The Essential Ellison Part 77

"Because it looks all fuzzy on the horizon. "

"Look out the window, Bill. Everything is fuzzy on the horizon."

"Yeah, but on tv it all gets muddy in the background. We're going to have to make it a 6-mile biosphere."

"Whaaaat?!"

"Six miles is the best we can do."

There is a pivotal element in the pilot script where the hero manages to hide out from a lynch mob. In a 50-mile biosphere that was possible. In a 6-mile biosphere all they had to do was link arms and walk across it. "But, Bill, that means I'll have to rewrite the entire script."

"Well, that's the best we can do."

Then, in a blinding moment of satori I realized Davidson was wrong, dead wrong; his thinking was so limited he was willing to sc.r.a.p the logic of the script rather than think it through. "Bill," I said, "who can tell the difference on a tv screen, whether the horizon is six miles away or fifty? And since we're showing them an enclosed world that's never existed before, why shouldn't it look like that! Shoot de facto six miles and call it fifty; it doesn't make any d.a.m.ned difference!"

There was a pause, then, "I never thought of that."

Only one indication of the unimaginative, hidebound and obstinately arrogant thinking that emerged from total unfamiliarity with the subject, proceeded through mistake after mistake, and foundered on the rocks of inability to admit confusion.

The conversation went on with Davidson telling me that even if Trumbull's effects didn't work and they couldn't shoot a 50-mile biosphere-after he'd just admitted that it didn't matter what distance they said they were showing-I'd simply love the set they were building of the control room.

"You're building the control room?" I said, aghast with confusion and disbelief. "But you won't need that till the last segment of the series. Why are you building it now?"

(It should be noted that one of the Maltese Falcons of the series, one of the prime mysteries, is the location of the control room biosphere. When they find it, they can put the ark back on course. If they find it in the first segment, it automatically becomes the shortest tv series in history.) "Because you had it in your bible," he explained.

"That was intended to show how the series ended. for G.o.d's sake!" I admit I was screaming at that point. "If they find it first time out, we can all pack our bags and play an hour of recorded organ music!"

"No, no," Davidson argued, "they still have to find the backup computer, don't they?"

"Aaaaarghh," I aaaaarghhed. "Do you have even the faintest scintilla of an idea what a backup control is?"

"Uh, I'm not certain. Isn't it the computer at the back of the ship?"

"It's a fail-safe system, you drooling imbecile; it's what they use if the primary fails. The primary is the control... oh to h.e.l.l with it!" I hung up.

When I returned to Los Angeles, I found matters had degenerated even further. They were shooting a 6-mile biosphere and calling it six miles. They said no one would notice the discrepancy in the plot. They were building the control room, with that arrogant ignorance that could not be argued with. Ben Bova, who was the technical advisor, had warned them they were going about it the wrong way; they nodded their heads... and ignored him.

Then Klenman rewrote me. Oh boy.

As an indication of the level of mediocrity they were seeking, "Phoenix Without Ashes" had been ret.i.tled, in one of the great artistic strokes of all time,,, Voyage of Discovery." I sent them word they would have to take my name off the show as creator and as writer of that segment. But they would have to use my pseudonym, to protect my royalties and residuals. (They had screwed up my creation, but r d be d.a.m.ned if I'd let them profit from the rape.) Davidson reluctantly agreed. He knew the Writers Guild contract guaranteed me that one last weapon. "What's your pen-name, we'll use it, what is it?"

"Cordwainer Bird," I said. "That's b-i-r-d, as in 'for the birds. ' "

Now he was screaming. He swore they'd fight me, they'd never use it, I was denying them the use of my name that was so valuable with science fiction fans. Never! Never!

G.o.d bless the Writers Guild.

If you tuned in the show before it vanished from all earthly ken you saw a solo credit card that said CREATED BY CORDWAINER BIRD and that's your humble servant saying the Visigoths won again; Bova walked off the series the week after Trumbull left, because of scientific illiteracies he'd warned them against, such as "radiation virus" (which is an impossibility... radiation is a matter of atoms, viruses are biological ent.i.ties, even as you and I and Kline and Davidson, I presume), "s.p.a.ce senility" (which, I guess means old, feeble, blathering vacuum), and "solar star" (which is a terrific illiterate redundancy like saying "I live in a big house home").

