I picked up some sand and dropped it. That gave me the vector of the wind. I went windward, down into the bowl of the crater.

The crescent Earth was just coming out of the clouds. From afar, in the growing light, his unnatural work was obscure, but hinted darkly of crime. He was perched on the hinges of his knees, as in devout prayer. His big porcelain head was tucked low in devotion, and his metal paws were clamped together before his boiler-drum chest, pumping up and down in the fervor of his obeisance. But coming closer I saw the heavy black roundshot held in his hands, thumping down upon the Dough-Boy corpse below him, hammering down and crackling the bones - splintering and shattering the rib bones, snapping the spine at the neck, and smashing the skull to pulp. Then he pulled a ten inch bone fragment from the aperture of his benignly smiling lips - clean white but for a few clumps of tough gristle - and threw it in the open swinging iron furnace door. The parted sides of his unbuttoned vest dangled on either side, like stage curtains; and inside, the embers seemed satyrs of fire that pursued and embraced nymphs of bone in this hellish puppet-show, this industrial Bacchanalia.

I was unnerved.

But even as he figured the sums of his Wormy work, he hissed and shrilled to himself through his organ-pipes, lisping softly and chiming metronomically - # % * @ -

The "Where's the Spot" Waltz

"Where's the spot? Where's the spot?"
A young Whig stirred the Congressional pot,
Making legal dickory-dock of Young Hickory:
"Where's the spot where our blood fell quickory?
Like a sheep with a shawl, you're self-contradictory--

"When you say `War is declared
by foreign action,', - for what's a Congress?
We alone make war, is my guess."
When Polk heard this Peace anapestic,
He told `em how Destiny was manifestic:

"War exists by foreign crime
"When the plum is ripe, it's picking time.
"The big fin fish eats the littlest fin
Or so says a friend of mine, name of Darwin."

That able Whig, Lincoln, caught Polk by the hair
and said, "Sir, I think I know your surveyor;
He's a crooked fellow by the name of False.
He's got us dancin' this Where's-the-Spot Waltz!"
The Ayes of Abolition got Nayed by Polk's:

"The Common Man is now crowned King
'Fifty-four Forty or Fight!' we sing
Providence has given us All the Moon
I read it up in that there Manifesto Commune."

"With the bloody light of Glory shinesthe national will
Let's make that brave fort the town of Brownsville."
So... Taylor needed guns; even Lincoln voted Funds.
The folks in the White House sure laughed hearty;
It was the bitter end of the damned Whig Party.

I crept closer, holding the long electric bayonet before me, and now I spied the two tin buckets spilled beside him. It was plainly evident that the automaton had taken them from the surgeon's refuse, for they were piled around him, the neatly sawed off arms and legs and feet and hands of the non-ambulatory casualty. I shuddered to see the same peckings and plucking polka-dotting upon those grey limbs as I'd seen in the grotesquely disinterred corpse of Sergeant Weigart.

"Hold, Monster! What are you doing!" I called.

Prince-President Franklin Stove puffed a bad black cloud from his stovepipe, and his knees creaked as he rose, and turned. His glass eyes glowed grey and milk white with sooty and gritty saltpeter stains, making murky daguerreotypes of what? a hanging? flogging? a branding? His furnace door clanked open and shut, showing and shuttering its lurid lantern, weird with what white shapes blackened there.

<<Rrr-roo! Err...Tick! I am the Moral Surgeon - >> said he through the stiff grinning pipe of his lips. <<I give succor to the dead. I excise sins of the flesh. Er-er-roo! And before I am through - # % * @ - I will force you to pay my Tax, too.>>

I took a step back, and looked away from the ambiguous mesmerisms of his eyes. "All right, Demon Stove!" I called, and I pulled back the hammer of the electric bayonet switch with both thumbs. "I've come to settle the score! You got anything to say?"

The automaton's dandy Beau Bremmer face just grinned and grinned, monotonously benign. <<Score? Tick!...Sss-sss-Tick! - Sss-sss-Tick!...Tick-ick-ick! I count it thus - # % * @ - >> And, his Babbage Calculating Machine ticking up some great sums, he told me the casualties of the last two days' battles, which, in my head, I automatically placed in the 8th & 9th inning of Sarah's scoreboard:

Inning        1-5  6  7  8    9    Score  Errors

Slow-Polks    6    0  0  350  800  1156   4
Pesky Lunars  6    0  0  54   122  182    5

"Dreadful Fiend!" I said, "I'll stop that death's head grin - let's see how 10,000 Volts appeal to you - "

I ran the last few yards and thrust the bayonet, against the preacher's suit, pressing the bayonet against his tin barrel chest. At the same time there was a hot blue spark - He rocked backwards, then forward. A bit of smoke curled from the charred cloth. The annunciator was dark - dead. I dropped that heavy box off my shoulders, and the musket, to wrestle or to run.

