Let the Fire Fall

I’m in the one place on earth that I think is truly safe. My office in the Cold Sleep Institute. This material is accumulating at a fantastic rate. One day an attendant will mistakenly open the door marked 09-TRI-274-A. and he will gasp with amazement at finding the box full of papers, scrapbooks, diaries, clippings. I’m putting everything on ice until some day….

I am so restless, and tired, and apprehensive. What is Obie planning? There is on ominous smell in the air that I have to attribute to his insanity. You smell it when you see a group of long hairs together, you feel it when a group of short hairs gather. I went to study Obie lost week, again. He was playing at the Garden again, to a full house, like always.

He is so goddamned clever. Not intelligent, but slick. He does by instinct what we in the business have to concede was exactly right every time. He gets immense crowds, uses lights so dramatically that it makes a good director want to cry. Then those damnable topers that give strobe effects. Do they emit a vapor that is a hypnotic? Do they? DO THEY? Why doesn’t someone find out and publish results? He builds tension on tension as if he were stacking blocks; he leads the congregation higher and higher into fear and wild expectations, and then knocks away their props and lets them flounder, and then offers a hand. They can’t resist it. They need a. hand by then. It’s madness but it is so goddamned effective! Not only does he get the sheep, he holds them, and they get more. Civilization hod laid down such a thin veneer over that desire to be allowed to hate freely, effectively, and Obie Cox has peeled the veneer away. May he drop dead of suffocation suffered from slipping and sinking in his own mountains of word-excreta!

I am afraid.

There I said it. What has happened this winter is enough to make anyone afraid. That bastard has started a civil war. Dress rehearsal for civil war. Let the government call it demonstrations, and the papers call it riots, but what it is is the prelude to civil war.

Just last week he stood in that goddamn light and glowed. He said: 1, He is in touch telepathically with the Star Child. Lie!; 2. The Star Child is responsible for the patents he has taken out. Lie! Johnny?; 3. The Star Child is a convert to the Church and wants to tell through it about the plot of his people directed against Earth! JOHNNY? My Johnny? I could cry and gnash teeth.

Why don’t they let Johnny refute him?

And that idiot book! Armageddon Now. Illiterate. Drivel. Childish. Nonsense: A school boy’s dream of getting even. The philosophy of a nine-year-old. Insurrection of a street gong. I’ll put the book on ice also and someone someday will read it and think what a marvelous sense of humor Americans had back in their dark ages after all.

So why do the idiot people respond to him?

That’s why I am afraid. They are fighting everywhere right now. Long hairs who believe in Obie Cox, the pretty little golden boy!, versus the short hairs. Toke a scissors to them and then what would happen? Ah, the sweet smells of civilization: burning cities, riot gases, stench bombs….

I must put down that scene from 3D, as well as I can remember it:

A rally, speaker on a platform, dressed in gray, tapers everywhere.

“Do you believe in God?”

“I believe!” From a thousand throats, from fifty thousand, from hundreds of thousands. They hold tapers. A choir sings hymns of praise to Obie Cox. They scream: “I believe! I believe! I believe!”

“The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness therein. I shall deliver My Children from the stranger! I shall deliver the believers from the stranger who would smite them down. Do you believe?”

“I believe! I believe! I believe!”

But you can see how it goes. For hours the rallies continue and when they end the crowds are turned into mobs with madness in their eyes, burned by an unquenchable fire to save Earth from the fearsome strangers, wrench it from the hands of the atheists, and the agnostics, and the fainthearted who profess belief and do not act on it.

Obie Cox, please drop dead. Please!

And the president. That fatheaded slob of a president. We never had it so good. The future belongs to us now. Progress has created wealth beyond the wildest dreams. You fool! They are burning down your country, and your progress, and your material wealth. There is no food in Detroit, no food in Denver…. But he’s afraid he’ll go in the history books as the president who started a religious war, and so he does nothing.

Tomorrow perhaps I can get home again. I wonder if I have an apartment left. Getting so used to the floor here that I’ll miss it.