THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 4, EPISODE 5

The decommission of the Zone (and T's opportunity to pick up Ralph and Alice for a song, a mediocre arietta, at that!) lay in several broad but related headwaters... (Creep-ing oil, briefcases, transferred from Key Biscayne to San Clemente)... certain audits, silent auctions. The Federation, having consolidated physical hold on a decaying Star Trek gameboard, increasingly resembled General Waste-more-land's forces; all-powerful in protected enclaves, at the sufferance of Romulan Dogs and Dominoes whereout. The remaining Klingony bikers of the Zone split like roaches... Davis Hayes to Lockheed, Van Zuss to spitballs and nervous tenure.

One evening, under the moon of Richard Millhouse Nixon, Almond O'Neill packed Thale and a few belongings (including white robes and silver, lead-lined box) into her jeep. Nobody in Sev City recalled seeing her depart... whether she'd turned east on Highway 50 towards Denver and Salt Lake or west to California. "She removed sensitive government material," Duck scolded; I couldn't help asking if he intended to go over the head of Billows... to AEC, even to Tricky Dicky himself. He only snorted, puffing out his chest. "She has more to fear from Federation justice than any government agency."

"I forget which episode it was the Federation authorized retaliatory violence," I'd replied.

"One of the lost ones," Duck smiled grimly. "Anything not justified in the lost episodes of the Honeymooners is in the lost episodes of Star Trek."

"There are no lost episodes of Star Trek," said Jeff, "not counting that one with the green women." Duck looked as if a speck of dirt had crawled out from beneath his fingernail - I'm working directly with Billow on what's cynically referred to as "decontamination", but Jeff's considered a burnout by this time, a Zone pariah.

"Prove it!" Duck smirked. "Maybe you'd better send him home to Daddy," he tells me, "they can dowse for flying saucers together."

It's time for goodbyes, some poignant, others bitter, still others of only temporary nature. Morgan Jones was a late hire who jumped early to the phone company with Zone electromagnetic pulse data; aware of Morgan's proprietary research, I'd hire him back into Lentex as soon as T. was dead. The Sev City steakhouse sees more retirement lunch business... "no more polygraph examiners," says Morgan, "... no more zinc! (Duck swore by the metal as an antidote to radiation suppers and passed the little capsules round like mints.) "No more dust, Goodbye old Paint!"

Richard Munk's seldom seen... I have it on authority he's on the horn, mostly, blackening the characters of rats deserting a sinking OPIE. Who knows what hand he had in Tony being laughed out of a Bell interview for suggesting phaser and transporter research; the Kays finally surface in Redding, California, where Tony becomes a night motel manager, Nan waiting tables in a steakhouse off the Interstate. Boning up on their Japanese so they can proceed to Tokyo and, meanwhile, pestering local Yurok to be allowed to participate in tribal dances.

Duck, for all his boastful loyalty, applied for a grant from the FAA; after he's become Doctor Duck, he and Lily go to Oklahoma where, in the heart of Merle Haggard's hippie-stomping Amurka, some eleven thousand pounds of weapons-grade nukestuff, mostly plutonium and enriched uranium, goes missing over a four year interval. They divorce... Lily ostensibly going back to family in Pennsylvania, Duck into retirement on Puget Sound to manage his investments and "consult". Manny's investigators report he's never home... huge place, full of punkboys Duck's hired as "security", used to clock regularly at Anchorage airport for a few years, then disappeared wholly. Probably down Harry's Stone's rabbit-hole temple, where Max feeds stray planets to black holes.

Angita! What a repulsive, silly lodge!

Now... the year before departure, however, Duck has put on his Importancy Suit, a fair replica of Captain Kirk's tunic with that little pin I've noticed in New York here, almost a decade later. Kids spraypaint it on corporation walls and construction sites. Melanie says it has nothing to do with Star Trek, it's a symbol for Anarchy. Anyway, Jeff hasn't been Romulated yet, his drug habit's no worse than most Zoners, he even goes along with Duck's trip of handing out identities, like tossing popcorn to the hated pigeon-leaguers. Asa, the only silver licitly handling weapons grade caca day in and day out, affects a ludicrous Scots brogue... "So, Tony," Jeff asks the newest and least secure member of the tribe, "say this were Enterprise, up in space there... no dust except for space dust... who would you be?"

"Gee, I... I..." Duck hasn't brought him wholly into the circle yet so he hesitates, not knowing if he'd step over someone's jealously protected shadow. "I haven't thought... maybe Chekhov? What does he do, anyway? Sulu?"

"Uh huh?" Duck points. "Goofballs here, he's a tribble."

