What might have been, p.32
What Might Have Been, page 32
“Kcuf em won syob!” says Leda, who’s gone seven dry weeks without the straight-on loving these scientists are so clearly ready to provide.
So they pull into the next tourist cabins and get naked and find out what factorial three really means. I mean ... do they get it on or what? Those stag-film stars Candy Barr and Smart Alec have got nothing on Leda, Dickie, and Doctor Miracle! Oh baby!
And then it’s near dawn and they have breakfast at a greasy spoon, and then they’re on Route 85 south. Johnny’s got the brain programmed to drive them right to the 7:57 A.M. White Sands space-time coordinate; he’s got the program tweaked down to the point where the Cad will actually cruise past ground zero and nestle itself behind the observation bunker, leaving them ample time to run inside and join the other top bomb boys.
Right before the turnoff to the White Sands road, von Neumann decides that things are getting dull.
“Dickie, activate the jacks!”
“Yowsah!”
Lernmore leans over the front seat and flips a switch that’s breadboarded into the dash. The car starts to buck and rear like a wild bronco, its front and tail alternately rising and plunging. It’s another goof of the wondercaddy—von Neumann has built B-52 landing gear in over the car’s axles.
As the Caddy porpoises down the highway, its three occupants are laughing and falling all over each other, playing grab-ass, champagne spilling from an open bottle.
Suddenly, without warning, an ooga-ooga Klaxon starts to blare.
“Collision imminent,” shouts von Neumann.
“Hold onto your tush!” advises Lernmore.
“Be careful,” screams Leda and wriggles to the floor.
Lernmore manages to get a swift glimpse of a night black Buick driving down the two-lane road’s exact center, heading straight toward them. No one is visible in the car.
Then the road disappears, leaving only blue sky to fill the windshield. There is a tremendous screech and roar of ripping metal, and the Caddy shudders slowly to a stop.
When Lernmore and von Neumann peer out of their rear window, they see the Buick stopped back there. It is missing its entire roof, which lies crumpled in the road behind it.
For all Neal’s bragging, M’s not something he’s totally used to. He has to stop and puke a couple of times in El Paso, early early with the sky going white. There’s no sympathy from Jack, ‘cause Jack picked up yet another bottle of sweet wine outside San Antone, and now he’s definitely passed. Neal has the machine gun up in the front seat with him; he knows he ought to put it in the trunk in case the cops ever pull them over, but the dapperness of the weapon is more than Neal can resist. He’s hoping to get out in the desert with it and blow away some cacti.
North of Las Cruces the sun is almost up, and Neal is getting a bad disconnected feeling; he figures it’s the morphine wearing off and decides to fix again. He gets a Syrette out of the Buick’s glove compartment and skin-pops it. Five more miles and the rosy flush is on him; he feels better than he’s felt all night. The flat empty dawn highway is a gray triangle that’s driving the car. Neal gets the idea he’s a speck of paint on a perspective painting; he decides it would be cool to drive lying down. He lies down sideways on the driver’s seat, and when he sees that it works, he grins and closes his eyes.
The crash tears open the dreams of Jack and Neal like some horrible fat man’s can opener attacking oily smoked sardines. They wake up in a world that’s horribly different.
Jack’s sluggish and stays in the car, but Neal is out on the road doing dance incantation trying to avoid death that he feels so thick in the air. The Thompson submachine gun is in his hand, and he is, solely for the rhythm, you understand, firing it and raking the landscape, especially his own betraying Buick, though making sure the fatal lead is only in the lower parts, e.g. tires as opposed to sleepy Jack backseat or gas tank, and, more than that, he’s trying to keep himself from laying a steel-jacketed; flat horizontal line of lead across the hapless marshmallow white faces of the rich boys in the Cadillac. They have a low number government license plate. Neal feels like Cagney in White Heat, possessed by total crazed rage against authority, ready for a mad-dog last-stand showdown that can culminate only in a fireball of glorious fuck-you-copper destruction. But there’s only two of them here to kill. Not enough to go to the chair for. Not yet, no matter how bad the M comedown feels. Neal shoots lead arches over them until the gun goes to empty clicks.
