The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “So because I didn’t take your damn key, you come here with some crazy hippy just to humiliate me?”

  —Ted looked our way. I caught his eye. He shrugged at me as Robin fingered his neck. I shrugged him back a go-ahead sign, knowing he wouldn’t. Nasty, nasty!—

  “Not just to humiliate you,” said The Man in Black. “She also happens to be a groovy chick who’s free as the birds and is an excellent fuck.”

  “Meaning I’m a bad fuck?” Arlene nearly screamed. But there were clockwork gears grinding.

  “Meaning you play unpleasant games with both of our heads and Robin is a Chile of Nature and therefore a welcome change of style,” I said.

  —Said Chile of Nature was now kissing Ted. Was I uptight behind my massive cool? Well... not really... And anyway, there was Doris walking toward them—

  “So you prefer her to me?”

  “I didn’t say that. The invitation is still open. Any time you want the key, just holler. But in the meantime, don’t put down a chick with more guts than you’ll ever have.”

  —Doris was watching the kiss with a knowing, secure smile. She let them finish, then said something non-uptight to Ted. Ted and Doris smiled fatuously at each other. Poor Ted, his last bluff called! Robin chatting with them like some genteel tea-party all smiles all around. Evil chick! Evil chick!—

  “What do you mean, more guts?”

  “Guts enough to live her own life without Big Daddy Harvey,” I said. “Guts enough to do without a piano roll.”

  “Ooooh...” Arlene snarled through her bear-trap lips, her hands balled up into fists. Hit me, baby! I telepathed. Do you good.

  “You two have a nice little talk?” Robin said, appearing beside me. “I’m not interrupting anything?”

  Robin smiled sweetly at Arlene. “Our boy’s a nice tasty piece of dick, isn’t he?” she said woman-to-womanwise. “You can ball him tonight if you want to. Lots of other action around.” And she halfturned as if to leave like a gentlewoman.

  “Oooh shit!” Arlene howled. And she stomped off into the depths of Uncle Harvey’s Bavarian Cuckoo Clock.

  “Evil chick!” I hissed at Robin.

  Tiger-eyes and a pussycat smile. She parted her lips and ran her dainty pink tongue around them.

  The Man in Black shrugged and kissed his Chile of Nature hard on the mouth and let her fill his own with her luscious magic witch’s tongue.

  “I do not believe this place,” Robin said as we took a breather in the dark hallway separating the monkey cage from what is sometimes laughingly referred to as the real world. “I just do not believe it.”

  “Neither do I,” said The Man in Black. “I don’t believe it either, is how come I can hang around and not get incorporated into the cuckoo-clock mechanism.”

  “Yeah man, but why? Do you dig what this is all about, do you really dig it? I mean, I can play at being an evil chick, but that Harvey cat is not playing, man. Eeevill All those cartoon-character people... he’s got their souls in a paper bag. Yeah, he probably goes home and sticks all those souls in a hookah and smokes ‘em.” She touched my cheek with the palm of her hand. “You’re a nice cat, I like you. I don’t want to see old Soul-Smoker roll you into a joint and suck you up, baby.”

  “Harvey Brustein can’t touch The Man in Black,” I assured her. “I have the strength of ten because my heart is rotten. Besides, tonight, thanks to better living through chemistry, I have seen the mechanism. No way he can stick a piano roll in me. I can take old Harv any time I want to. Do you believe, girl, do you believe?”

  “Well yeah, I guess, I mean I can see your game and it’s not his game. You’re a heavy cat, but so is he. I suppose you can stand him off—”

  “Stand him off!” The Man in Black shouted indignantly. “I can STOMP HIM INTO THE FUCKING GROUND, you better believe it!”

  “Yeah man, but why bother? Who needs this bummer?”

  “Nobody needs it,” I said. “That’s just the point. None of these poor fuckers need it. Harvey is scooping their souls and replacing them with clockwork.”

  “Are you going to save them?”

  “Fuckin’-A, baby!”

  “But why do you care about these losers? They’re gray, they’re pimply, they’re cartoon-characters.”

  “Yeah, but what were they before Harvey wired them into his Bavarian Cuckoo Clock? Maybe they were all groovy people once. Ted was.”

  Robin made a face like biting into a lemon. “Ted?” she said. “Man, that is one pathetic cat! A mile of mouth and an inch of action. The cat’s a total fraud.”

