The high twittering hiss had been slowed but it was still sharp; the words chopped through the impacted air like an ax through ice.
"Down with dilettantes who mouth dopey slogans and muddy the flow of change! May the lot of you be slit butthole to bellybutton by the diamond edge of ACHALA Lord of Hot Wisdom, whose face is bloody fangs, who wears a garland of severed heads, who turns Rage to Accomplishment, who is clad in gunpowder and glaciers and lava, who saves honest tormented spirits from filth-eating fascist pig ghosts! In His name I curse you: NAMAH SAMANTHA VAJRANAM CHANGA!"
It sounded like some militant soprano Gary Snyder tongue-lashing a strip miners' meeting. I joined the others in the hall to see what it was that could sound so pissed-off and poetic all at once.
"MAHROSHANA SHATA YA HUM TRAKA HAM MAM!"
It was a girl, still years and inches short of legal age or full growth, bony and bone-colored, skin, hair, eyes, clothes, and all. There was a checkerboard pattern up her front from the crash with the Cyclone fence, but no cuts, no purple bruises. The only color in the whole composition was a green swatch down the side of her close-cropped head, probably from the scuffle on the lawn. She fingered the air before her a moment, like a cave lizard, then lunged.
"Give me my fucking stick you faggot!"
"No you don't, Lissy." The biggest-butted aide held it high out of her reach. "This could be a weapon in hostile hands.'"
I saw that the spear had originally been the kind of lightweight staff used by the Vision Impaired. The white paint was all but gone from the battered aluminum, and it had been thonged from tip to handle with feathers and beads, like an Indian spear. Just in front of the handle was lashed the staffs main mojo - a rubber squeeze-toy head of Donald Duck, his angry open bill forward and his rubber sailor cap within thumb's reach. This was how she had been able to swing the thing and quack it at the same time.
"Give it give it give it!" she screeched.
"I won't won't won't!" the aide mocked, parading ahead like a fat-assed drum major with a baton. The girl took squinting aim at the plump target and kicked; she missed as wide as she had missed the gate. She would have fallen if the matron hadn't been gripping her arms.
"What about my glasses then? Am I going to deathray somebody with my fucking glasses? I'm fucking legally blind, you stupid shits! If I don't get my glasses immediately every turd of you is gonna fry! My whole fucking family are lawyers."
This threat hit home harder than all the other curses together. The parade stopped cold to talk it over. The aide who had gone in search of higher authorities came panting back with the news that the ward seemed empty of doctor and nurse alike. After a whispered debate they decided to relinquish the specs. The state trooper removed them from a manila envelope and handed them to her. The matrons loosened their grip so she could put them on. The lenses were like shot glasses. As soon as they were settled on her nose she swung around snarling. Out of that whole hallful of gaping specters she focused on me.
"What are you gawping at, Baldy? You never seen somebody on a bum trip before?"
I wanted to tell her as a matter of fact I had - been on some myself - but the ward door clashed open again and in bustled Joe, the nurse, and Dr. Mortimer. The nurse was carrying a two-way radio. She saw the congestion in her halls and waded right in without breaking stride, swishing it clear with the antenna. She stopped in front of the girl.
"Back so soon, Miss Urchardt? You must have missed us."
"I missed the elegant facilities, Miss Beal," the girl declared. "Wall-to-wall walls. Bathtubs you could get drowned in." A lot of the sharp sting had gone out of her tongue, though.
"Then let's not hesitate to enjoy one. Dr. Mortimer? Would you phone Miss Urchardt's father while I admit her? The rest of you, go about your business."
At his office Dr. Mortimer passed the task right on to his secretary and hurried Joe and me toward the ramp door. We could hear the phone start ringing before he got it closed. He leaned back in.
"That's probably the senator now, Joannie," he called. "If he wishes to speak to his daughter, tell him she's in the Admissions Bath. If he wishes to speak to me, tell him he'll have to call Orlando, care of the Disney World Hotel. Ask for Goofy."
Then locked the door behind us. He giggled all the echoing lope down the ramp. "Ask for Goofy, Senator; ask for Goofy."
