They'd been ready for a long time, but they had to be asked …
When the thing came through the door Peter started screaming, but he really didn't scream for very long.
THE BIG FLASH
Norman Spinrad
TMINUS 200 DAYS … and counting …
They came on freaky for my taste—but that's the name of the game: freaky means a draw in the rock business. And if the Mandala was going to survive in L.A., competing with a network-owned joint like The American Dream, I'd just have to hold my nose and out-freak the opposition. So after I had dug the Four Horsemen for about an hour, I took them into my office to talk turkey.
I sat down behind my Salvation Army desk (the Mandala is the world's most expensive shoestring operation), and the Horsemen sat down on the bridge chairs sequentially, establishing the group's pecking order.
First, the head honcho, lead guitar and singer, Stony Clarke—blonde shoulder-length hair, eyes like something in a morgue when he took off his steel-rimmed shades, a reputation as a heavy acid-head and the look of a speed-freak behind it. Then Hair, the drum mer, dressed like a Hell's Angel, swastikas and all, a junkie, with fanatic eyes that were a little too close together, making me wonder whether he wore swastikas because he grooved behind the Angel thing or made like an Angel because it let him groove behind the swastika in public. Number three was a cat who called himself Super Spade and wasn't kidding—he wore earrings, natural hair, Stokeley Carmichael sweatshirt, and on a thong around his neck a shrunken head that had been whitened with liquid shoe polish. He was the utility infielder: sitar, base, organ, flute, whatever. Number four, who called himself Mr. Jones, was about the creepiest cat I had ever seen in a rock group, and that is saying something. He was their visuals, synthesizer, and electronics man. He was at least forty, wore early-hippy clothes that looked like they had been made by Sy Devore, and was rumored to be some kind of Rand Corpo ration dropout. There's no business like show business.
“Okay, boys,” I said, “you're strange, but you're my kind of strange. Where you worked before?”
“We ain't, baby,” Clarke said. “We're the New Thing. I've been dealing crystal and acid in the Haight. Hair was drummer for some plastic group in New York. The Super Spade claims it's the rein carnation of Bird and it don't pay to argue. Mr. Jones, he don't talk too much. Maybe he's a martian. We just started putting our thing together.”
One thing about this business, the groups that don't have square managers, you can get cheap. They talk too much.
“Groovy,” I said. “I'm happy to give you guys your start. Nobody knows you, but I think you got something going. So I'll take a chance and give you a week's booking. One AM to closing, which is two, Tuesday through Sunday, four hundred a week.”
“Are you Jewish?” asked Hair.
“What?”
“Cool it,” Clarke ordered. Hair cooled it. “What it means,” Clarke told me, “is that four hundred sounds like pretty light bread.”
“We don't sign if there's an option clause,” Mr. Jones said.
“The Jones-thing has a good point,” Clarke said. “We do the first week for four hundred, but after that it's a whole new scene, dig?”
I didn't feature that. If they hit it big, I could end up not being able to afford them. But on the other hand four hundred was light bread, and I needed a cheap closing act pretty bad.
“Okay,” I said. “But a verbal agreement that I get first crack at you when you finish the gig.”
“Word of honor,” said Stony Clarke.
That's this business—the word of honor of an ex-dealer and speed-freak.
T minus 199 days … and counting …
Being unconcerned with ends, the military mind can be easily manipulated, easily controlled, and easily confused. Ends are de fined as those goals set by civilian authority. Ends are the conceded province of civilians; means are the province of the military, whose duty it is to achieve the ends set for it by the most advantageous applications of the means at its command.
Thus the confusion over the war in Asia among my uniformed clients at the Pentagon. The end has been duly set: eradication of the guerrillas. But the civilians have overstepped their bounds and meddled in means. The generals regard this as unfair, a breach of contract, as it were. The generals (or the faction among them most inclined to poranoia) are beginning to see the conduct of the war, the political limitation on means, as a ploy of the civilians for performing a putsch against their time-honored prerogatives.