  “That’s the point, chile. Time was, Ted wasn’t a fraud. Time was I’d kick the shit out of you if I saw you making eyes at Ted because I’d know what would happen. Harvey’s cut my friend’s balls off. Think I let him get away with that?”

  “Wouldn’t have something to do with that Arlene, would it?”

  “You’re jealous!”

  Robin looked me cold in the eye with pupils as hard and measured as ball-bearings. Smiled a smile a million years old. “Baby,” she said evenly, “when I find myself getting jealous of a chick like that, I take ten thousand mikes and go out in a blaze of glory. Do you believe that?”

  “I believe,” I said.

  “Groovy. Then listen man, you’re doing a Knight in Armor number. You’re not so hung up on the chick as hung up on the ego-trip of saving her from the Soul-Smoker.”

  “So? Didn’t you tell me that was my game? Don’t put down ego. Where would I be without it?”

  “Yeah, but that’s a Goodness Trip. It’s a drag. You’re blowing your cool.”

  “Are you accusing me of not being evil?” The Man in Black asked righteously.

  “You’re in danger, man. I haven’t seen you do anything really evil tonight.”

  “Didn’t I give it to Harvey in there?”

  “You started to, but as soon as dear sweet Arlene showed up, you blew your cool and forgot about it.”

  By God, the chick was right! I had forgotten all about Harvey as soon as Arlene had showed up. Yeah, but....

  “But I did a really evil number on Arlene,” I said.

  “I didn’t see that,” Robin said primly. “Come on baby, go on in there and let’s see some evil. Kill! Kill!”

  “You are an eeevil chick!”

  “Come on tiger, go on in there and let’s see you do your thing. Give me Harvey’s head on a platter. Bet you can’t! Bet you can’t....”

  “Evil chick,” I said, but this time I smiled. She was right; I was losing the razor-edge of my cool.

  “What you need is a booster-shot,” Robin said, taking my hand and leading me down the hall to the coatroom. “I’ve got about four good tokes in the hash pipe in my coat. Let’s go suck up some tasty evil and then go set the cartoon on fire!”

  “Lead on, Lady Macbeth,” said The Man in Black.

  Just what the witchdoctor ordered. My cool honed to a switchblade edge, I was Kid Death, The Man in Black, gliding out of the shadows with his Dark Lady and onto the Main Street of Cuckoo-clock City. The Smoker of Souls, Master of the Cuckoo Clock, had gathered most of his creatures around him, or caused their piano rolls to form them up into a series of concentric semicircles centered around the foot of the dais on which he stood. Sense of the night building to a climax; all individual piano roll programs coming together at a preprogrammed harmonic point and Harvey standing above this space-time nexus ready to make his move, change the Master Piano Roll, the hand is quicker than the eye.

  But not quicker than the All-Seeing Eye of The Man in Black, knows all, sees all, kills all. Two would face each other across the nexus in the Big Shootout.

  The Man in Black moved to the rear edge of the crowd and stood there projecting the blackest of vibes as the Dark Lady held his hand and whispered into his ear: “Kill... kill... kill....”

  Up at the front of things, Ted had planted one boot up on the dais, and was saying: “Come on, Harvey, why not?”

  With a butte
r-would-not-melt-in-my-mouth look on its face, the Smoker of Souls said: “Are you really serious about this, Ted?”

  “Of course I’m serious,” Ted said. “It’d be easy if we all did it together.”

  The Man in Black and his Lady drifted closer to the front of the crowd; elbows and knees were not necessary as a wavefront of black vibes parted the sea before them.

  “Move the Foundation to San Francisco?” said the Smoker of Souls.

  “Sure,” said an alternate voice of the Smoke of Souls through the speaking-mechanism of the Ted-thing. “All together, like a commune. We could set up committees—one to find jobs, one to find pads, one to find a house for the Foundation. It’d work—”

  Way in a far corner of the room, Arlene was standing apart from it all with her body but sucking it up with her eyes—New York patriotism conflicting with her San Francisco sub-program.

  “You’re assuming that we really want to move to San Francisco,” Harvey said. Ah, the master’s touch: the Devil playing Angel’s Advocate, knowing how well his San Francisco piano rolls had programmed his creatures. Gotta admire confidence.

  “You mean you wouldn’t go?” said Bill Nelson.

