Mind Webs - The Tank And Its Wife

0:30Mindways. Welcome to a half hour of mindways. Stories from the worlds of speculative fiction. This is Michael Hanson. The mind web story for this half hour is The Tank and its wife, a story by Arsene Darnay.

1:33The tank drove around the mansion's curving drive passing between lavish flower beds. It was a small tank painted in random green beige yellow patches, a vehicle perfect for the quick and dirty grilla warfare of the African plains. This wasn't Africa. The potentious mansion, a mixture of temple and hazy end to top to California hill. It wasn't thrown in a near empty landscape, far from affluent neighbors spotted on other hills. The sunlight bright on rolling lawns, sprinklers spurred brilliantly. There would surely be a pool in the back, turquoise in the sun, and stables down the hill. And a gardener who rode a wheeled fortress with automatic transmission to more than the classic acres of green. The tank made a fearful noise and had no muffler in the rapid, plop plop plop explosions of its engine drowned out the clattering, chaining metallic clicking of its tracks. Long before the muzzle of its gun had come into view over the steep approach,

2:38the lady of the house attracted by the racket. It ran to a bay window to peer out through Gaw's curtains. She stood there still, mesmerized and puzzled when the tank suddenly wheeled at the apex of the drive, and with treads churning newly planted bulbs and dark moist dirt on either side of the entrance apron, it crashed with a deafening roar and a turmoil of splintering, cracking, tearing, and crunching noises through the portals into the foyer and then into the spacious living room. The tank seemed to pause. Then its turrets wang from left to right, swept to chandelier against the ceiling, pulverizing it in the process, and at last it faced the lady of the house. She screamed, unheard, and stood now, pressed hard against the window, her hands half covering her face, her eyes frozen and terror. A panel opened in the turret, a black barrel looked out, and briefly rattled. A string of bullets tore into a wall, demolishing two glass-rained watercolor showing Parisian scenes. A pattern of the bullets spelled a message.

3:43I, it said. The woman ran out sobbing and frantic stumbling over the dusty rubble and shoot up carpeting behind the tank. She ran down a hallway, floored in colorful tarot zone, through a panelled room with antlers and bookshelves, through a spacious glittering kitchen bright with copper pots hung from wooden pegs and out to a glass roofed patio. She raced on from there, passed the swimming pool down the deep lawn toward the stables. She screamed, Herman, Herman! But the gardener was nowhere to be seen, and she began to sob at her own ineffectualness. The tank came behind her. She heard it roar and glimpsed over her shoulder, the white dust caused a boil out of the house. The tank emerged through an opening wider by far than the sliding glass door pushed before it frame an all-grounded dust under its tracks on the irregular grace later the patio. The tank stopped and appeared to survey the scene. Then it's

4:49gun fired with a roar, causing the tank to rock back on its treads. Three shells arched over the diminishing form of the lady. They raised guisers of dirt into the air before her. Spent steel fell at her feet, her ears buzzed over the explosions. She turned, unthinking, and saw the tank. It stood half covered by the wire reinforced glass roof of the patio. A stream of fire spurred from an aperture in its turret and fell to the sloping grass beyond the pool. Black smoke boiled from the lawn, spent itself, and left a scorched pattern of words. Darling, weight, I am home. The lady's face worked out of control. She had mascara around her raved, middle-aged eyes. Her lashes had been lengthened, her face carefully made up. Her lips accentuated by a pale pearl lipstick. Now her usually cool, smooth features were those of a

5:50terrified child. She covered her face, collapsed slowly, assumed a fetal posture, and began to rock. The sergeant was hysterical, a state he frequently experienced. He appeared to be jumping up and down, quivering with impatience while two kneeling soldiers and fatigues connected the grave, the copper ends of a cable to an oblong box with instruments on its face. The cable hung in a loose spiral from a frame just beneath the blinding neon-lighted corrugated roof of the hanger. Come on, come on, what does it say? The men were busy and said nothing. The sergeant rang his pudgy hands, he sucked air between his clenched teeth and looked and treatingly up at the roof as if to invoke the almighty's aid. One of the soldiers turned his head. The line to that, a no stimulation coming through it all. Are you sure? The sergeant turned abruptly

