The Müller-Fokker Effect (29 page)

The Klan are out on the Mall, raping a Negro vice-squad cop in drag…forty have been in already without noticing anything odd.

‘Hey, the boas done blown up the Lincoln Memorial!
EEEEE
yahoooo!’ They set up a wooden cross by the Reflecting Pool and ignite it.

It explodes. One of the Fat-ists has slipped a grenade in the kindling. A Goblin is killed and a Cyclops loses an eye.

Angry tourists mill around the ruins of Lincoln’s tomb. They jump the prostrate Guardsmen, flailing away with thermos bottles, cameras and campstools. ‘You son of a bitch, you could have kept it up until I got a picture of it!’

‘Kick his nuts off, Gladys! Our whole trip’s ruined!’

The man from Babel Tours rushes among them, trying to make peace. ‘Girls, girls! Fellas, fellas! Let’s be sensible, now. No use losing our tempers. Now let’s all go over to the
Washington
Memorial…the big spire over
there
. And let’s try to keep together this time.’

The Pentagon’s
MODULOG
program is making things worse. Ideally the computer team would feed in data about concentrations of rioters (number, race, armament, deployment) and the computer would automatically dispatch the right number and kind of troops to deal with it. But in practice the machine doesn’t seem to be listening.

Troop, police and supply movements are getting snarled. Paratroops are dropped for no special reason in Chesapeake Bay. One Marine unit hits the beach in Baltimore; a CBW unit is reassigned over thirty times, each time to a different random location—they never even have time to unpack their assortment of sophisticated gases. Contradictory orders follow one another like machine-gun bullets; One tank command spends the whole riot ruining the lawn of the National Gallery as they roll around in circles…

There are jurisdictional disputes caused by
MODULOG’S
erratic assignments: The Army and the Virginia National Guard claim the same turf…the MPs have to move in on both of them with gas-firing tanks to prevent an intra-service war.

A lone sniper has barricaded himself in the top of the Washington monument. The police call up with a bull-horn asking him to give give give himself give himself himself up himself up up up. He is variously indentified as a Negro, a Chinese, Indian, Soviet ambassador, anarchist, etc.

The Klan catch six White Shirts still in blackface from the parade. As it happens, there are six lampposts right handy.

‘Please! No! Wait, you’ve got us wrong. We’re white as you are!’

‘Haw haw, this black son bitch gone try tell me he’s white, Rufe, you heah that? Haw haw—Arrrgh!’

The Grand Goblin falls forward, a fire arrow quivering in his back. War whoops. A band of Iroquois descend from their lair on the high steel of a nearby construction site. In a minute, it’s all over but the scalping. After the Indians leave, Negro children roll the living and the dead. The Iroquois have already taken the sheets, but there are a few credit cards…They pause to wave at a boy in uniform, riding in on a boxcar…

Bronze-chinned soldiers scour the city for pederasts. A boy scout is leading a blind man across the street, taking his hand. An armored car pauses to mow down the pair with heavy machine-gun fire, then moves on, broadcasting:

‘Keep in your homes! There is nothing to worry about, the situation is under control!’

Inside, the atmosphere is stifling. The corporal shuts off the amplifier and asks, ‘Lootenant, we got any more Pepsi?’

‘Naw, wait’ll we stop for gas. Not this station here, the next on the right. They give double green stamps.’

The incipient queer-fears of lawmen have by now been fully aroused. Twenty Klansmen are surrounded, Plunked and kicked to emasculinity. (
Plunk
: a new riot-control gas which paralyses the victim’s limbs but leaves him fully conscious and capable of feeling intense pain. ‘A cop’s dream’ says the
American Law Enforcement Bulletin
.) A carload of Daughters of the American Legion, out slumming, are arrested as drag queens and subjected to interesting humilitations.

‘My good man, do you realize
who
I am?’

Nasty laugh. ‘No I don’t, tooty-frooty, but I’m sure gonna find out.’ Tries to pull away her blue-rinsed hair, gives up when some of the scalp comes up. The cops take them back to the new detention center on the Mall, where they can ‘put on a little show, like you done at the Fadeout Club.’

