Passing Through the Flame (67 page)

“Chick is going to tape every performance in the next four days,” O’Brian said. “Rubber Duck is going to be all over the place, so we figured it would be a good idea to bring them in on the action.”

“Uh-huh,” Stein said. It was obviously too late to do anything about it now, but he didn’t like the idea of bringing Day in at all. Rubber Duck was an outlaw outfit all right, but they were outlaw
capitalists
, at least as exploitative as the straight record companies.

“I was just explaining the plan to Chick,” McAllister said. “Yeah.”

Stein dropped his pack in a corner, sat down on a cot. Ruby sat down next to him while Ivan peered at McAllister’s chalked diagram. Stein stared silently at McAllister for a long moment, then tried to telepath his message to O’Brian. Neither said anything. Shit!

“How much have you told Chick?” Stein finally asked McAllister up front.

“Just the timetable and what we’re going to do afterward,” McAllister said. “Chick’s going to record the historic moment for posterity.”

“Should make a great album series,” Day said. “We’ll donate ten percent of the gross to the government of the liberated zone. If things work out okay, maybe we’ll move our plant here. Maybe even set up recording studios and go overground.”

“Great,” Ruby said.

There was another long moment of silence as Stein, McAllister, and O’Brian exchanged glances. “Look, Chick,” Stein finally said, “we’ve got some business to discuss, and the fewer people that know about it the better.... Nothing personal, but....”

“I can dig it,” Day said. “I won’t ask you about your business, you don’t ask me about mine. See you after the revolution.”

“Jesus, Rod, do you mean to say you
trust
that guy?” Stein said when Day had left.

“He can’t go to any cops, can he?” McAllister said. “He can’t go to Taub or Beck because EPI has warrants out on him for selling pirate records of their artists. And he’s got a lot of equipment here. Once we take control, he can be useful, and I thought he’d be more cooperative then if he felt we had trusted him beforehand.”

“Don’t be so paranoid, Barry,” Ivan said. “Don’t you want to be a record star?”

“You gonna do a nude album cover?” Ruby said.

“If you’ll Yoko my John,” Ivan answered mockingly.

“Can we cut out the bullshit for a while and find out where we stand?” Stein said. “By the way, Dick, who’s your friend?” O’Brian put an affectionate hand on the blond girl’s knee, and she smiled thinly. “This is Linda Lundgren from the Venice Street Theater,” he said. “Don’t worry, she’s not a spy for Jango Beck.”

“I didn’t say she was,” Stein said. “But I think we should get it straight that we don’t bring any more people in on these strategy sessions than have a need to know. Now where do we stand? What do we have here? How does it look?”

“We’ve got a mimeo set up, and we’re set to crank out three or four editions of a one-sheet bulletin every day,” O’Brian said. “I figure we don’t put any names on it at all right now, just let it circulate anonymously.”

“We’ve got about a hundred and seventy workers from the People’s Alliance, the MSAC, the Sunshine Conspiracy, and a few other groups to pass the flyers out and do organizational work,” McAllister said. “And we’ve got representatives from just about everyone here ready to put together a government for the liberated zone once we take over.”

“Sounds pretty good,” Stein said. “We ought to get out the first bulletin immediately. Question is, what do we say?”

“We ought to announce some kind of meeting here, after sundown, but before the night’s performances start,” Ivan said. “We’ve got to start getting the people organized behind us.”

“But if we announce that we’re going to take the festival over, we’ll alert Beck,” Ruby said.

“Right.”

“What we’ve got to do is mobilize discontent, so that when we do take over, the people will welcome the action,” Stein said. “We shouldn’t go any further than that till Sunday.”

“Yeah, so what we need are some heavy issues, some big beefs, stuff that pisses people off,” O’Brian said.

“Like what?” Ruby asked. “There seems to be plenty of food, water, toilets, and things to do. Looks to me like everyone’s having a good time. There doesn’t seem to be anything going on here that we can use to raise people’s consciousness.”

“There’s Beck’s movie,” Stein said. “Everybody knows about the rip-off exploitation film that’s going to be shot, and we know damn well that nothing is going to make Beck stop the filming. So there’s our first demand—stop the shooting of the exploitation film. Beck
won’t
stop the shooting, and we can use that to force a confrontation that will educate the people to the true nature of the festival. Once we’ve got the people aroused, we can move on to actions against the industrial exhibitors.”

