“You feel, then, that people are wrong to tie up what they’ve seen here with all the talk about columbium?”
“Definitely. Anybody who thinks that way ought to go home and do some deep breathing.”
“Thank you, Brother Theo.” Theo got up and left the telecasting booth. The announcer continued. “And now. . . . What’s this? Ladies and gentlemen, there’s just been a new development here, stand by, please. . . . Yes, yes. Oh, that’s just fine! Great! Ladies and gentlemen, our Number Two booth down on the field has just flashed us on the intercom—it looks like they’ve finally rounded up Brother Vishinu for an interview! Stand by, folks, take it away, Number Two. . . .”
Another announcer appeared on the screen, sitting at a table with Vishinu. The Union representative was dressed in a blue-and-white blazer, rather like a yachting jacket, and a long-visored white cap; his heavily jowled, dark face was composed and impassive.
“Brother Vishinu,” the announcer said deferentially, “you have just heard Brother Theo’s reassuring words to the Inland Strip. Have you anything to add to them?”
“Nothing. Except, of course, one little thing. He is totally wrong.”
“Wrong? You mean—about columbium?”
“I mean precisely about columbium.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, sir. Could you try—?”
“I will put it this way,” Vishinu said. “For many, many years now the Inland Strippers, and before them their forefathers when there was yet no Immob, have had a very smug attitude about themselves and their country. Very satisfied with themselves. They decided they alone have all the know-how to make machines and apparatus of various sorts, that in all the world there are no engineers and masters of technics like them, so naturally everybody should kiss their, mm, boots and they should be allowed to rule the whole world.”
“But. . .” the announcer faltered. “I thought, Brother Theo was just saying—”
“Semantically it made no sense,” Vishinu said impatiently. “I am explaining to you now the truth. The union engineers have been working very, very hard on prosthetics. Now it is proved that we can make the best pros in the world, better even than the master minds of the Strip. By the logic of the Strip imperialists it follows that if we have such fine know-how also we should have all the columbium in the world.”
“Brother Vishinu,” the announcer said. “You are, why, you are contradicting everything Brother Theo said.”
“Of course. Precisely my purpose.”
“Do you mean, then, that Brother Theo was wrong about what we can expect after the Games? You won’t share your discoveries with other Immobs?”
Vishinu smiled for the first time. “With other Immobs, definitely yes,” he said. “With those who betray the Immob world and stray off from the true path of Martine, definitely no.”
“What about the time element here, sir? How long have you had these new pros?”
“Please, no philosophical discussions. Not so easy to define time—the East and the West have most different approaches to this commodity.”
“When—will you announce your plans soon?”
“Very soon. In a matter of minutes everything will become most clear.”
“Minutes? Is something going to—?”
“Young man,” Vishinu said as he got up to go, “remember, please, the words of your great Brother Theo: Be patient. Rome was not burned in a day. I must go, the high jump is happening very soon now.”
As the two teams lined up on the field for the final event the announcer, badly shaken by Vishinu but trying hard to recapture his usual bland glibness, explained the procedure. Since the Games winner was already known, there was no point to prolonging things unduly. Therefore, by consent of all parties, the crossbar would, right from the start, be heisted to the highest mark ever set, at the world’s record level established nine years ago by none other than Brother Theo himself.
The field was cleared and the Union captain withdrew several yards to allow himself the usual running start; the stadium was still as the morgue. The jumper poised himself on his toes, then took several long, loping steps until he came to the take-off point. He was not exerting himself, he seemed only to hunch for a fraction of a second, bending slightly at the knees to give himself an upward push. Then he took off, effortlessly but with rocket-like force.
Up, up he shot, not even bothering to scissor his legs as jumpers usually did to facilitate clearing the bar. There was no danger of his grazing the bar, he went up stiff as an arrow, body upright and arms held rigidly at his sides—zoomed past the bar, past the tops of the uprights supporting the bar, and kept going. He had easily jumped two hundred feet. When he plummeted down he bent his knees parachuter style to break the fall, landed gracefully on his oleo-strut shock absorbers and bobbed up and down a few times and marched away.