Slowly, black Jack opens the holey Buick door, feeling God it’s so horrible to be alive. He blows chunks on the meaningless asphalt. The two strange men in the Cadillac give off the scent of anti-life evil, a taint buried deep in the bone marrow, like strontium 90 in mother’s milk. Bent down wiping his mouth and stealing an outlaw look at them, Jack flashes that these new guys have picked up their heavy death-aura from association with the very earth-frying, retina-blasting all-bomb that he and Neal are being ineluctably drawn to by cosmic forces that Jack can see, as a matter of fact, ziggy lines sketched out against the sky as clear as any peyote mandala.
“Everyone hates me but Jesus,” says Neal, walking over to the Cadillac, spinning the empty Thompson around his callused thumb. “Everyone is Jesus but me.”
“In,” says Lernmore, “I’m sorry we wrecked your car.”
Leda rises “up from the floor between von Neumann’s legs, a fact not lost on Neal.
“We’re on our way to the bomb test,” croaks Jack, lurching over.
“Ve helped invent the bomb,” says von Neumann. “Ve’re rich and important men. Of course ve vill pay reparations and additionally offer you a ride to the test, ezpecially since you didn’t kill us.”
The Cadillac is obediently idling in park, it’s robot-brain having retracted the jacks and gone into standby mode after the oil-pan-scraping collision. Neal mimes a wide-mouthed blow job of the hot tip of the Thompson, flashes Leda an easy smile, slings the gun out into the desert, and then he and shuddery Jack clamber into the Cad’s front seat. Leda, with her trademark practicality, climbs into the front seat with them and gives them a bottle of champagne. She’s got the feeling these two brawny drifters can take her faster farther than science can.
Von Neumann flicks the RESET cyberswitch in the rear seat control panel, and the Cad rockets forward, pressing them all back into the deep cushioned seats. Neal fiddles with the steering wheel, fishtailing the Cad this way and that, then observes, “Seems like this tough short’s got a mind of its own.”
“Zis car’s brobably as smart as you are,” von Neumann can’t help observing. Neal lets it slide: 7:49.
The Cad makes a hard squealing right turn onto the White Sands access road. There’s a checkpoint farther on; but the soldiers recognize von Neumann’s wheels and wave them right on through.
Neal fires up a last reefer and begins beating out a rhythm on the dash with his hands, grooving to the pulse of the planet, his planet awaiting its savior. Smoke trickles out of his mouth; he shotguns Leda, breathing the smoke into her mouth, wearing the glazed eyes of a mundane gnostic messiah, hip to a revelation of the righteous road to salvation. Jack’s plugged in, too, sucking his last champagne, telepathy-rapping with Neal. It’s almost time, and Doctor Miracle and Little Richard are too confused to stop it.
A tower rears on the horizon off to the left, and all at once the smart Cad veers off the empty two lane road and rams its way through a chain-link fence. Nerve-shattering scraping and lumbering thumps.
“Blease step on za gas a bit,” says von Neumann, unsurprised. He programmed this shortcut in. “I still vant to go under za tower, but is only three minutes remaining. Za program is undercompensating for our unfortunate lost time.” It is indeed 7:57.
Neal drapes himself over the wheel now, stone committed to this last holy folly. Feeling a wave of serene, yet exultant resignation, Jack says, “Go.” It’s almost all over now, he thinks, the endless roving and raging, brawling and fucking, the mad flights back and forth across and up and down the continent, the urge to get it all down on paper, every last feeling and vision in master-sketch detail, because we’re all gonna die one day, man, all of us —
The Caddy, its sides raked of paint by the torn fence, hurtles on like God’s own thunderbolt messenger, over pebbles and weeds, across the desert and the sloping glass craters of past tests. The tower is ahead: 7:58.
