The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “Three from Moderan” represents the first reprinting of Bunch’s work in quite some time. There is some reason to hope not only that a full Moderan collection will be forthcoming but that previously unpublished Bunch stories will finally become available to readers as well.

  THREE FROM MODERAN

  David R. Bunch

  NO CRACKS OR SAGGING

  Sometimes, from the brink of our great involvements, we move in our minds back to remember things of seemingly small-bore significances that loom, in the recalling times, extra-large. The day I crossed over, the day I went into Moderan, out of the rolled and graded fields, far as the eye could reach, were these long-legged tamping machines. Essentially they were huge black cylinders swung spinning between gigantic thighs and calves of metal. There seemed an air of casualness about these strange black monsters as they loafed on their tall-thighed legs and twirled their cylinders about in what appeared to be, at times, almost totally contrived, excessive, and meaningless nonchalance. Then, at no signal that I could detect, at no prompting that I could learn of, one or another of the machines would rush right over to a spot of ground and, seeming to bend forward a little at the waist, unleash the fury of its cylinder at the fresh earth underneath as though in great glee and highest concentration. The two-legged machine, once started, would really pummel that spot of earth with the front end of its cylinder for upwards of, say, thirty minutes or maybe even three-quarters of an hour, increasing its battering motion as the minutes passed. Then, appearing to know without any guessing when enough was plenty, and withdrawing a dirt-caked cylinder-end, the machine, as it erected to full height from its leaned position, would wander away and rejoin other loafing, waiting machines as though nothing of any consequence had really occurred at all.

  Once two machines started for the same spot of earth, and it was quite a show to watch them both hunch into battering position at the same time, take aim at the same place, and start battering each the other’s cylinder almost as much as they pummeled the ground. An overseer for tamping machines watched this ridiculous punching contest for a while before he went over and drummed each machine on the rump just enough to break up the rhythm of their misdirected jab-jab-jab and send them both packing off twirling their cylinders as though they hadn’t really wanted to use them anyway. The job was awarded to a third machine, a troubleshooter reserve type who soon hunched into position and went about poking away at the place as though the world were entirely new and jolly to him and heigh-ho, jig-jig, holiday, holiday, go Go GO!

  “What goes WHAT GIVES!?” I asked the overseer of tamping machines, my voice with wonder like a child’s, my eyes surely bulged out like, in the Old Days, a frog’s.

  “Time goes, life stays, heigh-ho heigh-hey,” he recited. And then he said, “What are you, some kind of a humorist, or something? What do you mean, ‘what goes, what gives’?”

  “What goes, what gives? Explain these grim, grotesque, and altogether hilarious actions. I wish to be instructed. I want to understand. I see nothing but burlesque here. Is there more?”

  “Is there more!? Man, is there more!!” Then he looked at me closely. “Why! you’re from Out There! Old Times!” he ejaculated. “Perhaps you really do not understand at all. Maybe you really do mean, ‘What goes, what gives?’ ”

  “I mean WHAT GOES, WHAT GIVES!” My fists were doubled by now and I saw I could easily go into my punch-now talk-later mood for sure.

  “Travel far?”

  “I came far enough. In miles. In time. In blasted hopes and withering dreams. In tears I came. In trouble. YES, I came far enough. And now to find, near the place of my chartered destination, if I came on course and if I drew my lines correctly on the charts they gave, a kind of antic Silly Far. Where big two-legged machines that are essentially, as I see it, just contrivances for carrying around those big proddy rammers, at wholly random instances and to no practical purpose at all, try to have sexual intercourse with the soil.”

  “You’re quite a talker. Why don’t you cut through, more? Go direct to your statement and pummel your meaning? Be more like these machines? You can see, when they get that signal, they don’t beat around the bush. They go right over there and then it’s just phoo phoo phoo, jig jig jig, bam bam bam, until the job’s done.”

  “WHAT JOB? WHAT’S DONE?”

  “The solution is to cover the pollution. The answer is to get rid of the cancer. Ho ho ho.”

