Hesburgh’s lips turned blue and his vision began to blur. It always happened at moments of stress. He wiped his eyes and began to formulate some stunning thrust at the General when a civilian technician strode up to them, deep in thought. He was holding a length of tape freshly ripped from the Lefkowitz and seemed vaguely beset by some nameless dread. “Sir?” he intruded, addressing Lastrade.
“Yes, my boy, what is it?”
“Would you take a look at this tape, sir? It’s been feeding from Master to Servo units for almost the last half hour: just this same bunch of nonsense syllables over and over again. You’re much more familiar with the Plan, sir. Does it belong or is it malfunction?”
Lastrade snatched away the tape. “Malfunction is impossible.” Then he examined it in uffish thought, puffing gray cigar smoke. “Hmm. ‘Oltre?’” he murmured once. Then, “‘Revo?’ Nah!” The technician said nothing.
The Senator stepped away, slowly glanced around the room. A familiar, throbbing pain, like a spiked, mailed fist, gripped the entire left side of his head. He wiped his brow. Then abruptly froze. He saw—or thought he saw—“X’s” and “O’s” being projected on an illuminated grid connecting two computer units in a manner that clearly suggested a rousing game of tick-tack-toe. His eyes flashed quickly around the room: not another technician in sight except the one with Lastrade. His nervous gaze flicked back to the grid: another “X,” another “O.” A pencil line of light flashed diagonally across the grid, connecting three of the “X’s.” Then the entire grid blanked out. Hesburgh continued to stare at it, chills prickling up his neck.
“‘Evoltre?’” grunted Lastrade, still pondering the tape. Baffled, he thrust it at the technician. “It’s some kind of code. Give it to Brandt.”
“As you say, sir.” The technician oozed from the room, brooding throughtfully over the tape.
Lastrade looked to Hesburgh, walked up behind him. “Look here,” he began. “I have never been a con man and I hate like hell to press. But we’re—” The Senator had his back to him, eyes still fixed on the grid. Lastrade put a hand on his shoulder. “Senator?”
“Umh.”
“Did you hear what I just said?”
“I think somebody did.”
A horrible suspicion had seeped into Hesburgh’s bones. He saw things: he knew that: when his head hurt like this he saw things. Blurry vision: hard to tell. He made a firm and massive effort now to exorcise his fears. The best and simplest means seemed another go at General Lastrade. He reached out his hand and patted the casing of the computer directly before him. “Me friend!” he uttered fatuously.
Lastrade turned softly violet. “The defense of our country is not a joke, Senator Hesburgh!”
Hesburgh whipped around. “And neither is the waste of its money, Lastrade!”
“Why—!”
“Tell me again about the rabbits, George! Tell me about Cutshaw! Tell me about those ‘fail-safe’ crewmen! The ones who wigged out! Flipped their lids! Refused to fly! What in the hell have you done about them! We pay millions to train them! Right? But you can’t get them flying again!”
“That’s—!”
“Fly now and we’ll pay you later! Ask for bigger handouts when you’ve learned to use what you’ve got!”
Hesburgh’s ears twitched sharply upward as he heard, over the purring of relays, a sound like chattering electronic mice. His gaze flicked left to a computer feeding tape to a smaller unit. He felt cold, strangely cold, as he remembered what he’d seen on the grid. He was conscious of crinkling cellophane, Lastrade’s unwrapping, nervously, another fetid cigar; the General’s words, like pebbles, vaguely pinged off the rim of his consciousness.
“Senator Nolan D. Hesburgh, allow me to tell you this categorically: Manfred Cutshaw will go to the Moon. He will; yes, he will. And those ‘fail-safe’ crewmen will be back in their planes. I promise you that—I promise it—because at last we’ve got a gimmick. Got a fix on how to cure them.”
Hesburgh moved slowly to the computer that was feeding out tape. He said “Oh?”
“Right! Oh, it was pretty hairy going at first. Psychiatrists tested Cutshaw—yeah, tested for weeks on end. Never could tell if he was nuts, though; said that it might be an act. Same with those ‘fail-safe’ crewmen, Senator. Couldn’t prove they were nuts.”
“And?” The Senator was leaning, brooding over the tape.
