I have observed that millions of people who are obliged to live in temperatures of ninety seem to do so with tranquillity and this is the message my cortex has delivered, not as gospel—not as the authority for a trance—but as submitted opinion. I have sent my brains the opposite message, in North Dakota, in the winter, with similarly good result.
The latitudes of tolerance are immense. The uses people make of them are meager. They pant too much on hot days, shiver too much on cold. About God and science, sex and business, they have hypnotized themselves to the great benefit, they think, of that bright, running dot of conscious vanity called "I." Even asleep, they finally hear little but the repetition of their own opinion. It becomes the one voice on earth—God's, of course.
The point here is—I liked the warm day.
But liking is another poor, irrelevant expression. What did it matter, now, whether I liked, disliked, or snored with apathy?
The elevator gnashed its teeth.
I entered the green-walled room and took off all my clothes but my shorts. I unpacked the typewriter-paper box that held the pages of my serial. I set up a card table andput my portable machine on a corner of it. I gathered up cigarettes, an ashtray, Kleenex for my spectacles, pencils, and my pen.
I had used the soft hair, high breasts and haunted eyes of—of what in hell was her name?—Yvonne Prentiss—as a barricade. Now, it dissipated. The sad look in her eyes was gone; her smile, like the Cheshire Cat's—that was gone. And the Ghoul came out from where it had been.
I had expected it would.
I said hello to the Ghoul.
I knew the bastard.
George T. Death.
The analgesia was absorbing, or it had been absorbed. My throat felt as if a tack were stuck in it. A stinging sensation—hardly noticeable (to the properly-hypnotizing cortex). One could scarcely expect a lavish use of clinical techniques for blocking off the mere prick of a biopsy. Still—it would be inconvenient to be reminded by my own flesh, prematurely, of what it had fallen heir to. There was stir enough in my gray matter on the topic, already; no additional goad was needed.
We death-dreaders—we victims of the marvels of science—souped up to the last ganglion by every advertisement, billboard, radio commercial, lecture, and editorial—by damned near every syllable we read or hear—to live to enjoy things (rather than to stand ready to die for the sake of ideas) are poorly prepared for carcinoma—for whatever your equivalent may be.
Or—was I afraid, not so much of dying as of the manner?
Get busy, I said to myself; you'll have plenty of time to savor these notions.
Or—was I even afraid? Shocked, rather?
Work.
There's the drug you need, boy.
I lay back on the divan, smoking.
George T. Death. I knew him of old.
In several guises.
I remembered the year I was ten, the year I had appendicitis, then peritonitis, then general blood poisoning. Sometimes, at night, the pain of my body, the pain of my tube-filled, pus-lathered guts will come back to me. And the smell. The fever. The thirst. They didn't believe in giving you liquids, then—not any—and I know what it's like to be on the Sahara without a drop to drink—and your viscera opened up, in the bargain.
I know.
Father came to the hospital during one of the spells of consciousness. His eyes were desperately gentle. "How's the fight, son?"
"Am I going to die?"
"You're pretty sick, son."
I laughed a little with my curdled belly. Too soon to answer,You're telling me.Nineteen-twelve. That was what I meant.
"But—will I die?"
His tender passion became tenderer still. "Would you be afraid to, son?"
"No."
"Do you believe in God?"
"Of course."
"Want to live—still?"
Still, he had said. He could see—what I could only feel.
"Yes."
"Then—fight."
That time I looked right smack into George T. Death's eye sockets and fought. But I was a kid then—and kids are brave if they have brave parents.
In some ways, my father is the bravest man I've ever known; in others, a coward. Who's different?
Who's different without being more coward?
There was the time in Warsaw.
My half brother Ted and I had finished our tour of Russia and come shaken across the Polish frontier—like two unconvinced readers of Dante who had gone there ourselves to be sure which part was poetry and which was accurate reporting. We found out. Our Dante was a good journalist.
In Tiflis, after too much vodka, in the biggest, best restaurant where the rats were so bold they would sit under your table and nibble your crumbs and run off a little way if you took the trouble to skid your feet at them—in Tiflis, where every kind of man goes by on the street, Negro and Turk, redhead and ash-blond, because every kind of man has poured through the Caucasus for thousands of years on the way to conquer Europe or the way back in conquest of Asia—in purple-walled Tiflis where the archeological strata are as clear as the story of the stones in a cross-cut syncline and bare human feet have drilled deep paths in the rock floor of the old Roman baths—in Tiflis where Persians still sit cross-legged on tables and play what Ted called snake-charmer music on bulbous pipes—we talked too much.
We drank too much and talked too much—to a dozen tourists who sat about the big table, waiting for their late dinner—waiting an hour or two, as you do in Russia. Tourists who, for the most part, had come from France, Germany, England, and the United States so pre-entranced with communism, so ignorant of farming and industrial process, so self-blinded to horror and despair as to imagine, even after seeing some of it, that the Soviet Experiment offered hope to any man. Not being blind—being noncommittal at the outset—we had seen better.
Wait till we get home, Ted and I told them.
We'll put the truth in America's magazines.
Police state. Prison. Human abattoir. Endless steppes of horror. Perversion of the mind. Destruction of the spirit. A factory of torture to keep the factories running. Hunger and helpless hatred. Dirt.
The old, old, old abomination in new clothes: tyranny.
We'll tell them.
It began, after that.
The GPU men everywhere we went—pretending they spoke no English and reddening when Ted and I blasphemed and insulted them in their hearing. The trip to the tea plantation in Batum—on a bus that deposited its other passengers and started up a series of hairpin turns—with a driver and Ted and myself on board. The slide—the driver jumping out. Ted and I jumped, too—but the bus didn't go over the cliff. It merely caught on the edge and hung there. (Was the driver chagrined because it failed to go over—or because we jumped also—or because he had steered so incompetently? How could you tell?)
Odessa.
The bartender offered us a bottle of Scotch—the first we'd seen in the long, grim way from Leningrad. We drank some and gave the rest away. And took the night train for Shepatovka, exulting in the thought that we would never see the UCCP again, come the morrow.
There was no water on the train.
All night, we turned on the hard boards.
In the blazing forenoon our car was shunted onto a siding and the Red Army soldiers—its only other occupants—marched away. Nothing was in sight but the sparse wheat of the Ukraine and its scalding mirages. We waited—with our thirst. Hung-over, desperate. Another train finally picked up our car and we went on—at the galling pace of communist transportation.
