Deserts of Fire Read online

  Don’t bums like that deserve to be shafted? It isn’t enough they use me as a tax-loss patsy; they gotta tell me who to book! “Go sign the Four Horsemen, the group that’s packing them in at the Mandala,” they say. “We want them on ‘A Night with the American Dream.’ They’re hot.”

  “Yeah, they’re hot.” I say, “which means they’ll cost a mint. I can’t afford it.”

  They show me more fine print—next time I read the contract with a microscope. I gotta book whoever they tell me to and I gotta absorb the cost on my books! It’s enough to make a Litvak turn anti-semitic.

  So I had to go to the Mandala to sign up these hippies. I made sure I didn’t get there until twelve-thirty so I wouldn’t have to stay in that nuthouse any longer than necessary. Such a dive! What Bernstein did was take a bankrupt Hollywood-Hollywood club on the Strip, knock down all the interior walls, and put up this monster tent inside the shell. Just thin white screening over two-by-fours. Real schlock. Outside the tent, he’s got projectors, lights, speakers, all the electronic mumbo-jumbo, and inside is like being surrounded by movie screens. Just the tent and the bare floor, not even a real stage, just a platform on wheels they shlepp in and out of the tent when they change groups.

  So you can imagine he doesn’t draw exactly a class crowd. Not with the American Dream up the street being run as a network tax loss. What they get is the smelly, hard-core hippies I don’t let in the door and the kind of j.d. high-school kids that think it’s smart to hang around putzes like that. A lot of dope-pushing goes on. The cops don’t like the place and the rousts draw professional troublemakers.

  A real den of iniquity—I felt like I was walking onto a Casbah set. The last group had gone off and the Horsemen hadn’t come on yet. So what you had was this crazy tent filled with hippies, half of them on acid or pot or amphetamine, or, for all I know, Ajax, high-school would-be hippies, also mostly stoned and getting ugly, and a few crazy schwartzes looking to fight cops. All of them standing around waiting for something to happen, and about ready to make it happen. I stood near the door, just in case. As they say, “The vibes were making me uptight.”

  All of a sudden the house lights go out and it’s black as a network executive’s heart. I hold my hand on my wallet—in this crowd, tell me there are no pickpockets. Just the pitch black and dead silence for what, ten beats, and then I start feeling something, I don’t know, like something crawling along my bones, but I know it’s some kind of subsonic effect and not my imagination, because all the hippies are standing still and you don’t hear a sound.

  Then from monster speakers so loud you feel it in your teeth, a heartbeat, but heavy, slow, half-time, like maybe a whale’s heart. The thing crawling along my bones seems to be synchronized with the heartbeat and I feel almost like I am that big dumb heart beating there in the darkness.

  Then a dark red spot—so faint it’s almost infrared—hits the stage which they have wheeled out. On the stage are four uglies in crazy black robes—you know, like the Grim Reaper wears—with that ugly red light all over them like blood. Creepy. Boom-ba-boom. Boom-ba-boom. The heartbeat still going, still that subsonic bone-crawl, and the hippies are staring at the Four Horsemen like mesmerized chickens.

  The bass player, a regular jungle bunny, picks up the rhythm of the heartbeat. Dum-da-dum. Dum-da-dum. The drummer beats it out with earsplitting rim shots. Then the electric guitar, timed like a strangling cat, makes with horrible, heavy chords. Whang-ka-whang. Whang-ka-whang.

  It’s just awful, I feel it in my guts, my bones; my eardrums are just like some great big throbbing vein. Everybody is swaying to it; I’m swaying to it. Boom-ba-boom. Boom-ba-boom.

  Then the guitarist starts to chant in rhythm with the heartbeat, in a hoarse, shrill voice like somebody dying: “The big flash … the big flash …”

  Then the guitarist starts to chant in rhythm with the heartbeat, in a hoarse, shrill voice like somebody dying: “The big flash … the big flash …”

  And the guy at the visuals console diddles around and rings of light start to climb the walls of the tent, blue at the bottom becoming green as they get higher, then yellow, orange, and finally as they become a circle on the ceiling, eye-killing neon-red. Each circle takes exactly one heartbeat to climb the walls.

