“You
sound so sad,” Silky said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Hamilton
answered shortly. “Nothing at
all”
“Is
there anything I can do?”
“No.”
He grinned a little. “Thanks anyhow.”
“We could go upstairs and go to
bed.” Willingly, she
stroked aside the
fabric that covered her loins. “I always
wanted you to have me.”
Hamilton patted her wrist
“You’re a good girl. But that won’t help.”
“You’re
sure?” Appealingly, she showed him her bare,
moistly luminous
thighs. “It’ll make us both feel better … you’d enjoy it
…”
“Maybe
once, but not now.”
“Isn’t this a sweet little
conversation?” Marsha murmured, her face pinched and drawn.
“We
were just kidding,” Hamilton told her gently. “No harm
intended.”
“Death
to monopolistic capitalism,” Laws interjected, with a solemn belch.
“All
power to the working class,” Hamilton responded
dutifully.
“For
a people’s democracy of the United States,” Laws
stated.
“For
a Soviet of Socialistic Americas.”
Around the dim bar, a few of the
workmen had looked up from their beers. “Keep your voice down,”
McFeyffe warned uneasily.
“Hear, hear,” Laws cried,
banging on the table with his pocketknife. Opening the knife, he laid it out
menacingly. “I’m going to skin one of the carrion-eaters of
Wall Street,” he explained.
Hamilton studied him suspiciously.
“Negroes don’t
carry pocketknives.
That’s a bourgeois stereotype.”
“I
do,” Laws said flatly.
“Then,”
Hamilton decided, “you’re not a Negro. You’re
a crypto-Negro who’s betrayed his religious
group.”
“Religious
group?” Laws echoed, hypnotized.
“The concept
race
is a
fascistic concept,” Hamilton confided. “The Negro is a religious and
cultural group,
nothing more.”
“Ill be damned,” Laws
said, impressed. “Say, this
stuff
isn’t bad at all.”
“Would you like to dance?”
Silky said to Hamilton, with sudden intensity. “I wish I could do
something for you … there’s such an awful despair about you.”
“I’ll
recover,” he told her briefly.
“What
can we do for the revolution?” Laws demanded
eagerly. “Who do we kill?”
“It
doesn’t matter,” Hamilton said. “Anybody you see. Anybody who can
read and write.”
Silky and some of the attentive
workmen exchanged
glances. “Jack,”
Silky said, in a worried voice, “this isn’t
a joking matter.”
“Absolutely
not,” Hamilton agreed. “We were almost
lynched by that mad dog of monopolistic finance, Tilling
ford.”
“Let’s
liquidate Tillingford,” Laws cried.
“I’ll
do it,” Hamilton said. “I’ll dissolve him and pour him down the
drain.”
“It seems so funny to hear you
talk this way,” Silky said, eyes still fixed doubtfully on him.
“Please, Jack,
don’t talk this way. It
scares me.”
“Scares
you? Why?”
“Because—” She gestured
hesitantly. “I think you’re
being
sarcastic.”
Marsha
gave a thin, frantic bark of hysteria. “Oh, God, not
her,
too.”
Some
of the workmen had slid from their stools; edg
ing their way among the
tables, they were approaching
quietly. The
noise of the bar had faded away. The juke
box was deathly still. In the
rear, the teen-agers had slipped away into the eddying gloom.
“Jack,” Silky said
apprehensively, “be careful. For
my
sake.”
“Now
I’ve seen everything,” Hamilton said. “You,
politically
active. You! An honest, home-loving girl, is that it? Corrupted by the
system?”
“By capitalist gold,” Laws
said moodily, rubbing his
dark forehead and
upturning his empty beer bottle. “Se
duced by a bloated
entrepreneur. A minister, probably.
Has her
maidenhead mounted on the wall of his library,
over the fireplace.”
Gazing around the room, Marsha said,
“This isn’t really a bar, is it? It just looks like a bar.”