‘There’s one of ‘em! Get the bastard!’ Virginia state troopers pile’ out of their cars and chase Cardinal Homer across the lawn of his residence. Ten Knights of Columbus try to fight a rearguard action with blunt sabers; a few cops stop to slap the cuffs on them and haul them off as pimps.

The main body are almost within grabbing distance of his streaming red cloak when a platoon of Mafia gorillas step out from the bushes and lay down a withering crossfire: Thompson submachine-guns, captured army automatic rifles, magnum-style Italian assassination guns…

‘You okay, fadda? Anybody else gets smaht wit ya, you just tell Big Fats, and I’ll lean on ‘em a little.’

Frustrated pilots slew around in the sky, now and then popping a Skybolt at some fishing boat off the coast.…Each pilot’s worried sick he might be queer and not know it.…

‘Now let’s see, what’s that unidentified craft down there? Looks like a Russian trawler to me…so what if they’ve disguised it as the Presidential yacht…well I’m a happippily mumarried man, two great kikids…
DIE, RUSSIAN SPY SHIP
!…so what if there was that time in flight school, nobody knows about that…’

Zionist students picket the Arab embassies, as usual blaming these poor oil billionaires for everything. The Arabs cower inside, stoned to inertia. Their flowing robes, the way they reek of
kif
, makes the Marine Guards sick.

‘For two cents I’d turn this machine-gun around the other way. I mean, here we are, guarding a buncha pansies…’

‘I know how ya feel, kid. But we’re pertecting our oil inneress—on the other hand, who’d know it was us?—Here’s a nickle, kid. Have an orgy.’

They pick up their weapons and stroll inside, through the elaborate mosaic hallway. ‘You take this end, I’ll take that one. But fer Chrissakes, kid, don’t shoot up the harem. Might come in handy later…’

The President’s evacuation plan is readied. He is to take the underground passage to Blair House, then helicopter from the roof to the submarine
Scampi
waiting in the mouth of Delaware Bay.

Everybody has a plan for getting the nut down from the Washington monument. The cops want to rush up the stairs and just take him. The Marines, traditionalists ever, want to use mortars with white phosphorus or mustard gas. The Navy put out feelers about shelling it from a battleship offshore, but nobody’s buying.

Up in the monument, the sniper picks off two more civil servants, raising his score to 48. He has his own loudhailer:

‘Listen to me, down there! You have all failed to make a distinction somewhere. Drop your weapons one and all, and come up here with your hands up! By the way, can anyone tell me why the Little Moron wore a condom when he went whaling?’

The Pentagon is defended by National Guardsmen from five states, Federal troops and Federal marshals equipped with the latest in chemical sprays, including Plunk, Mace and Mush (
Mush
sends the victim into an acute panic and at the same time causes behavior to become automatic and repetitive. He begins to run away and is usually found some ten or fifteen miles away, dead of heart failure).

Inside, specially-flown-in teams of experts are looking over the computer to find out what’s wrong with it. A dozen men in suits with IBM shoulders stand around the big round table in the War Room going over schematics.

Brigadier General Garner, acting chief of staff, sticks his head in. ‘About through with our table, gentlemen? The battle-board’s under all your papers there, and we can’t get a thing done without it.’

‘We’ve hit a snag, General. George here was just saying it might be the step-up of the differentiable multiplex write-in analyzer, but the rest of us opt for improved multi-scan facilities and a new software package.’

‘That so?’ The general closes the door, feeling old. He stops a white-coated technician coming out of the computer room. ‘You tell me, boy, in plain English. Can our brain be saved?’

‘Couldn’t tell you, sir. I just stopped by for coffee; I’m not in this department.’

‘Not a computer man, son?’

‘No sir. My job is feed birth pills to the pigeons, on the roof.’

The lobotomized Soviet official goes beserk in the supermarket, hauls out a huge Russian automatic and begins spraying the place with lead. The manager comes over to reason with him.

