disk player in his grandmother’s house in Palmerton, Pennsylvania. Tredgold was recounting some story about a badger that had hidden from dogs in the cellar of a church, and Peters interrupted him to say, “What’s it like in England now?”
You read, let us say, that this or that Corps has tried . . . but before we go any further, the serial number of the Corps, its order of battle are not without their significance. If it is not the first time that the operation has been attempted, and if for the same operation we find a different Corps being brought up, it is perhaps a sign that the previous Corps have been wiped out or have suffered heavy casualties in the said operation; that they are no longer in a fit state to carry it through successfully. Next, we must ask ourselves what was this Corps which is now out of action; if it was composed of shock troops, held in reserve for big attacks, a fresh Corps of inferior quality will have little chance of succeeding where the first has failed. Furthermore, if we are not at the start of a campaign, this fresh Corps may itself be a composite formation of odds and ends withdrawn from other Corps, which throws a light on the strength of the forces the belligerent still has at his disposal and the proximity of the moment when his forces shall be definitely inferior to the enemy’s, which gives to the operation on which this Corps is about to engage a different meaning, because, if it is no longer in a condition to make good its losses, its successes even will only help mathematically to bring it nearer to its ultimate destruction. . . .
—MARCEL PROUST,
Remembrance of Things Past
The north and south walls were pale blue, of painted plaster over stone. A wide door in the north wall, of dark wood and old, dark, discolored brasswork, gave into the hotel corridor, floored (like the big room itself) in dull red tile. Flanking this door were elaborate wrought-iron candelabra; their candles would be lit later that night by Clio Morris, on signal from Lowell Lewis, when Force Cougar was pinned down near the 75–94 interchange in Dearborn and he felt things needed cheering up. Clio (that stenographic muse of history) was good for lighting such things: she was tall, and wore high heels and short skirts, and the soft coiffures she favored lent her face a brown and gold aureole when the flames were behind it.
To the right of the candelabrum on the right side of the doorway stood a heavy “library” table with a blue vase full of fresh cinerarias, the blue vase and blue flowers against the blue wall producing a ghostly effect—the shadows of vase and blossoms more visible and distinct than the things themselves. Above this blue ghost was a very large and brightly colored photograph in a massive frame. It depicted a barren hill crowned with the ruins of a large stone building, of which only (what once had been) the foundation of a tower retained any semblance of its original form. At the bottom of the frame a small brass plaque had been let into the wood, and this was engraved with the words Viana do Castelo, presumably to guide any tourist who might wish to visit the site.
Next to the candelabrum on the left of the door stood one of the twenty-three large leather-covered chairs which dotted the floor of the room—empty despite the invitation of a small table positioned near its right arm at a height convenient to hold a drink—above this chair was a second photograph of exactly the same size and shape as the first, framed in the same way. It depicted a barren hill topped with the tumbled ashlars of another (but equally demolished) stone building. The atmosphere of this photograph was so similar to that of the first that it was only after a careful process of ratiocination that the viewer (if he troubled) convinced himself that it was not a picture of the same ruin from a different angle, though in fact the two held no detail in common but the bright Portuguese sky. The plaque at the base of this second frame read: Miró.
The south wall held three doors, each of them smaller than the large door in the north wall that gave access to the remainder of the hotel, and each leading to a bedroom–sitting room with a bath. The leftmost (east) bedroom looked down into the patio garden of the hotel, and the central bedroom out (south) toward a wing of this patio, with a wall and a street beyond. All the bedrooms were comfortably furnished with carpets and chairs and (in each case) a large double bed, but this central bedroom had, in addition, a vidlink terminal which Lewis’s executive assistant, Peters, would use several times that night. It was a wardrobe-sized gray machine with a screen, a printer, a speaker, keys for coding the addresses of others, and various switches; it had been built by United Services Corporation, the company which employed Peters, as well as Lowell Lewis and Miss Morris and Donovan. (Five foot eight, 230 pounds, thinning blond hair, European sales manager for United Services, a good salesman and a hard worker, he felt he didn’t really have to worry if U.S. went down—hell, he’d lived in Europe for the past eight years, his wife was Belgian, and he spoke Flemish, German, and Swedish like he owned them, and he had connections all over, and half a dozen European firms would be tickled pink to lay their hands on him. He was right too.)
The west wall was entirely of glass and showed the Atlantic Ocean. Because the sun was low now, Peters (a middle-sized young man with a camouflaged face—Peters was one of those people who look a little Jewish but probably aren’t, and he played a good game of lacrosse) had drawn gray velvet drapes across this ocean, but later Clio Morris would open these drapes in order to see the stars.
The east wall was also entirely of glass. It was, in fact, one immense vidlink screen fifteen feet high and thirty-five feet wide, originally installed in this permanently leased suite to demonstrate the fact that vidlink, unlike conventional television, employed what United Services referred to as “Infinite Scanning,” by which the United Services copywriters meant that a vidlink picture was not divided into a number of scan lines and hence could be magnified—like reality itself—to any extent. When this screen was turned off it was a dark and brooding presence upon which the room instinctively focused, but no drapes were provided that might be used to cover it. (When turned on it was sometimes camera as well as screen, the viewer beheld in his beholding.)
The red tile floor was, except at the edges of the room, covered with a dark Moorish carpet on which were scattered, as smaller and less regularly shaped carpets, the hides of Angora goats. The twenty-two armchairs that did not orient themselves to the north wall were arranged on this floor facing (generally) east in a way suggestive of a loose theater. A portable bar stood close to the west window, and at this bar Peters sat eating scrambled (mexidos) eggs.
The large door in the north wall opened and Donovan came in. He was wearing a light-colored suit and a panama hat. He saw Peters and asked, “Everything set for tonight?”
Peters shrugged.
“It better be. It better be good. I’ve got people coming from all over.” He named an important German industrialist. “——is coming.” He leaned closer to Peters, who was afraid for a moment that the end of his (Donovan’s) tie might fall into his (Peters’s) eggs, which were covered with a sauce that, without being ketchup, was nonetheless the color of blood. “Do you know what he told me? This’ll be the first time he’s been outside Germany since 1944. Think of it. Damn near fifty years. The old man himself.”
Peters nodded, his mouth full of eggs, and said, “Wow!”
Donovan named a prominent Italian industrialist. “——is coming too. From Turin. Of course he goes all over, buying art and all that crap. Hell, he spends more time in the States than I do.”
“Not now he doesn’t,” Peters said.
“Well, hell no,” Donovan said, offended. “What do you expect?”
The door to the central bedroom opened and Lewis’s secretary came in wearing a yellow dress and carrying a tear sheet from the vidlink. She said, “Call for you, Mr. Peters,” and Peters took the sheet from her and went into the bedroom.
