Sally was locked away over in Vicksburg and not likely to be returning any time soon. Debra had taken the household helm. She intended to redecorate the whole place, telling her father, “I want to strip away the old life, Daddy. It’s surely gone.” Already, in the parlor she had installed one of those nice big Victrola humpbacks with the crank handle on the side.
Some weeks later, Doc awakened one sweltering night to the recurring thump of the jungle band. He got dressed and sneaked out the back door, careful of the crushed landing lest history repeat itself. The sound had grown in heat and intensity. It throbbed like the blood in his overworked arteries. Music. The battle hymn of a guerrilla war that had already claimed his former lieutenants.
“Oh, jass,” cried a voice. “Jass, jass, I love it.” The music slid around a wailing cornet. He knew already what that sound was—the workhouse radio, a device Carpy had brought in, arguably to keep the rest of the workers content enough to remain. But what was this hopped-up shit they were playing? “Juba,” came a reply to chill his blood.
He peered around the edge of the open door. The whole of his depleted workforce sat grouped around the big wooden box. Some of them swayed in the rhythm. Their lidded eyes rolled loosely in their sockets. He might as well have been a ghost: they had no sense of him. A frenzied announcer broke in, babbling mythopoeic names—Chippie, Bix, Kid Ory, the Duke and the King. Names of power, and maybe capable of standing up to Ghouls and Dragons? And Cyclopes?
He wanted to go in there and rip apart that radio but was frightened by the energy pulsing through the room; scared rigid by the presence of Debra, like a ghost herself, cozy in their midst. He swallowed and drew back. This must be a nightmare from which he would shortly awaken. Even the crickets chirred with the beat.
Doc withdrew around the side of his house. Awhile on the steps, he breathed in the muggy night air. Jasmine mist hung thickly about him. There was enough pressure inside his skull to blow out a suture. He stared over toward the field where the trombone had lain but could see nothing. Finally, he climbed for the security of his own house.
Inside, someone had put on the parlor Victrola. The tune sounded like a washboard and banjo accompanied by a kazoo in a tub—just more of the insane noise that was pouring out of the workhouse. Drawn fearfully by it, Doc crept into the parlor, to find Carpy and Psalmody naked on the floor between the sofa and center table. He stared, brain on hold. He couldn’t remember how to run away. The impassioned lovers didn’t notice him but the eye in Carpy’s shoulder rolled open and viewed him harshly. Doc stumbled back into the hall, his teeth clamped on the edge of his hand.
Slowly, an irrational anger took hold of him. Outmoded desire resurged in him against the invisible, the preternatural, which dwarfed him in its freedom. By God he wouldn’t just stand here quivering. He’d whip this thing. Doc charged along the hall and down into the cellar. His secret identity hung hidden there—the white linen shroud and flour-sack hood of office. And there, across a keg of nails, lay a new branding iron. Its mark was new to him: a cross with extra arms. He didn’t understand it exactly but the iron had a real heft that he liked.
Once in his guise of Cyclops, he took up his sceptre and rebounded up the stairs. At the top stood Lizzie in her nightdress. She seemed drunk or entranced. “Mr. Doc,” she said gently, with acute sadness, but he would not be undone by so obvious a ploy. He struck her with the iron and, when she withstood the blow, struck her again. Hadn’t he cared for her, hadn’t he treated her justly?
The music seemed to race; someone had cranked up the Victrola. Its noise drowned out the thunder of his passing. He would descend upon the workers, scare them into their graves, and only then punish Carpy. Oh, that thankless task would be hardest of all. He had given that boy more than anyone could ask.
Doc stumbled, half-blind within his hood, down the porch steps, music the scent he followed through the night. He’d smash the radio first. “If thine eye offend thee,” he recited triumphantly.
In the darkness, something struck him on the head. He paused. Another stinging tap—this one on the shoulder—made him spin about. What was it? Chestnuts dropping out of season? Then another, harder blow caught him over one eye. Defiant, he raised the iron, and a dozen of the pesky things hammered into him. With a grunt, he collapsed onto one knee. He snatched at one of the objects as it tumbled in the grass. He thought he had hold of a chunk of hail for a moment but it was long and smooth and carefully finished. It was, dear God, a piano key. Alert to his folly, Doc tried to get up to retreat and found that a pile of the keys had amassed around him, the hem of his robe snagged beneath them. He whacked away as the wall grew up. He whipped the iron desperately, until exhaustion and a thousand blows made him reel.
The keys showered down, hard as buckshot. Black and white, they pummeled like fists, spreading dark stains across the shroud, until all that remained was the iron, stuck out like a lightning rod with a good-luck sign at the tip. The heaped keys glistened as bright moonlight reappeared, and the music tinkled artlessly away.
The Long-Awaited Appearance of the Real Black Box
Ratislav Durman
Edward Reindrop Horvat never had any illusions that he was an important person. His work as a restorer of Martian relics had no direct influence on the history of mankind; in fact, his influence was really quite negligible. The policy of Isolation had cut off all links between the Earth and Mars but, even without any further flow of artifacts from the Red Planet to Earth, there were still enough so that Edward had no fear that he would have to pass the years before retirement in another profession. The question was whether he would make it to retirement at all.
He was among the first conscripts yet the war did not interest him at all. At the obligatory political education classes during basic training they told him there were twenty reasons for war. The first two were so obviously ridiculous that he didn’t bother to listen to the rest. He slept through them instead since the officer who gave the lectures obviously didn’t care whether anyone listened to him or not.
By the time Edward arrived at the front the bitterness he had acquired in basic training had grown considerably. It bothered him that there was no one whom he could address with any conviction as “Sir” (the only man he knew was worthy of his “Good Morning, Sir” was killed in the first bombardment). It maddened him that instead of engaging in the highest sort of intellectual pursuits he was now forced to carry a rifle. It annoyed him that the only women he met were mindless automations of neurotic sexual compulsives who wanted to have one last orgasm before the end. These were the members of women’s battalions with whom they were ordered to couple in the interests of “reducing psychic tension” among the troops.
But more than anything else it drove him into a rage that he was being forced to kill people who also had no interest in the war, who, if they were lucky, slept during political education lectures, just as he did. His dissatisfaction, however, did not last long. The physical exertions, the constant uncertainty and the everyday presence of death quickly extinguished every emotion. He became an automation which was fine since nothing more was expected of him.
Ten years went by, and death ignored him.
Anthony Sever would have been a soldier in any era and under any regime. Under Caeser, Joan of Arc or Rommel, he would certainly have risen no further than non-commissioned officer, a rank he certainly would have attained. However, his personal traits and the exigencies of the times in which he lived had made him general—and the head of the High Command at that.