The Starlost came up a loser, as do most tv series. Because they don't understand the materials with which they have to work, because they are so tunnel-visioned into thinking every dramatic series can be transliterated from the prosaic and over-familiar materials of cop, doctor and cowboy shows, because there was so much money to be skimmed... another attempt at putting something fresh and innovative on the little screen came up a loser.

Is mine an isolated bit of history? A case of sour grapes attributable to the intransigent nature of a writer whose credentials come red-stamped with the warning that he is a troublemaker? Hardly.

In TV Guide in October of 1964 the excellent Merle Miller told in detail how his series Calhoun had come a cropper. In February of 1971, again in TV Guide, the well-known sf author and historian James Gunn related how they leavened and dumbed The Immortal out of existence after fifteen weeks. Through the years, right up to the 1981 anthology series Dark Room-suicidally placed opposite first The Dukes of Hazzard and then moved to a primetime spot facing Dallas by ABC-which was canceled after six airings, the story is the same. This time it was my turn, that's all.

Have you, gentle reader, learned anything from this angst? Probably not. Viewers seem not to care about authenticity, accuracy, logic, literacy, inventiveness. Friends call me when they see reruns of The Starlost in Canada, and they tell me how much they like it. I snarl and hang up on them.

The upshot of all the foregoing was precisely what I had predicted when I cut out of that deranged scene. NBC had gone into the series with a guarantee of sixteen episodes firm, and an almost guaranteed pickup option for eight more. But the ratings were so low, in virtually every city where the series was aired-sometimes running opposite the nine thousandth rerun of I Love Lucy or scintillating segments of Zen Archery for the Millions-that NBC bailed out after the first sixteen.

The shows were so disgracefully inept, so badly acted, uniformly directed with the plunging breakneck pace of a quadruple amputee crossing a busy intersection, based in confusion and plotted on the level of a McGuffey's primer... that when the show was canceled after sixteen weeks, there were viewers who never knew it was missing.

When it was dumped, and I got the word from a contact at the network, I called one of Kline's toadies, and caroled my delight. "What the h.e.l.l are you so d.a.m.ned happy about," he said,, 'you just lost a total of $93,000 in partic.i.p.ation profits."

"It's worth ninety-three thousand bucks to see you f.u.c.kers go down the toilet," I said.

But even though I fell down that rabbit-hole in TV Land and found, like Dorothy, that it wasn't Kansas, or any other place that resembled the real world, I have had several moments of bright and lovely retribution-c.u.m-vindication.

At one point, when the roof started falling in on them, they called Gene Roddenberry, the successful creator of Star Trek, and they offered him fifty percent of the show if he'd come up and produce the show out of trouble for them. Gene laughed at them and said what did he need fifty percent of a loser for, he had a hundred percent of two winners of his own. They said they could understand that, but did he have someone else in mind whom he could recommend as producer? Gene said, sure he did.

They made the mistake of asking him who.

He said, "Harlan Ellison. If you hadn't f.u.c.ked him over so badly, he could have done a good job for you."

Then he hung up on them.

Which is just what the viewers did.

The second bright moment was when the trial board of the Writers Guild judged me Not Guilty of scabbing. It was a unanimous decision by some of the finest writers in Hollywood, and I was reinstated on the WGA's Board of Directors thereafter. Nonetheless, were I ever to forgive the thugs and fools who took the labor of a year and corrupted it so completely that I felt nothing but shame and fury for a long time after, I can never forgive them for placing me in such jeopardy with the craft guild to which I proudly belong. More than likely, had my efforts to thwart and circ.u.mvent 20th Century-Fox's anti-strike efforts in producing the series not been so blatant, and so infuriatingly effective to Kline and his superiors, I might well have been tagged with that most vile and inexcusable sobriquet: scab. There is no forgiveness in me for that part of the monstrous history of The Starlost.

But the brightest moment of all came on March 21st, 1974 when I became the first person in the history of the Writers Guild of America to win the Most Outstanding Teleplay Award for the third time, with the original version of the pilot teleplay for The Starlost, "Phoenix Without Ashes."

The original script, my words, my dream; not the emasculated and insipid drivel that was aired; but my work, as I wrote it, before the trolls f.u.c.ked it over; that screenplay won the highest writers' award Hollywood can give.

In the category of "best dramatic-episodic script," meaning continuing series, as opposed to anthologies or comedies, there were eight nominees out of 400 top submissions: four segments of The Waltons, a Gunsmoke, a Marcus Welby and an episode of Streets of San Francisco. And my original teleplay... selected as the best for the year 1973.

