CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
DOCTOR PAUL PROTEUS, an unclassified human being, was put aboard the 12:52, where he shared an ancient coach, half cuspidor, half humidor, with sixty troops on furlough from Camp Drum. “Great Bend. The stop is Great Bend,” said a tape recording through a loudspeaker over Paul’s head. The engineer pressed a button in his cab as he pulled into each station, down came the steps, and out came the voice. “Next station, Carthage. Next station, Carthage. Click.” ” ‘Board!” bawled another loudspeaker on the outside of the car. An old man, kissing his wife goodbye on the rotting planks of the Great Bend platform, looked apologetically at the urgent voice, as though to ask the man to wait just a second more for him to say one last word. ” ‘Board!” Machinery whirred, and the coach steps arose from the platform, nestled into one another, and disappeared into their niche. “Coming! Coming!” cried the old man, and jogged unhappily toward the moving train as fast as his brittle legs would carry him. He caught the handrail, swung aboard, and stood panting in the vestibule. He fumbled for his ticket, dropped it into the mechanism on the door. The mechanism considered it, found everything in order, pulled back the door bolt, and let him into the frieze and cast-iron monument to tobacco. He settled, winded, in the seat next to Paul’s. “Son-of-a-bitch won’t even wait a second for an old man,” he said bitterly. “It’s a machine,” said Paul. “All automatic.” “Don’t mean he ain’t a son-of-a-bitch.” Paul nodded appreciatively. “Used to be conductor on this line.” “Oh?” The man had the florid, righteous look of a specialized bore, and Paul wasn’t interested in listening to him. “Yes, forty-one years,” he said. “For-tee-wunnn years!” “Huh!” “For-tee-wunnnn. Two times twenty plus one. And I’d like to see one of them machines deliver a baby.” “Huh! You delivered a baby, eh?” “Yep. Little boy. By coincidence I done it in the men’s room.” He chuckled richly. “For-tee-wunnnn years!” “Huh.” “And I never seen the machine yet that’d watch out for a little girl three years old all the way from St. Louis to Poughkeepsie.” “Nope. Guess not,” said Paul. He filed this remark away for his next meeting with Bud Calhoun. He could see the device now – sort of an Iron Maiden, without the spikes, of course, and electronic, of course, that would grasp a little girl firmly at St. Louis, and eject her into the arms of relatives at Poughkeepsie. “For-tee-wunnnn years! With machines you get quan-titty, but you don’t get qual-itty. Know what I mean?” “Yup,” said Paul. “Carthage,” said the tape recording. “The stop is Carthage. Next station, Deer River.” Paul settled back against the unyielding seat with a sigh of relaxation, and closed his eyes in a pretense of sleep. “For-tee-wunnnn years! These machines never help an old lady down the steps.” In time the old conductor ran out of examples of man’s superiority over machines and took to anticipating the tape recording’s station calling, casually, contemptuously, as though any fool could do it. “Deer River. The stop is Deer River. Next station, Castorland.” “Deer River. The stop is Deer River,” said the tape recording. “Next station, Castorland.” “Ha! What’d I tell you?” Paul actually did drop off to sleep fitfully, and at last, at Constableville, he saw his companion slipping his ticket into the door slot and being let off. Paul checked his ticket to make sure it wasn’t bent or torn, that it would unlock the door at Ilium. He’d heard tales of addled old ladies locked aboard cars for days for having misplaced their tickets, or for having missed their stops. Hardly a newspaper was printed that didn’t have a human interest story about car clean-up crews from the Reeks and Wrecks liberating somebody. The old displaced conductor disappeared into the Constableville night, and Paul wondered at what thorough believers in mechanization most Americans were, even when their lives had been badly damaged by mechanization. The conductor’s plaint, like the lament of so many, wasn’t that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn’t do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do. “Constableville. The stop is Constableville. Next