The call was from a modeling agency in another quarter of the city, and he found himself talking to a sharp-featured, crew-cut young Englishman who wore jade earrings and a (phallic) jade pendant. The Englishman said, “Tredgold here,” and Peters nodded and asked, “What can I do for you, Mr. Tredgold?” and then, unconsciously imitating Donovan, “Everything set?”
“Just what I was going to ask you,” Tredgold said, and smiled. “You’re going to do it still?”
“Have our little party?” Peters said. “Oh, yes.”
“Marvelous. You know, you people have come back wonderfully just in the past few weeks.”
“Oh, we’re not dead yet,” Peters said.
“Spirit.”
“The girls will be here?”
“Ten on the dot.” Tredgold looked at his watch. “Never fear. They are primping their little hearts out at this very moment.”
“The ones Mr. Lewis selected.”
“Quite.” Tredgold smiled again. “I daresay the old boy enjoyed that; did he say anything after?”
Peters tried to remember, then decided it was one of those cases where a lie—he called such lies fables to himself—would serve better, and said, “He talked about it for an hour after we got back, and—you know—told me why he’d picked this one and not that one, all the fine points.”
“He has an eye for décolletage; one saw that. For that matter I have myself.”
“Interesting business you’re in.”
“Quite.” Tredgold smiled again, his fingers twiddling one of the round jade ear bobs. “Peters, I shouldn’t ask this if I were a gentleman, but how old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Just my own age. Good school and all that?”
“Harvard Business School,” Peters said.
“That’s good, I suppose. I went to a redbrick university myself. You like what you’re doing? Following old Lewis about and all that?”
“I suppose so.”
“And someday you’ll be a big pot yourself—that is, if the hairies don’t tear it all down for you—but right now it’s a bit of a bore, eh? Big company and all that. Our little agency here is big company too, you know. Owned by ——[he named a British newspaper] and they’re owned by ——” (a company Peters had always associated with music tapes). “That’s American, you know. Small world.”
“It is,” Peters said. He was wondering what would happen to Tredgold if they lost the war. Probably nothing.
“So I was once where you are now—not quite so high, of course. At the paper; Mum and Dad had scrimped and put me through, and I was to be a journalist. One is chosen to go up in the first three years—you’re aware of that? Or not at all. Only I made a bish. You only make one bish, you know.”
“I know,” Peters said.
“But I was fortunate: I made a cracking good one, and they sent me here. Old Wellingsford called me into his office just after and said they wished to transfer me—‘a nice place for a chap like you,’ was the way he put it. They wanted an Englishman to run it, but the wages were Portuguese—‘very sorry and all that, but the rule about dismissed if you refused transfer still holds, can’t go breaking rules every moment, can we?’ ”
“So you went,” Peters said.
Tredgold nodded. “Boring you, aren’t I? But you can’t say so—that’s the fault of a good school.”
“You’re not boring me,” Peters said honestly.
“Ah,” said Tredgold. He leaned back in his chair and for an instant Peters thought he was about to put his foot up on the desk, but he did not. “Well, I put up a brave front, you know. ‘Going to be manager there, Mums, and good-bye for a bit, eh?’ Tear. Dick Whittington and all that. Tear.”
“ ‘Bye, Dad,’ ” Peters said, getting into the spirit of the thing.
“Right. Absolutely. Salary four thousand bloody escudos per month, and never told them the bloody escudo’s hardly worth a farthing.”
“You can live here cheaply, I suppose, once you know your way around the city.”
“I shouldn’t know,” Tredgold said. “The week I came the really big pots got tired of seeing their little subsidiaries on the bad side of the books and declared a bonus for management—three percent of the net; damned little really, you’ll say, but I’m the only management we have, and all we’re going to have, as long as I’m managing. And I mean to say, a modeling agency with all those great newspapers behind it to threaten the politicians—how can one lose?”
“If you’re in the red,” Peters remarked wisely, “three percent of nothing is zero.”
“Oh, but we didn’t stay there, you know—not with that sort of money in view.”
“Sounds as though they should have put you in charge long ago,” Peters said. It was one of his stock compliments.
“They didn’t want it, you know.” Tredgold’s smile was broader than ever. “I daresay you think profit’s what they’re generally after, don’t you? Went to business school and they taught you that.”
“Yes, they did,” Peters admitted. “Or I should say they taught us that the object of business management was to maximize the value of the stock—that was the definition we had to learn.”
“Oh, son!”
“I know in Britain”—Peters fumbled for words—“there’s more concern for, uh, social objectives, but still . . .” He stopped. Tredgold was laughing. “Well, what is it then?”
“My dear chap . . . my dear old chap, look about you; haven’t you ever seen a firm where one of the salesmen started to do really well selling on commission? What do they do, eh? Fire him, take part of the territory from him, possibly make him sales manager—no commission there, you know—something of the kind. Yet he was making the firm a mint and now they haven’t got it. He was a mere salesperson, you see, and they’d sooner bankrupt the place than have him make too much. Let me tell you something: the big ones, the ones with offices and works of one sort or another all about, like yours and mine, can buy profits whenever they choose just by offering a thin bit of them to the chaps who do the work. But they don’t and they won’t, and who can blame them? I mean, what would they do with the bloody stuff?”
“Build more plants, I suppose,” Peters said.
“More problems for the big pots, and the government on them too and should one of those new works not go, their reputations suffer—so why risk it? None of them know the least about manufacturing anyway.”
“Give it to the stockholders then.”
“Just makes the blighters greedy. No, quite seriously now, Peters, y’know what saved me? Potty little Portugal has to be shown in a separate column in the annual report, and we balance out the limousine thing—so I’m permitted to feather my wee nest. Besides”—Tredgold winked—“there are fringes. Here, love.”
A pretty dark-haired girl came on camera. Tredgold said, “Give us a kiss, love, and blow one to the Yank—I say, Peters, your chief is behind you; bet you didn’t know it.”
Lowell Lewis was coming through the door from the large, chair-strewn room beyond. His face, heavy and unexceptional as ever, might have been a trifle drawn. Peters put Tredgold on Hold.
“Can you get me Hastorf on that thing?” Lewis said. He named a steel company and, when Peters still hesitated, added, “Pittsburgh.” Peters keyed the number and got a secretary, who, seeing Lewis, touched a button by which she replaced her own face with the image of a white-haired man of fifty-five or sixty. Peters cleared his throat and slipped out of the console chair; the white-haired man said, “Hi, Lou.”
Lewis nodded and said, “Phil.”
The white-haired man smiled. “Just about to take myself home, but what can I do for you?”
“I don’t want to hold you up,” Lewis said.
“Any time.”
Lewis smiled. “Pittsburgh quieter now?”
