Slippage (32 page)

Which is what I did.

They booted me out over Strawhill and I rode the dropshaft into country, and we took Borag and Hyqa and the whole archipelago at Insmel. I got
this
at Insmel, this nice transparent cheek here.

TEF pulled us out of there and I went straight on through inverspace to Black's Nebula. That was sweet, too. Lost half our complement there. They were waiting when we popped out of inver. Wiped two dreadnoughts and a troop condo before we'd pushed our eyeballs back into their sockets. They were all over the scan. Men-of-war and little kickass wasps from the top of the screen to the bottom. And there was just a little poof of implode and a couple of thousand grunts were stardust.

But we got a few loads through, and I went shaft and tried to make my way to the primary, and on the way I got tossed and went in a hundred and fifty kliks shy of the bull. Some kind of a little city, not a major target, but with enough of a home defense system to raise some mist around me. So I burned them.

Turned the beams loose on full, and just swept the goddam town. That wasn't smart. First thing they tell you in Sapper school is, "Don't ever get close enough to see them burn."

I got too close. First time I ever saw anything like that. Wasn't like what they'd taught us it would be. There were old guys like my Grampa Louie, and old women, and kids, and those dog-things they keep for pets...and all of them splitting and popping like bags of pus. They'd bubble and the eyes would explode from the inside. The hair sizzled and the gold skin split, and you could see bone for a second before it all turned black and they fell in like finishing a bag of popcorn and crushing the bag in your hands. I saw a kid, a little girl, I guess, and she looked straight into the screen as I passed over, and she opened her mouth to scream, and her mouth just kept going, right across her face, and then the bottom came away, and she was running in circles and flapping her hands, and I saw all her parts before they turned into stew.

You motherfuckers never told me about that part of it, did you?

Never told me they look a lot like us. Oh sure, they got golden skin, and those eyes, and the little worm fingers. But they're not like the ghosters you showed us! They're
not,
are they? Where's the guy who phonyed up those Kyben monsters for the bond drive ghosters, for the holos that got all of us to join up before we'd learned to wipe our asses? Where is that talented sonofabitch? I'd like to give him an Oscar. 'Cause
they don't look like that!

I'm okay.      

Gimme a minute. Just to clean up.

Yeah. Swell. I'm just swell.

I did the job for you. That kid would never invade old Earth. Took her right out.

But it was the old ones that did it to me. The old ones just like my Grampa Louie, that I adored. You should see what old Kyben have inside them. A lot of stuff that wriggles before it bursts. I guess that was what the guy who phonyed up the monsters
meant
to show, but he never got any closer to the real thing than any of us do. We just hang out there in space and dump. And when the Sappers go in, it's whambam and out so fuckin' fast all you see is a new sunrise.

The old ones. Gawd, it was just swell. Just...swell.

And I was a hero. Like my Grampa Louie.

I got a citation, and a month Earthside.

They snapped me back through inverspace, and I got scrip for a thirty-day repple-depple, and I went home.

It was all I could do to face my family. I wanted to puke. They couldn't stop showing me off to the neighbors. And when the ghosters came to interview me, I just said I was too whacked to talk, and they ran all that bullshit my family put on like the Sunday tablecloth, and I just sat there and stared.

For a day and a half I didn't have the guts to go up and see Grampa Louie. But finally, when I couldn't stand it any more, I knew I had to go tell him I wasn't like him, that I'd come to hate it, and take what he had to say, and just swallow it. But I knew in my heart that I was no more a hero like him than I was an angel. So I went up.

At first he wouldn't unlock the door.

"Grampa, jeezus, I got to talk to you! I'm in Hell, Grampa!"

And he opened the door, and looked at me with his last good eye, and the bullet train scars so red and painful looking, and he was a lot older and closer to the dust than I'd ever seen him. And he was crying. He was crying for me.

And I came through and his old, thin body was around me, him hugging and whispering stuff, and I just laid my head on his shoulder and let it all go.

After a long time we sat down on the edge of his bed, and he told me to tell him all of it. So I did, with snot running down my face, and my hands making these stupid gestures in the air, me trying to grab onto something wasn't there, and Grampa Louie overflowing, too.

And when I got done, and couldn't even gasp any more, he said, "It was a long time ago, and I don't know if it was Pope Gregory XI or Innocent II, I've heard it both ways; but it was in the tenth century sometime. They invented the hand crossbow. It was so awful a weapon that the Pope, whichever one it was, he said, 'This weapon is so horrible that it will surely end all wars,' and he wouldn't let them use it. At least for a while. Then they decided that as terrible as it was, Christians couldn't use it against each other...but they could kill the lousy Mohammedans with it."

He looked at me. "You know what I'm telling you, Del?"

I said I knew perfectly, what he was telling me.

Then he told me something no one else but him in the whole galaxy knew. Something he'd wanted to take to the grave.

And I loved him more, and hated him more, and suffered with him more, and despised him more, than I had ever loved and hated and suffered with or despised anyone in my life, except myself. "What'm I gonna do, Grampa?"

So he told me what to do. What
he
would've done twenty years ago, but didn't have the courage to do, especially since he was a hero.

And that's what I did, you Officers and Gennulmen. I cut out during Molkey's Ash, and I kept going. Maybe before you toss me into the starfire chamber you'll confide how it was you tracked my ass down, and maybe you'll keep it to yourself. But I'll make you a deal.

You tell me how you found me, and
I'll
tell you what Grampa Louie told me that was a secret. Whaddaya say?

Aw, hell, c'mon. What've you got to lose?

We got a deal?

