Keep The Giraffe Burning (25 page)

That concluded Bissell’s report. Flanked by two of his enormous agents, the little man marched out of the room. The rest realized they had been holding their breaths. Now the place seemed empty, as though it had lost some great dynamic presence – some modern Wilhelm Reich.

At the Rocking R

Brad Dexter peered out of his water-cooled window at America Deserta. As always, hot and quiet. Fifty degrees out there, or so the ranch authorities said, and a laborious calculation told him that this was ‘a hundred and twenty-two real degrees, Irma! Think of that!’

He propped her up so she could see the shimmering desert. ‘You know, in the old days, they used to fry an egg on the sidewalk on a day like this. No, I guess they only pretended to fry it. I found out later it was a fake, in
Unvarnished Truth
magazine. I got the issue here someplace.’

Much of the small room was taken up with towering stacks of magazines. The ranch authorities hadn’t liked it, but Brad had insisted on not parting with a single issue of
Unvarnished Truth
. If a man couldn’t live in comfort at a retirement ranch, just where in hell could he relax? Just
tell Brad that, and he would ask no more.

It wasn’t much of a ranch. No horses, cattle, barns, corrals or pastures. In fact, it wasn’t a ranch at all, except for being stuck out here in the blazing desert. The Rocking R Retirement Ranch consisted of thirteen great hexagonal towers called ‘bunkhouses’, each named after some forgotten child star. Brad and Irma resided on the twentieth story of Donald O’Connor.
^*

‘Now where is that article?’ Brad leafed through tattered, yellowed issues containing the latest on the Kennedy assassinations, ‘I Killed Martin Bormann’, ‘Her Hubby Was a Woman’, ‘Eyeless Sight’, ‘Birth Pills Can Kill!’ and ‘How Oil Companies Murdered the Car That Runs on Water’. ‘I know I had that danged thing someplace – What are you looking at, honey?’

There wasn’t much to see outside. Everything was so still it could have been a hologram. The electric fence that marked the future location of the Wall made a diagonal across this picture, starting in the lower right corner and disappearing over a dune at the upper left. Next to it an endless sausage curl of barbed wire followed the same contour. Somewhere beyond the dune lay the work camp where they were building the Wall. Once a week, Brad had been lucky enough to see a great silver airship carrying equipment and supplies to the camp, and now he hoped Irma had spotted another. It was funny about Irma. Even though her eyes never moved, Brad could always tell when she was intent on something.

Now he saw it, a tiny figure trudging along next to the barbed wire coil, coming this way. From here, Brad couldn’t make out much except the gray uniform.

‘Escapee from the work camp, Irma. And there goes the danged lunch bell. Well, to heck with that – this is worth missing lunch for!’ He took out his teeth for comfort.

The work camp prisoners were all political agitators, commies, anarchists and others who had tried to overthrow the government by force. Brad had got to see some of them closer up when they came to do some work on the roof of Shirley Temple. They had built an enormous black box up there – something to do with the security system for the Wall. Brad guessed it was radar. The prisoners had all looked well fed and contented, probably better off than a lot of people that had worked hard all their lives, like Brad.

‘This should be good,’ he said, breaking wind with excitement. ‘That fool has been slogging along God knows how many miles in this heat, and all for nothing. They’ll get him. Always do, or so they tell me. I figure they won’t even bother looking for him until they’ve let him bake his brains a little. They know what they’re doing, all right. There, what did I tell you?’

A helicopter cruiser had now come over the hill. It moved slowly along the barbed wire as though tacking the fugitive, though he was in
plain sight. Looking back, he speeded up his walking movements, though his progress was still hopeless. Gradually the spray of dust raised by the rotors advanced, erasing his footprints.

As the cruiser closed in, the pedestrian threw himself down and tried to dig in like a crab. But the magic circle of blowing dust overtook and enclosed him. The helicopter paused, turning, poking its rear in the air, excited by the kill.

When it rose, the man was flopping in a net, a neat package hanging from the insect belly. Brad watched it out of sight.