  Boy, what an awful feeling! Like I was a tube of toothpaste being squeezed in rhythm till the top of my head felt like it was gonna squirt up with those circles of light through the ceiling.

  And then they start to speed it up gradually. The same heartbeat, the same rim shots, same chords, same circles of light, same “The big flash … the big flash …” Same base, same subsonic bone-crawl, but just a little faster…. Then faster! Faster!

  Thought I would die! Knew I would die! Heart beating like a lunatic. Rim shots like a machine gun. Circles of light sucking me up the walls, into that red neon hole.

  Oy, incredible! Over and over, faster, faster, till the voice was a scream and the heartbeat a boom and the rim shots a whine and the guitar howled feedback and my bones were jumping out of my body—

  Every spot in the place came on and I went blind from the sudden light—

  An awful explosion sound came over every speaker, so loud it rocked me on my feet—

  I felt myself squirting out of the top of my head and loved it.

  Then: the explosion became a rumble—

  The light seemed to run together into a circle on the ceiling, leaving everything else black.

  And the circle became a fireball.

  The fireball became a slow-motion film of an atomic-bomb cloud as the rumbling died away. Then the picture faded into a moment of total darkness and the house lights came on.

  What a number!

  Gevalt, what an act!

  So, after the show, when I got them alone and found out they had no manager, not even an option to the Mandala, I thought faster than I ever had in my life.

  To make a long story short and sweet, I gave the network the royal screw. I signed the Horsemen to a contract that made me their manager and gave me twenty percent of their take. Then I booked them into the American Dream at ten thousand a week, wrote a check as proprietor of the American Dream, handed the check to myself as manager of the Four Horsemen, then resigned as a network flunky, leaving them with a ten-thousand-dollar bag and me with twenty percent of the hottest group since the Beatles.

  What the hell, he who lives by the fine print shall perish by the fine print.

  T minus 148 days … and counting… .

  “You haven’t seen the tape yet, have you, BD?” Jake said. He was nervous as hell. When you reach my level in the network structure, you’re used to making subordinates nervous, but Jake Pitkin was head of network continuity, not some office boy, and certainly should be used to dealing with executives at my level. Was the rumor really true?

  We were alone in the screening room. It was doubtful that the projectionist could hear us.

  “No, I haven’t seen it yet,” I said. “But I’ve heard some strange stories.”

  Jake looked positively deathly.

  “About the tape?” he said.

  “About you, Jake,” I said, deprecating the rumor with an easy smile. “That you don’t want to air the show.”

  “It’s true, BD,” Jake said quietly.

  “Do you realize what you’re saying? Whatever our personal tastes—and I personally think there’s something unhealthy about them—the Four Horsemen are the hottest thing in the country right now and that dirty little thief Herm Gellman held us up for a quarter of a million for an hour show. It cost another two hundred thousand to make it. We’ve spent another hundred thousand on promotion. We’re getting top dollar from the sponsors. There’s over a million dollars one way or the other riding on that show. That’s how much we blow if we don’t air it.”

  “I know that, BD,” Jake said. “I also know this could cost me my job. Think about that. Because knowing all that, I’m still against airing the tape. I’m going to run the c
losing segment for you. I’m sure enough that you’ll agree with me to stake my job on it.”

  I had a terrible feeling in my stomach. I have superiors too and The Word was that “A Trip with the Four Horsemen” would be aired, period. No matter what. Something funny was going on. The price we were getting for commercial time was a precedent and the sponsor was a big aerospace company which had never bought network time before. What really bothered me was that Jake Pitkin had no reputation for courage; yet here he was laying his job on the line. He must be pretty sure I would come around to his way of thinking or he wouldn’t dare. And though I couldn’t tell Jake, I had no choice in the matter whatsoever.

