The Monkey Wrench Gang (33 page)

He shuffled through the sand to the railway, cut the stock fence, pushed aside an embankment of tumbleweeds and stepped to the nearest power-line pole. Like the others, it was guyed to the ground. He looked up at Bonnie. She gave him the go-ahead sign. He started
the chain saw and noisily but quickly cut a deep notch in the base of the pole. He shut off the saw, looked at Bonnie and listened. She gave him the all-clear sign.

Hayduke trotted to the next pole, made the same kind of cut. Finished, he stopped the engine and checked with his lookout. Okay. He notched three more. Only the guy wires kept the poles standing. He was about to start on a sixth pole when he noticed from the corner of his eye that Bonnie—too far away to be heard above the whine of the saw—was making frantic arm signals. At the same moment he felt, even before he heard, the hated and dreaded
whock! whock! whock! whock!
of a helicopter. He stopped the saw and dove with it down the bank of the roadbed into the waist-high mass of tumbleweeds piled in the ditch. Curling and shriveling beneath them, willing himself invisible, he drew his revolver and waited for fiery death.

The helicopter came over the ridge and the sound was suddenly much louder, terrible, insane. The air shuddered as the machine passed overhead by a hundred feet, clattering like a pteranodon. The turbulence pressed Hayduke to the ground. He thought he was dead but the thing flew on. He squinted through the weeds and saw the helicopter receding down the right-of-way, following the convergence of the rails toward the east. The notched poles swayed slightly in its wake but did not fall.

The helicopter was gone. He waited. No sign of Bonnie; she too must have buried herself somehow. He waited until the last imperceptible vibration of the air machine was gone. As his terror drained away its place was filled by the old and futile and unappeasable outrage.

I hate them, George Hayduke said, under the sun of Arizona, I hate them all. The moment he’d heard that bubble-nosed dragon approach one memory before all others flashed on the screen of his mind: by a dusty road in Cambodia, the bodies of a woman and child fused together in a black burning mass of napalm.

He stood up. The helicopter was gone. He waved at Bonnie, now appearing from under her tree. Go back, he signaled. She didn’t seem to understand.

“Go back,” he shouted. “Back to the jeep.” She was shaking her head.

Hayduke gave up on her. He stumbled out of the thicket of tumbleweed, up the roadbed and on to the next power-line pole. He jerked the starter cord of the chain saw; the motor growled. Hayduke set the guide bar against the pole, thumbed the oiler button, squeezed the power trigger. The saw snarled like a cat; the chrome-plated cutting teeth slashed into the tender wood. First a slanting cut at 45 degrees; then a horizontal cut intersecting the first halfway into the heart of the pole. Eight seconds. He shut off the engine, pulled free the saw. A wedge of pinewood tumbled out.

On to the next. And the next. He paused to look and listen. Nothing. Nobody in sight but Bonnie, high on the ridge above the railway, five hundred yards away now, almost out of earshot. Hayduke notched three more poles. Stopped again to look and listen. No sound but that of his own breathing, his trickling sweat, the singing of the blood in his ears. Once again he signaled Bonnie to go. Again she ignored the command. Okay, he thought. Now. Down with it.

He had notched eleven poles. Should be enough. Time to uncouple the guy lines. He hid the saw under the nearest juniper and got out the fencing pliers. Using the pliers like a capstan handle, he unscrewed the turnbuckles which kept each guy anchored to the ground. As he moved down the line he undid each one. On number nine the whole array of notched poles began to lean. With number ten they fell.

They fell inward, upon the tracks, pulled by the weight of the cantilevered power line. An instant before the crash Hayduke saw a blue spark 50,000 volts strong leap the gap from cable to rail. He thought of God. And then the
clang!
of the collision, like eighty-eight grand pianos committing simultaneous suicide. The smell of ozone.

All Power, down and out. He scrambled up the cutbank and through the fence and jogged south over the slickrock among the admiring junipers. Clutched in his right hand was the chain saw, in his left the pliers. He paused now and then under the concealment of the trees to look and listen. Somewhere along the line somebody must
already be in radio contact with the helicopter, giving the word. General alarm.