This aspect of the situation would bode ill for the country, were it not for the fact that the growing paranoia among the generals has enabled me to manipulate them into presenting both my scenarios to the president. The president has authorized implementation of the major scenario, provided that the minor scenario is successful in properly molding public opinion.
My major scenario is simple and direct. Knowing that the poor flying weather makes our conventional airpower—with its depend ency on relative accuracy—ineffectual, the enemy has fallen into the pattern of grouping his forces into larger units and launching pun ishing annual offensives during the monsoon season. However, these larger units are highly vulnerable to tactical nuclear weapons, which do not depend upon accuracy for effect. Secure in the knowledge that domestic political considerations preclude the use of nuclear weapons, the enemy will once again form into division-sized units or larger during the next monsoon season. A parsimonious use of tactical nuclear weapons, even as few as twenty one-hundred kiloton bombs, employed simultaneously and in an advantageous pattern, will destroy a minimum of two hundred thousand enemy troops, or nearly two-thirds of his total force, in a twenty-four-hour period. The blow will be crushing.
The minor scenario, upon whose success the implementation of the major scenario depends, is far more sophisticated, due to its subtler goal: public acceptance of, or, optimally, even public clamor for, the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The task is difficult, but my scenario is quite sound, if somewhat exotic, and with the full, if to some extent clandestine support of the upper military hier archy, certain civil government circles, and the decision makers in key aerospace corporations, the means now at my command would seem adequate. The risks, while statistically significant, do not ex ceed an acceptable level.
T minus 189 days … and counting …
The way I see it, the network deserved the shafting I gave them. They shafted me, didn't they? Four successful series I produce for those bastards, and two bomb out after thirteen weeks, and they send me to the salt mines! A discotheque, Can you imagine they make me producer at a lousy discotheque! A remittance man they make me, those schlockmeisters. Oh, those schnorrers made The American Dream sound like a kosher deal—twenty percent of the net, they say. And you got access to all our sets and contract players, it'll make you a rich man, Herm. And like a yuk, I sign, being broke at the time, without reading the fine print. I should know they've set up The American Dream as a tax loss? I should know that I've gotta use their lousy sets and stiff contract players and have it written off against my gross? I should know their shtick is to run The American Dream at a loss and then do a network TV show out of the joint from which I don't see a penny? So I end up running the place for them at a paper loss, living on salary, while the network rakes it in off the TV show that I end up paying for out of my end.
Don't bums like that deserve to be shafted? It isn't enough they use me as a tax loss patsy, they gotta tell me who to book! “Go sign the Four Horsemen, the group that's packing them in at the Man dala,” they say. “We want them on A Night With The American Dream. They're hot.”
“Yeah, they're hot,” I say, “which means they'll cost a mint. I can't afford it.”
They show me more fine print—next time I read the contract with a microscope. I gotta book whoever they tell me to and I gotta absorb the cost of my books! It's enough to make a Litvak turn anti semit.
So I had to go to the Mandala to sign up these hippies. I made sure I didn't g
et there till 12:30 so I wouldn't have to stay in that nuthouse any longer than necessary. Such a dive! What Bern stein did was take a bankrupt Hollywood-Hollywood club on the Strip, knock down all the interior walls, and put up this monster tent inside the shell. Just thin white screening over two-by-fours. Real shlock. Outside the tent, he's got projectors, lights, speakers, all the electronic mumbo jumbo, and inside is like being surrounded by movie screens. Just the tent and the bare floor, not even a real stage, just a platform on wheels they shlepp in and out of the tent when they change groups.
So you can imagine he doesn't exactly draw a class crowd. Not with The American Dream up the street being run as a network tax loss. What they got is the smelly, hard-core hippies I don't let in the door and the kind of j.d. high school kids that think it's smart to hang around putzes like that. A lot of dope-pushing goes on. The cops don't like the place, and the rousts draw professional trouble makers.