station, Remsen.” A poker game was going on in the facing seats behind Paul, and a superannuated first sergeant, zebra-like under symbols for patience, individual bloodlettings, and separations from home, was telling tales of the last war – of the Last War. “Jesus,” he said, riffling through the deck absently, as though his mind were a thousand miles away, “there we was, and there they was. Imagine the men’s room there’s a hogback, with the bastards dug in deep on the reverse slope.” The recruits looked at the men’s room through narrowed, battle-wise eyes, and the sergeant shuffled the cards some more. “The night before, a lucky shot knocked out the generator.” “Holy cow!” said a recruit. “You can say that again,” said the sergeant. “Anyway – five-card stud, nothing wild – there we were with no juice, eighteen of us facing five hundred of them. The microwave sentinels, the proximity mines, the electric fence, the fire-control system, the remote-control machine gun nests – pfft! No juice, Queen, ace, ace, and dealer gets a deuce. Bet the first ace. “Well, boys – a dime to me? Raise it a dime just to make things interesting. Well, boys, then the fun started. At seven hundred hours they tried a hundred-man patrol on us, to see what we had. And we had nothin’! And communications was cut to hell, so we couldn’t call for nothin’. All our robot tanks’d been pulled out to support a push the 106th was makin’, so we was really alone. Snafu. So, I sent Corporal Merganthaler back to battalion for help. – Two queens, no help, two aces, and dealer catches another lousy deuce. Bet the aces. So over they come, screamin’ bloody murder, and us with nothing but our goddamn rifles and bayonets workin’. Looked like a tidal wave comin’ over at us. – Aces check? Aw, hell, deuces’ll try a dime. – Just then, up comes Merganthaler with a truck and generator he’s moonlight-requisitioned from the 57th. We hooked her into our lines, cranked her up, and my God, I wish you could of seen it. The poor bastards fryin’ on the electric fence, the proximity mines poppin’ under ’em, the microwave sentinels openin’ up with the remote-control machine-gun nests, and the fire-control system swiveling the guns and flamethrowers around as long as anything was quiverin’ within a mile of the place. And that’s how I got the Silver Star.” Paul shook his head slightly as he listened to the sergeant’s absurd tale. That, then, was the war he had been so eager to get into at one time, the opportunity for basic, hot-tempered, hard-muscled heroism he regretted having missed. There had been plenty of death, plenty of pain, all right, and plenty of tooth-grinding stoicism and nerve. But men had been called upon chiefly to endure by the side of the machines, the terrible engines that fought with their own kind for the right to gorge themselves on men. Horatio on the bridge had become a radio-guided rocket with an atomic warhead and a proximity fuse. Roland and Oliver had become a pair of jet-driven computers hurtling toward each other far faster than the flight of a man’s scream. The great tradition of the American rifleman survived only symbolically, in volleys fired into the skies over the dead in thousands of military cemeteries. Those in the graves, the front-line dead, were heirs to another American tradition as old as that of the rifleman, but once a peaceful tradition – that of the American tinker. “Gosh! Sarge, how come you never went after a commission?” “Me go back to college at my age? I’m not the school kind, sonny. Gettin’ that B.S. was enough for me. Two more years and an M.A. for a pair of lousy gold bars? Naaaaaah! – And a queen, and no help, and a jack, and no help, and a five, and no help, and dealer gets a – what do you know? Three deuces. Looks like my lucky day, boys.” “Middleville. The stop is Middleville. Next station, Herkimer.” “Sarge, d’ya mind talkin’ about your wound stripes?” “Hmmm? No – guess not. This ‘un’s for a dose of Gamma rays at Kiukiang. This ‘un’s – lemme see – radioactive dust in the bronchial tubes at Afyon Karahisar. And this little bastard – uh – trenchfoot at Kransystav.” “Sarge, what was the best piece you ever had?” “A little redheaded half-Swede, half-Egyptian in Farafangana,” said the Sarge without