Ascendancies (49 page)

Birds sang in the pines above the campground.

“He's right,” Vanna said in a small voice.

“‘He who diggeth a pit will fall in it,'” Charles quoted.

“Okay, okay,” Mr. Judy muttered. “I'm not going to hit you.”

“She who lives by the sword will die by it.”

Mr. Judy frowned darkly. “Don't
push
me, asshole!”

“I know what you're doing, even if you yourselves are too corrupt to recognize it,” Charles continued eagerly. “You're trying to legitimize the mass poisoning of the unborn generation.” Charles seemed encouraged by their confusion, and waved his arms eloquently. “Your contempt for the sanctity of human life legitimizes murder! Today, you're killing kids. Tomorrow, you'll be renting wombs. Pretty soon you'll be selling fetal tissue on the open market!”

“Hey, we're not capitalists,” Vanna protested.

Charles was on a roll. “First comes abortion, then euthanasia! The suicide machines…The so-called right-to-die—it's really the
right-to-kill
, isn't it? Pretty soon you'll be quietly poisoning not just unborn kids and old sick people, but everybody else who's inconvenient to you! That's just how the Holocaust started—with so-called euthanasia!”

“We're not the Nazis in this situation,” Mr. Judy grated. “You're the Nazis.”

“We're pro-life. You're making life cheap. You're the pro-death secular forces!”

“Hey, don't call us ‘secular,'” Vanna said, wounded. “We're Goddess pagans.”

Starlitz was steadily munching his cereal.

“I think you should give me all those pills,” Charles said quietly. “It's no use going on with this scheme of yours, now that we know, and you know that we know. Be reasonable. Just give all the pills to me, and I'll burn them all. You can go back home quietly. Nobody will bother you. Don't you have any sense of shame?”

Mr. Judy grated her teeth. “Look, buster. In a second, I'm gonna lose my temper and break your fucking arm. I'd sure as hell rather die by the sword than by the coathanger.”

“Sure, resort to repressive thuggish violence,” Charles shrugged. “But I promise you this: you won't thrive by your crimes. We are everywhere!”

“Goddamn you, that's
our
slogan!” Mr. Judy shouted.

Starlitz washed his muesli bowl under a rusty water-faucet, and belched. “Well, that's that. Let's get goin'.” He opened the door of the van.

“We know darned well what you're up to!” Charles cried, as Vanna and Judy fled hastily into the van. “We're going to videotape you, and photograph you, and speak about you in public!” Starlitz fired up the van and pumped the engine. “We're gonna make dossiers about you and put you on our computer mailing lists!” Charles shouted, raising one callused hand in solemn imprecation. “We'll call your Congressman and complain about you! We'll start civil suits and take out injunctions!”

Starlitz drove away.

“We'll call you at your home!” Charles bellowed, hands cupped at his lips. “And call your offices! All day and all night, hundreds of us! With automatic dialers! For years and years!” His voice faded in a final shout.
“We'll call your parents!”

“Mother of God,” Mr. Judy said, shaken, buckling herself into the passenger seat. “That was
horrible!
What are we going to do about that guy?”

“No problem,” Starlitz said, setting the scanner for cellular-phone frequencies. “I mean, my parents died in a tornado in a Florida trailer park.” He shrugged. “And besides, I never show up on videotape.”

Mr. Judy frowned suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

“It's just this, uhm, thing that happens,” Starlitz said, shrugging. “I mean videos just never work when they're pointed at me. Either the battery's dead, or the tape jams, or the player blows a chip and just starts blinking twelve-o'clock, or the tape splits so there's nothing but scratches and blur…I just don't show up on videotape. Ever.”

Mr. Judy took a deep breath. “Leggy, that's got to be just about the wildest, stupidest—”

“Hush!” Starlitz said. Charles' voice was emerging from the scanner.

“I told you they wouldn't hurt me,”
he said.

“Well, we're not gonna follow them,”
said a woman's voice—his wife Monica, presumably.
“It's too dangerous. I'm sure they have guns in that van.”
She lowered her voice.
“Charlie, were they lesbians?”

“Well, I dunno about the guy they had with them,”
Charles replied,
“but yeah, those girls were sexual deviants all right. It's just like Salvation told us. Really makes your blood run cold!”
He paused.
“Is the car fax still working? Better dial him a report right away!”