A real den of iniquity—I felt like I was walking onto a Casbah set. The last group had gone off and the Horsemen hadn't come on yet, so what you had was this crazy tent filled with hippies, half of them on acid or pot or amphetamine or for all I know Ajax; high school would-be hippies, also mostly stoned and getting ugly; and a few crazy schwartzes looking to fight cops. All of them standing around waiting for something to happen, and about ready to make it happen. I stood near the door, just in case. As they say, “The vibes were making me uptight.”
All of a sudden the house lights go out and it's black as a network executive's heart. I hold my hand on my wallet—in this crowd, tell me there are no pickpockets. Just the pitch-black and dead silence for what, ten beats, something crawling along my bones, but I know it's some kind of subsonic effect and not my imagination, because all the hippies are standing still and you don't hear a sound.
Then from a monster speaker so loud you feel it in your teeth, a heartbeat, but heavy, slow, half-time like maybe a whale's heart.
The thing crawling along my bones seems to be synchronized with the heartbeat and I feel almost like I am that big dumb heart beating there in the darkness.
Then a dark red spot—so faint it's almost infrared—hits the stage that they have wheeled out. On the stage are four uglies in crazy black robes—you know, like the Grim Reaper wears—with that ugly red light all over them like blood. Creepy. Boom-ba-boom. Boom-ba-boom. The heartbeat still going, still that subsonic bone-crawl and the hippies are staring at the Four Horsemen like mes merized chickens.
The bass player, a regular jungle-bunny, picks up the rhythm of the heartbeat. Dum-da-dum. Dum-da-dum. The drummer beats it out with earsplitting rim-shots. Then the electric guitar, tuned like a strangling cat, makes with horrible heavy chords. Whang-ka-whang. Whang-ka-whang.
It's just awful. I feel it in my guts, my bones; my eardrums are just like some great big throbbing vein. Everybody is swaying to it, I'm swaying to it. Boom-ba-boom. Boom-ba-boom.
Then the guitarist starts to chant in rhythm with the heartbeat, in a hoarse, shrill voice like somebody dying: “The big flash … The big flash …”
And the guy at the visuals console diddles around and rings of light start to climb the walls of the tent, blue at the bottom becoming green as they get higher, then yellow, orange, and finally as they become a circle on the ceiling, eye-killing neon-red. Each circle takes exactly one heartbeat to climb the wall.
Boy, what an awful feeling! Like I was a tube of toothpaste being squeezed in rhythm till the top of my head felt like it was gonna squirt up with those circles of light through the ceiling.
And then they start to speed it up gradually. The same heartbeat, the same rim-shots, same chords, same circles, same bass, same subsonic bone-crawl, but just a little faster…. Then faster! Faster!
Thought I would die! Knew I would die! Heart beating like a lunatic. Rim-shots like a machine gun. Circles of light sucking me up the walls, into that red neon hole.
Oy, incredible! Over and over faster and faster till the voice was a scream and the heartbeat a boom and the rim-shots a whine and the guitar howled feedback and my bones were jumping out of my body—
Every spot in the place came on and I went blind from the sudden light—
An awful explosion-sound came over every speaker, so loud it rocked me on my feet—
I felt myself squirting out of the top of my head and loved it.
Then:
The explosion became a rumble—
The light seemed to run together into a circle on the ceiling, leaving everything else black.
And the circle became a fireball.
The fireball became a slow-motion film of an atomic bomb cloud as the rumbling died away. Then the picture faded into a moment of total darkness and the house lights came on.
What a number!
Gevalt, what an act!
So after the show, when I got them alone and found out they had no manager, not even an option to the Mandala, I thought faster than I ever had in my life.
To make a long story short and sweet, I gave the network the royal screw. I signed the Horsemen to a contract that made me their manager and gave me twenty percent of their take. Then I booked them into The American Dream at ten thousand a week, wrote a check as proprietor of The American Dream, handed the check to myself as manager of the Four Horsemen, then resigned as a net work flunky, leaving them with a ten thousand bag and me with twenty percent of the hottest group since the Beatles.