I found the carafe of water in the toilet—where no water had been before. Recklessly, tremblingly, we drank it—equally dividing the thankful drops. And late that day, without further ado, we crossed the border to the relaxation, the seeming luxury, the comparative freedom of Poland.
It was some days later, in the Palace Polonia Hotel, in Warsaw, when I woke with the cramps in my belly and legs. With a climbing fever.
Time spun—hours commingled in the familiar wastes of pain. I knew belly-fire. I did not know my legs could hurt so hideously or curl up against my will. I lay vomiting, fainting, crawling to the bathroom and there, too weak to lift myself, pouring out rice water. Areas of my skin turned purple.
Ted, untouched by an affliction neither of us recognized, took care of me. On the fourth day he brought a doctor and a nurse. On the fifth, I was briefly better.
That evening, on my insistence, he left me for the first time since I'd fallen sick.
He came back to the hotel alone, late, and sober—for he talked awhile with the concierge. He went to his room—beside the one where I lay ill—and opened the French windows, apparently to stare at Warsaw in the vermilion dawn. They found him on the sidewalk five floors below—dead.
When the consul came to see me, and the pleasant young men from the embassy, we were unable to make out what had happened. Had he stepped too far out? Climbed up on the roof for a better view? Had the concierge mistaken his condition and had he lost his balance? Jumped? Or had he been pushed—in the fashion of political assassins who pursue their foes into other nations so as to conceal their bloody reach?
We can never know.
The embassy and the consulate thought he was murdered.
And when I told Tom, my friend and doctor, the step-by-step progress of the first phase of my sudden sickness—when I remembered the thirst and the miraculous appearance of a carafe of water—Tom said, "I think you had cholera. It could have been in the water. Some people are immune to it. Maybe Ted was."
Maybe.
He was not immune to a five-story fall onto a cement sidewalk.
What matter?
Ted was dead.
I sent the cables.
And the second phase of my illness began. The swelling joints, the atrophy of muscles, the inflammation of nerves, the—why go into it? They sent to the largest institute for the best specialist in whatever this sequel might be.
And there was G.T. Death again.
The specialist seemed seven feet tall—a skinny man—who wore such a mustache as only the Poles can grow. He sat on my bed after the torturesome examination and told me about it, in French.
"I am afraid, my American friend, that I have bad news for you. You are a man. You will want the truth. It is a progressive malady. Your foot—your arm—already crippled. When it reaches the heart—"
He went away.
My nurse wept.
Ted was the one we counted on to be the great man. The strong, the good-humored, the precocious, the gifted, the good, the young Paul Bunyan of the family. Dead.
And now I had a turn at it.
I, the elder brother.
I, who had taken Ted on his first trip abroad.
I, who had led him to miserable accident, to foul execution, or to horrible impulse—bred, perhaps, in the vile durances of the vast nation we had traversed.
Abrupt hate of life.
I lay in that hotel bedroom—they had told me that a Warsaw hospital was to be avoided—and rehearsed the placid, polite syllables of the specialist.
He had been interested, as one foreigner inspecting another, to observe reactions.
I had therefore been careful to exhibit none.
Alone, I could react.
As now, I thought of my wife and my daughter and the insurance and the banks.
And having finished with that, I turned to rue.
Feeble fool. Wretched clot!
How little of what you felt and thought did you take the trouble to express!
When your corpse follows your brother's to the crematory in Gdynia, what epitaph?
Here lies a minor author—an excessive curiosity and a penchant for investigation—who never bothered to write up his reports.
So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase.
I knew: I never got it said.
Isn't it true of you, also?
Didn't you know—and weren't you always on the verge of saying so—when you had to go to the movies, lunch, the bathroom, bed, or the jute mill in quest of new shoes for baby?
Yanh-yanh.
Each generation learns enough too late to pass it to the next, for when the learning's accomplished the newcomers have always been educated ahead of the achievement—in ignorance.
So when will cradles be rocked by wise men and good women?
They never know it will take a thousand years, and perhaps a thousand times a thousand years; they think it will be tomorrow; that is the trouble with them—it is the trouble with them all.
I lay in the Palace Polonia, with the European cars blatting in the sacrificial street and the trains hooting across the moribund way and it vividly occurred to me that in a few more years Hitler's men would blow down these corridors and blow up those cobblestones. I lay in Jericho.
I thought, finally, about a palm frond.
There was a day in Florida when, in a mood of black despair, I stretched out beside the sea with all the cabanas of the Roney Plaza and all the dollars lying round about, reciting to myself the abhorrent antics of my compatriots and my own repulsive participation. The beach boys laughed; the handsome harlots splashed; and the purple sea came meaninglessly ashore. My eye, tired of the drenched blue firmament, came to rest on the frond of a coconut. It was a young leaf, very green, and it glistened in the sun like lacquered metal.
While I regarded it, the leaf had a sudden meaning—the meaning of life and growth and Evolution. Not the idea—but the felt significance. (You would say, doctor, that some biochemical process completed itself in that instant—a change came in the endocrines. Or you, doctor, that the individual unit shares with the group the Toynbean shift-to-the-opposite—the yin-yang—and hence, sometimes, joy-through-funk.) Anyhow, I looked at the damned palm frond and a great peace came over me, followed by an excitement. I decided to leave the American scene and make a personal inquiry of Hitler's Germany and Mr. Stalin's Russia and to take my brother along.
I got up and said so. The purple sea also took back its meaning, then, and all its other meanings. And that was that.
I flew with gulls once more, skittered with flying fish, and bathed in the limpid, tepid surf with every sand flea.
That is what I remembered, exactly, in Warsaw where I lay dying, as usual.
Remembering, I determined to go back to that sea.
My shoulder was disjointed and full of slime. Certainly. My left leg was also paralyzed. I was ankylosed and calcified and atrophied. But of course. Agony—sic. What was left of me might be a stumblebum but the outside part could somewhat swim still and the inside part could fly.
My brother was dead.
There was work to do.
To hell with Dr. Jerkski, great man of the Institute.
I would frustrate every specialist in Poland.
Take up your bed and totter, Wylie.
It required a year for the doing—in Warsaw and Paris, Manhattan, Connecticut, and California.
Then I had entirely recovered.
Trauma excepted.
Now that is what I thought of in the space of time it took to smoke a cigarette on my divan at the Astolat—that, and several thousand more items.
