Mr. Remington did not flinch or look embarrassed. He laughed richly. “Come, now, Major, you know very well that one must always lie to the mob, always flatter it, so that it will do what you want it to do. An apple for a horse, a carrot for a donkey, a bone for a dog, flattery for the people. It is all one and the same thing.” He laughed again, and waited for Durant to laugh, also. But he did not laugh. Mr. Remington, then, was for a moment a trifle disconcerted. “If the people had any intelligence, Major, they would never have listened to flatteries and cajolements all through the centuries. They would have used their minds. Not having minds, they must be led, as the ass is led, broken to work and service. If there is any design in the universe, the Common Man was created to serve his betters. That’s always been understood by the rulers of all nations.”
Durant kept his face bland. “I quite agree with you, Mr. Remington.”
Mr. Remington glanced triumphantly at his colleagues. “Good, Major! Very good!”
Durant lifted his hand. “In fact, Mr. Remington, we, the Military, regard all civilians, without a single exception, as horses, donkeys and dogs. We, the Military, see you, and all your friends, as no better than any of the wretches who work in your factories and your houses and your mills. You, too, are servants of The Democracy and the Military. You made the Military your rulers, believing we would be your robots. You put guns into our hands in order that we might make a whole nation your slaves. You forgot that a robot can never be trusted not to swing blindly on his metallic heels and shoot down blindly the man who made him. A robot sees no difference in any human creature. He makes no distinction. I, gentlemen, the robot created by you, see you as only flesh and blood—like the slaves at your machines and the slaves at your blast furnaces. You put me into motion, by the turn of your screws and destiny—a destiny you designed—and I can’t stop in my tracks. You made me incapable of stopping. So, gentlemen,” and now he shrugged, “I can’t stop. The monster of steel you made commands you. And you can’t crush me. I haven’t a heart to beat or flesh to feel or a mind to think. Gentlemen, I am the Military.”
He smiled at them engagingly, and Grandon, Bishop and Edwards and Keiser smiled also, and swaggered a little behind him.
Mr. Remington had become quite pasty, and his colleagues were aghast. “But, Major,” said Mr. Remington, “if, as you say, we made you, and we did, then—”
“I’m your robot, your slave?”
Mr. Remington did not answer. He rose, with dignity, and his friends rose with him. “I know you are to be informed of any message sent to the Chief Magistrate. We intend to ask his opinion.” With that, the elegant delegation turned as one and left the office.
The Chief Magistrate, when petitioned by the MASTS to set aside the directives regarding taxes, privileges and servants, replied politely that he had given Major Curtiss full and absolute power in “this present emergency,” and that Major Curtiss was to be obeyed to the letter.
Nothing of the dismay, horror and hate and rebellion of those now oppressed, who had oppressed, came to Durant’s ears. But he could well imagine what went on in secret, what hasty meetings were held, what defiance was uttered, what plans were being made. He could even feel it in the air, in the movement of the wind, in the very light that fell over the streets of the city. But how soon would the former privileged, the farmers, the securely wealthy, MASTS, the bureaucrats, revolt? Would they meekly obey, after all? No, they would not. They had been too well fed; they had lived too luxuriously; they were swollen with privilege. Out of their rage and resolution the revolt would come, and they would utterly destroy the robot they had created, and, as they had done so often in the past when they themselves, were threatened, they would restore liberty and overthrow what they had built in their avarice.
They were so stupid. They never understood, after all these centuries, that the tyrant is invariably chained by the evil he has conjured up to chain others, that the despair he has inflicted shall blacken the doorway of his own house, that the murderers he has paid shall eventually dig his own grave.
They always burst the prisons they had erected, and, in freeing themselves, they inadvertently, and without intention, freed those they had set within the bars and under the whips of the torturers.
An old, old story. But they always forgot the Magna Carta and the barons. This time, they always told themselves, they would succeed. They never succeeded.
