Read Echo Round His Bones Online
Authors: Thomas Disch
Echo Round His Bones
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Berkley
Medallion
echo
round
his
bones
The brilliant new SF novel about a man trying
to save the world from Doomsday --
by the author of THE GENOCIDES
Thomas M. Disch
SINKING INTO TROUBLEMedallion
echo
round
his
bones
The brilliant new SF novel about a man trying
to save the world from Doomsday --
by the author of THE GENOCIDES
Thomas M. Disch
Worsaw shot the private three times in the face. The body
crumpled backward against -- and partly through -- the
wall.
"That takes care of
one
son-of-a-bitch," said the spectral
Worsaw.
Before the man's murderous inference could be realized,
Hansard acted. In a single motion he threw himself from
the bench and the attaché case that he had been holding at
Worsaw's gun hand. The gun went off, doing harm only to
the case.
In leaping from the bench Hansard had landed on the floor
of the steel vault -- or more precisely, in it, for his hands had
sunk several inches into the steel, which felt like chilled
turpentine against his skin. This was strange, really very
strange . . . But not to be distracted from his immediate
purpose -- which was to disarm Worsaw -- he sprang up to
catch hold of Worsaw's hand, but found that with the same
movement his legs sank knee-deep into the insubstantial
floor.
echo
round
his
bones
Thomas M. Disch
round
his
bones
Thomas M. Disch
ECHO ROUND HIS BONES
NATHAN HANSARD
The finger on the trigger grew tense. The safety was released, and
in almost the same moment the gray morning stillness was shattered by
the report of the rifle. Then, just as a mirror slivers and the images
multiply, a myriad echoes returned from the ripening April hillsides --
a mirthful, mocking sound. The echoes re-echoed, faded, and died. But
the stillness did not settle back on the land; the stillness was broken.
The officer who had been marching at the head of the brief column of men
-- a captain, no more -- came striding back along the dirt track. He was
a man of thirty-five or perhaps forty years, with fair, regular features
now set in an expression of anger -- or, if not quite anger, irritation.
Some would have judged him a handsome man; others might have objected
that his manner was rather too neutral -- a neutrality expressive not
so much of tranquility as of truce. His jaw was set and his lips molded
in the military cast. His blue eyes were glazed by that years-long
unrelenting discipline. They might not, it could be argued, have been
by nature such severe features: without that discipline the jaw might
have been more relaxed, the lips fuller, the eyes brighter -- yes,
and the captain might have been another man.
He stopped at the end of the column and addressed himself to the
red-haired soldier standing on the outside of the last file -- a
master-sergeant, as might be ascertained from the chevron sewn to the
sleeve of his fatigue jacket.
"Worsaw?"
"Sir." The sergeant came, approximately, to attention.
"You were instructed to collect all ammunition after rifle practice."
"Yes, sir."
"All cartridges were to be given back to you, therefore no one should
have any ammunition now."
"No, sir."
"And this was done?"
"Yes, sir. So far as I know."
"And yet the shot we just heard was certainly fired by one of us.
Give me your rifle, Worsaw."
With visible reluctance the sergeant handed his rifle to the captain.
"The barrel is warm," the captain observed. Worsaw made no reply.
"May I take your word, Worsaw, that this rifle is unloaded?"
"Yes, sir."
The captain put the butt of the rifle against his shoulder and laid his
finger over the trigger. He remarked that the safety was off. Worsaw
said nothing.
May I pull the tngger, Worsaw?" The rifle was pointed at the sergeant's
right shin. Worsaw still said nothing, but beads of sweat had broken out
on his freckled face.
"Do I have your permission? Answer me."
Worsaw broke down. "No, sir," he said.
The captain broke open the magazine and removed the cartridge clip.
He handed the rifle back to the sergeant. "Is it possible, Worsaw,
that the shot that brought us to a halt a moment ago was fired from this
rifle?" There was, even now, no trace of sarcasm in the captain's voice.
"I saw a rabbit, sir -- "
The captain's brow furrowed. "Did you hit it, Worsaw?"
"No, sir."
"Fortunately for you. Do you realize that it is a federal offense to kill
wildlife on this land?"
"It was just a rabbit, sir. We shoot them around here all the time.
Usually when we come out for rifle practice, or that sort of stuff -- "
"Do you mean to say that it is
not
against the law?"
"No, sir, I wouldn't know about that. I just know that usually -- "
"Shut up, Worsaw!"
