by Sladek, John
The work camp prisoners were all political agitators, commies, anarchists and others who had tried to overthrow the government by force. Brad had got to see some of them closer up when they came to do some work on the roof of Shirley Temple. They had built an enormous black box up there – something to do with the security system for the Wall. Brad guessed it was radar. The prisoners had all looked well fed and contented, probably better off than a lot of people that had worked hard all their lives, like Brad.
‘This should be good,’ he said, breaking wind with excitement. ‘That fool has been slogging along God knows how many miles in this heat, and all for nothing. They’ll get him. Always do, or so they tell me. I figure they won’t even bother looking for him until they’ve let him bake his brains a little. They know what they’re doing, all right. There, what did I tell you?’
A helicopter cruiser had now come over the hill. It moved slowly along the barbed wire as though tacking the fugitive, though he was in plain sight. Looking back, he speeded up his walking movements, though his progress was still hopeless. Gradually the spray of dust raised by the rotors advanced, erasing his footprints.
As the cruiser closed in, the pedestrian threw himself down and tried to dig in like a crab. But the magic circle of blowing dust overtook and enclosed him. The helicopter paused, turning, poking its rear in the air, excited by the kill.
When it rose, the man was flopping in a net, a neat package hanging from the insect belly. Brad watched it out of sight.
‘By Godfrey, Irma, wasn’t that something? Our boys really know their stuff. It made me proud to be living here in the greatest country on earth. And to think that our boys are building our First Line of Defence right here where we can see it! God, it’s grand, old girl!’
The second lunch bell rang, and Brad decided to eat after all. At least today he’d have something to tell Harry Boggs, instead of the other way around. Harry thought the world revolved around him and his Listening Post work. Gossip-gathering was all it really amounted to.
‘Only, today I’ve got better gossip!’ Brad slipped in his teeth and grimaced them into position, then off he went. Irma, being an inflatable, had of course no need to eat.
Captain Middlemass
That week the residents of Donald O’Connor bunkhouse were treated to an official lecture on the Wall. Captain Mallery Middlemass turned out to be all they could have hoped, a well-burnished young man, glowing with health. They all savoured the depth of his chest, the breadth of his shoulders, the rich timbre of his voice. So unlike the usual visitors, either down-at-heels entertainers like ‘The Amazing Lepantos’ or else retired folk from other bunkhouses, people with frail lungs, uneven shoulders and thin, dry hair. The captain’s hair was shiny black as patent leather, and his eyes were dark-glowing garnets.
He explained that the Wall was a population barrier. While our own population was increasing at a reasonable rate, that of Mexico was completely out of control.
‘For years the slow poisons have been seeping across the border: marijuana, pornography, VD and cheap labour. They have seeped into America’s nervous system, turning our kids into drug addicts, infecting their minds and bodies with filth and stealing away American jobs. Poverty and its handmaidens, crime and vice, are spreading across the nation like cancer. They have one source: Spanish America!’
He showed them the model and explained some of the Wall’s special features. It would incorporate (on the Mexican side) sophisticated electronic detection equipment and weapons, capable of marking the sparrow’s fall, and (on our side) part of a new highway network connecting retirement ranches with new Will Doody Funvilles.
Brad and Harry got in line to shake the captain’s hand. Up close they could see that he was not so young, after all. The sagging patches of yellow skin around his eyes really were a case for Unvarnished Truth.
3. The Bang Gang
A Harsh Physic (II)
After Bissell, a police training expert spoke on riot control. ‘The first step is knowing when and where a riot is going to start. We can often control this factor by “priming the pump”, or staging a catalytic incident ourselves.’
‘Just a minute!’ The Great Seal looked concerned. ‘Isn’t that provocation? Is it legal?’
‘It is, the way we do it, yes, sir. We just have one man dressed as a demonstrator “attacked”, “brutally beaten” and “arrested” in sight of the mob. All simulated, of course. My department has never been against using street theatre in this way – and it’s legal.
‘Once things are in motion, we have other choices: We can contain, control or divert a riot. Sometimes we even “de-control” it, or let it get out of hand. If a mob does enough damage, we usually find public opinion hardened against them.