The excitement in the city rose to a subdued frenzy when it was learned that Mr. Alex Sheridan, director of the infamous and terrifying Federal Bureau of Home Security, had been arrested, by order of Major Curtiss, for the murder of Andreas Zimmer.
Durant, the lawyer, intended to put into motion the swift machine of jurisprudence. He looked forward, with deep pleasure; to conducting the trial, himself. Juries had long been dispensed with, as had the writ of habeas corpus and all the other entangling and delaying impedimenta of justice and law. Now, the military officer in charge was both judge and jury, and from his sentences there was no appeal. Sheridan would die, not for a murder he had not committed, but for all the anonymous murders he had committed in the soundproofed rooms of the fearful FBHS. His victims would stand, an invisible jury, at his judgment.
And then Durant received a message from Arthur Carlson, the Chief Magistrate. Mr. Carlson, Durant was informed, was coming to Philadelphia within four days, to conduct the trial in person. “The case of Mr. Sheridan was so important, and would have so many far-reaching consequences, that it was necessary that the Chief Magistrate, in these days of desperate emergency, preside, himself, at this momentous prosecution.”
Alex Sheridan had been a great favorite and friend of the powerful, from whom he had received much secret wealth and support. The fact that he had not only been under suspicion, but had actually been arrested and would be tried, affrighted them. If Alex Sheridan, the friend and confidant of the President, was no longer secure, no longer safe in his person, and could be prosecuted like any common criminal, then no one could boast of immunity!
The people were elated. Their monstrous enemy, the shadow that brooded over them day and night, who fell upon them from around corners and in their beds and at their meager tables, was confined in the noisome prison which so many of them knew only too well. They speculated upon him; they even dared to gather in groups under the windows of the prison and jeer faintly until the soldiers dispersed them with obscene threats. They began to adore Major Curtiss, who was now oppressing those who had oppressed them. They hailed his car on the streets. This alarmed him. He had reduced their rations to a point where a little less would cause them to collapse of starvation. He had issued the most intimidating directives against them. But they still adored him. Bad, very bad, when it was designed that their very enemies should lead them to freedom.
He was even more alarmed at the coming of the Chief Magistrate. Didn’t Carlson trust him? Did Carlson fear that he would not punish Sheridan severely enough? Had he failed, somewhere? Had Carlson heard that he had not succeeded in arousing even the slight possible resistance of the people to him? In desperation, Durant ordered wholesale arrests and disappearances, and, before Carlson arrived, the people hated and feared him as had been originally intended. When one night eight of his soldiers were murdered on the streets—something which had not occurred for over two years—he was heartened again. Some of the people, at least, had weapons of a sort, and this, too, had a cheering effect on Durant. They had brought out these hidden and secret weapons, and they had used them. Possible resistance, possible revolution, had become probable.
There was only one consoling thought in the coming of Arthur Carlson. Somehow he, Durant, would discover how it was with his Maria and his children. He had done good work; Carlson was not a stone. He could, perhaps, be moved by some human compassion and sympathy.
Waiting, with some apprehension, for the arrival of the Chief Magistrate, Durant felt his loneliness descend upon him more heavily than ever. He often talked with Ben Colburn on the
telephone, on matters of new directives, but he never saw him socially, or even had a glimpse of him. The ambiguous Morrow never crossed his path, though Durant knew that his oppressive directives against the farmers were being carried out with what seemed extraordinary zeal on the part of Morrow. Dr. Dodge was blind and deaf to an incredible degree, though Durant, in his presence, disconnected the wires of the thing behind the landscape. Durant had talked with the two FBHS men who had sworn that Sheridan had not been with them on the crucial evening in question. They were typically bureaucratic, anonymous in appearance and apparently devoted to their work of endlessly turning out new regulations against the people and arresting scores of suspected “saboteurs” and “subversives.” Were they deserting Sheridan because they wanted his position? Durant began to consider that possibility with disappointment. Or were they Minute Men, placed in that strategic spot by Carlson? When talking with the men, Durant studied them searchingly, but they merely returned his regard with the complacent stare of bureaucrats and answered his questions with the usual circumlocution of their profession. There was not a single gleam of eye, a sudden faint smile, a slight gesture, which would lead Durant to believe that they were other than what they professed to be. Of course, he tried to reassure himself, if they were Minute Men they would be well trained and would not trust him, just as he had been told not to trust anyone.