  I moved in on him and I was ready to punch him down. Then I saw he had a strange look. He stared me back with gleaming, beaming, funny eyes, and there was about him something of the manner of, not a man, but more a machine-man. “This is Moderan,” he said. “We’re building New Land here. When these misters detect a soft place in our soil, they rush right over and batter it into submission. They look random and nonchalant. I know. But really they’re not. When they seem to be just standing, they’re sampling things from way off, maybe. You see, they own very sensitive feet. It’s built in. If there’s a soft place in their sphere of detection, they’ll get it through these sensitors in the feet. Treading here, they’ll get a vibration from a hollow place out there. They’re programmed to hate hollow places. They rush right over and stick in the jammy-ram cylinder when they get wind of a hollow place. By hollow place, I mean a piece of the land surface that isn’t as hard as it should be.”

  “Oh yes! And that’s important!?”

  “VERY.” Then he looked at me cold-eyed. “Maybe you’d better come with me. I can leave these machines for a while. These jammy-rams are programmed so that really all I have to do is put in my time. And take care of unusual occurrences, like when two signals cross at the juncture of spheres and detection. This happens but rarely, but when it does, whooee! look out! we have, as you saw, the strange, hilarious, and altogether inefficient phenomena of two jammy-rams going for the same hole. (By hole, I mean a piece of the land surface that isn’t as firm as it should be.) Very hard on jammy-rams and also it doesn’t make for a good tamping job at the hole either. And when you’re building for forever, that’s one of the things you really do want and must have—a good tamping job at the hole.” He wasn’t kidding. I saw he wasn’t kidding.

  We got into his flap-hap airabout scoot that he used to check on plans and we went up high. And far as the eye could gaze I saw the flats. All dotted with jammy-ram monsters was about three-quarters of this far-as-I-could-see area of the flats, brown-black scraped-off earth speckled with the darker, wandering, and nonchalant spots that were machines doing, I had just been told, a very efficient and important piece of detection work and finalization execution at the hole. Then far down near the horizon, and at the edge of the dots that were jammy-rams, I saw how the browny-black changed to a blur that was gray or grayey-white. He slipped me a pair of the long-rangers for the eyes and I zeroed in on the blur. “The new ice age!”

  “Not at all!” he returned. “Or maybe just precisely, if you want to see it so. But this ice age, if you want it so—go ahead, call it that!—is for the species, not against it. You’ll never see this ice age rolling up boulders or creeping along with mammoth bones in its teeth. This ice age is covering up dirt, not just rearranging it. That’s plastic you’re looking at, man! I’m out here as an advance guard for plastic. It’s a friendly deadly-competitive hell-for-plastic devil-take-the-hindermost race between my jammy-rams and me on one side and that creeping gray edge on the other. And we’re gaining!” He smirked with satisfaction. And if I hadn’t already decided he was some kind of a Great One, I would have suspected right now that he was just some kind of a small jackass overseer type taking a lean satisfaction from staying on top of his small-small job. But surely not. Surely this was a Planner, a mover, a shaker, and a rearranger of the World Scheme. At least a mover, a shaker, and a rearranger of the surface of the earth.

  “Why—what—?” I sputtered. Yes! I was snowed in just now, as deep back in the murk as I ever like not to be.

  He looked hot-eyed with little bulbs at me.
He really bored in hard. He seemed to be making some kind of a tough decision about whether I really existed or not. Anyway, I got that impression, so hard was his bright-bulb stare. “Say, you are cleared for this,” he finally said, “aren’t you?”

  I remembered some gates and some guards I had passed many days and many many miles long back. Far down at the edge of the place where things were old and wrecked, I remembered that hard cross-questioning, and the lie detectors, and the probing, the probing in— “I think I’m cleared,” I answered. “Would I have got this far if I had not been? Some things like tin eagles have hung over me all the long way, as it is, circling, circling, as I came slowly on my tired shank’s mare….I take it you people are taking no chances whatsoever with what you’ve got down there.”

  “We take no chances! Show me if you’ve got it!”

  I rolled up my sleeves and showed him the two bright-orange M’s that had been stamped on my lower arms, at the clearing gates a long while back. I thought that might be what he wanted to see, and it was. “You’re cleared! And you’re a whole lot more than that!” He peered more closely at the M’s. “You probably don’t know it now, but you’re a whole lot more than just cleared!” There was in his voice a note of admiration that I couldn’t believe was faked. Yes, he meant it. He pointed at some small symbol under each M. “You probably don’t know exactly what those mean,” he mused, “but I do. I really do.” Then he shook his head in what I had to read as sadness, and he seemed to slip in memory a long way down. “Too old,” he muttered, “too old and too many bridges gone crackling down in the floods, the flames, and the always-present wrecking of the days, before this thing came up for me. But you—you’re just right! You’re young and apparently you passed your tests with colors flying, really whipping out there in the breeze. I bet you’re stamped just about all over! under your clothes!”

