Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

HE knew what he would find at the store, but he went there just the same, for it was the only place he could think of where he might establish contact. But the huge show window was broken and the house that had stood there was smashed as utterly as if it had stood in a cyclone's path.

The mob had done its work.

He stood in front of the gaping, broken window and stared at the wreckage of the house and remembered the day that he and Ann had stopped on their way to the bus station. The house, he recalled, had had a flying duck weather vane and a sun dial had stood in the yard and there had been a car standing in the driveway, but the car had disappeared completely. Dragged out into the street, probably, he thought, and smashed as his own car had been smashed in that little Illinois town.

He turned away from the window and walked slowly down the street. It had been foolish to go to the showroom, he told himself, but there had been a chance — although the chance had been a slim one, as he knew all his chances were.

He turned a corner and there, in a dusty square across the street, a good-sized crowd had gathered and was listening to someone who had climbed a park bench and was talking to them.

Idly, Vickers walked across the street, stopped opposite the crowd.

The man on the park bench had taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and loosened his tie. He talked almost conversationally, although his words carried clear across the park to where Vickers stood.

"When the bombs come," asked the man, "what will happen then? They say don't be afraid. They say, stay on your jobs and don't be afraid. They have told you to stay and not be afraid, but what will they do when the bombs arrive? Will they help you then?"

He paused and the crowd was tense, tense in a terrible silence. You could feel the knotted muscles that clamped the jaws tight shut and the hand that squeezed the heart until the body turned all cold. And you could sense the fear — "They will not help," the speaker told them, speaking slowly and deliberately. "They will not help you, for you will be past all help. You will be dead, my friends. Dead by the tens of thousands. Dead in the sun that flamed upon the city. Dead and turned to nothing. Dead and restless atoms.

"You will die…."

From far away came the sound of sirens and at the sound the crowd stirred restlessly, almost angrily.

"You will die," the speaker said, "and there is no need to die, for there is another world that waits you.

"Poverty is the key to that other world. Poverty is the ticket that will take you there. All you need to do is to quit your job and give away everything you have — and _throw_ away everything you have. You cannot go except with empty hands…"

The sirens were closer and the crowd was murmuring, stirring, like some great animal arousing itself from sleep. The sound of its voice swept across the square like the sudden rustle of leaves in the wind that moved before a storm.

The speaker raised his hand again and there was instant silence.

"My friends," he said, "why don't you heed? The other world awaits. The poor go first. The poor and desperate, the ones for which this world you stand on has no further use. The only way you can go is in utter poverty, with empty hands, with no possessions.

"In that other world there are no bombs. There is a beginning over, a starting over again. An entire new world, almost exactly like this world, with trees and grass and fertile land and game upon the hills and fish teeming in the rivers. The kind of place you dream of. And there is peace."

There were more sirens now and they were getting closer.

Vickers stepped off the sidewalk and dashed across the Street. A squad car screeched around a corner, skidding and whipping to get straightened out, its tires screaming on the pavement, its siren await as if in agony.

"I beg your pardon?"

Almost at the curb, Vickers stumbled and went sprawling. Instinctively, he pulled himself to hands and knees and flicked a sidewise glance to see the squad car bearing down upon him and he knew he could not make it, that before he could get his feet beneath him the car would be upon him.

A hand came down out of nowhere and fastened on his arm and jerked and he felt himself catapulting off the Street and across the sidewalk.

Another squad car came around the corner, skidding and with flattened tires protesting, almost as if the first had returned to make a second entrance.

The scattered crowd was running desperately.

The hand tugged at his arm and hauled him erect and Vickers saw the man for the first time, a man in a ragged sweater, with an old knife-mark jagged across his cheek.

"Quick," said the man, the knife-mark writhing with the words he spoke, teeth flashing in the whisker-shadowed face.

He shoved Vickers into a narrow alleyway between two buildings and Vickers sprinted, shoulders hunched, between the walls of brick that rose on either side.

