The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Page 10

  For two hours, he played and sang, and told the old tales.

  He was just finishing the story of Atlantis, when the cop arrived. The cop was dressed in the usual blue tunic and shorts, and the usual scowl. “What the hell’s going on here?” he said.

  The robot came wheeling over, moaning, “Obscenity is forbidden in the playground. Obscenity is—”

  “Shaddap!” said the cop.

  The robot shut up.

  “All right, bud,” said the cop, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Just singing a few songs, and telling a few stories,” said the man with the waxed mustache meekly.

  “You’re disturbing a public playground,” said the cop. “I think I’ll run you in.”

  A little sparkle returned to the man with the mustache. “Is that a crime, officer?” he said.

  “No, but…”

  Miklos chewed on his cigar. “Then I guess you’ll be on your way,” he said.

  “Not so fast,” said the cop. “I can still run you in for vagrancy.”

  The man with the mustache grinned, and then permitted himself a large laugh. “I’m afraid not, my friend. No indeed, I’m afraid not.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of wet, soiled bills. He counted out two hundred dollars, and shoved them under the cop’s nose. “See, my friend? I am hardly a vagrant. Well, my little friends,” he said, turning his back to the cop, “I must be going, before there is any more trouble, and I am tempted to turn this worthy officer of the law into a you-know-what. Good-by, my friends. Remember the Romany.”

  The children grinned. The cop stood there. The man with the waxed black mustache hoisted his guitar to his shoulder, and slowly walked out of the playground, whistling loudly.

  The early morning sun shone in through the large picture window, bathing the bar in bright yellow light. The bar was empty, except for the bartender and a young man with a detached, faraway look. The young man, who was wearing the gold and black uniform of the Space Corps, sat at one end of the bar staring out the window and sipping a beer.

  Miklos stepped in, the open door admitting a blast of hot air into the air-conditioned room. “Hello, my friend,” he said, sitting down two seats away from the young Spaceman. “A beer, please.”

  The bartender pressed beer, and the plastic stein appeared in front of Miklos. Miklos took a long drink. “The morning is the best time for a good cold beer,” he said. “Too bad so few people recognize its beauties.” He glanced at the young man. The Spaceman gave Miklos a funny look, but not one of distaste. He said nothing, and continued to stare out the window.

  “Did you find the playground?” asked the bartender. The Spaceman smiled a twisted smile.

  “Of course,” said Miklos, lighting a cigar. “No trouble at all. That is, except for a cop that tried to chase me away. But he was little trouble.” He pointed to his head. “Not too bright, you know.”

  The Spaceman chuckled softly.

  “You still haven’t told me what you did there,” said the bartender.

  The man with the mustache thumped his guitar. “I played this thing, I sang, I told the kids a few stories.”

  “What for?” asked the bartender.

  The young man got up, and sat down next to Miklos. “I know what for, don’t I?” he said, smiling.

  Miklos laughed. “If you say you do.”

  “Say,” said the bartender, “you’re a Spaceman. You been around, no?”

  “I suppose I have.”

  “Well then,” said the bartender, “maybe you can help our guitar friend here. He’s looking for something.”

  “Oh?” said the young man with the faraway stare. He seemed to be suppressing something between a snicker and a grin.

  “Yeah,” said the bartender, laughing, “Gypsies!”

  The Spaceman did not laugh. He ignored the bartender, and turned to Miklos. “You are looking for Gypsies?”

  “Yes,” said Miklos soberly. “Yes, I am looking for Gypsies.”

  “For the Romany?”

  Miklos stared hard at him. “Yes, the Romany.”

  The Spaceman drank the last of his beer. “It is a hard thing,” he said, “to find Romany these days.”

  “I know, I know,” said Miklos, resting his head in his hands. “For fourteen years I have looked. Fourteen years, six continents, and God knows how many countries. It’s a long time—a long sweaty time. Perhaps too long, perhaps I am crazy, and there are no more Romany, and perhaps there never will be. Perhaps I should give up, and go back to being a vice president in charge of sales, or go to a psychiatrist, or—”

  “I know a place,” said the young man.

  “A place?”