You'll keep your word? Sure, I know you will. You're Officers and Gennulmen, and we're all just grunts in the TEF, right? So, okay, here it is:

Grampa Louie just
hated
it when I'd drool over his model up there on the Wall. Used to drag my scrawny kid's ass away as fast as he could, not because he really gave a damn that someone might spot him and make a big who-struck-John about him being the hero of the Pleiades, but because he knew he was a fraud. He was a killer, and
you're
killers, and me,
I
was a killer, too.

He hadn't gotten those blast scars in battle. He'd gotten them from the Kyban woman he was trying to stick it up the ass of. There wasn't any sex in it. He was just horny, and he'd been out there forever, and he didn't give a shit what it would do to her, or anything. He was just the kind of guy you train us to be. Real grunts.

And she burned him. And he stomped in her head with a boot just like that boot he's wearing up there on the Wall you all admire and drool over so much. He just smashed in her head like that Kyban battle bonnet on the sculpture.

My Grampa Louie was just like me.
Just
like me. One of the few, the proud. The shit you made believe all that
hail to us ain't we the best in the universe
crap!

Get out, Del. That's what my Grampa Louie told me. Get out before they make you what I am, before they kill you and you never get a chance to say you're sorry. Because there's no way to say I'm sorry. And there's no way to get over hating yourself for being so goddam dumb that you buy into all that
kill the Mohammedans
bullshit. Get out, kid. Hightail it, get out, and don't stop.

So now I'm getting hoarse, and that's my tale, Sirs.

Now you gonna tell me how you tracked me?

You gonna tell me in exchange for the honor of my Grampa Louie, who put a squirtgun on that goddam Wall the week after I shipped out again, and blew a chunk out of it before the cops wasted him, not knowing he was the guy up there on the sculpture? You ready to tell me?

Well?

Whaddaya say? I'm waiting.
 

What...? You
what!?

Why,
you sonsofbitches, you no-good rotten bastards?
 

Right into the starfire?
 

You
bastardsl

You lied to me! You
lied
to me.

The Deadly “Nackles” Affair

a true tale of action, danger; duplicity, and the Search for Literary Excellence in the nterhworld of television, with a Stern Moral about ethics and a reminder that a loaf of bread doesn’t cost 13¢ any more

Andre Gide wrote: “Everything’s already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.”

(You can use that the next time some spud tells you it isn t worth being a writer, because Shakespeare created all the basic plots, and all that's left to us is rewriting what has already been done perfectly.)

The mistake we all make is in assuming anybody remembers
any
damnthing from one day to the next. If that were true, we'd stop getting involved with approximately the same kind of wrong lover each time, we'd learn the lessons of history, the death penalty would discourage those plotting murder, and George Santayana's famous quote would be about as popular as "the bee's knees." But few of us keep accurate records of what we've learned as we hobble through life barking our shins in the dark on experiences we've already had; we have no tickler file to point out the similar traps of Korea and Viet Nam, of Joe McCarthy and Jerry Falwell; and as Olin Miller has so aptly noted, "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory."

Thus, I must remind myself that though I have written two books of essays on the subject of television (concluding that to work in television is akin to putting in time in the Egyptian House of the Dead), and subsequently wrote a long essay as introduction to my 1978 collection, STRANGE WINE (in which I vowed on peril of losing my immortal soul that I would never again work in television), there may be at least tens of thousands of readers of this essay who remain unaware of my loathing for the coaxial medium, and who know not that my going to work in November of 1984 for CBS's revival of
The Twilight Zone
caused some small, but significant, tremor of confusion among the faithful. After all, hadn't I inveighed against television for a decade and more? Hadn't I advised viewers to kick in the picture tubes and use their sets as planters? Hadn't I grown to be the specter at the banquet, doomsaying brain damage and tertiary blandness for all of you out there sucking up them good ole phosphor dots?

Well, you can just imagine what happened when it was announced that I was returning to tv, to work as Creative Consultant on
The Twilight Zone!
Such hue and cry, such
sturm und drang,
such death and transfiguration. You'd have thought that a simple mention in
TV Guide
was more unsettling than The Zimmermann Telegram!

Explaining what I was doing toiling for a year in the hold of the television trireme, for those who don't remember (and don't give a hoot), leads to an explanation of why I left
The Twilight Zone's
employ, for those who are delighted to see the teleplay of "Nackles" published here. And all of it, from joyous opening credits to shabby fadeout, circumnavigates the core fact that neither you nor I remember the past and thus are condemned to repeat it.

I worked for more than a decade in television. I won a number of awards doing it. The number of awards I won, counted on the fingers of the left hand, total more than the number of happy days I had working in the medium during that period, counted on the fingers of the right hand. And if my left hand had suspected what my right hand was up to, my left hand would surely have crushed the unhappy fingers of my right hand between the jaws of a bench vise. But perhaps I exaggerate. I recall at least two personal experiences that were more unpleasant than working in television: passing forty-eight kidney stones in the space of eight hours without benefit of anaesthesia, and a sigmoidoscopy that left me walking funnily for a week. Writing television ranks right in there somewhere.

The angst comes not from the actual writing, which is usually pleasurable—as long as one selects shows on which one can work with a sense of craft, art, and honor—but from fighting the soul-crushing
apparat
placed between creators and viewers by networks, studios, production companies and their feckless
apparatchiks.
By the time anything one has written gets on the little screen, the misery one has been put through has flensed even the joy of the writing, and all one is left with is money. Which is what they pay you for the privilege of telling you that they know how to write what you've written better than you can. One never asks: if you can do it so much better, schmuck, why don't you just
do it?
One never asks, for answer came there none.