great effort that he moved in any direction, even to reach for his mint tea. ‘I tell you, it is in my mind to help you, M’sieur Suggs, as a friend helps a friend. But—I do not know. The risk is great.’
‘You must know something of use.’ The CIA man tried to hold his breath whenever a whiff of kif smoke came near, but now he leaned across the low brass table and spoke in an earnest whisper. ‘Just give us the man’s name, that’s all. It is for the good of Morocco as well as that of the United S—Nations. The whole world will benefit.’
‘Ah, but that is what the Russian gentleman says. Which of you is telling the truth?’ With a cunning gleam in his eye, Haroun added, ‘What is a simple man to believe? I am not well-educated. I am only a poor merchant, as you see.’
The sweep of his glittering hand indicated the parquet floor, rich carpets, mosaic walls; it took in the stained glass lancets and the delicate, jewel-like chandeliers. The room was a chaos of textures : brass, wood, leather, silk, wool, silver, velvet. Through a marble doorway Suggs could see the cool garden where a white peacock stalked to and fro beneath the lemon trees.
‘As you see, I have not the air conditioning. I have not the television set. I have none of the luxuries so commonplace in your land, no, not even the electric toothbrush.’
Hiking up his jelaba, Suggs brought out a slim billfold. ‘We are prepared to pay, of course,’ he said. ‘Anything reasonable.’
‘Ah !’ Haroun’s tiny nostrils exhaled twin jets of aromatic smoke. ‘Then I must overcome the scruple of my conscience. Here is the right half of a picture of the man you seek. His name is Brioche, Marcel Brioche. He is a pilot of planes for the French Air Force—and who knows what else, eh?’
‘No one is exactly what he seems,’ Suggs said pleasantly. As his left hand reached out to take the half-picture his right, still
inside his jelaba, fired his silenced gun. Haroun Al Raschid did not move, but only grunted slightly as the front of his silk shirt grew purple with blood.
Suggs did not wait to see the inevitable look of surprise on his victim’s face—after nine years in the CIA, one grew weary of such looks—but tucked the photo in his billfold and hurried out into the sun-drenched street. He drew up his hood as he ran. The motion set scalding pangs of diarrhoea growling in his guts.
A crowd of ragged boys besieged him almost at once, and followed him to his hotel, chanting :
‘M’soo, M’soo ! You want gull, nice gull? You want nice boy? Kif, smoke? Mister ! ’Allo ! You like picture? You like see dancing gull? You like camel whip? Me very strong, M’soo ! You want shoes shine? Me guide, M’soo. Me guide. You want nice gull?’
His disguise had not been as effective as he had hoped.
In the lobby, Suggs bought a postcard depicting snake charmers in the market, Dar El Fna, and a stamp. ‘Dear Madge,’ he wrote. ‘Still having wonderful time, though I miss you and Susie. Love, Bubby.’ He mailed it at the desk.
Scotty, his partner, sat in the only comfortable chair in their room, reading an Arabic newspaper. ‘Did you get it?’ he asked, without glancing up. Suggs nodded as he locked the door. ‘Good man. Haroun give you any trouble?’
‘A little. I had to kill him.’
‘That’s tough. We could have used him. What happened?’
>
‘Tell you as soon as I get the report made out, Scotty.’ Divesting himself of the jelaba and loosening his tie, Suggs sat down at the portable and rolled in a triplicate form.
‘Item : one bullet, .375 calibre,’ he typed. ‘Date used; 1 June, 196–.’ He went on, typing slowly, taking a certain pride in his neat spacing. When he had finished, he brought out the half-photo and showed it to Scotty.
‘He was going to sell them the other half,’ Suggs explained.
The other looked surprised. ‘Them? I thought Vovov was working alone on this.’
‘Not any more. This is too big for just Vovov. They know as well as we do what’s going on here—that this Brioche is an astronaut—that France means to put him on the moon. They’ve brought in their top man, Vetch. Maybe to check on his subordinate, or maybe to ringer this Brioche.’
‘How do you know Vetch is in town?’