6:51and ran between two rows of tanks. He was a perishing man, unacoustumbed to running. His fatish rears danced back and forth. His ankles turned inward. His eyes swept the tanks as he ran. Each camouflage colored and lengthed by coiling cable to the central stimulator mounted under the roof. The tanks looked peaceful and harmless in the huge echoing hanger. 99 identical tanks and four rows only. One was missing. T98, midway in the third row. The sergeant ran toward a half open door through which could be seen part of a coffee urn set on a tight-rider table. Next to it, white cups that bore the colorful heraldic emblem of the PFP command. He stopped at the door and looked with still fresh horror at a monstrous jagged hole in the hanger's metal wall through which T98 had made its exit during the night. And he looked beyond the gash across a tread marked

7:55expanse of gravel at the ruination of the chain-link fence. It resembled a basket ball basket laid on its side. There, sweet Jesus. The sergeant muttered and then ran on imagining the track of rubble, twisted metal, fleeing civilians and burning houses that T98 could well have left behind. He arrived at his office panting and reached across his desk for the telephone speaker laid on a heavily doodled calendar blotter. Captain Richards had been holding the sergeant told him what the instruments had said. Captain Richards called Colonel Baxter, Baxter called General Hals. And General Hals went to a sleek blue and cream computer console against the window of his office and typed T98 on the keyboard. The machine began to clatter almost instantly. Hals first skimmed a brief piece of the long report. Subject John Hamilton entered PFP program 695

9:03age 56 after stroke paralysis. Background career real estate. Well to do no children or surviving siblings. Politically right of center. Application filed by wife radio ad response. Who described subject living vegetable better dead than alive. An executed battery of release forms. Subjects dead. Life was told oral and written. Probability, subject survival is 2.9%. It was notified 12 to 86 subject succumbed to complications and nervous system transplant operation. Fumerol held using actual body later displayed wake for friends and associates. Subject enrolled tank core 1219 86 performance undistinguished scheduled African theater 5587. General Hals began to read the meat around the skeleton but he didn't catch very far. Reports began

10:05pouring in and he knew he had a crisis on his hands. He ordered his helicopter to be brought around, armed himself with a lacquered swagger stick on whose end the gilded bullet cleaned and took off to supervise to capture operation from the air. By the time the general arrived above the scene hovering on the sun on his bright sphere a chopper blades a smoky halo above the bubble. The hilltop mansion was under siege. Military forces, sheriff's deputies, two fire companies in the highway patrol were on the spot. A crowd of gaukers that also gathered among them two reporters demanding to know who was in charge. General Hals told Gapin Richards to stall the press a little and this the captain undertook to do. He strode from his jeep toward the pesty reporters with a stiff forbidding curl about his lips but he had flutters in his stomach. General Hals surveyed the scene and saw the errant T-98 midway down the eastern hill. It stood in the midst of a

11:10rudded reddish area where its various maneuverings had stripped the thin side from the clay. Its wife had to be that curled up bundle on the ground but the general assumed that she was still alive. T-98 attempted still to communicate with her in various ways. At uneven distances from the tank lay the smoking wreckage of jeeps patrol cars and a fire engine. Man occasionally peered from behind those people barriers. The general made a quick decision and called Richards once again. Richards, is your jeep still working? Positive on that general. All right, Richard, got the radio out of it and then send it down the hill toward the tank. Right here on that general. Wait a minute. While the tank's busy with the jeep, I want to mend down here, blow me to get in there and drag the woman away. We may sustain casualties, General. Then sustain them. And the general thought about the members of the press and what those gentlemen would write about a tank that penned love

12:15letters on plush suburban lawns with a flame thrower. The evidence had to be eradicated at the first opportunity. Darling, I have missed you more than I can say. Set a scorch mark just below the pool. Near the stable stood the words. Our years together are my most cherished memories. Another telltale message below the patio said, darling, wait, I am home and yet another a little lower. Why are you afraid of me? Why do you run from me? The general put in a call for Air Force jets. He wanted napalm. The planes should assume a holding pattern nearby. He would do it despite the bad publicity. He would wash this hill in fire better that way.

