Nightmares & Geezenstacks (12 page)

He had not quite emptied the clip when he heard the scream of the coming shell. He tried to throw himself back into the shellhole, just a little too late. He was off balance, falling backward when the shell struck. It struck and exploded just behind the thing that crawled. He heard the clang of a fragment of steel ricocheting off his helmet. Almost miraculously, he was otherwise unhit.

The impact on his helmet stunned him.

When consciousness returned, Wong Lee found himself lying quietly in the bottom of his shellhole. At first he thought the battle had ceased or moved on. Then the drifting smoke over the rim of the crater and the constant shaking of the ground beneath him told him that it was not so. The battle continued; the shattered eardrums of Wong Lee brought him no auditory impressions of it.

Yet he
heard
. Not the thunder of battle, but a quiet, calm voice that seemed to be speaking within his own mind. It asked, dispassionately, “What are you?” It seemed to be speaking Chinese, but that made it no less bewildering. Strangest of all, it did not ask
who
he was, but
what
.

Wong Lee struggled to a sitting position and looked about him. He saw it lying there beside him, scant inches away.

It was a human head, or what had been one. With growing horror he saw that it was the head of the thing that had crawled toward him. The shell that had struck just behind it had blown it here, though without the body that had enabled it to crawl.

Well, it was dead now, all right.

Or was it?

Again, in the mind of Wong Lee, that quiet query, “What are you?” made itself heard. And suddenly, not knowing how he knew, Wong Lee was certain that the asker of that question was the severed, horribly mutilated head beside him in the shellhole.

Wong Lee screamed. He tore off his gas mask as he scrambled to his feet and screamed again. He gained the top rim of the shellhole and began to run.

He’d taken out ten paces when, almost at his feet, the thousand-pound demolition bomb struck and exploded. Soil and rock from the explosion of the bomb rose high into the air and descended. The falling soil and rock filled completely most of the smaller shellholes around the new crater.

In one of these, now buried under seven feet of soil, lay the mutilated head that had once been part of the body of Johnny Dix, now the unbreakable prison of an alien being.

Helpless to leave his new bonds of matter, helpless to move at all in space or to move in tune other than to drift with the time-stream of this plane, the Stranger—until an hour ago a being of pure thought—began calmly and systematically to study the possibilities and limitations of his new mode of existence.

Erasmus Findly, in his monumental
History of the Americas
, devotes an entire volume to the dictator John Dix and the rise of imperialism in the United States immediately following the successful conclusion of the Sino-American War. But Findly, as do most modem historians, scouts the legendary character often given the figure of Dix.

“It is natural,” he says, “that so sudden a rise from complete obscurity to complete and tyrannical control of the greatest government on the face of the earth should lead to such legends as those which the superstitious believe about Dix.

“It is undoubtedly true that Dix went through the Sino-American War as a buck private, without distinguishing himself. For this reason, possibly, he had most records of himself destroyed after his rise to power. Or possibly there was some mark on those records which made him wish them destroyed.

“But the legend that he was reported missing during the crucial battle of that war—the Battle of the Panamints—and was not seen until the following spring, when the war was over, is probably untrue.

“According to the legend, in the spring of 1982 John Dix, naked and covered with dirt, walked up to a Panamint valley farm house, where he was given food and clothing and from there he proceeded to Los Angeles, then under reconstruction.

“Equally absurd are the legends of his invulnerability; the statements that dozens of times the bullets of assassins passed through his body without seeming even to cause him inconvenience.

“The fact that his enemies, the true patriots of America, got him at last is proof of the falseness of the invulnerability legend. And the crowning horror of that scene in the Rose Bowl, so vividly described by many contemporary witnesses, was undoubtedly a trap-door conjuring trick engineered by his enemies.”

Calmly and systematically, the Stranger had begun the study of the nature of his prison. With patience, he found the key.

