Hmmm. I’d have to think for both of us.
Inspiration came. I punched for a late twenty-first-century drugging-song called—“Brother Have You Got Any Reds?” There were few prominent red stars in this galactic neighborhood—if any appeared in Walter’s “window” it might help Al figure our positions.
His uptake was improving; the answer was immediate. Ellington’s immortal: “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But the Blues.”
So much for that one.
I was stumped. I could think of no more leading questions to ask Walter with music. If he couldn’t, for once, make his own mind start working in punny ways, we were both sunk. Any time now, real live Enemies might pop out of the ’Hole, and there was no way of telling what they were like, because no human had ever survived a meeting with them at that time. Come on, Walter.
And he floored me. The piece he selected almost eluded me, so obscure was it: an incredibly ancient children’s jingle called, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.”
I studied the starcharts feverishly, trying to visualize the geometry (“cosmometry?”)—I lacked enough skill to have Al do it for me. If Walter could see the Bear at all, it seemed to me…
I sent the chorus of “Smack Dab in the Middle,” the legendary Charles’s version, and hoped Walter could sense the question mark.
Again, his answer baffled me momentarily—another Beatles song. He loves me? I thought wildly, and then I got it. “Yeah yeah yeah!”
My fingers tickled Abacus Al’s keys, a ruby light blinked agreement, and Al’s tactical assessment appeared on the display.
MARK ONE, it read.
“Walter,” I yelled in clear, “Main drive. Now!”
And so when the live Enemies came through the ’Hole, we had the drop on them, which is how man got his first alien corpses to study, which is why we’re (according to the government) winning the War these days. But the part of the whole episode that I remember best is when we were waiting there dead in space—in ambush—our remaining weaponry aimed at the ’Hole, and Walter was saying dazedly, “The most amazing thing is that the damned thing just sat there listening to us plot its destruction, with no more sense of self-preservation than the foresight of its programmers allowed. It just sat there…”
He giggled—at least, from anyone else I’d have called that sound a giggle.
“…sat there the…the whole time…”
He was definitely giggling now, and it must be racial instinct because he was doing it right.
“…the…the whole time just…”
He lost control and began laughing out loud.
“Just taking notes,” he whooped, and I dissolved into shuddering laughter myself. Our mutual need for catharsis transformed his modest stinker into the grandest pun ever made, and we roared. Even Abacus Al blinked a few times.
“Walter,” I said, “I’ve got a feeling the rest of this hitch is going to be okay.”
And then alarms were going off and we went smoothly into action as a unit, and the Enemy never had a chance.
IN THE OLDEN DAYS
George Maugham returned home from work much later than usual, and in a sour frame of mind. He was tired and knew that he had missed an excellent home-cooked meal, and things had not gone well at work despite his extra hours of labor. His face, as he came through the door, held that expression that would cause his wife to become especially understanding.
“Light on in the kids’ window,” he said crankily as he hung his coat by the door and removed his boots. “It’s late.”
Luanna Maugham truly was an extraordinary woman. With only a minimal use of her face and the suggestion of a shrug and the single word “Grandpa,” she managed to convey amusement and irony and compassion and tolerant acceptance, and thereby begin diffusing his potential grumpiness. He felt the last of it bleed from him as she put into his hands a cup of dark sweetness which he knew perfectly well would turn out to be precisely drinking temperature. He understood how much she did for him.
But he still felt that he should follow up the issue of their children’s bedtime. “I wish he wouldn’t keep them up so late,” he said, pitching his voice to signal his altered motivation.
“Well,” she said, “they can sleep in tomorrow morning—no school. And he does tell fairy tales so well, dear.”
“It’s not the fairy tales I mind,” he said, faintly surprised to feel a little of his irritation returning. “I just hope he’s not filling their heads with all that other garbage.” He sipped from his cup, which was indeed the right temperature. “All those hairy old stories of his. About the Good Old Days When Men Were Men And Women Knew Their Place.” He shook his head. Yes, he was losing his good humor again.
“Why do his stories bother you so?” she asked gently. “Honestly, they seem pretty harmless to me.”