  “I didn’t say that,” said Magnanimous Harv. “How many of you would seriously consider going to San Francisco if the Foundation moved? I don’t mean would move, I just want some idea of how many would take the idea seriously.”

  The Cuckoo clock chimed the hour of doom with a great murmur coming off the vocal piano rolls of all the loose ones that weren’t nailed down (Ted, Linda, Rich, Weeping Willy, Bonnie Elbert, Tod and Judy, like that): just pure affirmative noise on cue, essence of the Piano Roll Blues.

  “Well, I believe in coming to a consensus on things like this,” the Smoker of Souls said. “You could bring this up at a meeting, Ted. We could kick it around for a couple of weeks or even longer, and if the group consensus favored a move to San Francisco, I’d probably go along with it.”

  “Go... go... go...” Robin whispered in my ear. She was right: it was time for The Man in Black to make his move.

  “LIAR!” I shouted. One huge knife-edged word that cut through the murmuring like flame through smoke.

  The silence held; it was my ally since the next move was Harvey’s and I intended to force him to make it. I pulsed heavy black vibes at Harvey. He sucked them in and transmuted the energy to a thin Buddha-smile.

  “You apparently want to say something, Tom,” Harvey finally said softly. “Why don’t you go ahead and say it?” The smile broadened into a leer and the moment broke: the animals giggled. “Aw shit, he’s stoned out of his mind,” Bill Nelson said.

  “Stoned into his mind,” Robin said, stepping up beside me.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’m stoned and you suckers aren’t. If you were, you’d see the game that’s being played here.”

  “Crazy junkie!” Linda-uptight-Kahn shouted to approving murmurs. “Gibbering—”

  “SHUT UP, CUNT!” I roared, resorting to Tactical Nuclear Gross-Out Weapons. They were bombed back into Stone Age Silence.

  “Whose idea was this San Francisco thing, Harvey?” I said.

  “It’s my idea,” Ted said. “I—”

  “SHUT UP, TED! Come on Harv, WHOSE IDEA?”

  “It’s Ted’s idea, apparently—” Harvey said.

  “WHOSE IDEA, HARVEY?”

  “Stop yelling, Hollander,” Charley Dees said.

  “Hey, what is this, Tom,” Ted said sincerely. “You heard me talking about it before, man. You know it’s my idea. So why are you—”

  “Who put the idea in your head, Ted?”

  “Nobody did,” Ted said indignantly. “Are you calling me a liar? If you weren’t my friend and if you weren’t stoned—”

  “Harvey programmed the idea into your head,” I said. “Didn’t you, Harvey?”

  Harvey looked out over his congregation, smiled at them, shrugged, looked at me. “I’m afraid none of us have any idea of what you’re talking about,” he said. “You seem to be suffering from severe paranoid—”

  “LIAR!” I shouted. “Who’s got a wife and kids in San Francisco, Harvey, you or Ted?” Something flickered for a moment behind Harvey’s watery eyes. Then the spark went out.

  “I fail to see—”

  “THE FUCK YOU DO! You want to go back to San Francisco and you want all your suckers to follow you. That’s why you put the idea in their heads.”

  Harvey smiled a great shit-eating smile. “Is there anyone who thinks I... put the idea of moving the Foundation to San Francisco in his mind?” Silence, aside from a few snickers. “See, Tom?” Harvey said. “You’re imagining things. If you’re high on drugs, you may even be hallucinating. It’s not surprising that your hallucinations are taking paranoid form, considering—”

  “Don’t you see what he’s doing?” Goddamit, couldn’t they see? Wasn’t there anything protoplasmic alive out there? “He’s got your minds so controlled you don’t even know you’re controlled! Don’t you see? Can’t any of you see?”

  I turned and stared the whole lot of them in their nonfaces. Doris, Ida, O’Brien, Charley. Dead fish-eyes. Linda, Rhoda Steiner, Bill Nelson. Corpses animated by clockwork. Blum, Chester White, Mannie Davis. Swiss music-box zombies. Rich, Tod and Judy, Frieda Klein. I stared at them all and a million glass eyes seemed to stare blindly back.

  I looked into Ted’s face, inches from my own—dead, dead! Harvey had scooped him out hollow and filled the shell with himself.

  “Ted, Ted, for Chrissakes, can’t you see? It’s a fucking Cuckoo clock! You’ve been programmed! WAKE UP, DAMN YOU, WAKE UP!”

