OPUS 21 (25 page)

Well, I thought, when and if we reach the state of cannibalism, I shall try to eat a critic. There should be good crackling around fat heads.

And next I thought that even Huxley made too little of the fact that, after our earth was literally Hell for a hundred years, man produced the Renaissance.

I also thought how no one apparently had realized that the Californian cult of Belial was an inversion of the Roman Catholic parades, liturgies, chants and other idolatrous measures. And I thought how the Huxleyan method disclosed, with considerable vim and penetration, that Christian worship--Catholic or Protestant--is all but completely a paean for Satan today. The Godly serve the Devil through hatred, hypocrisy, materialism, conceit and big death wishes. They need only a change of names and symbols to align what they actually do with their pretension. Belial already reigns over the Church--not God.

Someday, after the atomic wars--I thought--a practitioner of the corrupted religion of his time, a science-hater (for what he deemed science had done to man), a legless character with three arms and two navels (owing to the general damage done the genes of all living things), a cannibal (but one who could still read a little), might discover this volume in the silence of a wrecked library and hail Huxley as a great prophet--a man with valuable new ideas for worship and fresh notions about sex relations in public places.

Thus Huxley might contribute (contrary to his intent but in the same fashion as many other prophets) to the majestic rites of human degradation.

No critic, however, could possibly contemplate such a matter as anything but a joke.

I wondered how the great-grandchildren of critics would view it.

Thus wondering, I went to bed.

It was late, of course.

I put out my light and listened to the seismic nocturne of the city.

From the next room came a bold, cajoling giggle.

Then quiet.

The building quivered.

The planet turned.

Exhaustion lowered me into sleep on a jerky rope that did not loosen me for a long time.

12

Contrary to expectation, the end of civilization came about through a series of events connected in no way with war or atomic bombardment. Of these events the earliest, so far as careful inquiry could determine at the time, was initially observed by Malcolm Calk of 2531 North Munley Street, Urbana, Illinois. Mr. Calk had just become engaged to Dorothea Lurp of the same address--the boarding establishment of Sarah L.

Rev, or Reev--and they were celebrating the happy occasion by spending a weekend at the Chicago home of Miss Lurp's parents. The day being warm--it was the 9th of August, in the hot summer of 1953--the young couple determined to repair to the beach.

They were contentedly ensconced at the lakeside when Mr. Calk's eyes wandered from the person of his fiancée, who was in wading, to the clouds overhead. These were of a cumulus nature, for the most part widely spaced, and drifting southward on a wind reported later by the Weather Bureau as of twelve miles per hour at mean cloud altitude.

Calk's mind was, as may readily be imagined, turned toward those fancies which are commonly described as "building castles in the air." He reports, indeed, that the phrase passed through his thoughts as he looked at the vaporous structures overhead.

Within them he observed a certain slight turbulence or agitation to which he at first paid scant heed. Clouds revolve and turn themselves inside out in a manner that bespeaks air currents and their own diaphanous consistency--a manner that sometimes suggests they have a life of their own in a weird fourth dimension of the blue up yonder.

But the young Calk gave the phenomenon only a cursory, occasional glance; his head was already "in the clouds"--another phrase upon which he recalls musing at the time. He was apparently a person of whimsey--a patternmaker employed by the Racine Forge and Tool Company of Urbana.

Presently, however, his focus was drawn with insistence toward the slow-tumbling clouds and, as people will, he gave free play to his imagination, seeing in the changing shapes now a dragon, now a cat's face, and now the chuck of a turret lathe.

These gossamer figures wove themselves, vanished, and eddied into yet different forms until, ultimately he found himself viewing a large letter N. About this he saw nothing remarkable--at first. A letter of the alphabet is probably shaped by the clouds as often as any boar's head or serpent.

The "N," however, took on contour and texture until it seemed a deliberate thing--

resembling, as Calk put it later, "Sky-writing done backwards in a newsreel so that the frayed-out smoke pulled together again to make a real clean-cut N."