The stadium was still, a petrified forest. Even the announcer was quiet, evidently he had nothing to say, the visual evidence spoke for itself. Months later, an eternity later, a long low ripple, a sound like wind lapping at dead leaves, passed through the crowd.
Stepping out smartly, like a drum major, the Union captain proceeded to the officials’ box and went into conference with them; in a few moments the Strip captain was called over. After some more whispered talk one of the white-capped officials went over to a microphone and addressed the crowd over the loud-speaker system.
“The Committee has an announcement to make,” he said. “In view of what has just happened the Strip team concedes the final event without a contest. The Games are over.”
Another flabby ooze of sound, the stadium was one enormous mouth softly gasping.
Now began the final ceremony. The whole Union team, some two hundred strong, proceeded to one end of the field and assembled in military formation. They began their triumphant procession, arms and legs sparkling as they rose and fell in unison. At the head of the column marched Vishinu.
The new champions reached the center of the field, wheeled at a right angle, headed like an electrified centipede for the judges’ stand. Here were assembled all the top officials of the Strip government in their capacity as hosts, all of them, headed by Helder and Theo. When the Unioneers arrived at the stand Vishinu raised his arm and they came to a halt. At a second signal from their leader they went into precise side-stepping maneuvers until the several rows had fused and they were all spread out in a single line running parallel to the stand. They stood rigidly at attention, Vishinu at the center of the formation and a few paces in front of it.
Helder rose to speak, holding a large golden object which gleamed in the sun. Theo stood too, at the President’s right. The camera panned in on Helder for a close-up, the object in his arms bulked large on the screen—a statue, miniature reproduction of the gigantic sculpture at the hub of New Jamestown, showing a man being run over by a steamroller. But something had been added: the triumphant figure of a quadro equipped with pros was straddling the machine, exactly like the figure of Martine in the bas-relief outside the Martine Home. He rode the steamroller with the extravagant chest-bursting pride of Prometheus unbound, in his hand a javelin instead of a bolt of lightning.
The camera moved upward to Helder’s face. Martine stirred, slid from his chair and sank to his knees in front of the television. The face was as he remembered it but grown meatier and more pensive—brown hair thinned considerably at the forehead, long nose thickened and inset more deeply, dimples lengthened into crevice-like folds, the thin pressed lips become a harsh and undeviating incongruous gash that seemed laid out alongside the otherwise irregular features with a T-square, the eyes still intense gray pinpoints but ringed with thick shadows that were new. There was trouble written on this face, a tension not entirely under control. When the camera backed away Helder’s legs came into view: plastic. Somewhere in the stadium a band played a few bars of some brassy flourish, then Helder began to speak.
“Brother Vishinu,” he began. “Esteemed visitors from the far corne
rs of the Immob world. It is in order on this day, Peace Day, that we remind ourselves of other times, less enlightened times, when the Olympics were not the noble, fraternal occasion they are now but cultural echoes of the terrible imperialist struggles which racked the whole world—contests of egocentric persons and ethnocentric nations. You are no enemies who stand triumphant before us now, claiming your rightful prize—you are only our other, and at the moment obviously better, sides! You are ourselves! Can the left hand resent what the right hand accomplishes? Especially since we know, we know full well, that the marvels which you have unveiled before our eyes here will not be selfishly hoarded treasures. Every Immob advance is another drop in the ocean of humanity from which we all drink, the ocean of Martine.
