“And then,” Gus said, “you defected?”
“No,” Jeff said. “That came later, after I used the illusion machine again.”
“What did you use it for the second time?” Gus asked, fascinated.
“Why, what would you do with a thing like that if you was in my shoes, Mr. Swenesgard, sir? I made me a pretty little girl friend with it!”
“Then after the girl friend started to fade out—”
“No, sir. Before the girl friend started to fade out. I tell you, sir, that little girl was the meanest, most complainin’ woman I ever did see! I’m no coward but, sir, that little girl went and chased me right out of the Neeg-parts.”
In a cave high in the mountains a figure lying in a sleeping bag stirred, sat up. “Lincoln,” Percy grated harshly, reaching out a hand to shake his sleeping comrade.
“Huh?” muttered Lincoln, “whazat?”
“I’ve made up my mind,” Percy said. “We’ve been on the defensive long enough. With the hardware we have now we stand a real chance to go on the offensive, to bust out of these mountains and really kill a few wiks.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Lincoln said sleepily. “As far as these weapons go we’ve hardly scratched the surface.”
“Pass the word along. We want all the new weapons in action, except that Big Daddy up at Summit Cave. I got to admit, goddam it, man, that that thing scares me, even me. I’ll leave one day for preparation, then we hit Swenesgard with everything we’ve got. If we can take his plantation we’ll have all the first-line Gany hardware he’s got on loan from the worms, and plenty of Toms who’ll come over to our side when they see we’re winning.
“With a little bit of luck we might even be able to step on that worm, Mekkis. From what I hear through the network Mekkis doesn’t do anything but lie around reading. He leaves all the work of running the bale of Tennessee to Swenesgard. When we take the plantation we’ll have to keep going, spreading out as fast as we can, so that if the Gany military starts hitting with nuclear missiles we won’t be all bunched up in one place. Everything depends on speed. And,” he finished, half to himself, “on illusion.”
“The Nowhere Girl is coming!” wailed the Oracle.
“Don’t shout at me like that,” Mekkis snapped. “Can’t you see I’m trying to read?” All is illusion, he said to himself. Each of us is a windowless monad, without any real contact with a world outside ourselves. Balkani proves it. Why therefore should I concern myself with meaningless phantoms such as Nowhere Girls and Neeg-parts and the Great Common ? The world is a picture and if I wanted to change it, all I would need to do is imagine it to be different.
For instance, if I cared to I could imagine an earthquake and—
A vast tumbling-motion spilled through the room around him, a wave rolling through him and past, leaving a yawning fissure in the floor.
Mekkis gazed down at it with satisfaction while the Oracle babbled meaninglessly, hysterically.
Gus learned about Percy’s planned attack from a defector—two hours before sundown on the night of the attack. He drove at once to the office of Administrator Mekkis and asked to see him.
“Mr. Mekkis,” the wik secretary said with obvious relish, “has left word he does not want to be disturbed. Under any circumstances.”
“The Neeg-parts are attacking in force tonight,” Gus said; he sweated visibly, even though the waiting room in which he stood was air-conditioned.
“Is that all?” the secretary said scornfully. “The Neeg-parts are always attacking something or other. Surely you can handle it.”
Gus opened and closed his mouth, turned red and then, without another word, turned and stomped out. Once in his ionocraft he took firm hold of the microphone, lifted it to his lips and began rapidly to issue orders.
Within an hour the assorted forces of Gus Swenes-gard, made up of everything from small nuclear missile launchers to Toms with pitchforks, moved in a jumble of confusion toward the great black shapes that now, in the moonless night, could be seen thundering and rumbling toward them.
The nuclear missiles were fired before the forces met, but they did not go off. The vast rolling masses of blackness seemed to swallow them up. Then the ionocraft scout bombers swept in, and they, too, disappeared.
Gus sat in his ionocraft, hovering over his plantation, and watched what took place through a bank of small TV monitors, mounted on the control panel, which received signals from various units of his motley army. One screen in particular caught his attention; it displayed a transmission from a squad of creech-operated ionocrafts that had moved nearer the enemy than any other of Gus’ units. There on the screen Gus saw, forming out of the blackness, a herd of gigantic African aardvarks as big as dinosaurs with evil, glittering eyes, huge claws and ears like circus tents, and with unbelievably long tongues that lashed out and licked ionocrafts out of the sky.
“Oh, my God,” Gus said, unable to accept the fantastic sight. “Not aardvarks!”
In the wake of the stampeding aardvarks came a battered autonomic ionocraft taxi bearing Percy X and Lincoln Shaw. “You see that?” Percy yelled. “I’ll bet they didn’t expect that.”
“It’s wild,” Lincoln said, more awestruck than enthusiastic.
“What else can you do?” asked the taxi.
“How about something really beautiful?” Percy shouted. “How about a gigantic bird all made of flame? How about a phoenix?”
“Okay,” Lincoln said. “One phoenix coming up.” He adjusted the controls on the construct in his lap and concentrated. Out of the clouds of dust that rose in the wake of the aardvarks formed an incredible winged creature, more than a thousand feet in wingspread. It seemed to be made up of burning light or perhaps electricity, and all the colors of the spectrum flickered chaotically over its feathered surfaces. Its eyes consisted of points of blindingly bright blue white light, like twin welding torches, and, as it glided majestically ahead of them, it left in the air a trail of sparks like falling stars. The two men in the ionocraft could smell the ozone caused by its electrical fire, and the wind from its wings blew the ionocraft roughly about, almost overturning it. Now and then it opened its blazing beak and uttered a hoarse cry that sounded, to Lincoln, like the scream of an ignorant and innocent thing being tortured to death.
“Isn’t it great?” Percy yelled.
“De gustibus non disputandum est,” the taxi said philosophically.
“Charge!” shouted General Robert E. Lee as he galloped into battle at the head of a troop of mounted Valkyrie. Their long blonde hair streamed in the wind as they screamed ancient runic oaths and trampled beneath the hooves of their ice cream white horses creech, white and Tom, without discrimination.
A squadron of vampires dripping blood from their fangs and wearing the insignia of Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s Flying Circus flapped by overhead, while Samson, hair and all, strode past, swinging the jawbone of a duckbill platypus.
Through the milling confusion rushed a battalion of Brownie Scouts, cracking skulls right and left with overbaked cookies, while a kosher butcher, with his vorpal meat cleaver, reduced the enemy to meat knish. Redassed baboons charged in behind him, pushing supermarket carts armed with fifty caliber machine guns. A rock-and-roll group headed by a young long-hair trumpeter named Gabriel played the “jerk” while a team of trained surgeons removed one appendix after another, throwing in an occasional lobotomy to avoid monotony.