“It’s
a bar in front,” Hamilton pointed out. “What more
do you want?”
“But
in back,” Marsha said unsteadily, “it’s a Commu
nist cell. And
this
girl
here—”
“You
work for Guy Tillingford, don’t you?” Silky said
to Hamilton.
“I picked you up there, that day.”
“That’s right. But Tillingford
fired me. Colonel T. E. Edwards fired me, Tillingford fired me … and I
guess
we’re not done, yet.” With vague
interest, Hamilton no
ticed that the circle of workmen around them were
armed. In this world, everybody was armed.
Everybody
was on one side or the other. Even Silky. “Silky,”
he said aloud, “is this the same person I used to know?”
For a moment the girl faltered.
“Of course. But—” She shook her head uncertainly; tides of blond hair
spilled down around her shoulders. “Everything’s so darn mixed-up. I can
hardly keep it straight.”
“Yeah,”
Hamilton agreed. “It has been a mess.”
“I thought we were
friends,” Silky said unhappily. 1 thought we were on the same side.”
“We
are,” Hamilton said. “Or were, once. Somewhere else, in some other
place. A long way from here.”
“But—didn’t
you want to exploit me?”
“My dear,” he said sadly,
“I have eternally wanted to exploit you. Throughout time. In all lands and
places,
in all worlds. Everywhere. I’d want
to exploit you until
the day I die. I would like to take hold of you and
exploit you until that titanic chest of yours rattles like an
aspen in the wind.”
“I thought so,” Silky said
brokenly. For an interval she leaned against him, her cheek resting against his
necktie. Clumsily, he toyed with a strand of blond hair
that had fallen across her eye. “I wish,” she said distantly,
“that
things had worked out better.”
“So
do I,” Hamilton said. “Maybe—I could drop by and
have a drink
with you, once in awhile.”
“Colored water,” Silky
said. “That’s all it is. And the
bartender
gives me one chip.”
A little sheepishly, the circle of
workmen had drawn
their rifles out.
“Now?” one of them asked. Disengaging herself, Silky got to her feet
“I suppose,” she murmured, almost inaudibly. “Go ahead. Get it
over
with.”
“Death to the fascist
dogs,” Laws said hollowly.
“Death to the wicked,”
Hamilton added. “Can we
stand up?”
“Certainly,”
Silky said. “Whatever you want. I wish—
I’m sorry, Jack. I really
am. But you’re not with us, are
you?”
“Afraid
not,” Hamilton agreed, almost good-humoredly.
“You’re
against us?”
“I must be,” he admitted.
“I can’t very well be anything else. Isn’t that so?”
“Are we just going to let them
murder us?” Marsha
protested.
“They’re your friends,”
McFeyffe said, in a sick, defeated voice. “Do something; say something.
Can’t you
reason with them?”
“It
wouldn’t do any good,” Hamilton said. “They don’t
reason.” Turning to his wife, he gently
raised her to her feet “Close your eyes,” he told her. “And
relax. It won’t
hurt much.”
“What—are
you going to do?” Marsha whispered.
“I’m going to get us out of
here. By the only method that seems to work.” As the circle of rifles
clicked and lifted around him, Hamilton drew back his fist, took
careful aim, and hit his wife cleanly on the jaw.
With a faint shiver, Marsha
collapsed in Bill Laws’ arms. Hamilton took hold of her limp body and stood
foolishly clutching her. Foolishly, because the dispassionate workmen were
still very tangible and real, as they loaded and adjusted their guns.
“My
God,” Laws said wonderingly. “They’re still here.
We’re not
back at the Bevatron.” Stunned, he helped
Hamilton support his inert, totally unconscious wife.
“This isn’t Marsha’s world after all”
XVI
“But
it doesn’t make sense,” Hamilton said woodenly,
holding onto the unstirring, warmly yielding body
of his
wife. “It must be
Marsha’s world. If it isn’t, then whose
world is it?”