  “Hey man, take it easy... Maybe you should lie down and—”

  “And die? Lie down and die like the rest of you?”

  I looked around the room trying to find a human face. Zombies. Robots. A million dead eyes. But... but off in her corner, Arlene’s eyes seemed to be wet with tears. She was crying—for me? But that was all wrong, I should be crying for her, for Ted, for Doris, for a roomful of corpses who had sold their souls for a mass of clockwork.

  I whirled around, screamed at Harvey: “YOU FUCKING MURDERING SON OF A BITCH! Give them back their souls! GIVE THEM BACK THEIR SOULS!”

  I looked out into a forest of eyes. Cold glass eyes of animated corpses reflecting the neon-light of mechanical nonbeing. Millions of unblinking dead eyes whirling, whirling, whirling...

  The room started to spin around me. I felt Robin’s hand of warm real flesh in mine, my only anchor to flesh-and-blood reality.

  “Take it easy, man,” she said. “They’re just not worth it. Don’t let them freak you out. There’s nothing alive in here to care about, anyway.”

  I stared at Harvey, with his pseudo, plastic concern painted on his lying face. At Ted, shaking his head at his freaking friend. At a roomful of deaf clockwork.

  I was beaten.

  Disgusted, infuriated, frustrated, saddened beyond hope, I let Robin lead me out of the room and into the dark hallway. Behind us, there was a short moment of dead silence, and then I heard the machinery of the Cuckoo clock whirring back into an imitation of life behind me.

  14 - The Cuckoo-clock Revisited

  Everyone is a sucker for something for nothing, but as I climbed the stairs to the Foundation on Monday night, I wondered whether it wasn’t possible to carry the great American tradition of never looking a gift horse in the mouth a bit too far.

  A special group for the benefit of little old me, just because you need it and we care, no extra charge, was how Harvey had put it to me on the phone last night. Oh sure. A bunch of the Senators are throwing a little party for you at the Forum, Caesar, just because we dig you, baby. I’ll be there with bells on Brutus, old buddy.

  No man, I knew damn well that I was about to walk into Harvey’s version of a Court of the Star Chamber. No question about it, I had really grossed them all out Saturday night, if nothing else. Probably nothing else. It had been a long time (well, anyway, sinc
e my acid trip) since I had been that stoned. Too stoned to make sense to unstoned Foundation-heads. Not too stoned to remember all events that had occurred. But too stoned to remember how I had really felt during those events. Not too stoned to retain the vision of Foundation-as-Cuckoo-clock. But too stoned to be sure whether or not in hash veritas.

  Which, of course, was why I had decided to answer Harvey’s subpoena. Dope can give you a vision that seems realer than real, but you can’t know that it’s true until you take a second look at things straight. Works like binocular vision: take a look stoned (left eye), then straight (right eye). Either eye sees only a two-dimensional halftruth, but put them together and you see reality three-dimensionally, which should be closer to the way things really are. That’s why this trip was necessary: looking at something only stoned is no better than looking at it only straight. Truth is in the intersection between stoned and straight realities.

  Besides, when you’re as stoned as I was, it’s pretty hard to get through to anyone who isn’t on your trip. I had made sense to me Saturday, and I still made sense to me today, but I obviously hadn’t gotten through to the poor slobs trapped in the Cuckoo-clock. Being straight now, but still in possession of the memory of the vision, I might be able to get it across now And furthermore, if those motherfuckers thought Tom Hollander wouldn’t have the balls to show his face in their creep-joint again, they had another think coming!

  But as I entered the Star Chamber itself, I found that I had another think coming. In addition to Harvey, Arlene, Rich, Charlie, Ida, Doris and Linda—the group I had come to know and love—there was my buddy Ted sitting on the right hand of God. To Ted’s right, Doris, Rich, and Arlene; to Harvey’s left, Ida, Charley and Linda. And an empty seat for the victim encircled by the arms of the crescent and facing the judge, and Smoker of Souls, good old Harvey.

  All of them very solemn and soberly concerned for the soul of the heretic. Even Arlene mirrored the group’s collective this-is-for-your-own-good expression. If I were Charles De Gaulle, I’d have gone into ecstasy at finally really digging what it felt like to be Joan of Arc versus the Inquisition.