Hayduke Lives! Page 8

  Far above the red eyes squinted, looking both cross and cross-eyed, toeing in and downward at the insect life before its shoes. The blue glow was suddenly transformed into a thin precision beam of laserlike intensity directed into the open bore of Smith’s revolver. Psssst! said the beam. The revolver’s barrel drooped like a wilted flower, an impotent daisy, and poured in a puddle of gray molten steel to the ground between his bare feet. Holy Moroni! Smith turned to run, as any sensible hero would.

  The machine stepped forward, lifting its 130-foot shoes (both together) and bringing them down on Smith’s barn. The barn disappeared in a cloud of dust, smashed flat as a seaskate — tractor, wagons, manure spreader, hay baler and all. Completing the cycle, the machine rose from its butt, swung forward on its pelvic arch, like a duck doing the bump and grind, and sat down again. With a crash. The ground trembled. The shoes rose —

  Smith ran for his life, for the safety of his bed, the comforts of his wife, straight toward the little gray vine-covered board-and-batten ranchhouse. Kathy’s place, the old dude ranch near Hardrock in Utah’s Dixie. He seemed to be running in glue, a mucous mud that clung to his feet like quicksand. The blue beam, now a spotlight with revolving mount, blazed on his back, projecting his antic shadow fifty feet before him. He saw the shadow of something else swoop down, heard the rush of wind and the iron clank of pulleys, cables and boom in action, looked back to see the monster’s great excavator bucket, fanged jaws spread wide, big enough to hold four Greyhound buses or twelve Eldorado Cadillacs, striking at his rear.

  Smith leaped.

  The bucket plowed deep into the ground scant inches short, flinging a wave of dirt and debris over Seldom’s back. Missed, he rejoiced, it missed. The bucket’s lower jaw slid forward beneath his feet, making the ground ripple like a carpet, while the upper jaw passed over his head, cutting off the light. Whoa! thought Smith, it got me. The iron mandibles clanged shut before him, square teeth interlocking like the links of a zipper. He was trapped inside the iron bucket like a rat in a box. A small rat in a very big black box.

  They got me. He waited; nothing happened. Fear overcame his soul.

  Kathy! he bawled. Mama! Jesus!

  No succor came. He heard the rattle of machinery and felt himself being suddenly raised, as in an elevator, high into the air. He could see very little through the chinks in the wall of the bucket — a spray of stars, clouds of rising dust, the wild bluish glare of the spotlight, a pair of red eyes high above, blinking.

  The bucket rose up, back, and partly down, slamming with brutal metallic force into a square dock high in the complex superstructure of the machine. The jar knocked Smith off his feet. Stunned, he waited, groped his way to his hands and knees, felt his head. No blood. No leaking brains. Didn’t hurt me a-tall, he thought. Only the head. He waited.

  Silence. Then the iron clamor resumed, the jaws of his trap opened wide, the blue beam glared into Smith’s eyes. A pause, the buzzing noise, and a recorded voice began to speak, a gentle mellifluous feminine, almost human, well-trained in elocution but scratchy, badly transcribed:

  Welcome, K mart shoppers. Today’s Special is our new patio dinette set, regular price one hundred thirty-five dollars, reduced for one week only to ninety-nine fifty. Please visit our Home Improvement Department for a free no-charge no-obligation look at this truly unique value. Brief pause. [Sic.] Bienvenidos señoras y señores aficionados de K mart. La especialidad de hoy —

  The tape stopped abruptly. The blue light wobbled on its crazy pivot, watching Smith. Far above, the two red eyes gazed forward, blinking into deep space, deep time, searching for the significance of existence in the spiral galaxies beyond Andromeda while the machine lurched onward, smashing Kathy’s house, Kathy, and Kathy’s garden.

  So far so good, thought Smith, blinded by the light — but now what?

  After further hesitation and a few moments of electronic hemming and hawing, a different recording got under way, this time in the voice of a more masculine android, deeper, richer, with standard American accent and a quality of barely repressed enthusiasm, as if announcing the Second Coming. However, the surface noise was conspicuous; tapes getting dusty.