  “Okay, roll it,” Jake said into the intercom mike. “What you’re going to see,” he said as the screening room lights went out, “is the last number.”

  On the screen: a shot of empty blue sky, with soft, lazy electric guitar chords behind it. The camera pans across a few clouds to an extremely long shot on the sun. As the sun, no more than a tiny circle of light, moves into the center of the screen, a sitar-drone comes in behind the guitar.

  Very slowly, the camera begins to zoom in on the sun. As the image of the sun expands, the sitar gets louder and the guitar begins to fade and a drum starts to give the sitar a beat. The sitar gets louder, the beat gets more pronounced and begins to speed up as the sun continues to expand. Finally, the whole screen is filled with unbearably bright light behind which the sitar and drum are in a frenzy.

  Then over this, drowning out the sitar and drum, a voice like a sick thing in heat: “Brighter … than a thousand suns …”

  The light dissolves into a closeup of a beautiful dark-haired girl with huge eyes and moist lips, and suddenly there is nothing on the sound track but soft guitar and voices crooning low: “Brighter … oh, God, it’s brighter … brighter … than a thousand suns …”

  The girl’s face dissolves into a full shot of the Four Horsemen in their Grim Reaper robes and the same melody that had played behind the girl’s face shifts into a minor key, picks up whining, reverberating electric guitar chords and a sitar-drone and becomes a dirge: “Darker … the world grows darker …”

  And a series of cuts in time to the dirge:

  A burning village in Asia strewn with bodies—

  “Darker … the world grows darker …”

  The corpse heap at Auschwitz—

  “Until it gets so dark …”

  A gigantic auto graveyard with gaunt Negro children dwarfed in the foreground—“I think I’ll die …”

  A Washington ghetto in flames with the Capitol misty in the background—

  “… before the daylight comes …”

  A jump-cut to an extreme closeup on the lead singer of the Horsemen, his face twisted into a mask of desperation and ecstasy. And the sitar is playing double-time, the guitar is wailing and he is screaming at the top of his lungs: “But before I die, let me make that trip before the nothing comes …”

  The girl’s face again, but transparent, with a blinding yellow light shining through it. The sitar beat gets faster and faster with the guitar whining behind it and the voice is working itself up into a howling frenzy: “… the last big flash to light my sky …”

  Nothing but the blinding light now—

  “… and zap! the world is done …”

  An utterly black screen for a beat that becomes black, fading to blue at a horizon—

  “… but before we die let’s dig that high that frees us from our binds … that blows all cool that ego-drool and burns us from our mind … the last big flash, mankind’s last gas, the trip we can’t take twice …”

  Suddenly, the music stops dead for half a beat. Then:

  The screen is lit up by an enormous fireball—

  A shattering rumble—

  The fireball coalesces into a mushroom-pillar cloud as the roar goes on. As the roar begins to die out, fire is visible inside the monstrous nuclear cloud. And the girl’s face is faintly visible, superimposed over the cloud.

  A soft voice, amplified over the roar, obscenely reverential now: “Brighter … great God, it’s brighter … brighter than a thousand suns… .”

  And the screen went blank and the lights came on.

  I looked at Jake. Jake looked at me.

  “That’s sick,” I said. “That’s really sick.”

  “You don’t want to run a thing like that, do you, BD?” Jake said softly.

  I made some rapid mental calculations. The loathsome thing ran something under five minutes … it could be done… .

  “You’re right, Jake,” I said. “We won’t run a thing like that. We’ll cut it out of the tape and squeeze in another commercial at each break. That should cover the time.”

  “You don’t understand,” Jake said. “The contract Herm rammed down our throats doesn’t allow us to edit. The show’s a package—all or nothing. Besides, the whole show’s like that.”

  “All like that? What do you mean, all like that?”

  Jake squirmed in his seat. “Those guys are … well, perverts, BD,” he said.

  “Perverts?”

  “They’re … well, they’re in love with the atom bomb or something. Every number leads up to the same thing.”