That is why, so to speak, I had nodded courteously at the Ghoul.
He is always hanging around.
One has only to turn one's head fast enough—and there he is.
Most people, by the cortico-schizoid mechanism I have described a few pages back, partition him off.
He is not behind me, they convince themselves.
But he is.
There are always exactly enough Ghouls to go round. Billions of people apply the blindfold technique in another way:
He is not a Ghoul, they say, but the God of Heaven.
The Eternal Grocer, who will dole out milk and honey forever.
The Great Conductor whose baton will direct my Everlasting Harp.
The Keeper on the Inexhaustible Preserves who will set infinite game before my arrow in the Happy Hunting.
Chairman of the Greens Committee of the Elysian Fields.
The Sublime Pander who will fit an houri to me on the hour, each hour, and I shall be the Paramour of Paradise.
The Universal Usher who will take the stub of myticket and lead me to my seat in the Reserved Section at the Right Hand.
What asinine measurements of man are furnished by his Heavens!
My own opinion of the Functions of the Ghoul is different, as I am gradually trying to imply here. And I am certain, furthermore, no one really believes, in his heart, that such heavens be. His mouth says it, his cortex confirms it, and his heart gives him the lie; so he has his Hell.
For how could Nature come to as tawdry an end as Heaven?
Even human nature?
I told the Ghoul, after this sweating, to get behind me, like Satan, while I cut my serial.
4
This is the way of it.
You take out an adjective here, an adverb there, a prepositional phrase yonder—and so gain a line.
You make the first mark on a tally sheet. When you have four marks set parallel, you cross them with the fifth. When you have a row of twenty-eight marks, you have removed one page. When you have forty of these, you have completed the task—provided they are distributed through the installments in such a fashion that each part will be tailored to the desired length.
It was a story of manners—a light thing, with a plot.
I had enjoyed writing it.
I did not enjoy the cutting.
Every syllable scratched out is likely to take away some quality of a character upon which a subsequent event will turn. It is necessary to remember to the last detail what is removed and what remains. The elimination of a noun in the first installment may reduce the impact of a scene in the last. The contraction of a scenic description may ruin thecomprehensibility of the hero's actions later on in the tale. And, when the most careful economy has been achieved, the goal of decimation may still be at a distance so that the writer is obliged to select this situation, that dialogue, yonder tender scene, and recast the whole in briefer compass, the while omitting no cogent phrase or fact, however trifling.
It is a big puzzle and a hard job.
It took me, I should think, another quarter of an hour to stow away my Ghoul completely, divert attention from the prick in my throat, and become immersed in the running words.
My editors say I am a good professional.
And that, my liberal-intellectual critics add, is all: a capable hack.
O liberals.
O cognoscenti.
O critics.
I give you my death-wish—and the atom bomb for its consummation.
Why didn't you study it sooner?
You copied into your literature whatever you saw on washroom walls—and little else—while brighter boys copied Bohr's equations from blackboards.
Both were true.
Both were real.
One was old.
The other new.
And where are you tomorrow?
Anyway, as I was suggesting, I write for money, usually.
I enjoy it—the writing and the dough. If writing isn't fun, I give it up. And I spend the money.
Here today and marlin fishing tomorrow.
Here today and at the couturiers with Ricky tomorrow.
Night club today and novelette tomorrow.
Serial today, book, movie, play.
Sarcophagous tomorrow.
I am at least one two-billion-three-hundred-millionth responsible for the contemporary world and bear the burden gamely. Why not take up my burden and follow me as I, too, follow? The burden of Light.
Or why not take up, better than I have, the same burden and improve upon my shambling progress?
I am the occasionally somewhat rich man who finds the Kingdom of Heaven at hand this day—and the next, discovers in his private concerns and small affluence that the door has narrowed down and his camel is balked by its load. The little acre I have dedicated stays where it is but wants, sometimes, for cultivation. I have sinned; that is why I understand sin. Men have made enough things for me to last fifty lifetimes; I have given them away for newer, more expedient things. Enough substance has been dug out of the earth and grown upon it and sold to me to support a tenementful of more intent philosophers. And I cannot compare myself favorably with other men: perhaps they lacked my environmental opportunities—a Princeton education, for instance—or a youth's experience of Montclair, New Jersey. (What grim lessons!). If, furthermore, my assigns perish with the yuts and their barbarous impedimenta, they will have no reason to remember me kindly.
But these are my problems.
And these are your problems, too.
Do you repent at all?
Or ever act?
Or merely join another lunch club and boost your voice loose? What fagins broughtyouup?
Old Bob Durfree, editor of the magazine for which I'd written so many yarns about Cynthia Davis and Cynthia's silly mother and Cynthia's patient pop would welcome this one. My short stories, my serials, were a branded feature of Bob's magazine. Struggling years! A hundred serials—froth composed of my blood and sweat and tears—were written for nothing. And then, at last, Success. Chimes in the mercantileestablishments! Fiesta for salesmen! Orgasms in banks! The Cynthia stories belonged more to Bob Durfree's magazine than to me—and nearly as much to the taste of millions as to my taste, although I sometimes put spices in the meringue that offended the flaccid palate of Mrs. America and the lovely abscess she rears as a daughter.
At any rate, I poured it out on Bob Durfree's yarn because of the dignities I have referred to—and in light scorn of those critics who can never tell if silver is alloyed in gold since they do not know what gold is. They will follow their wrong guesses into oblivion. Every time they cried Eureka another true prophet went flat on his face.
It was about five o'clock when my phone rang.
I was surprised it hadn't rung sooner.
People are always calling me up. They want me to talk to Lions, Elk, Moose, and other quadrupeds. I never do. They want me to go on Information Please, or Town Hall, or Breakfast at Sardis. I never go. They want to know what boat to charter for a day's fishing. I always tell them. They want to argue. Me, too.
I thought, friends, relatives. Max, maybe—my brother. I thought, We, the People, asking me to appear as a Voice.
"Sorry—I'm all booked up. Busy. Going to die in a few weeks. Yes—exactly. Keeps you jumping."
"Phil! This is Paul! I'm down in the lobby!"
"Well, come up." I gave him the room number.
