S’pense looked up from his watch at the first sound of trucks. His last communication with the Company’s forward scouts had been nearly forty hours ago and nobody back at the Capital wanted to even admit that they recognized his name. The last word he’d received from anybody whose opinion he respected had told S’pense to sit tight and expect all Hell to break loose.
When S’pense asked about plans for a calculated withdrawl, the aide giggled hysterically and informed him that withdrawl was out of the question. The project was on: The clock was ticking, and everything further that happened out in the field would be broadcast live to an audience of seventy-two million subscribers back in the States and around the world.
S’pense began, for the first time in his life, to consider the possibility that the club to which he’d always assured himself he belonged, might actually just have been stringing him along. For the first time since his unmanning in Mittelalter, that time with the Danish pole vaulter, he started sweating.
S’pense considered striking out alone, against the jungle, but then simply fell to staring at his watch. All along the front lines, his fuzz-faced seventeen-year-olds smoked cigarettes like fiends and jumped at every squawk or crack.
The screen door to his Quonset slapped shut crushing to paste no less than three flies all trying to make their way into S’pense’s personal domain. “Major S’pense, Sir,” the civil Welshman who entered said, “Smashing to meet you, I’ve followed your career ever since the Insbrück Olympics. We really have to talk sometime when this is over, but I think we’re twenty-three minutes behind our schedule?”
S’pense mindlessly took the young man’s hand. He couldn’t shake the feeling that 23 minutes was just exactly how long he’d been sweating over his watch. He got up from his chair and started to lead the young colonel across the platform, toward the Main Control room.
“You guys have got us all way out on a line here, Tidbits,” he said. “This dream of an International Supermarket. I just hope this souped-up Muzak of yours turns the trick. We’ve got ten-thousand happy-go-lucky Freedom Fighters spilling out of a jungle where nobody’s ever seen more than three people in a group in their whole lifetime before. They seem to be headed this way.”
“Of course they are,” Tidbits replied. “They are on time. We, on the other hand, are late. And we shall have to fill time with a comic or something. Come on now, do hurry. We’ve got the thing they all came to hear.”
Colonel Tidbits unsealed a zippered pocket beneath his left breast and produced a shining platinum disk. “This,” he announced, “is it. The latest synthesis! Sent to me by my secret contact among the Buena Salidans, Archard Venango. . .”You know, we tested those tapes that you sent us. nowhere, you know? This. This disk, baby. This is the real stuff.” S’pense looked nervously at his watch, and opened the door to the Control room.
“I want you to sit in the command seat,” Tidbits said to him. “I know of no-one in this whole organization that deserves a better view than you. I want you to fully experience this product of the very people you have tried so hard to find a reason to hate.”
S’pense looked at him grinning in his professional smugness. This colonel conducted himself with all the grim determinism of a dentist. He represented a product and the product was himself. And the product was to be like him. A sporty little dresser, with a sharp stick and keen edges. He carried the campaign around in his two hands: A shiny rainbow-colored circle of platinum. S’pense had seen all that back in the Pro-Amateur days. The P.R. approach. Salesmen selling commodities to other salesmen. Sharkskin dealers with no intelligence to speak of, but a two-inch wad of twenties. S’pense had seen his opening and taken the clean way out.
The clean way. So why was he stuck in the middle of a jungle with two-hundred and eighty-six men about to meet a legion of ten-thousand? He watched the colonel try to operate. It was a snide little melodrama with himself the sole audience.
“I think you’ll like this,” Tidbits grinned. He nested the disk into a slot, closed a gate and pushed a button.
S’pense looked out at the twelve-meter screen they’d erected. In front of him, and to the sides—in fact, from almost 312 degrees of arc—a colorful starburst erupted like a sun. Or a nuclear bomb. Or a strobe light flash. And for a second, frozen at the brink of a daily diminishing jungle, flashed the image of ten-thousand screaming Salidans.
S’pense took a final glance at his watch. Just after 8:45 p.m. The show was late coming on; The natives were restless. Whatever the drive or motivation behind this enterprise, the product was now on the market.
S’pense sank back against the cushioned seat. Here in the Control booth, it was easy to feel outside of it all. Out there; two hundred yards away. Might as well be two hundred years. Real Indians were about to meet some real life cowboys and the outcome seemed far too certain to be readily acceptable.
But the cartoon was already over, and before he could speculate further, S’pense was awed by the spectacle of seventy-five foot tall Technicolor letters proclaiming the start of the evening’s feature: PROJECT ROCK’N’ROLL.
Main image: Photo by Rima from Pexels.