“Typical,” Mr. Judy said. “We ought to go back there and slash his tires!”

“Let's just get out of here,” Vanna sighed.

“I don't have to take any gay-bashing lip out of that Norman Rockwell hayseed.”

“If you beat him up, they'll know we're listening to the cellular band,” Vanna pointed out wisely.

“Well, your pal Charlie was right about one thing,” Starlitz said cheerfully. “This whole scam of yours is totally fucked now! Time to lose the van and pick up some action with the Polynesians.”

“We're going to Salt Lake City, Leggy.” Mr. Judy's face was set stonily. “We'll get there if we have to drive all day and all night. We'll make the delivery, dammit. Now it's a matter of political principle.”

They met their first roadblock in Gooding County, Idaho. A dozen placard-waving militants burst from the back of two pickups and threw a cardboard box of caltrops across Highway 84. Starlitz, suspecting land mines or blasting-caps, slowed drastically.

The sides of the van were hammered with blood-balloons, and glass Christmas-tree ornaments filled with skunk-stinking butyl mercaptan and rotten-egg hydrogen sulfide. An especially brave militant with a set of grappling hooks was yanked from his feet and road-burned for ten yards.

The trucks did not pursue them. Starlitz stopped at a carwash in Shoshone Falls. After the stomach-turning stink-liquids had been rinsed off with high-pressure soap, he yanked seven caltrops from the van's tires. The caltrops were homemade devices—golf-balls, with half-a-dozen six-inch nails driven through them, the whole thing cunningly spray-painted black to match highway tarmac.

“Good thing I bought these solid-rubber tires and ditched those fancy-ass Michelins,” Starlitz said with satisfaction.

“Yeah,” Vanna said. Mr. Judy said nothing. She'd given Starlitz a hard time about the tires earlier.

“Shoulda saved money on that fancy fiber-optics kit, and gone for the Plexiglas windows, instead,” Starlitz opined. “The bulletproof option. Just like I said.” Mr. Judy, who'd done the lion's share of the scrubbing, went to the ladies' and threw up.

They took 93 south of Twin Falls and across the border to Wells, Nevada. The switch to a smaller highway seemed to stymie their pursuers, but only temporarily. At 80 West just east of Oasis they found the desert highway entirely blocked. A church bus full of protestors in death's-head masks had physically blocked the road with their black-cloaked bodies. As the van drew nearer, they began chaining themselves together, somewhat hampered by their placards and scythes.

Starlitz rolled down the driver's-side window, took his hands off the steering-wheel and stuck them both out the window, visibly. Then he hit the accelerator.

The blockaders scattered wildly as the van bore down upon them. The van whacked, bumped, and crunched over chains, scythes, and placards as shrieks of rage and horror dopplered past the open window.

“I think you hit one of them, Leggy,” Vanna gasped.

“Nah,” Starlitz said. “Probably one of those dead-baby dummies.”

“They wouldn't be carrying
real
babies with them, would they?” Vanna said.

“In this heat?” Starlitz said.

The bus pursued them at high speed all the way to Wendover, but it grew dark, and they entered some light traffic. Starlitz turned the van's lights off, and pulled into an access road to the Bonneville Salt Flats. The bus, deceived, roared past them in pursuit of someone else.

They spent the night outside the military chain-link around an Air Force test-range, then drove into Salt Lake City in the morning.

It was Sunday, the Sabbath. Utah's capital was utterly sepulchral. The streets were as blank and deserted as so many bowling lanes.

The van felt pitifully conspicuous as they drove past blank storefronts and shuttered windows. At length they hid the van on the sheltered grounds of a planetarium and stuffed all the contraband into Mr. Judy's backpack.

They then hiked uphill to the Utah State Capitol. The great stone edifice was open to the public. There was not a soul inside it. No police, no tourists—no one at all. The only company the three of them had were the Ikegami charged-couple-device security minicams, which were bolted well above the line-of-sight on eight-inch swivel pedestals.

“We're early,” Mr. Judy said. “Our contact hasn't shown yet.” She shrugged. “Might as well have a good look at the place.”

