Killdozer! (27 page)

“The circuit breaker!” cried Kelly.

He threw the holder up on the deck plate of the Seven in front of the seat, and ran across the little beach to the welder. He reached behind the switchboard, got his thumb on the contact hinge and jammed it down.

Daisy Etta
leaped again, and then again, and suddenly her motor stopped. Heat in turbulent waves blurred the air over her. The little gas tank for the starting motor went out with a cannon’s roar, and the big fuel tank, still holding thirty-odd gallons of Diesel oil, followed. It puffed itself open rather than exploded, and threw a great curtain of flame over the ground behind the machine. Motor or no motor, then, Kelly distinctly saw the tractor shudder convulsively. There was a crawling movement of the whole frame, a slight wave of motion away from the fuel tank, approaching the front of the machine, and moving upward from the tracks. It culminated in the crown of the radiator core, just in front of the radiator cap; and suddenly
an area of six or seven square inches literally
blurred
around the edges. For a second, then, it was normal, and finally it slumped molten, and liquid metal ran down the sides, throwing out little sparks as it encountered what was left of the charred paint. And only then was Kelly conscious of agony in his left hand. He looked down. The welding machine’s generator had stopped, though the motor was still turning, having smashed the friable coupling on its drive shaft. Smoke poured from the generator, which had become little more than a heap of slag. Kelly did not scream, though, until he looked and saw what had happened to his hand—

When he could see straight again, he called for Tom, and there was no answer. At last he saw something out in the water, and plunged in after it. The splash of cold salt water on his left hand he hardly felt, for the numbness of shock had set in. He grabbed at Tom’s shirt with his good hand, and then the ground seemed to pull itself out from under his feet. That was it, then—a deep hole right off the beach. The Seven had run right to the edge of it, had kept Tom there out of his depth and—

He flailed wildly, struck out for the beach, so near and so hard to get to. He gulped a stinging lungful of brine, and only the lovely shock of his knee striking solid beach kept him from giving up to the luxury of choking to death. Sobbing with effort, he dragged Tom’s dead weight inshore and clear of the surf. It was then that he became conscious of a child’s shrill weeping; for a mad moment he thought it was he himself, and then he looked and saw that it was Al Knowles. He left Tom and went over to the broken creature.

“Get up, you,” he snarled. The weeping only got louder. Kelly rolled him over on his back—he was quite unresisting—and belted him back and forth across the mouth until Al began to choke. Then he hauled him to his feet and led him over to Tom.

“Kneel down, scum. Put one of your knees between his knees.” Al stood still. Kelly hit him again and he did as he was told.

“Put your hands on his lower ribs. There. O.K. Lean, you rat. Now sit back.” He sat down, holding his left wrist in his right hand, letting the blood drop from the ruined hand. “Lean. Hold it—sit back. Lean. Sit. Lean. Sit.”

Soon Tom sighed and began to vomit weakly, and after that he was all right.

This is the story of
Daisy Etta
, the bulldozer that went mad and had a life of its own, and not the story of the missile test that they don’t talk about except to refer to it as the missile test that they don’t talk about. But you may have heard about it for all that—rumors, anyway. The rumor has it that an early IRBM tested out a radically new controls system by proving conclusively that it did not work. It was a big bird and contained much juice, and flew far, far afield. Rumor goes on to assert that a) it alighted somewhere in the unmapped rain forests of South America and that b) there were no casualties. What they
really
don’t talk about is the closely guarded report asserting that both a) and b) are false. There are only two people (aside from yourself, now) who know for sure that though a) is certainly false, b) is strangely true, and there were indeed no casualties.

Al Knowles may well know too, but he doesn’t count.

It happened two days after the death of
Daisy Etta
, as Tom and Kelly sat in (of all places) the coolth of the ruined temple. They were poring over paper and pencil, trying to complete the impossible task of making a written statement of what had happened on the island, and why they and their company had failed to complete their contract. They had found Chub and Harris, and had buried them next to the other three. Al Knowles was back in the shadows, tied up, because they had heard him raving in his sleep, and it seemed he could not believe
Daisy
was dead and he still wanted to go around killing operators for her. They knew that there must be an investigation, and they knew just how far their story would go; and having escaped a monster like
Daisy Etta
, they found life too sweet to want any part of it spent under observation or in jail.