Paul is the eldest of my nephews—twenty-five now, or perhaps only twenty-four. His last name's Wilson. He is my older sister's only son and he reminds me of myself at that age, sometimes. Gaunt and hectic—continually outraged by the course of human events and continually upset by his own doings as well as his failures to do. Erudite in many things. Phenomenally naïve, all but unteachable, in others. (Maybe I haven't changed as much as I think.) And there is a difference between us of great magnitude. Where I was an interested but lazy mathematician, Paul is a genius; where I wascaptivated by every discovery of every science and adept at none, Paul was captured in earliest childhood by physics. We are temperamentally alike, to some degree. But he concentrated and achieved where I dispersed my attention and mastered nothing. He has—as I have—the familial facility for expression; this is the common property of so many of my relations that when any of them turns out to be inarticulate he is regarded as a sport.
Paul's mother, Georgianna Wylie, was such. Born two years before me, still more years before my brother, sister, half brother and half sister, and dispatched to an aunt after the death of my mother—which occurred when I was small—she was always a nebulous member of the family. A cumbersome, religious woman who wore plain-colored dresses—brown, as a rule—and rolled her hair in tight coils, like rusty screendoor springs. An introvert. She sang in the choir somewhere and studied for the missionary field. She never made it. Some remote Wylie cousin fell ill and Georgianna was drafted to take care of her. The illness turned chronic and young Georgianna's assignment became penal servitude. She spent twenty years or so as a peon in a prairie village that straddled a State border. What was never bloom, faded gradually; but it did not quite die out. One night in Minnesota at a camp meeting she met a chemistry professor who had gone to the service for a lark. He had it. He got Georgianna pregnant on the spot—or within harmonium-shot of it—and she died giving birth to Paul.
Wilson, the professor, meantime had done the right thing by her; they were married by an uncle of mine.
"Georgianna," my aunt used to say, "was the most docile, uncomplaining human being on earth. A true Christian. If she hadn't met that vile seducer—that atheist, Willy Wilson—she'd be serving her Lord in some distant land to this very day. She expiated her sin, believe me. The night she died, she said so. 'I'm going, Effie,' she told me. 'Bring up the boy in the Master's steps.' I failed her! Willy Wilsoninsisted on taking the boy—and brought him up a nonbeliever, like himself. Poor Georgianna!
"'I know He has forgiven me!' Those were her last words—excepting for what she said after the delirium set in."
My aunt would frown and shake her head at that point. "Two more mortal hours she lay there, twisting and trying to sit up—with me holding her. And the whole time she cursed the name of Wylie with words you wouldn't believe a girl like that would know. Of course—she meant Wilson—it's a common befuddlement. But whenever I think of the language she heaped on that evil man, I know what human torture is!"
It was one of our favorite family stories.
And, needless to say, Georgianna didn't mean Wilson at all. He's still a good chemistry prof—a husky, redheaded guy whom everybody likes. Georgianna was cursing her own blood the way people curse the day they were born—and for sufficient reasons. She had glimpsed—all but too late—the hypocrisy implicit in Scotch Presbyterianism. The strong, lucid mind that burned in silence beneath her clumsy exterior had finally cut through that wall between reason and instinct which men call Faith. Just before her "delirium" Georgianna had realized that Willy, not Jesus, had forgiven her (or would forgive her) for deserting him after their marriage, for working as a farm cook, and (as the result of over-fatigue) for falling down a back stairs in the ninth month of her pregnancy, thus bringing about her own demise through stubbornness and vanity. She had figured out the family—and Willy too. She got at least one moment of transcendent understanding, and followed it with two sound hours of profanity—crowding into the racing moments as many repressed sensations of her life as she had time for. Not a bad job, on the whole.
After Willy had explained it to me, I'd always wished I'd investigated Georgianna more attentively.
There hadn't been much chance.
Paul—her son—came in. The one we were so proud of.
Pushed the door open, kicked the book away, and let the automatic closer snap the lock. He took off a seersucker jacket that had flapped around his slatty shoulders. He picked up the book and said, "Jesus Christ. I thought I explained quantum mechanics to you ten years ago!" He went through my bedroom to the bathroom. A firm, pounding stream. He kicked the toilet handle, missed, kicked again—and it flushed resentfully. His jacket had fallen to the floor. When he returned, he kicked that. It rose in the air and he caught it. He whipped off his shirt.
"Buy me a drink," he said.
"What?"
"Scotch and soda."
"Order it yourself—and order me a coffee."
He went to the phone. I cut one more line, and then tidied up the bridge table, stacking things so I could start in quickly where I had left off.
"I didn't know you were in town," I said.
"I didn't know you were. Took a chance. I had to see a gook who lives near here—so I stopped in. How's Ricky? Recovered now?"
"Swell."
"What you down for? Cheating?"
"Work."
He considered that, pinching the flared nostrils of a long nose, peering luminously over his fist, wrinkling his forehead. "It's possible, anyhow. You're getting pretty old."
"I'm not too old to take you on, Spare-ribs."
His dark eyes twinkled. "No. You're getting oaken, Phil. Late maturing and frost resistant. Someday, though, I'll be like that myself—and then you'll be a wizzled shard who goes around feeling young girls. I'll bring over a pretty one to bait you up, and when you reach for her, I'll wallop you till they have to put you in an iron lung."
"By God, I believe you will!" I was laughing. "How's physics?"
His face became taut. "Don't you know Congress will crucify you for merely asking?"
Paul worked for Johann Brink, at the Belleau Lab. For the Atomic Energy Commission. Brink had picked him from a prepared slate of geniuses at M.I.T., Caltech, and several other schools. Paul was that good.
I said, "Congress has got one of my arms pinned down already and a hole in my foot, besides. If you don't want to tell me how physics is—I'll tell you. Put it this way. There was an atmosphere at Eniwetok you didn't like—"
"What do you know about that?" he said swiftly.