‘Our actual techniques are too numerous to describe – the menu of gases alone is enormous. I might mention one experiment: giving tactical police a rage-inducing drug prior to their going on duty. A related experiment is hate-suggestion TV in the duty bus. On their way to the scene of action the boys are given a dose of King Mob at his ugliest. This has produced a nine percent increase in arrests, and a whopping seventeen percent increase in nonpolice casualties! It seems worth further investigation.
‘A lot of riot work is the job of the evidence and public relations squads. The evidence squad guarantees convictions for riot crimes: conspiracy to disorder, incitement to riot and unlawful assembly. One way of doing this is to issue what we call “black” publications. These are posters, leaflets and newspapers made to look like real “underground” items, but we’ve added to them certain incriminating articles. After all, the real intentions of these radicals are to bomb and shoot the ordinary, decent citizens into submission, and it’s time we exposed them for what they are! Our evidence squad is headed by a man with considerable experience, the former editor of Unvarnished Truth magazine.
‘The public relations squad helps edit film and TV tape of riots, to help the public understand what we are doing. They remove portions that might be used to smear our tactical police forces. The national networks have all been very cooperative in this effort to close the “communications gap” and keep the American public informed. It all adds up to a whale of a lot of work for us, but we like it that way. We believe that there’s no such thing as a terrible riot – just bad publicity.’
Up the Sleeves
‘The question is, why is it legal to be a cop?’ Chug asked. The crowd, gathered to watch him and Ayn performing, were caught off balance. ‘The cop is clearly employed by the criminal, to spread crime and disorder.’
‘Commie!’ A bottle crashed at Chug’s feet.
‘Another vote for law and order,’ he remarked, and went right on. ‘Ever see a cop eat a banana?’
Ayn and Chug usually got a crowd by doing tricks. Am, in pink spangled tights and with her black hair flowing free, would swallow fire. Then Chug would take over. In immaculate evening dress, he’d stride about the cleared circle, producing fans of cards and lighted cigarettes from the air. Now that they had Ras to sell pamphlets down front, it became a smoother show. The crowds were bigger, but nastier.
Someone threw another bottle. Ayn picked up a big piece of it and took a healthy bite. The crowd was so quiet that all could hear her crunching glass. After a moment Chug resumed his speech, whipping them up to such wild enthusiasm that one or two reckless citizens bought nickel pamphlets from Ras.
‘Why is our corporation government so worried about Mexico?’ Chug asked. ‘Why are they willing to spend more money on building a wall against the Mexican poor than has been spent on the welfare of our own poor in fifty years? Could it be that mere humanity is becoming an embarrassment to our standard oil government?’
‘Go back to Russia!’
‘Russia is a state of mind. Why don’t we all go back to a human state of mind? Why is it more illegal now to blow up an empty government office building, hurting no one, than to drop tons of bombs and burning gasoline on civilian farm famili
es? Is it because the first is something the people do to a government, while the second –’
The next missile was a tire iron. It spun high against the lemon Jell-O sky and down, knocking off Chug’s silk hat. Grinning desperately, he produced two bouquets of feather flowers. Under cover of this misdirection, Ayn escaped to get the car. She picked up Ras first, then circled the crowd to get Chug as the rocks and bottles started reaching for him. Ras opened the door and a brickbat clipped Chug in.
‘The crowd wasn’t angry,’ he said, mopping blood with a string of bright silk squares. ‘Someone started that. Someone in back.’
‘I know, I saw them,’ said Ras. ‘Lambs.* Four of them. I noticed when they got out of their Cadillac, with coats over their arms to hide the tire irons and bats. I tried to warn you, but they were too quick.’
‘Well, it shows they care.’
Ayn, Chug and Ras
Although various people drifted in and out of the group centred on OK’s Bookstore, Ayn and Chug were its constant twin nuclei. Formerly ‘The Amazing Lepantos’, they had fallen into revolution as a new gimmick, an addition to their repertoire. What a show-stopper, to finish with government for good! But now the gimmick had ensleeved them. Ayn ran the bookstore, which specialized in the occult and so drew those hungering for utopia.