“Oh, we’ve never had trouble out here, Lou. We’re twenty-five miles outside the city proper, you understand. What we say is, let them have the damn place for a while and wear themselves out on it. Employees who lived in the central city are free to bed down right here in the offices at night—of course, it’s a bit hard on them.”
“What I wanted to know, Phil, was about the planes. I was just talking to General Virdon, and he stresses the importance of having air support.”
“We’re guaranteeing fourteen fighter-bombers,” the other man said.
“Good. Couldn’t scrape up a few more for us, could you?”
Hastorf shook his head. “Not much in the way of ground crews left now, Lou. We’re sending some of our laboratory people over to the base to help out, but of course they’re mostly metallurgical specialties. Couldn’t spare a few technicians from your outfit, could you? Or some engineers?”
“Would it get me more planes tonight?”
Hastorf said, “I’ll talk to the boys.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. An engineer for every plane over the fifteen.”
“Fourteen,” Hastorf said.
“I thought you said fifteen. In fact, I’m sure of it.”
For the first time Hastorf appeared to notice Peters. “Young man,” he said, “could we hear from you?”
Peters said, “Fifteen.”
Hastorf gave him a wry smile before turning back to Lewis. “I’ve only got fourteen, Lou.”
“All right, damn it, an engineer for every plane above fourteen.”
Afterward he said to Peters, “Knew him in college. Hastorf.”
Peters nodded.
“Damn funny, isn’t it? He went with them, and of course I went with U.S., and hell, I don’t think—no, I bumped into him at some kind of trade show once. I remember having a drink with him. A machine tool show.”
Peters said, “I guess you talked over old times.”
“That’s right.” The old man turned and walked toward the door, then stopped. “Now here we are working together again.” He shook his head. “For thirty years he’s been with that steel outfit—a whole different world. Our senior year we were both on the dance committee. It’s like you were seeing somebody rise from the dead—you know what I mean, Pete?”
Peters said, “I think so. Does—— [he named the steel corporation that employed Hastorf] have the air force now?”
“Most of it’s with some oil outfit in Texas.”
Lewis shut the door behind him, and Peters touched, for an instant, the spot toward which Tredgold’s dark girl had blown her kiss. Then Peters hit Release, wondering if Tredgold had bothered to wait. Tredgold said, “ ’Lo, Peters. Recovered from my revelations yet?”
Peters smiled. “Not yet. Not quite.”
“Redbrick—did I tell you? We like to put the knife in you toffs when we’ve the chance.”
“I wanted to ask if you’d like to come—yourself—to the party tonight,” Peters said.
Tredgold whistled. “The old chap—did he endorse this bold move?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll say I suggested you drop by to make sure your girls were on the ball.”
“All right,” Tredgold said, “but I should tell you I’ve promised Mum I’ll be home before eight.”
In the main room the first guests were already drifting in, staring at the wall screen on the east wall, talking in self-conscious groups; several of them carried newspapers. Clio was handing around cocktails, and Donovan was already deep in conversation with a man who looked so much like himself that he might almost be talking to a mirror. Watching them all, Peters had the sensation of having seen just this tableau of elaborate casualness and subdued, content-free speech before. It was only when a woman in a red dress—very obviously the secretary-mistress of the Danish shipbuilder whose arm she held—entered that Peters could place it: the operatic market scene into which, in a moment, one of the principal singers was sure to come, calling for the thrill of romance or (what is much the same thing) the defense of France. Surely, Peters thought, the curtains have just parted. He looked toward the west window and saw Clio moving toward the cord even as he formed the thought.
The gray velvet rolled back to show tossing Atlantic waves. Peters wanted to incline his head toward them, a very slight bow, but someone took him by the arm and said, “You are one of the Americans?”
“Oh, yes, and you are—” He tried, and failed, to attach a name, then a nationality, to the face. Oh, well, when in Rome . . . “Senhor . . .”
“Solomos.”
“Damn glad you could come,” Peters said, taking his hand.
“What is happening in your country is so interesting,” Solomos said. “Great art will come from it—have you thought of that? Great art. The blood of a great people is stirred by such things, and there will be so much of what was old blown away.”
Someone put an old-fashioned into Peters’s hand, and he sipped it. He said, “I suppose.” He thought of the Italian industrialist who collected art, but he was reasonably sure Solomos was not he.
“The armies—do they take pains to preserve such art as your country possesses?”
“Armies?” Peters had never thought of the radicals as an army.
“We soldiers like to loot,” Solomos said. “All, that is, except the soldiers of my own country—we regard any art save our own as an aberration.” He laughed.
There was a cherry in the bottom of Peters’s glass, and he ate it. He said to Solomos, “You’re a soldier, then?”
“Oh, no. No more.”
A third man joined them; he was tall, and had a mustache. He said, “You are Mr. Peters, I take it. Where do you feel the sympathies of the American people lie, Mr. Peters?”
Peters said, “With the government, unquestionably.”
“But since May,” the tall man began, “there has been so little government left, and so little of the will to rule in what is left—”
“One knows what he intends,” Solomos said.
A fat man who had been talking to another group turned (it was a little, Peters thought, like watching a globe revolve in a library) and said, “In the science of realpolitik the sympathies of the population do not matter except insofar as they are nationalistic sympathies. In the event of a civil war the concept of nationalistic sympathy is inapplicable because to the popular mind the nation claiming allegiance is perceived to have vanished. A charismatic leader—”
Peters said, “In the Civil War regional sympathies—”
“Wait,” the tall man said. “Something is happening.”
Peters turned around and saw that Lowell Lewis was now standing facing the dark screen and rapping (though the sound was inaudible over the hum of talk) with a long pointer on the glass surface.
“He should shoot off a gun, hahaha,” Solomos said. “That would quiet them.” Peters said, “I think he’s afraid of guns,” then realized he should not have, then that no one had heard him anyway. A beautiful dark-haired girl in an evening gown, one of Tredgold’s girls, gave him a martini.
The fifteen-by-thirty-five-foot screen behind Lewis flashed with light, showing Lewis’s own face, immensely magnified so that every pore could be seen as though through a microscope. It glowered at them, all eyes and nose and mouth, the forehead and chin lost in ceiling and carpet; so magnified it assumed a new quality, like the giants in fairy tales, who are not merely big men but monsters. “Gentlemen,” Lewis said. “Your attention, please.”
The room fell silent.
“I’m afraid we are not quite all here yet, but we have a definite appointment with General Virdon, and it would be best if I began your orientation now.”
Someone said, “Will there be a period for questions?”
The giant answered, “There will be all evening for questions—I want that understood. You may interrupt any speaker—including myself—whenever you have questions. We’re not trying to sell you a pig in a poke.”
“If the attack tonight succeeds, what benefits do you anticipate?”
