Route 666

by Jack Yeovil

  ’Nola Gay was out of sight. The Psychopomps’ ve-hickles were neatly parked in the lot, under armed guard.

  “Girlie-girls,” Jazzbeaux announced, “we’ve got klicks to cover ’fore tomorrow night. So let’s move out.”

  V

  In the Outer Darkness, the Old Ones swarmed, awaiting the Summoning. The Dark Ones Who Stand By Themselves. The Summoner felt their immense excitement, their unknown activity, reach through the Planes of Existence, focusing on his own beating heart. The Power of the Crawling Chaos was almost too much to contain in one mere physical body.

  Blood had been spilled on the Path of Joseph. The Channels were opening. Not enough blood yet, but a start was made on the Great Invocation. The ritual, more ancient even than those it was to summon, had been commenced. Again.

  The Road to the Shining City must be marked out for the Dark Ones and their Servitors, just as landing lights mark out an airfield runway. The spilled blood would guide the Dark Ones to the Earthly Plane, to the Last City.

  More blood, more blood!

  The Summoner assessed his work and was well pleased. He had travelled this route before, spilled blood before. Since then, he had had time to wait, time to live. Now the cycle could recommence. Lines came into his head, and he followed them through…

  Turning and turning in a widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned…

  The Irishman had known more than he understood, the Summoner mused, and had died too soon to realise what he was talking of. He was one of the so-called magicians. They had all been fools and children, playing conjuring tricks, never really grasping the cosmic significance of the old rites. He had known them all, and seen them for what they were: the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, A. E. Waite, Arthur Machen, the Si-Fan, the Illuminati, the Adepts. Fools and children.

  The Summoner was happier with his collection of half-mad geniuses: De Sade, Poe, Aspern, Edvard Munch, Bierce, Gustave von Aschenbach, Kafka, Howard Lovecraft, Meyrink, Scott Fitzgerald, Jake Lingwood, Plath, Michael Reeves. Poets and painters and fabulists and freaks. Taken before their times, they had been worthy offerings to the Dark Ones. Nothing so pleased his masters as the waste of human potential. Sometimes he flirted with exposure, allowing the sacrifices to learn a little, letting it seep into their work. He was quite a patron of the Arts. Sometimes, through carelessness, someone doomed to early disgrace and death grew wise and slipped away.

  He thought of the singer, Presley, who had so nearly been his toy but who had diverged from the path laid out in blood and gold. The Summoner knew Presley was out there in the world. His was a sacrifice which would be completed some day.

  Now the secret societies, the love cults, the freemasonries were gone. The poets and philosophers were dead, the dilettantes and madmen in their graves. But the Summoner breathed still, alone in the knowledge that the Time of Changes was truly imminent.

  Fish would sprout from trees and the sun would burn black. But first the blood ritual would be complete, the Dark Ones would walk the face of the Earth, the common mass of humanity would be cast down, the raging chaos would coat the red-soaked land. The battles would be joined, and the fires of ice would burn. The Age of Pettiness would be at an end, and the Great Days, the Last Days, would be upon them. It would be a glorious sunset, and an eternal night.

  And the Summoner would have his reward.

  ZeeBeeCee’s Nostalgia Newstrivia: The 1960s

  Do you remember where you were, what you were wearing, which song you were humming, when Americans touched the moon in 1965? Tonight on Nostalgia Newstrivia, Luscious Lola Stechkin recalls the decade of Family Value and the British Invasion, of American Harmony and Chaos Abroad… the Solid ’60s.

  Hi, America. Wouldn’t you just love to hug me and squeeze me and touch me and feel me?

  Slip into your Interactive Rubber Cardigan and enjoy the totality of the Lola Stechkin arm-wraparound experience. For further sensations, turn your dial to 143 and place your mouth to the lip-mallow, selecting the “French Kiss” option. This has been a bonus service from ZeeBeeCee.

  Mmmmmmmm-wah! Tonight we drift back to those dreamy idyllic years of your baby-boomette childhood, when Marlon Brando ran the Ponderosa and Richard Nixon ran the country.

