The heat in his face died away, and it was the day of the end, before he fully returned to sanity and a sense of awareness.
He had escaped bestiality, perhaps at the cost of his soul.
It was. It was, indeed. The day it would happen. He had several glimpses that day, so shocking, so brilliant in his mind, that he reaffirmed his knowledge of the coming of the event. Today it would come. Today the world would go off and burn.
One vision showed great buildings, steel and concrete, flashing like magnesium flares, burning as though they were crepe paper. The sun was raw looking, as though it might have been a socket from which someone had gouged an offending eye. The sidewalks ran like butter, and charred, smoldering shapes lay in the gutters and on the rooftops. It was hideous, and it was now.
He knew his time was up.
Then the idea of the money came to him. He withdrew every cent. Every penny of the four thousand dollars. The vice president of the bank had a peculiar expression on his face, and he asked if everything was all right. Arthur answered him in epigram, and the vice president was unhappy.
All that day at the office — of course he went to work, he would not have known any other way to spend that last day of all days — he was on edge. He continually turned at his desk to stare out the window, waiting for the blood red glaze that would paint the sky. But it did not come.
Shortly after the coffee break that afternoon, he found the impression of nausea growing in him. He went to the men’s room and locked himself into one of the cubicles. He sat down on the toilet with its top closed, and held his head in his hands.
A glimpse was coming to him.
Another glimpse, vaguely connected to the ones of the holocaust, but now — like a strip of film, running backward — he saw himself entering a bar.
There were words in twisting neon outside, and repeated again on the small dark–glass window. The words said: THE NITE OWL. He saw himself in his blue suit, and he knew the money was in his pocket.
There was a woman at the bar.
Her hair was faintly auburn in the dim light of the bar. She sat on the bar stool, her long legs gracefully crossed, revealing a laced edge of slip. Her face was held at an odd angle, half–up toward the concealed streamer of light over the bar mirror. He could see the dark eyes, and the heavy makeup that somehow did not detract from the sharp, unrelieved lines of her face. It was a hard face, but the lips were full, and not thinned. She was staring at nothing.
Then, as abruptly as it had come, the vision passed, and his mouth was filled with the slippery vileness of his nausea.
He got to his feet and flipped open the toilet. Then he was thoroughly sick, but not messy.
Afterwards, he went back to the office, and found the yellow pages of the phone book. He turned to “Bars” and ran his finger down the column till he came to “The Nite Owl” on Morrison and 58th Streets.
He went home especially to freshen up . . . to get into his blue suit.
She was there. The long legs in the same position, the edge of slip showing, the head at that strange angle, the hair and eyes as he had seen them.
It was almost as though he were reliving a dramatic part he had once played; he walked up to her, and slid onto the empty stool next. “May I, may I buy you a drink, Miss?”
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 glass 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 and Arthur had paid him.
Then the girl said, “Thanks.”
Arthur nodded, and moved the glass 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 hell 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 turned on him with vehemence. “Look, mac, you on the make, or what? You got a pitch? Come on, it’s late, and I’m beat.”
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 fink. My luck, always my luck.” She bolted the rest of her drink and slid off the stool. Her skirt rode up over her knees, then fell again, as she moved toward the door.
Arthur felt panic rising in him. This was the last chance, and it was important, how 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. Six 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 freaky 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.
“Gee,” she mumbled, 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 good woman.”
The woman held the money tightly. Four thousand dollars. What a simple little bastard. 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 pass, 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 hell, and that I thought some day perhaps the whole world would be that hell, unless we stopped trying to strangle decency, unless we stopped trying to turn logic and imagination and the hearts of men toward a
Battlefield
SATURDAY
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 the 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 full–blooded 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 bitch of a job gettin’ 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 in 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 at the 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 gray, 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 space.
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 glassene ports; men donned special equipment, and snapped switches that cut in their air 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, passed completely over the crabs, and shusssssed off into the Darkside, and space, 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, bloody scrapheap 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 slowly fell back.
All along the line the doggies 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 qu
ickly, 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 Huer 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 hell below them, the Huer 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 toward their own lines. It was futile: sonorad had caught them. Trackbeams snaked out across the sky, picking each man off like a moth caught in a flame. The Huer units were snuffed out in midair, even as the 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, and in a holocaust of exploding ferro–atomics the entire battery went up. Three hundred men died at once, faces burned off, arms ripped loose from sockets, legs shattered 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, exploding them on contact, then moved on. Eventually, they probed at the firm outer shell 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: a visible struggle to beat down the strength of the other.