Dangerous Visions (19 page)

Interviewer: "Young Finnegan was seventy years old when his father died."

Accipiter: "During this struggle, which went on for many years, Finnegan decided to rename himself Winnegan. It's a pun on Win Again. He seems to have had a childish, even imbecilic, delight in puns, which, frankly, I don't understand. Puns, I mean."

Interviewer: "For the benefit of our non-American viewers, who may not know of our national custom of Naming Day . . .this was originated by the Panamorites. When a citizen comes of age, he may at any time thereafter take a new name, one which he believes to be appropriate to his temperament or goal in life. I might point out that Uncle Sam, who's been unfairly accused of trying to impose conformity upon his citizens, encourages this individualistic approach to life. This despite the increased record-keeping required on the government's part.

"I might also point out something else of interest. The government claimed that Grandpa Winnegan was mentally incompetent. My listeners will pardon me, I hope, if I take up a moment of your time to explain the basis of Uncle Sam's assertion. Now, for the benefit of those among you who are unacquainted with an early 20th-century classic,
Finnegan's Wake
, despite your government's wish for you to have a free lifelong education, the author, James Joyce, derived the title from an old vaudeville song."

(Half-fadeout while a monitor briefly explains "vaudeville.")

"The song was about Tim Finnegan, an Irish hod carrier who fell off a ladder while drunk and was supposedly killed. During the Irish wake held for Finnegan, the corpse is accidentally splashed with whiskey. Finnegan, feeling the touch of the whiskey, the 'water of life,' sits up in his coffin and then climbs out to drink and dance with the mourners.

"Grandpa Winnegan always claimed that the vaudeville song was based on reality, you can't keep a good man down, and that the original Tim Finnegan was his ancestor. This preposterous statement was used by the government in its suit against Winnegan.

"However, Winnegan produced documents to substantiate his assertion. Later—too late—the documents were proved to be forgeries."

Accipiter: "The government's case against Winnegan was strengthened by the rank and file's sympathy with the government. Citizens were complaining that the business-union was undemocratic and discriminatory. The officials and workers were getting relatively high wages, but many citizens had to be contented with their guaranteed income. So, Winnegan was brought to trial and accused, justly, of course, of various crimes, among which were subversion of democracy.

"Seeing the inevitable, Winnegan capped his criminal career. He somehow managed to steal 20 billion dollars from the federal deposit vault. This sum, by the way, was equal to half the currency then existing in Greater LA. Winnegan disappeared with the money, which he had not only stolen but had not paid income tax on. Unforgivable. I don't know why so many people have glamorized this villain's feat. Why, I've even seen fido shows with him as the hero, thinly disguised under another name, of course."

Interviewer: "Yes, folks, Winnegan committed the Crime Of The Age. And, although he has finally been located, and is to be buried today—somewhere—the case is not completely closed. The Federal government says it is. But where is the money, the 20 billion dollars?"

Accipiter: "Actually, the money has no value now except as collector's items. Shortly after the theft, the government called in all currency and then issued new bills that could not be mistaken for the old. The government had been wanting to do something like this for a long time, anyway, because it believed that there was too much currency, and it only reissued half the amount taken in.

"I'd like very much to know where the money is. I won't rest until I do. I'll hunt it down if I have to do it on my own time."

Interviewer: "You may have plenty of time to do that if young Winnegan wins his case. Well, folks, as most of you may know, Winnegan was found dead in a lower level of San Francisco about a year after he disappeared. His grand-daughter identified the body, and the fingerprints, earprints, retinaprints, teethprints, blood-type, hair-type, and a dozen other identity prints matched out."

Chib, who has been listening, thinks that Grandpa must have spent several millions of the stolen money arranging this. He does not know, but he suspects that a research lab somewhere in the world grew the duplicate in a biotank.