13:19Richards had done his order. The jeep appeared from the shadows of one of the mansion's wings and began a slow, throttled descent toward T-98. It was driverless, of course. The tanks saw the jeep approach and swung its turret to take aim. At that moment, men hiding in the cover of the wreckage to T-98's rear rushed forward. The tank was still enjoying the lovely ball of fire it had made of Captain Richards jeep, a face of fire for the blackish crown of smoke that rose and mushroomed almost as delightfully as a tactical nuke when the men grabbed the lady of the house and ran away down the hill. The tanks swiveled sharply and lowered its gun, but nothing happened. T-98 evidently did not wish to harm its boss. Sir, Sir, General? The general saw the pilot pointing toward the distant hills at another helicopter. General Hals was a cool,

14:19precise, unflappable man. He was entirely like the faultlessly shaped mustache he wore, whose every hair he inspected daily, and whose misdemeanors he corrected every morning face close to the mirror with a golden fingernail clipper. He knew that the approaching helicopter was none other than W-T-U-V's eye in the sky. Its cameras would be loaded for action. They would relish recording T-98's of fusion's unvideo tape. Despite the irritation Hals felt in that moment, he showed none of it outwardly. He called the Air Force, an ordered napom dropped. The Air Force was sorry. The special code word the general had used in ordering the strike could not be found in any of the books. Higher headquarters had been consulted, but no response had been received. And under the circumstances, the target area was under the jurisdiction of the state of California. The governor had not, well, by the time the Air Force had rogered out,

15:21W-T-U-V's eye in the sky had come, had seen, and was still taping. It had much to record. The tank had been stung by its wife's abduction, and displayed its rage in a barrage of artillery. Shell's level to mention. Machine gun bullets sprayed. Fire swept the lawn, obliterating tank having some of the tanks onwards. And the tank darted this way, and mad attacking everything in sight, save only the wreckage where its wife lay sheltered by soldiers, sheriffs, and firemen. The general decided it was time to put an end to it, and he told Richards to bring in bazookas. The tank spanned itself in rage, but inwardly it felt the throat clutch of impence to disappointment, impotence, and sadness. The bold adventure was over before it had begun, finished the dream. Could it have cried, the tank would have cried? The night before,

16:30parked in the hangar with its mates, the tank had expected another night of pornographic dreaming, much like every other night before, to be followed in the morning by training exercises, to teach the tank how to use the still unfamiliar and strange prosthesis which seemed so huge, clumsy, and lacking in proper means of communication. Such was the round of its life. But then, to its puzzlement and delight, the compelling sex bliss had stayed away. It had enjoyed the total stillness of utter leisure, and not just for a moment, but for hours on end, recalling suddenly that life had been like that before in a wheelchair, but now the stillness and leisure were a blessing rather than a curse. Toward morning had come the electrifying notion that it was no longer quite so helpless as in that wheelchair long ago. It had means of locomotion

17:33and of communication at its disposal. It tried the engine and it started, engaged a gear, and it took. Then the tank experienced a moment of emotion so strong and excruciating that it would have fainted, had it been a body rather than just a packaged brain. It had a vision of its wife, that other being next to whom he had lived so many years, so thoughtlessly, taking her so for granted, and after the stroke he had not been able to say to her what he had wanted to say more than ever, that he loved and appreciated her, that his life with her had been a quiet but joyous time, all he had wanted. But now, now it could undo all that, it could move and speak again. However, clumsily, it could see her one last time before they shipped it out to Africa. So, the tank had broken rank inside the hangar and had begun its long trip home.