And where was Bonnie? He looked but could not see her. If she was half as scared as he was she’d be halfway back to the jeep.

Scared, yes, and happy too. Scared but happy, thinks Hay duke, panting like a dog, tongue lolling. He ran on, bolting across exposed places, pausing under trees to rest and gasp for air and listen to the sounds of the listening sky. Proud as pie, he stopped again for breath. A big black bird with a great big mouth began to sing:

He pitched a stone at the big-mouthed bird. It flapped off, yak-king like a clown. The wings flapped heavy on the thin air, going
whock whock whock
, making a heavy, heavy, heavy sound….

Green River, Utah. Susan’s house. The watermelon ranch. An easy day’s
drive from Sheila’s place at Bountiful, which was in turn an easy day’s drive from Kathy’s house near Cedar City. He’d planned it all that way, of course from the beginning. Seldom Seen Smith hearkened to the prophet Brigham: he was polygamous as a rabbit.

Three o’clock in the morning and the bedroom was full of dreams. Oh pearl of great price! Through the open windows floated the smell of ripening watermelons, the sweet odor of cut alfalfla. (Second cutting of the summer.) Also the smells, poignant and irrevocable, of apple trees, horseshit, and wild asparagus along the irrigation ditches. From the embankment only one field away came the sound of whispering willow, the flat
whack!
of a beaver’s tail slapping the river water.

That river. That river, that golden Green, flowing down from the snows of the Wind River Range, through Flaming Gorge and Echo Park, Split Mountain and The Gates of Lodore, down from the hills of Ow-Wi-Yu-Kuts, from the Yampa, Bitter Creek and Sweetwater, down the canyon called Desolation through the Tavaputs Plateau to emerge from the portal of the Book Cliffs—which John Wesley Powell thought “one of the most wonderful facades in the world”—and
there to roll across the Green River Desert into a second world of canyons, where the river gives itself to Labyrinth and Stillwater and the Confluence with the Grand, under the rim of The Maze and into the roaring depths of Cataract….

Smith lay in his bed beside his third wife and dreamed his troublesome dream. They were after him again. His truck had been identified. His rocks had rolled too far. The Search and Rescue Team was howling mad. A warrant for his arrest had been issued in San Juan County. The Bishop of Blanding raged like a strictured bull over half of Utah. Smith fled down endless corridors of sweating concrete. Under the Dam. Trapped again in a recurring nightmare of That Dam.

Down in the dank bowels of Reclamation. Engineers on skateboards glided past, clipboards in hand. Pneumatic panels opened before him, closed behind him, drawing Smith deeper and deeper into the dynamo heart of the Enemy. Magnetic webs pulled him toward the Inner Office. Where the Director waited, waiting for him. Like Doc and Bonnie and George, also locked up somewhere in here, Smith knew he was going to be punished.

The final door opened. Smith was dragged inside. The door slid shut and sealed itself. He stood again before the ultimate eye.
In the presence
.

The Director peered at Smith from the center of an array of metric dials, scintilometers, temblor screens, Visographs and sensor-scopes. Tape reels spun, their circuits humming, before the quiet buzz of electronic thought at work.

The Director was monocular. The red beam of its unlidded Cyclops eye played on the face of Seldom Seen, scanning his brain, his nerves, his soul. Paralyzed by that hypnotic ray, Smith waited helpless as a babe.

The Director spoke. Its voice resembled the whine of an electronic violin, pitched in highest register to C-sharp, that same internal note which drove the deaf Smetana insane.
“Smith,”
the voice began,
“we know why you are here.”

Smith gulped. “Where’s George?” he croaked. “What you done to Bonnie?”

“Never mind that.”
The red beam glanced aside for a moment, shifty-gimbaled in its hooded carapace. The tape reels stopped, reversed, stopped, rolled forward again, recording all. Coded messages flickered in sleek electric flow, transistor-relayed through ten thousand miles of printed circuitry. Beneath the superstructure the dynamo purred on, murmuring the basic message: Power … profit … prestige … pleasure … profit … prestige … pleasure … power …

“Seldom Seen Smith,”
the Director said, its voice now tuned to a human intonation (modeled it would seem on the voice of an aging teenybopper balladeer whose scraggly-bearded unisex face has appeared on the cover of
Rolling Stone
seventeen times since 1964),
“where are your pants?”