  “A far place,” said the Spaceman. “A place that no one has yet seen. Alpha Centauri. Or perhaps Sirus. Or Rigel.”

  “The stars?” said Miklos. “Nobody’s ever been to the stars.”

  “Indeed,” said the young man, smiling, “no one has ever been to the stars. What better place to find the Romany? Out there, in a land that is not yet in the travel tours, a land that no one has ever seen, the kind of land where the Romany have always gone. Somewhere out there, there are cities that put all the legends to shame. And magic, and wonder… The Universe has a billion worlds. Surely, on one of them there are Gypsies, on another Khans, on another ancient Baghdad.”

  “A very pleasant picture,” said Miklos, lighting a cigar, “and probably true. But unfortunately, it’s as possible to go to those worlds as it is to visit ancient Baghdad.”

  “Not quite,” said the Spaceman. “On the Moon, they are building a faster-than-light starship. First stop Alpha Centauri. There will be others. Many others.”

  Miklos stood up. “A starship! Yes! I’ll book passage right away. You wouldn’t think it, to look at me, but I’m moderately rich.” He stared out the window at the sky. “Perhaps I’ll find them yet, out there.”

  “Of course,” said the young man, “it’s a government project, like the Moon, and Mars and Venus. As they say, there’s only room for ‘trained experts.’ ”

  “Of course,” said Miklos, “of course… it’s always that way. Always machines, or men like machines, always. But no matter! If those ships exist, there is a way on them. If the stars are there, there’s a way to bum your way. If the Romany exist, some day, somewhere, I’ll find them.” He stood up, and slung his guitar over his shoulder. “I’m off for Canaveral,” he said. “And then to the Moon, and then… Well, good-by and thanks.”

  The man with the waxed black mustache strode out into the sunny street.

  “Thanks, pal,” said the bartender. “You really got rid of that screwball. He was starting to worry me. You really knew what made him tick.”

  “I ought to,” said the Spaceman.

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “Well, once there was a kid in Springfield, Ohio, in fact the kid was me. And this kid was like all the other kids in this world, a nice, packaged future member of a nice packaged society. And then one day, maybe eleven years ago, a crazy guy with a mustache blew into town, and told that kid a lot of tall tales about a lot of far places. Something changed in that kid that day—a very small change. But it got bigger and bigger every year, until now that little change is the whole person. And here I am, on my way to Centaurus.”

  “You mean there really is a starship?”

  “There sure is, and you know something? Somehow, some day, in some highly illegal manner, that guy is going to get on it.” The Spaceman looked out the window as if he were already on his way to Centaurus.

  “What’ll they do to him when they find him?” asked the bartender.

  The Spaceman looked at him, a strange softness in his eyes.

  “Only a certain rare kind of man can go somewhere no one’s ever seen. You can’t package that kind of man. You can’t grow him in controlled schools and mold him on canned dreams. You’ve got to beat him and kick him and laugh at him and call him crazy. And if someone has whispered certain thin
gs in his ear at a critical time, you have a man who will go to the stars.”

  The young man glared at the bartender.

  “What will we say to him, when we find him on the ship? What else, but ‘Welcome, Miklos. Welcome home.’ ”

  Technicality

  We were pretty well dug in at the base of a long, gently sloping ridge, with six Empie pillboxes guarding the crest, spread kind of thin. This was near the end of the war, when everyone knew that the Empies had had it, but the big boys were still not telling the civvies why. We knew that the ridge was just about all that the Empies had between us and their last real concentration in this part of the state, and tomorrow morning we were going over the top. By this time, the brass had finally got it through their thick skulls that night attacks were just too much to ask from anyone.

  Well, up to the lines comes the kid, Barker’s replacement, just as the Empies on top of the ridge decide to keep us honest with a brace of barf-bombs. The kid sees those four rockets coming down at us fat and lazy, and he gets the message or at least thinks he does. Without a “Howdy-do” or “Hello, Sarge,” he’s face downward in the dirt behind me. The wind being in our faces, the Empies have, of course, lobbed the barf-bombs short and the green gas is rolling slowly toward us. We’ve got maybe a minute, maybe two.