And
then, with overwhelming relief, he noticed it.
Charley
McFeyffe had begun to change. It was invol
untary; McFeyffe could not control it. The transformation
stemmed from his deepest, most profound layer of
be
liefs. Part of and hub to his
over-all view of the world.
McFeyffe
was visibly growing. As they watched, he
ceased to be a squat, heavy-set little man with a potbelly
and pug nose. He became tall. He became
magnificent A
god-like nobility
descended over him. His arms were
gigantic
pillars of muscle. His chest was massive. His
eyes flashed righteous fire. His square, morally inflexible
jaw was set in a stern and just line as he gazed
severely
around the room.
The
resemblance to (Tetragrammaton) was startling.
McFeyffe had clearly not been able to shed all his re
ligious convictions.
“What
is it?” Laws demanded, fascinated. “What’s he
turning into?”
“I
don’t feel so good,” McFeyffe boomed, in ringing,
god-like tones. “I think I’ll go take a
bromo.”
The
burly workmen had lowered their guns. Awed,
trembling, they gaped at him with reverence.
“Comrade
Commissar,” one of them muttered. “We
didn’t recognize you.”
Sickishly,
McFeyffe turned to Hamilton. “Damn fools,”
he boomed in his great authoritative voice.
“Well,
I’ll be goddammed,” Hamilton said softly. “The
little Holy Father himself.”
McFeyffe’s
noble mouth opened and closed, but no
sound
came.
“That explains it,”
Hamilton said. “When the um
brella got
up there and (Tetragrammaton) had a good
look at you. No wonder you were
shocked. And no
wonder He gave you a
blast.”
“I
was surprised,” McFeyffe admitted, after pause. “I
didn’t really believe He was up there. I thought
it was
a fake.”
“McFeyffe,”
Hamilton said, “you’re a Communist”
“Yeah,”
McFeyffe boomed wretchedly. “Aren’t I,
though?”
“How
long?”
“Years.
Since the Depression.”
“Kid
brother shot by Herbert Hoover?”
“No.
Just hungry and out of work and tired of taking it on the chin.”
“You’re
not a bad guy, in a way,” Hamilton said. “But
you certainly
are twisted around inside. You’re more
insane
than Miss Reiss. You’re more of a Victorian than
Mrs. Pritchet. You’re
more of a father-worshiper than Silvester. You’re the worst parts of all of
them rolled in together. And a lot more. But other than that, you’re
all right.”
“I
don’t have to listen to you,” the magnificent golden
deity declared.
“And on top of everything else,
you’re a heel. You’re
a subversive, a
conscienceless liar, a power-hungry crook,
and you’re a heel. How could
you do that to Marsha?
How could you make
up all that stuff?”
After a moment, the radiant creature
answered him. “The end, it’s said, justifies the means.”
“Party
tactics?”
“People
like your wife are dangerous.”
“Why?”
Hamilton asked.
“They don’t belong to any
group. They fool around
with everything. As
soon as we turn our back—”
“So you destroy them. You turn
them over to the lunatic patriots.”
“The lunatic patriots,”
McFeyffe said, “we can un
derstand. But
not your wife. She signs Party peace peti
tions and she reads the
Chicago
Tribune.
People like her—they’re more of a menace to Party
discipline than
any other bunch. The cult
of individualism. The idealist
with his own law, his own ethics.
Refusing to accept authority. It undermines society. It topples the whole
structure. Nothing lasting can be built on it. People like
your wife just won’t take orders.”
“McFeyffe,” Hamilton said,
“you’re going to have to
forgive
me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to do
something fruitless and futile. Because, even though I realize it’s useless,
I’m
going to kick the living Jesus out of
you.”
As he flung himself on McFeyffe,
Hamilton saw the
massive, iron-hard muscles
tense. It was too uneven; he
couldn’t even begin to dent the great
visage. McFeyffe
stepped back, caught
himself, and grimly responded.