Worsaw's face had become so red that his reddish-blond eyebrows and lashes
seemed pale in comparison. In his bafflement his lower lip had begun to
tic back and forth, as though some buried fragment of his character were
trying to pout.
"I despise a liar," the captain said blandly. He inserted his thumbnail
under the tip of the chevron sewn on Worsaw's right sleeve and ripped
it off with one quick motion. Then the other chevron.
The captain returned to the front of the column, and the march back to
the trucks that would return them to Camp Jackson was resumed.
This captain, who will be the hero of our history, was a man of the
future -- that is to say, of what would seem futurity to us; for to the
captain it seemed the most commonplace present. Yet there are degrees
of living in the future, of being contemporary there, and it must be
admitted that in many ways the captain was more a man of the past (of
his past, and even perhaps of ours) than of the future.
Consider only his occupation: A career officer in the Regular Army --
surely a most uncharacteristic employment in the year 1990. By that
time everyone knew that the army, the Regular Army (for though the
draft was still in operation and young men were compelled to surrender
their three years to the Reserve Army, they all knew that this was a
joke; that the Reserves were useless; that they were maintained only
as a device for keeping themselves out of the labor force, or off the
unemployment rolls that much longer after college), was a career for
louts and nincompoops. But if
everyone
knew this . . .? Everyone who
was "with it"; everyone who was truly comfortable living in the future.
These contemporaries of the captain (many of whom -- some 29 per cent --
were so much unlike him as to prefer three years of postgraduate study in
the comfortable and permissive prisons that had been built for C.O.'s --
the conchies, as they were called -- rather than submit to the ritual
nonactivities of the Reserves) regarded the captain and his like as --
and this is their most charitable judgment -- fossils.
It is true that military service traditionally requires qualities more
of character than of intelligence. Does this mean, then, that our hero
is on the stupid side? By no means! And to dispel any lingering doubts
of this, let us hasten to note that in third grade the captain's I.Q.,
as measured by the Stanford-Binet Short Form, was a respectable 128 --
certainly as much or more than we can fairly demand of a hero in this
line of work.
In fact it had been the captain's experience that he possessed intelligence
in excess of his needs; he would often have been happier in his calling
if he had been as blind to certain distinctions -- often of a moral
character -- as most of his fellow officers seemed to be. Once, indeed,
this over-acuteness had directly injured the captain's prospects. And it
might be that that long-ago event was the cause, even this much later,
of the captain's relatively low position (considering his age) in the
military hierarchy. We shall have opportunity to hear more of this
unpleasant moment -- but in its proper place.
It may just as plausibly be the case that the captain's lack of advancement
was due simply to a lack of vacancies. The Regular Army of 1990 was much
smaller than the Army of our own time -- partly because of international
agreements, but basically in recognition of the fact that a force of
25,000 men was more than ample to prosecute a nuclear war -- and this,
in 1990, was the only war that the two great power blocs were equipped
to fight.
Disarmament was a fait accompli, though it was of a kind that no one of
our time had quite anticipated; instead of eliminating nuclear devices,
it had preserved them alone. In truth, "disarmament" is something of a
euphemism; what was done had been done more in the interests of domestic
economy than of world peace. The bombs that the Pacifists complained of
(and in 1990
everyone
was a Pacifist) were still up there, biding their
time, waiting for the day that everyone agreed was inevitable. Everyone,
that is, who was with it; everyone who was truly comfortable living in
the future.
Thus, though the captain lived in the future, he was very little
representative of it. His political opinions were conservative to a point
just short of reaction. He read few of what we would think of as the
better books of his time; saw few of the better movies -- not because
he lacked aesthetic, sensibilities -- for instance, his musical taste
was highly developed -- but because these things were made for other,
and possibly better, tastes than his.
He had no sense of fashion -- and this was not a small lack, for among
his contemporaries fashion was a potent force. Other-directedness had
carried all before it; shame, not guilt, was the greater shaper of souls,
and the most important question one could ask oneself was: " Am I with it?"
And the captain would have had to answer, " No."
He wore the wrong clothes, in the wrong colors, to the wrong places.
His hair was too short, though by present standards it would have seemed
rather full for a military man; his face was too pale -- he wouldn't use
even the most discreet cosmetics; his hands were bare of rings. Once,
it is true, there had been a gold band on the third finger of his left
hand, but that had been some years ago.
Unfashionableness has its price, and for the captain the price had been
steep. It had cost him his wife and son. She had been too contemporary
for him -- or he too outmoded for her. In effect their love had spanned
a century, and though at first it was quite strong enough to stand the
strain, in time it was the times that won. They were divorced on grounds
of incompatibility.