What the hell, he who lives by the fine print shall perish by the fine print.
T minus 148 days … and counting …
“You haven't seen the tape yet, have you, B. D.?” Jake said. He was nervous as hell.
When you reach my level in the network struc ture, you're used to making subordinates nervous, but Jake Pitkin was head of network continuity, not some office boy, and certainly should be used to dealing with executives at my level. Was the rumor really true?
We were alone in the screening room. It was doubtful that the projectionist could hear us.
“No, I haven't seen it yet,” I said. “But I've heard some strange stories.”
Jake looked positively deathly. “About the tape?” he said.
“About you, Jake,” I said, deprecating the rumor with an easy smile. “That you don't want to air the show.”
“It's true, B. D.,” Jake said quietly.
“Do you realize what you're saying? Whatever our personal tastes—and I personally think there's something unhealthy about them—the Four Horsemen are the hottest thing in the country right now, and that dirty little thief Herm Gellman held us up for a quarter of a million for an hour show. It cost another two hundred thousand to make it. We've spent another hundred thousand on promotion. We're getting top dollar from the sponsors. There's over a million dollars one way or the other riding on that show. That's how much we blow if we don't air it.”
“I know that, B. D.,” Jake said. “I also know this could cost me my job. Think about that. Because knowing all that, I'm still against airing the tape. I'm going to run the closing segment for you. I'm sure enough that you'll agree with me to stake my job on it.”
I had a terrible feeling in my stomach. I have superiors too and the word was that A Trip with the Four Horsemen would be aired, period. No matter what. Something funny was going on. The price we were getting for commercial time was a precedent and the spon sor was a big aerospace company that had never bought network time before. What really bothered me was that Jake Pitkin had no reputation for courage; yet here he was laying his job on the line. He must be pretty sure I would come around to his way of thinking or he wouldn't dare. And though I couldn't tell Jake, I had no choice in the matter whatsoever.
“Okay, roll it,” Jake said into the intercom mike. “What you're going to see,” he said as the screening room lights went out, “is the last number.”
On the screen:
A shot of empty blue sky, with soft, lazy electric guitar chords behind it. The camera pans across a few clouds to an e
xtremely long shot on the sun. As the sun, which is no more than a tiny circle of light, moves into the center of the screen, a sitar-drone comes in behind the guitar.
Very slowly, the camera begins to zoom in on the sun. As the image of the sun expands, the sitar gets louder and the guitar begins to fade and a drum starts to give the sitar a beat. The sitar gets louder, the beat gets more pronounced and begins to speed up as the sun continues to expand. Finally, the whole screen is filled with unbearably bright light behind which the sitar and drum are in a frenzy.
Then over this, drowning out the sitar and drum, a voice like a sick thing in heat: “Brighter … than a thousand suns …”
The light dissolves into a close-up of a beautiful dark-haired girl with huge eyes and moist lips, and suddenly there is nothing on the sound track but soft guitar and voices crooning low: “Brighter … Oh God, it's brighter … brighter … than a thousand suns …”
The girl's face dissolves into a full shot of the Four Horsemen in their Grim Reaper robes and the same melody that had played behind the girl's face shifts into a minor key, picks up whining, reverberating electric guitar chords and a sitar-drone and becomes a dirge: “Darker … the world grows darker …”
And a series of cuts in time to the dirge:
A burning village in Asia strewn with bodies—“
Darker … the world grows darker …”
The corpse-heap at Auschwitz—“
Until it gets so dark …”
A gigantic auto graveyard with gaunt negro children dwarfed in the foreground—
“I think I'll die …”
A Washington ghetto in flames with the Capitol misty in the background—
“… before the daylight comes …”
A jump-cut to an extreme close-up on the lead singer of the Horse men, his face twisted into a mask of desperation and ecstasy. And the sitar is playing double-time, the guitar is wailing and he is screaming at the top of his lungs: “But before I die, let me make that trip before the nothing comes …”
The End Of The World Page 6
