Or the World Will Die

II

Something had gone out of the sunlight and something was gone out of the day. I struggled with Chapter Three which had suddenly grown clumsy and awkward. I played some of it back. The conversation was wooden. I put the needle back to the beginning of the record and set it to shave off the words that weren’t fit even for my public.

When the record was clean and I was ready to start again, the words wouldn’t come. I hung the mouthpiece on the hook on the side of the metal monster and slumped in my chair.

This Holmes Quinn had a good face. A sensitive and intelligent face. But there was no steel in him. An idealist at heart, I guessed. Maybe the whole world had suddenly turned idealist after that Agreement of 1948.

You remember how it was. That nightmare that started with Hiroshima and ended with the Agreement. That time when any nation could expect to find, rising over her cities, that boiling, magnificent mushroom of smoke that spelled death.

To the guy in the street. You and me and the cab driver, it was like trying to imagine a billion dollars, or a light year. You can’t do it. Beyond the imagination. You looked down at the skin on the back of your hand, at the pores and the sprinkling of hair and you tried to imagine how it would be if, without warning, in. a flash brighter than the sun, every particle of you was reduced to microscopic bits too small to find. You looked at the downy napes of the necks of your kids and the house for which you’re still four thousand bucks in hock and the wife’s newest dress — and you tried to imagine how it would be.

It’s easier to imagine a million dollars.

So people didn’t talk about it during those black years and they stopped themselves when they tried to think about it, because it was a thought that had no place in the mind of man. A little gimmick called the atom was loose in the world and at any time might speak to you in a very loud voice.

We lived hard and played hard in those short years, demanding of the minutes the juices of hours, and in some small part of our minds we were counting. Slowly. Like a man watching a burning fuse. Or a rocket flashing down through the sun.

The papers played up the rumors. “France Makes Atomic Bomb.” “Scientist Tells Genetic Effects of Atom.” “Rockets to Carry Atomic Warheads.”

But we didn’t read very carefully, you and I. We turned quickly back to Little Abner and Dagwood and Dick Tracy. We looked at the pictures of the fat little men sitting in fat little rows in a magnificent assembly hall, bickering about our future and we wondered if they’d never make sense.

Then the shock. The Agreement of 1948, and I had relaxed just like you did and the cab driver did and the gal behind the candy counter. We had been afraid and we hadn’t told anyone, even ourselves. But those fat little men fixed it so that the bomb wasn’t any longer the roaring God of the Bomb. It was just a little gimmick that scientific boys could fiddle around with in their laboratories — the first hunk of real international property — owned by every man on the face of the earth, and to be used on not one of them.

There wasn’t any dancing in the streets, you’ll remember. But everybody took a long slow breath that went right down to their heels. They let it out just as slowly and then went about their business. After the Agreement of 1948 people didn’t play as hard. They knew they had more time. They even started smiling at each other again. Maybe I smiled at you. I do a lot of walking when I’m living in New York during the winter.

But you wouldn’t recognize me if you saw me again. I’m one of those people who look completely and discouragingly average. I’m five foot nine and I weigh a hundred and sixty-five. I’m thirty-eight years old, with brown hair, fair complexion, light eyes, two of them, an average nose and an average mouth.

I have three qualities which aren’t average. They put those factors to use in the war. I have complete and absolute control over my facial expression. I have been suddenly, horribly, frightened — and met it with a calm look, dry palms and a steady heart beat. In other words, I have voluntary control of reflexes that, in the normal person, are involuntary.

The second quality is an ability which is also not my fault. I was born with it. I can explode from absolute immobility into very quick action. That is a question of coordination. Nerves and reflexes.

The third quality is something I acquired through practise. You can learn it also. It has been called sympathetic imagination, and it is a very valuable thing to have. The next time one of your friends gets in a bad spot, where he has a choice of actions, pretend that you are he. Try to figure out in advance what he is going to do, basing your reasoning on everything you know about him. If he does something other than what you imagine he will do, find out the reason from him and check back and see where you went wrong. If you keep it up, you will eventually know at precisely what point a finger on a trigger may depress that unfortunate eighth of an inch. It can be handy.

Some of the people in my novels wear disguises. I never have. Disguise is not in plastering little bits of hair on yourself, in wearing glasses, or shoes with a lift. Disguise consists of adopting a carriage, and manner and habits completely foreign to your own, and of maintaining the resultant new personality during every second of the day. There’s a very simple rule. Provide yourself with a constant and painful reminder. Such as a pebble in your shoe.

The afternoon was a loss from the time Holmes Quinn left, undoubtedly sitting rigid and discouraged in the back seat of the car he had rented in the village. He had come with every reasonable expectation of success. And failed.

Whenever I tried to work, his pale thin face intruded. I remembered the hot look in his eyes. Yet basically, he seemed ineffectual. Maybe that is the trouble, or one of the troubles with the world. The men-of-good-will have an inner core of weakness, of ineffectuality. Whereas brutality and greed stride through the world well armored. I sat there staring at the dumb instrument that twisted my well-spoken words into banalities until at last the late afternoon turned cool.

I went into the house and sent James out after the machine. I made myself a shaker of Martinis and went into the library. I sat and told myself that there was no point in thinking about it, that I would surely give Quinn the same answer when he came back. No need to think about it at all.

And yet the fear was with me again, the fear that had mysteriously and beautifully dissolved when the Agreement of 1948 had been made.

I sat and wondered what nation it was that expected to find their security in preparing for atomic war. Russia? Russia had turned over her meager stockpile of bombs to the Atom Federation. France? France was the traditional defender, attacked, in her last three wars, without the will or the desire to strike outside her boundaries. France was a third rate power. My thoughts returned to Russia. With the death of Stalin in 1948 the fierce independent will of the Russias seemed to collapse. The reaction from the strain of the war years had hit her at last and her people were being given uncensored information about the rest of the world.

Argentina? Head of the coalition of South American dictatorships. She too had turned over her one atomic bomb, apparently painfully relieved that she didn’t have the responsibility of seeing if it would work.

Germany? Germany was partitioned, rotting, dying. Certainly not Germany.

China? Too busy industrializing the slice she had bullied from Burma, too busy wiping out the last vestiges of the government of Yunan. Maybe at some time in the future, but not yet. Not yet.

Who then? Some nation on the face of the globe wanted to raise the high mushroom cloud of destruction, release the radioactivity that would mutilate the genetic process so that for hundreds of years in the neighborhood of the blast, peasant women, in the night, would bury the poor malformed creatures. Children of the blast.

The fear was back, and the uncertainty. I felt it.

I was quite drunk by the time James announced that my dinner was served. As soon as I start smiling, James stops. I think he feels that by assuming the opposite of my mood, he somehow frustrates me. I ate, grinning like an idiot, and James served me with the happy cheer of a conscientious undertaker.

The food took away the sting of the Martinis, and at last I read myself to sleep over a copy of my fourth book. I don’t know what I have written for the rest of the world. For myself, I have prepared the most effective soporific I have ever found. Even better than Walden.