The warhead of the missile struck near the edge of their camp, just between the pyramid of fuel drums and the dynamite stores. The second stage alighted a moment later two miles away, in the vicinity of the five graves. Kelly and Tom stumbled out to the rim of the mesa, and for a long while watched the jetsam fall and the flotsam rise. It was Kelly who guessed what must have happened, and “Bless
their clumsy little hearts,” he said happily. And he took the scribbled papers from Tom and tore them across.

But Tom shook his head, and thumbed back at the mound. “He’ll talk.”

“Him?” said Kelly, with such profound eloquence in his tone that he clearly evoked the image of Al Knowles, with his mumbling voice and his drooling mouth and his wide glazed eyes. “Let him,” Kelly said, and tore the papers again.

So they let him.

I
SAT AT
the controls of the big D-8 bulldozer, and I tried to remember. The airfield shoulder, built on a saltflat, stretched around me. Off to the west was a clump of buildings—the gas station and grease rack. Near it was the skeletal silhouette of a temporary weather observation post with its spinning velocimeter and vane and windsock. Everything seemed normal, but there was something
else.…

I could remember people, beautiful people in shining, floating garments. I remembered them as if I had seen them just a minute ago, and yet at a distance; but the memories were of faces close—close. One face—a golden girl; eyes and skin and hair three different shades of gold.

I shook my head so violently that it hurt. I was a bulldozer operator. I was—what was I supposed to be doing? I looked around me, saw the gravel spread behind me, the bare earth ahead; knew, then, that I was spreading gravel with the machine. But I seemed to—to—Look, without the physical fact of the half-done job around me, I wouldn’t have known why I was there at all!

I knew where I had seen that girl, those people. I thought I knew … but the thought was just where I couldn’t reach it. My mind put out searching tendrils for that knowledge of place, that was so certainly there, and the knowledge receded so that the tendrils stretched out thin and cracked with the effort, and my head ached from it.

A big trailer-type bottom-dump truck came hurtling and howling over the shoulder toward me, the huge fenderless driving wheels throwing clots of mud high in the air. The driver was a Puerto Rican, a hefty middle-aged fellow. I knew him well. Well—didn’t I? He threw out one arm, palm up, signaling “Where do you want it?” I pointed vaguely to the right, to the advancing edge of the spread gravel. He spun his steering wheel with one hand, put the other on
the trip-lever on his steering column, keeping his eyes on my face. As he struck the edge of the gravel fill with his wheels I dropped my hand; he punched the lever and the bottom of the trailer opened up, streaming gravel out in a windrow thirty feet long and a foot deep—twelve cubic yards of it, delivered at full speed. The driver waved and headed off, the straight-gut exhaust of his high-speed Diesel snorting and snarling as the rough ground bounced the man’s foot on the accelerator.

I waved back at the Puerto Rican—what was his name? I knew him, didn’t I? He knew me, the way he waved as he left. His name—was it Paco? Cruz? Eulalio? Damn it, no, and I knew it as well as I knew my own—

But I didn’t know my own name!

Oh hell, oh hell, I’m crazy. I’m scared. I’m scared crazy. What had happened to my head?… Everything whirled around me and without effort I remembered about the people in the shining clothes and as my mind closed on it, it evaporated again and there was nothing there.

Once when I was a kid in school I fell off the parallel bars and knocked myself out, and when I came to it was like this. I could see everything and feel and smell and taste anything, but I couldn’t remember anything. Not for a minute. I would ask what had happened, and they would tell me, and five minutes later I’d ask again. They asked me my address so they could take me home, and I couldn’t remember it. They got the address from the school files and took me home, and my feet found the way in and up four flights of stairs to our apartment—I didn’t remember which way to go, but my feet did. I went in and tried to tell my mother what was the matter with me and I couldn’t remember, and she put me to bed and I woke four hours later perfectly all right again.