This happened two years after Chib was born. When Chib was five, his grandpa showed up. Without letting Mama know he was back, he moved in. Only Chib was his confidant. It was, of course, impossible for Grandpa to go completely unnoticed by Mama, yet she now insisted that she had never seen him. Chib thought that this was to avoid prosecution for being an accessory after the crime. He was not sure. Perhaps she had blocked off his "visitations" from the rest of her mind. For her it would be easy, since she never knew whether today was Tuesday or Thursday and could not tell you what year it was.

Chib ignores the mortuarians, who want to know what to do with the body. He walks over to the grave. The top of the ovoid coffin is visible now, with the long elephantlike snout of the digging machine sonically crumbling the dirt and then sucking it up. Accipiter, breaking through his lifelong control, is smiling at the fidomen and rubbing his hands.

"Dance a little, you son of a bitch," Chib says, his anger the only block to the tears and the wail building up in him.

The area around the coffin is cleared to make room for the grappling arms of the machine. These descend, hook under, and lift the black, irradiated-plastic, mocksilver-arabesqued coffin up and out and onto the grass. Chib, seeing the IRB men begin to open the coffin, starts to say something but closes his mouth. He watches intently, his knees bent as if getting ready to jump. The fidomen close in, their eyeball-shaped cameras pointing at the group around the coffin.

Groaning, the lid rises. There is a big bang. Dense dark smoke billows. Accipiter and his men, blackened, eyes wide and white, coughing, stagger out of the cloud. The fidomen are running every-which way or stooping to pick up their cameras. Those who were standing far enough back can see that the explosion took place at the bottom of the grave. Only Chib knows that the raising of the coffin lid has activated the detonating device in the grave.

He is also the first to look up into the sky at the projectile soaring from the grave because only he expected it. The rocket climbs up to five hundred feet while the fidomen train their cameras on it. It bursts apart and from it a ribbon unfolds between two round objects. The objects expand to become balloons while the ribbon becomes a huge banner.

On it, in big black letters, are the words

WINNEGAN'S FAKE!

Twenty billions of dollars buried beneath the supposed bottom of the grave burn furiously. Some bills, blown up in the geyser of fireworks, are carried by the wind while IRB men, fidomen, mortuary officials, and municipality officials chase them.

Mama is stunned.

Accipiter looks as if he is having a stroke.

Chib cries and then laughs and rolls on the ground.

Grandpa has again screwed Uncle Sam and has also pulled his greatest pun where all the world can see it.

"Oh, you old man!" Chib sobs between laughing fits. "Oh, you old man! How I love you!"

While he is rolling on the ground again, roaring so hard his ribs hurt, he feels a paper in his hand. He stops laughing and gets on his knees and calls after the man who gave it to him. The man says, "I was paid by your grandfather to hand it to you when he was buried."

Chib reads.

I hope nobody was hurt, not even the IRB men.

Final advice from the Wise Old Man In The Cave. Tear loose. Leave LA. Leave the country. Go to Egypt. Let your mother ride the purple wage on her own. She can do it if she practices thrift and self-denial. If she can't, that's not your fault.

You are fortunate indeed to have been born with talent, if not genius, and to be strong enough to want to rip out the umbilical cord. So do it. Go to Egypt. Steep yourself in the ancient culture. Stand before the Sphinx. Ask her (actually, it's a he) the Question.

Then visit one of the zoological preserves south of the Nile. Live for a while in a reasonable facsimile of Nature as she was before mankind dishonored and disfigured her. There, where Homo Sapiens(?) evolved from the killer ape, absorb the spirit of that ancient place and time.

You've been painting with your penis, which I'm afraid was more stiffened with bile than with passion for life. Learn to paint with your heart. Only thus will you become great and true.

Paint.

Then, go wherever you want to go. I'll be with you as long as you're alive to remember me. To quote Runic, "I'll be the Northern Lights of your soul."

Hold fast to the belief that there will be others to love you just as much as I did or even more. What is more important, you must love them as much as they love you.

Can you do this?

