Speck lay on his stomach in the grass on a hillside, peering down on the gringos through a flawed pair of field glasses. The left eyepiece afforded him a clear, magnified view of the frenzied activity far below. The starred right lens, however, caught shards of strange light from all directions and fed them as discontiguous images into his eye.
With his left eye, Speck could hold the gringo S’pense drilled into his office chair like a pin through a bug while, with his right eye, he could observe, variously, the peeling of paint on the generator hatch plates, the irregularly faceted heads of molybdenum “jolly-bolts” that secured the base fundaments with most of the iron superstructure, or he could watch the antics of a family of peeper monkeys as they learned to mimic the behaviors of organized labor.
The instrument afforded Speck with a view that was at once both horribly distorted, and significantly realistic. Consequently, his was seldom a very comfortable vantage.
He lowered the glasses and rubbed his eyes back into focus. In the clearing down below him, the crews were swarming madly about the massive iron stages they’d built. Neither he nor Shlemmer had quite figured out what was to take place on those stolid platforms. Shlemmer kept referring to Elizabethan tragedy, but Speck had his own ideas involving the arrival of angels, God’s emissaries, on massive, fusion propelled shuttlecraft dispatched from an orbiting intergalactic mothership.
Speck had been on 22 hour-a-day observation of Project Rock’n’Roll for nearly two weeks. Every day he radioed back to Shlemmer that something big seemed imminent. For his part, he hoped it would come soon.
Perhaps it would have made him happy to know that at that very moment, 14:53:17, Major Brian S’pense was synchronizing his watch with the final official countdown for Project Rock’n’Roll. The helicopters had arrived, bringing the Code Green team from the States. Perimony, Helius, and Aberdeen sections were running their final systems checks. S’pense got up to leave the room, but the telephone called him back.
“Blue line,” a voice told him. He recognized it immediately as that of Yosemite Mike, his primary intelligence agent back in Santa Carcinoma. “You got trouble, old boy!”
“I always got trouble when I hear your voice, Amigo. What could it be this time?” S’pense grinned around a five-dollar cigar and propped his feet up on the desk.
“Looks like we got us a shootin’ war, pard,” Mike told him. “Unfriendly peacemakers from over the border in Manopla Province. Colonel Tidbits says to expect gunnin’ ‘fore the cock crows.”
“Whaddaya mean, gunning?” S’pense demanded. “By whom? These people don’t shoot back!”
“The colonel says it’s somebody calls ’emselves The `Officinal Power to the People Romantic Revivalist Brigade’. Says they brought ten thousand people across the Muelos by cover of night. He says they caught Placido down at number three completely out to lunch.”
“Placido.” S’pense recalled the sunburned face of his friend, the healthy rivalry they’d cultivated over who would be first to bring the project up on line. The next words he heard cut him deeply:
“They fastened him to a cable spool with gaffer’s tape and rolled him down a hillside into his own barbed wire.” Yosemite Mike sounded overwrought. S’pense wondered how many days they’d been sitting on this information. Collecting tragic reports and eating amphetamines while some petit-dictator in Intelligence decided whether to tell anyone.
At the same time, he just couldn’t formulate for himself the image of a group of Salidans rising up for any reason. For months he’d strayed far into the jungles in search of some sign that a counterforce was arming itself. For years, acting on orders, he had dutifully shelled the countryside; but everyone had come to see that as merely an exercise in the depletion of ordnance stockpiles. The idea of finding an armed Salidan revolutionary occurred to him as ludicrous.
Through his left eye, Reinhold Speck watched a team of six men sequence and synchronize the flashing of a bank of strobe lights. One of the lights went off and was caught by Speck’s weird right lens. A blinding blue-white light exploded inside Speck’s head and at just the same time, a bone-scraping peal of amplified feedback rang out from twelve hundred 22″ JBL loudspeakers and echoed off across the jungle.
Main Photo: Courtesy of WikiMedia Commons, Wall of Sound by Loozrboy from Toronto, Canada.