“I should think the benefits are obvious.”
“I will put it in another way,” the questioner continued. “Do you not feel that the real struggle is taking place on your coasts? That they are the important theaters of operations?”
From beside Peters the tall man called, “Some believe we have been brought here to witness a show victory—a Potemkin village of war.” Peters had been trying to guess the tall man’s nationality, thus far without success.
Lewis disappeared, replaced by a map of America. The real Lewis, seeming suddenly diminutive, tapped Detroit with his wand. “This city may not be known to many of you,” he said, “as it is not a cosmopolitan city, but it is a manufacturing center of great importance. Please observe that it is virtually impossible to isolate it without infringing upon Canadian sovereignty.”
The man with the mustache said, “Canada cannot allow the passage of war matériel.”
“I am speaking of industrial goods, whose passage Canada has guaranteed— machine tools and electronics. Not supplies for the troops in the east. Our aim in this campaign is to restore American productivity.”
Someone near Peters said, “And American credit.” There was a ripple of laughter.
“Precisely.” Lewis’s flat voice came loudly, cutting through the amusement. “Credit, as you know, is a matter of confidence, of trust. Ours is still a country of great natural resources, with a wonderful supply of skilled labor and unmatched management know-how. I don’t have to tell any of you gentlemen that U.S. is one of the world’s leading manufacturers, or that we are trying to obtain, currently, financing overseas, but—”
The man standing next to Peters said, “You are having difficulties. What is it you call management if you have such difficulties?”
Peters turned, expecting to see Solomos, but it was a man he had not met, a short, fat man of fifty or so. Peters said, “We mean business management. Maximizing the return on invested capital.”
“Management,” the fat man said firmly, “is management.”
Peters turned back to listen to Lewis.
“End,” the fat man continued, “you do not any longer have these resources you speak of, not so much more as other peoples.”
Peters said, “There is a great deal left.”
“Not so much for each person as Western Europe. Different, yes, but not so much.”
Lewis had a map of Detroit on the screen now, stabbed by arrows from the south and west.
On the other side of Peters someone asked, “Do you have a master plan for retaking the country?” And the tall man with the mustache said, “They surely must, but I doubt if this young man knows it, or could confide in us if he did.”
Peters recalled a conversation he had had with Lewis earlier in which he had asked much the same question. Lewis had said, “Top management knows what it’s doing,” and Peters had felt better until he remembered that Lewis was top management. One of Tredgold’s girls brushed against Peters, her back arched, her hands and a tray of hors d’oeuvres above her head; he was acutely conscious of the momentary warmth and pressure of her hips; General Virdon was talking on the wall-sized screen, a gray-haired, square-faced man whose hard jaw was betrayed by nervous eyes. Peters had seen the face before, the face of a frightened middle-management man whose career had topped out in his forties, driving his subordinates from habit and his fear of his many-faced, ever-shifting superiors. Donovan edged up to Peters and said, “He looks like old Charlie Taylor, doesn’t he? Runs the Duluth plant.”
Peters nodded. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
“I was out there two years ago,” Donovan continued. “You know, go around, see what the boys back home were doing. . . .”
Mentally Peters tuned him out. Someone new, a major, was on the screen. He said, “I regret that Colonel Hopkins was unable to return as scheduled to address this group. He left our headquarters here at fourteen hundred hours and was due back quite some time ago. I don’t know just what he had intended to tell you, but I’ll answer your questions as well as I can.” The major wore paratrooper wings; they went well with his impassive, almost Indian, face.
Someone asked, “If your colonel does not return, will you direct the attack?”
“If you mean Force Wolverine,” the major said, “I’ll lead it. General Virdon will direct it.”
From another part of the room: “Isn’t it true that you have put clerks and cooks into the fighting ranks?”
“Not as much as I’d like to.” Unexpectedly the major smiled, the boyish smile of a man who has gotten his way when he did not expect it. “They’re usually the most able-bodied soldiers we’ve got, especially the clerks. Now that the government’s out and the companies have taken over, all the goofballs with political connections can’t write their damn letters anymore.”
“Don’t you find it difficult to get recruits when you cannot pay?”
“Hell, that would be impossible,” the major said. “But we can pay something— the companies have bankrolled us to some extent, and they buy up some of the stuff we liberate.”
Lowell Lewis said, “May I add a bit of explanation of my own there, Major? Thank you. Gentlemen, this is, of course, one of the most important reasons for the loans we are trying to secure here—we feel an obligation to deal fairly with the men who are directing these vital operations in our own country. They are going to win, they will win, and we are in a position to secure those loans with the solidest possible collateral—victory.”
“A question for you, Mr. Lewis. This officer takes order from General Veerdon—”
“Virdon,” the major said.
“Thank you. General Veerdon. But from whom does General Veerdon take order?”
There was a long pause. At last Lewis said, “At present General Virdon can’t be said to be getting orders from anyone. America feels that as one of its finest commanders he is competent, during this emergency, to exercise his own judgment.”
“But he consults with you?”
Lewis nodded. “About finances and supplies, and to a certain extent concerning priorities among objectives.” Peters saw Clio Morris hand Lewis a note.
“And General Marteen, at Boston, with who—”
“Excuse me,” Lewis said, “but word had just been flashed to us that the troops are jumping off for the attack, and I don’t think any of you will want to miss that.”
Down an eight-lane highway dotted with the carcasses of burned-out auto-mobiles (casualties of the June fighting that had lost the city) men in green and brown and blue were advancing ahead of three light tanks. Some of the men wore helmets; others did not, and Peters noticed one group in the flat-brimmed campaign hats of state police. The short, fat man called out, “Ees Force Wolpereen?”
“No,” Lewis said, “this is Cougar, moving up Interstate Seventy-five from the Rockwood-Gibraltar area. We’ll be seeing Wolverine in a few moments now.”
Another voice: “May I ask how we are receiving these pictures? They do not appear to be coming by helicopter.”
“That is correct. Although we have a great deal of airpower—I believe you can see some fighter-bomber strikes in the background there—we prefer to use handheld cameras for this sort of coverage, since they permit us to contact individuals directly. I believe an officer sitting on the roof of a truck is taking this.”
“Would it be possible for us to talk to one of the soldiers involved?”
“I’ll see if I can’t arrange it.”
The picture abruptly changed to show a burning building that might have been an apartment house. “This is Wolverine: the skirmish line preceding the main force, which I believe is just now jumping off.”
A soldier with an assault rifle dashed past, followed by two dungareed sailors carrying carbines. Abruptly the burning apartment house wobbled and fell away to a street lined with buildings with sandbagged windows, then sky, then the face of General Virdon, who said, “It appears our operator has bought it, sir. We’ll have another one for you in a few seconds.”
