Gus sat in his ionocraft, hovering over his plantation, and watched what took place through a bank of small TV monitors, mounted on the control panel, which received signals from various units of his motley army. One screen in particular caught his attention; it displayed a transmission from a squad of creech-operated ionocrafts that had moved nearer the enemy than any other of Gus’ units. There on the screen Gus saw, forming out of the blackness, a herd of gigantic African aardvarks as big as dinosaurs with evil, glittering eyes, huge claws and ears like circus tents, and with unbelievably long tongues that lashed out and licked ionocrafts out of the sky.
“Oh, my God,” Gus said, unable to accept the fantastic sight. “Not aardvarks!”
In the wake of the stampeding aardvarks came a battered autonomic ionocraft taxi bearing Percy X and Lincoln Shaw. “You see that?” Percy yelled. “I’ll bet they didn’t expect that.”
“It’s wild,” Lincoln said, more awestruck than enthusiastic.
“What else can you do?” asked the taxi.
“How about something really beautiful?” Percy shouted. “How about a gigantic bird all made of flame? How about a phoenix?”
“Okay,” Lincoln said. “One phoenix coming up.” He adjusted the controls on the construct in his lap and concentrated. Out of the clouds of dust that rose in the wake of the aardvarks formed an incredible winged creature, more than a thousand feet in wingspread. It seemed to be made up of burning light or perhaps electricity, and all the colors of the spectrum flickered chaotically over its feathered surfaces. Its eyes consisted of points of blindingly bright blue white light, like twin welding torches, and, as it glided majestically ahead of them, it left in the air a trail of sparks like falling stars. The two men in the ionocraft could smell the ozone caused by its electrical fire, and the wind from its wings blew the ionocraft roughly about, almost overturning it. Now and then it opened its blazing beak and uttered a hoarse cry that sounded, to Lincoln, like the scream of an
ignorant and innocent thing being tortured to death.
“Isn’t it great?” Percy yelled.
“De gustibus non disputandum est, the taxi said philosophically.
“Charge!” shouted General Robert E. Lee as he galloped into battle at the head of a troop of mounted Valkyrie. Their long blonde hair streamed in the wind as they screamed ancient runic oaths and trampled beneath the hooves of their ice cream white horses creech, white and Tom, without discrimination.
A squadron of vampires dripping blood from their fangs and wearing the insignia of Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s Flying Circus flapped by overhead, while Samson, hair and all, strode past, swinging the jawbone of a duckbill platypus.
Through the milling confusion rushed a battalion of Brownie Scouts, cracking skulls right and left with overbaked cookies, while a kosher butcher, with his vorpal meat cleaver, reduced the enemy to meat knish. Redassed baboons charged in behind him, pushing supermarket carts armed with fifty caliber machine guns. A rock-and-roll group headed by a young long-hair trumpeter named Gabriel played the “jerk” while a team of trained surgeons removed one appendix after another, throwing in an occasional lobotomy to avoid monotony.
Four squealing transvestites in silk evening gowns swung, with deadly accuracy, blue-sequined purses filled with cement, while cavemen and Pygmies hurled poisoned confetti.
A dayglow orange unicorn reared up with seven soldiers impaled on his horn like so many unpaid
bills, and a man-eating plant with an Oxford accent sucked dry one spinal column after another with a sound like a rude boy trying to suck up the last drop of a milkshake. Sadistic peacocks circulated among the wounded, tickling to death the unwary with their feathers. A pregnant ten-year-old teeny-bopper, smashed on acid, mercilessly beat all comers at chess, passing the time between moves by painting pictures of her favorite celebrities, Marshal Ky, Marshal Koli and Adolf Hitler, on her naked but flat chest, with purple lipstick.
Little nude lesbians no more than one inch high scampered over the faces of the enemy removing beards one hair at a time. The Wolfman chewed contentedly on a big toe, spitting out the toenail. A brave band of lawnmowers and growling laundromat machines executed a brilliant flanking movement and attacked from the rear. Everywhere the air was filled with the ghastly sound of guttural shrieks, whoops, howls, oily laughter, gasps, grunts, lisps, drawls, yells, croaks, bellows, whines, sensual moans, brays, yaps, meows, tweets, bleats, roars and maundering.
But at the moment when it appeared as if the ordinary forces of Gus Swenesgard would be wiped out to a man, the fantastic hordes of Percy X began to quarrel among themselves. Frankenstein attacked the Wolfman. Godzilla attacked King Kong. The Boy Scouts criminally assaulted Girl Scouts.
The sabre-tooth tiger was blinded by the needles of shoe-making elves. A spikelet of Meadow Fescue (festuca elatior) was struck down by a cowardly blow from Bucky Bug, anthers, pistil, paleae, glume and
all. Suddenly it became a free-for-all. Every apparition for himself.
In an instant Percy realized that if he remained in the midst of the nightmare battle just a moment too long, he and his men would fall victim to their own phantasmagoria. In fact at this very moment a carnivorous vacuum cleaner was attempting to break into the taxi in which he and Lincoln Shaw sat.
“Retreat!” Percy shouted into his mike. “Back to the mountains before it’s too late.”
At dawn the battlefield lay silent.
A mist hung over the scene, hiding the incredible carnage left behind by the night’s orgy of destruction. As the sun rose higher in the sky the mist began to evaporate, and with it the multitude of fantastic shapes and forms which the mist had hidden. Ghostly dead elephants and ruined tanks melted together, became translucent, then transparent, then faded away. Heaps of corpses, wearing the uniforms of every age and nation, blurred and shimmered and became one with the fog. Ionocrafts and creeches and Toms and Neeg-parts they, too, faded and turned to a fog, the real and the unreal meeting and blending and then vanishing together.
By noon the mist and what the mist had hidden had both disappeared without a remnant, and in the shuddering mid-day heat nothing remained but weeds and the bent, upward-poking stalks of grass.
Paul Rivers did not face the man; instead he stood gazing out the hotel room window at the seamy side of Knoxville, Tennessee, as it baked in the afternoon heat. Everything he says is true, Paul thought to himself. And yet—
“There are only two possible outcomes to the situation up there in the hills,” Dr. Martin Choate, Paul’s immediate superior in the World Psychiatric Association, said. ‘‘Percy will not use the hell- weapon, and he will lose his pelt and the ego of the human race will be lost with him, or Percy will use the hell-weapon and that will be the end for all of us. Don’t you see that?”
Paul did not speak; he only nodded. Yes, he thought, I see that. But I can’t accept it.
“Then you must also see,” Dr. Choate said, “that we have no choice but to kill him and to burn his body, making it look as if he died in action— heroically. Our organization has already begun to make its move. Seven high-ranking wik officials have already killed themselves under hypnotic suggestions implanted by their psychotherapists. Other more complex plans have already been set in motion,
but we must have a martyr; we must have our John Brown, our crucified Christ, if we hope to gain the support of the broad masses of people. Isn’t the freedom of most of the human race more important to you than the life of one man, one murderous fanatic?”
Paul said, “Why me?”
“Because he trusts you. You saved him from Balkani. We don’t have anyone else who could get near him.”
“That’s the problem,” Paul said. “He trusts me. That’s why I can’t do it.”
“He won’t be able to probe you telepathically. We can hypnotically implant a cover story in your mind, a story you’ll believe yourself until the moment comes to strike. He’ll never know.”