  Welcome, project visitors. Welcome aboard “GOLIATH.” No doubt you are wondering what’s behind the world’s largest dragline bucket? Answer … the world’s largest dragline! The 4250-W Walking Dragline, a twenty-seven-million-pound giant that walks to work, is the biggest mobile land machine on earth!

  This is a new age, folks, an age requiring better ways to lower costs to meet ever greater demands. And that’s why a machine this size has come into being. The 4250-W’s record size and design enable it to uncover vast areas of coal, uranium, potash, molybdenum, or other minerals that before now could not have been economically mined. Operated by one man scratch that [sic] by one person in an air-conditioned cab the 4250-W walking dragline “GOLIATH” is the latest example of how Bucyrus-Erie keeps pace with our world’s most urgent requirements.

  Look at these 4250-W fantastic facts!

  One: Overall length four hundred and ten feet! Three times longer than the Wright brothers’ first aerial flight! Longer than a row of nine average size railroad coal hoppers! Almost one and a half times the length of a football field!

  Two: Twenty-seven million pounds weight! Thirteen and a half thousand tons! As heavy as one hundred fifty fully loaded average-size railroad ore hoppers! Equal to the weight of nearly fourteen thousand automobiles!

  Three: Height sixty-seven feet one inch from base to top of powerhouse enclosure! One hundred nineteen feet eleven one-quarter inches from base to top of A-frame! Two hundred twenty-two feet six inches from base to top of boom at highest operating angle!

  Four: Two hundred ninety thousand square foot working area! Equivalent to a six-acre park! Lifts loads three hundred twenty-five feet, dumps six hundred ten feet away. …

  Smith began to find the jubilant lecture wearisome, even tedious. He was having trouble keeping his eyelids open. He felt about for the steel wall of the dragline bucket, found it and propped himself erect. The proud and happy voice brayed on, sprinkling Smith with a tepid vapid insipid drizzle of amazing facts and fantastic figures. When he heard the words

  … prior to mining the land was used to a limited extent for cattle grazing. However the mine area is classified by the U.S. Department of the Interior as marginal to submarginal at best and is nearly uninhabited. …

  he reached for his revolver, found it intact and holstered, drew and looked beyond the rotating spotlight for a suitable target. Public address speakers, for instance. He heard them rasping and rattling somewhere above his head but could not see them. He aimed instead at a point between the pair of blinking red eyes far up in the topmost rigging. Blast the goldamn critter’s brains out, he thought, that’ll stop the sumbitch. Knock him down, stomp on his paws, cut off the rattles and skin the beast. When he heard the words

  … serving the needs of our changing ever-growing world economy …

  he fired five times in quick succession, aiming casually from about the middle of his belly, natural shooter style like his father always did. He blew the puff of smoke from the pizzle, opened and reloaded the cylinder, reholstered his weapon and waited for results.

  The spotlight wobbled hysterically, screaming like a toy tin top in full career, turned its beam skyward and inspected the damage. Smith had missed the brainpan — there was no head up there, only the eyes, like those of a crab set high on stalks — but hit and severed an electrical conduit. One eye blacked out, the machine swayed and stumbled on, a drunken mechanical bum winking at eternity, blinking from a nervous tic. As it moved, the dangling cables, fuming with blue sparks and the stink of overheated insulation, bounced against a steel box-truss, creating an intermittent short circuit in an electrical system of 13,800 volts (“… enough energy to pull ten average-length freight trains! enough to power 75,000 TV sets!”).

  Slightly injured but neither stopped nor slowed, the G.E.
M. of Arizona tramped forward, step by step, flattening a sheet-metal warehouse on the outskirts of Kanab, Utah, stamping down the LDS church across the street, crushing a troop of Boy Scouts sleeping in their pup tents in City Park, liquidating the maternity ward of the county hospital (the biggest ward), and squeezing, like toothpaste from a tub, the dozing occupants of a speeding Greyhound bus caught and suddenly compacted in a curve of the highway south of town. The bus split open at the rear, the passengers squirted out. Any odor? Oh no. They came out like a ribbon, lay flat on the sagebrush.