"I just listen to what Truman says," I answered, "and then I extrapolate." I shook my head. "It's funny. As soon as anybody has a dose of military security, he gets the soldier's creed—assumes people stop thinking because certain thoughts are classified. Everything about atomic energy is secret, hunh? Well—who has Brink been seeing, lately? Who was he photographed with? Old man heavy water. So now you come in here—looking like an underfed caribou with the wind up—and what must I think? That your little cadre of nuclear physicists is fooling with the hydrogen-helium cycle and getting hotter than the rotor in a turbo-jet. You're scared you'll figure out that one-thousand-times-more-powerful-than-Nagasaki bomb. The atomic cloudmaker. The continental broom. The universal gene-mangler. Or crack light metals or separate isotopes by heat. Don't tell me if I've read your mind, doctor. I would rather be calm in my surmises than fearful I might say something in my sleep that could be checked. Do you guys really think it is smart to cause officials to go around positively announcing that the number of bombs we have in our beloved stockpile is smaller than anybody who knew the prewar radium production could figure out? When you discuss atomic 'weapons' in the press—without specifying—doesn't it seep into the dull heads of uslaymen that, for instance, hot isotopes would make a nifty charge for ordinary high-explosive bombs—against warships, for example? And can't anybody make a pile, now—and start the isotopes flowing? Crop-dust cities? And don't you incessantly talk too much about how long it will be before you can do thisa and thata? Remember when your spokesmen were telling us of the inutility of thorium? Cannot we, the plain people, add and subtract neutrons in our heads? Aren't you protesting too much now about how long it will be before you can push a couple of hydrogen atoms into one helium, with great and beneficial new release of energy?"
Paul was unamused. "Someday G2 is going to walk in here and walk out with you."
"Thought control," I said. "Never worked. Never will. Whenever a nation uses it, you can know that nation's washed up." The coffee came in—and the highball. I signed the check and tipped Karl. "Danke schoen," I said, and turned to Paul again. "G2 came after me long ago. I wrote a story before the war about uranium bombs and how they would be made and what they'd do—and it wasn't accepted until 1945. It went to censorship automatically—and when the censors read it—they hit the ceiling. Thought there was a leak in the Manhattan District. The only leak was in their heads. They sent a major out after me—like the hounds on the tail of Uncle Tom—"
"I recall the escapade," Paul said wearily. "You lead such a harrowing life, Mr. Wylie. And tell about it over and over."
Nobody likes that one. I said, "Sorry," and carried Paul his drink. He was sitting in one of my chairs; he had his legs on another; his elbow rested on my coffee table. I saw in my mirror that I was flushing a little: I felt embarrassed.
But Paul had already forgotten chiding me. "Phil," he said, jiggling his glass to cool his psyche with the ice-clink, "it gets worse and worse. It is beyond horrible. Past hideous. More than unthinkable. And it surpasses the unbearable."
"How about—tiresome?"
He remembered again—and grinned. "Quid pro quo? Okay. What do you want to talk about?"
"It," I said. "You. Any damned thing you please."
Paul sipped his highball. And that was another difference. At his age, I hadn't sipped. I had guzzled. He appeared to be thinking over what he would like to discuss—as if it were a scientific problem. Finally he said, "Phil, what's the matter with us?"
"Us who?"
"Physicists."
"Religion," I said.
"The faith of skepticism?" He leered at me. "If all you've got on it is that old chapter about the law of opposites, never mind."
"Lack of skepticism," I answered.
Paul chuckled. "Goody! Go ahead."
"The religion of a physicist is his belief in pure reason. He has done so well with it that he regards it as the whole of consciousness. He is like a man who has discovered the shovel. It digs so much better than his hands that he never looks for—"
"—the steam shovel?"
"Dynamite."
"Ouch!"
I laughed. "Take theBulletinof the Atomic Scientists. This journal has been coming to me ever since you guys got frightened by What-Hath-God-Wrought-Now. I've been reading it for so long that I maybe ought to carry a pocket radiation meter to be sure I don't read it too much. What is this noble publication? An inquiry, it claims, into the means for controlling atomic energy and assuring world peace."
"And a pretty complete, exhaustive inquiry, too."
"Is it? Is it even a scientific inquiry? The atomic bombwill never go to war by itself. Men will drop, toss, or convey it."
"Sure. And theBulletinhas taken up every known means by which people can be told what atomic energy is, and why it must be controlled, and how to do that. Every step of the debate in the House and the Senate—and the debates in the United Nations—has been followed. Every idea my fellow physicists could hit on has been aired—"
"With no result."
"No result, my eye! If we hadn't ganged up to make Congress see that atomic energy was more than a military matter—soldiers would control the whole business right now."
"Grant that. You did get the AEC appointed. The brass doesn't run the whole domestic show. But the world show is run entirely from the viewpoint of possible war."
"Do you expect the physicists to be able to do anything about Russia and the Iron Curtain—when all the statesmen of all the nations can't drive a pinhole in it?"
"Look. There are too many places where you lads aren't really scientific at all. You run a magazine to investigate ways for avoiding atomic war. Men make war. But never in yourBulletindid I once see an article about human motivations. An article by a top-notch psychologist. A digest, even, of the existing science of human personality—and how that might apply to war, to atomic bombs, to international relations."
"Psychology isn't our business. We're specialists."
I slightly sneered at him. "Son, when you are trying to stop wars, psychology is the only business you're in! You're in the business of trying to answer the questions about what makes men tick—including the tick they make these days that sounds so much like an infernal machine. But you think that's still the reason—business."
"A lot of big shots," Paul answered, "have called on the psychologists to contribute. Asked them to speed the workon their science and the science of sociology—so we'll have a solid technical basis for establishing peace."
"Yeah. They have. And not one God-damned super-brain in the barrel has stopped to note for a moment—so far as I'm aware—that the psychologists are 'way ahead of them. The science of personality—of behavior—of consciousness and instinct—is well along. The psychologists could tell them why men fight. They could tell them why—so far as present evidence indicates—men are going to go right ahead having wars—atomic bombs, germs, and all—into the far, foreseeable future."
"Why?" he asked mildly.
"Oh—because they exploit individualism and never take any responsibility for it. Their hostilities and aggressions, frustrations and fears—add up, inside their groups, and burst out, since they're never even noticed, let alone dealt with, on the personal and private level, where they originate."
"So you have written," he grinned. "So what? Should we pure scientists simply say that peace is hopeless? Quit cold? Or try for peace with what we do know?"
"You and your pure science! Pure is a word that should be forbidden all of you. What's pure in a science that deals exclusively with the object and rules out the subject doing the dealing?"
"Just," Paul answered, "the result. If we hadn't ruled man out of man's investigations, we'd still believe the earth was flat, the sky was a cup, and the stars were holes in it. We'd still be premedieval—"
"Yet—when you did establish the objective facts to a considerable degree—set up physics and chemistry and biology—did you boys then turn that knowledge and that method upon yourselves?"
"You claim," Paul answered airily, "that the psychologists have done so."