It should be noted that unlike Emmys and Oscars, which are political in nature, are bought and sold and lobbied for with hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent in trade paper advertis.e.m.e.nts by studios and networks that realize the box-office value of such popularity prizes, the WGA awards are given solely on the basis of written material; in blind judging with the names of the authors removed, by three tiers of blue-ribbon readers (most of whom are previous winners) whose ident.i.ties are kept strictly secret.

When I accepted the Award at the 26th Annual Awards Reception and Banquet in Hollywood, I said, in part, "If the f.u.c.kers want to rewrite you... smash them!"

But even had I not received such vindication from my peers, I know d.a.m.ned well that the loss of $93,000 was not the vain and foolish gesture of a nit-picker. That Award is the rose I've plucked from the summit of the mountain of cow flop The Starlost became.

Nor have I lost my sense of smell. A writer has only his or her talent, determination and imagination to pit against the winter of mediocrity Hollywood generates. Good writers die here, not from too much cocaine, or too much high living, or even too much money. For, in the words of Saul Bellow, "Writers are not necessarily corrupted by money. They are distracted-diverted to other avenues." They die in pieces, their talent and thus their souls turned sere and juiceless. Until they are fit for nothing better than to bend to the whims of businessmen with a stranglehold on the art-form.

It is a writer's obligation to his craft to go to bed angry, and to rise up angrier the next day. To fight for the words because, at final moments, that's all a writer has to prove his right to exist as a spokesman for his times. To retain the sense of smell; to know what one smells is the corruption of truth and not the perfumes of Araby.

Whether in a fifty-mile-across biosphere, in Oz, in Kansas or in Hollywood.

Face-Down In Gloria Swanson's Swimming Pool By the eleventh day of the Ohio lecture tour I was drawing big, sprawling crowds of students. The auditorium of Wittenberg College in Springfield was jammed, right up to the balcony: (Where, later in the evening's festivities, a Jesus Freak would leap up, scream that I was " the Anti-Christ, doing the Devil's Work," flick her Bic, set fire to her Little Orphan Annie hair, and rush out of the auditorium with her friends beating at her head.) It was Wednesday, October 3rd, 1973, and I had been a resident of Los Angeles for eleven years.

There I stood, on the platform in Springfield, Ohio-dead in the center, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, of the geographic belt of greatest density of air pollution in the United states-and this kid with rheumy eyes, sallow skin, pustules and running sores yells up from the audience, "How can you live in Los Angeles with all that pollution?"

And I look down at him, and I hear myself saying, " Are you kidding, running that kinda okeydoke past me? You live in the same state with Dayton, top of the Clean Air Commission's Pure Death Locale chart. How can I live in Elay? It's easy, brother! I look out my living room window through the saddle of the Santa Monica Mountains, fifteen miles straight across the San Fernando Valley to the San Gabriel Range, and three hundred out of every three hundred and sixty-five days of the year I can see those mountains-sometimes fuzzily...but I see 'em! I was in downtown Springfield today, and I couldn't see the bank building on the corner of the next block!

"In Los Angeles, in the s.p.a.ce of a week, I can talk to Randy Newman, Ray Bradbury, Howard Fast, Carol Connors, Bucky Fuller, Gunther Schiff, Ralph Bakshi, Dorothy Fontana, Louise Farr, Richard Dreyfuss, Richard Matheson, Christopher Knopf, Richard Brooks and Michael Crichton. I'd have talked to people here in Springfield today, but I couldn't pry them loose from their television sets!

"In Los Angeles I can eat lomito saltado at Machu Picchu, moussaka vegetarian at Mischa's, sizzling rice three-flavor soup at Golden China, beef mole at Antonio's, zucchini florentine at Musso & Frank's, besuga al horno at La Masia, steamed clams and abalone steak at Mel's Landing, the best barbecue this side of the House of Blue Lights at Dr. Hogly Wogly's Tyler Texas-Pit BBQ, the Poliakov Special at Chez Puce, Mont Blanc at the Paprika and a terrific noodle kuchel at Hamburger Hamlet. I went out for a bite to eat here in Springfield and had to arm-wrestle the waitress at the Toddle House best two-out-of-three to get my cheeseburger well-done without any mayonnaise on it!