“Get ready, Uncle Sam,” whispers Neal. “We’re coming to cut your balls off. Hold the boys down, Jack.”
Jack body-rolls over the seat back into the laps of Lemmore and von Neumann. Can’t have those mad scientists fiddle with the controls while Neal’s pulling his cool automotive move!
Leda still thinks she’s on a joyride and cozies up to Neal’s biceps, and for a second it’s just the way it’s supposed to be, handsome hard-rapping Neal at the wheel of big old bomb with a luscious brunette squeezed up against him like gum.
And now, before the guys in back can do much of anything, Neal’s clipped through the tower’s southern leg. As the tower starts to collapse, Neal, flying utterly on extrasensory instincts, slows just enough to pick up the bomb, which has been jarred prematurely off its release hook.
No Fat Boy, this gadget represents the ultimate to date in miniaturization: it’s only about as big as a fifty-gallon oil drum, and about as weighty. It crunches down onto the Caddy’s roof, bulging bent metal in just far enough to brush the heads of the riders.
And no, it doesn’t go off. Not yet: 7:59.
Neal aims the mighty Cad at the squat concrete bunker half a mile off. This is an important test, the last step before the H-bomb, and all the key assholes are in there, every atomic brain in the free world, not to mention dignitaries and politicians aplenty, all come to witness this proof of American military superiority, all those shit-nasty fuckheads ready to kill the future.
King Neal floors it and does a cowboy yodel, Jack is laughing and elbowing the scientists, Leda’s screaming luridly, Dickie is talking too fast to understand, and Johnny.
They impact the bunker at eighty mph, folding up accordian-style, but not feeling it, as the mushroom blooms, and the atoms of them and the assembled bigwigs commingle in the quantum instability of the reaction event. Time forks.
Somewhere, somewhen, there now exists an Earth where there are no nuclear arsenals, where nations do not waste their substance on missiles and bombs, where no one wakes up thinking each morning might be the world’s last—an Earth where two high, gone wigged cats wailed and grooved and ate up the road and Holy Goofed the world off its course.
For you and me.
No Spot of Ground
WALTER JON WILLIAMS
The dead girl came as a shock to him. He had limped into the Starker house from the firelit military camp outside, from a cacophony of wagons rattling, men driving tent pegs, provost marshals setting up the perimeter, a battalion of Ewell’s Napoleon guns rolling past, their wheels lifting dust from the old farm road, dust that drifted over the camp, turning the firelight red and the scene into a pictured outpost of Hell. . . .
And here, to his surprise, was a dead girl in the parlor. She was perhaps sixteen, with dark hair, translucent skin, and cheeks with high spots of phthisis red. Her slim form was dressed in white. She lay in her coffin with candles at her head and feet, and her long-faced relatives sat in a semicircle of chairs under portraits of ancestors and Jefferson Davis.
A gangly man, probably the dead girl’s father, rose awkwardly to welcome the surprised stranger, who had wandered into the parlor in hopes of asking for a glass of lemonade.
The intruder straightened in surprise. He took off his soft white hat and held it over his heart. The little gold knots on the ends of the hat cord rattled on the brim like muffled mourning drums.
“I am sorry to intrude on your grief,” he said.
The father halted in what he was going to say, nodded, and dropped back into his chair. His wife, a heavy woman in dark silk, reached blindly toward him, and took his hand.
The intruder stood for a long moment out of respect, his eyes fixed on the corpse, before he turned and put on his hat and limped out of the house. Once he had thought this sight the saddest of all; once he had written poems about it.
What surprised him now was that it still happened, that people still died this way.
He had forgotten, amid all this unnatural slaughter, that a natural death was possible.
That morning he had brought his four brigades north into Richmond, marching from the Petersburg and Weldon depot south of the James break-step across the long bridge to the Virginia Central depot in the capital. Until two days ago he’d commanded only a single brigade in the defense of Petersburg; but poor George Pickett had suffered a collapse after days of nerve-wrenching warfare in his attempt to keep the city safe from Beast Butler’s Army of the James; and Pickett’s senior brigadier was, perforce, promoted to command of the whole division.