hesitation. “Boy! I hope that’s where they send me.” That much of a fine old American military tradition, Paul supposed, would always be alive – send me where the tail is. “Herkimer. The stop is Herkimer. Next station, Little Falls.” “Say, Sarge, is this train a local?” “You might call it that. How’s about a round of cold hands for the odd change?” said the sergeant. “O.K. with me. Oops. Lousy trey. A queen for Charley. An eight for Lou. And, I’ll be go to hell, the Sarge catches a bullet.” “Say, Sarge, hear Pfc. Elmo Hacketts is shipping out.” “Yep. Been asking for overseas ever since he joined the outfit. Pair of treys for Ed, nothing for Charley, jack for Lou, and dealer catches a – I’ll be damned.” “Ace!” “Little Falls. The stop is Little Falls. Next station, Johnsonville.” “Here we go around again, and – What you know about that?” said the sergeant. “Ed’s got three treys. Yep – hate to see Hacketts go. With a coupla years seasoning, I could see him as a helluva fine guidon bearer. But, if he wants to throw all that over, that’s his business. Nothing for Charley, and Lou gets my ace. Three treys got it so far.” “Where’s Hacketts going? You know?” “And no help, and help, and no help, and no help,” said the sergeant. “Yeah, his orders came through today. Last time around, boys. No help, no help, no help, and -” “Jesus!” “Sorry about that third ace, Ed. Guess that one’s mine too. Yeah, Hacketts gets his overseas duty all right. Shipping out for Tamanrasset tomorrow morning.” “Tamanrasset?” “The Sahara Desert, you dumb bastard. Don’t you know any geography?” He grinned wolfishly. “How about a little blackjack for laughs?” Paul sighed for Hacketts, born into a spiritual desert, now being shipped to where the earth was sterile, too. “Johnsonville . . . Ft. Plain . . . Fonda . . . Ft. Johnson . . . Amsterdam . . . Schenectady . . . Cohoes . . . Watervliet . . . Albany . . . Rensselaer . . . Ilium, the stop is Ilium.” Bleary-eyed, Paul shuffled to the door, inserted his ticket, and stepped onto the Ilium station platform. The door on the baggage compartment clattered open, a coffin slid onto a waiting freight elevator and was taken into the refrigerated bowels of the station. No cabs had bothered to meet the unpromising train. Paul phoned the cab company, but no one answered. He looked helplessly at the automatic ticket vendor, the automatic nylon vendor, the automatic coffee vendor, the automatic gum vendor, the automatic book vendor, the automatic newspaper vendor, the automatic toothbrush vendor, the automatic Coke vendor, the automatic shoeshine machine, the automatic photo studio, and walked out into the deserted streets on the Homestead side of the river. It was eight miles through Homestead, across the bridge, and up the other side of the river to home. Not home, Paul thought, but the house where his bed was. He felt dull, mushy inside, with an outer glaze of bright heat – sleepy yet sleepless, assailed by thoughts yet thoughtless. His footsteps echoed against Homestead’s gray fa?ades, and lifeless neon tubes, proclaiming one thing and another of no importance at this hour, were empty, cold glass for want of the magic of electrons in flight through inert gas. “Lonesome?” “Huh?” A young woman, with bosoms like balloon spinnakers before the wind, looked down from a second-story window. “I said, are you lonesome?” “Yes,” said Paul simply. “Come on up.” “Well,” Paul heard himself saying, “all right, I will.” “The door next to the Automagic Market.” He climbed the long, dark stairway, each riser of which proclaimed Doctor Harry Friedmann to be a painless dentist, licensed under the National Security and Health Plan. “Why,” asked Friedmann rhetorically, “settle for less than a D-006?” The door on the hallway, next to Doctor Friedmann’s, was open, the woman waiting. “What’s your name, honey?” “Proteus.” “Any relation to the big cheese across the river?” “My half-brother.” “You the black sheep, honey?” “Yup.” “Screw your brother.” “Please,” said Paul. He awoke once during the remainder of the night with her, awoke from a dream in which he saw his father glowering at him from the foot of the bed. She mumbled in her sleep. As Paul dropped off once more, he murmured an automatic reply. “And I love you, Anita.”