  The kid looks up with a face full of mud and he says, “They missed us, huh, Sarge?”

  “You have supper yet, kid?”

  “Why, yeah, thanks, Sarge. I—”

  “Too bad,” I have time to say, and then the gut-gas hits, heavy green stuff that works on skin-contact so masks are useless, and we are all too busy gagging and puking to continue the conversation.

  A couple of boys in the platoon are still insisting on shooting back up at the Empie emplacements every time they lob something at us, but the Funny Bunnies are way down underground, and when the gas clears enough for me to stop gagging, I chew them out for wasting ammo. Not that they won’t go and do the same thing the next time we get fed puke pills. Some jerks just take everything so damned personal.

  Well, the kid wipes most of the mud mess off of himself, and you can see that now he is feeling like a real pro. “When do we get to kill us some Empies?” he asks, with what he hopes will impress me as the real gung-ho.

  “You might try reporting first, Soldier,” I suggest. I am up to my ears with all these Mickey Mice, and I have no energy to do the full-scale sergeant act.

  So he tells me that he is Pfc. Tolan, and I tell him how overjoyed I am to see him. Like every other replacement we’re getting lately, the kid is just about straight out of high school, and like all civilians, knows next to nothing about the war that’s going on all around him. About all the civvies know is that almost two years back, these green characters show up from some place called Tau Ceti, in honest-to-Pete flying saucers. A real live invasion from Outer Space, just like in the movies. Well, to begin with they are mopping the floor with every army on Earth, and they conquer half of good old terra firma. We start using the big stuff, H-bombs even, and then they get real unpleasant. Every time we use even an atomic popgun, three cities get king-size doses of puke gas. Finally, the brass gets the message: the Funny Bunnies will leave the civvies alone as long as we lay off the nuclear stuff. So we find ourselves slogging through the mud just like an old World War II movie, for the sake of the civvies’ tender stomachs. Politics!

  And do the civvies give a damn now? All they know is that the Empies are leaving them alone, and that now, for some reason that no one is really explaining, we are mopping the floor with them. The civvies are all calling the Funny Bunnies “Empies,” but maybe one in ten knows that “Empie” comes from “M.P.,” and the brass is making sure that no civilian below the Secretary of Defense knows what M.P. stands for. Which is about the only thing about the war that doesn’t confirm my pet theory that anything above the rank of Master Sergeant is really a chimpanzee.

  So, of course, what the kid asks next is, “What’s the secret?”

  “I give up, kid. You tell me.”

  “I mean the Secret Weapon. Everyone says we got a Secret Weapon, ever since last year when we finally started winning. What’s the Secret Weapon, Sarge?”

  I try not to groan too hard. I point to the kid’s autorifle, which at least seems to be in working condition. “You’re holding it, kid,” I say. “Tomorrow morning, we all go up that hill. All you got to remember is that no matter what, and I mean no matter what, you keep running up that hill, and you don’t turn back. That’s the Secret Weapon, a gun on the end of a pair of legs. And you don’t turn back. Turn back, and I blow your brains out, got it?”

  The message seems to penetrate. Of course, I don’t go around shooting every yuk that turns tail. If I did, I would be shooting about two platoons a week, on the average. But the first time is usually the worst, the one that makes a civvie into a soldier. I figure that, if I can make them more afraid of me than of what’s happening to ’em, they got a better chance of sticking it out. Sometimes it even works.

  Bright and early the next morning, up we go. We have, of course, not eaten breakfast, and we’ve emptied our bowels and bladders as thoroughly as possible. I keep the kid as close to me as I can, and I’m doing my best to look ferocious.

  We’ve gone maybe twenty yards when the Empies wake up and start lobbing barf-bombs. Most of the guys are pretty much used to the dry heaves, and so we stumble and retch, but all in all make pretty good time up through the gut-gas. The kid is in a pretty bad way, but he’s got guts, and he’s even firing his autorifle now and then, trying to look like a soldier. I’m about to tell him to stop wasting ammo, but then I figure, what the hell so he wastes a few rounds, long as it helps keep him going.

