The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

  The fireball became a slow-motion film of an atomic-bomb cloud as the rambling 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 network flunky, leaving them with a ten-thou-sand-dollar 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 yon, B.D.?” Jake said. He was nervous as hell. When you reach my level in the network structure, 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 sponsor was a big aerospace company which 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 extremely long shot on the sun. As the sun, 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 closeup of a beautiful darkhaired 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 closeup on the lead singer of the Horsemen, 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 girl’s face again, but transparent, with a blinding yellow light shining through it. The sitar beat gets faster and faster with the guitar whining behind it and the voice is working itself up into a howling frenzy: “… the last big flash to light my sky…”

  Nothing but the blinding light now—

  “… and zap! the world is done…”

  An utterly black screen for a beat that becomes black, fading to blue at a horizon—

  “… but before we die lets dig that high that frees us from our binds… that blows all cool that ego-drool and burns us from our mind… the last big flash, mankind’s last gas, the trip we can’t take twice…”

  Suddenly, the music stops dead for half a beat. Then:

  The screen is lit up by an enormous fireball—

  A shattering rumble—

  The fireball coalesces into a mushroom-pillar cloud as the roar goes on. As the roar begins to die out, fire is visible inside the monstrous nuclear cloud. And the girl’s face is faintly visible, superimposed over the cloud..

  A soft voice, amplified over the roar, obscenely reverential now: “Brighter… great God, it’s brighter… brighter than a thousand suns…”

  And the screen went blank and the lights came on.

  I looked at Jake. Jake looked at me.

  “That’s sick,” I said. “That’s really sick.”

  “You don’t want to run a thing like that, do you, B.D.?” Jake said softly.

  I made some rapid mental calculations. The loathsome thing ran something under five minutes… it could be done,…

  “You’re right, Jake,” I said. “We won’t run a thing like that. We’ll cut it out of the tape and squeeze in another commercial at each break. That should cover the time.”

  “You don’t understand,” Jake said. “The contract Herm rammed down our throats doesn’t allow us to edit. The show’s a package—all or nothing. Besides, the whole show’s like that.”

  “All like that? What do you mean, all like that?”

  Jake squirmed in his seat. “Those guys are… well, perverts, B.D.,” he said.

  “Perverts?”

  “They’re… well, they’re in love with the atom bomb or something. Every number leads up to the same thing.”

  “You mean… they’re all like that?”

  “You got the picture,” Jake said. “We run an hour of that, or we run nothing at all.”

  “Jesus.”

  I knew what I wanted to say. Burn the tape and write off the million dollars. But I also knew it would cost me
my job. And I knew that five minutes after I was out the door, they would have someone in my job who would see things their way. Even my superiors seemed to be just handing down The Word from higher up. I had no choice. There was no choice.

  “I’m sorry, Jake,” I said. “We run it.”

  “I resign,” said Jake Pitkin, who had no reputation for courage.

  T minus 10 days… and counting…

  “It’s a clear violation of the Test-Ban Treaty,” I said.

  The Under Secretary looked as dazed as I felt. “We’ll call it a peaceful use of atomic energy, and let the Russians scream,” he said.

  “It’s insane.”

  “Perhaps,” the Under Secretary said. “But you have your orders, General Carson, and I have mine. From higher up. At exactly eight-fifty-eight p.m. local time on July fourth, you will drop a fifty-kiloton atomic bomb on the designated ground zero at Yucca Flats.”

  “But the people… the television crews…”

  “Will be at least two miles outside the danger zone. Surely, SAC can manage that kind of accuracy under ‘laboratory conditions.’ ”

  I stiffened. “I do not question the competence of any bomber crew under my command to perform this mission,” I said. “I question the reason for the mission. I question the sanity of the orders.”

  The Under Secretary shrugged, and smiled wanly. “Welcome to the club.”

  “You mean you don’t know what this is all about either?”

  “All I know is what was transmitted to me by the Secretary of Defense, and I got the feeling he doesn’t know everything, either. You know that the Pentagon has been screaming for the use of tactical nuclear weapons to end the war in Asia—you SAC boys have been screaming the loudest, Well, several months ago, the President conditionally approved a plan for the use of tactical nuclear weapons during the next monsoon season.”

  I whistled. The civilians were finally coming to their senses. Or were they?

  “But what does that have to do with—?”

  “Public opinion,” the Under Secretary said. “It was conditional upon a drastic change in public opinion. At the time the plan was approved, the polls showed that seventy-eight point eight percent of the population opposed the use of tactical nuclear weapons, nine point eight percent favored their use and the rest were undecided or had no opinion. The President agreed to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons by a date, several months from now, which is still top secret, provided that by that date at least sixty-five percent of the population approved their use and no more than twenty percent actively opposed it.”

  “I see… just a ploy to keep the Joint Chiefs quiet,”

  “General Carson,” the Under Secretary said, “apparently you are out of touch with the national mood. After the first Four Horsemen show, the polls showed that twenty-five percent of the population approved the use of nuclear weapons. After the second show, the figure was forty-one percent. It is now forty-eight percent. Only thirty-two percent are now actively opposed.”

  “You’re trying to tell me that a rock group—”

  “A rock group and the cult around it, General. It’s become a national hysteria. There are imitators. Haven’t you seen those buttons?”

  “The ones with a mushroom cloud on them that say ‘Do it’?”