<< - # % * @ - You are in error. My metal parts are mixed with wood and porcelain. I make a poor conductor, sir - # % * @ - Your flesh conducts your Error - # % * @ - In fact in the score of this game you will make the 4th Error - # % * @ - What is Error? - # % * @ - Error ergo freedom - >> he said, and reached out. His hard hand clenched its vice on my wrist. So strong were his iron fingers, it was like being shackled!

Bones glowed in the hot-box of his belly, with ugly little coals and floating clumps of ash. Nymphs fled the stump footed satyrs inside that hissing fire - it hissed insidiously persistent as it shrank. The Metal Man ticked twice and pulled my hand. I was helpless! Was he going to thrust it in that fire?

"HELP!"

<< - # % * @ - But I only want to give you a fraternal kiss - >> he said, and lifted my hand to his jaws. There was a click - his jaw fell open a notch.

He lifted up my hand -

"OH, HELP!"

There was a small dark slot there. He pressed my hand against the hole - and bit me - ! It was a darting deep bite -

"MURDER!"

BANG-CLANG! - a rifle shot ripped the black suit. - I heard horses behind me. There was a rush of men and hooves - the Metal Man released me and turned as - POW-CLANG! - the Wallis Gordon's pistol burst open a new button hole as his iron ribs clanged like a bell - Sarah tossed a lasso around the Prince-President's neck and he flew backward - landing heavily. She dragged him a few yards, then leapt off the horse and pounced on him. She held her Colt to his face. He reached for her -

"Watch out - he bites - !" I called, holding my wounded hand. Sarah jumped back. My hand hurt bad, and tingled.

Captain Seawell and Six-Fingers rode up, the latter's rifle smoking. Seawell jumped down with his wooden canteen, and rushed over. He kicked the furnace door open and poured water into it. The Metal Man started to sit up but Sarah stepped on the rope between his neck and her horse - he fell back again. Great steam poured around Captain Seawell - the Ranger tossed the captain his gourd, next. The other riders caught up and the contents of six canteens burst into steam. The Metal Man's boiler pressure dropped slowly. He was weakening. He looked up at his captors with watery-white glass eyes. His ticking stopped, then continued, unsteadily.

Captain Mansfield unpacked a small chest from his saddle. It was full of tools. {He took a hammer and a chisel and set it against the edge of the porcelain mask. Tock! Tock! It wouldn't budge.

His pink painted face seemed so stupid and tawdry! A thinning little trickle of smoke curled up out of his top hat. A last, weak puff of steam emitted from his nostril pipes, as he said, so faintly, <<Wait - # % * @ - But I now have nine lectures - Wait - # % * @ - The ninth is - Wait - # % * @ - Wait - # % * @ - `The Case for, Necessity of, and Practical Methods of Drilling Ourang-Outangs as Obedient Volunteers for the United States Army...' - Wait - # % * @ - Wait - # % * @ - >> He seemed to be ticking faster again. I was surprised to hear his Babbage Calculating Machine brain ticking and whirring more furiously than ever now that his furnace was cooling, his boiler settling, his toy-marble eyes nearly black. He laid there on the broken battlefield, weakly lit by the gibbous good Sphere that so many months ago had let loose a volley of steam-balloons in an invasion of the Moon. A shiver shook me. What could account for it? He whirred and whirred, <<Wait - # % * @ - Er-rr - I have ten lectures - - # % * @ - I have eleven - Er-er-rr-roo! Er-er-rr-roo! - >> frantically, as if he wasn't really dead.

"Peculiar engine," said Captain Mansfield.

"But if he's just an engine," said Six-Fingers, "then he never was alive, so he can't be dead - ?"

"With his boiler system shut down, what powers his calculations? How do I open up this thing - ?" Captain Mansfield looked around the ears for some kind of clasp or hinge.

"I know how to open `er up," Sarah offered.

"By all means, go ahead," said Mansfield, standing up.

She kneeled. "Perfessor, I'm sorry to have to tell ya, your goose is cooked." Holding her Colt by the barrel, she hammered the butt right against the center of the porcelain plate of a face.

The white nose shattered, leaving just a dark hole like a jack o'lantern, and two slender copper tubes bent askew.

Horrified we stared.

Some strange organ wriggled within the hollow of his head!

The thing cried, "Er-err-err-rr-ooo!"

It jerked its squirmy little head out of the hole the blow had made, and quickly snapped it back inside. But in that instant I'd seen its ugly little eyes and snapping mouth.

"Nasty!" said Sarah, straightening up. She yanked her bowie knife from its sheath, and squatted back down by the fallen foe. Carefully, blade at ready, she peeked inside the hole. She peered inside the cavity -

"It's all hollow inside thar - I see two little rooms. Thar ain't no Cabbage Calculating Machine in thar a'tall! I see straw, feathers. Thar are about a baker's dozen leevers that look like spoons. Looks like all kind of wires, pulleys, and little gears up top. Oo - thar's that nasty feller again - "

All of a sudden that ugly eyed little head poked out of the hole. It jerked this way and that, eyeing Sarah curiously, then snapped back in.