With the help of a ticket agent, a later longer flight finally got us through the night to the sticky Florida sunshine. The rent-a-car cost us double, because of the fuel shortage, we were told, but the room for three at Disney's monstrous pyramid cost us only about half the regular rate, and for the same reason. The gum-chewing peach behind the desk told us we were lucky, that triples was took months in advance, usually.
I asked if a Dr. Klaus Woofner had checked in yet. She glanced at her book and told me not yet. I left my name and a message for him to call our room as soon as he arrived. "Or leave word if we're out," Mortimer added, herding us upstairs to stow our bags. "Time's a-wasting, boys. I intend to see it all."
On the monorail to the park Dr. Mortimer divided the package of free ticket books that had been provided us by the movie producers, more thrilled by the minute. He really did intend to see everything, we found out. He ran Joe and me ragged for hours. I finally balked at Small World.
"I want to phone the hotel, see if anybody's heard anything about Woofner."
"And I want," Joe added, "to buy one of those beadwork botas." We had seen a bunch of foreign sailors drinking out of wineskins on the Mississippi Riverboat Ride, and Joe had been covetous ever since.
"I suspect they're not available here, Joe," the doctor suspected. "I hate to get separated -"
"Joe can ask around while I phone. We'll check for you every half hour - at, say the Sky Ride ticket booth?"
"I guess that will be all right," the doctor singsonged, right in time with "It's a small world af-ter all," and hurried away toward the music.
Joe asked around and I phoned. Nobody had heard anything about Woofner or wineskins, either one. On the Sky Ride we were able to enjoy Joe's samples in the privacy of our plastic funicular. We alighted to find that there are ticket booths at each end of the ride. When the doctor wasn't at one end there was nothing to do but climb back aboard and highride back to the other. We spent a good part of our afternoon this way, without another glimpse of Dr. Mortimer. Once, though, Joe thought he might have seen Dr. Woofner.
"The guy with the nurse?" Joe pointed a tiny Tanqueray bottle at the funicular that had just passed us. "Could that be our hero? He appears old and bald enough."
I craned around to look. An old man and a blond nurse were seated on each side of a folded wheelchair. He wore dark glasses and a too-big Panama hat. For a second something about him did remind me of Woofner, some severe slant to the shoulders, some uncompromising hunch that made me wonder if I wanted to meet up with the ornery old gadfly as much as I thought I did, then a breeze flipped the hat off. The man was old and bald all right, nary a hair from his crown to his chinless neck, but he wasn't much bigger than a child. I laughed.
"Not unless he's turned into a Mongoloid midget," I said. "These dwarf drinks must be affecting your vision, Joe."
When we docked I phoned the hotel nevertheless. No doctor by that name had checked in. There was a message from one named Mortimer, though. He had returned, reserves exhausted - would see us before the evening's program.
The Sky Rides had depleted Joe's reserves, too, so we spent the rest of the afternoon more or less on the ground. It was exactly like Disneyland in Anaheim except for one striking addition: the Happy Hippos. This was a temporary exhibit set up in Adventureland, near the Congo boat dock. A low fence had been erected outside a tent, and a pair of full-grown hippos lounged in a makeshift puddle in the enclosure.
These brutes were nearly twice as big as those mechanical robotamuses on Disney's Wild Jungle River Ride, awesome tons of meat and muscle, fresh from the real wild. Yet they dozed complacent as cows in their kn
ee-deep puddle, beneath an absolute downpour of insults. Kids bounced ice cubes and balled-up Coke cups off their bristled noses. Teenagers hollered ridicule: "Hey Abdul how's yer tool?" A Campfire Girl probed at the wilted ears with her rubber spear from Frontierland until an attendant made her stop. Every passerby had to stop and express contempt for this pair of groggy giants, it seemed. The chinless dwarf from the Sky Ride even got in his licks; he took a big sip of Pepto-Bismol, then motioned his nurse to wheel him up close so he could spew a pink spray at them.
Inside the tent was the exhibit's film, produced by UNESCO, Made Possible by a Grant from Szaabo Laboratories, rear-projected on three special screens donated by Du Pont. As the right and left screens flashed slides of drought-stricken Africa, the center screen would show parched hippos being winched from the curdled red-orange mire of their ancestral wallows. These wallows were drying up, the narration informed us, as a result of a lengthy dry spell plus the damming of rivers to provide electricity for the emerging Third World.