At the moment, however (so uncritical was his brain and so unrelated was the celestial phenomenon to his thoughts), he came to a different conclusion. When the N

established itself as a clear and sharply defined capital letter, some two miles in length and many thousands of feet above Lake Michigan, Calk informed himself that it was, actually, the work of a sky-writer. This is a kind of rationalization which any psychologist will recognize. Because what he saw did not quite conform to his past experience, Calk discounted his sensory impression and interpreted an external fact in terms of orderly recollections rather than of observable reality. Donner, Bates, Breesteen, Cavanaugh, Cohen and Wilstein, among other authorities, have noted the similiarity of this process to that by which prejudices are often established.

"Look, honey," Mr. Calk called to his fiancée. "Skywriter."

Miss Lurp looked and nodded in agreement. "Yeah. Bet it's cold up there! Lucky fellow--the pilot."

No one else in the vicinity appeared to be aware of the process overhead. Miss Lurp continued to wade--Mr. Calk to watch her and to cast an occasional glance at the sky. A letter U was slowly formed alongside the perfect N.

Miss Lurp at this point stepped on a clamshell, or possibly a broken bottle, which hurt her foot although it did not break the skin. Exaggerating the injury, she hopped ashore to solicit comfort, which Mr. Calk readily supplied. Thereafter, sitting side by side, they gazed up at the NU, near which yet other clouds were shifting and shaping themselves.

"Why," said Miss Lurp, "that's not sky-writing at all! It's just the clouds coming together accidental-like." To another couple, sitting on the sand nearby, she called,

"Look, people! The clouds are having a spelling bee!"

One upturned countenance, or even two, may not serve to divert a throng from its preoccupations, whether sordid or sublime. But four faces intently elevated will permeate any mass of people and constrain nearly all of the individuals in it to join. This contagion of curiosity now spread over the beach. Soon, persons everywhere--on the sand and the walk behind and in the water--bathers, loafers, nurses with perambulators on the Drive, and policemen who were supposed to patrol it but who were more attentive to the nurses-

-looked up to see, in a vast blue area above, three letters:
NUT

Sedately the word moved toward the city area. People began to speculate about the product thus being advertised. Two or three of the quicker-thinking formed hat-pools for dimes and quarters--best guess to take all. At the same time, a considerable discussion arose over the fact that these letters were not being formed by a plane--a glinting speck at the head of a comet of smoke--but were the result of a composing of clouds which had thitherto appeared to be in the random distribution familiar to all. A vague alarm became observable in the voices and the postures of the beholders although it was suggested by the calm among them that the sky-writer had lost the first part of his message--a PEA, for example, or a GRAPE. At the same time, the discomforting fact remained that no performer, and no aerial equipment of any nature, could be descried.

The growing strain--and strain came easily amongst persons who had lived through eight years of the Atomic Age--rather suddenly diminished. Clouds boiled, rotated and stretched out to make what people began to recognize (in the order of individual percipience) as a pluralizing Sand an exclamation point. The great letters on the sky said:

NUTS!

This, clearly, was a joke. Someone who possessed a slightly malicious sense of humor, some technician with a novel trick, had seen fit to write above Lake Michigan a laconic comment: NUTS! People laughed and went back to their activities--and their deliberate eschewals of all activity.

Other clouds appeared and offered no further entertainment. A few cars on the Lake Shore Drive ground to a stop. Their operators and passengers looked up to see what still intrigued the residual gazers--chuckled--and drove on.

Perhaps only Calk, of all those myriads, had a real premonition of evil. He referred it, not unnaturally, to the fact that this was the occasion of his engagement.

Looking at the long, shiny limbs of Miss Lurp, the nodes on them, at her rather dangly breasts and her somewhat overteased brown hair (that now smelled of a plastic bathing cap into which had been "built" a perfume that did not quite eradicate the cap's original odor of phenol) he could not help wondering if it was auspicious to behold, upon their first venture as affianced persons, a great NUTS! floating overhead. Following the word with his eye, as it drifted toward the metropolis, he also observed, with distaste, that it maintained its continuity better than any sky-writing he had ever seen.