"Yes. And you needn't pretend I have no right to makethe claim. You scientists, self-styled, let a few doctors—ridiculed by the public and unassisted by you—do the investigating of the consciousness you were applying to electrons and protons. They used your method—the empirical method. They have announced their results steadily for the past half century. You never even looked them over. So now what are you? Big cheeses in the high-tension labs. Mere mice, around the psychological clinics. Hunting in yourBulletinfor a way to stop war when, really, you haven't a good kindergarten knowledge of what war is and how it comes about."
"If there were enough psychiatrists, then—we wouldn't have to worry?"
"Be sarcastic!" I said. "All you birds need a good psychiatrist." He winced at that, rather sharply, I thought. But I didn't let up on him. "Guys like you are aware enough to see that perhaps Hitler could have used a psychoanalysis. You are not aware enough to see that any president of any big engineering school could use it, too. Why? Because you think pretty much as he thinks. And neither of you can see that your thinking is largely emotion and only somewhat logic. The great blunder of science was to imagine that science could be indefinitely developed for the physical benefit of man and never concurrently applied to his subjective needs, states, motives."
"It was hard enough for the early scientists to get across the simple truth about objects. If they'd tampered with man's beliefs—they'd all have been burned to death."
"What about you later scientists, then? Would anybody burn old Johann Brink to death, today, say for studying Freud?"
Paul chuckled. "The picture is beyond imagining."
"Yeah. And I'm sick of it. All your eminent predecessors rushed ahead investigating stars and bugs and drugs and air currents and left any inquiry into man himself to philosophers—who were usually ignorant even of physical science—or to James and Wundt and a few trying, solitary people. You didn't ever really apply science. Not all science to all reality. You just promulgated pure science along exactly half of its possible lines—and called it a job. Looking forever at the light outside—and never at the interior dark. Justifiable in a sense. But not bright. And not really scientific at all."
"Hear, hear!"
"If the Greeks had worked out math and aerodynamics and built flyable air frames—without bothering to study the problem of engines, we would regard them as remarkably skillful imbeciles. They would have littered old Attica with the fusilages of Piper Cubs and maybe B-29's that couldn't get off the ground. In a sense, that's what they did do: they pushed knowledge ahead along certain lines a certain distance—and never followed through. You goons are still doing the same half-baked job."
"You want us to quit studying physics and start picking up stuff about the Oedipus complex and sibling rivalry?"
"It's too late. That's the assignment for the next civilization."
He just looked at me.
After a while, I went on. "You birds say that knowledge is power—yet all your knowledge turns into impotence when you want it used for human harmony and peace. What is the power, then?"
"Let me guess. Instinct. You see—as an old Wylie reader—"
I heaved a cushion at him and enjoyed a little of my second cup of coffee. "Instinct. You dumb bastards! If you were really dedicated to science, as you say, the last war would never have happened. And the next one wouldn't be forever imminent. You say you believe that scientific knowledge should be free to all. Freedom of knowledge, you say, to put it backwards, is essential to science. But every time the nations get miffed at each other—you lice lock yourselves up in the national labs and go to war against eachother as much as any soldier. The old herd instinct. The old ego. Intellectual fealty to scientific principles? You have none!"
"I kind of resent that," Paul said slowly.
"You resent the accusation. We who are about to die of the fact resent your behavior. Or should. If you pure scientists were pure guys purely devoted to science, Hitler could never have hired a dozen of the lot of you in Germany, or Stalin coerced six. If you had insisted on keeping science free—the Wehrmacht could never have been armed. If you had been scientific men, not men practicing science—even granting you felt it necessary to wipe out the Axis—when the deed was done, you could simply have published all the atomic facts and be damned to the politicians and the so-called patriots. Left mankind to work out its destinies in a climate where knowledge was still free. As it is—Russia knows enough to wipe up America in a few more years—the patriots and politicians are living in a fool's paradise—yourBulletinsweats monthly to explain that sinister fact—and all you gained by assenting to the current lockup of freedom of knowledge is a bureaucratic sweatbox to do your work in—and a terrible endless case of jitters. You don't understand behavior well enough to predict the results of your own. Others do. And by far the most probable result of the failure of pure scientists to behave purely toward science will be the end of the possibility of further top-level scientific investigation for a century or two."
"You think I should sit down and write out all the atomic secrets I know and print them and scatter them from a plane?"
"I do not. I think you should sit down and face the fact that science is precisely as hypocritical as religion—essentially no different from it—hamstrung in the opposite tendon by the same egotistical means. Sinful—call it. Guilty. The scientist can see the lack of logic in religion—so he rules it out. He doesn't see the import of its universal existence. The religious man can see that physical science offers precisely nothing of value to his inner sensibilities—but fails to see the meaning of logic. So he neglects to learn science and applies logic only when it flushes his toilet or eradicates his foes. You're both apes."
Paul swallowed the last of his ice. For a moment he sat without speaking, the reflected sunlight softening his sharp features. Then he said, "I hate to think anybody understands anything I don't. And I strongly suspect you do."
"I strongly know I damned well do."
There was another pause. Paul pulled his nose. He drew a breath to speak—and gave up the impulse. His eyes turned inward. Little by little, his limbs sagged. An expression of the utmost melancholy passed like a shadow over his face and was followed by lines of resolution—lines I did not like because, visible in them, was conflict—unacknowledged discontent mixed with unknown resolve.
"I'm in a terrible mess, Phil."
"Aren't we—and so forth?"
"I want to quit."
"The Lab?"
He nodded. "There is something positively bestial—in the worst sense—about going any further with schemes to turn physical theory into mere implements of death."
"Instinct coming to your rescue. I thought you liked the work?"
"I did. As long as it was a series of problems. Now—it's getting to be a cold choice of means for engineering murder. That's no fun. It's like spending all your time figuring out how to destroy your own home—after you've already hit on half a dozen nifty ways."
"Why not quit, then?"
"Brink—for one. I like the old guy. I'm indispensable to him—I at least pretend. And I feel loyal."
"Talk it over with him."
"No use. He's got the idea that he's engaged in some sort of holy mission—a personal war against all tyranny, right or left. That he, and we, and guys like us, must keep out in front—from the weapons standpoint—until every tyrant's done for."
"Tyranny, Paul, isn't a gent. It's something inside everybody."
He drew a long, sighing breath and abandoned the subject. Soon, he grinned at me. "Phil, I came as near praying you'd be in town today as I get to prayer. When the telephone operator put me through—I like to fainted with gratitude."
