Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede by Bradley Denton (my reading book .txt) 📕
Buddy took a few steps back from the camera and shifted the Strat into playing position. "That's all the sign says, but I'll repeat the address in a while in case nobody's listening right now." He looked up and around, as if watching an airplane cross the sky. "Seems like I'm in a big glass bubble, and I can't tell where the light's coming from. It's a little chilly, and I sure hope I don't have to be here long. In the meantime, here's one for your family audience, Mr. Sullivan." He struck a hard chord and began singing "Oh, Boy!" in a wild shout.
I remote-controlled the Sony into blank-screened silence. Poor Buddy. He had seemed to be surrounded by nothing worse than stars and shadows, but I remembered enough from my Introductory Astronomy course to know better. Ganymede was an immense ice ball strewn with occasional patches of meteoric rock, and its surface was constantly bombarded by vicious streams of protons and
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Ringo considered. If he jumped into the truck, the man might shoot at them as they left, and the bullet might hit the woman. Ringo supposed that he could destroy the rifle first—but now he smelled another weapon inside the man’s coat, and he was afraid that the man might be able to use it before he had finished splintering the rifle.
The only way that he could go with the woman and still ensure her safety would be to kill the man. He tried to make himself do that, but it was impossible. The necessary circuitry wasn’t there. He could knock down, shake, and even wound, but he couldn’t kill.
With the arm still clamped in his mouth, he lay down on the man’s chest and sighed. The man groaned.
“Damn it, dog, come on,” the woman said. “I’ve got to go before Ollie gets too far ahead!”
Ringo sighed again, making a whuff sound that he hoped would communicate his regret. Then he closed his eyes to indicate that his decision would not change.
The truck left. Ringo lay still for several minutes, and then he opened his eyes, released the man’s arm, and stood. He took a few steps away from the man and stood watching him.
The man rolled onto his stomach and rose on his hands and knees. Then, breathing hard, he grasped the rifle and stood up. He was stooped over, as if his back pained him.
There were no lights in the park now, so Ringo brightened the blue spark in his black dog-eye to ensure that the man would see him. He had changed his mind about his dealings with people. Regardless of whether they were kind or cruel, he would not back away from them anymore. He would not run.
The man straightened his back and cocked the rifle. He pointed it at the Doberman and fired.
Ringo’s processors flashed, and without even knowing that he would do it, he caught the .30-06 bullet between his incisors.
The man stared for a moment, then cocked the rifle again. Ringo sucked the bullet into his mouth, took a deep breath, and spat.
The slug entered the man’s right thigh, and he staggered backward, dropping the rifle. Ringo stayed until the man got down on his hands and knees and began crawling toward the black automobile. Then, sure that the man would survive, he loped out to the highway.
The motorcycle’s scent was strong and easy to follow. The crew-cab truck’s scent was strong too, and Ringo was glad to find that the woman was following Vale as she had said she would. He was looking forward to seeing her again.
As he ran, he belched up a Budweiser and popped it with his teeth. He wished he’d done it earlier; that would have really freaked the man with the gun.
SKYVUEKhrushchev stood beside the county road, his cloudy breath whooshing from his nostrils as if from a cartoon bull. His flesh quivered. He was enraged.
The theater’s marquee was lit, and there, in gargantuan red plastic letters, were words announcing that the Reverend William Willard of Oklahoma City would hold a rally here, in person, on Monday evening, February 6. Khrushchev had not known about it until this moment. He had been watching Buddy Holly on the five-inch TV in the snack bar when he’d heard the racket, and he had come out here just as the people who had put up the letters were driving away.
Eisenhower emerged from the darkness below the marquee and walked toward Khrushchev.
“Did you let them do this?” Khrushchev bellowed.
“They paid a reasonable fee,” Eisenhower said as he came close.
Khrushchev kicked off his right shoe, snatched it from the frozen ground, and began beating Eisenhower on the forehead with the heel.
“Is there a problem in there?” Khrushchev shouted. “Hello? Can you hear me? Jesus Christ!”
Eisenhower crossed his arms. “You’re going to give me a bruise.”
Khrushchev flung his shoe across the road. “There’s a mob violence in the cities, world leaders are accusing each other of provocative acts, and now you’ve rented out SkyVue to the Bill Willyites! They’re calling your boy the Antichrist, did you know that? They’d like to lynch him, did you know that? They’re using your Buddy Holly stunt to grab power, did you know that? They’re mean, did you know that? They’re going to ruin the chances of all their fellow fleshbound, did you know that?”
Eisenhower turned away and began walking down the drive toward the theater lot. “They have a constitutional right to assembly,” he said. “If we’re going to make our case for the fleshbound people’s worthiness, we have to demonstrate that they deserve the rights they already have.”
“But these people are fanatics!” Khrushchev cried. “The ordained psychopaths of the Corps of Little David could hurt somebody!”