  It was the decade that began with the promise, made in President Nixon’s 1961 inaugural address, that an American would walk on the moon by 1965. That promise, like so many others, was fulfilled.

  JOHN GLENN: One small step for a man, one giant leap for all mankind…

  It was the decade which ended with the escalation of a futile war in South-East Asia. Hostilities between Russian and Chinese ground troops in Indo-China lead to a brief, terrifying exchange of tactical atomic weapons along the Sino-Soviet border in the Nine-Minute War of 1970.

  FIRST SECRETARY GROMYKO: The People’s Government of South Vietnam cannot be allowed to fall to the barbarians of the North, behind whose depradations we sense the insidious hands of the barbarians of the East.

  MONTAGE: Soviet troops marching, parachuting, driving tanks, smiling at the camera, smoking kif. Vietnamese villages burning. A running firefight. A Kremlin official reading off casualty figures. Mao Zedong ranting. Long-haired protestors thronging Red Square. Mushroom clouds rising. Gromyko resigning. A KGB officer holding up a severed head.

  Tonight, on Nostalgia Newstrivia, we remember the moods and the music, the triumphs and tragedies, the faces and factoids, the prices and the crises, the fashions and the food…

  PRESIDENT NIXON: My fellow Americans, we must survey each situation, national and international, and ask one simple question, not “what’s in it for us?” but “what’s in it for the US?”

  For America, these were years of achievement as President Nixon seemingly conquered the universe. After the calamitous failure of the first manned Soviet orbital flight, we surged ahead in the race thanks to massive US investment in the space programme and the diversion of Russian initiative into its ruinous land war. Mercury begat Gemini begat Apollo begat Hercules begat Pegasus.

  Everyone remembers the first men on the Moon, John Glenn and Wally Schirra, but spare a thought for the casualties of mankind’s first steps to the stars. Yuri Gagarin, Virgil Grissom, Richard Rusoff, Garrett Breedlove and so many others. A sombre rollcall of heroism.

  It was once suggested by General Westmoreland of NASA that the moon be granted statehood, though the question of who exactly might represent the new state in Congress and the Senate was never satisfactorily answered.

  MONTAGE: Rockets rising from Cape Canaveral. Rockets exploding on the gantry. Funerals for dead astronauts. Mass oblations before smiling, blown-up ID cards. Americans walking in space. Americans on the moon. Americans beset by tickertape. Countdowns, Touchdowns, Splashdowns. Animated diagrams of weapons satellites John Glenn in a plaid suit, grinning on the bridge of the USS Enterprise.

  In music, the decade saw the withering of American dominance in the wake of the rock ‘n’ roll riots of 1961. Followers of evangelist Jimmy Swaggart clashed with those of DJ Alan Freed at Madison Square Gardens, New York. Among the thousands left dead by morning were Chuck Berry, Jackie Wilson, Little Richard and Freed himself. A family footnote was the tragic, permanent crippling of the Reverend Swaggart’s cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis.

  In the wake of the Tin Pan Alley Self-Regulation Codes, names like Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins disappeared from the jukeboxes, remembered only by a rising generation of Russian children who, energised by the anti-war movement of the late ’60s, would transform the American rhythms of the ’50s into the all-powerful Sove Sounds of the ’70s and beyond.

  These were the years of the British Invasion. The Liverpool Sound came to America, represented by Ken Dodd’s first international million-seller, “Tea
rs (for Souvenirs)”. American artists were fast to react and soon Fabian Forte, Jan and Dean and Gracie Wing were covering the hits of Matt Monro, Mrs Mills and Valerie Singleton.

  America’s teenagers embraced the Brits but found a place for their own idols. The President, admitting he owned every disc Pat Boone ever cut, commended the music industry for championing decent young citizens whose example in moderate behaviour, modest dress and fetching hairstyles was eagerly copied by adoring fans. The President even confessed one or two “race records” had caught his fancy, reserving especial praise for Diana Ross’s interpretation of Rolf Harris’s “Sun-a-Rise”.

