“I’m a good Christian,” Gus muttered, rallying. “You believe,” the voice continued implacably, “that the flesh is evil, but you can’t escape it. You’re helpless to stop the regular, persistent functions of your body, the functions you regard as dirty and sinful and unmentionable, and so you live in constant guilt. You are an abomination, Gus; to me and to everyone—to yourself most of all. You can never be king, Gus; you have a powerful enemy who will sabotage everythyng you do, everything you try, step by step. As you build it up he will tear it down.” “Who?” Gus shouted, now thoroughly terrified. “Who’ll do that to me?”
“I will,” the voice said. And the receiver clicked. Gus, stepping unsteadily away from the dead vid- phone, heard the gales of laughter from down the hall; for a moment it seemed to him that the merrymakers were laughing at him, personally. But of course that couldn’t be.
Just some crank, he thought shakily. I must n ’t poy him no mind.
But the words on the phone had gone right through him, like a burning knife, and now they haunted him. Try as he would he couldn’t forget them.
I’ve got work to do, he told himself. And slunk off back to his room, to write his forthcoming TV speech—and finish off the bottle of Cutty Sark.
Joan still sat quietly in the waiting room when Paul
Rivers emerged from the general practitioner’s office, both hands bandaged and all his fingers in organic splints. “You didn’t have to stay,” he said to her. “I can manage all right by myself.” However, he thought, I’m glad you did. In actuality he could not manage—and would not for some time. And both of them knew it.
Joan opened the door for him and accompanied him out into the hall. He realized that she had noticed his limp and tried to walk as naturally as possible. I don’t, he reflected, want her to feel sorry for me but that’s silly, of course; she feels nothing for me, one way or the other. It’s a part of her conditioning that she be indifferent to such matters.
Still, she had taken the trouble to drag his unconscious body into the ionocraft, give him first aid and bring him here to the doctor. She had not merely left him there in the cave to die, as she easily could have done.
As they stepped into the elevator, Joan said haltingly, “Paul, I—” She then stopped. The elevator door slid shut and they descended in silence. At last she continued, “It seemed so strange, up there in the mountains. Being you. Yet in another way not so strange being you. As if some part of me—this is how it felt—some part of me had always been you.”
The elevator door opened again, allowing them to exit into the main lobby of the medical building. Paul said, “I felt the same thing about you, when I became part of you.” They stepped out of the elevator and made their way through the crowd of milling, shouting, happy people, some of who now and then grabbed and hugged them. Paul did not object to their shoving him about, even though, because of his in-
juries, the experience was painful. The mob thinned out near the front entrance, and once again he and Joan could hear each other.
“In a way it felt good,” Joan said, “being you. A real, living, feeling, caring human being. Now, of course, it’s too late for me.”
Paul stopped and looked at her intently; her eyes had become moist and in the lights of evening they glistened. This has got to be an hallucination, he thought with astonishment. Joan Hiashi crying? Impossible.
“I have a problem,” Joan said wistfully; she looked away from him. “I have nothing and I want nothing; I’ve achieved the state that holy men have striven for down throughout centuries and now—I want out.”
“Joan,” he said, with an intensity he couldn’t conceal. “Don’t you see the contradiciton in what you just said? You do want something.”
“Something I can never have.” Her voice sagged with hopelessness.
“That’s not true.” He touched her shoulder gently with his bandaged right hand. “Just your wanting to reenter the world of the shared reality means the battle is half won. Now, because you want something, I can help you. If you’ll let me, of course.” “You’ll teach me?” Her voice had lost a little of its gray overcast of hopelessness.
“I’ll teach you how to be with people. And you can teach me how to be alone.”
“Between us,” Joan said wonderingly, “we have it all. Don’t we?” Abruptly she stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek.
Laughing recklessly, Paul trotted out onto the
sidewalk, shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!”
All the taxis had been taken; they had to wait a long time, standing side by side. But that did not bother them; it struck both Joan and Paul as perfectly all right.
Most smells did not bother the not overly-sensitive nostrils of Gus Swenesgard, but for some obscure reason the relatively faint ordor of ozone, of electricity, in the TV studio did. They ought, he thought with annoyance, to air this place out once in a while. But maybe it was just that the prospect ahead of him made him tense.
Everything appeared to be in readiness for the telecast. Gus had personally supervised the installation of the idiot cards from which he would read his prepared speech. And he had, in addition, personally selected the heart- moving, patriotic music which would play softly in the background while he spoke.
He had even personally written the spot announcements that had been telecast at intervals throughout the day, preparing the world for the big moment.
Glancing toward the entrance of the studio Gus saw Dr. Paul Rivers just coming in, with Joan Hiashi on his arm. From Dr. Rivers’ bandaged hands and limping gait Gus gathered that he had met with a major accident, perhaps the result of too much celebrating. Putting on his best political smile Gus waddled over to greet them.
“Hey,” he said fondly, glad to see friends, “what do you think of the funny smell in here? Or maybe I’m just tense; is that it?” He peered at Paul Rivers nervously, awaiting his professional answer.
“I hadn’t noticed anything,” Paul Rivers said genially.
“Well, you don’t run a hotel,” Gus said, frowning. “I wouldn’t allow no smell like this in my hotel. Guests might complain.” He had, then, the sudden feeling that Paul Rivers might be silently laughing at him—and glanced suspiciously in the doctor’s direction. But Paul Rivers seemed perfectly straight- faced. I must, Gus thought, be getting stage-shy. He mopped his forehead, then; drops of greasy sweat had begun, as always, to stand out on his mottled flesh.
“You’re on in five minutes,” said a thin technician with glasses. “Five minutes, Mr. Swenesgard.” The technician hurried busily off.
“Would you like a tranquilizer?” Paul Rivers asked Gus.
“No, no; I’ll be okay,” Gus muttered. He wandered nervously off, found his way into the dressing cubicle which the studio people had assigned him and took a good, healthy drag on a bottle of Early Times bourbon. That, he told himself with satisfaction, is the only tranquilizer Gus Swenesgard needs.
The door opened; Gus hastily hid the bottle behind him. “Four minutes, Mr. Swenesgard,” the technician with the glasses said.
“Go ’way,” grumbled Gus. “You make me jumpy.”
The technician departed, but Gus knew with grim certainty that he would soon be back to say, “Three minutes, Mr. Swenesgard.” So he stumped out of his cubicle and took his place at the modem, large table before the TV cameras.
Behind him hung the old pre-war flag of the United
Nations. This would be the first time since the Gany occupation that this flag had been publicly displayed. A nice touch, Gus said to himself.
“Three minutes, Mr. Swenesgard.
A weird feeling came over Gus at that moment, an eerie sensation of being watched. Someone, he thought, is staring at me. He looked around the studio. Yes, a lot of individuals here and there, including Paul Rivers and the Jap girl, had their eyes on him—not to mention the cameramen. But it wasn’t that.
I know what it is, he said to himself. It’s the entire people of the world. The whole cottonpickin’ planet; that’s who’s watching me.
This answer satisfied him intellectually, but emotionally there still remained a nagging feeling of the uncanny, an uneasiness—even fear—that could not rationally be explained.
“Two minutes, Mr. Swenesgard.” The thin technician with glasses said, hovering.
Now Gus localized the feeling. It emanated from the general direction of the stand on which his idiot cards rested, neatly stacked and waiting.
