Keep The Giraffe Burning (7 page)

‘Something,’ something said, ‘has been left out of the catalogued code range,’ and showed him the neat ranks of code letters:

He solved it without the key, but it was late, for work. The sound of the grindstone sharpening the cleaver, became the drone of medium bombers coming in over the lake.)

The last day of detasseling season he fought one of the biggest boys and won, although his cut lip developed a lump that lasted far into the winter – long after his blue jeans stopped smelling of sweat and pollen.

When the war began, the town put up a Roll of Honour on Courthouse Square. For a time, the sign painter had to come every day, ruling it with his blue chalk line and sketching in the names of
the dead.)

The contingencies involved in a single battle plan are of course staggering. If each of two opposing generals has merely fifteen decisions to make, each decision comprising two choices, the number of possible battles is over a billion. To investigate all of them would take some time. And even the simplest bush action requires hundreds of quick decisions, inter-related in obscure ways, and multivalent.)

The third week, he asked Savage how the scrambler tape recorder worked.

‘It’s sealed, you see.’ The captain named one finger. ‘Any attempt to open it will set off a charge which vaporizes its thin-film components.’ He moved to the second finger.

‘Part of it generates a signal of unknown shape which is mixed with your speech and the resultant signal recorded.’

On the Masonic signet finger, he said, ‘The REWIND button operates a destruct mechanism. There can be no rewinding or erasing.’

Pinky. ‘To prevent the accumulation of a large amount of material and solution of the signal, the signal shape is changed with each new tape cartridge. This button does it.’

‘How’s your sex life?’

‘Sir?’

‘Let’s get on with it.’ The machine went on. ‘To begin with, let me repeat what I said at the start: It is
not enough
for a plan to cover all contingencies. It must
also
be the simplest possible solution, and it must be beautiful – elegant, if you like. It must have the beauty of a dream: utterly strange, but
THE RIGHT PLACE
. When I see a good plan, something tells me
I’
VE BEEN HERE BEFORE
.’

Beaming Dr Godden came in to draw some more blood. He sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing the skirts of his white coat. Flashing a penlight in the General’s eyes, he asked him how we were feeling this morning. The General did not reply.

Abruptly the doctor put away the toy and forced his face from its molded smile for a moment. ‘We have the biopsy report on you, General, I’m afraid it’s positively malignant. We’d like to try a little exploratory surgery, but of course I’m afraid there’s nothing – in cases like these, one can’t hold out too much –’

‘Don’t get so broken up about it, Doctor. You must handle a dozen or so terminal cancer patients a year, yeah? So let’s not piss our britches over one more or less.’ The General showed his teeth.

‘I’m glad you’re resigned. However –’

‘I’m far from resigned. I’m scared to hell, but there isn’t anything I can do now but die. Except for my work.’

‘Your work?’

‘I want to have enough time to finish this monograph. As long as I’m sane enough, logical enough, I want to go on with it. So no pain-killers. I don’t want anything dulling my brain or shortening my life by a single minute, hear?’

The doctor rose, smiling assent, but behind that smile was another, which said: ‘You poor son of a bitch, you think you can get along without it, do you? A week or two from now, you’re going to be begging for the needle, just like everyone else. And I, healer, physician, Christlike friend, will of course hear your plea, I may even “help you across”, if you ask me nice … we often get such requests.’

‘Where was I?’ he asked Savage.

‘… the beauty of a dream, General.’

(hoped the faceless code-clerk would not turn around. His androgynous father/mother helped him into the rear of the plane, where pretty Miss Glass was already treating the burned child. The medics joking and loitering around the door were drunk. ‘Peace on earth, get it? Don’t you get it?’ Miss Glass began peeling away the bandage roughly. The child screamed. The men began singing ‘When the Khe San Goes Rolling Along’, then ‘Unter-der-Lyndon’. He could see pieces of the burned flesh coming away in the bandage. The singing drowned the screams. One of the medics staggered over and offered the molten face a Hershey bar.)

‘Gentlemen, before we get into the work, I’m reminded of a story – a geographic story, naturally.’ The class had permission to laugh with the colonel. ‘They say a woman at different ages is like the seven continents’ – he thought of Miranda the changeable, kissing him goodbye at the train. He’d wondered how they looked to others, and peered around, but no one was watching them. Off We Go, Into The Wild Blue Yonder, the band played. A frantic, drunken soldier lurched to the train window and vomited into the bell of the tuba. Miranda promised to write, but never did – ‘then she is like North America: fully explored and free with her resources.’)
Plan must do exactly what a good general himself does:

1. Collect intelligence.
   

2. Outline a tentative plan of action, with reasonably accessible alternatives.
   

3. Feed in data from past personal and historical experiences.
   

4. Compute probable success of each operation.
   

5. Re-cost the original plan in terms of maximizing success.
   

6. Feed in newer intelligence, and reassess.
   

7. Repeat steps 4 through 6 as often as needed.
   

To do all this, it has been necessary to equip the computer with immense amounts of historical and personal ‘experience’. It is particularly important to clarify the vague notions of historians, and to break down the ‘hunches’ of line officers into analytical operations.

But there remained a further step: developing the scope and predictive ability of the Master Plan, by postulating novel situations and strategies to meet them.)

