Ellison Wonderland Part 11

She only acknowledged his presence and his question with a half-nod and soft grunt. He motioned to the black-tied bartender and said, "I'd like a gla.s.s of ginger ale. Give the young lady whatever she, uh, she wants please."

The woman quirked an eyebrow and mumbled, "Bourbon and water, Ned." The bartender moved away.

They sat silently till he returned with the drinks. Then the girl said, "Thanks." Arthur nodded, and moved the gla.s.s around in its own circle of moisture. "I like ginger ale. Never really got to like alcohol, I guess. You don't mind?"

Then she turned, and stared at him. She was really quite attractive, with little lines in her neck, around her mouth and eyes. "Why the h.e.l.l should I care if you drink ginger ale? You could drink goat's milk and I couldn't care less." She turned back.

Arthur hurriedly answered, "Oh, I didn't mean any offense. I was only--"

"Forget it."

"But I--"

She looked at him with vehemence. "Look Mac, you on the make, or what? You got a pitch? Come on, it's late."

Now, confronted with it, Arthur found himself terrified. He wanted to cry. It wasn't the way he had thought it would be. His throat had a choke lost in it. "I--I, why I--""Oh, Jeezus, wouldn't 'cha know it. A freak. My luck, always my luck." She bolted the rest of her drink and slid off the stool. She smoothed the miniskirt over her thighs and backside as she moved toward the door of the bar.

Arthur felt panic rising in him. This was the last chance, and it was important, terribly important! He spun on the stool and called after her, "Miss--"

She stopped and turned. "Yeah?"

"I thought we might, uh, could I speak to you?"

She seemed to sense his difficulty, and a wise look came across her features. She came back and stopped very close to him. "What now, what is it?"

"Are you, uh, are you do, doing anything this evening?"

Her sly look became businesslike. "It'll cost you fifteen. You got that much?"

Arthur was petrified. He could not answer. But as though it realized the time had come for action, his hand dipped into his jacket pocket and came up with the four thousand dollars. Eight five hundred dollar bills, crackling and fresh. He held them out for her to see, then the hand returned them to the pocket. The hand was the businessman, himself merely the bystander.

"Wow," she murmured, her eyes bright. "You're not as bad as I thought, fella. You got a place?"

They went to the big, silent house, and he undressed in the bathroom, for it was the first time, and he held a granite chunk of fear in his chest.

When it was over, and he lay there warm and happy, she rose from the bed and moved to his jacket. He stared at her, and there was a strange feeling in him. He knew it for what it was, for he had felt a distant relative to it, in his feelings for Mother. Arthur Fulbright knew love, of a sort, and he watched her as she fished out the bills.

"Jesus," she murmured, touching the money reverently.

"Take it," he said softly.

"What? How much?"

"All of it. It doesn't mean anything." Then he added, as if it was the highest compliment he could summon: "You are a very good woman."

"Why, thanks, honey."

She held the money tightly. Four thousand dollars. What a simple little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. There he lay in the bed, and with nothing to show for it. But his face held such a strange light, as though he had something very important, as though he owned the world.

She chuckled softly, standing there by the window, the faint pink glow of midnight bathing her naked, moist body, and she knew what counted. She held it in her hand.

The pink glow turned rosy, then red, then blood crimson.

Arthur Fulbright lay on the bed, and there was a peace deep as the ocean in him. The woman stared at the money, knowing what really counted.

The money turned to ash a scant instant before her hand did the same. Arthur Fulbright's eyes closed slowly.

While outside, the world turned so red and hot, and that was all.While in the US Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky, one of my duties was Troop Information NCO, and the story that follows (published in a magazine at that time) seemed to me an interesting departure from the usual stodgy troop lectures I was required to give. I read this story to a number of groups of hardened twenty-year men (as well as six- monthers and two-year draftees) and asked for comment. Those who spoke up (inarticulation is an occupational disease in the Army after a three-year period) said it wasn't as fantastic as it sounded. That it seemed such a thing might some day come to pa.s.s, and they wanted to know how I, a man who had never been in combat, had been able to devise such weird ideas, and put them down in a form that seemed rational. I told them I had glimpsed h.e.l.l, and that I thought some day perhaps the whole world would be that h.e.l.l, unless we stopped trying to strangle decency, unless we stopped trying to turn logic and imagination and the hearts of men toward a

Battlefield

SAt.u.r.dAY.