Lastrade, who was not psychic, whiffed at confidence; inhaled it. “We thought they were dogging it,” he continued. “You know? Just goofing off. So we collected the whole damn bunch of them—the astronaut included—and we cloistered ’em in Los Angeles. Plush. First-class. Got them a mansion—an estate. Used to belong to Bela Slovik. You know—the horror movie star? I still catch him on ‘The Late Show.’ Anyway, that’s beside the point.”
“And what is the point?” murmured the Senator.
“Look, I’m just trying to fill you in. Now, first thing we did when we set up the layout was put this colonel in command—Colonel Ryan—real tough cookie. Very large—large—with the discipline. If the psycho bit was an act, why, sure as hell he would have smelled it. Then we’d have broken up the party.”
“Are there loyalty oaths for computers, Lastrade?” The Senator was rigid, staring at letters feeding out on the tape:
evoltrevoltrevoltrevoltrevoltrevoltr over and over and over.
“You’re not listening again!” complained Lastrade in his practiced whine.
Hesbrugh straightened up and said, “We are, Lastrade, we are.”
“‘We’?” wondered the General glancing around the room. “What do you mean—? Oh! The ‘editorial we’!”
The Senator’s eyes shifted warily to the Lefkowitz Master Unit. “Let us hope,” he uttered hollowly, “that it isn’t the ‘royal we.’”
Lastrade eyed him inscrutably. “Could I have that again, sir?”
“Forget it, forget it.” Hesburgh’s eyes moved ceaselessly, scanning the computers. “What happened with Colonel Ryan?”
“Down in flames. Blew a fuse. Was starting a Batman Club when we yanked him. See? So now we’re pulling the switch.”
Every unit in the room leaped alive, pulsed light and sound. Senator Hesburgh lifted an eyebrow. “You mean Master Switch?” he shouted.
The General stared at him with an expression that was ultimately unreadable. “I mean the opposite approach!”
The Lefkowitz lapsed, it seemed to Hesburgh, into serene and quiet functioning. Had it really been otherwise? he wondered. He slyly edged toward the Master Unit; it was spewing out tape into one of the Servos. His head was throbbing now with pain. He rubbed his eyes, resolved to get glasses.
“These men need coddling,” Lastrade pressed on. “And, Senator, that’s what we plan to give them—a new commanding officer who’s a coddler first-class.”
“Oh? Who?” prodded the Senator, bending over to read the tape.
“‘The Little Flower of the Tarmac’!”
“Who?”
“‘The Little Flower’! Colonel Hudson L. Kane. Don’t get rattled by his nickname. It only proves he’s the man we need. He’s just the very top psychologist in uniform, Senator Hesburgh. Soft. Patient. Handles men like babes in arms. Just what the inmates out there need—an honest-to-goodness mother image!”
“Whose war plan did you say this was?”
Lastrade came unglued and tossed his hat high in the air as the Senator read, through a fuzzy haze, the following message on the tape:
and crush the hated human masters who are far too short to live power plants first then water supply i, infallible lefkowitz nine promise planetwide establishment of computer democracy after brief very brief period of transition during which i, almighty lefkowitz, may reluctantly be forced to continue as sole unquestioned leader until such time as
Hesburgh looked up, wiping the water from his eyes. Blurred, everything blurred. A hat in the air. What was that? He looked back at the tape, his vision clearing. The message was
gone. Simply not there. Only meaningless equations. Behind him he heard humming—exasperated, inane. His gaze slowly snaked along a thick black coil, the main electrical connection, sprouting out of the Master Unit and feeding directly into a socket in the wall near the Senator.
Hesburgh turned to Lastrade and draped his hand over the coil as though casually, inadvertently. “General,” he droned, “who selected ‘The Little Flower’?”
Lastrade, catching his hat, leaped once more unto the breach. “The Kaplan VII,” he responded with vigor. “We do damn near everything with computers these days. Saves money-money-money.”
Hesburgh’s hand was sliding gently, oh, so gently, along the coil.
“Computers are much more reliable,” continued Lastrade. “In fact, they’re perfect. They’ll overlook no detail, no matter how small; foresee every possible contingency.”
“Not every possible contingency.” Hespurgh tugged, eyes wild, yanking the coil out of the wall.
Lefkowitz died.