“I like it,” Ivan said. “It should work. The camera crews will give us visible targets all over the festival.”

“Don’t play freak for Jango Beck!”

“Woodstock, not Altamont!”

“Turn the cameras over to the people!”

“I’ll type up a flyer on it and send it right to the mimeo people,” O’Brian said. “We should have it out in a couple of hours.”

“What about your friend Chris Sargent, Ruby?” Ivan said slyly. Stein felt a vacuum rush to the pit of his stomach. Ruby blushed.

“What about him?” she said belligerently.

“Just wondering if he’s gonna show up...”

“Yeah,” McAllister said, “what’s the status of the strike force?”

“Can we count on his action at all?”

“Chris Sargent is more together than anyone in this tent,” Ruby said angrily. “He’ll do his job; you heroes just worry about yours.”

“Someone should at least make sure that he’s shown up,” McAllister said. “We don’t want to find out on Sunday that we’ve stirred the people up to want something we can’t deliver.”

“I was about to go do that,” Ruby said.

“I’ll go with you,” Stein said. Their eyes met, and her belligerence seemed to melt into wry female amusement. She’s using Sargent to tease me with, he thought, and I’ve got to admit it’s working.

“All right, Barry,” Ruby said slyly. “I’m sure Chris will be glad to see you.” Now she probably intends to use
me
to tease Sargent, Stein thought. Who is the objective and who is the ploy? I wonder if she knows herself.

Chris Sargent sat on his sleeping bag in front of the tent, squinting against the sun as he scanned the sea of human flesh to the south for new arrivals. The campgrounds were crowding up now, and men and women alike were removing their shirts—and in some cases everything—to bask in the morning warmth. Baum sat beside him puffing idly on a joint, staring at the bare boobs of a young blonde no more than ten yards away, sitting in a circle with a dozen other hippies passing around a jug of wine.

Nice tits they were, too, but Sargent noticed them only as his eyes passed over them in their rapid east-west sweeps. Twenty yards away, a tie-dyed red-and-blue sunburst flag flew from a tall bamboo pole, matching the pennant that fluttered from the steel whip antenna behind Sargent’s tent. Mart Pulaski was directing his fumbling-fingered squad of seven spaced-out freaks as they tried to hammer tent pegs into the ground without smashing their fingers while their attention was fixed on all the half-naked pussy surrounding them instead of on what they were doing. All that bare ass was a problem Sargent hadn’t anticipated, and he had to admit that he was getting a little horny looking at it himself.

“Looks like someone else’s squad arriving now,” Baum said, still leering pointlessly at the blonde, who hadn’t even noticed him.

Peering south across the campsite area, Sargent saw a rippling disturbance among the crowd of people. People seemed to be edging away from and at the same time turning their attention toward some commotion that was making its way toward him, an arrow of hassle pointing straight for the flag behind him. A helicopter pilot could follow it well enough to plant a brace of rockets right in the tent. And there
were
helicopters around.

“Goddamn it, I told everyone that it was essential not to make ourselves conspicuous,” he muttered.

“Even money that’s Bellows’ squad,” Baum said.

“Even money you’re right,” Sargent answered sourly.

In a few minutes, they had both won their bet as Frank Bellows, puffing and cursing, herded eight longhairs through the space between two tents and nearly through the circle of people passing the jug. The recruits were dawdling along raggedly, rapping with chicks, half of them smoking joints they had probably snatched from campers along the way, goofing along like the hippies they were supposed to blend into. But that asshole Bellows was trying to move them along smartly like a squad of soldiers, moving up and down the ragged line, goosing along stragglers, trying to keep the eight of them tightly together. No wonder they were making waves!

“Jesus Christ, Bellows, I told you not to draw attention,” Sargent said, rising to his feet as Bellows called his troops to a halt in front of the tent. The men discarded their packs, sat down, and started a little pot party. “What do you think that approach would’ve looked like from the air? Try to remember that in this action,
were
on the ground like Charlie, and
he’s
up there in helicopters looking at us.”