But instead of the indigestible stone of Marxist tracts, Ayn gave them the bread of poetry. OK Press produced pamphlets calling no one brother, exhorting none to rise up or join in, making no demand to stand up and be counted. The Garden of Regularity was a spirited defence of cannibalism on the grounds of its ‘natural laxative effects’, while Think Again, Mr Big Business! was a pornographic radio play. One unaccountably popular item was a movie scenario by ‘Phil Nolan’, called The U– S– of A–.
Chug was a spare-time anarchist, as he had been a spare-time Lepanto. His real job was mechanical designer for Will Doody Enterprises. It was Chug who choreographed the antics of the robot animals that made up each Doody Funville show.
Bison and beaver were programmed to dance and sing the stories of famous Americans, all of them Unforgettable Characters. A caribou related the musical story of the invention of the telephone by ‘Mr Ring-a-ding-dingy Bell’. Otters caroled of Abner Doubleday’s game. The pleasanter parts of the legend of John D. Rockefeller were repeated by a shy, long-lashed brontosaurus.
In the Doody world it was always Saturday afternoon in a small Midwestern town of 1900. Science was represented by Tom Edison, poetry by Ed Guest, painting by Norm Rockwell and Grandma Moses, literature by Booth Tarkington and Horatio Alger, culture by the ice cream parlour and politics by the barbershop. And all was interpreted by cuddly robots.
Currently Chug was arranging the linkages of a duck to enable it to duckspeak of Thomas Paine:
Yup, yup! He was a firebrand
And his brand of fire
Was more than old King George could stand.
The song omitted mention of how Paine had died: old, lonely and so despised by the Americans whose freedom he’d laboured for that they could not suffer him to sit in a stagecoach with decent folk. In spare moments at work, Chug drew sketches for impossibly elaborate singing bombs.
Ras became the third steadfast member of the group. He was an unemployed high school teacher who apparently drifted to them and stuck. Running the press, minding the store, handing out pamphlets – nothing was too much trouble for him. That’s because he was, as everyone knew perfectly well, a police spy.
Ras found it hard to infiltrate them, not because they were secretive, but because they seemed to have no secrets at all. They were careless about publicity, and indeed, the group had never been given a name. Baffled by their openness, Ras kept digging. He never doubted for a moment that they had concealed a sinister purpose, like Chesterton’s anarchists, under a cloak of jolly anarchy.
‘Where do we keep the bombs?’ he would ask.
‘Up here,’ Ayn would say, tapping her head with solemn significance. ‘Truth be our dynamite.’
‘And Justice our permanganate,’ Chug would add. ‘And our blasting caps be Freedom, Honour and –’
‘No, really. The real bombs.’
They hated to disappoint him. ‘You’ll know soon enough, Ras. It’s just that we hate to tell you too soon, in case you fell into the hands of the police or anything.’
Then Chug and Ayn would go off somewhere and laugh, while Ras went to report. It never occurred to them to ‘deal with’ him in any way, or even to withdraw their friendship. He was, after all, a needed romantic figure, an Informer. Without him the group would have been dull indeed.
The Circuit Breaker
Ras was supposed to be giving old Mr Eric von Jones tuition in mathematics. Shortly after each lesson, Mr von Jones would take a piano lesson from an FBI agent. In this way Ras and the agent communicated without knowing each other’s name or face.
‘Have you completed the problems I assigned?’
Somehow asking Mr von Jones the simplest question set off in him an elaborate cycle of clockwork twitches and tics: hand to mouth, roll of eye, lift of brow and shrug of shoulder. The cycle took a full minute to complete.
‘Yes … here.’ The old man slid across the dining table a dozen sheets of carefully written equations. On the last page were Ras’s orders.
‘Fine. Now here’s your corrected work from last time.’ Ras slid back to him a report on the OK’s Bookstore group. ‘Now, shall we go over some trigonometric ratios?’