Sarah followed it with her eyes - "Hey, I know what that is! - What do you know? - It's pecking on one a'them spoons - it's grabbin' on a tiny lever and pressing on it to get the spoon down - it's pecking on it - thar's some kind of gore on the spoon - when he pecks it, it kind of gets knocked around - he's pecking all kind of levers - "

Indeed, we could here the steady tick, tick, tick.

Sarah looked up at us. "Oh dear, oh dear - thar's a bloody button on the spoon - says U. S.!"

"He is a Cannibal, then!" pondered Captain Mansfield.

"How utterly savage - !" said Captain Seawell, straightening.

"Shh - he's talkin'!" said Sarah, putting her ear close to those copper nostril tubes.

After a moment she lifted her head.

"What did he say?" asked Seawell.

"I don't know. I don't think I heard him right."

"What did it sound like?" asked Mansfield. Sarah's eyebrows frowned. "Sounded like - sounded like he said, <<Not goose...>>"

With her left hand she snapped her fingers in front of the hole. The thing inside looked, then lunged. It nipped her fingers with its quick, sharp beak. It drew blood, but Sarah grabbed around the ugly little head even as it bit. She pulled tight. The neck stretched out a long ways - five inches - almost like a little Lunar nose-trunk. She sawed it hard with her knife.

"ERR! ERR-OOO!" it screamed.

Snick! - The neck snapped in two.

It was a little chicken's head, a bantam rooster. The head sat in her bloody hand, its beak convulsively opening and closing. The tongue pressed in and out, slowly. All the way out it went, then all the way in, over and over, slowly.

The face-plate of the Metal Man knocked open from the inside. Then I saw what I had seen many times back at the farm. The headless body of the bantam flapped wildly. Its shredded neck honked and bleated, "Roo! Erroo!" spraying blood as it flapped its headless wings and rose up crookedly into the air. Blindly it flew, twisting, flapping, and bleeding. Then it fell. It let out a last weak honk and flopped down on the battlefield.

We crowded around the open cavity of the Metal Man's head. It was a mess of blood and feathers. Two little hens lay dead in the back, where a nest had been. There were two chambers. The bantams lived in the larger of the two; beneath it, only an inch high, level with the mouth, was the second. It was empty.

There were the levers that Sarah described. "Did just the random peckings of those birds against the levers direct the motions of the automaton?" asked Captain Mansfield, frightened and angry.

Undisturbed, Sarah reached in and pulled out the two little hens. In the nest, something moved -

A snake slithered up and out of the head, an egg in its mouth.

"Rattler!" cried Sarah, jumping back.

Hiram squinted along his barrel and BANG - the head broke open. The egg rolled free.

"Nice shot, Hiram," laughed Sarah. "I'd be pleased to cook up that nice fresh chicken egg fer you."

I looked at me hand - it wasn't a mere peck - I could now make out the twin red holes of poison fangs - .

"I'm snake bit," I said weakly, and sat down.

"I'll fix y'up," said Sarah. "Just think of the nice chicken soup we'll get tomorrow!"

While Sarah was cutting X's on the holes, and sucking and spitting the blood, Captain Mansfield was poking in the cavity. It smelled filthy inside. He found two more dead rattlers. "Three chickens, their eggs, and three snakes? The nests each have a hole in them, through which the snakes feed on the eggs - The snake could kill the chickens, but looks like they didn't. The eggs kept them from being hungry. That's all it is? little beasts pulling pulley-wires when they feed? The rote animation of little brutes? That's all it is? That's all there is?" He kept saying, "That's all there is?" over and over, until Captain Seawell put his hand on his shoulder. Mansfield stood up and with tears in his eyes, kicked the dead doll.

The men packed up the chickens and the rattlesnake, too. I was so worried and exhausted, and that rattler poison was getting me, because I felt dizzy and sick. Sarah put me on her saddle and rode behind me, holding me on when I had a weak spell. "Only out of charity," she explained. "Git my idear? You read up my note?" she asked, a bit proud.

I just groaned affirmation, too sick to protest.

Captain Seawell hailed Fort Texas to open the gate.

And aggrieved shout went up amongst us when the reply came that by General Taylor's orders, it wasn't called Fort Texas no more.

I kept wondering if that poison in my blood was what Prince- President Franklin Stove had meant when he warned me, <<Your flesh conducts your Error - # % * @ - In fact in the score of this game you will make the 4th Error - # % * @ - What is Error? - # % * @ - Error ergo freedom - >>

Go to the next chapter of Moonifest Destiny
Go to the table of contents for Moonifest Destiny
Go back to the Quanta home page