Lewis said, “We quite understand.”
Peters, trying to make it appear that he was relaying a question from one of the people near him, asked, “Can you tell us the composition of Force Wolverine, General?”
“Certainly.” Virdon leaned forward to glance at a note on his desk before answering, and Peters wondered suddenly where he was—if he was within a hundred miles of the battle. “Wolverine comprises elements of the Thirty-first Airborne, strengthened with naval detachments from the Great Lakes Training Station and armored units of the Wisconsin National Guard—the name, as you may have guessed, has been chosen to honor these last.”
In Peters’s ear Donovan said, “Belongs to ——[he named a mining company] and we’re getting them on loan. Lou set it up.”
A tall black man said, “I represent the National Trade Bureau of the Empire of Ethiopia. May I ask a question?”
Lewis said, “Certainly. It isn’t necessary, however, for anyone to identify themselves.”
“I wish to ask my question of General Virdon.”
On the colossal screen the general nodded.
“Would you tell us your prior military experience, sir?”
Solomos, who had reappeared from somewhere, said to Peters, “A very nice party. I enjoy it. But what do you think of the attack as far as this?”
Peters said, “If we win in Detroit it will be the key to opening up the Midwest and splitting the radicals.” It was what he had heard Lewis tell a Swiss banker earlier that day.
“No doubt. But will you win?”
“We have to win,” Peters said, and found that he had surprised himself. As quickly as he could he added, “The odds are too heavily weighed in our favor. Suppose, for example, Mr. Solomos, that your company was going to open up a new territory, or introduce a new product. You would observe your competitors: not just how much advertising they are doing, but how much they are capable of doing—and how many salesmen they have, how good those salesmen are, any special advantages they may have, like high customer loyalty in this particular area. When you’ve learned all those things you’re in a position to calculate just how much it will take to knock them out of the top spot quickly, and decide whether or not you can do it. If you go in at all, you go in with about double the top ad budget they can afford, free samples, coupon offers, and the pick of your sales force—on special bonus incentives. You don’t go in until you’ve asked yourself, How can I lose? and found that you can’t imagine any possible way you could—and then you can’t. Well, that’s what we’ve done”—Peters waved at General Virdon on the screen—“and we’re going in.”
“Bravo,” Solomos said. “Magnificent. You say all that very well. But they have more men than you.”
“Ours are better armed and have air support and tanks, and I doubt that they really have more people—at least not many. A great part of the population of Detroit is still loyal to free enterprise, or just doesn’t want to get involved.”
“But that was interesting to me,” Solomos continued, “about the selling. What if the product you sell is not better?”
“Actually,” Peters said, “that hardly matters, unless it’s really pretty bad. We—I mean United Services—always try to have the best, and in fact we spend a lot on that sort of thing: R and D, and quality control. But mostly we do it because it energizes the sales force.”
The Ethiopian was saying to General Virdon, “Then you have not ever actually fought—you yourself fought.”
“What matters in combat is organization and fire support—the total fire-power that can be directed at the enemy. We learned that in Vietnam. If you can blow up enough jungle you can kill anybody. . . . Now, Mr. Lewis—sir?”
“Yes?”
“Your guests mentioned that they would like to talk directly to one of the enlisted men taking part in this operation. We have that set up now, sir.”
A young man appeared. He was handsome in a boyishly appealing way and wore neatly pressed fatigues with a PFC’s stripe. To the audience he said, “Private Hale reporting, sir.” His forehead was abundantly beaded with sweat, and Peters wondered if it was really that hot in Detroit. After a moment Hale wiped it off.
Someone called, “You are a soldier? Don’t you know you could be killed in this action?”
Hale nodded solemnly into the screen, then said, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, sir, but you can get killed crossing the street—anyway, you could in the good old days—and I think what my buddies and me are doing here is more important than a whole lot of streets.”
“And you are confident this operation will succeed?”
The soldier nodded. “Yes, sir, I am. There’s a whole bunch of good guys wrapped up in this thing, and . . .”
Peters became aware that the soldier’s voice was fading, and with it his image on the screen.
“. . . all of us know . . .” It was barely audible. The screen went white, dazzlingly bright.
“What is this?” a new voice asked. The voice was young, unpolished, and unprofessional, the muttering of the new tenant next door to himself, heard through the walls at 11:00 P.M.
Lewis said, “I’m afraid we’re having some communications problems here, gentlemen; you’ll have to bear with us.” Addressing the disembodied voice: “Is this Grizzly Bear?”
“Ken!”
“Grizzly Bear One—General Virdon—come in, please.”
As though drawn long ago in invisible ink and only now called up by heat or the ammoniacal fumes of blood, a face materialized. Peters had expected a beard and the conventional exotic, vaguely erotic, jewelry, but the boy was too young for the first and had removed—if he ever wore it—the second, save for the rhinestoned frames (each weeping a crystal acrylic tear) of thick glasses. “Well,” he said, and then, “ken.” He moved toward his screen, appearing to lean out of the illusion, his thin, unlined face suspended above them as it might have been over a cage of white rats. Then his eyes left them and he looked toward the window that was the west wall of the room, and the tossing Atlantic.
“Who are you?” Lewis asked.
“Philadelphia,” the boy answered simply. Peters saw Lewis wince; Philadelphia was in radical hands.
From the floor someone called, “We were watching the attack on Detroit.”
“Oh,” the boy said. And then, “I can get you Detroit. Wait a minute.”
The screen flashed, and was filled with a young man whose forehead was painted with hieroglyphics. He said, “This is Free Michigan Five with uninterrupted battle coverage, music, and macrobiotic diet tips, except when we are interrupted. Did everyone get to see the pig plane that crashed in Dearborn Heights?”
Someone called, “No!” but the young man appeared not to have heard. “I guess you’ve got the news that six kenkins are going to donate their bodies to Peace, and we’re going to give you that live right now. Hold on.”
A bigger man, with a bushy beard, his hair held back by a beaded band. Behind him four men and two women sat cross-legged on ground littered with rubble, their heads bent. “No Roman circus,” the bearded man said. “If you’re not considering doing this yourself, please tune out.”
“This is a television picture,” Lewis said at the front of the room. “That’s what’s giving the streaky effect. Vidlink does not do this.”
“Over there”—the bushy-bearded man waved an arm—“is what they call Cougar. That’s the big pig force attacking us from the south. I think you can hear the shooting.”
They could. The distant whine of ricocheting bullets, the nervous chattering of assault rifles and machine guns; and below all this (like the bass section of an orchestra, in which iron-souled strings, and horns, and wild kettledrums inherited from Ottoman cavalry speak of the death of spring and heroes) the doubletoned pounding of the quad-fifties—four fifty-caliber machine guns mounted together on a combat car and controlled by a single trigger—as they chewed down stone and brick and sandbags to splash the blood and brains of lonely snipers across the debris.