‘Look, you can’t act like that in here! You’ll drive all my customers away! What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway?. Who’s gonna pay for that display of canned peaches, 4¢ off this week?’

A dying shopper groans in delirium:

‘And gimme a package of stainless steel razor bl…’

‘He was afraid he might catch Moby Dick!’ screams the bull-horn from the top of the Washington obelisk.

‘We could do it easy,’ says the Navy man. ‘A couple shots to get the range, then
POW!’

At that moment, Students for Chairman Fat solve all problems in dealing with him: they crash a stolen truckload of explosives into the base of the monument.

The Capitol is ringed with three cordons of battle-tested paratroopers and an outer wall of more expendable types. At first no one tries the bayonet wall. Then a large contingent of
HOMODRAFT
rush in, while American Nazis stand by ready to spit on either side. Anti-papists charge, waving contraceptive devices and screaming for the blood of Guy Fawkes. Down the Mall come a hundred Students for Chairman Fat, screaming Chinese syllables insanely and swinging their placards (
‘WHY DIE, G.I.?’ ‘FAT IS OUR BROTHER
’ and
‘FOLLOW THE CROWDS TO FOOK HING CHINESE LAUNDRY
.’) From the rear of the Capitol come a horde of Black Nationalists in African costume, Black Claw of Islam brothers in leather jackets and shades, and the Iroquois. From the North come Klux, White Shirts, and the Organization for the Rights of Gentile, Anglo-Saxon Man, beefed up with a few hefty Daughters of the American Legion (in the front ranks for a spearhead attack). From the South come Zionists, anarchists, Knights of Columbus and Cosa Altra (the boys have been got together), young Communists of sixty and old of ninety, vigilantes, cops on strike, looting antique dealers after a bit of Americana, motorcycle hoods on bikes, the Peace Love Acid World Peace Society (who have no idea what they are here for) and a large auxiliary of aging pachucos in pink shirts and pegged pants (who are just waiting for some wise soldier to bump their shoulders or call their mother a name).

The Nazis’ eyes gleam; they work up their biggest gobs of spit. At the last possible second, when it looks as if everyone is going to impale themselves on bayonets, a team of lost helicopters comes over, spraying out a ton and a half of defoliants. The thick mist descends; everyone is too busy lying flat and fighting for breath to fight anyone else.

One brave soldier manages to stand his post, coughing and sputtering. As a final gesture he bayonets a figure charging toward him in the mist—it’s Senator Vuje, who’s been trying to get in (to use the Senate toilet) for hours.

The cherry blossoms are falling.

Looting and arson spread to all quarters of the city. Weary firemen have just put out a department store for the second time and are packing away their hoses and trophies when a flame-throwing tank comes by and gets it all going again.

‘Aw, fuck this,’ says one firefighter. ‘I been to so many fires today already my boots hurt—all full of transistor radios and watches and stuff.’

‘Our battle plan has several options,’ General Garner explains to his staff. ‘1. Contain the riot without attempting a showdown, erect barriers, then slash and burn out the corruption. 2. Divide the city into sectors, then go in and clean it out a sector at a time. 3. Level unimportant sectors of the city with artillery and/or bombing, defoliate, then napalm the corruption. 4. Evacuate the President and key congressmen (the Hawk list), evacuate our boys, then
nuke
the joint! I favor number 4, as the way to expend least effort and men for maximum results.’

At that moment a flash message comes in:
IT’S OVER.

Garner slugs the messenger and dials the Operations Room himself. ‘What the hell do you mean, “it’s over”?’

‘That’s right, General. All units report their sectors are pretty well under control. Just mopping up, sir.’

‘And the rioters?’

‘Looks like they just tired of it and went home.’

Wes Davis sat up in bed.

‘A nigger plot!’

‘You all right, chief?’ One of his lieutenants came towards him.

‘Stayawaystayaway!’

‘Sure, Wes. Anything you say.’

Another man stood up in the shadowy end of the room. ‘It’s only us, Wes. Skeeter and Travis.’

Wes held up a trembling hand. ‘Don’t come no closer! Turn on a light so’s I can see you, boa.’