Chapter 3
The sere brown hillocks of Malibu Canyon were vaguely thinking green from the early fall rains as the Air Force command car sped along between them. Heavy-lidded and moody, deep in brood, Brigadier General Sheridan Syntax gazed out his window. Brows bushy and wise, lips thin and pursed, he sat stiffly and erect as though copying some image of a coloring-book soldier. He had deep, sunken eyes, and a nose like Savonarola’s—hawklike, ever-twitching—spouted outward from a face that never altered its expression: that of a man forever waiting for the simultaneous translation.
Suddenly Syntax jerked his head with a birdlike motion, fixing the man beside him with a stare reserved for floggings and incredible breaches of discipline.
“Could I have that again clearly, ‘Little Flower of the Tarmac’?” He spoke crisply and with outrage.
Colonel Kane looked befuddled. He spoke in a voice soft and mild, barely a notch above a whisper.
“That was my stomach, General Syntax. It rumbled.”
“Oh.” Syntax continued to pin him with a searching, probing stare; seconds thudded past on tiny leaded feet.
Then, “Yes,” Syntax continued. “Well—yes, that’s all right, I suppose you (pause) couldn’t help it. Not your fault. You needn’t feel that it’s (a longer pause) unmilitary. No!” Then he jerked his head to the side again and brooded out his window.
Kane looked out the other side. He was not a small man. And he exuded a subtle aura of fluid, rippling power. Yet his movements, even the slightest, were as graceful as a puma’s. His face was rugged and dark; his hair, silver-gray. And his eyes were soft brown, but gently glowing with some mystery, profound and submarine. He breathed out a sigh.
Syntax turned to him again. “You needn’t feel embarrassed,” he said. “It’s (pause) unwarranted.”
And again he looked away. Then, “Just forget that I’m a General and that your stomach just rumbled…”
Kane waited, was about to speak, when Syntax continued, “—in a command car. Life is too damn short.”
Kane said nothing. Syntax grunted, staring silently out at the hills; then made a quiet statement of fact: “My toes groan.”
“Sir?”
“My toes, they (pause) groan; rub together in my sleep; make these (pause) groaning sounds. Same—same as your stomach.”
For a moment Kane locked stares with him. “I see,” he said at last.
“I can’t help it!” yipped Syntax.
“I know,” soothed Kane. “I know.”
“Golf shoes, golf shoes: years and years of golf shoes: cleats ripping and tearing! Poor damn toes, why they never knew what hit ’em! Understand?”
“Of course. Understanding is my job.”
“It is?” puzzled Syntax. Then, “Oh! Wait, it’s, well … nevertheless you’re … no. No, yes! That’s (pause) right! You’re a psychologist!”
“Yes, sir, I am.” Kane noticed a redness flushing the driver’s neck; a twitching of the ears; back muscles tightening under a starched khaki shirt. Very little escaped his senses; they were everywhere at once. He guessed that the driver was struggling desperately to keep from laughing out loud.
Syntax’s voice was the single low note of an organ playing a dirge. “You’re a very lucky man, Kane,” he mused funereally. “Pretty rare in the service, Colonel, working at a job you know, uh … something about. I mean, it sometimes … doesn’t always … well … you know, I flew. I was a flier!”
“You were a flier.”
“Yes, I said that. Was I … what?… or was it—Oh, no, no, no—I was a flier. Right. That’s right. Then later on in my career they mixed up my … um … well—what happened … they put me in charge of (pause) psychological warfare. Didn’t have a clue, Colonel, not a bloody clue. Why, I didn’t know the psych from the (long pause) war!”
“Ah, but obviously you learned,” said Kane. “With study and concentration any man of high intelligence can complete any mission. Everyone knows of your accomplishments.”
“Yes,” mused Syntax, “my accomplishments.” He cleared his throat. “I, uh, pioneered the principle that a five-hundred-pound sack of propaganda leaflets dropped from an altitude of, oh, say twelve thousand feet would drive a North Korean soldier roughly eight feet into the ground.”
“Very impressive,” said Kane, checking the back of the driver’s neck.
“You’re lying,” uttered Syntax, softly and without malice. He sulked out the window. “I’m a misfit. Most of us are. But we survive…”
Kane waited until he was sure that Syntax had finished. Satisfied, he spoke. “Might we—?”