The first needle of the "day" came over Copernicus Sector at 0545...and seven seconds. The battery commander on White's line was an eager-beaver. His bombardment cut short the coffee-pause Black's men had planned to enjoy till at least 0550. When the hi-fi in the ready dome screeched--a vocal transformation of the sonorad blip indicating a projectile coming through--the Black men looked at one another in undisguised annoyance, and banged their bulbs onto file counters.

Someone muttered, "Spoil sport!" and his companions looked at him and laughed; obviously a repple officer, fresh from the Academy.

One of the veterans, who had been with the outfit when Black had been Black One and Black Two--before the service merger--chuckled deep in his throat. He began to dog down the bubble of the pressure suit. But before the plasteel bowl was settled in place, he gibed, "Cookie-boy, you shoulda been up here when White rung in a fullblooded Cherokee named Grindbones or somethin'. You'da been on the line a'reddy at 0500. He was lobbin' 'em in solid by this time...had a h.e.l.l of a job get tin' him croaked." He chuckled again, and several other officers nodded in remembrance.

The young lieutenant addressed as "Cookie-boy" turned an interested glance on the older man. "How did you manage to kill him? Full-day batteries at double strength? Spearhead through the craters?"

The veteran winked at his friends, and said levelly, "Nope. Easier'n that."

The young lieutenant's attention was trapped.

"Waited till he went down, and had a goon squad put a blade into his neck. Real quick. Next day, had our coffee without sweat."

The young lieutenant was still. His face gradually became a mask of disbelief and horror. "You...you mean you...oh, come on, you aren't serious/"

The veteran stared at him coldly. "Sonny, you know I'm serious." He dogged down the pork-bolts on his helmet. He was out of the conversation.

Yet the lieutenant continued to protest. He stood in the center of the ready dome, his helmet under his arm, his other arm thrown toward the rounded ceiling fu a theatrical pose, and blurted, "But--but that's illegal! When they declared the Moon a battlefield, that was the reason, I mean, what's the sense of using up here to fight, if we still kill each other down there, I mean--"

"Oh, shut up, will you, for Christ's sake!" It was a lean, angular-faced Major with a thread-scar from a single. beam across the brutal cut of his jaw. "This wasn't war, you young clown. This was a matter of a man who fought, and stuck too closely to the rules. What you learned in the Academy was all floss and fine, man, but grow up!

Use your noodle. What they taught you there doesn't always apply out here.

"When someone crosses too many wheat fields, he's bound to find a gopher hole. This Indian stepped in one of those, that's all."

The Major turned away, dogged down, and joined the rest of the line company's officers at the exitport. The young lieutenant stood alone, watching them, still muttering to himself. For with the other men on intercom only, they could not hear what he was saying: "But the war. The--the war. They said we wouldn't chew up the Earth any more. The war...up here it's so much cleaner, a man can fight or die or...but--but they said they killed him on his way down.

"He was going home, to Earth, and they killed him--"

The Major turned with sluggish movement in the pressurized dome, and waved a metal-tooled gauntlet atthe lieutenant. It was time to move to the units.

The lieutenant hurriedly dogged down, and joined the group. The veteran officer who had first spoken, turned the younger man around with rough good humor, checking the pork-bolts. Then he slapped the lieutenant on his shoulder with a comradely gesture, and they went into the exitport together.

The hi-fi had been screeching constantly for a full three minutes.

Outside, the Blacks and the Whites went into the five thousand and fifty-eighth day of the war. That particular war.

The needles came across all that early morning. In the dead black of the Darkside, their tails winked briefly as vector rockets shifted them on course. No sound broke across the airless cratered surface, but the tremors as each missile struck rang through the bowels of the dead satellite like so many gong-beaters gone mad.

Where they struck, great gouts were ripped from the grey, cadaverous dust of the surface. Brilliant flashes lived for microinstants and then were gone, for without air there could be no flames. Where the needles struck, and the face of the moon tore apart, new craters glared blindly up at s.p.a.ce.

At 0830 on the dot, the first waves of armored units spread out from the ragged White line near Sepulchre Crater and advanced across the edge of the Darkside, into the blinding glare of the Lightside. Vision ports sphinctered down into narrow slits; filters that dimmed the blaze of light clicked over the gla.s.sene ports; men donned special equipment, and snapped switches that cut in conditioning units and coolant chambers--and turned off the feverishly working heaters.