“It’s strictly voluntary whether you talk or not,” the man with the beard said. “We’ve asked everyone who isn’t actually thinking about doing this themselves to tune out, but probably there are a lot of them still on. You know how it is. Anybody want to talk?”
For a moment no one moved; then a thin young man with a curly beard stood up. He was wearing only undershorts, boxer shorts dotted with a pattern of acorns. The interviewer said, “This is great, man. In the last two batches nobody would talk.” He smiled. He had bad teeth and a good smile.
The curly-bearded young man in shorts said, “What do you want to know?”
The bearded man said, “I guess most of all why.”
“If you don’t know I can’t tell you. Yes, I can; because I want to turn things around. Like, everybody all the time only does it for himself or something he sees being part of him only bigger, an empire or a church, like that. I’m doing it for ants, to set us loose.”
The bearded man said, “You stoned?”
“Sure I’m stoned. Ken, I’m stoned blind.”
“You don’t look stoned, man.”
“Trust me.”
“You believe in more life after you die?”
The curly-bearded young man in boxer shorts shook his head. “That isn’t what it means. When there’s no more, that’s Death.”
He nodded. “The big dark.”
One of the girls stood. She was a thin and rather flat-chested girl, with straggling brown hair and the large, 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 I is going to live afterward if they kill me— of course not. But something will continue in existence, and there are a lot of things here”—oddly, she touched her shoulders, each hand against its own so that for a moment her doubled arms seemed wings, small and thin and featherless— “we could do without.”
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 canapés. 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. Don’t you guys care about anything?” The crew of the half-track stared at him until an officer drew a pistol and fired. The bald man leaped to one side (Peters could not tell whether he had been hit or not) and ran toward him shouting something about the Boston Braves. The officer fired again and the bald man’s body detonated like a bomb. The voice of the young man with hieroglyphics on his forehead said, “I think we’re going to catch the Zen Banzai charge over on the west side now.” There was a sudden shift in picture and they saw a horde of ragged people with red cloths knotted around their heads and waists streaming toward a line of soldiers supported by two tanks. Some of the ragged people had firearms; more were armed with spears and gasoline bombs. For a moment they were falling everywhere—then the survivors had overwhelmed the tanks. Peters saw a soldier’s head still wearing its steel helmet, open-eyed in death and livid with the loss of blood, held aloft on a homemade spear. The picture closed on it as it turned and swayed above the crowd; it became the head of General Virdon, who said, “Now we’ve got you again. My communications people tell me we lost you for a few minutes, Mr. Lewis.” He sounded relieved.
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 and your small war in Korea you allowed your army to become only a consumer of your industrial production. What will this general do if they march from Chicago while his front is entangled in this street fighting?”
Donovan, appearing drink in hand from some remote part of the room, said, “I’m glad you asked that, Colonel Solomos. You see, that’s part of our plan—to get these people out into the open where our planes can get at them.”
Solomos made a disgusted sound. “Virdon has no reserve to cover his rear?”
“Certainly he does,” Donovan said. “Naturally I can’t tell you how many.” A moment afterward, when Solomos was talking to someone else, Donovan warned Peters, “Be nice to that guy; he represents the Greek army—its business interests. Lou is trying to contract for some Greeks to stiffen things along the coast.”
Peters said, “I’d think they’d be worrying about being nice to us, then. They ought to be glad to get the money.”
“There’s not a lot of real money around. Mostly we’re talking trade agreements after the war, stuff like that.”
A familiar voice asked, “Suppose one wished to get down a bit of a flier on this row; what’s the old firm offering?” It was Tredgold.
Donovan, a little puzzled to see someone he did not recognize, said, “I’m afraid I’ve already laid out as much as I can afford.”
Peters asked, “You’re betting against us?”
“Only for sport. The fact is, I’d back either, but I shouldn’t expect you to turn against your own chaps. Ten thousand escudos?”
“You’re on.” By a simultaneous operation of instinct both looked up at the screen, where General Virdon, looking much as though he were giving the weather, was outlining his battle plan in chalk.
Tredgold called loudly, “I say, there! Those marks show where you are now, eh? But where shall you be in an hour?” The general began laboriously sketching phantom positions across the heart of Detroit. “Well, we’ll see, eh?” Tredgold whispered to Peters.
Peters asked, “Have you had a drink?”
“Well, no, I haven’t, actually. Just arrived a moment or so ago, to tell the truth. Are my birds behaving?”
“Yes, they’ve been fine.” Peters waved over a tall dark girl whose hair, gathered behind her head in a cascade of curls, suggested a Greece not represented by Solomos. She smiled at each of them in turn, and they each took a drink—Peters was conscious that it was his third or fourth; he could not be sure which. “Listen,” he said to Tredgold when the girl had gone. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”
They found chairs at the back of the room, next to the window, and Peters said, “Can you set me up with that girl?”
“You didn’t need me, old boy; just ask her. Your chief is paying, after all.”
They talked of something else, Peters conscious that it was impossible— equally impossible to explain the impossibility. Time passed, and he knew that he would despise himself later for having missed this opportunity, though it was an opportunity that would only exist when it was too late. A few feet away Donovan was taking his wallet from his pocket, making a bet with a tall German; for some reason Peters thought of the recording company which, ultimately, employed Tredgold, and their trademark, a cluster of instruments stamped in gold, recalling the slow way it had turned round and round on the old-fashioned 33 disk player in his grandmother’s house in Palmerton, Pennsylvania. Tredgold was recounting some story about a badger that had hidden from dogs in the cellar of a church, and Peters interrupted him to say, “What’s it like in England now?”
Tredgold said, “And so you see the poor blighters couldn’t explain what they were doing there,” and Peters realized that he had not spoken aloud at all and had to say again, “But what is it like in England now?”
Tredgold smiled. “I daresay we’re fifteen years behind you.”
“You’re expecting all this?” Peters waved a hand at the distant screen. “I mean, are you expecting it?”
“Seems likely enough, I should think. Same problems in both countries, much. Same sort of chaps in authority. And ours look to yours—of course, it won’t last nearly so long on our side; we haven’t the space.”
“If we win,” Peters said, “I doubt that it will ever break out in England.”
“Oh, but you won’t, you know,” Tredgold said. “I’ve money on it.”
Peters sipped his drink, trying to decide what kind of whiskey was in it; everything tasted the same. Probably Canadian, he thought. He had checked the supplies sent up by the hotel before the party began, and had noticed how much Canadian whiskey there was; the war had dried up the American market. “You could change things,” he told Tredgold suddenly, “before this happens.”
“I could change things? I bloody well could not.”
