trusting eyes of a fawn. “I don’t agree with that,” she said. “If Death is Nothing, why have another name for it?”
“That’s nominalism,” the curly-bearded young man said. “That’s camp.” After he had said it he seemed sorry he had spoken.
“And I’m not killing myself,” the girl continued. “That’s up to them— whether I die or not. I don’t think this
The bushy-bearded man said, “You’re going to let them be your judges?”
“My Lord let Pilate be his.” She sat down. The curly-bearded young man had turned his back to the screen.
“Anyone else,” the bearded man said. “Anybody at all.”
No one looked toward him. A girl wearing a motorcycle helmet came trotting up and announced, “Ready.” The six stood. The bearded man said, “This is it. We’ll follow them as long as we can.” In point of fact the six were already offscreen, though the bearded man was, presumably, looking toward them. “We get all kinds, I suppose you could say—you just talked to two of them. Truth seekers, Jesus freaks, activists, pacifists, about twice as many boys as girls. No one has to come, and anyone can turn back at any time. The people you just talked to could turn back now if they wanted, although it doesn’t look like any of them are going to.”
A shot of the six showed them following the girl in the motorcycle helmet. The buildings to either side of them had been largely destroyed by air strikes, and they might have been tourists trailing a guide through some older ruined city.
“Some of you will be thinking you would like to do what they are doing,” the bushy-bearded man said. “You can sign up at most Buddhist and Christian spiritual centers, and also at the temple of Kali just off the Edsel Ford Express-way. Also in the basement of——[—he named a well-known department store]—where the travel office used to be. Of course nothing is final right up to the bullets.”
The camera jumped, and the men Lowell Lewis had gathered together saw the six emerging from an alley choked with rubble. The girl in the motorcycle helmet was no longer visible. Awkwardly they spread to form a single straggling line, three young men on one end, then the two girls, then an older, balding man. Two had contrived, or perhaps been given, white rags on sticks; they waved them. The remaining four advanced with lifted hands.
At Peters’s ear Solomos whispered, “How near are they now? To the fighting?” As if to answer him a bullet kicked up dust before one of the young men’s feet. He hesitated for a moment, then trotted to catch up.
“Please,” the bushy-bearded man’s voice said, “if you aren’t a potential volunteer we ask you to tune out.”
Someone called to Lewis, “Switch it off.”
Lewis said, “As you have seen, they have taken control of our channel.”
Solomos asked, “He could still deactivate this receiver, could he not?” And Peters answered, “Sure.” He felt that he was going to be sick, and was surprised to see one of Tredgold’s Portuguese girls still circulating with a tray of drinks and canapes. He took a martini and drained it; when his eyes returned to the screen three of the six were gone. The remaining three, seen now from behind, still advanced. The young man with the curly beard had removed his acorn-printed shorts and walked naked.
Whether from a remote mike or by some sound-gathering device, voices came suddenly into the Lisbon hotel room. The naked boy was saying, “Peace! Peace! Don’t shoot; look at us!” A girl crooned wordlessly, and the bald man recited the Lord’s Prayer.
Distantly someone called, “Hey, cease fire. They’re giving up. Squad! Hold it!”
The three continued to advance, but diverged as they came, first six, then twelve, then twenty-four or more yards separating each from his or her companions, as though each were determined to die alone. The screen could not longer encompass all three, and began to move nervously from one to the next as though afraid to miss the death of any. A soldier stood and motioned to the curly-bearded young man, indicating the midden of smashed concrete which had sheltered him. As the soldier did so he was shot, and fell backward. The curly-bearded young man turned toward his own lines shouting, “Stop! Stop!” and was shot in the back. The camera showed him writhing on the dusty pavement for a moment, then switched to the girl, now remote and fuzzy with distance but still large in the picture provided by the telephoto lens. Four soldiers surrounded her, and as they watched one put his arms about her and kissed her. Another jerked them apart, shoved the first aside, and tore away the girl’s thin shirt; as he did she exploded in a sheet of flame that embraced them all.
The bald man was walking rapidly toward a half-tracked combat car mounting quad-fifties; faintly they could hear him saying, “Hey, listen, the Giants won twenty-six straight in 1916, and the biggest gate in baseball was more than eighty-four thousand for a Yankees-Browns game in New York. The youngest big leaguer ever was Hamilton Joe Nuxhall—he pitched for Cincinnati when he was fifteen.
Lewis said, “We had technical difficulties.”
The voice of the boy in Philadelphia announced, “I did that fade with the faces—it was pretty good, wasn’t it?”
Solomos asked Peters, “Why are you attacking? You should be defending. You have lost most of your country already.”
“We don’t think so,” Peters said.
“You have a few army camps and airdromes and some factories remote from centers of population; that is not the country. You survive thus far because they do not know how to fight, but they are learning, they are drilling armies everywhere, and you do not know how to fight either, and are not learning; after the defeat of the Germans
