Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) (18 page)

“The fool!
 
The heart of a rabbit.
 
Have you traced him?”

“It is probable that he went to some
sort of a vacation house—”

“Find it.”
 

The officer saluted and turned
away.
 
As Zergoff swung toward us again,
he saw that George Knight had regained consciousness.
 
The General took the revolver from the table
and ambled toward Knight’s chair, smiling with smug self-confidence.
 

“Possibly, Comrade Knight, my original
approach to your re-education was wrong.
 
Here is the weapon I gave you before, still loaded with the one shell
you refused to use to defend yourself.
 
Take it, Comrade.”
 

Knight did not move.
 
Zergoff shrugged and balanced the revolver on
the arm of the Quaker’s chair.
 
“You
would not fight for yourself —but of course you would defend a helpless
man.
 
Typical
middle-class nobility.
 
Surely,
Comrade, you would sacrifice your soul to save another man?”

“If it were the will of
God.”
 

Zergoff selected a prisoner at
random.
 
He ordered Bergoll to lash this
new victim with the riding crop.
 

“Take the gun, Comrade.
 
If you fire at Bergoll, the beating will
stop.”
 

Knight held his hands folded in his
lap.
 
The prisoner cried out in agony;
blood spilled from his lacerated face.
 
In Knight’s eyes I saw a surge of pity, as if he felt the pain
himself.
 

“Here is an innocent man.”
 
Zergoff bent toward the Quaker, no longer
smiling and no longer confident.
 
“A persecuted man.
 
You can save him—at the sacrifice of a principle.
 
You lose nothing real.
 
No property; no money.
 
It costs you nothing, Pacifist!”

“Nor would I save him.”
 

Zergoff clenched his fists.
 
Slowly the color drained from his face.
 
“Comrade if you will fire the gun —simply
fire it, Comrade!—I will give you your freedom.
 
You can leave this house and go where you please.
 
You have my promise as a Soviet
General.”
 

“And all I hear is the voice of a Soviet
General—not the inner voice of God.”
 

The prisoner fell and Zergoff, quivering
with anger, waved Bergoll aside.
 
He
snapped one of his men to attention and took his submachine gun.
 
Grinning again he carried the gun to Knight
and laid it gently in his lap.
 

“Now, Comrade, fire,” he whispered.
 
“You can kill us all; you can destroy the
high command of the invasion.”
 

George Knight did not touch the
gun.
 
He glanced up at Zergoff and he
said gently, “You know this experiment is safe, too, General.
 
I will not use the gun.”
 

Zergoff leaped at him, hammering
Knight’s face with his fists.
 
When the
General’s fury subsided, the Quaker was unconscious again.
 
Zergoff said drunkenly, “Send them back to
their rooms.
 
Dragen, get me a
bottle.”
 

I carried George Knight up the three
flights of carpeted steps.
 
As I lowered
him into the chair, his eyes fluttered open.
 
In a whisper he said, “Thank God I—I had the strength to go through with
it.”
 

He lapsed into unconsciousness.
 
I stood looking at him, and I knew I saw a
miracle.
 

The First
Two Days

I.
 
The Highway—Friday, 9:00 A.M.
 
Boris Yorovich

I SAW the redheaded girl first, looking
down at me.
 
Her face was hard, but the
expression was something new to her.
 
It
didn’t fit her well.
 
Behind the grimness
I saw a sensitive, clear-eyed innocence, like the farm girls on our party
posters.
 
She had my submachine gun in
her hand; it was aimed steadily at my heart.
 

“You’re going to kill me?” I asked.
 

“Not yet.”
 

Americans were softhearted fools, the
commissars had always told us.
 
The
tension in my muscles relaxed.
 
If I
rolled against her legs, I could knock her down and take the gun from her.
 
I tentatively tried to move my legs and I
felt the numb pain again.
 
I wasn’t sure
I could walk.
 
That damned fire!
 
…

“I’m surprised you speak English,” the
girl said.
 
“That will make it
easier—what we have to do.”
 

“We were ordered to learn your language
for the invasion.”
 

I turned my head and I saw the
others.
 
An elderly couple, a dark-haired
man with a politician’s slick face, a child, and a boy about the girl’s age—a
big, half-naked, giant, who looked like a Finn or a Swede.
 
He might be the redhead’s husband, but I
didn’t think they married so early in America.
 

“You have a name,” the girl said.
 