The new commander was fifty-five years old, and even if he was only a division commander till Pickett came back, he was still the oldest in the army.
At school he had been an athlete. Once he swam six miles down the James River, fighting against the tide the whole way, in order to outdo Byron’s swim across the Hellespont. Now he was too tired and ill to ride a horse except in an emergency, so he moved through the streets of Richmond in a two-wheel buggy driven by Sextus Pompeiius, his personal darky.
He was dressed elegantly, a spotless gray uniform with the wreathed stars of a brigadier on his collar and bright gold braid on the arms, English riding boots, black doeskin gloves. His new white wide-brimmed hat, a replacement for the one shot off his head at Port Walthall Junction twenty days ago, was tilted back atop his high forehead. Even when he was young and couldn’t afford anything but old and mended clothes, he had always dressed well, with the taste and style of a gentleman. Sextus had trimmed his grizzled mustache that morning, back in camp along the Petersburg and Weldon, and snipped at the long gray curls that hung over the back of his collar. A fine white-socked thoroughbred gelding, the one he was too ill to ride, followed the buggy on a lead. When he had gone south in 1861 he had come with twelve hundred dollars in gold and silver, and with that and his army pay he had managed to keep himself in modest style for the last three years.
As he rode pas? the neat brick houses he remembered when it was otherwise. Memories still burned in his mind: the sneers of Virginia planters’ sons when they learned
of his background, of his parents in the theater and stepfather in commerce; his mounting debts when his stepfather Mr. Allan had twice sent him to college, first to the University of Virginia and then to West Point, and then not given him the means to remain; the moment Allan had permitted the household slaves to insult him to his face; and those countless times he wandered the Richmond streets in black despondent reverie, when he couldn’t help gazing with suspicion upon the young people he met, never knowing how many of them might be living insults to his stepmother, another of Mr. Allan’s plentiful get of bastards. . . .
The brigadier looked up as the buggy rattled over rusting iron tracks, and there it was: Ellis & Allan, General Merchants, the new warehouse of bright red brick lying along a Virginia Central siding, its loading dock choked with barrels of army pork. The war that had so devastated the Confederate nation had been land only to two classes: carrion crows and merchants. The prosperous Ellis & Allan was run by his stepbrothers now, he presumed, possibly in partnership with an assortment of Mr. Allan’s bastards—in that family, who could say? The brute Allan, penny-pinching as a Jew with the morals of a nigger, might well have given part of the business to his illegitimate spawn, if for no other reason than to spite his foster son. Such was the behavior of the commercial classes that infected this city.
Richmond, he thought violently. Why in the name of heaven are we defending the place? Let the Yanks have it, and let them serve it as Rome served Carthage, burned to the foundations and the scorched plain sown with salt. There are other parts of the South better worth dying for.
Sextus Pompeiius pulled the mare to a halt, and the general limped out of the buggy and leaned on his stick. The Virginia Central yards were filled with trains, the cars shabby, the engines worn. Sad as they were, they would serve to get the division to where it was going, another fifteen miles up the line to the North Anna River, and save shoe leather while doing it.
The detestable Walter Whitman, the general remembered suddenly, wrote of steam engines in his poems. Whitman surely had not been thinking of engines like these, worn and ancient, leaking steam and oil as they dragged from front to front the soldiers as worn and tattered as the engines. Not trains, but ghosts of trains, carrying a ghost division, itself raised more than once from the dead.
The lead formation, the general’s old Virginia brigade, was marching up behind the buggy, their colors and band to the front. The bandsmen were playing “Bonnie Blue Flag.” The general winced—brass and percussion made his taut nerves shriek, and he could really tolerate only the soft song of stringed instruments. Pain crackled through his temples.