Still, his loneliness and depression mounted. What do you want? he asked himself irritably, a secret Club of Anonymous Minute Men? Do you want to ferret out possible Minute Men for cozy chats, and so expose all of us to suspicion and ruin and death? The safety of the Minute Men, the hope for the country, was imbedded in silence and lack of recognition.
Durant, in his hunger for human companionship, even tried to cultivate the superficial friendship of his officers. But though he had served his time in the Army, he had never mastered the obscenity of military men, had never been interested in their lives and knew next to nothing of their jargon. He was not one, even casually, with Grandon, Edwards and Bishop, and he knew they knew it. As for Keiser, he must be avoided for the safety of both of them, though they often exchanged knowing glances. As the powerful Military Officer in Charge, Durant had been invited to numerous parties at the homes of the privileged. He had courteously refused. Since his frightful directives against them he had, naturally, not received any more invitations.
He rarely, if ever, saw the Lincolns or their sons, except at a distance. They were like furtive rats scurrying from his path, though occasionally he saw Lincoln’s gray face, Mrs. Lincoln’s anxious body flitting through a doorway and the three sons working sullenly in the field with their slaves. So he spent his nights reading, praying soundlessly, cursing as soundlessly to himself and desperately worrying about his family. I have the plague, he thought, the plague called Militarism.
He had worked, and had done good work. But what about the other Sections in the country? Were they copying his directives against the farmers, the MASTS, the bureaucrats, the wealthy? He could not know, for each Section was almost hermetically sealed against other Sections. Of course, there were rumors, but Durant preferred facts. He studied the newspapers closely. If they mentioned the other Sections it was only to report with enthusiasm that the farmers were producing more than ever, that beef would be plentiful “shortly,” that weather was good in the agricultural Sections, or bad, that “production had gone up,” or had not gone up, in the purely industrial Sections. There was news of “the war” and the grim determination of “the people to resist the new aggressions of the Enemy,” and the naval bombardments and bombings of the great cities of South America. But how much of this was true, and how much downright lies, Durant had no way of knowing.
The Press was as dead as all the other freedoms. Most of the pages were devoted either to eulogy of The Democracy, “and our great ideals which no enemy has ever vanquished, and our national vow that our liberties shall never be destroyed,” or to speeches by the captive President, or to news of enthralling murders, or to foolish and trivial fiction extolling military heroes, women spot-welders in the factories, women farm-workers, devoted male workers in every industry, lascivious cartoons and pages and pages of “comics.” If the Press had died, it had not been struck dead by Washington. It had been delivered up to death by the people decades ago, the faceless, stupid, benighted and greedy mobs who had struck down freedom with their ape-fists, and had permitted their unions to be dominated by criminal elements and had regarded that domination with a sort of chuckling and idiot pride.
There was no surcease, anywhere, for the beset Durant. Sundays had long been abandoned as holy days, since religion had been severely restricted. Sunday was only a day of labor, except for higher officers in the Military, and then only if their services were not needed. Durant was careful not to make a point of taking each Sunday off. But on the Sunday before Carlson’s arrival in Philadelphia, he decided that he would not go into the city.
He had not been able to sleep the night before, in spite of the sedatives he had taken. So, wearily and heavily, he walked out of the silent house in the morning, dragged himself across yards and a field, and found a small swell of ground on which grew five poplars in close formation. It was a very hot day in midsummer, but here the shade was thick and blue and fragrant, and gentle with the dark and holy silence of trees. Durant sat down and gloomily smoked cigaret after cigaret, brooding on his wretchedness and his fear for his family and the awful muteness of his life.