"How much," I asked caustically, "do you want to borrow?" Then I wondered if I ought to lend anybody more money.
He laughed. "Money, a guy like me can always use. Someday, though, I'll take time out and invent a quicker way to make ice cubes, or a better zipper, and get rich and pay you back. I keep a record of the debt on a letter I got from Fermi—a cherished possession."
He would, too, I thought. Get rich and pay back—Ricky. "Hundred bucks?"
"That wasn't why I wanted to see you. But thanks." He fumbled in his mind for some sort of beginning. "Oh, hell," he finally said. "What I want to say can be put in two sentences. And they're the hardest two I ever had to speak. I haven't tried them on anybody yet. But I've got to—with someone. Meaning you. It goes like this." For a full minute he sat there saying nothing. Then he pushed back his rather long chestnut hair and looked at me squarely—with an expression in his eyes that I would remember for a long time, if I had a long time to remember in. "I'm in love. And the girl's a whore." He turned away from me, after that, and looked toward the window, toward afternoon blue sky into which the sun still pointed. His chin was shaking.
I thought of several responses and picked one carefully."All right. It's said—the whole thing. It leaves me fairly undisturbed, Paul."
"I guess you don't understand—don't believe me. I mean it. The girl actually was—a professional tart. A call girl. What they hold to be a high-class one."
"So I gathered. I've known several cases."
"It—" He swallowed hard a time or two. "Mind if I have another Scotch?"
I shook my head.
He ordered and began once again. "I didn't know it—like a dope—for a long time. I can't even tell whether or not knowing it right off—would have made a difference. I suppose it would. I suppose I'd just have been bitter—because I couldn't afford her. The name's Marcia."
"Nice name."
"Yeah. Look, Phil. It was last winter—after I got back from Eniwetok. Some of the directors of a big corporation where I'd been called in for a conference asked me to a party. Marcia was there. I suppose that the other girls were the same." He looked at his knuckles. "Scratch that. I know they were—now. Nobody said anything about it. Just—big corporation hospitality for people like me, whose advice might make them a few more millions. I sat around drinking cocktails and having a swell time and thinking that the girls had got prettier while I was in the Pacific, working. I didn't know they were to take home—like candy—compliments of the management. And Marcia didn't mention the fact when I asked her if she'd care to ditch the binge and have supper just with me."
"No."
"She merely went. She went—and was charming. You see—she caught onto my naïve assumptions, and she was being paid, and it amused her to be thought of as just an ordinary girl—a debutante, or the like—for whom a smart young physicist was falling like a ton of bricks." He lookedat me again. His explanation was coming more easily. "Do you get the picture?"
"She must be bright. As well as attractive."
He nodded. "She has a sense of drama. All I did—feeling suffused that evening with love—was to take her to her apartment and bid her a pleasant good night. She asked me in—sure. Even tried to argue me in. But I was thinking in terms of the long and sentimental pursuit. Or—at least—decorum. Not-the-first-night, baby. That's me. Gentleman of the old school. I extracted her phone number—it wasn't difficult—and escorted her home, and went out to Brooklyn to my flat—and dreamed into my pipesmoke. Happy me."
He was silent for so long that I said, "And then?"
"I called her up the next afternoon. She was busy." A muscle shaped itself in his temple, twitched, vanished. "So I made a date for another evening. We had dinner and danced around—at the Stork. On dough you lent me. And that evening I accepted the invitation to go into her apartment with her. You see—she wasn't merely diverted by a dope—but she felt she owed me something. Something that corporation had paid for. Only—"
"It was different for her."
He seemed surprised. "How'd you know?"
"I'm thinking of the difference that would understandably exist between a guy who was paying—and a guy in love with you."
"It upset her."
"So she tried to duck you."
He was still more surprised. "She told me she'd be out of town for a couple of weeks."
"And you waited—"
"—the all-time eager beaver. And phoned. She sounded—odd. She asked me if I'd like to come up to her place for dinner—said she didn't feel like going out. She cooked. I know now that she had planned to tell me—that night.Instead—well, she didn't. She said she worked some as a model—which she had done. She said she had an income—not said, just hinted. I asked her to marry me—around threeA.M."
"Just what did she do about that?"
"She cried. Quietly. Told me that she'd taken a fall out of marriage—which was also true. Didn't want to risk it again—not without being sure of the guy. And said there weren't any such guys as—she needed."
"Pretty close to being pretty nice."
Paul answered the door, took the drink, and put his own dollar on Karl's tray. "It went that way for about two months. Then she told me." His ice clinked without his volition. "The whole story—straight out—beginning at dinner one evening in the Waldorf. The guy she married—a smug, sadistic twirp. Getting divorced. Coming to New York. Scrimping along on modeling jobs. Running into Hattie Blaine. Ever heard of her?"
Who hadn't? Hattie was madam to Manhattan's upper set. I gave a nod.
"Hattie sold her on the idea—after quite a campaign. Marcia went to work. That was about three years ago. I took her home that night—placidly enough—and went for the walk that lasts till they put out the sidewalks again. Then I phoned Johann I was sick—and got sick, drinking. For a month or so more, I tried the old Presbyterian anodyne: work. No use."
"Not when you're young."
"Later?"
"It comes with time. Go ahead."
"When I had all but burned out my main bearings, I phoned her. Maybe you won't believe it—but Marcia was going to phone me that evening. We talked it over. She moved to my flat and got a job."
"So?"
"We might get married."
"She want to?"
"She refuses—now. I'm not always certain I want to, myself." He stuck his forefinger into his shoe and tugged at the counter. "And I don't know why. Why I want to marry her. Why I'm uncertain."
"How do your—?" I broke that off.
But he got it. "My friends think she's swell. You gathered she was good-looking. She's a tall, slender gal with light-brown hair and blue eyes. Quiet. You'd never think—! But I went into that, didn't I? She attended college, in Iowa, for a year—and she likes to read. By that I mean—"
"Nobody else—?"
"Christ, no. They think she's a working gal—which she is, now: a nice friend of mine."
"Someday—" I stopped there—again.
"Yes." His face whitened. "A putty-chinned, overweight lodge brother from Keokuk, just tight enough to miss the stony stare and come up with the big hello. It's happened."
"I see."
"She went home and had hysterics."
"Bring her over."