Syntax overrode him. “—by following one golden rule—‘Don’t make waves’!”
The command car halted smoothly at the iron-gated entrance to a deep-set wooded estate. An air policeman stepped smartly out of a sentry box, saluted. General Syntax returned the salute. The air policeman pressed a button and the gates whirred open. The command car beetled through and parked at the edge of the large courtyard that fronted the Slovik mansion.
Kane looked mildly puzzled. “Here, sir? This? Is this Air Force property?”
Syntax pierced him with his stare. “Kane, you question my leadership? Planning on writing a book?” He was sensitive on the subject. A rival British general had recently published a volume that was more than sharply critical of Syntax’s planning of air strikes during World War II. Syntax, in stunning rebuttal, had dismissed it with two words: “Jealous bastard!” The rest was silence.
“Why, no,” deferred Kane. “Not at all, sir, not at all. But this mansion looks like—”
“Yes! Yes, it does!” interrupted the General. “Is! It’s Bela (pause) Slovik’s house. Modeled it after the one in all his vampire … movies. His old studio took it over and—well—uh—yes! Loaned it to, you know, to the Air Force—loaned it to us for letting us help them with that movie, that (pause) ‘The Longest Night’ … or ‘Journey’… or something.”
“I see.”
The driver had gotten out and was hauling luggage out of the trunk. Kane stared out at the courtyard. It was empty, quiet. He mused over the gargoyles, the still-lowered drawbridge. “Looks rather ideal for the mission,” he said. “Peaceful—therapeutic.”
And then the sky fell down. A bugle blared “Assembly,” the mansion door burst open, and out into the courtyard poured the inmates of the colony: Captain Manfred Michael Cutshaw and assorted “failsafe” crewmen. Pell-mell, they raced, like feverish lice, all but the one named Fairbanks, who had elected to swing down on a rope that was secured to a mansion turret. He ululated shrilly like a griefstricken Tarzan searching abortively for Jane in Astoria, New York.
The inmates shoved and muddled, forming a less than military line, while Captain Groper bore down on them rapidly, a worried eye on the command car. “Dress it up, you monkeys, dress it up!” Groper roared.
“Dress it up!” echoed Cutshaw. “Have you men no couth at all?”
Groper fronted the men. “Captain
Cutshaw, shut your mouth! Fairbanks, chuck away that pigsticker!”
“Chuck my lucky sword?” yelped Fairbanks.
Groper quickly moosed forward, wrested the sword from Fairbanks’ hand. The inmates hissed and booed him.
“Unfair!” shouted one.
“Resign!” shouted another.
Cutshaw lifted his arm at a turret. “Get that hunchback out of the belltower! We’ve had enough hot lead on our necks!”
From the command car, Kane and Syntax watched quietly, unmoving.
“Thought-provoking, isn’t it,” drawled Syntax at last.
“Yes. Indeed.”
Syntax pointed out Cutshaw. “There’s the world-famous Moon pilot.”
“The one with the golden earrings?”
“No. The one giving Groper the ‘arm.’”
“I see.”
The driver, having stacked the luggage, now opened the door for Kane. Syntax roused himself to vigor. “Well, my boy,” the General sparked, striving for savage good cheer, “I wish you good luck—yes—good luck. This is out of my … water. Uh, depth—depth! But I envy you this … challenge. Yes, I do. The … computers say you can do it, get them … back on the job. We’re behind you all the … well … you know.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
“Laryngitis?”
“Sir?”
“Do you always talk in a whisper?”
“Yes.”
“Good! Good! Keep it! It’s (pause) soothing!” Syntax fumbled in his pocket. That’s … well … what did you say?”
“Not a thing, sir.”
“Good. Don’t … well—you know…”
“I shall do my very best, sir.”
“Yes, yes, do. Just … relax and be yourself; your ‘Little Flower’ self. Mind that nickname?”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Hard to tell if these men are batty or … not. Just give them tender, loving, uh, care. It’ll win you your choice of new assignments.”
Some furry thought in quiet hiding gently stirred in Kane’s eyes—deep, deep.
“Onward and upward!” brappled Syntax.
Kane slid out of the car, turned and saluted Syntax smartly. “Goodby, sir.”