After an animal was successfully winched up from his bog he would be knocked out with a hippo hypo, forklifted onto a reinforced boxcar, and released, hundreds of miles away, into a chain-link compound full of other displaced hippos awaiting relocation. The compound looked as desolate as the regions they'd just been evacuated from, swirling with flies and thick orange dust.
"During the initial weeks of the project," the voice of the narrator told us, "the hippos made repeated charges against the compound's fences, often breaking through, more often injuring themselves. We were eventually able to quell these assaults by introducing into their drinking water a formula especially designed by our laboratories - making them, comparatively, much happier hippos."
"Compared with what?" I heard Joe's one-liner from the dark. "Each other?"
The shadows were long when we emerged from the film, the sun sinking between the spires of Cinderella's Castle. I had pretty much lost interest in the convention, but Joe felt he should make an appearance. Besides, now his reserves were completely exhausted. So we took the old-fashioned choo-choo around to the gate, where we boarded its modern monorail counterpart.
We had to wait while our engineer had a cigarette outside on the landing. A restless musing filled the car while we waited. Hidden machinery hummed. People slumped in the chrome-and-plastic seats. Out the open doors of the car, the Florida sky was airbrushed full of crimson clouds, just like Uncle Walt had ordered, and the indistinct sounds and voices of the park waved softly in and out on the evening breezes. Annette Funicello's recorded greeting at the entrance gate could be heard clearest: "Hey there hi there ho there," she chanted like a cheerleader. "We're as happy as can be, to have you here today... hip hip hoo-ray!"
None of the waiting passengers seemed inclined to be led into the cheer. In the seat in front of us a family rode, six of them. The husband sat alone, his back to us, his muscled arms spread over the red plastic seatback. Across from him, facing us, his family fussed and stewed. His wife had dark circles under her eyes and at her Rayon armpits. In her lap his toddler whimpered. On one side of her his first-grader whined and on the other side his sixth-grader sucked her thumb. Across the aisle his teenager slouched and bitched.
"The kids at school will not believe we never went on Pirates of the Caribbean!"
"Hush, honey," the mother said wearily. "We were out of tickets. You know that."
"We could have bought more," the teenager maintained. The other kids wailed agreement. "Yeah! we could have bought more!"
"We were also out of money," the mother said.
"We didn't even get to see the Enchanted Tiki Birds. The kids at school simply will not believe it!"
"That we were out of money? Well, the kids at school had better believe it. And you better give it a rest if you know what's good for you - all of you!"
And all the while the father sat without comment, not moving, just the muscles in his forearms and his big workadaddy hands, gripping the back of the seat. I noticed he'd been able to get his wrists and knuckles clean for this occasion, but there was still carbon under the fingernails, the indelible tattoo left by the other fifty-one weeks of his year working a lathe in Detroit, or changing tires in Muncie, or scrabbling coal in Monongahela.
"In a recent worldwide survey," Annette's voice continued in a more serious vein, "it was found that twice as many people desire to go to Disney World than to any other attraction on earth. That's pretty impressive, don't you all agree?"
Nobody nodded agreement, not even the kids. Before we could hear more our driver returned to his controls; the doors hissed shut and the big tube hummed away toward the hotel. The hands continued their gripping and ungripping of the seatback, trying not to let it show how hard it was getting to be, this business of keeping a grip - Joe and I exchanged looks. The poor guy. Hadn't he done everything you're supposed to? Labored hard? made a home? raised a family? even saved enough for this most desired of all vacations? But it wasn't working. Something was wrong somewhere, and hanging on was getting harder all the time.
We never saw his face. They filed off forward of us at the hotel. As they left Joe shook his head:
"Just the tip of an enormous iceberg," he said, "heading toward a titanic industry."
I had no idea just how titanic until I saw the exhibits. While Joe rushed off to make his appearance at industry parties, I roamed the crowded exhibition hall, amazed at all the latest devices and potions designed to care for and control the upcoming hordes unable to care for or control themselves. Teenagers rented from the local high school were our guides through a vast maze of displays. They demonstrated long-snouted pitchers that could get nourishment down the most intractable throat. They showed us how new Velcro straps could strap down a big strapping lad as well as the bulky old buckle cuffs. They invited us to test the comfort of urine-proof mattresses, pointing out the slotless screwheads that held the bed-frame together: "to keep them nuts from eating the screws."
