Дэймон Найт: Orbit 5

A bad thought, the kind we’re not supposed to think or I’ll start watching Jeremy and he’ll start watching me and we’ll get a paranoia feedback going. . . . But that can’t happen; we’re too stable, too responsible. As long as we remember that it’s healthy to feel a little spooky down here, we’ll be all right.

But the television set is a good idea. It keeps us in contact with the outside world, keeps it real. It’d be too easy to start thinking that the missile control center down here is the only real world and that nothing that happens up there really matters.. . . Bad thought!

The Four Horsemen . . . somehow these guys help you get it all out. I mean that feeling that it might be better to release all that tension, get it all over with. Watching The Four Horsemen, you’re able to go with it without doing any harm, let it wash over you and then through you. I suppose they are crazy; they’re all the human craziness in ourselves that we’ve got to keep very careful watch over down here. Letting it all come out watching the Horsemen makes it surer that none of it will come out down here. I guess that’s why a lot of us have taken to wearing those “Do It” buttons off duty. The brass doesn’t mind; they seem to understand that it’s the kind of inside sick joke we need to keep us functioning.

Now that spiral thing they had started the show with —and the droning—came back on. Zap! I was right back in the screen again, as if the commercial hadn’t happened.

“We are all in here together . . .”

And then a closeup of the lead singer, looking straight at me, as close as Jeremy and somehow more real. A mean-looking guy with something behind his eyes that told me he knew where everything lousy and rotten was at.

A bass began to thrum behind him and some kind of electronic hum that set my teeth on edge. He began playing his guitar, mean and low-down. And singing in that kind of drop-dead tone of voice that starts brawls in bars:

“ I stabbed my mother and I mugged my paw . . . ”

A riff of heavy guitar-chords echoed the words mockingly as a huge swastika (red-on-black, black-on-red) pulsed like a naked vein on the screen—

The face of the Horseman, leering—

“Nailed my sister to the toilet door . . .” Guitar behind the pulsing swastika—

“Drowned a puppy in a ce-ment machine. . . . Burned a kitten just to hear it scream...”

On the screen, just a big fire burning in slow-motion, and the voice became a slow, shrill, agonized wail:

“Oh God, I've got this red-hot fire burning in the marrow of my brain. . . .

“Oh yes, I got this fire burning ... in the stinking marrow of my brain. . . .

“Gotta get me a blowtorch . . . and set some naked flesh on flame. ...”

The fire dissolved into the face of a screaming Oriental woman, who ran through a burning village clawing at the napalm on her back.

“I got this message. . . . boiling in the bubbles of my blood ... A man ain't nothing but a fire burning ... in a dirty glob of mud. . . ."

A film-clip of a Nuremburg rally: a revolving swastika of marching men waving torches—

Then the leader of the Horsemen superimposed over the twisted flaming cross:

“Don't you hate me, baby, can't you feel somethin' screaming in your mind?

“Don't you hate me, baby, feel me drowning you in slime!”

Just the face of the Horseman howling hate—

“Oh yes, I'm a monster, mother. . . ."

A long view of the crowd around the platform, on their feet, waving arms, screaming soundlessly. Then a quick zoom in and a kaleidoscope of faces, eyes feverish, mouths open and howling—

“Just call me—"

The face of the Horseman superimposed over the crazed faces of the crowd—

“Mankind!"

I looked at Jeremy. He was toying with the key on the chain around his neck. He was sweating. I suddenly realized that I was sweating too and that my own key was throbbing in my hand alive. . . .

T minus 13 minutes . . . and counting . . .

A funny feeling, the Captain watching the Four Horsemen here in the Backfish's missile control center with us. Sitting in front of my console watching the television set with the Captain kind of breathing down my neck ... I got the feeling he knew what was going through me and I couldn’t know what was going through him . . . and it gave the fire inside me a kind of greasy feel I didn’t like. . . .

Then the commercial was over and that spiral-thing came on again and whoosh! it sucked me right back into the television set and I stopped worrying about the Captain or anything like that. . . .

Just the spiral going yellow-blue, red-green, and then starting to whirl and whirl, faster and faster, changing colors and whirling, whirling, whirling. . . . And the sound of a kind of Coney Island carousel tinkling behind it, faster and faster and faster, whirling and whirling and whirling, flashing red-green, yellow-blue, and whirling, whirling, whirling . . .

And this big hum filling my body and whirling, whirling, whirling . . . My muscles relaxing, going limp, whirling, whirling, whirling, all limp, whirling, whirling, whirling, oh so nice, just whirling, whirling . . .

And in the center of the flashing spiraling colors, a bright dot of colorless light, right at the center, not moving, not changing, while the whole world went whirling and whirling in colors around it, and the humming was coming from the dot the way the carousel-music was coming from the spinning colors and the dot was humming its song to me. . . .

The dot was a light way down at the end of a long, whirling, whirling tunnel. The humming started to get a little louder. The bright dot started to get a little bigger. I was drifting down the tunnel toward it, whirling, whirling, whirling. . .

T minus 11 minutes . . . and counting . . .

Whirling, whirling, whirling down a long, long tunnel of pulsing colors, whirling, whirling, toward the circle of light way down at the end of the tunnel . . . How nice it would be to finally get there and soak up the beautiful hum filling my body and then I could forget that I was down here in this hole in the ground with a hard brass key in my hand, just Duke and me, down here in a cave under the ground that was a spiral of flashing colors, whirling, whirling toward the friendly light at the end of the tunnel, whirling, whirling . . .

T minus 10 minutes . . . and counting . . .

The circle of light at the end of the whirling tunnel was getting bigger and bigger and the humming was getting louder and louder and I was feeling better and better and the Backfish’s missile control center was getting dimmer and dimmer as the awful weight of command got lighter and lighter, whirling, whirling, and I felt so good I wanted to cry, whirling, whirling . . .

T minus 9 minutes . . . and counting . . .

Whirling, whirling ... I was whirling, Jeremy was whirling, the hole in the ground was whirling, and the circle of light at the end of the tunnel whirled closer and closer and—I was through! A place filled with yellow light. Pale metal-yellow light. Then pale metallic blue. Yellow. Blue. Yellow. Blue. Yellow-blue-yellow-blue-yellow-blue-yellow . . .

Pure light pulsing . . . and pure sound droning. And just the feeling of letters I couldn’t read between the pulses—not-yellow and not-blue—too quick and too faint to be visible, but important, very important'. . .

And then a voice that seemed to be singing from inside my head, almost as if it were my own:

“Oh, oh, oh . . . don't I really wanna know . . . Oh, oh, oh . . . don't I really wanna know . . ”

The world pulsing, flashing around those words I couldn’t read, couldn’t quite read, had to read, could almost read . . .