‘By Godfrey, Irma, wasn’t that something? Our boys really know their stuff. It made me proud to be living here in the greatest country on earth. And to think that our boys are building our First Line of Defence right here where we can see it! God, it’s grand, old girl!’

The second lunch bell rang, and Brad decided to eat after all. At least today he’d have something to tell Harry Boggs, instead of the other way around. Harry thought the world revolved around him and his Listening Post work. Gossip-gathering was all it really amounted to.

‘Only, today I’ve got better gossip!’ Brad slipped in his teeth and grimaced them into position, then off he went. Irma, being an inflatable, had of course no need to eat.

Captain Middlemass

That week the residents of Donald O’Connor bunkhouse were treated to an official lecture on the Wall. Captain Mallery Middlemass turned out to be all they could have hoped, a well-burnished young man, glowing with health. They all savoured the depth of his chest, the breadth of his shoulders, the rich timbre of his voice. So unlike the usual visitors, either down-at-heels entertainers like ‘The Amazing Lepantos’ or else retired folk from other bunkhouses, people with frail lungs, uneven shoulders and thin, dry hair. The captain’s hair was shiny black as patent leather, and his eyes were dark-glowing garnets.

He explained that the Wall was a population barrier. While our own population was increasing at a reasonable rate, that of Mexico was completely out of control.

‘For years the slow poisons have been seeping across the border: marijuana, pornography, VD and cheap labour. They have seeped into America’s nervous system, turning our kids into drug addicts, infecting their minds and bodies with filth and stealing away American jobs. Poverty and its handmaidens, crime and vice, are spreading across the nation like cancer. They have one source: Spanish America!’

He showed them the model and explained some of the Wall’s special features. It would incorporate (on the Mexican side) sophisticated electronic detection equipment and weapons, capable of marking the sparrow’s fall, and (on our side) part of a new highway network connecting retirement ranches with new Will Doody Funvilles.

Brad and Harry got in line to shake the captain’s hand. Up close they could see that he was not so young, after all. The sagging patches of
yellow skin around his eyes really were a case for
Unvarnished Truth
.

3. The Bang Gang

A Harsh Physic (II)

After Bissell, a police training expert spoke on riot control. ‘The first step is knowing when and where a riot is going to start. We can often control this factor by “priming the pump”, or staging a catalytic incident ourselves.’

‘Just a minute!’ The Great Seal looked concerned. ‘Isn’t that provocation? Is it legal?’

‘It is, the way we do it, yes, sir. We just have one man dressed as a demonstrator “attacked”, “brutally beaten” and “arrested” in sight of the mob. All simulated, of course. My department has never been against using street theatre in this way – and it’s legal.

‘Once things are in motion, we have other choices: We can contain, control or divert a riot. Sometimes we even “de-control” it, or let it get out of hand. If a mob does enough damage, we usually find public opinion hardened against them.

‘Our actual techniques are too numerous to describe – the menu of gases alone is enormous. I might mention one experiment: giving tactical police a rage-inducing drug prior to their going on duty. A related experiment is hate-suggestion TV in the duty bus. On their way to the scene of action the boys are given a dose of King Mob at his ugliest. This has produced a nine percent increase in arrests, and a whopping seventeen percent increase in nonpolice casualties! It seems worth further investigation.

‘A lot of riot work is the job of the evidence and public relations squads. The evidence squad guarantees convictions for riot crimes: conspiracy to disorder, incitement to riot and unlawful assembly. One way of doing this is to issue what we call “black” publications. These are posters, leaflets and newspapers made to look like real “underground” items, but we’ve added to them certain incriminating articles. After all, the real intentions of these radicals are to bomb and shoot the ordinary, decent citizens into submission, and it’s time we exposed them for what they are! Our evidence squad is headed by a man with considerable experience, the former editor of
Unvarnished Truth
magazine.