“I like this building,” Starlitz announced, gazing around raptly. “This contact of yours must be okay. Setting up a dope-deal here in Boy Scout Central was a way gutsy move.” He closely examined a Howard Chandler Christy reproduction of the Signing of the US Constitution. The gilt-framed tableau of the Founding Fathers had been formally presented to the State of Utah by the Walt Disney Corporation.

The capitol's rotunda was a sky-blue dome with a massive dangling chandelier. It featured funky-looking '30s frescos with the unmistakable look of state-supported social-realism. “Advent of Irrigation by Pioneers.” “Driving the Golden Spike.” “General Connor Inaugurates Mining.”

“Listen to this,” Mr. Judy marveled. “It's a statement by the bureaucrat that commissioned this stuff.
This is the greatest opportunity that the artists of this or any other country have ever had to show their metal
. He actually says that—‘mettle'!
It is a call to them to make good and prove that they have something worth while to say
. Yeah, unlike you, you evil little redneck philistine!
It is an opportunity to sell themselves to the country and I know they will answer the challenge.”
Suddenly she flushed.

“Take it easy,” Starlitz muttered.

“‘Sell themselves to the country,'”
Mr. Judy said venomously. “Mother of God…sometimes you forget just how bad it really is in the good ol' USA.”

Farther down the hall they discovered an extremely campy figurine of an astronaut on a black plastic pedestal. The pedestal was made of O-ring material from Utah-produced Morton Thiokol solid-rocket boosters.

Every other nook or cranny seemed to feature a lurking statue of some fat-cat local businessman: a “world-renowned mining engineer”—a “pioneer in the development of supermarkets.”

“Wow, look who built this place!” Mr. Judy said, gazing at a bronze plaque. “It was the Utah state governor who had Joe Hill shot by a firing squad! Man, that sure explains a lot…”

“This place is creepin' me out,” Vanna said, hugging herself. “Let's go outside and wait on the lawn…”

“No, this place is great!” Starlitz objected. “Six Flags Over Jesus was decorated just like this…Let's go down in the basement!”

The basement featured a gigantic hand-embroidered silk tapestry: with the purple slope of Mount Fuji, a couple of wooden sailboats and a big cheesy spray of cherry blossoms. It had been presented to the People of Utah by the Japanese American Citizens League—“For Better Americans in a Greater America”—on July 21, 1940.

“Five months before Pearl Harbor,” Mr. Judy said, aghast.

“Musta been mighty reassuring,” Starlitz said slowly. He wandered off.

Mr. Judy stared at the eldritch relic with mingled pity and horror. “I wonder how many of these poor people ended up in relocation camps.”

Vanna silently wiped her eyes on the tail of her shirt.

Starlitz stopped at the end of the hall and looked around the corner to his right. Suddenly he broke into a run.

They found him with his nose pressed to the glass framework around “The Mormon Meteor”—“designed, built and driven by ‘Ab' Jenkins on the Bonneville Salt Flats.” The 1930s racer, which had topped two hundred miles per hour in its day, sported a 750 hp Curtis Conqueror engine. Streamlined to the point of phallicism, the racer was fire-engine red and twenty-two feet long—except for the huge yellow Flash Gordon fin behind the tiny riveted one-man cockpit.

The two women left Starlitz alone a while, respecting his obsession.

Eventually Mr. Judy came to join him.

“Ab Jenkins,” Starlitz breathed aloud. “‘The only man who has raced an automobile 24 continuous hours without leaving the driver's seat.'”

Mr. Judy laughed. “Big deal, Leggy. You think this stupid boy-toy's impressive?” She waved at a set of glass-fronted exhibits. “That cheap-ass tourist art is ten times as weird. And the souvenir shop's got a sign that says
All shoplifters will be cheerfully beaten to a pulp
!”

“I wonder if it's got any fuel in it,” Starlitz said dreamily. “The Firestones still look good—you suppose the points are clean?”

Mr. Judy's smile faded. “C'mon, Leggy. Snap out of it.”

He turned to her, his eyeballs gone dark as slate. “You don't get it, do you? You can't even see it when it's right in front of you. This is it, Jude. The rest of the crap here is just so much cheesy bullshit, you could see stuff like that in Romania, but this”—he slapped the glass“—this is
America
, goddamn it!” He took a deep breath. “And I want it.”