"In Los Angeles I've got my choice of a thousand different bookstores, from A Change of Hobbit, where they stock every science fiction book since Lucian of Samosata, to Boulevard Books and the Scene of the Crime, where I can find Cornell Woolrich and Richard Stark and Anthony Boucher if I feel like a little mayhem. Needham Bookfinders and Barry Levin and Pickwick and World Book & News on Cahuenga are regular watering-holes for me. I have 37,000 books in my house, and I need a ten-book-a-day fix just to keep me going. Here in Springfield, if I need something to pa.s.s the interminable evenings, the best I can do is inspirational literature left in the motel desk or go to the A&P for one of those LOVE'S TENDER FURY abominations.

"In Los Angeles..."

And I stopped.

The implausibility of it hit me like an 18-wheeler on the Grapevine. Here I was, a refugee from (ironically) Ohio, dragged by the nose to Los Angeles eleven years earlier, hating the mere thought of living in the town that had killed Scott Fitzgerald, swearing I'd be back in New York inside a month...more than a decade later standing on a lecture platform in (ironically) Ohio, running a Chamber of Commerce panegyric to the wonders and deliciousness of the City of Angels.

What hath G.o.d wrought? I thought. Without even noticing, I've become an Angeleno!

When my then-New York literary agent, the late Bob Mills, said to me in 1961, "You've got to go to California. You'll never be able to live the way you want to live, and be free to write what you want to write, unless you crack films and make enough during the year to buy free time for writing the books," when he said that to me, the first image that flooded into my head was William Holden lying face-down in Gloria Swanson's swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard.

And washing right along behind that vision were all the ghastly scenes from Day of the Locust, The Loved One, What Makes Sammy Run?, The Slide Area, The Big Knife, The Last Tyc.o.o.n and Flash and Filigree. I conjured up rampaging nightmares of good writers clubbed to their knees-as I had always believed-by Hollywood: Horace McCoy, Dashiell Hammett, Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Dorothy Parker. And I shivered with fear.

"No, no," I pleaded, "don't make me go to Los Angeles! I'll turn into a pillar of Waldo Salt! My hair's too fine to take a blonde rinse, and I can't even ice skate, how the h.e.l.l you think I'm gonna learn to surf?"

And always, Bill Holden as that indigent Hollywood screenwriter, Joe Gillis, spread-eagled and waterlogged in Norma Desmond's befouled swimming pool. What a horrendous metaphor!

But I was chivvied into coming. And eleven years later I stood on a platform in Ohio and said, '1 And even if all that good stuff weren't true of only Los Angeles, even if you had it all here...I'd still be in L.A., man, and you'd still be in Springfield!"

And now it is sixteen years since I motored into Hollywood with ten cents in my pocket, driving a '57 Ford that was gasping its last, and I am here to tell you: this is a dynamite town.

I've lived allover the place. Painesville, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; New York; Chicago; New Orleans; Shelby, North Carolina; Paris and London. And while London is a fast second-place to this burg, if I were to rummage around in the stock of America's leading Art Deco dealer, H. Frank Jones (who just happens to be right here in Los Angeles), and came up with an original Lalique magic lamp, and rubbed it to bring up the patina, and out came this dyspeptic genie who'd grant me any wish I desired, I wouldn't ask him to let me live anywhere but here!

Los Angeles is the cutting edge of the culture, despite the claims and pretensions of San Francisco and New York and Boston and Washington. It has all the verve and dynamism that I found in New York when I went there in 1950. Verve and dynamism that New York has lost, that Chicago wanted and for which it subst.i.tuted brutality and angst, that New Orleans is afraid to let loose. For me, L.A. is like a big, gauche baby with a shotgun in its mouth. It'll do anything. And with more style, with more fire, with more Errol Flynn go-to-h.e.l.l vivacity than any other city I've ever experienced.

As for what L.A. does to an artist, it's all bulls.h.i.t about the death of creativity out here in the vanilla sunshine. In sixteen years I've written nineteen books, a dozen movies and more television than I care to think about, even now that I've renounced that lousy medium. Everything that's made a reputation for me...I wrote while living here...or on the way back to here. If Fitzgerald bought the plot while out here, it was because he did it to himself. Oh, it's easy enough to go for the sparkle and the dazzle (h.e.l.l, I even worked for Aaron Spelling for a little while), but anyone who wants to work out here can find the most salutary environment in the world.