  “You mean … they’re all like that?”

  “You got the picture, BD,” Jake said. “We run an hour of that, or we run nothing at all.”

  “Jesus.”

  I knew what I wanted to say. Burn the tape and write off the million dollars. But I also knew it would cost me my job. And I knew that five minutes after I was out the door, they would have someone in my job who would see things their way. Even my superiors seemed to be just handing down The Word from higher up. I had no choice. There was no choice.

  “I’m sorry, Jake,” I said. “We run it.”

  “I resign,” said Jake Pitkin, who had no reputation for courage.

  T minus 10 days … and counting… .

  “It’s a clear violation of the Test-Ban Treaty,” I said.

  The Under Secretary looked as dazed as I felt. “We’ll call it a peaceful use of atomic energy, and let the Russians scream,” he said.

  “It’s insane.”

  “Perhaps,” the Under Secretary said. “But you have your orders, General Carson, and I have mine. From higher up. At exactly eight-fifty-eight P.M. local time on July fourth, you will drop a fifty-kiloton atomic bomb on the designated ground zero at Yucca Flats.”

  “But the people … the television crews …”

  “Will be at least two miles outside the danger zone. Surely, SAC can manage that kind of accuracy under ‘laboratory conditions.’”

  I stiffened. “I do not question the competence of any bomber crew under my command to perform this mission,” I said. “I question the reason for the mission. I question the sanity of the orders.”

  The Under Secretary shrugged, and smiled wanly. “Welcome to the club.”

  “You mean you don’t know what this is all about either?”

  “All I know is what was transmitted to me by the Secretary of Defense, and I got the feeling he doesn’t know everything, either. You know that the Pentagon has been screaming for the use of tactical nuclear weapons to end the war in Asia—you SAC boys have been screaming the loudest. Well, several months ago, the President conditionally approved a plan for the use of tactical nuclear weapons during the next monsoon season.”

  I whistled. The civilians were finally coming to their senses. Or were they?

  “But what does that have to do with—?”

  “Public opinion,” the Under Secretary said. “It was conditional upon a drastic change in public opinion. At the time the plan was approved, the polls showed that seventy-eight point eight percent of the population opposed the use of tactical nuclear weapons, nine point eight percent favored their use and the rest were undecided or had no opinion. The President agreed to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons by a date, several months from now, which is still top secret, p
rovided that by that date at least sixty-five percent of the population approved their use and no more than twenty percent actively opposed it.”

  “I see … just a ploy to keep the Joint Chiefs quiet.”

  “General Carson,” the Under Secretary said, “apparently you are out of touch with the national mood. After the first Four Horsemen show, the polls showed that twenty-five percent of the population approved the use of nuclear weapons. After the second show, the figure was forty-one percent. It is now forty-eight percent. Only thirty-two percent are now actively opposed.”

  “You’re trying to tell me that a rock group—”

  “A rock group and the cult around it, General. It’s become a national hysteria. There are imitators. Haven’t you seen those buttons?”

  “The ones with a mushroom cloud on them that say ‘Do It’?”

  The Under Secretary nodded. “Your guess is as good as mine whether the National Security Council just decided that the Horsemen hysteria could be used to mold public opinion, or whether the Four Horsemen were their creatures to begin with. But the results are the same either way—the Horsemen and the cult around them have won over precisely that element of the population which was most adamantly opposed to nuclear weapons: hippies, students, dropouts, draft-age youth. Demonstrations against the war and against nuclear weapons have died down. We’re pretty close to that sixty-five percent. Someone—perhaps the President himself—has decided that one more big Four Horsemen show will put us over the top.”

  “The President is behind this?”

  “No one else can authorize the detonation of an atomic bomb, after all,” the Under Secretary said. “We’re letting them do the show live from Yucca Flats. It’s being sponsored by an aerospace company heavily dependent on defense contracts. We’re letting them truck in a live audience. Of course the government is behind it.”