At this point it may have occurred to the reader to wonder why in a tale
of the future we should have chosen a hero so little representative of
his age. It is an easy paradox to resolve, for the captain's position
in the military establishment had brought him -- or, more precisely,
was soon to bring him -- into contact with that phenomenon which, of all
the phenomena of his age, was most advanced, most contemporary, most at
the forefront of the future -- with, in short, the matter transmitter --
or, in the popular phrase, the manmitter -- or, in the still more popular
phrase, the Steel Womb.
"Brought into contact" is perhaps too weak and passive a phrase.
The captain's role was to be more heroic than such words would suggest.
"Came into conflict" would do much better. Indeed he was to come into
conflict with much more than the Steel Womb -- with the military
establishment as well, with society in general, and with himself.
It could even be said, without stretching the meaning too far, that in
his conflict he pitted himself against the nature of reality itself.
One final paradox before we re-embark upon this tale: It was to be this
captain, the military man, the man of war, who was, at the last minute
and by the most remarkable device, to rescue the world from that ultimate
catastrophe -- the war to end wars, the Armageddon that we are all,
even now, waiting for. But by that time he would not be the same man,
but a different man; a man quite thoroughly of the future -- because he
had made it in his own image.
At twilight of that same day on which we last saw him, the captain was
sitting alone in the office of "A" Artillery Company. It was as bare a
room as it could possibly be and yet be characterized as an office. On the
gray metal desk were only an appointment calendar that showed the date
to be the twentieth of April; a telephone, and a file folder containing
brief statistical profiles of the twenty-five men under the captain's
command: Barnstock, Blake, Cavender, Dahlgren, Doggett. . . .
The walls of the room were bare, except for framed photos, cut out of
magazines, of General Samuel ("Wolf") Smith, Army Chief of Staff, and
of President Lind, whose presence here would have to be considered as
merely commemorative, since he had been assassinated some forty days
before. As yet, apparently, no one had found a good likeness of Lee
Madigan, his successor, to replace Lind's photo. On the cover of
Life
,
Madigan had been squinting into the sun; on
Time's
cover he was shown
splattered with the President's blood.
There was a metal file, and it was empty; a metal wastebasket, it was
empty; metal chairs, empty. The captain cannot be held strictly to account
for the bareness of the room, for he had been in occupancy only two days.
Even so, it was not much different from the office he had left behind
in the Pentagon Building, where he had been the aide of General Pittmann.
. . . Fanning, Green, Homer, Lesh, Maggit, Norris, Nelsen, Nelson. . . .
They were Southerners mostly, the men of "A" Company; sixty-eight per cent
of the Regular Army was recruited in Southern states, from the backwoods
and back alleys of that country-within-a-country, the fossil society
that produced fossil men. . . . Lathrop, Perigrine, Pearsall, Pearsall,
Rand, Ross. . . . Good men in their way -- that cannot be denied. But
they were not, any more than their captain, contemporary with their own
times. Plain, simple, honest men -- Squires, Sumner, Truemile, Thorn,
Worsaw, Young -- but also mean-spirited, resentful, stupid men, as the
captain well knew. You cannot justly expect anything else of men who have
been outmoded; who have had no better prospect than this; who will never
make much money, or have much fun or taste the sparkling elixir of being
"With It," who are and always will be deprived -- and who know it.
These were not precisely the terms with which the captain regarded
this problem, though he had been long enough in the Army (since 1976)
to realize that they did not misrepresent the state of affairs. But he
looked at things on a reduced scale (he was only a captain, after all)
and considered how to deal with the twenty-five men under his command so
as to divert the full force of their resentment from his own person. He
had expected to be resented; this is the fate of all officers who inherit
the command of an established company. But he hadn't expected matters to
go to such mutinous extremes as they had this morning after rifle drill.
Rifle drill was a charade. Nobody expected rifles to be used in the
next war. In much the same way, the captain suspected, this contest
of wills between himself and his men was a charade -- a form that had
to be gone through before a state of equilibrium could be reached; a
tradition-sanctioned period of mutual testing out. The captain's object
was to abbreviate this period as much as possible; the company's to draw
it out to their advantage.
The phone rang, the captain answered it. The orderly of Colonel Ives
hoped that the captain would be free to see the colonel. Certainly,
whenever it was convenient to the colonel. In half an hour? In half an
hour. Splendid. In the meantime, perhaps, it would be possible for the
captain to instruct "A" Company to prepare for a jump in the morning?
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