The great white house shone in the early morning sun through its banks of glittering trees. The barracks stretched behind it, and the red barns and the silos. Cows were toy figures in the distance, as were the men who worked in the wheat fields and the vegetable gardens. The sweetest warm wind blew through the poplars, and they sang mysteriously. All the earth shimmered with the circumambient light which fell down upon it from the sky like a cataract. A few fair-weather clouds gathered and drifted in the intense blue sky. There was a holiness in this quiet, on this land, which no directive, which no insane Military, which no mad government or enslaved people, or war, could befoul. The fewer people, the less dementia, thought Durant, and the thought was not a happy one, considering that men were immortal souls as well as bodies.
Immortal souls! All at once, the idea was grotesque to the young man brooding under the poplars. If “immortal souls” had created all this evil in the world, then something was wrong in the universe, something distorted and horrible and witless, or, perhaps, something wicked and malignant. Had Satan disenthroned God, after all? Durant looked at the sky; the ghost of the full moon stood there, a small rounded cloud, in the very midst of the blaze of the sun. Were the smirking scientists right, and was there no significance to life, no Good, no personal Deity, and nothing whatsoever except some pointless Law and Order among wheeling and meaningless suns? Was man’s dream of God a lie, as his old dream of liberty and dignity was a lie?
It was useless for Durant to tell himself that in the past centuries there had been wars and oppressions and tyrannies and massacres. He knew that these had been local matters, and not universal ones. Now the whole world was mad. Europe, broken, disorganized and completely ruined, was one chaos of anarchy, with starving multitudes surging back and forth over a whole continent, mingling with disordered and disorganized armies constantly and senselessly killing for the mere pleasure of killing. There were not even a few hidden churches and monasteries left, where devoted men and women would record the history of the ages, and its sciences and its arts, in deathless books. There were no governments except tribal or local ones. The blasted cities were not being rebuilt; the torn fields were not being plowed. Only plunder and fury and death and starvation prevailed, while ancient walls toppled and mountains of rubble were overgrown with weeds. War had done this, war born of man’s intrinsic hatred for his species. The Century of Man’s contempt for Man! Immortal souls!
He had not seen or heard anyone approach him, but all at once he was aware of a presence.
Dr. Dodge was beside him, carrying a small silver tray on which stood a glass of whisky. Durant started violently, and his cigaret burned his fingers. He began to swear, then saw Dr. Dodge’s face. The blindness and deafness was gone; the old man was smiling. He murmured: “I thought you needed this, Major. I saw you from a window.”
Durant, staring at him, took the glass of whisky. He put it to his lips, and with the quick motion of despair, he swallowed the liquor. Dr. Dodge stood rigidly beside him, but now he was looking over the fields and at the distant mountains. The alcohol began to spread warmly through the bitter coldness in the heart of the younger man, and something relaxed in him. He, too, for long minutes, watched the glowing countryside with the old man.
“The churchbells,” murmered Dr. Dodge, as if he were speaking to himself. “One misses them. They should be heard over all this land, from the villages. It is the time for prayers. It is a time for God.”
Durant remembered his church, from the days of his childhood, before religion was proscribed. He saw the white altars, the shining candles, the exquisite statues, the tall golden crucifix, the stained glass, the marble floor glimmering in the holy dusk. He heard the tinkle of the bell, the chant of the priest. The altar boys were genuflecting; the choir soared out in a triumphant voice. The pillars of the church shook and there was a light on the faces of the kneeling people. Suddenly, Durant bent his head on his knees.
“Man has abandoned God, in all the world,” said Dr. Dodge, dreamily. “But, has God abandoned man?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” answered Durant, in a muffled voice.
“I often think of the story of Jonah and the depraved city of Nineveh,” went on Dr. Dodge, in his murmurous voice. “Jonah went out from the city and sat on the east side of it and contemplated it. Then God made a plant to grow overnight to shelter Jonah from the heat of the sun, and Jonah sat under it and waited for the destruction of Nineveh. But the next morning a worm gnawed the plant, and the plant died. Jonah, attacked by the merciless blaze and the wind, fainted, and said to himself: ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’”