Eisenhower paused and glanced back, rubbing his forehead. “You should talk,” he said, and then continued down the drive.
Khrushchev stood looking after him and felt ashamed.
He had struck a friend in anger.
It was appalling what flesh could do to a person. He would be glad to go home again, to return to the blessed state of noncorporeality that had given the Seekers their freedom.
He stood in the cold for a few more minutes and then began limping toward the snack bar. He had decided not to look for his lost shoe.
Reading Volume IV of Mother’s diary, I see myself and the culture in which I was raised through the eyes of a woman being driven crazy by both of them. Volume IV chronicles the end of my first decade of life, and the end of the sixties. Both of us were stinkers.
My most vivid memory of 1970 is of April, when an oxygen tank in the command module of Apollo 13 ruptured. At school, we had a Moment of Silence every day to pray for Lovell, Haise, and Swigert as they went all the way around the moon with a crippled ship, using the oxygen and power reserves of the lunar module to substitute for what the command module no longer had. For the only time in my life, I willingly said the same prayers that everyone else did.
And then they were back, haggard and drained, but heroes, and I felt again as though human beings could accomplish anything, that all in the universe was ours.
I was ten years old.
Mother, of course, saw Apollo 13 and its message in a different light.
The ancient Atlanteans, they who fly the ships of light, have done this, she wrote. They crippled the ship to teach us our weakness, and they brought it safely home to teach us that our lives are dependent on chance, on Fate.
The astronauts were closer to death than we have been told. The coupling with the lunar module should not have worked, but the celestial Seekers saw to it that it did. They are warning us of our frailties while exhorting us to become pure of heart so that we may overcome those frailties.
It is yet another omen. They are trying to tell us that we are close to disintegration, to self-destruction.
The command capsule of Apollo 13 returned to Earth on April 17, 1970, and Mother wrote the preceding words the next day. Two and a half weeks later, four people were shot to death on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.
They carried no weapons. They were killed by bullets shot from the rifles of National Guardsmen—by definition, their protectors.
Disintegration. Self-destruction.
Some animals, when caught in a trap, will chew off parts of their bodies in order to escape. As the decade came to a close, my nation was caught in such a trap, and it began to devour itself. A few kids at a time.
I was ten years old.
There was no prayer vigils in schools for those who were killed, and none for those killed a few days later at Jackson State.
Mother wrote, I am changing my opinions of those who fly the ships of light. Some of them must be malevolent. It must have been one of these who whispered into a Guardsman’s ear, “Shoot, or they will kill you!” It is the only explanation. Why else would a youth with a rifle kill another youth who does not have one? Human beings would melt into pools of blood before we would do such things of our own wills.
We could not massacre children as it is said was done at My Lai. After all, we are not only humans, but Americans. We are the Good Guys. We would not beat people to death or hang them from trees. We would not kill unless we were made to do so by a force against which we could not stand.
Some blame Nixon. I do not. He is not strong enough to do this to us. He may not even exist.
Somewhere in the Void, a battle is raging. The aliens who love us are fighting those who despise us, and while the battle rages, spies of the malevolent ones whisper in our ears. They know that we can be made to destroy ourselves.
Yet some of us, especially those who make music of power, are not so weak as the rest. They have joined in the battle against the malevolent ones, and in them I place my ultimate hope.
Which was more hope than they could handle. In the fall, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died of drug overdoses within weeks of each other. Willingly or not, they and their music had become symbols of the counterculture and of the struggle for justice, and they had blown it. Big time.
Shortly after Mother had taken her job at KKAP, she had begun the album collection that now forms the core of my own. She began with the Crickets and proceeded through the late fifties and early sixties until she had caught up with the year, and then she had bought whatever music she could afford. By 1970, she owned virtually all of the most important rock ‘n’ roll albums ever pressed.
Then Hendrix and Joplin offed themselves.
They lied, Mother wrote. They promised life, and they gave us death. They listened to the malevolent ones. Jimi played guitar like he came from a planet where a guitar is part of your body, and then he drowned in his own puke. Janis had a voice that could make you feel love and pain and life and sex all at the same instant, and then she filled her body with shit and fell on her face.
Fuck them and the bus they rode in on.
She went through her record collection and pulled out everything that had been pressed after 1965, boxed them up, and sealed the boxes with duct tape. She wanted to retreat to the late fifties, when Buddy Holly was still alive and all seemed right with the world.
“We’ll take these to the dump,” she told me, and I was horrified. Sergeant Pepper was in there.
The boxes sat in the living room while Mother immersed herself in the music of the fifties and in paperbacks about UFOs and ancient civilizations. I listened to acid rock under the covers in my bedroom.
Then, on her thirtieth birthday, Mother wanted to hear “Eleanor Rigby,” from the Beatles’ Revolver album, which was pressed in 1966. The box containing that record came open, and the others soon followed. She played them all, even
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