Three

by Shoshi

standing. He has not been invited to sit down. No one is ever invited to sit down in the Supreme One’s presence.

  “You should be told that we did suffer one casualty.”

  “Bound to happen on a raid. One of your soldiers?”

  The Captain hesitates again. “No, it was—the observer.”

  The Commander’s face seems to freeze.

  “He had the habit of wandering off. We couldn’t---”

  The Commander has become curt and very tense.

  “You sure it was him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the body?”

  “We disposed of it at sea.”

  The Captain’s adjutant leans forward and speaks softly but audibly. “Except, Captain—to remind you. We do not have the head. All we had was the body.”

  “What!!” The Supreme One seems almost to catch fire and burn. “You don’t have the head?”

  “No, sir,” says the Captain.

  The Commander tries hard to contain his fracturing anger.

  “This is the most impossible act of incompetence I ever heard of!” He exudes an edge of froth along the brute line of his mouth. “The head is what matters. It’s all that matters.” He stands for a long wildfire moment staring at this contemptible subordinate. In a low threatening voice he says: “You will instantly return to the South Pacific and retrieve it. Or I warn you, Captain: this will be the end of your career--or something infinitely worse.”

  “Yes, sir. Instantly.” He and his adjutant bow, turn sharply about and march in lock step out of the room.

  As they hurry down a hallway, the adjutant is almost quaking. He says: “I can’t believe what I just heard. A man with your record and reputation.”

  “He meant every word of it.”

  “What could be so important about a man’s head? Especially a man as useless as that?”

  “I can only think of one possibility,” says the Captain. “His head contained something it probably shouldn’t have, and the Commander wants it back.”

  The adjutant is whispering now. “Are you referring to the---?” He silently mouths a single word.

  “All matons contain bits of the Code,” says the Captain in a low voice. “This individual might have had more of it than the rest of us. Yes, he was useless in the field, but I knew there was something about him. Some special capability--the real reason he was sent along on our mission.”

  The Commander is alone again. He seems to have forgotten for the moment about the Captain. He stands at the vast windows of his soaring office watching something. Is it the slow sky-crossing of the twin moons? He picks up a small telescope and peers at them a while longer. What is he thinking? We will know soon enough.

  We are back with Feena and her brother. They are relaxing with the others on an island beach. The enemy is gone, and it is no longer raining. All present have washed away the grime of battle, and Feena is back to her customary, flower-like radiance. The sun shines tepidly in a damp sky while they play a pickup game of soccer. The twin moons are about to set in synchrony on the opposite side of the earth. As she twists and turns about the beach, we can see she is ballet-graceful and skilled. We can also see Feena’s body is as beautiful as her face.

  “I guess we’re safe enough for now,” says Gailus. “They must be back at their headquarters boasting to the Commander about how they devastated us again, about the valuable training it provided their soldiers.” He gives the soccer ball a vicious kick, and it sails far into the shrubbery. Feena chases after it. Suddenly, there’s a stifled whimper. Gailus can tell she has found something unpleasant and runs into the bushes after her.

  “What is it, Feena?” He calls to her, but there’s no answer.

  He finds her down on her knees in a clearing. She looks up at him, obviously distraught. On the ground in front of her, partly immured in the sand, is a man’s head. It is no ordinary head. It looks like a human head, a handsome one, but it does not bleed. Protruding from its neck are the frayed ends of tangled wiring.

  Gailus whistles a low whistle and drops to his knees beside her. “I’ve always suspected this,” he says. “But they remove their dead and wounded too quickly for us to see wounds like this one.” He thinks back. “At first it seemed like they’d brought all these soldiers with them on their rockets. Yet, even when we destroyed so many of them, they always replaced them quickly.” He shakes his head as he looks at Feena. “This is why they always take their wounded with them. They don’t want us to know.”

  “Know what?” she says. “We rescue our wounded, too.”

  “That’s so we can nurse them and try to save them,” he says.