Suggs wagged a finger playfully. ‘Oh, I have my spies, I have my spies,’ he said. ‘But what worries me is, have they already got the other half of this? Do they know what Marcel Brioche looks like?’
‘Are you sure he’s the man?’
Suggs nodded. ‘We’ve got to contact him before they offer him—the moon.’
Neither man smiled. They lapsed into a thoughtful silence, each trying to unravel the mystery surrounding the half-picture.
—Why had Haroun offered him only half a picture? Suggs wondered. It didn’t make sense, if he had intended to sell the other half to the Russians. Perhaps he only had meant to hold it back for more money. Haroun was too smart to try selling to both sides.
But there were other things that did not make sense. What of the crowd of urchins—they had recognized him through his disguise as an American ! Could they have stolen the other half of the picture? What kind of pictures had they been trying to sell him? He recalled their grimy, skinny hands clutching at him—could they have picked his pocket? Perhaps, on the other hand, they had been trying to warn him of something—of the location of the rocket, for example. What was it they had said about gulls? ‘You want gull?’ But Marrakech was in the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from any gulls ! It was a code, then, but a code for what, he could not imagine. He was about to ask Scotty, when something, a gleam of scrutinizing eye, arrested him. What was Scotty thinking about?
—Scott watched his partner watching him. Yes, there was guilt in Suggs’s face, real guilt and worry. He had killed today, almost for no reason. Then too, he was reticent about his sources of information. How had he found out what the Russkies were up to? What was going through his mind now? Scott was glad he had taken the precaution of tucking his gun down the side of his chair earlier.
—If the urchins had seen through his disguise, Suggs reasoned, only one person could have tipped them off—the only person who knew about his visit this afternoon—Scotty ! His partner in the CIA for nine fantastic years !
Suddenly, Suggs knew fear. Was Scotty hiding a gun behind that Arab paper? Well, there was always the typewriter. Its carriage could fire a single shotgun shell—Scotty had probably forgotten that.
It seemed incredible that Suggs’ partner could have sold out, but he must have done so. To whom? Suggs wondered. Not to the Russians, or he’d have known about Vetch. Was he, then, working for Morocco? For France? Or was he playing some even deeper game?
—What kind of game was Suggs playing? Scott wondered. Had he killed Haroun because the merchant knew too much? Had Haroun called him outright a double agent? There was no doubt Suggs was a wheel within a wheel, but for whom? He wondered how he could have let Suggs fool him for so long. Why, everything about him gave it away—the half-picture, the over-casual way he seemed to be looking at the ashtray, while his other hand was out of sight, going for a gun.
—There were no ashes, Suggs noted, but there had been ashes yesterday. Someone had cleaned this ashtray. Why? He saw the over-casual way Scotty was yawning. Was he getting ready to make his play?
—Was Suggs making his play?
—Yes, now !
—Now! Fire through the newspaper !
—Now! Suggs stabbed the question mark button on the typewriter.
Fire and steel exploded. Scotty slumped forward, dead.
‘I’m really sorry, Scotty,’ Sugg murmured, standing over the corpse. ‘I wish you could get a hero’s funeral, at least. But I gotta protect myself, old shoe. The noise of that shotgun blast will bring the police. I’ve got to make sure the hotel will pay them off and cover up your death.’
He opened an emergency kit and dug out a black lace brassiere and a lipstick. He fastened the brassiere about the cadaver’s torn chest and drew red upon the discoloured lips. Then he looked hard at the half-photo, memorized the address on the back, tore it in bits and swallowed them.
Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs as he left by the balcony. Suggs took a last look at the body.
‘Don’t worry, Scotty,’ he said earnestly. ‘I’ll get the bastards for making me do this. So help me.’
CHAPTER VIII
TOE END OF THE WORLD
‘What are little girls made of? Contain dextrose, maltose, monosodium glutamate, artificial flavouring and colouring; sodium propionate added to retard spoilage.’
