‘Nobody has black, sir. We couldn’t guarantee a new Instrument in black. What is the colour-scheme of your room?’
In fact, it’s pale-green. But I knew the consequences of my admitting this. So I joked. I thought.
‘It’s black,’ I said. ‘Black wallpaper, black ceiling, black fitted carpet. Black furniture.’ I waited for her laugh.
‘We-e-ell,’ she said, ‘Why not have a white Instrument to set it off?’
‘All right,’ I said running my tongue over my lips. ‘All right, white.’
‘Wish I could persuade you to have a coloured Instrument. Everyone else does, you know. They’re so much more individual.’
‘Yes. Well, that’s all, I suppose?’
‘But we haven’t decided on the chime yet, have we?’
‘The what?’
‘The chime. You can have a conventional ring if you choose, but for the Discerning we are now able to offer a Gentle, Cheerful Chime Adjustable To Suit Your Activities Or Your Mood.’
‘But how do I know what mood I’ll be in when it chimes?’
‘But on some days, don’t you just long for a Gentle Chime?’
I closed my eyes. For three weeks I have carried on a running fight with my landlord over my request to change my door-chime for a buzzer. And two weeks ago I bought, or, rather, was sold, a Discount House Bargain which keeps perfect time all day, and, having been set for nine a.m., awakes me up at 4.17 by chiming crazily and hurling scalding coffee over the walls and carpet.
‘No, dear,’ I said wearily, ‘I’m something of a strident buzz man myself’.
‘As you choose, sir.’ I could hear her hesitate. I knew she was cracking. Finally she murmured: ‘The Princess Bedside lights up at night.’
‘Quite possibly,’ I said, and replaced the receiver.
After I left the building, I stopped to buy the copy of Life from which I quoted at the beginning of this story. And suddenly I saw her, and her sad sorority, in their last hours, in their windowless concrete pillar above the rubble of New York. Three thousand telephonists, connected only by a web of lavender cable, frantically dialling and re-dialling, while the nightlights flash, and the bells chime gently, over a dead world.
… that Fell on the House that Jack Built
The bombing of North Vietnam has had little or no effect on the flow of men and materials from north to south.
US Secretary of Defence McNamara
Five miles south of the DMZ, Major-General Sam Kowalski, USAF, sopped up the last of his egg with the last of his ham, sluiced it down with the last of his coffee, and belched gently. It was good coffee. Not, he hastened to remind himself (nostalgia being the better part of valour) as good as the coffee in Topeka, Kansas, which was the best coffee in the world. But good. He watched the morning sun dissolve the white mists to the north, longingly: better flying weather than this, you couldn’t expect.
Except there was nothing to fly against.
It had been that way for a week now. Daily, Kowalski’s reconnaissance planes went out, daily they returned, with nothing to report. The photographs showed hills and streams, trees and cloud shadows on the grass. Nothing a man could bomb. Not even a goat. A goat would have been something, thought Kowalski; especially a moving goat. Now there was a challenge! Out of the amethyst sky, Kowalski’s spotless Skyhawks would swoop, hedge-high over the dark grass, trim as white playing-cards flicked across the green baize tables of home, and BLAT! No more goat. One dead Cong goat.
Kowalski sighed, stood up, tugged his gleaming belt into the soft movement of his breakfast, and notched it. At his right hip hung a Smith & Wesson .45 Magnum, not Army Issue, but Kowalski’s own side-arm. His mother’s Christmas present. She had gone into Duckett’s Hardware in Topeka and said did they have anything for her boy who was a Major-General in Vietnam, and the salesman had said nothing was too good for a guy like that and sold her the hand-gun for two hundred dollars. He threw in a hand-tooled cutaway holster, because that was the least he could do, he said; he would have been out there himself, he said, only he had this trick knee, had it since he was a kid, gave him hell.
On his left side, Kowalski wore a Bowie knife. It was the sort of thing the men appreciated, he knew. It gave him personality, it gave him colour, it placed him in a direct line of descent from Sam Houston and John Mosby and George Custer and Blackjack Pershing. He wanted the men to know that if the Cong ever attempted to overrun the airstrip, he, Kowalski, would be out on the perimeter, meeting them hand-to-hand. ‘Remember the Alamo!’ he would cry. ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes!’
He walked out into the bright sun to where his Skyhawks were drawn up, combat-ready, gleaming-white. Bullpup AS missiles hung beneath their wings, slim, deadly, and Zuni launchers fat with 5-in. rockets, and AIM-9 Sidewinders, and plump napalm tanks like great grey footballs. Kowalski watched them through his smoked glasses, trembling with anticipation, feeling himself part of their functional mystery. Kowalski prayed for opportunity.
He was still there when the morning reconnaissance planes touched down.
‘Nothing,’ said the pilot in the de-briefing room.
‘Nothing?’
‘Looks like it, General.’
Kowalski flicked again through the blown-up photographs, still moist from the fixing-bath. He stopped suddenly, peered close, cursed the light.
‘What’s that?’
The pilot squinted.
‘Some guy cutting wheat, I guess.’
Kowalski straightened up, triumphantly, looked at his assembled staff with bright eyes.
‘Cong wheat!’ he said. ‘For Cong bread.’
A colonel shrugged.
‘It’s one peasant, General,’ he said.
‘Correction, Colonel! One Cong peasant.’
‘North Vietnamese.’
‘Cong, North Viet, what’s the difference?’ shouted Kowalski. ‘He’s cutting strategic wheat, right? To make strategic bread, right? To feed to Cong, so they got the strength to pull the triggers, right?’
Twenty-minutes later, three Skyhawks roared off north. Sam Kowalski watched their black trails dissolve, willing them on, feeling in his muscles the faint recoil of cannon, seeing the shells stitch dark patterns in the earth.
Two planes came back.
‘Who