In a minute, there on the bulldozer, I didn’t get over being scared but I began to get used to it, so I could think a little. I tried to remember everything at first, but that was too hard, so I tried to find something I could remember. I sat there and let my mind go quite blank. Right away there was something about a bottom-dump truck and
some gravel. It was there, clear enough, but I didn’t know where it fit nor how far back. I looked around me and there was the windrow of gravel waiting to be spread. Then that was what the truck was for; and—had it just been there, or had I been sitting there for long, for ever so long, waiting to remember that I must spread it?

Then I saw that I could remember ideas, but not events. Events were there, yes, but not in order. No continuity. A year ago—a second ago—same thing. Nothing clear, nothing very real, all mixed up. Ideas were there whatever, and continuity didn’t matter. That I could remember an idea, that I could know that a windrow of gravel meant that gravel must be spread:
that
was an idea, a condition of things which I could recognize. The truck’s coming and going and dumping, that was an event. I knew it had happened because the gravel was there, but didn’t know when, or if anything had happened in between.

I looked at the controls and frowned. Could I remember what to do with them? This lever and that pedal—what did they mean to me? Nothing, and nothing again.…

I mustn’t think about that. I don’t have to think about that. I must think about
what
I must do and not how I must do it. I’ve got to spread the stone. Here there is spread stone and there there is none, and at the edge of the spread stone is the windrow of gravel. So, watching it, seeing how it lay, I let my hands and feet remember about the levers and pedals. They throttled up, raised the blade off the ground, shifted into third gear, swung the three-ton moldboard and its twelve-foot cutting edge into the windrow. The blade loaded and gravel ran off the ends in two even rolls, and my right hand flicked to and away from me on the blade control, knowing how to raise it enough to let the gravel run out evenly underneath the cutting edge, not too high so that it would make a bobble in the fill for the tracks to teeter on when they reached it—for a bulldozer builds the road it walks on, and if the road is rough the machine see-saws forward and the blade cuts and fills to make waves which, when the tracks reach them, makes the machine see-saw and cut waves, which, when the tracks reach them … anyway, my hands knew what to do, and my feet; and they did it all the time when I could only
see what was to be done, and could not understand the events of doing it.

This won’t do
, I thought desperately. I’m all right, I guess, because I can do my work. It’s all laid out in front of me and I know what has to be done and my hands and feet know how to do it; but suppose somebody comes and speaks to me or tells me to go somewhere else, I who can’t even remember my own name. My hands and my feet have more sense than my head.

So I thought that I had to inventory everything I could trust, everything I knew positively. What were the things I knew?

The machine was there and true, and the gravel, and the bottom-dump that brought it. My being there was a real thing. You have to start everything with the belief that you yourself exist.

The job, the work, they were true things.

Where was I?

I must be where I should be, where I belonged, for the bottom-dump driver knew me, knew I was there, knew I was waiting for stone to spread. The airfield was there, and the fact that it was unfinished. “Airfield” was like a corollary to me, with the runway and the windsock its supporting axioms, and I had no need to think further. The people in the shining garments, and the girl—

But there was nothing about them here. Nothing at all.

To spread stone was a thing I had to do. But was that all? It wasn’t just spreading stone. I had to spread it to—to—

Not to help finish the airfield. It wasn’t that. It was something else, something—

Oh. Oh! I had to spread stone to
get
somewhere.

I didn’t want to get anywhere, except maybe to a place where I could think again, where I could know what was happening to me, where I could reach out with my mind and grasp those important things, like my name, and the name of the bottom-dump driver, Paco, or Cruz, or Eulalio or maybe Emanualo von Hachmann de la Vega, or whatever. But being able to think straight again and know all these important things was arriving at a
state
of consciousness, not
at a
place
. I knew, I knew, somehow I knew truly, that to arrive at that state I had to arrive at a point.

Suddenly, overwhelmingly, I had a flash of knowledge about the point—not what it was, but how it was, and I screamed and hurt my throat and fell blindly back in the seat of the tractor trying to push away
how
it was.