  Smith meanwhile … was having difficulties. His brief whingding of a party was over. Paralyzed in the spastic blue glare of the spotlight, he was seized by jointed, whip-like tentacles, disarmed, stripped to his shorts, pulled from the dragline bucket and transported instantly to a point in space ten feet above and to one side of the operator’s control cab.

  … separately air conditioned and provided with large picture windows for a full two hundred seventy degree view …

  The guide tape stopped.

  Smith waited, dangling in mid-air, helpless as an infant, musing upon his sense of déjà vu.

  Somewhere in the bowels or brains of GOLIATH a new cassette was inserted in the cassette player. Unreeling automatically, the tape played one full minute of computerized digital static — one of high technology’s more characteristic refinements — before a third voice began to gibber, in extreme high frequency (like R. Buckminster Fuller at 78 rpm), from the P.A. loudspeakers. Mounted on the masts above the A-frame, loosened by the machine’s constant vibration, the speakers functioned badly; Smith could hardly make out a word. But he felt, he sensed, he knew that this message was addressed directly to him and to no one else:

  Welcome to our new control cab operator …

  The tape stopped. Why? Smith waited, wondering. The tape replayed itself, this time at a speed too slow. The androidal voice assumed a deep Dopplerian adenoidal tone, not inhuman as before but subhuman. The speech of Frankenstein’s dying monster recorded on a sick compact disc, hecho en Mejico by carefree fun-and-family-loving maquiladores. The sense, however, was clear:

  Welcome to our new control cab operator. Having completed the ten-minute factory training course, we know that you are eager to begin your employment as a 4250-W Walking Dragline control cab operator. You will be pleased to learn that this position is permanent, full-time and guaranteed for the life of either the 4250-W Walking Dragline or the 4250-W Walking Dragline control cab operator, depending upon which event precedes the other. …

  For life? Smith became aware, for the first time, of a semi-human figure strapped to a contoured plastic seat inside the control cab. Hands attached by rivets to the self-adapting control levers, the operator was being yanked back and forth in the jerky movements of a windup toy.

  … such tenured employment contingent upon satisfactory performance of control cab operations …

  … You will note that the present control cab operator is not functioning properly but has succumbed to metal fatigue and molecular stress. Having expired in accordance with terms of original agreement …

  The creature in the control cab looked up at Seldom Seen, forcing a weak and terrified grin, and shook its head. It wore an airtight Plexiglas helmet sealed to the neck of a pressurized, separately air-conditioned, aluminum foil bodysuit by Ralph Lauren. (Halston?) Whether man or woman Smith could not say, but he/she was pale as a fish, sweating, and desperately frightened. Looked almost like a much older Bonnie Abbzug.

  Wait, thought Smith, do I really want to be a Super-G.E.M. control cab operator? What about fringe benefits? Ain’t heard no mention of them. And then, shamed by the operator’s pleading eyes, he forgot personal concerns and reached once more for his revolver. Gone. The belt was gone. His pants were gone. GOLIATH lumbered on.

  … we will now terminate employment of present 4250-W Walking Dragline control cab operator and install the replacement component. …

  The voice on the tape halted, waiting, as a large hatch opened itself in the roof of the control cab. The dragline bucket, until now suspended far ahead on the point of the forward boom, came sailing back through the air on creaking cables and halted above the hatchway. The huge jaws gaped wide, far too big themselves to enter the control cab, and extruded something that resembled the forked tongue of a serpent. This was, however, merely the specialized replacement adapter, a forceps-like instrument with teeth that dropped into the cab and snatched the struggling operator, straps, rivets and all, from the control chair. Arms and legs writhing in reflex terror, the operator was swung to maximum boom extension two hundred and twenty-two feet above the ground, and freed, i.e., released, that is, dumped, directly into the path of the machine’s advance.

  (Smunch!)

  Smith heard, above the fuel-thirsty roar of engines and the clanking, clanging, banging uproar of chains and cables and pulley-wheels, he heard — or thought he heard — that tiny, mouse-like squeak, remote but human, of the plunging body’s final scream.