  “Yeah, they stamped me up pretty well. Then they told me to get going. Pointed me to a road, gave me maps and charts, and said, ‘Get on up there. They’re a-building and you’re sure to be in time.’ Is that what they meant?”

  “NOOO. Not for you! This is what I qualified for. I was a Moderan Early-Early. But I was too old and time-ravaged and event-hurt before this gold chance came up for me. But you, you’re young and right and on the mark. I can tell you now, you’ll be a Stronghold master, one of the elite-elite, if you can stand those operations. And there’s no reason why you can’t. I stood what ones they allowed me to, in good shape. And you’re to be allowed the maximum. I can read it by those small marks under the M’s. CONGRATULATIONS!” Impulsively he let go of the controls of the flap-hap and grabbed my right hand with both of his hands. I really got a steel handshake that day!

  After a while we landed, back at the place where we had started, and there were two jammy-rams going for the same hole again, so it was altogether to the good that we had arrived back at this station when we did. He rushed right over and straightened things out by slapping the two silly rammers on their rumps, with a certain rhythmic beat, as I had seen him do in that other instance. “A very bad spot, this here,” he announced, coming back. “Something about the spheres of detection right here at this locale, which you’ll notice is a little bit of a depression, taken on the large, causes tangling of the spirals. Really not the fault of the machines, not at all, for they just do what they’re programmed for and that’s it.”

  “You really know how to do it!” I exclaimed, for something intuitively told me now that here was just a little serving man, really, a victim, who could do with some praise.

  He swelled a lot with good pride as his chest came up a notch. “You know, I developed that technique myself—slapping them on the rump that way with a certain beat. Breaks up their rhythm, jiggles the connections, and they just wander away for a while, not knowing what in hell else to do. After a short time, though, they settle right back down again, the rhythm of their programming is restored, and they’re good serviceable jammy-rammers once more.”

  “Anyway, I think that’s neat, slapping these big earth fornicators on the rump that way to send them off just twirling their dirty cylinders at the air, all puzzled and deranged. Sort of shows man’s mastery somehow. Yet—huh?”

  “YEAH! Thought it up myself, kind of by accident really. Saw it’d work when my foot slipped and I fell against one of them one time, flailing my arms for balance. Adopted the method. All against procedures, naturally. SAY! you should see what I’m really supposed to do when something like this comes up. About twenty-five to thirty forms to fill out giving the pinpoint time and place and my ideas on why the foul-up. I’m furiously filling out the forms, see, after I’ve immediately and at once sent in the signal to headquarters that two jammy-rammers are at the same hole, COME WITH ALL SPEED! About sixteen big shots hop off their new-metal mistresses up at headquarters, their secretaries, you know, jump in their flap-hap airabout jet scoots, and slam off out here as though hell itself were inside coming out. All this time the two poor jammy-rams with their signals crossed are beating hell out of each other’s rammers, making a bigger scarred-up soft place in the graded surface than there was before, and generally compounding futility to the top degree. But the big shots get there fast, in about two to five minutes—I will say this for them, they’re prompt—and they rush out of their jet-slap airabout scoots and have their big cigars fired up and are clearing their throats and considering things almost before the two mixed-up jammy-rams are scarcely one-third through with their programmed cycle of earth ramming. Which makes it harder, really, because naturally being big-deal men of action, these headquarters fellows (do something, even if it’s wrong! you know) signal off out there at once for the Separator task forces, which come in on the heavy transports in about ten minutes more, and these Separator troops throw big chain links around the intensely working jammy-rams and drag them away from the hole, the jammy-rams still fighting to finish the cycle, naturally, of course. Ever try to pull a jammy-ram by force away from the hole before he’d finished his cycle?”

  “No, never did that.”

  “No,” he laughed, “course you didn’t. But it can be done with enough horsepower pulling at the jammy-rams and strong enough chains. Tears up the jammy-rams, though, and causes them to have to be sent away many many miles to the repair stations. Then I just complete the filling out of the forms, and procedures are maintained, and everything’s unstrained, happy, and satisfied with the hardware boys.”

