He took the usual huge stogie out of his mouth and waved a despondent greeting to MacVeagh. The editor paused. “Poor house tonight?” he asked sympathetically.
“Poor house, he says!” Mr. Marcus replaced the cigar and it joggled with his words. “Mr. MacVeagh, I give you my word, even the ushers won’t stay in the auditorium!”
MacVeagh whistled. “That bad?”
“Bad? Mr. MacVeagh, Rio Rhythm is colossal, stupendous, and likewise terrific. But it smells, yet.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Stink bombs, Mr. MacVeagh. Stink bombs they throw, yet, into the Lyric. A strictly union house I run, I pay my bills, I got no competitors, and now comes stink bombs. It ain’t possible. But it’s true.”
MacVeagh half guessed the answer even then. He got it in full with Molly’s first speech when he reached the office.
“Boss, you’ve got to look after things better yourself. I don’t know how the copy desk let it get by. Of course, that kid you put onto handling movie reviews is green; he doesn’t know there’s some things you just don’t say in a paper, true though they may be. But look!”
MacVeagh looked, knowing what he would see. The movie review, a new department added experimentally since the Sentinel had expanded so, stated succinctly: “Rio Rhythm stinks.”
John MacVeagh was silent for a long count. Then he said wryly, “It’s quite a responsibility, isn’t it, Molly?”
“Boss,” she said, “you’re the only man in the world I’d trust with it.”
He believed her—not that it was true, but that she thought it was. And that was all the more reason why . . .
“You’re kidding yourself, Molly. Not that I don’t like to hear it. But this is a power that should never be used for anything but the best. I’ve tried to use it that way. And tonight I’ve learned that—well, I’ll put in inadvertently to salve my conscience—that I’m ruining one man’s business and have destroyed another’s happiness.
“It’s too much power. You can’t realize all its ramifications. It’s horrible—and yet it’s wonderful, too. To know that it’s yours—it—it makes you feel like a god, Molly. No, more than that: Like God.”
There was an echo in the back of his mind. Something gnawing there, something remembered . . .
Then he heard the words as clearly as though they were spoken in the room. Father Byrne’s unfinished sentence: “If you were God—” And Jake Willis’ question that had prompted it: “Why doesn’t God stop the war?”
Molly watched the light that came on in the boss’s eyes. It was almost beautiful, and still it frightened her.
“Well,” said John MacVeagh, “why don’t I?”
It took a little preparing. For one thing, he hadn’t tried anything on such a global scale before. He didn’t know if influence outside of Grover would work, though truth should be truth universally.
For another, it took some advance work. He had to concoct an elaborate lie about new censorship regulations received from Washington, so that the tickers were moved into his private office and the foreign news came out to the rewrite staff only over his desk.
And the public had to be built up to it. It couldn’t come too suddenly, too unbelievably. He prepared stories of mounting Axis defeats. He built up the internal dissension in Axis countries.
And it worked. Associated Press reports from the battlefields referred to yesterday’s great victory which had been born on his typewriter. For one last experiment, he assassinated Goering. The press-association stories were crowded the next day with rumors from neutral countries and denials from Berlin.
And finally the front page of the Grover Sentinel bore nothing but two words:
WAR ENDED
MacVeagh had deleted the exclamation point from the proof. There was no need for it.
VI
Excerpts from the diary of Hank Branson, FBI:
Washington, June 23.
This looks to be the strangest case I’ve tackled yet. Screwier than that Nazi ring that figured out a way to spread subversive propaganda through a burlesque show.
The chief called me in this morning, and he was plenty worried. “Did you ever hear of a town called Grover?” he asked.
Of course I had. It’s where the Hitchcock plant is. So I said sure and waited for him to spill the rest of it. But it took him a while. Almost as though he was embarrassed by what he had to say.
At last he came out with, “Hank, you’re going to think I’m crazy. But as best we can figure it out, this is the situation: All this country is at war with the Axis— excepting Grover.”
“Since when,” I wanted to know, “do city councils have to declare war?”
So he tried to explain. “For two weeks now, the town of Grover has had no part in the war effort. The Hitchcock plant has stopped producing and is retooling for peace production. The Grover draft board hasn’t sent in one man of its quota. The Grover merchants have stopped turning in their ration stamps. Even the tin-can collections have stopped. Grover isn’t at war.”
“But that’s nuts,” I said.
“I warned you. But that’s the case. We’ve sent them memoranda and warnings and notifications and every other kind of governmental scrap paper you can imagine. Either they don’t receive them or they don’t read them. No answers, no explanations. We’ve got to send a man in there to investigate on the spot. And it’s got to be from our office. I don’t think an Army man could keep his trigger finger steady at the spectacle of a whole community resigning from the war.”
“Have you got any ideas?” I asked. “Anything to give me a lead.”
The chief frowned. “Like you say, it’s nuts. There’s no accounting for it. Unless— Look, now you’ll really think I’m crazy. But sometimes when I want to relax, I read those science-fiction magazines. You understand?”
“They’re cheaper than blondes,” I admitted.
“So this is the only thing that strikes me: some kind of a magnetic force field exists around Grover that keeps it