Pants? Smith looked down. Good Gawd Almighty!

The scanning beam returned to Smith’s face.
“Come closer, fellow,”
the voice commanded.

Smith hesitated.

“Come closer, Joseph Fielding Smith, known informally as ‘Seldom Seen,’ born Salt Lake City, Utah, Shithead Capital of the Inter-Mountain West, for behold art thou not he who was foretold in 1 Nephi 2:1–4,
The Book of Mormon
, wherein it is written, ‘The Lord commanded him, even in a dream, that he should take his family and depart into the wilderness’? With ample provision, such as organic peanut butter, and with his family known as one Doc Sarvis, one George W. Hayduke, and one Miz B. Abbzug?”

Some tongue from a higher world answered for Smith, in words he knew not: “Datsa me, Boss.”

“Good. But unfortunately for you, fellow, the prophecy cannot be fulfilled. We cannot allow it. We have decreed, Smith, that you shalt become as one of us.”

What?

Four green bulbs winked in the Director’s frontal lobes. The voice changed again, becoming clipped and cryptic, clearly Oxfordian.
“Seize him.”

Smith found himself pinioned instantly by rigid, though invisible, bonds. “Hey—?” He struggled feebly.

“Good. Affix the electrodes. Insert the anode into his penis. Quite so. The cathode goes up the rectum. Half a meter. Yes, all the way. Don’t be squeamish.” The Director issued his orders to invisible assistants, who bustled about Smith’s paralyzed body. “Good. Imprint the flip-flop circuits on his semi-circular canal. Below the ear drum. Right. Five thousand volts should be sufficient. Attach sensor wires by strontium suction cup to his coccyx. Firmly. Plug the high-voltage adapter into the frontal sockets of his receptor node. The head, idiots, the head! Yes—right up the nostrils. Be firm. Push hard. Quite so. Very good. Now close circuit breakers. Quickly. Thank you.”

Horrified, Smith tried to speak, to protest. But his tongue, like his limbs, seemed gripped in an absolute and infantile paralysis. He gaped in terror at the cables now joining his head and body to the computer bank before him.

“Well now, Smith,” the Director said, “—or should we call you (heh heh) Seldom Scanned?—are you ready for your program? What’s that? Now now, buck up. That’s a good lad. You have nothing to fear if you can pass this simple test we have prepared for you. Call the taper, please. Good. Insert the magnetic tape. No tape slot? Then make one. Between the anode and cathode attachments, of course. Right up through the old perineum. Precisely. Never mind the blood, we’ll have George clean that up later. Ready? Insert the tape. All the way. Hold his other foot down. What? Then nail it down! Good. Quite so.”

The Director’s single eye beamed into Smith’s pineal gland.
“Now Smith, your instructions. We want you to expand the simple exponential function
y=e
^x
into an infinite series. Proceed as follows:
Bn:
transfer contents of storage location
n
to working register;
Tn:
transfer contents of working register to location
n; + n:
add contents of location
n
to contents of working register;
xn:
multiply contents of working register by contents of location
n; ÷ n:
divide contents of working register by contents of location
n; V:
make sign of contents of working register positive;
Pn:
transfer address
n
to accumulator if contents of working register are positive;
Rn:
transfer address in location
n
to accumulator;
Z:
stop program. Is that clear, Smith?”

Numb as novocaine, Seldom could not speak.

“Good. Get ready. You have 0.000012 milliseconds in which to perform this basic operation. If you fail we will have no choice but to transplant your vital organs into more adaptable specimens and to recycle your residue through the thermite crucibles. Are you ready? Good lad. Have fun now. Set the timer, please. On your toes, Smith. Count down from five. Here we go. Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Zero! THROW THE GODDAMNED SWITCH!”