Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

Later he looked up and the music was over. He turned and saw Siva at his penumbra’s edge, turned back to still waters.

Turned back to silence . . .

Then the lights went off behind him and he was left alone with the fall and the surge of the sea.

T minus 200 days . . . and counting . . .

They came on freaky for my taste—but that’s the name of the game: freaky means a draw in the rock business. And if the Mandala was going to survive in LA, competing with a network-owned joint like The American Dream, I’d just have to hold my nose and out-freak the opposition. So after I had dug the Four Horsemen for about an hour, I took them into my office to talk turkey.

I sat down behind my Salvation Army desk (the Mandala is the world’s most expensive shoestring operation) and the Horsemen sat down on the bridge chairs sequentially, establishing the group’s pecking order.

First the head honcho, lead guitar and singer, Stony Clarke—blond shoulder-length hair, eyes like something in a morgue when he took off his steel-rimmed shades, a reputation as a heavy acid-head and the look of a speedfreak behind it. Then Hair, the drummer, dressed like a Hell’s Angel, swastikas and all, a junkie, with fanatic eyes that were a little too close together, making me wonder whether he wore swastikas because he grooved behind the Angel thing or made like an Angel because it let him groove behind the swastika in public. Number three was a cat who called himself Super Spade and wasn’t kidding —he wore earrings, natural hair, a Stokeley Carmichael sweatshirt, and on a thong around his neck a shrunken head that had been whitened with liquid shoe polish. He was the utility infielder: sitar, base, organ, flute, whatever. Number four, who called himself Mr. Jones, was about the creepiest cat I had ever seen in a rock group, and that is saying something. He was their visuals, synthesizer and electronics man. He was at least forty, wore Early Hippy clothes that looked like they had been made by Sy Devore, and was rumored to be some kind of Rand Corporation dropout. There’s no business like show business.

“Okay, boys,” I said, “you’re strange, but you’re my kind of strange. Where you worked before?”

“We ain’t, baby,” Clarke said. “We’re the New Thing. I’ve been dealing crystal and acid in the Haight. Hair was drummer for some plastic group in New York. The Super Spade claims it’s the reincarnation of Bird and it don’t pay to argue. Mr. Jones, he don’t talk too much. Maybe he’s a Martian. We just started putting our thing together.”

One thing about this business, the groups that don’t have square managers, you can get cheap. They talk too much.

“Groovy,” I said. “I’m happy to give you guys your start. Nobody knows you, but I think you got something going. So I’ll take a chance and give you a week’s booking. One a.m. to closing, which is two, Tuesday through Sunday, four hundred a week.”

“Are you Jewish?” asked Hair.

“What?”

“Cool it,” Clarke ordered. Hair cooled it. “What it means,” Clarke told me, “is that four hundred sounds like pretty light bread.”

“We don’t sign if there’s an option clause,” Mr. Jones said.

“The Jones-thing has a good point,” Clarke said. “We do the first week for four hundred, but after that it’s a whole new scene, dig?”

I didn’t feature that. If they hit it big, I could end up not being able to afford them. But on the other hand $400 was light bread, and I needed a cheap closing act pretty bad.

“Okay,” I said. “But a verbal agreement that I get first crack at you when you finish the gig.”

“Word of honor,” said Stony Clarke.

That’s this business—the word of honor of an ex-dealer and speed-freak.

T minus 199 days . . . and counting . . .

Being unconcerned with ends, the military mind can be easily manipulated, easily controlled, and easily confused. Ends are defined as those goals set by civilian authority. Ends are the conceded province of civilians; means are the province of the military, whose duty it is to achieve the ends set for it by the most advantageous application of the means at its command.

Thus the confusion over the war in Asia among my uniformed clients at the Pentagon. The end has been duly set: eradication of the guerillas. But the civilians have overstepped their bounds and meddled in means. The Generals regard this as unfair, a breach of contract, as it were. The Generals (or the faction among them most inclined to paranoia) are beginning to see the conduct of the war, the political limitation on means, as a ploy of the civilians for performing a putsch against their time-honored prerogatives.

This aspect of the situation would bode ill for the country, were it not for the fact that the growing paranoia among the Generals has enabled me to manipulate them into presenting both my scenarios to the President. The President has authorized implementation of the major scenario, provided that the minor scenario is successful in properly molding public opinion.

My major scenario is simple and direct. Knowing that the poor flying weather makes our conventional airpower, with its dependency on relative accuracy, ineffectual, the enemy has fallen into the pattern of grouping his forces into larger units and launching punishing annual offensives during the monsoon season. However, these larger units are highly vulnerable to tactical nuclear weapons, which do not depend upon accuracy for effect. Secure in the knowledge that domestic political considerations preclude the use of nuclear weapons, the enemy will once again form into division-sized units or larger during the next monsoon season. A parsimonious use of tactical nuclear weapons, even as few as twenty 100 kiloton bombs, employed simultaneously and in an advantageous pattern, will destroy a minimum of 200,000 enemy troops, or nearly two-thirds of his total force, in a twenty-four hour period. The blow will be crushing.

The minor scenario, upon whose success the implementation of the major scenario depends, is far more sophisticated, due to its subtler goal: public acceptance of, or, optimally, even public clamor for, the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The task is difficult, but my scenario is quite sound, if somewhat exotic, and with the full, if to-some-extent-clandestine support of the upper military hierarchy, certain civil government circles and the decision-makers in key aerospace corporations, the means now at my command would seem adequate. The risks, while statistically significant, do not exceed an acceptable level.

T minus 189 days . . . and counting . . .

The way I see it, the network deserved the shafting I gave them. They shafted me, didn’t they? Four successful series I produce for those bastards, and two bomb out after thirteen weeks and they send me to the salt mines! A discotheque, can you imagine they make me producer at a lousy discotheque! A remittance man they make me, those schlockmeisters. Oh, those schnorrers made the American Dream sound like a kosher deal—20% of the net, they say. And you got access to all our sets and contract players, it’ll make you a rich man, Herm. And like a yuk, I sign, being broke at the time, without reading the fine print. I should know they’ve set up the American Dream as a tax loss? I should know that I’ve gotta use their lousy sets and stiff contract players and have it written off against my gross? I should know their shtick is to run the American Dream at a loss and then do a network TV show out of the joint from which I don’t see a penny? So I end up running the place for them at a paper loss, living on salary, while the network rakes it in off the TV show that I end up paying for out of my end.