  Have a nice day [the tape said]. Install next operator, please.

  The blue light, until now occupied elsewhere, turned its cranky woozy wobbling spot upon the face and naked limbs of Seldom Seen Smith.

  “No,” he groaned. “Not me. I quit.”

  Moaning in his nightmare, he fumbled about, felt the warm abundant flesh of his wife, clutched her to him in a drowning man’s embrace.

  “Seldom,” she said, coming slowly into wakefulness. Then louder, sharply: “Seldom! Wake up.” She squeezed his encircling arm, the heavy leg thrown across her thighs. “Seldom, wake up!”

  “Ohhhhhhhh. …” He opened his eyes, saw in the gloom the sweet anxious face of his wife peering at him. “Kathy …”

  “Guess again.”

  “Huh?” He blinked, trying to emerge from his bog of horror. “Susan …?”

  Sheila frowned, not amused. “You get one more guess, buddy, and it better be right.”

  He stared at her, smiled, drew that pretty face close and kissed her on the mouth — a long wet slobbering desperate kiss of relief. “Bonnie,” he murmured, “Bonnie. …”

  10

  Man Running

  A man was running running for his life, across and up a naked dome of golden sandstone. Far off in silhouette against an evening sky, dark figure running across a field of gold, a flush of gashed vermillion, the flaring fanned-out rays of setting sun peering for one final moment, under a reef of purple clouds, into the slickrock desert, over the rippled sea of golden lifeless petrified dunes of sand …

  He ran, ran, ran to live, up the rising skyline curve of rock, across the huge plasmic crimson bulge of sun, black running human animal caught forever, in perpetual motion, eternal in his fear, upon the red sun and background of the yellow sky of Utah.

  A stocky man in boots, jeans, no shirt, big hat, puffing like an engine, hoarse and gasping in despair, laboring at ever-slower pace up the barren and unsheltering incline of monolithic stone.

  He ran because he was pursued. Fifty yards to his rear and gaining rapidly came a snorting ramping bellowing machine, the diesel-powered forty-ton dirt scooper, product of Caterpillar Inc., bouncing after its prey on rubber-tired wheels each taller than a tall man. The operator’s cab projected forward above the front wheels; the windows of the cab, covered with dust, splattered with mud, obscured the nature of whatever it was, if anything, that guided and propelled and animated the machine. Reaching the upward slope, the machine redoubled its efforts, bounding ahead. Puffs of black smoke jetted from the upright exhaust stack, floating like little balls of dirty cotton up and backward on the pure golden backdrop of the sky.

  Hopeless flight, implacable pursuit. The running man stopped running, stopped climbing, stopped and turned to face the iron black joggling goblin that approached him, closer, closer, with spinning wheels and howling motor, towering above him, about to run him down, crush him like an insect, leave him smeared in a paste of hair, calcium, protoplasm and blood acros
s the gritty surface of the rock.

  The man drew a small object from his belt, something not much bigger than his fist, dark against the sunset light, impossible to immediately identify. The man raised this object and pointed it toward the blunt flat advancing snout of the machine. His finger twitched.

  A red flame leaped from the tip of the object in the man’s hand. Leaped and disappeared, followed presently by the report of a small compact explosion. The man froze, waiting. The machine slowed, stopped as if surprised, and jiggled for a moment, up and down, on heavy springs, twelve feet short of its victim. An arc of cooling liquid spurted like blood from the creature’s nose, spouting under pressure into the air then looping down to spatter on the stone. Hurt, baffled, astonished, the machine remained at a standstill, one dark and solid silhouette of steel, rubber, glass and iron upon the forlorn red flare of dying sun, a complicated outline of angles, joints, hoses, couplings, wheels and linkage rods flat back against the horizon. As the light faded the engine died, the coolant drooped in a smaller arc and petered out, the surrounding sea of desert silence closed in complete upon machine and man.

  Silence. Stasis. Creeping darkness.

  The man replaced the object in his belt. He turned away from the stricken machine — dead tech — and walked upward on the ridge-line, descended the farther slope and vanished into a dense violet twilight.