The armored crabs came first, sliding along, hugging the contours of the moon's face, raising and lowering themselves on stalk-like plasteel rods.

The Black batteries detected their coming, but not their nature, and the first barrages were low-level missiles that zoomed silently through the glaring sunlight, pa.s.sed completely over the crabs, and shusssssed off into the Darkside, and s.p.a.ce, where they would circle aimlessly till the men from Ordnance Reclamation went out with their dampening nets and sucked the missiles into the cargo hatches of the ships.

But as the crabs flopped and skittered their way toward the Black line, the sonorad was able to distinguish more easily what they were. The cry went up in the tracking cells buried deep under the pumice of the moon, and new batteries were readied/launched! Doggie-interceptors screamed silently from their tubes, broke the surface of the moon like skin divers reaching water's surface, and began to follow the line of terrain, humping over rises, slipping into craters, always moving out.

The first ones made contact.

Within the crabs, the shriek of rending metal was a split microsecond ahead of the roar and flash of the doggie exploding. Great gouts of flame roared out angrily...and were gone as quickly, leaving in their place a twisted, b.l.o.o.d.y sc.r.a.pheap where the crab had been. Another doggie struck. It caught the crab and lifted it backward and up on its stiltlegs, and then it exploded violently. Pieces of bodies were thrown two hundred feet into the airless nothing above the moon, and fell back soddenly.

All along the line the doggie's were tracking their prey and demolishing them. On the far right flank, one crab managed to train its twenty-thread on an incoming doggie, and exploded the missile before it hit. But it was a short-lived victory, for two others, coming on collision courses, zeroed in and struck simultaneously. The flash was seen fifteen miles away, the roar trembled the ground for thirty miles.

But White's offensive for the day was just beginning. In streaming waves the foot-soldiers were coming up behind the crabs. They were small pips on the sonorad units in Black GHQ, and though they could not tell if what was coming was human or mechanical, Black continued to send out the doggies.

It was a waste of missiles; precisely what White had been counting on. The doggies homed in, and exploded, hundreds of them, each finding a lone man and atomizing him so quickly, no bit of pressure suit, weapon or flesh could be found. The missiles came down like hail, and where each struck, a man died horribly, without time to scream, with his body exploding inward in a frightful implosion of power and fire. Hundreds died all along the line, and as the doomed foot-soldiers drew the fire, the jato teams soared up from White Central and streaked before little gouts of flame, toward the Black perimeter.

Each man wore a harness over his pressure suit, with a jet unit, to drive him across the airlessness.

While their brothers died in flaming h.e.l.l below them, the jato units soared through the empty sky, above the level of the terrain-skimming doggies, and dropped down like hunting falcons on the batteries.

Each man carried, in a drop-pouch, a charge of ferro-atomic explosive on a time fuse. As they whipped over the batteries, the men released their deadly cargos, directly into the barrels of the thread-disruptors, and sped up and away, back for their own lines. It was futile, of course, for sonorad had caught them, and trackbeams snaked out across the sky, picking each man off like moths caught in a flame. The jato units were snuffed out in midair, even asthe ferro-atomics went off inside the disruptor barrels.

Great sheets of metal exploded outward, ripping apart the bunkers into which they had been set. The disruptors shattered their linings, throwing their own damping rods out, and in one h.e.l.l's holocaust of exploding ferro-atomics, the entire battery went skyward. Three hundred men died at once, faces burned off, arms ripped loose from sockets, legs broken and shredded. Bodies cascaded from the sky and the steel ran with blood.

It was a typical day in the war.

The trackbeams probed outward, scouring the ground for landmines planted by the foot-soldiers, and exploded them on contact, then moved on. Eventually, they probed at the firm outer sh.e.l.l of the White perimeter.

Then the charged trackbeams of White met the Black beams, and they locked. They locked in a deadly struggle, and at opposite ends of those beams, men at control panels, in shock helmets, poured power to their beams, in a visible struggle to beat down the strength of the other.

A surge, a slight edge, a nudge of force, and White was dominant. The beam raced back the length of the weakened Black beam, and in a dome two hundred miles away, a man leaped from his bucket seat and clawed at his helmet...even as his eyes spouted flame, and his mouth crawed open in a ghastly scream. His charred body--burnt black inside--turned half-around, writhing, as the man beat at his dead face, and then he fell across his console.