There were unrippable pajamas with padded mittens to prevent the hallucinator from plucking out an offending eye. There were impact-dispersing skullcaps for the clumsy, disposable looparound mouthpieces for the tongue gnashers, lockfast maxi-Pampers for the thrashing incontinent, and countless kinds of medication reminders that beeped and buzzed and chimed to remind the forgetful. The vast majority of the booths were manned by the many pharmaceutical laboratories supported by this industry. Most of these displays lacked the visual pizazz of the hardware shows. Pills and pamphlets just aren't as interesting to look at as restraining chairs featuring built-in commodes with automated enemas. The Szaabo display was the exception, attracting far the largest audience of all the booths. Company designers had mocked up a large cocktail lounge complete with plastic plants and free peanuts and waitresses in miniskirts. Above the bar was a big-screen TV monitor that played actual tapes of the company's products in action. Conventioneers could eat peanuts and drink and cheer like a Monday Night Football crowd as they watched big hyperactive hellraisers get wrestled down and turned meek as mice with a shot. I wondered if the display designers got the idea from the hippo show, or vice versa.
The trouble was once you got into the popular Szaabo lounge, it was next to impossible to get back out through the crush of the boisterous crowd. Harder than that to snag one of the free drinks. I was buffeted back and forth through the smoky clamor until I found myself near an exit along the far wall. It was marked for Emergency Use Only. I felt my smarting eyes and burning throat qualified so I pushed the lockbar and peeked out. To my great relief I saw I had found not only a private balcony with fresh air and a view of the sunset, but a tray of unclaimed martinis.
I squeezed through and heard the big door shut behind me over the noise. I grabbed the push bar but I was too late. "Let it lock," I decided, releasing the bar. "I can get by on olives if I miss the banquet."
I noticed these olives were skewered on clever little S-shaped silver swizzles, supposed to look like the Szaabo logo. It was also etch
ed on the martini glasses, in red and yellow, like the crest on Superman's chest. About halfway through the tray I raised one of the glasses in a toast - to Szaabo Labs, original layers of those tiny blue eggs of enlightenment. Remember when we used to think that every egg would hatch cherubs in every head and that these fledglings would feather into the highest-flying Vision in mankind's history? Remember our conspiracy, Szaabo? You make 'em; we'll take 'em - as far as the Vision can see. Who's left to carry the colors of our crusade now? Where's the robin's-egg-blue banner of the Vision of Man now? In the hands of one little girl, that's where, some titless wonder who can see about as far as she can pee, and she's been captured, probably by now quelled with one of your latest designer formulas and watching a rerun of Happy Days, comparatively happy herself.
But, like Joe says, compared to what?
By the time the drinks were drained and the olives eaten, the din on the other side of the door had gone down considerably. For a keepsake I dropped the last glass in my shoulder bag with my Ching and my leftover ticket books and tried the door. I was able to attract one of the waitresses by rattling the tray between the bar and the metal. She let me back in, apologizing all over herself for not hearing my signal earlier; it had been just too dern noisy. I gave her the tray and a ten spot and told her not to worry - I hadn't been signaling earlier, anyhow.
The Szaabo bar and the convention hall were both almost empty. Everybody was off getting dressed for the evening's main event. I swung one more time by the main desk and saw my message to Woofner still folded in his box. The fresh peach behind the desk told me so many folks'd been asking she was curious herself what'd come of this missin' doctor.
Up in our room Dr. Mortimer was trying to find an answer to the same question. He was pacing to and fro in front of the telephone table in his rumpled tux and untied tie, talking into the receiver in a loud singsong German. I discerned he was a little drunk. When he saw me he put his hand over the receiver and shook his head forlornly.
Joe was also dressed for dinner, more rumpled than his boss and lots drunker. He was tilted back on a wastepaper basket. "You're burned bright as a beet," he said squinting at me. He held out the miniature bottle of Beefeater he was drinking. "Use some of this on your head. White wine's best but gin'll do."