‘The public relations squad helps edit film and TV tape of riots, to help the public understand what we are doing. They remove portions that might be used to smear our tactical police forces. The national networks have all been very cooperative in this effort to close the “communications gap” and keep the American public informed. It all adds up to a whale of a lot of work for us, but we like it that way. We believe that there’s no such thing as a terrible riot – just bad publicity.’

Up the Sleeves

‘The question is, why is it legal to be a cop?’ Chug asked. The crowd,
gathered to watch him and Ayn performing, were caught off balance. ‘The cop is clearly employed by the criminal, to spread crime and disorder.’

‘Commie!’ A bottle crashed at Chug’s feet.

‘Another vote for law and order,’ he remarked, and went right on. ‘Ever see a cop eat a banana?’

Ayn and Chug usually got a crowd by doing tricks. Am, in pink spangled tights and with her black hair flowing free, would swallow fire. Then Chug would take over. In immaculate evening dress, he’d stride about the cleared circle, producing fans of cards and lighted cigarettes from the air. Now that they had Ras to sell pamphlets down front, it became a smoother show. The crowds were bigger, but nastier.

Someone threw another bottle. Ayn picked up a big piece of it and took a healthy bite. The crowd was so quiet that all could hear her crunching glass. After a moment Chug resumed his speech, whipping them up to such wild enthusiasm that one or two reckless citizens bought nickel pamphlets from Ras.

‘Why is our corporation government so worried about Mexico?’ Chug asked. ‘Why are they willing to spend more money on building a wall against the Mexican poor than has been spent on the welfare of our own poor in fifty years? Could it be that mere humanity is becoming an embarrassment to our standard oil government?’

‘Go back to Russia!’

‘Russia is a state of mind. Why don’t we all go back to a human state of mind? Why is it more illegal now to blow up an empty government office building, hurting no one, than to drop tons of bombs and burning gasoline on civilian farm families? Is it because the first is something the people do to a government, while the second –’

The next missile was a tire iron. It spun high against the lemon Jell-O sky and down, knocking off Chug’s silk hat. Grinning desperately, he produced two bouquets of feather flowers. Under cover of this misdirection, Ayn escaped to get the car. She picked up Ras first, then circled the crowd to get Chug as the rocks and bottles started reaching for him. Ras opened the door and a brickbat clipped Chug in.

‘The crowd wasn’t angry,’ he said, mopping blood with a string of bright silk squares. ‘Someone started that. Someone in back.’

‘I know, I saw them,’ said Ras. ‘Lambs.
^*
Four of them. I noticed when they got out of their Cadillac, with coats over their arms to hide the tire irons and bats. I tried to warn you, but they were too quick.’

‘Well, it shows they care.’

Ayn, Chug and Ras

Although various people drifted in and out of the group centred on OK’s Bookstore, Ayn and Chug were its constant twin nuclei. Formerly ‘The Amazing Lepantos’, they had fallen into revolution as a new gimmick, an addition to their repertoire. What a show-stopper, to finish with government for good! But now the gimmick had ensleeved them. Ayn ran the bookstore, which specialized in the occult and so drew those hungering for utopia.

But instead of the indigestible stone of Marxist tracts, Ayn gave them the bread of poetry. OK Press produced pamphlets calling no one brother, exhorting none to rise up or join in, making no demand to stand up and be counted.
The Garden of Regularity
was a spirited defence of cannibalism on the grounds of its ‘natural laxative effects’, while
Think Again, Mr Big Business!
was a pornographic radio play. One unaccountably popular item was a movie scenario by ‘Phil Nolan’, called
The U– S– of A–
.

Chug was a spare-time anarchist, as he had been a spare-time Lepanto. His real job was mechanical designer for Will Doody Enterprises. It was Chug who choreographed the antics of the robot animals that made up each Doody Funville show.

Bison and beaver were programmed to dance and sing the stories of famous Americans, all of them Unforgettable Characters. A caribou related the musical story of the invention of the telephone by ‘Mr Ring-a-ding-dingy Bell’. Otters caroled of Abner Doubleday’s game. The pleasanter parts of the legend of John D. Rockefeller were repeated by a shy, long-lashed brontosaurus.