Old Saying
Though the television newscaster seemed hysterical, Susie Suggs was not agitated in the least. She was not really watching the screen of her portable TV; it served only as a flat weight on her tummy, while she did her deep breathing exercises according to Lady Fair magazine. The exercises made her sleepy, and the voice of the little figure seemed to dwindle to a mosquito hum. It was almost as if he were a little man growing right out of her tummy; but this idea was so vaguely disquieting that it brought her fully awake. Forgetting to count her breaths, Susie began actually watching.
‘Is it a Russian sneak attack? Is it one of our own secret weapons gone somehow horribly wrong? Or is it something we are even less prepared to face—an invasion of beings not of this planet? We’ll have the whole story in just a moment, after this message from the Vortex Corporation.’
The screen went white, then displayed a large white missile sitting in a mesh of black iron railings. Fire swelled from under it as, trembling, the giant cylinder rose into darkness.
‘This is … the Moloch !’ intoned a solemn announcer. ‘America’s newest power punch ! Just look at this baby go !’ The missile rose, tilted, and headed off into the night. ‘Now watch the Moloch destroy this mock-up of an enemy village !’ Something white flashed downward into a grass village, and both exploded together—‘Wow!’ said the announcer—in one instant of blinding glare.
The scene changed to a complicated laboratory, where a group of men in white coats listened to earphones and watched, on a dozen little TV screens, the destruction re-enacted.
‘These capable, experienced men designed Moloch. They are the members of Vortex Missile Group, just one of Vortex’s “Keep America Tough” programmes. Every man here is a genius, dedicated and committed to our ever-expanding missile
programme. They have solved the launch and guidance problems of the Moloch—and of seventeen other military missiles. Yes, at Vortex, retaliation is a way of life.
‘Vortex is many things to many people. Here we see a steel mill run by computers from Vortex Instrument Group. And here’, he said, and Susie took more interest in the next scene, for it was an operating room, ‘here is Dr. Toto Smilax performing open heart surgery—using a scalpel made by Vortex Cutlery Group.
‘Vortex!’ exclaimed the announcer in conclusion. ‘First in war and first in peace—and first in the hearts of its countrymen.’
The newscaster returned. ‘Altoona, Nevada,’ he said. ‘Until today, just another ordinary American city in the West. Now—who knows? Life may be going on as usual in Altoona—as far as we know. But since early this morning there has been a news blackout imposed by the joint efforts of the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency. We have been unable to contact
anyone within the city.
‘What has happened? Frankly, we don’t know. It could be, as some hint, a Russian invasion, or even an invasion from outer space. Calmer sources believe it to be a test of some sort, and at least one reliable source indicated that it might be a secret weapon gone wrong. We just don’t know.’ Every time he used this phrase, the newscaster’s face seemed a little more crumpled, a little closer to tears. For another fifteen minutes he told Susie of all the things we don’t know. Then the announcer with the soothing voice (that sent nice warm ripples over Susie’s tummy) returned to demonstrate the two-stage Hermes-Aphrodite missile. Advertising was so silly, Susie thought, resuming her breathing exercises.
By her Lifetime watch, she noted how late it was getting. She was going to have to hustle to be ready for her date with Ron. And she had meant to study for her Organic Chem test Monday morning. Here it was Saturday night and she hadn’t opened the book !
Quickly Susie showered with Nice, the 24-hour soap that gets at odours other soaps just seem to miss, and rolled on plenty of SHUR, to be sure about those offensive odours. After dusting all over with Lady Clinge talc, she slipped on her Modaform 6-way-stretch panty girdle that b-r-e-a-t-h-e-s, her Deepline Modaform Sport-support bra, and began applying Classique Parfum, the scent that makes every woman an empress, every
man a slave.
Drawing on her black sweater and black skirt, Susie seated herself at the vanity table to do her face. After covering her golden freckles with Blanc foundation, she powdered with Rubella Gorne’s Klown powder. To her Greekly perfect mouth, she applied a white lipstick called Eraser.
For her eyes, Susie selected her usual assortment of Nora Hart shades, chiefly oyster and sylph-green, but blending in touches of burgundy and bronze. Then, after brushing her hair and applying a liberal amount of Airnet, there remained only jewellery.