He heard the man panting along behind him.

"To your right," said the man. "A door."

Vickers grasped the knob and the door swung open into a darkened hall.

The man stepped in beside him and closed the door and they stood together in the darkness, gasping with their running, the sound of them beating like an erratic heart in the confining darkness.

"That was close," the man said, "Those cops are getting on the ball. You no more than start a meeting and…"

He did not finish the sentence. Instead he reached out and touched Vickers on the arm.

"Follow me," he said. "Be careful. Stairs." Vickers followed, feeling his way down the creaky stairs, with the musty smell of cellar growing stronger with each step. At the bottom of the stairway, the man pushed aside a hanging blanket and they stepped into a dimly lighted room. There was an old, broken down piano in one corner and a pile of boxes in another and a table in the center, around which four men and two women sat.

One of the men said, "We heard the sirens."

Scar-face nodded. "Charley was just going good. The crowd was getting down to shouting."

"Who's your friend, George?" asked another one. "He was running," said George. "Police car almost got him." They looked at Vickers with interest. "What's your name, friend?" asked George. Vickers told them.

"Is he all right?" asked someone.

"He was there," said George. "He was running."

"But is it safe…"

"He's all right," said George, but Vickers noted that he said it too vehemently, too stubbornly, as if he now realized that he might have made a mistake in bringing a total stranger here.

"Have a drink," said one of the men. He shoved a bottle across the table toward Vickers.

Vickers sat down in a chair and took the bottle. One of the women, the better-looking of the two, said to him, "My name is Sally."

Vickers said, "I'm glad to know you, Sally." He looked around the table. None of the rest of them seemed ready to introduce themselves.

He lifted the bottle and drank. It was cheap stuff. He choked a little on it.

Sally said, "You an activist?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"An activist or purist?"

"He's an activist," said George. "He was right in there with he rest of them."

Vickers could see that George was sweating a little, afraid at he had made a mistake.

"He sure as hell doesn't look like one," said one of the men.

"I'm an activist," said Vickers, because he could see that was what they wanted him to be.

"He's like me," said Sally. "He's an activist by principle, but a purist by preference. Isn't that right?" she asked Vickers.

"Yes," said Vickers. "Yes, I guess that's it." He took another drink.

"What's your period?" Sally asked.

"My period," said Vickers. "Oh, yes, my period." And he remembered the white, intense face of Mrs. Leslie asking him what historic period he thought would be the most exciting.

"Charles the Second," he said.

"You were a little slow on that one," said one of the men, suspiciously.

"I fooled around some," said Vickers. "Dabbled, you know. Took me quite a while to find the one I liked."

"But you settled on Charles the Second," Sally said.

"That's right."

"Mine," Sally told him, "is Aztec."

"But, Aztec…"

"I know," she said. "It really isn't fair, is it? There's so little known about the Aztecs, really. But that way I can make it up as I go along. It's so much more fun that way."

George said, "It's all damn foolishness. Maybe it was all right to piddle around with diaries and pretending you were someone else when there was nothing else to do. But now we got something else to do."

"George is right," nodded the other woman.

"You activists are the ones who're wrong," Sally argued. "The basic thing in pretentionism is the ability to lift yourself out of your present time and space, to project yourself into another era."

"Now, listen here," said George. "I…"

"Oh, I agree," said Sally, "that we must work for this other world. It's the kind of opportunity we wanted all along. But that doesn't mean we have to give up…"

"Cut it out," said one of the men, the big fellow at the table's end. "Cut out all this gabbling. This ain't no place for it."

Sally said to Vickers, "We're having a meeting tonight. Would you like to come?"

He hesitated. In the dim light he could see that all of them were looking at him.

"Sure," he said. "Sure. It would be a pleasure."

He reached for the bottle and took another drink, then passed it on to George.

"There ain't nobody stirring for a while," said George. "Not until them cops have a chance to get cooled off a bit."

He took a drink and passed the bottle on.