"Not a prayer, man. Put me in that movie, I'd be the fat dude who gets all the money and all of the chicks! Mudd? Yeah, Doctor Mudd!"

"You didn't say who you'd be," Tony turns to Jeff.

"Haven't decided. Spock or McCoy, of course, each of them have their advantages. Maybe a composite..."

"You can't be both!" Asa objected. "They're enemies... well, rivals at least, it would be illogical. You have to choose... one or the other."

"Well that's my problem, isn't it? Why would I even have to be any one of them... look, even the aliens are humanoid - the Vulcans, Klingons, the green people... all have two eyes and arms, a head...."

"That is because the set of human characteristics is that regarded, evolutionally, as the most optimal." Confrontation has Asa dropping the phony accent in a flash.

"But in the universe? Surely there are systems in which the most optimal form might be like a whale, even a cloud..."

"Knock it off, troopers," Duck commands. A car commercial fades and the episode comes on where some Enterprise crew grow crazy with glowing eyes, or was that the same where perspiration affects Vulcans like alcohol and Scotty says, as he must in every third or fourth episode... "Captain, we caenna go agin' the laws o'physics!" Doctrinal disputes were rare among silvers, as among Dogsters... except for references to lost episodes... somebody's always showing Star Trek or the Honeymooners on some station, even at obscure hours of night, from satellites which call down God's loop to settle questions for these fanatics of veracity or dissolution.

When the bad crewman tells Kirk: "I have been contemplating the death of an old friend," Lily breaks out some mighty fine cognac and a news promo promises updates on the draft. "Think Oscar won the lottery?" Duck asks, swirling brandy in his special Captain's snifter... sniffing, not drinking. He crashes the conversation like a Klingon photon torpedo... nobody wants to throw the dice with Uncle Sam.

When I was gambling last night, Manny whispered "the President is here." Zamora himself was preceded by an advance guard, and little comments rippled through the birthday throng at Delfinas, like wind through dry grass. Next came soldiers, plenty of those, now, the little asides getting more caustic... "look at that ring", "drunk since Carneval" and other flunkies. Finally the fine, patrician head of Alfonso Zamora, Junior inclines, he reaches out to embrace me.

"I understand surprise was not to be. My regrets. You, of course, know Fidelia, my fiancee," says the President of Costazul.

"That's a pretty fair rock," I reply, rubbing the emerald on her finger. "So when's the blessed day to be... September, I hear?"

"On the seventeenth," Zamora declared proudly. "The day after La Independencia. I insist that you be in attendance. All of you!" and his voice began rising. "Everyone is invited!" (He hasn't noticed the presence of Captain Engdahl!)

He's stared into his own sun and blinded himself, but nobody has courage to tell him so. Not I! The world's a veil we spin when hostages parade... masks for Brendan's face, unborn, on the other side of fire. Rare air breeds bosomy delusions.

Jeff, just before Billows let him go, left slime-trails all over the Zone. He'd cut back on his speed intake, but it's because his main man Clavo's importing coke from Vegas... "the lady" Jeff calls it reverently... it's eaten our savings down to mothholes and tatters. Duck tells my husband it's not stealing computer time that ignites administrative disgruntlement, it's just the way he doesn't seem to care, even, about appearing cool. "Some guy in a Captain Kirk suit has to tell me this?" Jeff replies.

He's also way uncool talking chip design with Jack Moss up on Confusion Mountain. The gnarliest problem is cost... a single chip may contain as many as a hundred thousand and/or gates that cost a hundred dollars each to develop and test. Prototypes are constructed downwards in layers like Uay hells... five layers, seven, even nine, like ferrite core stacks GE used to use. Always odd, as Tess has said: old Siberiaños bond all their hierarchical cities not only through horizontal space, but through central temples of time. (Maybe their chasms of the sky wash out in Uayax!) The allocation tables reside in the top chip, like priests on altars with their flint; specific functions radiating downward, field and focus exchanging place further down, or nearer the base of the pile. With a process so costly, economy of sand's thoroughly compromised - other media are being experimented with... gallium in the Far East, beryllium in Australia.

"So I ask Jesus... he's on that trip again... could they make a dilithium chip and he tells me, Jeff, there isn't such a thing as dilithium. I know, of course, I'm not fucking Duck Schaefer so I say later, then, fuck your chilithium dips, what about plain old lithium? He says Happy Chips? Sure, happy chips! Happy rat chicks. Old Drohm! Flashlight! Sixpacks of ratpacks!"

