Дэймон Найт: Orbit 5

“I know that, B.D.,” Jake said. “I also know this could cost me my job. Think about that. Because knowing all that, I’m still against airing the tape. I’m going to run the closing segment for you. I’m sure enough that you’ll agree with me to stake my job on it.”

I had a terrible feeling in my stomach. I have superiors too and The Word was that A Trip With The Four Horsemen would be aired, period. No matter what. Something funny was going on. The price we were getting for commercial time was a precedent and the sponsor was a big aerospace company which had never bought network time before. What really bothered me was that Jake Pitkin had no reputation for courage; yet here he was laying his job on the line. He must be pretty sure I would come around to his way of thinking or he wouldn’t dare. And though I couldn’t tell Jake, I had no choice in the matter whatsoever.

“Okay, roll it,” Jake said into the intercom mike. “What you’re going to see,” he said as the screening room lights went out, “is the last number.”

On the screen:

A shot of empty blue sky, with soft, lazy electric guitar chords behind it. The camera pans across a few clouds to an extremely long shot on the sun. As the sun, no more than a tiny circle of light, moves into the center of the screen, a sitar-drone comes in behind the guitar.

Very slowly, the camera begins to zoom in on the sun. As the image of the sun expands, the sitar gets louder and the guitar begins to fade and a drum starts to give the sitar a beat. The sitar gets louder, the beat gets more pronounced and begins to speed up as the sun continues to expand. Finally, the whole screen is filled with unbearably bright light behind which the sitar and drum are in a frenzy.

Then over this, drowning out the sitar and drum, a voice like a sick thing in heat: “Brighter . . . than a thousand suns . . .”

The light dissolves into a closeup of a beautiful darkhaired girl with huge eyes and moist lips, and suddenly there is nothing on the sound track but soft guitar and voices crooning low: “Brighter . . . Oh God, it's brighter . . . brighter . . . than a thousand suns ...”

The girl’s face dissolves into a full shot of the Four Horsemen in their Grim Reaper robes and the same melody that had played behind the girl’s face shifts into a minor key, picks up whining, reverberating electric guitar chords and a sitar-drone and becomes a dirge: “Darker . . . the world grows darker . . .”

And a series of cuts in time to the dirge:

A burning village in Asia strewn with bodies—

“Darker . . . the world grows darker . . ."

The corpse-heap at Auschwitz—

“Until it gets so dark . . .”

A gigantic auto graveyard with gaunt Negro children dwarfed in the foreground—

“I think I’ll die . .

A Washington ghetto in flames with the Capitol misty in the background—

“ . . before the daylight comes . . .”

A jump-cut to an extreme closeup on the lead singer of the Horsemen, his face twisted into a mask of desperation and ecstasy. And the sitar is playing double-time, the guitar is wailing and he is screaming at the top of his lungs: “But before I die, let me make that trip before the nothing comes. . .”

The girl’s face again, but transparent, with a blinding yellow light shining through it. The sitar beat gets faster and faster with the guitar whining behind it and the voice is working itself up into a howling frenzy: “. . . the last big flash to light my sky . . .”

Nothing but the blinding light now—

“. . . and zap! the world is done . .

An utterly black screen for a beat that becomes black fading to blue at a horizon—

“. . . but before we die let’s dig that high that frees us from our binds . . . that blows all cool that ego-drool and burns us from our mind . . . the last big flash, mankind’s last gas, the trip we can’t take twice. . .

Suddenly, the music stops dead for half a beat. Then:

The screen is lit up by an enormous fireball—

A shattering rumble—

The fireball coalesces into a mushroom-pillar cloud as the roar goes on. As the roar begins to die out, fire is visible inside the monstrous nuclear cloud. And the girl’s face is faintly visible superimposed over the cloud.

A soft voice, amplified over the roar, obscenely reverential now: Brighter . . . great God, it’s brighter . . . brighter than a thousand suns . . ”

And the screen went blank and the lights came on.

I looked at Jake. Jake looked at me.

“That’s sick,” I said. “That’s really sick.”

“You don’t want to run a thing like that, do you, B.D.?” Jake said softly.

I made some rapid mental calculations. The loathsome thing ran something under five minutes ... it could be done. . . .

“You’re right, Jake,” I said. “We won’t run a thing like that. We’ll cut it out of the tape and squeeze in another commercial at each break. That should cover the time.”

“You don’t understand,” Jake said. “The contract Herm rammed down our throats doesn’t allow us to edit. The show’s a package—all or nothing. Besides, the whole show’s like that.”

“All like that? What do you mean, all like that?”

Jake squirmed in his seat. “Those guys are . . . well, perverts, B.D.,” he said.

“Perverts?”

“They’re . . . well, they’re in love with the atom bomb or something. Every number leads up to the same thing.”

“You mean . . . they’re all like that?”

“You got the picture, B.D.,” Jake said. “We run an hour of that or we run nothing at all.”

“Jesus.”

I knew what I wanted to say. Bum the tape and write off the million dollars. But I also knew it would cost me my job. And I knew that five minutes after I was out the door, they would have someone in my job who would see things their way. Even my superiors seemed to be just handing down The Word from higher up. I had no choice. There was no choice.

“I’m sorry, Jake,” I said. “We run it.”

“I resign,” said Jake Pitkin, who had no reputation for courage.

T minus 10 days . . . and counting . . .

“It’s a clear violation of the Test-Ban Treaty,” I said.

The Under Secretary looked as dazed as I felt. “We’ll call it a peaceful use of atomic energy, and let the Russians scream,” he said.

“It’s insane.”

“Perhaps,” the Under Secretary said. “But you have your orders, General Carson, and I have mine. From higher up. At exactly eight fifty-eight p.m. local time on July fourth, you will drop a fifty kiloton atomic bomb on the designated ground zero at Yucca Flats.”

“But the people ... the television crews . . .”

“Will be at least two miles outside the danger zone. Surely, SAC can manage that kind of accuracy under ‘laboratory conditions.’ ”

I stiffened. “I do not question the competence of any bomber crew under my command to perform this mission,” I said. “I question the reason for the mission. I question the sanity of the orders.”

The Under Secretary shrugged, smiled wanly. “Welcome to the club.”

“You mean you don’t know what this is all about either?”

“All I know is what was transmitted to me by the Secretary of Defense, and I got the feeling he doesn’t know everything, either. You know that the Pentagon has been screaming for the use of tactical nuclear weapons to end the war in Asia—you SAC boys have been screaming the loudest. Well, several months ago, the President conditionally approved a plan for the use of tactical nuclear weapons during the next monsoon season.”