  SIZZLING SIXTIES TOP TEN: 1961: “(I Love, I Love, I Love, My Little) Calendar Girl”, Neil Sedaka; 1962: “Love Letters (Straight From Your Heart)”, Marilyn Monroe; 1963: “Happiness, Happiness (The Greatest Gift That I Possess)”, Ken Dodd; 1964: “Shout”, Valerie Singleton; 1965: “It’s Not Unusual”, Norman Wisdom; 1966: “Theme From Star Trek”, The Billy Cotton Band; 1967: “(It’s a Treat To Beat Your Feet on the) Mississippi Mud”, James M. Hendrix and the Merry Minstrels; 1968: “White Horses”, Jacky; 1969: “Hooray for Nixon”, Cherilyn LaPierre; 1970: “(I Did It) My Way”, Ken Dodd.

  At this point, should you wish to further your intimate relationship with the lovely Lola, please press the PAY button on your remote, and attach the milking sleeve as shown in the diagram provided. ZeeBeeCee takes no responsibility for coronary ill-effect or electrical discharges caused by faulty wiring or overuse of this consumer function. If in doubt, consult your family doctor…

  While the ’10s were marked by War and Revolution, the ’20s by racketeering and bathtub gin, the ’30s by Depression and the New Deal, the ’40s by World Conflict and Swing, and the ’50s by the dread shadow of the unleashed atom, no decade before or since has seemed so uncomplicated and peaceful to the great mass of the people of America as the 1960s. There were overseas wars, but America was merely a mournful, helpful observer, consistently intervening in futile attempts to find common ground between combatants.

  After 1961, there were no more riots among the young, the happy racial minorities, or the working man. 1969 saw the great Peace March—lead by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Senator Lyndon Johnson and John Wayne—which gathered outside the Washington consulates of the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. Similar marches in Moscow and Peking were not as peaceful; the death toll of that day will probably never be known.

  Employment held steady, rates of divorce and suicide plunged, American industry launched countless successful products—typified perhaps by the most popular car of the 1960s, the Ford Edsel—and the nation’s position in the world was paramount.

  ALFRED E. NEUMAN: What, me worry? I drive an Edsel!

  Truly, the 1960s were the American Decade, and the Man of the Solid ’60s was Richard Nixon, the only First Executive ever to have co-hosted Your Show of Shows with Milton Berle and Chevy Chase. President Nixon, that wise old bird, resisted calls that he share with FDR the opportunity of running for a third term. With typical good humour, he claimed he could make far more money from books and lectures after his retirement than he ever could in the White House.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Pat deserves a new coat and Checkers II is looking forward to the California sunshine.

  Who can forget the spontaneous demonstrations of loyalty that erupted throughout the country in 1968, as the presidential campaign took on the good-humoured air of a festival? In Chicago, the Democratic Convention was invaded by pranksters of the “Why Bother?” faction, encouraging delegates not to tinker with success and admit that the party of opposition could not hope to compete with the administration.

  Even losing candidate Hubert Humphrey, polling proportionately fewer votes than any second-placer in history, was able to laugh off defeat with an admission that he didn’t envy Barry Goldwater the job of following a fighting Quaker saint in the White House.

  That year, John Kennedy, the forgotten man of American politics, remarried, not to the blonde goddess whose wiles had ruined his chance for the presidency in 1960, but to Mia Farrow, youthful star of the summer’s heart-warming hit motion picture, And Rosemary’s Baby Makes Three.

  Amid the hilarity and fellow-feeling, one should remember Nixon the Statesman. The triumphs of the Nixon Presidency were epitomised by his swift intervention in Cuba in 1962, providing air support for democratic rebels who overthrew the short-lived regime of the mad tyrant, Fidel Castro. Here we see American offshore interests triumphant in 1963 as businessman Samuel Giancana reopens the Club Whoopee, Havana. That noise you hear has been identified as the happy popping of champagne corks.

  Also, Secretary of State Hoffa presided over the removal of many restrictions which threatened to impede the progress of American industry, granting rich government contracts to the technocrats who steadfastly worked in the space programme. Here, reactionary Ralph Nader slinks away from a congressional committee after the decisive defeat of his Slow Down Emissions recommendations, which would have cut American output by up to 50 per cent.