  “They rescue their wounded and dead so they can reuse them.” Understanding dawns on her. “You mean so they can fabricate new soldiers---create their ‘matons,’” she says. She is silent for a few moments. It seems to shock her. “It’s why, when they die,” she says, “they don’t bleed, they don’t cry out.”

  He says quietly: “They just---die. They’re not mindlessly brave, Feena. Matons imitate life, but they don’t have life.”

  She hears a faint voice. “Who’s that?” she says looking around her.

  Gailus can hear it, too. “I thought we were all out here together playing soccer. Must be a visitor from one of the other islands.”

  “Hello!” she shouts and jumps up, but no one shouts back.

  She runs out to the beach and peers along it to where it disappears from sight. She sees no visitor’s boat pulled up on the sand. The voice is now calling her name. Strangest of all, it seems to be right next to her—no, not next to her but inside her brain. She walks back to the place where Gailus is still standing by the man’s head in the sand. It seems to be motionless, but it also seems to be looking right at her. It’s decidedly eerie.

  She finds herself asking aloud: “Is that head staring at me?”

  A voice answers her, again inside her head. “You don’t have to say it aloud, Feena. I can hear you perfectly well if you just think it.”

  There’s a pause. “Yes, I can also see you.”

  “Oh, Gailus, I can’t stand this,” she says and runs to her brother’s side.

  “I can hear him, too,” he says--and, then, he bursts out laughing. “This can’t be true, Feena, but it is.”

  Incredibly, as they both stare at it, the severed head appears just barely to smile at them.

  We are back in the Commander’s headquarters. Do you recognize it, the one you crafted in your imagination? You were given a few hints back there—but you were left to imagine it for yourself. It is a vast space with cavernous windows that take in the entire sky. A map of the whole world sweeps out across the curved ceiling. A galaxy of points of light spears downward from pockets sunk into the map—like deer tracks on a beach. The Commander is watching the double moons again through a telescope now set up on a tripod. After a while he starts pacing around. He’s obviously worried.

  “What is it, Commander? I’ve never seen you so distracted.” This remark comes from a personage you haven’t met yet--- a creature that appears to be neither robot-like nor humanoid. In fact, it seems to be completely out of place in the Commander’s office. Bright yellow and impudently incongruous, it is sitting on the edge of the Commander’s desk. It has permission to do that?

  It looks very much like one of those tall, inflated stove-pipe freaks with a painted face, a topknot of flappity hair and two crazily flip flop arms that you see outside car washes and gas stations---put there to catch the eye of passing motorists. A blower fills them with air so they jerk and snap and wag their arms. We can see that the Commander is rather fond of it. Oddest of all, he appears to listen to its advice.

  “I’m worried about that head,” says the Commander.

  “Worried about who might get hold of it? Who cares?” says the stove-pipe man in its high, nasal voice. “What’s the use of a
head without a body to do what it says?”

  “I made a mistake,” says the Commander.

  “Made a mistake?” says the car wash thing. It lets go a short, sharp giggle. “I thought it was impossible for the Commander to ever make a mistake.”

  “That admission must never leave this room,” says the Supreme One sternly. “Or my anger will be titanic.”

  “Of course,” says the creature.

  “Remember, I can destroy you in a millisecond. You live by my whim.”

  “Of course, I remember,” it says in a contrite voice.

  “The fact that I allow you talk to me at all is a secret.”

  “Your secret is safe, Supreme One.” The Commander seems mollified. The stove-pipe ghoul tosses and yanks for a moment. Then, it asks: “What’s the mistake?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Come on, Commander, am I your advisor or not?”

  There is a long hesitation. Finally, he says: “It has the Code in its head. A piece of it.” The Commander pulls off his skullcap and runs a wavering hand through his animal-like hair. “All right, I admit it. It has the whole Code.”

  “That was not cool, Commander.”

  “I know, I know. I couldn’t think of any other place to hide it.

  Some jerk barged in here without warning, and I had to hide it somewhere—quickly. Hiding it in a maton’s head seemed safe enough.”

  “But what if this maton figures out a way to access some of the Code? Maybe all of it? The Code has vast capabilities.” The cartoon figure takes on a very