18:38And now, now the dream was over, she had not recognized it, had fled from it, had hidden her eyes from its frantically spelled messages. Well, the tank would die here on its own turf. After its moment of freedom, it loathed the thought of training a nightly bliss, it wished to die. The bazooka teams arrived at last, and after some dangerous maneuvers destroyed one of the tank's treads. With one track laying, and the other under power, the tank turned about its own center, like a swirling maniac intent on digging a grave for itself in the gouged and bleeding earth. Then came a shell that fastened on the turret like a fire leech and ate its way into the metal, a fizzing sparkling circle of voracious light and heat. Visual connections linking a tank to its eyelids and its turret melted into dripping ends of wire. And finally, the second tread was

19:44also shut away, and the tank was paralyzed. Outside its shell, sweating an anxious men prepared to carve holes into the metal, using laser guns linked by cables to a power pack mounted on a track. Up above, General Hell's bobbed and dipped and buzzed like hungry mosquito-sending blood. WTUV's eye in the sky had landed. The cameraman was taking footage from the edge of the temporary barrier made of strung out firehose and guarded by deputies and a stalking grim-lipped captain Richards. The lady of the house babbled incoherently in a speeding ambulance. She lay in a stretcher covered by blankets, a young man and white squatted at her head. The driver of the ambulance had the radio on. He listened to a country crooner finishing a song. Pamprami with praises, plimey with love, the woman saying, and then again on a concluding note, Pamprami with praises, plimey with love.

20:49The song ended and the announcer came on. Now folks, here's a public service message from the Department of Defense. The folks down Pentagon Way have come up with a new program for people with disabilities. They say it's kind of a dividend on all the tax dollars we spend on military research. The program is called Prostheses for Peace, meaning that the defense department will help people who can't see or hear or walk or such, and it's absolutely free. My now, those folks can't guarantee a thing, but if you've got someone here and dear, you want to help call now and they'll tell you how to file an application. What about it? Get off that old rocker people and do something for Gramps and Granny. Here, now that toll free number again is... Back at the mansion, the laser carvres had penetrated to the package. They snipped through its connections and brought it out through the seared or regular oval cut in the tank side.

21:50The package resembled a mid-sized picnic cooler. General Howe's had already landed in anticipation of this event. Men loaded the package into his helicopter. Moments later, the copter rose and spread away, leaving Captain Richards to fend for himself against a swollen complement of the press. The reporter is clamored for explanations. Why had the driver come to this place? What did all those messages mean? Why didn't he get out of the tank? Was the driver the woman's husband and was the driver still alive? What about that thing the copter had carried off? Classified records at the driver gone nuts, berserk. What detachment was this anyway? To all of this Richards replied by repeating monotonously that an official statement would be made at a later time. He had no authority to... And then inexplicably to the observers, airplanes appeared

22:51on the horizon, flying low. They came in. Napam, Groms fell, burst, and washed the hill of fire. Richards, reporters, sheriffs, firemen soldiers, and gockers barely escaped the Holocaust. The Air Force had found General Howe's cold word at last and had hastened to obey his order. General Howe's is exquisitely polished boots at rest on the package, communicated with a Pentagon by radio telephone. He sat in motion a series of phone calls all over the nation. Men less cool than he went to work on senators and congressmen, a governor, and the president of the TV station. In a pinch, the general reflected, he could even blind WTUV's eye in the sky. The tanks and inertial systems had survived the battle. It knew itself in motion and guessed that it had failed. It had been deprived of its death. It felt devastated, cheated, and sank into a

24:00catatonic numbness. The motion continued for a while, then its character changed. The tank was being carried now by men into the hangar, probably into that bright yet gloomy expanse that at this hour would be empty. Its buddies and comrades would be out on the range learning counterinsurgency. Then the motion stopped, and the tank felt it coming. An explosion of searing pleasure, as electronic impulses of supreme delicacy began to stimulate selected neuron bundles and its brain. It copulated with a thousand women all at once. It disappeared into transports of delight. The dream of that quiet night and a difficult adventure out there in the sunlight visiting its own past faded into an insignificant pale underexposed episode, the disintegrating spider webs of memory.

26:09You have heard the tank at its wife, a story by Arsend Arne, which first appeared in the analogue magazine of January 1978. This is Michael Hanson, technical production for this program by Rich Grote. Mindwebs is a production of WHA Radio and Madison, a service of University of Wisconsin extension.