Exploring, he tapped a memory in the head of Johnny Dix. A single episode suddenly became as vivid to him as though it were an experience of his own.

He was on a small boat, passing an island in a harbor. Beside him was a man who seemed very tall. He knew the man was his father and that this was happening when he was seven years old and they had taken a trip to a place called New York. His father said, “That’s Ellis Island, kid, where they let the immigrants in. Damn foreigners; they’re ruining this country. No chance any more for a real American. Somebody ought to blow Europe off the map.”

Simple enough, but each thought of that memory brought connotations that explained it to the Stranger. He knew what a boat was, what and where Europe was, and what an American was. And he knew that America was the only good country on this planet; that all the other countries were made up of contemptible people—and that even in this country the only good ones were the white ones who had been here a long time.

He explored further, found out many things that had bewildered him. He began to correlate these memories into a picture of the world in which he was now trapped. It was a strange, warped picture—although he had no way of learning that. It was a narrow ultra-nationalistic point of view, for one thing. And there were worse things than that.

He learned—
and assimilated
—all the hates and prejudices of buck private Johnny Dix, and they were many and violent. He knew nothing to the contrary of this strange world and so they became his hates and his prejudices, just as the memories became his memories.

Although he did not suspect it was so, the Stranger was finding his way into a narrower prison than his physical one; he was becoming trapped into the thoughts of a mind that had been neither strong nor straight.

There emerged a mentality which was a strange blend of the powerful mind of a strong entity and the narrow beliefs and prejudices of a Johnny Dix.

He saw the world through a dark, distorted lens. He saw that things must be done.

“
Those fatheads in Washington
,” he—or Johnny Dix—had said, “
oughta be kicked out. Now if I was running this country
—”

Yes, the Stranger saw what things he must do to put this world right. This was a good country—parts of it—surrounded by bad countries, and the bad ones ought to be taught a lesson, if not exterminated. The yellows ought to be all killed, men, women, and children. There was a black race that ought to be sent back to a place called Africa, where they belonged. And even among white Americans, there were people who had more money than they should have, and it ought to be taken away from them and given to people like Johnny Dix. Yes, we needed a government that could tell people like that where to head in. And enough military power so we could tell the rest of the world where to head in, too.

But the Stranger saw, too, that buried as he was and in a piece of matter that was disintegrating even as he explored it, there was little chance of his accomplishing any of these important things.

So, avidly, he began to study the nature of matter. He could bring his perceptions down to the scale of atoms and molecules and study them. He saw that in the very soil about him he had the necessary materials, all of them, to reconstruct the body of Johnny Dix. By means of his memories of his first explorations of the incomplete body of Johnny Dix, as it had been when he first entered it, he began the study of organic chemistry.

He filled in his concept of the parts that had been missing from the body from the memories of Johnny Dix and began work.

Transmuting the chemicals of the soil was not a difficult problem. And heat was a mere matter of speeding up molecular action.

Slowly, new flesh grew upon the head of Johnny Dix; hair, eyes, and a neck began to form. It took time, but what was time to an immortal?

One evening in early spring of the following year, a naked but perfectly formed human figure clawed its way to the surface of soil that had been softened by molecular action to enable that figure to crawl out.

It lay quiet for a while, mastering the art of breathing air. Then, experimentally at first but with growing skill and confidence, it tried the use of various muscles and sensory organs.

The group of workmen on the Glendale Reconstruction Project looked around curiously as the man in the ill-fitting clothes stepped up on a packing crate and began to speak.

“Friends,” he shouted, “how long are we going to tolerate—”

A uniformed policeman stepped up quickly. “Here now,” he objected. “You can’t do that. Even if you got a permit, these are work hours and you can’t interrupt—”

“Are you satisfied, Officer, with the way things are run around here, and in Washington?”

The policeman looked up and his eyes locked with those of the man on the packing case. For a moment he felt as though an electric current had gone through his mind and body. And then he knew that this man had the right answers, that this man was a leader whom he’d follow. Anywhere.