Is it slower than New York? That's what a few visitors from the Apple tell me. As I dance circles around them, watching them sneer and badmouth in slow-motion. The hours are longer here, the moments fuller, and no one here would tolerate for a moment the kind of three-hour business lunches they take in Manhattan. This is a working town. Ask Betsy Pryor or Phil Mishkin or Larry Niven.

And when they talk about wacko, back East, and they say L.A. is Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, I smile. Because all that weirdness is upstate in San Francisco. Sure, we get our occasional dingbats like Charlie Manson and the Hillside Strangler, but have you noticed, they're always schmucks who've come here from somewhere else and never really integrated? Is L.A. all plastic, without soul? Sure, if you come to visit and stay in Garden Grove or go to Anaheim. But if you want soul, just drive down to Watts and look at that testament to one human being's indomitability and creative purpose, the Towers of Simon Rodia. Soul? I'll give you soul: Pink's hot dogs, better than Nathan's; the Century City riot against the War in Vietnam; Prop 13 and that incredible old curmudgeon Howard Jarvis; Kent Bash's paintings; Jeremy Tarcher's regional success as a publisher against all the odds; Gypsy Boots; Art Kunkin and Brian Kirby's days at the Free Press; the best rye bread and coconut rum bars in the world at Brown's Victory Bakery; Auracle playing at Dante's; living in Laurel Canyon; kids streaming down from Pepperdine to help Burgess Meredith save his house at Malibu when the Pacific opened its maw; the Beverely Glen art fair every year.

Sixteen years, and every time I get off a plane at LAX, having been out there somewhere else, I find myself grinning and saying, "Thank G.o.d I'm home." An Angeleno. How 'bout that.

And I even met Gloria Swanson once. She was charming and warm and thoroughly magnificent. But, uh, old fears die hard; and I somehow didn't follow up on her invitation to come visit at her home. I don't even know if she's got a swimming pool.

XI PETARDS & HANGINGS.

"Are you aware of how much pain there is in the world?"

"Your Basic Crown of Thorns," New Introduction to PAING.o.d AND OTHER DELUSIONS, Pyramid, 1975 Disasters are the bane (and drama) of humanity. Vesuvius and Krakatoa, the 14th century Black Death, the regularity of famines, fires, floods and earthquakes, leave us with a resigned but still undefeated att.i.tude about Earth's occasional show of instability. We seek to control the natural disasters as best we can, but how valiantly do we seek to cancel the unnatural ones?

Pollution, war, racial hatred and social ostracism, the uncontrolled greed of capitalism and the ruthless limitations of communism: these are disasters of human origin that make Earth's curses seem no more than weak ripples in the lake of Time. Today it may appear patriotic to remain blind to our sins in the name of national security and stabilization, but we aren't so far beyond the tragedies of War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo that we can't see the burning fuse and the coming explosion of tomorrow.

All we have to do is open our eyes.

There has not been a moment of Harlan's career in which he was not concerned with the horrors of the human race's punishment of itself. These stories look at the agonies and ask us point blank if we can tolerate such atrocities. Illness can strike us down singly or in great numbers, but Harlan has developed fictional vaccinations for the physical symptoms and psychological shock treatments for the mental disorders.

"Soldier" (1957) is an early and crudely drawn anti-war polemic that strains our credibility with its strange mix of violence and optimism. Yet it is an important work by which to gauge Harlan's dedication to the motive of a concerted resistance to evil and our ability to elevate our n.o.ble goodness. In 1964, he adapted the story as an episode of the television anthology series The Outer Limits, and while the details of the plot were quite different, the message remained intact.

The small tensions are often more motivating than the grand outbursts, as "The Night of Delicate Terrors" (1961) admirably demonstrates. Harlan has never been less than vehement in his loathing of racial prejudice, and the reader who takes this story's quiet, laid-back atmosphere as a tentative or unsure gesture on the author's part is suffering from grand-outburst conditioning. It is a quiet story, but the structure is steel and the intimations are crucial.

The danger of human error doesn't always stem from preconceived prejudice handed down the generations. New errors are made, sometimes in the midst of our rejection of old errors. "Shattered Like a Gla.s.s Goblin" (1968) came as a surprise to the young people who were pushing for a revolution against Establishment practices of the 1960s, for it seemed to reject their search of self and the exploration of alternatives. In actuality, Harlan was rejecting the method rather than the goal, once again realizing the fatal consequence of any misstep as we traveled along the dangerous precipice of independence.