“Boris Yorovich, Lieutenant, Soviet
Paratroops.”
 
That much we were permitted
to tell them.
 

“I’m Cheryl Fineberg.”
 
She told me the names of the others, and I
was baffled.
 
I thought this was a family
unit—the Americans cling together with typical middle-class loyalty, the
commissars had said —but only the blond giant and the old woman had the same
family name.
 

The girl tossed my gun to the old man
and bent over me, ripping the torn uniform away from my leg.
 
The hot pain was like fire when she touched
my skin.
 

“It’s a nasty cut,” she said, “and
you’re badly burned.”
 
She opened a
small, canvas bag and stood tiny bottles and tubes of medicine on the ground
until she found the drug she wanted.
 
“This should kill the infection, Lieutenant Yorovich.
 
Afterward, we’ll put a salve on those
burns.
 
How did you get hurt?”

“Our transport was shot down.
 
We tried to use our chutes, but we were
caught on the wing.
 
I was lucky.
 
Just before the crash, I got free.
 
A tree broke my fall.
 
It scratched me up a little, but that’s
all.”
 

“And the others?”
 
She sprinkled a sulfa powder over my
wound.
 

I was tempted to lie to her—perhaps
that’s our natural approach to every situation—but it might have made her less
willing to help me.
 
“The fuel tank
caught fire,” I explained.
 
“They were
burned to death.
 
It was a close call for
me, too.
 
Before I got out of that tree,
the forest around me was burning.
 
It was
hot as hell.”
 

“It was hot, I’m sure, Lieutenant,” she
agreed, “but not as hot as the H-bombs you dropped on our cities.”
 
Her innocence, then, had teeth to it.
 
Maybe this wouldn’t be the pushover I expected.
 

Why had they kept me alive?
 
Why had she tended my wounds?
 
We were enemies.
 
The Americans must have hated us.
 
I felt no hatred for them, of course; pity,
perhaps, that a system so attractive had to be destroyed because it was too
weak to defend itself.
 

I count myself a sophisticate—or,
rather, I did then.
 
I was nineteen; I
had been a university student for more than a year.
 
I knew the difference between truth and party
double-talk, but I also knew what I had to do to survive.
 

The girl motioned to the half-naked
blond, whose name was Jerry Bonhill.
 
He
put his hands beneath my shoulders and lifted me to my feet.
 
I staggered back against the rocky wall
rising above the clearing.
 

Each of the others spoke to me, except
the handsome politician, Dr. Willard Clapper.
 
He mentioned his Cadillac.
 
It
was an issue they had been talking about before I stumbled into the
clearing.
 
I leaned against the granite,
listening.
 
I gathered that the politician’s
automobile had overturned.
 
He wanted
their help to right it so he could escape.
 
No mention of them; just his own, personal survival.
 
A good party man:
 
yes, that man I understood.
 

Still it didn’t add up right.
 
This Clapper was the type who knew the angles
and the risks.
 
He must have known he was
safer right here than anywhere else.
 
The
leather-faced old man — Pat Thatcher—put an end to the talk by saying flatly,

“We have another use for your car,
Clapper.”
 

 Artist Unknown

“It is my duty as an American —a loyal
American, I may add—to offer my services to the government.”
 

“We’ll be better off at Big Bear; so
we’ll use your car to get there.”
 

“Time is of the essence, Thatcher!
 
Under the best of conditions it’s a
three-hour drive to Los Angeles—”

“And just what do you have to do there?”

“I used that—I used it only as a
comparative distance.”
 
The politician’s
voice shot up into the high registers as the old man clutched his coat and
lifted him two inches off the ground.
 

“Let me have the key, Clapper.”
 

Dr. Clapper fumbled in his coat pocket
and handed over a key ring.
 
I began to
envy the way they handled their politicians in America.
 
Maybe if we had done the same thing long ago,
we could have called our souls our own now.
 

Thatcher and Jerry Bonhill went up the
road toward the ridge.
 
Clapper followed
after them, bleating about loyalty and property rights.
 
When they were gone, Bonhill’s mother
brought me some food in partly empty tins.
 
Cheryl Fineberg stood thirty feet away, holding my machine gun and looking
for
all the
world like a partisan guerilla on a party
war poster.
 

I emptied the tins.
 
Jim Riley, the child, asked me if I wanted
something else.
 
I said I did.
 
He rummaged through the cartons of food,
reading off the labels to me.
 