Paul looked at me thoughtfully. "You are upset."
"Sure. Now.Youare. So bring her over. Not tonight—or tomorrow night. I'm busy."
"What about lunch tomorrow? She's not working and I can slide out."
"Lunch, then. Come around one."
The family's very fond of Paul and a good many of us have tried to spoil him. He was one of those irresistible kids—the kind that wears glasses, has braces on his teeth, raises bizarre pets, looks up everything in the encyclopedia, and is always engaged in a project about five years ahead of his current age—so that he is always in deep water and needs help. Everybody helped Paul. When he grew up—through one of the most gangling and precocious adolescences in the history of youth—the aunts, sisters, and femalecousins used to argue constantly about his looks. Was he genuinely handsome, did he merely have character in his face, or was he plain ugly but friendly-looking? The argument was never decided. But, at least, he looked better when his eyesight was corrected, the spectacles were abandoned, and the braces had come off his teeth.
I walked Paul to the door and pulled out my bill-clip. There were a couple of fifties in it and I gave them to him. Not much else—so—when he'd gone, I wrote a check to cash and phoned for Bill the bellman. He came up and took my check and brought the money back in a few minutes. I gave him fifty cents—knowing it was too much—knowing I had always tipped too much—knowing that I had never cared because I'd been brought up amidst nickel pinchers and because I like to please the people around me—and realizing all of a sudden that I would go right on being extravagant till the day I died which, luckily for my estate, probably wouldn't be far off.
In this connection, one trifle should be mentioned which on looking over these minutes, I see I haven't got to.
It crossed my mind at this point, as it had earlier in the day.
I walked over and sat on the arm of a wing chair, staring out at the hot evening. New York often has a marine sky to which, being a seaport, it is entitled. That night the clouds were low and small—evenly spaced and of a size. When the sun hit them, it turned them several different colors—a dappled effect, like a peacock's tail in which orange, not iridescent blue-green, was the predominating tinge. It was getting on toward seven.
I thought about my dollar-strewing habits and the fact that I probably wouldn't much reduce what funds I'd stored up myself and reluctantly but methodically amassed in the coffers of the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company.
Tom-the-doctor had said the damned excrescence in my craw, if mortal, wouldn't be operable. That meant Iwouldn't be lying around in some hospital, like so many of them, at umpteen bucks a day, while they slowly took out my neck. It meant, so far as I was concerned, that a day would come along when I would make up my mind the books no longer balanced. A day, that is, when pain or mechanical difficulties made it impossible to proceed with the prose. When I couldn't write any more.
That day, I would have completed my best effort to get my affairs in order. I'd have seen the people I loved—and seen them before it was an ordeal for them to see me. I do not have a horror—but a kind of intellectual rage—over meaningless, agonizing, nonproductive, lingering existence. In my life, I've seen a great deal of it. I have seen people who were a stinking nursing problem twenty-four hours a day—who were afflicted with fantastic agony besides—and who implored their relatives, friends, and physicians to put them out of their misery—but who lived in that state for a couple of years.
By taking a reasonable amount of thought, and through a certain amount of luck, I have avoided several of the pitfalls into which man persistently topples. Into others, I've all but pitched myself. But this was one I intended to skip. In the kit I carry for boat trips is a hypodermic syringe and a thin little bottle of morphine tablets. I've never had to use them on the broken leg, the gasoline burn, the leader-wire cut, for which they are always ready. But, when the day came which, in my judgment, would turn the balance of life, I knew precisely what I would do. I had always known, even before I had owned such gentle means.
You dissolve all the tablets—five grains—and fill the barrel of the hypo. You jab yourself and push.
Simple.
The reader of these notes may therefore spare himself—as I spared myself—as all human beings should be spared—the anticipation of death dragged out excruciatingly by the miracles of science.
That is one of the items on the gigantic ledger in which are gathered those details that prove modern man is mad.
Too many people, for one thing,when they get to dying,want to top Jesus.Wanting that,inevitably,they want to kill as many others as possibleby Christlike torture—forgetting that even Hehad his legs brokenas a method of mercy killing.
My apologies, then, for not entering this note sooner.
I sat at the window and I could have pulled out my own hair, or wept, (or roared with laughter) on account of Paul.
I knew Paul pretty well, and loved him.
And I did not believe he was enough of a realist or a humorist to marry a harlot and prosper in his soul.
Whoever she was, she would eat him away altogether, or eat away years of him. When he found himself out—that he could not accept himself with her—it might be too late. He was stubborn. The ordeal would continue—brave front and eroding guts. What should a man do?
I am not my brother's keeper.
How often that wretched phrase has been used as the alibi for vicious neglect!
How rarely has it served in the intended sense. It is but a warning to Peeping Toms, to Meddlesome Matties and Interfering In-Laws, Overweening Do-gooders, Paul Prys, the Rabble of the Self-righteous.
Would God the Peepul understood the Words of Jesus had one meaning, always, and often the opposite of the convenient, accepted interpretation; that their Christ appreciated how nothing can be truly said of the Father that does not make a suitable apothegm for Beelzebub!
Who asked them tointerpret, anyway?
He told them toact.
I am not my brother's keeper.
The Holy Writ that John Sumner never comprehended, or Anthony Comstock, old Cotton Mather, and a dozen billion more.
What man, seeing even a pig caught under a fence, does not pull it out, although it might be the Sabbath?
Which is germane to the circumstance?
What of the Good Samaritan?
I left the sunset hanging over the gray composite of the roofs—the willow trees in penthouse gardens, the chimneypots that twirled with supper cooking, and the fly-eyed walls, the thousand-lenses, the bloodshot windows staring at New Jersey—staring from the square sides of skyscrapers that towered around me in stiff, unplanned attention, waiting for night, waiting with God knew what stony thoughts and brickish resignation—doubtless for Soviet rockets.
I pushed down my shorts, kicked them onto a bed as Paul had kicked his jacket, and turned on the water in the tub.
I lay down there, donning the warm garment gradually, the wet, the clean, the only other that fits as perfectly as the grave. I turned off the tap with my foot. I looked at my skin, which was still fairly smooth, for all the long time I'd worn it, weathered it, and given it unnatural chores of excretion.
Good-bye to All That. Good-bye Mr. Chips. And Miss Chippies.
Yak-yak.This is the cup.Andtake this cup from me.Nyanh-nyanh.I soaped the person.The phone rang.It does.