Afterword:

I'm strangely indifferent about getting a man onto the Moon. I say
strangely
because I've been reading science fiction since 1928 and selling science fiction stories since 1952. Moreover, I fully expected, and hoped and prayed, that we would be on Mars by 1940. About the time I was eighteen, I gave up this early date but still knew that someday, maybe 1970, we'd make it.

Also, I've been a military and commercial electronic technical writer since 1957 and at present am working for a company which is intimately concerned with the Saturn and Apollo space programs. Ten years ago, I would have been close to ecstasy if I could have worked on a space project. Rockets, Moon landings, airlocks, and all that.

But in the past eight years I've been increasingly interested in, and worried over, terrestrial problems. These are population explosion; birth control; the rape of Mother Nature; human, and animal, "rights"; international conflicts; and especially mental health. I'd like to see us explore space, but I don't think we have to. If the U.S. wants to spend its (my) money on space rockets, fine. I realize full well that space projects are more than going to pay their present expenses someday. Technological discoveries made along the way, serendipitous findings, plus such things as weather control, etc., will eventually make all this effort and expense worth while. I like to think so.

But let's spend at least an equal amount of money and research on trying to find out what makes people tick and mistick. If there has to be a choice between the two different kinds of projects, get rid of the space project. If this be treason, so be it. People are more important than rockets; we'll never be in harmony with that Nature which exists outside our atmosphere; we're doing an inept enough job of getting into harmony with sublunary Nature.

The idea for this story was sparked off when I attended a lecture at the home of Tom and Terry Pinckard. Lou Barron spoke of the Triple Revolution document, among other things. This publication contains a letter sent on March 22, 1964, by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution to President Lyndon B. Johnson, the politically safe reply from the President's Assistant Special Counsel, and the Triple Revolution report itself. The writers of the document know that mankind is on the threshold of an age which demands a fundamental re-examination of existing values and institutions. The three separate and mutually reinforcing revolutions are (1) the Cybernation Revolution, (2) the Weaponry Revolution, and (3) the Human Rights Revolution.

I will not outline this document; even this would take much space. But for those interested in the crises of our times, in what must be planned and done, and in the immediate and distant future, this document is vital. It may be acquired by writing to: The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, P. O. Box 4068, Santa Barbara, California.

Lou Barron was the first to mention the Triple Revolution in my presence and the last since. Yet this document may be a dating point for historians, a convenient pinpointing to indicate when the new era of "planned societies" began. It may take a place alongside such important documents as the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, Communist Manifesto, etc. Since the lecture, I've come across references to it in two magazines, but there were no elucidations. And during the lecture, Lou Barron said that the TRD, despite its importance, was still unknown to some economists and political science professionals on the UCLA campus.

Barron's lecture gave me the glimmerings of a story based on a future society extrapolated from present trends. I probably would not have done anything about it if Harlan Ellison, some months later, had not asked me for a story for this anthology. As soon as I heard that there would be no tabus, my eye rolled in a frenzy which some people may think coarse instead of fine. Up from the unconscious came the paraphrase of the Zane Grey title,
Riders of the Purple Sage
. Other things clicked into place as extrapolations followed.

Several things I'd like to make clear. One, this story represents only one of a dozen, each with entirely different future worlds, that I could write. The implications of the Triple Revolution document are many.

Two, the story here shows only the bones of what I wanted to write. Theoretically, there was no word limit, but in practice there had to be a stopping point. The 30,000 words here passed this, but the editors were indulgent. Actually, I wrote 40,000 words but forced myself to cut out many chapters and then to reduce those chapters left in. This resulted in 20,000 words which I later built up to 30,000 again. I had a number of episodes and of letters from various U. S. Presidents to various bureaus. The letters and replies were to show how the Great Withdrawal was initiated and how the enclosed multileveled cities were begun. A more detailed description of the physical construction of a community, THE OOGENESIS OF BEVERLY HILLS, LEVEL 14, was cut out, with the municipally organized jousts between teen-age gangs during the Folk Festival, a scene between Chib and his mother which would have given their relationship in more depth, a scene from a fido play based on the early days of the Panamorite sect, and about a dozen other chapters.