“I think all that old stuff depresses them. Nightmares and that sort of thing. Confuses them. Boring, too, the same old stuff over and over again.”
Mrs. Maugham did not point out that their two children never had nightmares, or permitted themselves to be bored. She made, in fact no response at all, and after a sufficient pause, he shook his head and continued speaking, more hesitantly. “I mean…there’s something about it I can’t…” He glanced down at his cup, and perhaps he found there the words he wanted. He sipped them. “Here it is: if the Good Old Days were so good, then I and my generation were fools for allowing things to change—then the world that we made is inferior—and I don’t think it is. I mean, every generation of kids grows up convinced that their parents are idiots who’ve buggered everything up, don’t they, and I certainly don’t want or need my father encouraging the kids to feel that way.” He wiped his lip with the heel of his hand. “I’ve worked hard, all my life, to make this a better world than the one I was born into, and…and it is, Lu, it is.”
She took his face in her hands, kissed him, and bathed him in her very best smile. “Of course it is,” she lied.
“And that,” Grandpa was saying just then, with the warm glow of the storyteller who knows he has wowed ’em again, “is the story of how Princess Julie rescued the young blacksmith Jason from the Dark Tower, and together they slew the King of the Dolts.” He bowed his head and began rolling his final cigarette of the night.
The applause was, considering the size of the house, gratifying. “That was really neat, Grampa,” Julie said enthusiastically, and little Jason clapped his hands and echoed, “Really neat!”
“Now, tomorrow night,” he said, and paused to lick his cigarette paper, “I’ll tell you what happened next.”
“Oh God, yes,” Julie said, smacking her forehead, “the Slime Monster, I forgot, he’s still loose.”
“The Slime Monster!” Jason cried. “But that’s my favorite part! Grampa tell now.”
“Oh yes, please, Grampa,” Julie seconded. In point of fact, she was not really all that crazy about the Slime Monster—he was pretty yucky—but now he represented that most precious commodity any child can know: a few minutes more of after-bedtime awakeness.
But the old man had been braced for this. “Not a chance, munchkins. Way past your bedtimes, and your folks’ll—”
A chorus of protests rained about his head.
“Can it,” he said, in the tone that meant he was serious, and the storm chopped off short. He was mildly pleased by this small reflection of his authority, and he blinked, and when his eyes opened Julie was holding out the candle to light his cigarette for him, and little Jason was inexpertly but enthusiastically trying to massage the right knee which, he knew (and occasionally remembered), gave Grandpa trouble a lot, because of something that Jason understood was called “our fright us.” How, the old man wondered mildly, do they manage an instant one-eighty without even shifting gears?
“You can tell us tomorrow, Grampa,” Julie assured him, with the massive nonchalance that only a six-year old girl can lift, “I don’t matter about it.” She put down the candle and got him an ashtray.
&n
bsp; “Yeah,” Jason picked up his cue. “Who cares about a dumb old Slime Monster?” He then attempted to look as if that last sentence were sincere, and failed; Julie gave him a dirty look for overplaying his hand.
Little con artists, Grandpa thought fondly, there’s hope for the race yet. He waited for the pitch, enjoying the knee-massage.
“I’ll make you a deal, Grampa,” Julie said.
“A deal?”
“If I can ask you a question you can’t answer, you have to tell about the Olden Days for ten minutes.”
He appeared to think about it while he smoked. “Seven minutes.” There was no timepiece in the room.
“Nine,” Julie said at once.
“Eight.”
“Eight and a half.”
“Done.”
The old man did not expect to lose. He was expecting some kind of trick question, but he felt that he had heard most, perhaps all, of the classic conundrums over the course of his years, and he figured he could cobble up a trick answer to whatever Julie had up her sleeve. And she sideswiped him.
“You know that poem, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’?” she asked.
“Which one? There are hundreds.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said, springing the trap. “I know a millyum of ’em. Roses are red, violets are blue—”
“—outhouse is smelly and so are you,” Jason interrupted loudly, and broke up.
She glared at her younger brother and pursed her lips. “Don’t be such a child,” she said gravely, and nearly caught Grandpa smiling. “So that’s my question.”