Other citizens, not having witnessed the formation of the word, took it for granted that some prankster had done the deed and, since Chicago is a city where a burp will bring down the house, hugely enjoyed it. The
Sun
had a box about it. The
News
had a cartoon about it--bad municipal government shuddering as the word in the sky threatened. The
Tribune
carried a long editorial attributing the whole affair to communists.

The next day was rainy.

The day after, however, was immaculately clear and from the azure reaches above the lake there floated to and over Chicago a second giant syllable:
CRAP!

The formation, this time, was witnessed by the officers and crew of the
Matthew
T. Handless,
a freighter. Her skipper, acting as spokesman for the group, seemed less awed by the reporters and news cameramen than by his memory. "It was an absolutely cloudless morning out there," he said. "Dry weather. Barometer at 30.46. Nothing in sight. Then clouds just seemed to appear of their own accord in the sky. Not a wave below-flat calm. They worked themselves into this here, now, word--and they started drifting for Chicago on a high-altitude breeze. I watched pretty much the whole thing with my glasses--and they're good glasses. I just had 'em checked at Davis's Optometrical, and there was no plane of any sort."

The news spread across an amused United States.

WRITING IN SKY PANICS CHI

"Disgruntled Chicagoan" was the universal solution. Disgruntled Chicagoan with a new process for sky-writing. Somebody sore about the housing shortage, the garbage disposal, the taxes, the materials scarcities, the innumerable blanks to be made out for local, state and federal governments, the new bonus, the rising menace of prohibition, the thousand things at which people were indignant in 1953. "Chicago per se," the New York
Times
rather uncouthly suggested.

It was not until the 14th of August, however-a day much like the 9th--that the matter took on different proportions. For, by then, the marshaled resources of science were as ready as set rattraps. When the clouds began to churn significantly, no less than one hundred and eighteen planes, not counting the planes of photographers and mere sightseers, climbed to the region from fields all around the Windy City, which, of course, as on the ninth, was enjoying a mild zephyr.

A huge S took shape. Traffic stopped. Customers and employees poured out of stores like lava, offices regurgitated their hordes, housewives left bacon burning and babies sodden; all were witness to an impromptu air circus. It had three phases, or acts.

First, police planes and military aircraft drove off unofficial spectators--light planes and helicopters belonging to the curious and two or three commercial pilots who carried their fares off the flyways for a closer look. Second, science went to work.

The letter S was photographed. Samples of it were taken. The air currents in and around it were measured by instruments operated through ports in airplanes readied just for the task. Various tagged atoms were then dusted into the letter and their courses were pursued by scientists in helicopters, armed with counters. From the ground, spectroscopes were trained upon the initial and diffraction gratings laid bare its spectrum. Everything was done that had been planned at the University of Chicago--and elsewhere in the city--

and by a variety of physical scientists who phoned and wrote in their suggestions.

Meantime, an H formed next to the S and subdued titter filled the watching streets.

The third plane followed when an ineluctable I was added to the throbbing sky-scene. As if this was carrying cosmic anagrams too far, military aircraft undertook to break up the phenomenon--also according to plan.

Four-letter words, so called, are one of the great American taboos. In this connotation, nuts and crap are not considered precisely forbidden, though each has a special reference which is impermissible. All people know all the four-letter words, of course, since they are scribbled everywhere and commonly used by lower caste persons when under duress. And substitute words are employed, by the most devout, for every profane or obscene term. So the taboo is of a magical nature (speaking anthropologically). Primitive people, such as the Americans, generally employ medicine men, witch doctors, or priests against magical threats. In this case, however, physical rather than spiritual results were expected from the efforts of the airmen.

First, formations of jets flew through the cloud-spelling--along its own paths and then in series of crisscrosses.

Nothing much happened; the streaming jets blew wisps and curls of mist out of alignment but it swiftly filled itself in again. Heavy bombers followed, but the washes of their props were equally ineffectual. During the bomber maneuvers, furthermore, one Paul Kully, a student flier, eluded the police and ventured close to the now-completed T.