“Could have done the same sort of thing yourselves,” Tredgold said. “All your big corporations, owning everything and running everyone, everything decided by the economic test when it was forty or more years out of date. One firm’s economies only good because of prices set by another to encourage or discourage something else altogether, and your chemical works ruining your fishing, turning the sea into a dustbin, then selling their chemical foods. Why didn’t you change things yourselves, eh?”
Peters shook his head. “I don’t know. Everybody was talking about it for years—I remember even when I was in grade school. But nothing was ever done. Maybe it was more complicated than it looked.”
“Britain’s the same. These chaps everyone’s been shouting at to change things, they’re the very chaps that do so well as things are. Think they’re going to make new rules for a game they always win? Not ruddy likely.” Tredgold stood up. “Your crowd’s thinning out a bit, I fancy. I say”—he took a passing stranger by the arm—“pardon me, sir, but where’s everyone off to?”
“The cabaret downstairs,” the man said in an accent Peters could not identify. “The last show there—it is ten minutes. Then we come here again and watch again the battle. You wish to come?”
Tredgold glanced at Peters, then shook his head. “Some other time, and thank you very much. You come to Lisbon often? Wait a bit; I’ve a card here somewhere.” He walked as far as the corridor door with the stranger, then returned to Peters. “Nice chap. Hungarian or something. Hope he fancies dark women.”
Donovan, who had been standing a few feet away watching the screen, said, “In there, mister,” and pointed to the two outside bedrooms. “We can’t use the middle one—Lou’s on the private vidlink in there.”
Tredgold feigned puzzlement and looked around the room. “I don’t even see one now.”
“Two in each room,” Donovan said. “They’ll come out when they’re ready—that’s what most of the guys in the chairs are waiting for.”
“How’s the attack going?” Peters asked. He was conscious of swaying a little and took hold of the back of a chair with one hand.
“Great,” Donovan said. The door of the east bedroom opened and a short man in a wool suit too heavy for Portugal came out sweating; after a moment a man who had been smoking stinking Dutch cigarettes in a chair near the door got up and went in.
“Great?” Peters asked.
“We haven’t lost an inch of ground yet. Not an inch.”
Peters looked at the screen. It showed a parking lot, apparently part of a shopping complex. Some broken glass lay on the asphalt, and several dead men, but nothing much seemed to be happening. Occasionally the whine of a shot came, its origin and its target equally unknowable.
“This is our side,” Donovan explained. “The stuff near the screen. The hairies have still got those buildings over on the far side.”
“We’re not supposed to be holding ground,” Peters said. “We’re supposed to be, you know, going forward.” He looked at his watch. “They ought to be almost to the lake shore by now.”
“We’re regrouping,” Donovan said.
“Listen. Will you listen to me for a minute?” Peters was aware that he was about to make some kind of fool out of himself, and that he could not prevent it. “We ought to be there, doing something, helping them. I mean we’re three men; we’re not just nothing.” He tried to make a joke of it: “Tredgold here’s smart, I’m strong, and you’re Irish—we could do something.”
Donovan looked at him blankly, then slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Yeah, sure,” and turned away.
Tredgold drawled, “Another thing I forgot to tell you about l’ancien régime— the winners are those who don’t fight for it. Thought your mum would have put you wise to that already. The mums know.” After a second’s hesitation he added, “Only works while the chaps who do fight play the game, of course. No profit otherwise—no anything at all.”
“Profit?” Peters said. “You said they didn’t really want profits, and I’ve been thinking about that and you’re right—for them profit above a certain point is just taking from each other. You said that.”
“Did I? I suppose I did. It sounds familiar. Wait a sec, will you? All my bloody birds are nesting and I want a drink.”
Peters called after him, “But what is it they do want?” and heard Tredgold mutter, “To hang on to their places, I should think.”
“Ah.” Lowell Lewis put his hand on Peters’s shoulder. “You and Donovan taking care of things for us out here, Pete? How’s it going?”
“Quiet,” Peters said.
“You’re up on the battle, I assume?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. We’ve been getting quite a number of calls on the private link from other companies—they have a stake in this of one sort or another, and they want to know the situation. To keep from clogging General Virdon’s communications with that sort of thing I’ve arranged that we would handle them. Think you can hold down the hot seat for a while?”
Peters nodded.
“There’s one other thing. You remember the soldier we had on-screen? The one that hippie-type boy from Philadelphia cut off?”
“Hale,” Peters said.
“Right. He was from the PR agency, of course; but when he had made the take that fool major who’s replacing Colonel Hopkins grabbed him; he seems to have put him in one of the combat outfits. Naturally the agency is very upset. Try to bail him out, will you?”
“Fine. In an hour I’ll send in Donovan or Miss Morris, and you can bring yourself up to date.”
Peters went into the center bedroom, trying to walk as steadily as he could, though he knew Lewis had already turned away to talk to someone else.
The bedroom was empty and dark. The vidlink screen was flashing the identity of some caller—Peters did not bother to discover who. He drew the curtains at the far end of the room and looked out over the patio wall at the headlights of the cars on the street outside, and noted vaguely that a diagonal view showed him the same dark Atlantic that sometimes seemed ready to invade the big room from which he had come.
There was a bathroom and he used it. He felt that he might have to vomit, but he did not.
Communicating doors linked this bedroom with those to east and west. He tried them, and found (as he had expected) that they were locked on the other side. Outside each he listened for a moment and heard the creaking of springs and whispered words, but no laughter.
At the vidlink he ignored the incoming calls and coded the Library of Congress, wondering if there was still anyone left there. There was, a plain-looking black girl of about twenty. He asked if she had a taped summary of American history for the last thirty years. She nodded and started to say something else, then asked, “Who is this calling, please?” And he said, “My name is Peters. I’m with United Services Corporation.”
“Oh,” she said. And then, “Oh!”
He asked her if something was the matter.
“It’s just that I have this friend—not really a friend, someone I know—that works in the Pentagon. And he says they weren’t paid there at all for several months . . . but now they are getting paid again . . . only now the checks are from your company . . . Do you know Mr. Lewis?” This was said with many pauses and hesitations.
“I’m his assistant,” Peters said.
“Well, would it be possible . . . The staff here hasn’t been paid since January. . . . Most of them are gone, and you wouldn’t have to pay them, of course; I live with my mother, and anything you could get for us . . .”
“I don’t—,” Peters began, then changed it to: “I don’t see why we couldn’t put you under military administration. I mean, nominally. Then you’d be civilian employees of the Department of Defense.”
“Oh,” the girl said, and then, “Oh, thank you.” And then, “I—I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten what it was you wanted. I’m a graduate of Maryland—I really am. Library science.”
“The history tape,” Peters said. “You ought to get more rest.”