“My name’s John Dix,” said the man on the box. “You ain’t heard of me, but you’ll be hearing of me from now on. I’m starting something, see? If you want in on the ground floor, take off that badge and throw it down. But keep your gun; it’ll come in handy.”

The policeman reached up for his badge and unfastened the pin.

That had been the start.

June 14, 1983, was the day of the end. In the morning there had been a heavy fog over Los Angeles—now capital city of North America—but by midafternoon the sun was bright and the air balmy.

Robert Welson, leader of the little group of patriots who had failed, for some reason, to join the mass hysteria with which the people had backed John Dix, sat at a window of the new Panamera Building, overlooking the vast throng in the reconstructed Rose Bowl. On the floor under the window from which he looked lay a high-powered rifle with Mercer telescopic sights.

On the stage of the Bowl, John Dix, Dictator of North America, stood alone, although uniformed guards occupied all seats immediately around the stage and were scattered elsewhere in the audience. A microphone hung just overhead and a speaker system carried the dictator’s voice to the farthest reaches of the Bowl, and beyond. Robert Welson and the others in the room with him could hear it distinctly.

“
The day has come. We are prepared. People of America, I call upon you to rise in your wrath and stamp out now and forever the power of the evil countries beyond the seas.
”

Over the Bowl cheering rose, a mighty wave of sound.

Through it Robert Welson heard three sharp raps on the door of the room behind him. He crossed the room and opened the door. A tall man and a scrawny boy with a large head and great vacuous eyes came into the room.

“You brought the kid,” said Welson, “What for? He can’t—”

The tall man spoke. “You know Dix isn’t human, Welson. You know how much good our bullets have done before! Why, in Pittsburgh, I
saw them hit him
. But this clairvoyant kid here—or maybe it’s telepathy or something and not clairvoyance and I don’t know or care—has got a line on him somehow. The first time the kid ever saw him he went into a fit. We can’t fight Dix without knowing what we’re fighting, can we?”

Welson shrugged. “Maybe. You play with that. I’m going to keep on trying steel-jacketed lead.”

He drew a deep breath and walked again to the window. He knelt before it on one knee and raised the sash. His left hand reached for the rifle.

“Here goes,” Welson said. “Maybe if we get enough lead in him—”

McLaughin, author of the most famous biography of John Dix, while avoiding direct acceptance of any of the legends which have filled many other books, concedes the mystical aspect of Dix’s rise to power.

“It is indeed strange,” he writes, “that immediately, suddenly, after his assassination, the wave of insanity which had engulfed the United States disappeared abruptly and completely. Had not the few true patriots who failed to follow his lead succeeded, the history of the world during the last part of the twentieth century would have been a story of bloody carnage unparalleled in history.

“Extermination, or ruthless suppression, would have been the lot of every country which he could have conquered and there is little doubt, in view of the superior armaments he had, that the ravage would have been far-flung. He might even have conquered the world. Although, of course, America itself would ultimately have suffered most.

“To say that John Dix was a madman can hardly explain the extent of his power over the people of his own country. Almost it is possible to credit the current superstition that he had superhuman powers. But if he was a superman, he was a warped superman.

“It was almost as though an ignorant, prejudiced, opinionated man, narrow-minded in every way, had miraculously been given the power to sway most of the population, able to impress his narrow hatreds upon all, or almost all, of those who listened. The few who were immune, battling terrific odds, saved the world from Armageddon.

“The exact manner of his death remains, after all this time, shrouded in mystery. Whether he was killed by a new weapon-destroyed after it had accomplished its purpose—or whether the monstrous thing seen by the throngs in the Bowl was a mere illusion, the trick of a prestidigitator extraordinary, will never be certainly known.”

The muzzle of the rifle rested on the ledge of the window. Robert Welson steadied it and peered through the telescopic sights. His finger rested against the trigger.