At Franklin Institute of Technology, Dr. Drohm described a demonstration in the early 60s, where a couple of scientists at GE hooked up female rats to platinum electrodes and milked their biopower for three tenths of a volt... about a sixth of the power of a common flashlight cell. Given the population of Jeff's ratpile, I begin to see implications in his going off the grid.

"He told me something else, Jesus did." And Jeff hesitated, as if by my asking him to go on, the responsibility would jump on my back and off his. I do and now it is...

"Back when he was only Jack Moss... way back, eighteen years ago, give or take, they sent him up to this test site in Alaska. Harry Stone used to go there, both Wilson Leonards, also, son and father. Anyway, they were testing bombs and someone made a really foolish move... the tests were way over on the other side of this island but, since it was spring, detonation sets off a whole round of avalanches, and one of them just buries the only elementary school on the island, wiping out everybody between four and twelve... lab kids, Aleuts... everyone! I guess older kids were somewhere else, at another school... safe. Jack watched it go down and goes back after five years or so, finds there are still adults, no teenagers, some kids too young to be in school, eight, nine, ten now, then nothing. They'd stopped having children... superstitious bastards... homicides and alcohol went through the roof, finally the government just bought everybody out. Said Angita was the creepiest place he'd ever been, our Jesus, and he's been down a whole lot of strange holes in his time. Dilithium..."

Nick Hopp had come round to the trailer to watch the Lebanon bombing, in retaliation for Munich, missing Clavo and Billy by ten minutes, and Jeff says, again, "Dilithium!"

"Pardon? says Dr. Hopp.

"I always wondered what it would be like getting off on spoons of dilithium. Mood elevator, probably, a space Quaalude. Mother's little helper?

Duck likes to rag on Harry Stone's reputation, but isn't, himself, above using scripture, especially Matthew Six, to justify his passion for space colonies... "there's no rust in orbit, no moths, no dust"... he professes, as evidence of "objectivity", his pointing out occasional Star Trek uncertainties and ambiguities such as cold start-up, mixing matter with antimatter. "It's by no means flawless... ever notice how they so often run out of dilithium at the most inconvenient moment? And there's no need for engines to be overheating so often, one thinks three centuries would be enough time for adequate coolant control. If I were really Kirk, I'd have Scotty out on the pavement or whatever... an asteroid belt, maybe... faster than Warp Nine."

"Except," Asa interrupts in the annoying brogue, "you'd have one hell of a disposal problem, mon."

"Just shoot the waste into the sun. Not ours, someone else's... an unimportant one, with unimportant planets. Pick a sun, any sun." The draft blip had about six seconds' worth of Nixon footage. "That man has totally decontrolled the system, he's always hated AEC," Duck pointed out. So, now, the internationals and their cemetery gangs get to swap nukes over the table instead of under, where they belong."

"Cuts the hooves out from under the black market," Jeff observed.

"Please," Duck said, "it's a gray entity, at worst! Real crazies won't get through the door... the Arabs and Irish? Seeing as Georgi Paulov - you know Georgi, right, Tony? - is shuttling between Boston and Washington, fast as his little red tucchus can carry him, that leaves only China. Pong follows Ping. We also have the clever fellows with suitcases of cash." I remember this more clearly than much... after the blue room in San Leon, my recovery quickens during Embargo. Darth Vader never had to wait in line for gas.

Scott says the engines are giving all they can, McCoy that he's just a doctor and Goofballs fished for the Schaefers' TV Guide. "What's on next... bummers!" he decided and threw it across the trailer. "Time to rotate our vices." He pulls a dark pipe and baggie of dope from his shirt pocket; Lily shakes her head, looks at Duck who nods in a hey-why-not? nod... Lily turns down the sound on the TV but not the picture, tuning the Vegas station on the radio to Back-Stabbers by the O'Jays.

"Not the afterburner," Asa recoils.

"Yes!" Goofballs pumps his fist. "Yes... the afterburner!" Tony looks a little puzzled, even ashamed, and Goofballs lays the dope on the table, returning the pipe to his pocket. "Forged from the finest U-235 shitpile in Colorado... the afterburner!"

"Call Almond," Duck barked. "And bring snacks!" And when Lily replied that she'd told him already they were out of chips and dips, he flew off the handle and the couch, too! "Stupid cunt!" he paces, drawing his hand back in a fist. "Must I do everything myself? His arm trembled in its Captain Kirk sleeve... he stormed into the kitchen of the middle part of the trailer, leaving us silent and apprehensive... we hear Duck bellowing scripture at the long cool woman in the kitchen. "The lamp of the body is the eye; if, therefore, thine eye be healthy, thy whole body shall be full of light.

"But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If, therefore, the light that is in the be darkness, how great is that darkness!"