  I laughed. He laughed. “Yeah, if I hewed to the line of procedures in every way, that long ice-edge of the plastic would be covering me up completely! Along with my jammy-rams, in no time at all. I run my show out here, the big-deal headquarters men can log more time on their new-metal secretaries, I stay ahead of the plastic, and who’s to care if I cut a few procedural corners right in twain?”

  “Nobody should care,” I agreed.

  He looked at me, and a half-smile toyed at the corners of his mouth, this proud, vain, little man. “You know, what’d happen if they found out, if they ever found out how I slap those jammy-rammers on the rump with a certain beat to shortcut the procedures? Why, I’d be riding out of here in chains in just minutes, that’s what’d happen. Yeah! Procedures are the god in New Land. It’s got to be that way, of course—but still, once in a while, I think a practical mind is best. I usually give those jammy-rams a little extra oiling, or a polish-and-pet with the ‘slick up, shine up’ kit to help them get back straight and forget their humiliation, and it works out.” And suddenly, I had a dazzling flash of insight. This man was really pretty usual! Procedures were for everyone but him. All at once I found myself not admiring his cunning little rump-slapping transgression of the rules quite as much as I thought I would. But then, as I’ve found out in the past, all people disappoint me, soon or late. They just don’t measure out. “What about that plastic? What about those jammy-rams for that matter?” I yelled. “You’ve flown me over wide expanses of scraped and graded earth swarming with milling, wandering, and
soil-fornicating jammy-rams. You’ve also flown me over wide areas of whitey-gray plastic that was smooth and cold as ice from where I sat. There’s some reason for all this? You seem to think it’s important. Outside of being your job, is it important?”

  His eyes went hard-bright. He was not a friendly man just then. But soon he relaxed, when something had clicked in his mind, I guess. “Sure,” he answered, “it’s very much of importance. But being so lately from Old Land and coming a far way from where all is wrecked and cindered, as I understand it, I guess you wouldn’t know. Forgive me. I was getting a little flame-hot at you just then. I thought you were ridiculing. But I know now, remembering your background, it’s ignorance. And ignorance can be admirable, if the person came by it honestly. Flippant, flyblow, half-baked wiseacring is about the worst thing in the world, compared to honest ignorance.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Now, to answer your question about the scraped-off rolled-down land, the jammy-rams, and the plastic: You see, we’re moving down toward where you came from. We’ll get it all in time. Surely you must know that the earth is poisoned. From what I’ve heard, where you are from is not only poisoned, but wrecked and cindered as well. We stopped just short of that havoc up here; therefore there is this place for you from Old Land to come to. But our land was poisoned by science ‘progress’ as much as yours was. So we’re covering all with the sterile plastic, a great big whitey-gray envelope of thick tough sterile plastic over all the land of the earth. That’s our goal. It’s a mammoth task, but for mammoth tasks man has behemoth machines. The mountains go into the valleys, the creek banks go into the creeks, the ditch sides go into the ditches, the golf courses are smoothed, the mine tailings are scattered—and all is coated. At the necessary places we make the reservoirs for runoff and freeze it solid. The oceans we will deal with in our own time, our own time and well enough. There are several plans, one being to use our scientific knowhow to freeze the oceans solid, another being to shoot the oceans out into space in capsules and be done with all that surplus water forever. The new-metal man, which I am to a degree, and which you are to become to a much much higher degree, will need very little water….But now it’s the land we’re doing. The water is a later task. But when we get all through, I visualize an earth of such tranquility and peace in nature that it must be the true marvel of all the ages. The surface of our globe will be a smooth, tough grayey-white hide. When our water plans are finalized the rainfall will be no more. No more will man be fleeing floods anywhere in the world. In cloudless heavens the winds will have died in our even temperatures; no more will man go sky-high in the twisters. The air will hang as a tranquil envelope over essentially a smooth gray ball, the smoothness being broken only by the Strongholds and the bubble-dome homes. Trees, if we want them, will spring up from the yard holes at the flick of a switch. The flowers will bloom just right and on time in wonderful bloom-metal. Animals—there will be no animals, unless we should want a few tigers and lions and such, all mechanical of course, for a staged jungle hunt. Yes! it will be a land for forever, ordered and sterilized. That’s the Dream!”