The trackbeam was loose inside the bunker. In a matter of moments, no living thing moved in the bunker dome. But it was a double-edged weapon, for a.s.sociate trackbeams of the doomed White had centered in, and now five of them joined in racing back along the Black's length. The scene in the White bunker dome was repeated. This time a woman had been under the helmet.

So it went. All day. One skirmish of foot-soldiers with ensnaring nets who stumbled across a Black detonation team, near Abulfeda Crater ended strangely, and terribly.

The detonation team was wrapped in the gooey meshes, but had barely enough time to toss their charges.

The charges exploded, killing the ensnaring outfit, but also served to shatter their own helmets. They lay there for minutes, those whose helmets had merely cracked, until their air ran out, and then they strangled to death. The ones who died initially were the lucky.

At day's end, at 1630 hours, the death toll was slightly below average for a weekend. Dead: 5,886.

Wounded: 4. Damages: twelve billion dollars, rounded off by the Finance & Reclamation Clerk. The batteries were silent, the crabs back in their depots and pools; the airless dead face of the moon left to the reclamation teams, who worked through the "night, " preparing for Monday rooming, when the war would resume.

The commuters were racked, and as the Blacks filed into their ships, as the Whites boarded theirs, the humming of great atomic motors rolled through the shining corridors of the commuters. Inside, men read newspapers and clung to the acceleration straps for the ride down.

Down to Earth.

For a quiet evening at home, and a quiet Sunday... before the war started again.

Almost as one, they roared free of the slight gravity, and plunged down toward the serene, carefully-tended face of the Earth. The young lieutenant hung from his strap and tried to block out the memory of what had happened that day. Not the fighting. G.o.d, that had been just fine. It had been good. The fighting. But what the older men had said. That was like saying there was no G.o.d. The moon was for war, the Earth was for peace.

They had knifed a battery sergeant on his way down? He looked about him, but all faces were turned into newspapers. He tried to put it from his mind forcefully.

Behind the commuters, the blasted, crushed and death-sprayed face of the Moon glowed in sharp relief against the black of s.p.a.ce.

What had the Major said later: War is good, but we have to retain our perspective.

SUNDAY.

Yolande was in the kitchen dialing dinner when the chimes crooned at her. She turned from the difficult task of dictating dinner to the robochef, and wiped a stray lock of ebony hair from her forehead.

"Bill! Bill, will you answer it...it's probably Wayne and Lotus."

In the living room, 2/Lt. William Larkspur Donnough uncrossed his long legs, sighed as he turned off the tri-V, and yelled back softly, "Okay, hon. I'll get it."

He walked down the long pastel-tiled hall and flipped up the force screen dial, releasing the wall into nothingness. As the wall flicked out and was gone, the outside took form, and standing on Bill and Yolande Donnough's front breezeway were 2/Lt. and Mrs. Wayne M'Kuba Ma.s.saro."Come on in, come on in, " Bill chuckled at them. "Yo's in the kitch fixing dinner. Here, Lotus, let me have your hood."

He took the brightly-tinted hood and cape offered by the girl, a striking Melanesian with an upturned Irish nose and flaming red hair.

He accepted Wayne Ma.s.saro's service cap in the other hand and stuck the apparel to the rack, which turned into the wall, holding the clothing magnetically.

"What'll you have, Wayne, Lotus?"

Lotus raised a hand to signify none for her, but Wayne Ma.s.saro made a T with his hands. He wanted a tea- ball with a shot of herro-c.o.ke.

When Bill had jiggered the mixture together, warmed it and chilled it again, when they settled down in the formfit chairs, Donnough looked across at the other lieutenant and sighed. "Well, how'd it go your first day up there?"

Ma.s.saro frowned deeply.

Lotus broke in before her husband could answer. "Well, if you two are going to talk shop, I'm going in to see if Yo needs help; " She got up, smoothed the sheath across her thighs, and walked into the kitchen.

"She'll never get used to my making the war a career," Wayne Ma.s.saro shook his head in affectionate exasperation. "She just can't understand it. "

"She'll get used to it," Bill replied, sipping his own hiskotch. "Lotus still has a lot of that Irish blood in her...

Yo was the same way when I came in."