“What?”
“Why do they always say that?”
“You mean, ‘Roses are red, violets—’?”
“When they’re not.”
“Not what?”
She looked up at the ceiling as though inviting God to bear witness to the impossibility of communicating with grownups. “Blue,” she said.
The old man’s jaw dropped.
“Violets are violet,” she amplified.
He was thunderstruck. She was absolutely right, and all at once he could not imagine why the question had not occurred to him decades earlier. “I’ll be damned. You win, Princess. I have no idea how that one got started. You’ve got me dead to rights.”
“Oh boy,” Jason crowed, releasing Grandpa’s knee at once and returning to his bed. “You kids nowadays,” he prompted as Julie crawled in beside him.
Grandpa accepted the inevitable.
“You kids nowadays don’t know nothing about nothing,” he said. “Now in the Olden Days…”
Grinning triumphantly, Julie fluffed up her pillow and stretched out on the pallet, pulling her blanket delicately up over her small legs, just to the knees. Jason pulled his own blanket to his chin, uncaring that this bared his feet, and stared at the ceiling.
“…in the Olden Days it wasn’t like it is these days. Men were men in them days, and women knew their place in the world. This world has been going straight to hell since I was a boy, children, and you can dip me if it looks like getting any better. Things you kids take for granted nowadays, why, in the Olden Days we’d have laughed at the thought. Sometimes we did.
“F’rinstance, this business of gettin’ up at six in the goddam morning and havin’ a goddam potato pancake for breakfast, an’ then walkin’ twenty goddam kilometers to the goddam little red schoolhouse—in the Olden Days there wasn’t none of that crap. We got up at eight like civilized children, and walked twenty goddam meters to where a bus come and hauled us the whole five klicks to a school the likes of which a child like you’ll never see, more’s the pity.”
“Tell about the bus,” Jason ordered.
“It was big enough for sixty kids to play in, and it was warm in the winter, sometimes too warm, and God Himself drove it, and it smelled wonderful and just the same every day. And when it took you home after school, there was none of this nonsense of grabbing some refried beans and goin’ off to haul rock and brush for the goddam road crew for fifty cents a week, I’ll tell you that. Why, if a feller had tried to hire me when I was your age, at a good salary, mind you, they’d have locked him up for exploiting me! No sir, we’d come home after a hard day of learning, and we’d play ball or watch TV or read a book, whatever we felt like—ah Christ, we lived like kings and we never even knew it!
“You, Julie, you’ll have children before you’re sixteen, and a good wife and mother you’ll be—but in the Olden Days you might have been an executive, or a doctor, or a dancer. Jason, you’ll grow up to be a good farmer—if they don’t hang you—but if you’d been born when I was, you could have made movies in Thailand, or flown airliners to Paris, or picked rocks off the goddam face of the Moon and brought ’em home. And before any of that, you both could have had something you’re never going to know—a mysterious, terrible, wonderful thing called adolescence.
“But my generation, and your father and mother’s, we threw it all away, because it wasn’t perfect. The best I can explain it is that they all voted themselves a free lunch, democratic as hell, and then tried to duck out when the check arrived. They spent every dime they had, and all of your money besides, and they still had to wash some dishes. There was two packs of idiots, you see. On one side you had rich sons of bitches, excuse my language, and they were arrogant. Couldn’t be bothered to build a nuclear power plant to specs or a car that worked, couldn’t be bothered to hide their contempt. Why, do you know that banks actually used to set out, for the use of their customers, pens that didn’t work—and then chain them in place to prevent their theft? Worse than that, they were the dumbest aristocrats in the history of man. They couldn’t be bothered to take care of their own peasants. I mean, if you want a horse to break his back for you, do you feed him, or take all his hay to make yourself pillows and mattresses?
