Operation Chaos

XIX

Nothing spectacular happened to us in the following three years. Or so you would have thought; but you are somebody else. For our little circle, it was when the world opened up for our taking and, at the „same time, buckled beneath our feet.

To start with, Valeria was unexpected. We found out later that Svartalf had been chasing the Brownie again and, in revenge, the Good Folk had turned Ginny’s pills to aspirin. Afterward I’ve wondered if more didn’t lie behind the incident than that. The Powers have Their ways of steering us toward situations that will sense Their ends.

At first finny intended to go ahead according to our original plan, as soon as the youngster was far enough along that a babysitter could handle things by day. And she did take her PhD. in Arcana, and had some excellent job offers. But once our daughter was part of our home, well, mama’s emancipation kept getting postponed. We weren’t about to let any hireling do slobwork on Valeria! Not yet, when she was learning to smile, when she was crawling everywhere around, when her noises of brook and bird were changing into language—later, later.

I quite agreed. But this meant giving up, for a while if not forever, the condition we’d looked forward to: of a smart young couple with a plump double income, doing glamorous things in glamorous places among glamorous people. I did propose trying to take up my Hollywood career again, but would have been astounded if Ginny had been willing to hear word one of that idea. “Do you imagine for half a second,” she said, “that I’d want a mediocre player of Silver Chief and Lassie, when I could have a damn good engineer?” Personally, I don’t think the pictures I made were that all bad; but on the whole, her answer relieved me.

A newly created B.Sc. doesn’t step right into the kind of challenging project he hopes for, especially when he’s older than the average graduate. I had to start out with what I could get. By luck—we believed then—that was unexpectedly good.

The Nornwell Scryotronics Corporation was among the new outfits in the booming postwar communications and instrument business. Though small, it was upward bound on an exponential curve. Besides manufacture, it did R & D, and I was invited to work on the latter. This was not simply fascinating in itself, it was a long step toward my ultimate professional goal. Furthermore, an enlightened management encouraged us to study part time for advanced degrees, on salary. That pay wasn’t bad, either. And before long, Barney Sturlason was my friend as much as he was my boss.

The chief drawback was that we had to stay in this otherwise dull city and endure its ghastly Upper Midwestern winters. But we rented a comfortable suburban house, which helped. And we had each other, and little Valeria. Those were good years. It’s just that nobody else would find an account of them especially thrilling.

That’s twice true when you consider what went on meanwhile at large. I suppose mankind has always been going to perdition in a roller coaster and always will be. Still, certain eras remind you of the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times!”

Neither Ginny nor I had swallowed the propaganda guff about how peace and happiness would prevail forevermore once the wicked Caliphate had been defeated. We knew what a legacy of wretchedness all wars must leave. Besides, we knew this conflict was more a symptom than a cause of the world’s illness. The enemy wouldn’t have been able to overrun most of the Eastern Hemisphere and a chunk of the United States if Christendom hadn’t been divided against itself. For that matter, the Caliphate was nothing but the secular arm of a Moslem heresy; we had plenty of good Allah allies.

It did seem reasonable, though, to expect that afterward people would have learned their lesson, put their religious quarrels aside, and settled down to reconstruction. In particular, we looked for the Johannine Church to be generally discredited and fade away. True, its adherents had fought the Caliph too, had in fact taken a leading role in the resistance movements in the occupied countries. But wasn’t its challenge to the older creeds—to the whole basis of Western Society—what had split and weakened our civilization in the first place? Wasn’t its example what had stimulated the rise of the lunatic Caliphist ideology in the Middle East?

I now know better than to expect reasonableness its; human affairs.

Contrary to popular impression, the threat didn’t appear suddenly. A few men warned against it from a the beginning. They pointed out how the Johnnies had become dominant in the politics of more than one nation, which thereupon stopped being especially friendly to us, and how in spite of this they were making converts throughout America. But most of us hardly listened. We were too busy repairing war damage, public and personal. We considered those who sounded the alarm to be reactionaries and would-be tyrants (which some, perhaps, were). The Johannine theology might be nuts, we said, but didn’t the First Amendment guarantee its right to be preached? The Petrine churches might be in trouble, but wasn’t that their problem? And really, in our scientific day and age, to talk about subtle, pervasive dangers in a religious philosophical system . . . a system which emphasized peacefulness almost as strongly as the Quakers, which exalted the commandment to love thy neighbor above every other-well, it just might be that our materialistic secular society and our ritualistic faiths would benefit from a touch of what the Johnnies advocated.

So the movement and its influence grew. And then the activist phase began: and somehow orderly demonstrations were oftener and oftener turning into riots, and wildcat strikes were becoming more and more common over issues that made less and less sense, and student agitation was paralyzing campus after campus, and person after otherwise intelligent person was talking about the need to tear down a hopelessly corrupt order of things so that the Paradise of Love could be built on the ruins . . . and the majority of us, that eternal majority which wants nothing except to be left alone to cultivate its individual gardens, wondered how the country could have started to disintegrate overnight.

Brother, it did not happen overnight. Not even over Walpurgis Night.