  After deliberating the findings of a committee chaired by Governor George Wallace, the president adopted the policy of Separate But Equal Development in education, housing and employment, ensuring unprecedented racial harmony in the South. The amusing shoeshine boy seen here ‘accidentally’ spilling polish over Governor George’s white pants-cuffs has been identified as a Mr Malcolm Little, who seems, quite sensibly to judge by that grumpy look on George’s face, to have disappeared from history soon after this candid footage was shot.

  In 1961, everyone went to the movies and saw Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Dolores Hart in Where the Boys Are and Kirk Douglas in Spartacus; in 1970, it was Richard Beymer and Katharine Houghton in Love Story, Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson in Darling Lili and John Wayne as John Glenn and Clinton Eastwood Jr as Wally Schirra in The Right Stuff. In 1961, the top TV shows were Bonanza, The Lawrence Welk Show and Dragnet, in 1970, they were Bonanza, The Ken Dodd Show and Star Trek. Hair went up and skirts came down. The biggest hit show on Broadway throughout the ’60s, so closely identified with the Nixon Era that Pat Nixon took to calling her husband’s cabinet “the Twilight of the Gods”, was Lerner and Lowe’s Ragnarok, adapted from Wagner’s Ring cycle. Here’s Rex Harrison as Wotan, to sing us out of our moist-eyed nostalgia with the song President Nixon was reputedly humming throughout his eight years in office…

  “The darkness is descending all around us

  The world, they say, is ending on this spot

  Those monsters from the underworld have found us

  … It’s Ragnarok…”

  Thank you, Lola. We’ll look forward to seeing more of your past in the future. Those who took advantage of our full interactive function are advised by ZeeBeeCee’s Dr Nick to light up a Snout, the high-tar cigarette that tastes like tobacco and smells like smoke.

  Now, it’s back to the ’90s for an all-new episode of that show that started in the ’60s and was featured in our nostalgia binge. Star Trek: The Golden Generation. William Shatner returns as Captain James T. Kirk, with Don Ameche as Mr Spock, George Burns as Bones McCoy and Jessica Tandy as Lieutenant O’Hara. In tonight’s episode, “The Syndrome Factor”, the USS Enterprise visits a parallel universe in which Richard Nixon was assassinated by Klingons in 1963 and the future has become a living hell…

  The Book of Meat

  I

  8 June 1995

  Canyon de Chelly stuck its stone finger up at the dusk like a taffy stretched Stonehenge megalith. The free-standing rock tower was a defiant sport. In a million years, wind had created the majestical feature. In a mere minute, the Knock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots would bring the untidy thing down. It was an anomaly and anomalies were intolerable.

  Franken Steinberg stood by the bus, recharging as Olympia busied herself with Blastite. Jump-leads connected his neck-bolts with the generator. Kochineel monitored, triple-belled cap nodding over the dials. Juice flowed into the capaci
tators under Franken’s clavicles. He could function for a day on less than five cents’ worth of electricity.

  Considering Canyon de Chelly, Franken found himself questioning the dictum that nature was random and chaotic. The column was so contrived, so perfect that, like his own mainly mechanical body, it bespoke the existence of a creator.

  It might be God’s colophon, a declaration of copyright and ownership.

  The thought was surplus to the cybermind. He made an effort to burn it from his graymass. When his meatmind consciousness transferred to a more efficient storage vessel, unfruitful byways would be shut off. He longed to achieve true machine state.

  He had abraded the GenTech logo from his plaskin face but the symbols persisted inside, a sub-microscopic rash on the robo-bits scattered through his altered body. Retaining memory of his half-life before BioDiv got to work on him, he did not (like more superstitious cyborgs) regard Dr Zarathustra as a God. He had been created equal with meatkind; GenTech BioDiv, for its own reasons, helped him evolve towards perfection.

  Towards perfection. That was the path of the ’bots.

  He was not personally involved in Olympia’s special project, but he observed her preparations with interest and admiration. Olympia was a good machine, if overinclined to special effects. Having run calculations through the chipped portion of her graymass, she had determined the exact charge necessary to fell the pillar. Flitting around the pillar on her points, she chattered instructions to Pinocchiocchio, who hulked along after her like a drone, placing the Blastite as ordered.