Robert Silverberg, who bought and published " At the Mouse Circus" (1971), called it Harlan's "deepest trip yet into surrealism." The dream-like events and images have a surreal quality, but the unmasking of venality, covetousness and the symbols of social status is so uncompromising that we can almost hear the swish of the noose as it swings down over our necks. And that ain't surreal at all.

"Writing these stories [...] brought me an awareness of how concerned I was about social problems, the condition of life for different minorities in this country, the depth of injustice that could exist in a supposedly free society, the torment many different kinds of people suffered as a daily condition of life."

"The Children of Nights," New Introduction to GENTLEMAN JUNKIE AND OTHER STORIES OF THE HUNG-UP GENERATION, Pyramid, 1975 Soldier Qarlo hunkered down farther into the firmhole, gathering his cloak about him. Even the triple-lining of the cape could not prevent the seeping cold of the battlefield from reaching him; and even through one of those linings-lead impregnated-he could feel the faint tickle of dropout, all about him, eating at his tissues. He began to shiver again. The Push was going on to the South, and he had to wait, had to listen for the telepathic command of his superior officer.

He fingered an edge of the firmhole, noting he had not steadied it up too well with the firmer. He drew the small molecule-hardening instrument from his pouch, and examined it. The calibrater had slipped a notch, which explained why the dirt of the firmhole had not become as hard as he had desired.

Off to the left the hiss of an eighty-thread beam split the night air, and he shoved the firmer back quickly. The spiderweb tracery of the beam lanced across the sky, poked tentatively at an armor center, throwing blood-red shadows across Qarlo's crag-like features.

The armor center backtracked the thread beam, retaliated with a blinding flash of its own batteries. One burst. Two. Three. The eighty-thread reared once more, feebly, then subsided. A moment later the concussion of its power chambers exploding shook the Earth around Qarlo, causing bits of unfirmed dirt and small pebbles to tumble in on him. Another moment, and the shrapnel came through.

Qarlo lay flat to the ground, soundlessly hoping for a bit more life amidst all this death. He knew his chances of coming back were infinitesimal. What was it? Three out of every thousand came back? He had no illusions. He was a common footman, and he knew he would die out here, in the midst of the Great War VII.

As though the detonation of the eighty-thread had been a signal, the weapons of Qarlo's company opened up, full-on. The webbings crisscrossed the blackness overhead with delicate patterns-appearing, disappearing, changing with every second, ranging through the spectrum, washing the bands of colors outside the spectrum Qarlo could catalog. Qarlo slid into a tiny ball in the slush-filled bottom of the firmhole, waiting.

He was a good soldier. He knew his place. When those metal and energy beasts out there were snarling at each other, there was nothing a lone foot soldier could do-but die. He waited, knowing his time would -come much too soon. No matter how violent, how involved, how pushb.u.t.ton-ridden Wars became, it always simmered down to the man on foot. It had to, for men fought men still.

His mind dwelled limply in a state between reflection and alertness. A state all men of war came to know when there was nothing but the thunder of the big guns abroad in the night.

The stars had gone into hiding.

Abruptly, the thread beams cut out, the traceries winked off, silence once again descended. Qarlo snapped to instant attentiveness. This was the moment. His mind was now keyed to one sound, one only. Inside his head the command would form, and he would act; not entirely of his own volition. The strategists and psychmen had worked together on this thing: the tone of command was keyed into each soldier's brain. Printed in, probed in, sunken in. It was there, and when the Regimenter sent his telepathic orders, Qarlo would leap like a puppet, and advance on direction.

Thus, when it came, it was as though he had antic.i.p.ated it; as though he knew a second before the mental rasping and the Advance! erupted within his skull, that the moment had arrived.

A second sooner than he should have been, he was up, out of the firmhole, hugging his Brandelmeier to his chest, the weight of the plastic bandoliers and his pouch rea.s.suring across his stomach, back, and hips. Even before the mental word actually came.

Because of this extra moment's jump on the command, it happened, and it happened just that way. No other chance coincidences could have done it but those, just those, just that way, done just that way.

When the first blasts of the enemy's zeroed-in batteries met the combined rays of Qarlo's own guns, also pinpointed, they met at a point that should by all rights have been empty. But Qarlo had jumped too soon, and when they met, the soldier was at the focal point.