“Yes, drained of their vicious content of man against man and people against people, the Olympics have become the great Moral Equivalent of war—Immob life on all levels has become one vast Moral Equivalent of war! Under Immob all of life has become one continuing Olympic, one unending sunny smiling Game. The Game has been snatched from the battlefield and brought into the world of community endeavor and mutuality! In the true innocent spirit of the Immob Game, therefore, I salute you, the gallant knights of joyous mutuality! You have made history here, the world will be the better for the cyber-cyto splendors of your accomplishments! And therefore, with rejoicing in my heart on this greatest of all days, Peace Day, I present this statue to your leader, Brother Vishinu. We pass it into your hands with no sense of loss. For we give to you that we may receive. . . .”
Vishinu stepped forward until he was standing directly under Helder. Helder reached down and handed the statue to him; he took it stiffly, without acknowledgment, and backed away until he had regained his original position. There was a microphone there, he spoke into it.
“You will receive, all right,” he said. “Definitely. All of you. You will be paid back double and triple for your rotten lies.”
A hushed “oh” from the massed flesh, vast and oval as the stadium itself; then a terrible silence, as of an electrovox suddenly going dead.
“Let us have a clear picture of these happenings,” Vishinu continued, speaking very slowly and precisely. “There has been no Immob, no true spirit of Martine, until this day. Until this day there has been no sharing and no equity and glad exchanges. The muck-a-mucks of the decadent West have been playing their usual game until now, the game of the lords and masters and the know-it-alls, of the global haves strutting around in front of the global have-nots. This has to stop before Immob becomes a dirty word. This week we, the East Unioneers, have put a stop to it. We represent the fresh new spirit of the East which is blowing up now a real cuber-cyto hurricane to sweep the world clean of the foul imperialist odors of the old Western masters. No, you will share nothing in our victory, Helder and Theo. What was victorious on this field was the true spirit of Immob, precisely in spite of you and your foul plots against Immob mankind.”
Behind Vishinu a frozen blur: half a million people rooted to their seats, not moving, hardly breathing. Martine’s fingers clawed at the floor, knuckles white with the strain; his face was flushed and moisture was beginning to trickle down his cheeks.
“Your imperialist crimes can no longer go unpunished. You are traitors, saboteurs, terrorists, schemers, and you will be dealt with as such. We peoples of the East, we vermin of color and backwardness, we coolies of the world, the white man’s burden—we show you now that we can do as much, even more, with your fancy vacuum tubes and transistors and nuclear energy and solenoids than you great masters of the world can. We have knocked you off your smug thrones cybernetically. Now, for the sake of everything we call Immob, we must knock you off your imperialist thrones too. On this Peace Day, in the name of Martine, for the sake of the Immob masses born and unborn, we now call you to account for your imperialist crimes.”
The Strip officials were standing rigidly in their box, stupefaction on their faces. Vishinu raised his hand once, emphatically: behind him the two hundred athletes lifted their arms too, pointing them at the officials in a gleaming mass salute, like divers ready to take the plunge.
There was a moment when nothing moved, not a sound was heard. Then Vishinu brought his hand down again, smartly, maestro pacing the flutes.
A series of sharp, explosive sounds. Simultaneously the outstretched arms of the Union athletes, all four hundred of the arms, lit up with a blinding glare. The effect was quite different from the dancing glints which usually emanated from pros: for a fleeting moment every arm seemed to be positively incandescent along its whole length.
The officials in the box reacted like drunken puppets. It was a scene out of comic opera, the gestures absurdly exaggerated and the facial contortions so unlikely that they were only clownish. Some flapped their arms wildly, like fledglings essaying to fly; others clutched their throats and thumped their chests in buffoonish frenzy, still others began to tear their hair, wring their hands, stroke their cheeks in fits of absent-mindedness: their hands came away from their bodies red. And there were some who, with no histrionics, no expressions on their faces but utter incomprehension, slumped immediately to the floor and out of sight behind the balustrade.
One by one the gesticulators, the claspers of bosoms, the hand wringers, followed suit, crumpling like marionettes from which the mover’s hand has suddenly been withdrawn. Cries of anguish came from one, then from another—sharp yelps, long meandering whines, hysterical screeches that sounded like laughter. Soon they were all on the ground, their bodies hidden from sight.