“Spaghetti and
meatballs.”
 
I stopped him there.
 
“That sounds fine, kid.”
 

I took a meatball out of the can and
offered it to the boy.
 
He stuffed it
into his cheek, like a squirrel with a nut.
 

“You know, you aren’t such a bad guy,”
he decided.
 

The Cadillac came down the highway; it
was painted blue on one side, while the bare metal was exposed on the
other.
 
Pat Thatcher was driving.
 
Bonhill and Clapper sat beside him, and the
politician was still whining about his rights.
 

“Of course it’s my fault,” Clapper
admitted.
 
“I didn’t stop to fill the
tank on my way up here.
 
But that isn’t
the question.
 
If we drive to Big Bear, I
won’t have enough gas left to—”

“It looks as if you aren’t going
anywhere, Dr. Clapper,” Jerry said mildly.
 

“You have no legal right to interfere.
 
This car is mine!”

“And we’re using it.”
 

These Americans were inexplicable.
 
Without hesitation, they were applying
something very close to Communism in seizing the politician’s Cadillac.
 
Maybe the Politburo psychologists were all
wrong.
 
Maybe the Americans valued the
human being even above personal possessions.
 
If so, that was a major error in our calculations.
 
In a sense, it gave them a secret weapon that
could win the war—if they knew how to exploit it properly.
 

We packed the canned goods in the trunk
of the car.
 
After a brief hesitation,
Cheryl Fineberg shoved the submachine gun as well as Bonhill’s rifle into the
compartment and slammed down the lid.
 
The two women, the
boy
and I sat in back.
 
Thatcher was forced to drive very slowly
along the winding road.
 

Jim Riley piped up, “We can’t let them
see the Lieutenant, not in his uniform.
 
I don’t think they’d understand that he’s O.K.”
 

“So you’ve made up your mind about him?”
the girl asked.
 

“Yes,” I laughed, “because I eat
spaghetti for breakfast.”
 

“Maybe that isn’t such a bad standard of
judgment, until we come up with something better,” she answered seriously.
 
“But Jim is right.
 
Let’s get rid of your coat, Lieutenant.
 
And your rank along with
it.
 
From now on in
you’re
simply Boris Yorovich, a friend we picked up on the
road.”
 

I slid off my coat, inching the scorched
cloth over my blistered hands.
 
She
decided my woolen undershirt had to go, too.
 
The military dye and the shoddy workmanship were a dead giveaway.
 
Stripped naked to the waist
;
I made a poor contrast to the blond giant in the front
seat.
 
The redhead eyed me
abstractly.
 

“We’ll have to get you out in the sun,
Boris.
 
If you’re typical, maybe what you
Russians really need is a good, two-week vacation in the mountains—instead of
another piece of someone else’s territory.”
 

With all our endless manpower, with all
our planes and bombs, we had one small chance of victory—and only one.
 
I saw that with a terrible clarity.
 
If Willard Clapper were the average
American, they would surrender in a week.
 
But if Cheryl Fineberg and Jim Riley and Jerry Bonhill were the enemy—

Cheryl decided that my trousers,
charred, dirty and torn, would be unidentifiable, but my boots had to go.
 
She rolled the discards into a bundle and
threw them from the open window.
 
Dr.
Clapper glanced at me across the front seat; his eyes glowed furiously.
 

“You know what you’ve done, Lieutenant
Yorovich,” he said.
 
“The deliberate
removal of a uniform is desertion.
 
On
the other hand, if you fall into the hands of responsible Americans—loyal
Americans—you will be considered a spy.
 
It isn’t a happy situation, is it?
 
As a human being, I wish I could help you.”
 

As Clapper turned his head toward the
front again, Mrs. Bonhill gave a little scream.
 
“Stop, Mr. Thatcher!
 
There’s a man lying in the road.”
 

Thatcher jammed on the brakes.
 
The man moved, pushing himself up on his
elbows.
 
His face and arms were
burned.
 
The skin hung loose in flapping,
tattered tendrils.
 

“A refugee from the desert,” Jerry
said.
 

“Burned by radiation!”
Cheryl gasped.
 
“We’ll have to help him.
 
Perhaps in the village we can find some drugs
to—”

“You won’t put him in my car!” Clapper
yelped.
 
“He might be radioactive.”
 

With a gesture of disgust, Thatcher
opened the door and got out.
 
Jerry
Bonhill and Cheryl followed him.
 