  The Under Secretary nodded. “Your guess is as good as mine whether the National Security Council just decided that the Horsemen hysteria could be used to mold public opinion, or whether the Four Horsemen were their creatures to begin with. But the results are the same either way—the Horsemen and the cult around them have won over precisely that element of the population which was most adamantly opposed to nuclear weapons: hippies, students, dropouts, draft-age youth. Demonstrations against the war and against nuclear weapons have died down. We’re pretty close to that sixty-five percent. Someone—perhaps the President himself—has decided that one more big Four Horsemen show will put us over the top.”

  “The President is behind this?”

  “No one else can authorize the detonation of an atomic bomb, after all,” the Under Secretary said. “We’re letting them do the show live from Yucca Flats. It’s being sponsored by an aerospace company heavily dependent on defense contracts. We’re letting them truck in a live audience. Of course the government is behind it.”

  “And SAC drops an A-bomb as the show-stopper?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I saw one of those shows,” I said. “My kids were watching it. I got the strangest feeling… I almost wanted that red telephone to ring…”

  “I know what you mean,” the Under Secretary said. “Sometimes I get the feeling that whoever’s behind this has gotten caught up in the hysteria themselves… that the Horsemen are now using whoever was using them… a closed circle. But I’ve been tired lately. The war’s making us all so tired. If only we could get it all over with…”

  “We’d all like to get it over with one way or the other,” I said.

  T minus 60 minutes… and counting…

  I had orders to muster Backfish’s crew for the live satellite relay on “The Four Horsemen’s Fourth.” Superficially, it might seem strange to order the whole Polaris fleet to watch a television show, but the morale factor Involved was quite significant.

  Polaris subs are frustrating duty. Only top sailors are chosen and a good sailor craves action. Yet if we are ever called upon to act, our mission will have been a failure. We spend most of our time honing skills that must never be used. Deterrence is a sound strategy but a terrible drain on the men of the deterrent forces—a drain exacerbated in the past by the negative attitude of our countrymen toward our mission. Men who, in the service of their country, polish, their skills to a razor edge and then must refrain from exercising them have a right to resent being treated as pariahs.

  Therefore the positive change in the public attitude toward us that seems to be associated with the Four Horsemen has made them mascots of a kind to the Polaris fleet. In their strange way they seem to speak for us and to us.

  I chose to watch the show in the missile control center, where a full crew must always be ready to launch the missiles on five-minute notice. I have always felt a sense of communion with the duty watch in the missile control center that I cannot share with the other men under my command. Here we are not captain and crew, but mind and hand. Should the order come, the will to lire the missiles will be mine and the act will be theirs. At such a moment, it will he good not to feel alone.

  All eyes were on the television set mounted above the main console as the show came on and…

  The screen was filled with a whirling spiral pattern, metallic yellow on metallic blue. There was a droning sound that seemed part sitar and part electronic, and I had the feeling that the sound was somehow coming from inside my head and the spiral seemed etched directly on my retinas. It hurt mildly, yet nothing in the world could have made me turn away.

  Then came two voices, chanting against each other:

  “Let it all come in…”

  “Let it all come out…”

  “In… out… in… out… in… out…”

  My head seemed to be pulsing—in-out, in-out, in-out—and the spiral pattern began to pulse color changes with the words: yellow-on-blue (in)… green-on-red (out)… in-out-in-out-in-out-in-out…

  In the screen… out my head… I seemed to be beating against some kind of invisible membrane between myself and the screen as if something were trying to embrace my mind and I were fighting it… But why was I fighting it?

  The pulsing, the chanting, got faster and faster till in could not be told from out and negative spiral after-images formed in my eyes faster than they could adjust to the changes, piled up on each other faster and faster till it seemed my head would explode—

  The chanting and the droning broke and there were the Four Horsemen, in their robes, playing on some stage against a backdrop of clear blue sky. And a single voice, soothing now: “You are in…”

 
Then the view was directly above the Horsemen and I could see that they were on some kind of circular platform. The view moved slowly and smoothly up and away and I saw that the circular stage was atop a tall tower; around the tower and completely encircling it was a huge crowd seated on desert sands that stretched away to an empty infinity.

  “And we are in and they are in…”

  I was down among the crowd now; they seemed to melt and flow like plastic, pouring from the television screen to enfold me…

  “And we are all in here together…”

  A strange and beautiful feeling… the music got faster and wilder, ecstatic… the hull of the Backfish seemed unreal… the crowd was swaying to it around me… the distance between myself and the crowd seemed to dissolve… I was there… they were here… We were transfixed…

  “Oh, yeah, we are all in here together… together…”

  T minus 45 minutes… and counting…

  Jeremy and I sat staring at the television screen, ignoring each other and everything around us. Even with the short watches and the short tours of duty, you can get to feeling pretty strange down here in a hole in the ground under tons of concrete, just you and the guy with the other key, with nothing to do but think dark thoughts and get on each other’s nerves. We’re all supposed to be as stable as men can be, or so they tell us, and they must be right because the world’s still here, I mean, it wouldn’t take much—just two guys on the same watch over the same three Minutemen flipping out at the same time, turning their keys in the dual lock, pressing the three buttons… Pow! World War III!

  A bad thought, the kind we’re not supposed to think or I’ll start watching Jeremy and he’ll start watching me and we’ll get a paranoia feedback going… But that can’t happen; we’re too stable, too responsible. As long as we remember that it’s healthy to feel a little spooky down here, we’ll be all right.

  But the television set is a good idea. It keeps us in contact with the outside world, keeps it real. It’d be too easy to start thinking that the missile control center down here is the only real world and that nothing that happens up there really matters… Bad thought!