Martine had not moved from his position on the floor. He was on his knees, Mohammedan crouching before a television Mecca. He searched the scene for some sign of Helder and Theo—he had not followed what had happened to them in the confusion, they were gone from sight now.
“The swine, the swine, the swine,” he said. He thought he was just talking but it was more like screaming. “He lied. Five or six months, he said. I remember distinctly. He said five or six months.”
A humming noise now began to come over the television speaker, slowly it grew louder.
“Swine,” Martine said, shrilled, pounding the floor with his fists. “Swine. Swine. Swine.”
One of the cameramen at the stadium seemed not to have lost his wits entirely—he swiveled his camera away from the boxes and tilted it up at the sky. Onto the television screen flashed an image of dozens of planes with helicopter rotors whirring, humming, a whole fleet flying in over the western rim of the stadium at an altitude of less than two hundred feet.
Slowly the planes made their way to the center of the field, then stopped there and idled in the air. From the underside of each plane dangled a series of contraptions which looked like trapeze bars.
At last something began to move on the ground. With Vishinu still at their head, their ranks unbroken, the Union athletes proceeded with military order to the center of the field, to a point directly below the motionless planes. Vishinu crouched, then bolted upward with bulletlike speed, body turning until he was moving feet foremost, straight for one of the planes. Whether by magnetic force or whatever, his plastic feet seemed to be pulled unerringly toward one of the trapeze bars. The moment they came into contact with the bar they stuck to it, in a second he was hauled into the plane through an opening in the belly.
Now a second Unioneer—this one a quadro, moving hands first—soared upward and disappeared into a plane; then a third, then a fourth. Very quickly the sky was peppered with dozens of bodies catapulting at once. And now figures began to break loose from the solid mass of flesh huddled in a ring around the stadium; they too came to the center of the field and began the ascent into the planes. Some of them carried drawing boards, some were women, they seemed to be the visiting artists from the Union, while others of all shades and complexions, men and women alike, were unmistakably from the East too. Apparently all the Union guests at the Olympics were taking part in this vast vertical exodus, being sucked up into the sky. Martine tried to m
ake out the individual figures as they darted onto the field and then vaulted into the blue. The women, not having cybernetic limbs and therefore unable to jump by themselves, climbed onto the shoulders of male Immobs and were carried piggyback by them; Martine squinted in an effort to see one such tiny figure as she hurtled upward on the back of a brawny Union athlete, he thought she was wearing a pink-and-blue dirndl skirt but it was hard to make out, he couldn’t be sure. Uneasy rider, he thought.
More sound effects now, the spectators were beginning to come out of the paralyzing shock. A woman howled, making a quavering sound something like a yodel; a throaty male yawping began, as of an animal in terrible pain—all the sounds of terror and lamentation somehow absurd because of the time lapse between stimulus and response. Gradually, under all the haphazard sounds of individual collapse which happened to be picked up by nearby mikes, there swelled a less shrill and more substantial sound, a steadily increasing hum from many thousands of throats as they unlocked and began to vibrate—a mass whimpering.
The camera panned down into the bleachers. At random points in the ring of flesh individual figures began to move: a man stood up and staggered a few feet, drunkenly, like a sleepwalker, hands alternately rubbing temples and playing an aimless game of patty-cake; a woman began to make disjointed movements with her arms, like a windmill furiously reversing itself over and over, then dropped in a faint. Everywhere around them other people were just sitting and looking into space, as though daydreaming on a park bench.
A figure wandered into range of the camera and stood there looking jerkily from side to side, very much like a spectator at a tennis match. It was one of the announcers, apparently unaware that he was being televised. His lips were moving, they were the lips of a priest saying his beads, of a child blowing bubbles—“My God, my God, my God,” he was saying over and over in a kind of throttled sob, the words came over the audio.
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