Clapper moved to release the brake, so
the car would roll down on the man and solve the problem for him.
 
I reached across the seat and cracked my fist
into the politician’s jaw—three times, before the body went limp.
 

I felt exultant, as if I were mildly
intoxicated.
 
The feeling was very
pleasant.
 

I got out and limped toward the others,
to help them carry the groaning Negro to the car.
 

In that moment my choice was made.
 
Not Clapper, but Cheryl and Bonhill were the
spirit of America—the America we would never destroy.
 
I could no longer bury inside my mind the whisper
from my childhood; I no longer had a desire to do so.
 

II
.
 
The
City—Friday Dr.
Stewart Roswell

IN SPITE of General Zergoff’s
determination to put what he called our intellectual circus on the air at noon,
the broadcast was postponed.
 
Zergoff had
a logical rationalization, as the Soviet Man must; the confusion in the United
States on the first day of conquest was too widespread for the propaganda to
be effective.
 
His real reason was
something a Russian General doesn’t report to the Politburo:
 
the spiritual challenge of George Knight,
Quaker.
 

Twice during the night guards carried
Knight out of our third-floor prison for long sessions of Communist
re-education.
 
When they brought him back
the second time, shortly after dawn on Friday, the Quaker was close to
death.
 
Zergoff sent doctors to patch up
the wounds.
 
It wouldn’t do for Knight to
die—not until he admitted defeat.
 

Later Knight and I were both transferred
to the first floor.
 
We were still
prisoners, but now we had the silk glove treatment in place of the mailed
fist.
 
George Knight, carefully bandaged
and reeking of antiseptic, was laid on a leather couch and wrapped in
blankets.
 
Maria D’Orlez brought us a
splendid breakfast—the only meal, incidentally, which we had that day.
 

Knight was still unconscious, but
started to wake up after she left.
 

“During my educational indoctrination,”
Knight said when he had eaten a bit, “I did a great deal of meditating,
Stewart.
 
The world has been thrown into
a disastrous war; the destruction is beyond any horror we can imagine; and the
worst misery and torment for the homeless millions is still to come.
 
Yet, in spite of all that, we have an
opportunity to create something good out of this catastrophe.
 
There will be no victor; there never is in
war.
 
But there can be an enormous
victory of ideals—to put it in words that mean more to me:
 
a spiritual victory.
 
The fighting will one day end; it must.
 
And a shattered world will have to be remade.
 
Before we dream of cities and parks rising
over the bomb craters, we must think—this time—about man
himself
.
 
We must build a believing world.
 
Belief is a fundamental need of us all.”
 

“Belief in what,
Knight?
 
Belief is an abstract.
 
Civilizations before ours have gone berserk
in the name of belief.”
 

“Let’s say, to start with, belief in
man—in the dignity of the human soul.
 
Build on that—it’s what I mean by a believing world—and the isms lose
all significance.”
 

He had made his point so unexpectedly
it exploded in my mind like a physical blow.
 
“This mutual respect of each man for the other,” I said.
 
“By its very nature, it would wipe out
Communism.”
 

Knight shrugged his shoulders
slightly.
 
“Then, I’m afraid Zergoff
believes in a false god.
 
I’m truly sorry
for him, Stewart.
 
I say that in complete
sincerity.
 
It isn’t easy for any man to
have the fundamental nature of his being torn apart—even when it’s built upon
falsehood.”
 

“And they call you Quakers Pacifists!”

“We take arms against no man,
Stewart.
 
But we believe all men—including
ourselves—have the right to seek the inner voice of God in their own individual
ways.
 
I will die for that belief just as
readily as Zergoff would die on the battlefield.
 
The General can’t recognize the conflict on
my terms, precisely as I refuse to fight on his.”
 

“But you’re forcing him to fight on
yours.”
 

“Not at all.
 
He’s forcing himself.”
 

“A man can’t be a conscientious objector
in a psychological war.”
 

“Spiritual, please; why are educated
people, so unwilling to use that word?
 
And you’re wrong, Stewart.
 
General Zergoff can refuse to fight—I do wish you wouldn’t call it
that!—by having me executed whenever it pleases him.”
 

“By doing that now—after he’s told the
rest of us he’ll break you —it would be admitting defeat.
 
Either way you win.”
 

“It isn’t a question of winning.
 
It’s the mutual respect we must learn to have
for each other as human beings.”