“Come off it, Chris, those are Beck’s helicopters. Who cares what they see? All this soldier playing is a shuck. The cops are Beck’s, and we’re doing this job for Beck, so there’s not going to be any opposition.”

A pimply dude pulled out a bottle of pills and passed them around to his buddies, who gobbled them like M&M’s. In two days, these freaks were going to be whacked out of their trees. And the rentacops Sargent had seen were from something called Hughes Security Service, a regular mercenary outfit two or three cuts below Pinkertons. Retired cops, out-of-work hillbillies, some MP vets, bozos, bouncers, professional bad-asses—in general, a lot of pretty raw meat. Those Mexican traffic cop outfits they wore might make the hippies think they were movie theater ushers, but Sargent knew that there was a lot of unstable muscle frying its brains in the hot sun and twisting what passed for its mind by staring at a few hundred thousand freaking hippie perverts. It didn’t seem to him that Jango had chosen a security force designed for the max in selfcontrol.

“Have you looked at what the rentacops are like?” he asked Bellows.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Look at them good, and then tell me you’d trust your ass to Jango’s ability to control them,” Sargent said. For that matter, he thought, I don’t trust my ass to Jango’s
wanting
to control them. Who knows what he wants? Who even knows why it’s worth one hundred thousand dollars to him to destroy a bunch of record album tapes?

“Now get these apes out of here and form a camp about thirty yards to the east of Pulaski,” Sargent ordered. “I don’t want people piling up around this tent.”

“Yessir, Uncle Ho,” Bellows said sardonically. He turned and spoke to his charges. “Let’s get things set up real GI like the man says, and then we can have a little party in private, just like the big-time dope freaks in the Nam. Get your asses in gear.”

He herded them past the tent and through a flower bed of sleeping bags and bodies. This time he didn’t play drill sergeant when they stopped to exchange bullshit and dope with the folks along the way, and their passage was much more smooth and natural. Swim in the sea of the people, Mao said. I wonder if he put a word or two in his little red book about not making waves.

“Company,” Baum said.

Sargent turned and saw that Ruby Berger was standing about five yards in front of the tent, just outside a circle of people who were starting to drone some crazy chant like spaced-out Buddhist monks.

“Oooooommmm... Ahoooom... Ooooom... Ahoooom....”

She was looking right at him with those hot hard eyes of hers, but he couldn’t read the expression on her face. She was wearing jeans and a blue work shirt open to the third button, with no bra, and she looked especially good to him now, after all the bare tits he had seen today. Barry Stein stood a step behind her, looking pissed off and whiny as usual. They must have seen the whole scene with Bellows and his freaks.

“Oooom... Ahooom... Ooooom... Ahoooom....”

“Hello, Chris,” Ruby said, walking up to him. “Good to see you.” She flicked her eyes at Stein. “Some people weren’t so sure you’d get your people here. But I wasn’t one of them.” Stein managed to look even more miserable.

“Good to see you, too,” Sargent said.

“Are you letting all of them drop pills like that?” Stein said. “By Sunday they’ll all be stoned out of their minds.”

“That’s the idea,” Sargent said. “They can’t get too loaded for my purposes. I want the max diversion value.”

“You can’t control street people when they’re that stoned,” Stein said. Ruby’s face clearly showed that his sniveling was turning her off, while the way her body leaned showed Sargent that
he
was turning her on.

“I know how to handle stoned troops,” Sargent said easily. “I think I’ve had a little more experience at it than you have.” He shared a private look with Ruby and watched Stein wince.

“There’s going to be a protest meeting tonight at the People’s Forum, Chris,” Ruby said.

“Protesting what?”

“By then we’ll have something to protest, don’t worry about it,” she said. Her eyes allowed themselves to laugh, to share a moment of cynicism with him. He liked that.

“I’ll bet you will,” he said.

“We’d like you to be there.”

“I can think of better ways to spend tonight than listening to a lot of hot air,” Sargent said. “Can’t you?”

“There’s going to be a strategy meeting afterward so we can start to coordinate our actions,” Stein said, in an irritated tone that only made things tastier for Sargent.

“Coordinating strategy is bullshit,” Sargent said. “You already know what I need from you—maximum disruption on Sunday. I don’t have to know how you’re going to do it.”

“We’d like you to be there,” Ruby said. “We can get together afterward.”