  We get through the puke-gas, which, of course, is just for openers, and then they really start opening up. Bladderbusters, bowelbillies, itchrays, freezers—just about everything but the heavy stuff. Already, some of the guys have had it, mostly the ones that have been around too long and have been getting flippy anyway.

  I glance around at the kid, to see if he has noticed that I am not shooting the tail-turners, but he’s far too busy twitching and scratching and shivering to notice anything. But he’s still running in the right direction and firing wildly. The kid has guts.

  Well, we get halfway up the hill, and the attrition rate is not too bad—more than half of us are still coming. Now we can see the tops of the Empie pillboxes, which are just steel slabs with rocket-ports, raynozzles and gasvents in them. There’s one big hatch to each pillbox. All the guts are underground.

  Then they start using the Big Stuff.

  First, the Aphrogas. Ever try fighting thinking about, feeling about nothing but women—I mean like hitting a Mexican border town after ten years in solitary? Yeah, Aphrogas and then Panic Pills.

  I’m scratching and yelling and feeling monsters all around me, like a super case of the d.t.’s, but I’m used to it. I’ve been in this war a whole six months, see. Well, the platoon is really falling apart now. We’ve been assigned number two pillbox, and the guys are, as usual, turning tail like polecats. Only me and Anders and Brown and McCuller and Gentry are still coming. And the kid. How about that, I think. That kid really has guts.

  Finally, we’re maybe fifty yards from the pillbox, and that’s within suicide-ray range. Of course we have all had as much hypnoconditioning as we can stand, and as soon as we feel that familiar urge to slit our own throats coming on us, our adrenals cut in, and we go into what the psych-boys call Turnaround, and we’re storming up the hill, thinking nothing but Kill! Kill! Kill! Either that, or running for home like scared rabbits.

  The little part of me that is not yelling “Kill! Kill! Kill!” is checking the rest of the platoon. Anders and Gentry are running down the hill. Brown has not been able to take enough hypnoconditioning. He’s blown his own brains out.

  It’s me and McCuller and the kid. Kill! Kill! Kill! Up those last fifty yards to the pillbox, and the suicide-ray getting s
tronger with every yard.

  But we’ve got too much Kill! Kill! in us—me and McCuller and the kid. We scramble up on top of the pillbox lid, up to the hatch, and I pull out a grenade, and they hit us with the last-ditch weapon.

  One second it’s Kill! Kill! Kill!, and the next we all love the Empies. How could we ever have thought of hurting such nice green little bunnies? Who never hurt anyone. Who love us all, with a great big mother-love. Lovely little Funny Bunnies… Dear little Empies…

  McCuller sort of slips off the pillbox, blubbering. He has had it. The kid, I guess, has never had a mother. He is just about dragging me, and I wouldn’t hurt the dear little Empies for all the world. Dear little enemies. Cute little…

  With the last bit of resistance that I have left in me, I plant the grenade atop the hatch, grab the kid, and roll us off the pillbox.

  Crump! not a big explosion, and most of it is directed downward anyway. The hatch is blown off, the suicide-ray and the love-ray nozzles smashed, and it is all over.

  The kid and I rush up to the hatch, and down into the pale, butter-colored light. We’re inside a big warm burrow where maybe ten or so little green furry creatures are just standing around on their big haunches next to a lot of now-useless machinery. They have dumpy little bodies like beavers, little heads with long floppy ears, and the saddest expressions in their big brown eyes. They just stand there, not moving, not trying to get away, not doing anything but looking sad and innocent and helpless.

  I start firing, and the kid is firing beside me, and in less than a minute there are ten furry little bodies on the ground, all torn to bits and laying in pools of the green stuff the Funny Bunnies have for blood.

  It’s just me and the kid and all that dead meat. Suddenly, standing there, watching the confused, sad, savage, goofy look on the kid’s face and remembering how it was for me when I found out, I know that I have finally had it. I can go up a hill again, through anything they have to throw at me, but I can’t shoot any more Funny Bunnies that just stand there, waiting, not doing a thing but looking like your favorite cocker spaniel. I know that they are all crazy fanatics, out to conquer anything that isn’t an Empie and that someone has to stop them. But not me, not any more.