Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (76 page)

A helicopter cruiser had now come over the hill. It moved slowly along the
barbed wire as though tracking 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 Defense
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 savored 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 labor. 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. Ayn, 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 families? 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.
⁴
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 parlor 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 labored 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, Honor, 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-colored 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!