“And then on the other side you had sincere, well-meanin’ folks who were even dumber than the rich. Between the anti-teckers and the no-nukers and the stop-fusion jerks and the small-is-beautiful types and the appropriate-technology folks and the back-to-the-landers they managed to pull the plug, to throw away the whole goddam solar system. The car might have got us all to a gas station, running on fumes and momentum—but now that they shut the engine down there ain’t enough gas left to get it started again…”
The old man’s cigarette was too short to keep smoking. He pinched it out between two fingers, salvaged the unburnt tobacco, and began to take up his tale again. Then he saw that the children were both fast asleep. He let his breath out, covered them, and blew out the candle. He thought about going downstairs to ask his son-in-law how things had gone in the fields, whether the crop had been saved…but the stairs were hard on the old man’s our fright us, and he really did not want to risk hearing bad news just now. Instead he went to the window and watched the moon, lonely now for several decades, and after a time he cried. For the children, who could never never hope that one day their grandchildren might have the stars…
SILLY WEAPONS
THROUGHOUT
HISTORY
People keep sending me their fanzines—amateur publications concerning sf and related subjects, and spanning the spectrum from mimeographs to four color offset. As with amateur efforts of any kind, some are just dreadful and some are sublime. One of the most piquant I have seen is a little ’zine out of Florida called the Tabebuian. It is the size of a pocket-calculator instruction pamphlet, much better printed, published by Mensa members Dave and Mardi Jenrette. I can attest to the fact that David’s sense of humor is D. Jenrette. I wrote him a letter asking why, if Mensa people were so smart, they had named their organization after the Latin word for table (mensa) rather than mind (mens, an early example of unconscious sexism). He replied that the club’s name is in fact derived from menses, and refers to their periodic meetings. (I gave this riposte a standing ovulation.)
Anyroad, one of the Tab’s running departments for a while was a feature called “Silly Weapons Throughout History.” The fi
rst one I saw was the Jell-O Sword, a short-lived weapon rendered obsolete by the subsequent invention (a week later) of the bronze sword. Inspired, I retired to my Fantasy Workbench, and over the next few days I hammered out the following Silly Weapons:
The Swordbroad: Invented by a tribe of fanatical male chauvinists, the Prix, this armament consisted of a wife gripped by the ankles and whirled like a flail (Prix warriors made frequent jocular allusion to the sharp cutting edge of their wives’ tongues). The weapon died out, along with the Prix, in a single generation—for tolerably obvious reasons.
The Rotator: A handgun in which the bullets are designed to rotate as well as revolve, presenting an approximately even chance of suicide with each use.
The Bullista: A weapon of admittedly limited range which attempted to sow confusion among the enemy by firing live cows into the midst, placing them upon a dilemma of the horns. (Also called the Cattling Gun.)
The Arbalust: A modification of the bullista, which sought to demoralize and distract the enemy by peppering their encampments with pornographic pictures and literature—yet another dilemma of the horns.
The Dogapult: Another modification of the bullista; self-explanatory.
The Cross’Bo: Yet another modification of the bullista, this weapon delivered a payload of enraged hobos. Thus gunnery officers had a choice between teats, tits, mastiffs, or bindlestiffs.
The Blunderbus: A hunter-seeker weapon which destroys the steering box in surface mass transit.
The Guided Missal: Originally developed as a specific deterrent to the Arbalust; as, however, it is hellishly more destructive, its use is now restricted by international convention to Sundays.
The Slingshit: self explanatory; still used in politics and in fandom.
And, of course, such obvious losers as the foot ax, relish gas, studded mice, and the effective but disgusting snotgun.
Ironically enough, since I wrote the above I have learned that the United States has recently been bombed several times by commercial airliners. Honest to God. True fact, documentation available. Airliner toilet holding tanks often leak, resulting in accumulations of blue ice on the fuselage during high-altitude flight. The blue ice is composed of roughly equal parts of urine; feces and blue liquid disinfectant. If the plane is required to make its landing descent rapidly enough, chunks of blue ice ranging to upwards of two hundred pounds can—and do—break loose and shell the countryside. I have seen a photograph of a roofless, floorless apartment that was demolished by a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound chunk of Blue Ice. It pulped an electric range in the apartment below. All the occupants escaped unscathed, but considerably unnerved. (Science fiction devotees beware: it’s said to be exceptionally terrible if that stuff hits the fan…)
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