“So should you,” the girl said. “You look tired.”
“I’m drunk.”
“Well, we’ve had so many requests for that tape that we just looped it, you know. We run it all the time. I’ll connect you.”
She pushed buttons on her own vidlink, and her face faded until only her mouth and bright eyes were visible, overlaying the helmeted figure of an astronaut. “All right?” she said.
Peters asked, “Is this the beginning or the end?”
“Sir?”
“I wanted to know—” He heard the door open behind him and hit the Cut button. “Later.” The screen filled at once with incoming calls. He turned.
It was Clio Morris. She shut the door behind her and said, “Enough to drive you crazy, isn’t it?”
He looked at her and made some commonplace reply, paying no more attention himself to what he had said than she would. She said, “Who do I remind you of?”
“Was I staring?” he said. “I’m sorry. Did you come to relieve me?”
“No, just to get away from the mess out there for a while. All right if I sit down?” She sat on the bed.
He said, “You don’t remind me of anyone.”
“That’s good, because you remind me of somebody. Mr. Peters. I’m going to have a drink—want me to bring you one?”
“I’ll get them,” Peters said. He stood up.
“No, I will. Back in a minute.”
Automatically Peters seated himself at the vidlink again and pressed the first Ready button. A man appeared who said he wanted, quite frankly, to tell Peters his management was worried about the way things were going, and that they already had a great deal sunk in this thing and could not afford to lose more. Peters agreed that things were going poorly (which disconcerted the man) and asked for positive suggestions.
“In what way?” the man said. “Just what do you mean?” “Well, we clearly need to apply greater force to Detroit than we have so far. The question, I suppose, is how we raise the force and how we can best apply it.”
“You certainly don’t expect us to commit ourselves to any plan with this little preparation.”
Peters said, “I just hoped you might have a few off-the-cuff suggestions.”
The man shook his head. “I can take the question to my management, but that’s as far as I can go.”
Peters told the man that he had heard certain foreign countries might have soldiers for hire, and that it would be possible for the man to ask among his own employees for volunteers to fight in Detroit. The man said that he would keep that in mind and signed off, and Clio came in with two old-fashioneds, one of which she handed to Peters. She asked him if he had gotten anywhere with Burglund.
Peters shook his head. “Is that who I was talking to?”
“Uh-huh. He works for ——.” She named a conglomerate, and Peters, suddenly curious, asked what they made.
“They don’t make anything,” Clio said. “Not themselves. They own some companies that make things, I suppose, and some oil tankers and real estate. Pulp-wood holdings in Georgia.”
Peters said, “I guess this is different from running pulpwood holdings in Georgia.”
“Sure,” Clio said. She sat down on one of the beds. “That’s why Lowell is losing his war.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Four or five months ago when he started all this I thought they could handle it—I really did.” When Peters looked at her questioningly she added, “The companies. I thought they could hold things together. So did Lou, I guess.”
“So did I,” Peters said.
“I know. You’re a lot like Lou—when he was younger. That’s what I meant when I said you reminded me of somebody: Lou when he was younger.”
“You couldn’t have known him then,” Peters told her.
“I didn’t. But about a year ago he showed me some tapes he had. They were training tapes he made twenty or twenty-five years ago. They showed him explaining some kind of machine; he was an engineer originally, you know. He looked a lot like you—he was a handsome man, and I guess he wanted me to see that he had looked like that once.”
“You sleep with him, don’t you?”
“I used to. Up until about six weeks ago. Now I’m trying to figure out why.”
Peters said, “I wasn’t asking you for an explanation.”
“I know,” the girl said. “You just wanted to find out if it was safe to fight with me, right?”
“Something like that.”
“The formal business power structure and the informal one.”
“Something like that.”
“You still think there’s a chance we’ll win and you’ll have a career with U.S.”
Peters shrugged. “With my education I don’t see anything else to shoot for— that’s something I didn’t understand until recently: you don’t get that degree; it gets you. Now, for me, it’s this or nothing.” He moved away from the vidlink and sat down beside her on the bed. The spread was satin, and he began to stroke it with his fingers.
“You think people like Burglund are going to pull us through? I mean, really?”
Peters was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “He won’t, but I still don’t know why not.”
“I do,” Clio said. “I’ve been helping Lou deal with some of them. What do you think it takes to be a successful businessman? Enterprise, lots of guts, hard work, high intelligence—right?”
“Roughly.”
“You want to tell me how you use those things to manage a tree farm in Georgia?”
“I don’t know,” Peters said. “I don’t know anything about the lumber business.”
“Neither does he. Or if he does, it doesn’t do him any good. Look, they’ve got all this land, with pines growing on it. When it starts getting mature—ready to cut—anyplace, people make them offers for it: paper mills and lumber companies. And since some of it gets mature every year they know quite a bit about price—all they have to do is look up last year’s bids. When one comes in that looks good, they can tell that company to go ahead if it’s a cash deal, and if it isn’t they can look up their credit in Dun and Bradstreet. They’ve got a regular crew that comes around and replants when the cutting’s done.”
“You make it sound easy,” Peters said.
“No, it isn’t easy—but it isn’t your kind of hard either. It takes a special kind of men who can go year in and year out without rocking the boat in any way. People who never get so bored with it they get careless, and that know when they have to bow to the state legislatures and when they ought to threaten to fight a new law through the courts. But now you’re telling them to get out and recruit soldiers—well, most of them were in the army themselves at one time or another, they were majors and colonels and all that, at desks, but they don’t know anything about soldiers, or thinking, or running anything that doesn’t go by routine. We used to say that what we wanted was initiative and creativity and all those things, just like we said we wanted kindness and human values, and the American frontier, while it lasted, actually encouraged and rewarded them, but we’ve been paying off on something else for a hundred years or so now, and now that’s all we’ve got.” Peters had slipped his hand between her thighs, and she looked down at it and said, “That took you a long time.”
He said, “I didn’t want to interrupt you.”
And later, “We still might do it.” He took her hand in the dark. “If we can change things just a little before it’s too late we still might do it.” The girl’s body blossomed fire that engulfed and scarred and clung; naked and burning he reached the center of the room beyond, but he fell there, on the Moroccan carpet that covered the red tiles, and, though they poured tepid water on him from the spent ice buckets, died there.
AFTERWORD
This one taught me a lesson. I needed a story, lacked an idea, and resolved to steal one. Damon Runyon was good, and I had a Runyon collection; I would open the book at random, read the story, and rewrite it as SF. (If this sounds desperate, it was.)
Opened at random, the book palmed off on me “A Light in France,” which may well be the only bad story Runyon ever wrote. I clenched my teeth, swore a mighty swear, and plowed on— eventually throwing out just about everything in “A Light in France.” You have read the result. I hope you enjoyed it.