Psychologically, the subject seems relatively stable
and integrated. The TAT shows a high ratio of paranoid fears and compulsive-obsessive enumeration to other characteristics. The MMPI profile showed paranoia more than two standard deviations above the norm, but the lie scale was too excessive to permit significant results. The subject has an I.Q. within the 170-200 range, with 70% certainty.)

‘My own life is in a way an example of failure to consider contingencies,’ he said. Savage leaned forward, ferret-eager. ‘I begin to have bloody thoughts. My marriage has failed, and now my health. It would be pleasant, very pleasant, to blame all this on The Enemy. But ultimately, the responsibility is mine. If I could not avert these catastrophes, I could at least have prepared for them.’

‘You have an encyclopedic mind, General.’

‘It isn’t enough to be encyclopedic.’ He breathed hard from pain. ‘An encyclopedia is a miz-maze – I mean a mish-mash – of loose facts and opinions. A man must order his world completely. That’s what life’s all about.’

Life was a magazine Miss Nylon read, or pretended to read, near the window on rainy days. She was just out of nursing school, and obviously getting over an unhappy affair. Who else could sigh over Life’s pretty pages?

Watching her tight little ass, the General considered offering her what he would call depth therapy. He decided against it for two reasons: (a) it would upset her small, unstable ethical system to board this sinking hulk; she would feel guilty when he was gone. (b) anything that could shorten his pain-shot life by even a second was foolish now, with the end of his work in sight.

He contented himself with the kind of Hollywood-battle-wound-ward flirtation he knew Miss N. could accommodate:

HE: (pinches her buttock)

SHE: (slaps his hand) You old goat, you!

HE: (touches her leg at hemline)

SHE: (slaps his hand) Naughty little boy!

HE: But you’re so sexy!

SHE: And you are just plain oversexed!

HE: If I were thirty years younger, etc. etc.

The pain dreams intruded often now
(His opposite number was General X, a fat Chinese sitting incredibly heavily on his chest. ‘They are showing a chest x-ray of you in the other room,’ he said. From under the tightly closed door to the other room came a sudden gush of dark blood. ‘My eyes!’)))))
and the occasional dullness of his mind was additional pain.)

The two frightened nurses face him, uncertain whether or not to block his path. The boyish intern crouches near them in a fighter’s stance. The figure on the floor is Dr Godden. The instrument in the naked General’s hand is a surgical knife.

‘This is my body,’ he wants to gargle at them. ‘I know none of you
believes in the body. And how could you, hacking away at it day after bloody day?

‘I say to you, I am your Frankenstein. You put me together in England, and on the surface the parts matched perfectly. But inside there was an ugly twist, an interface of artist’s hand and murderer’s wrist. Do you appreciate that these medical experiments cannot go on any longer? These Jewish women, kashered by the tens of thousands on your hospitassembly lines –
verstehen Sie?
(The headaches and backaches were horribly constant. He became suddenly jaundiced and went on baby foods
(‘Between forty and fifty, she is like Asia: Worn out but exotic. And finally, after fifty, she is like Australia: Everybody knows it’s down there, but nobody gives a damn.’).

Interviewed, the subject demonstrated lack of affect regarding the death of Ruth (‘She got what she wanted, I guess.’ ‘The marriage was a mistake. I’m sorry I made it, as I always am when I figure things out badly.’) Was reticent about father (‘analsadistic, I guess you’d jargon him. I’ll say no more.’) and mother (‘a non-entity. I’m interested in entities.’), and under the strong delusion that a great discovery of some sort was imminent.)

If the following example appears vaguely worded and incomprehensible, it is merely to demonstrate the kind of problem the Master Plan is now learning to deal with. The author of this monograph apologizes, but prefers to skip over less interesting examples and come to grips with an essential one: The nature of The Enemy.

The Enemy is no one; is someone; is everyone. The Enemy is nowhere; somewhere; everywhere. He is without: within. The Enemy is myself.

These comprise a working vocabulary of statements the truth of which can be tested against various hypotheses. One may construct a hypothetical story, such as the following:

‘I, Brig. Gen. Bernard Parks, USAF, know that I have an opposite number in some unspecified Asian nation, whom I temporarily designate The Enemy. He knows everything about the Master Plan, as indeed I know everything about his similar work. We know that we know, and so forth.

‘He is faceless to me, this General X, but I do know that his thoughts, plans, aspirations are much on the order of my own. He knows little of my movements, nor I of his, yet we can make necessary assumptions about one another which turn out to be correct. If they were not, our faulty logic would one day become explicit on the battlefield.

‘Now I wish to subsume his thinking into the Master Plan. To do so, I must affect his system, drawing his soul into a snare while maintaining the integrity of my own soul. The fact our nations are at a stalemate underscores our equivalence; he is equally interested in entrapping my soul, or system. We make our secret plans and attack.’)

‘I am not a monster, forgive me, only a lesser card. The face cards you know only too well; the Communist bosses of Wall Street and Washington, the Fascist pigs of Moscow and Peking. I am a friend. I wanted only to live my life, solve my little calculus of war, and die. A decent burial with a free flag from the Veterans’ Administration, that’s all I wanted.