The twitches unwound once more. ‘Yes … I’d like that.’ Squaring his notebook with the corners of the table, he selected one of a dozen pencils all sharpened to the same length and headed the page ‘Notes’.
‘You don’t need to really take notes,’ Ras whispered.
‘I’m very … interested in ratios.’
Ras looked at him: a corpse at attention. No doubt Mr von Jones made the FBI man teach him scales too. That parsnip-coloured face seemed to glow only at the prospect of some tiresome duty. Probably he would go on from one chore to another, carrying himself through routine motions for a few more years, until at last he was called to the great treadmill in the sky.
Dr Lane’s Secret Journal (II)
I can’t understand how Hank knew they were going to build a wall along the border. One with a ‘white line … fifteen hundred miles long’, which is a highway! It all seemed just babbling at the time, but now even the ‘good-bye Mexico’ makes sense. I have also just learned that a Will Doody Funville is to be built somewhere in the area, against the wall. No doubt ‘Up against the wall, robot!’ refers to Doody’s robot animals!
This seems to be a genuine case of clairvoyance. There is just no other rational explanation!
Harry Boggs on Life
Harry gave an after-dinner lecture on the subject ‘Is There Life on Other Planets?’ to a dozen other residents of Donald O’Connor bunkhouse. He concluded that there certainly was, and that it was of the utmost importance to get in contact with the Uranians.
‘That’s the real reason they’re building this wall,’ he said. ‘With powerful telescopes, the Uranians will be able to see it.’
Another important means of communication could be telepathy, he went on, but most of us had our telepathic equipment damaged by a lack of vital sea kelp in our diet. When he’d finished, four or five white heads in the audience nodded, as if in agreement. Brad Dexter’s was among them; Harry bad seen bundles of Unvarnished Truth on a cart, bound for the incinerator. And draped over the top bundle, what looked like a deflated rubber dolly …
No time for such thoughts now, of course. Time for Harry’s important government work. Red-faced and breathless with vision, he hurried to his room and tuned in on Listening Post.
‘Number 764882. Number 764882,’ said an announcer slowly, so he could copy it down. Two women’s voices came on the air.
‘ … a slipped disk. But all in all, it wasn’t bad.’
‘Haven’t they got any forjias? No? OK, bring m
e the roast sud. What did you say his name was?’
Harry was happier talking about his important government work than actually doing it, but he soldiered along. The FBI expected him to listen to an hour a day of this:
‘Impinging upon my career. The great chain of buying, that’s what it is. Impinging and impugning … impugn sort … Sri Mantovani … Einstein and people like Einstein said that the world was flat … reliance … bargain jay or meep …’
Harry vowed that he would never again say anything dull or unimportant in a public place.
MEMO: From the desk of A. Lincoln
I generally find that a man slow to get a joke is slow to win a battle. That is why I like to see my generals piss-eyed with laughter at all times. General Ned Allison tells me he knows of three soldiers, who had been imbibing, and were sent to a certain address in Gettysburg – but I expect that this is just one of Ned’s ‘leg-pullers’. Hope you and Martha are well. I and the missus are tolerable.
The Séance
Chug and Ayn had wanted to go, so much so that Ras suspected a secret meeting. Perhaps this ‘séance’ was really the place where they received their orders, from the Central Council of Anarchists. He’d volunteered to go with them, and they’d insisted he go in their place. There was his dilemma: Were they getting him out of the way while they went elsewhere, or were they trying to bluff him out of the séance?
He went, still vaguely expecting the Central Council, men in beards and dark glasses, calling themselves Breakfast, Coffee Break, Lunch, Tea, Dinner, Supper and Midnight Snack …
The medium was an anaemic old lady with knotty flesh hanging from her arms, Mrs Ross. The others were Hank James (an old man with mad eyes), Dr Lane (looked like a young optician), Mrs Paris (a plump old lady with an asthmatic Pekingese and a hat of similar material) and Steiner, a young man with erupting skin.
As soon as the lights went out, Ras felt another presence, an enormous fat man who almost filled the room. In the deep blind blackness it was terrifying, for Ras dared not move for fear of touching the fat man.
