Trojan Horse Laugh

III

Joe Morgan, before going up to the news room, went into the room off the lobby of the News Building where Sadie Barnum and two other girls handled many details including the taking of classified advertising.

He didn’t see Sadie, Julie, the redhead, winked over the shoulder of a man laboriously writing out an ad. Joe leaned against the wall until the man had paid and gone.

“Where‘s my gal?” Joe asked.

“Which one. I’m here, Joey.”

“You’re for Thursdays. I want today’s gal, the ineffable, Miss Barnum?”

“She hit Glance for an extra hour tacked onto her lunch hour. Love must wait.”

Joe turned toward the door. “Tell her to buzz me when she gets in.”

He went up winked at the city editor, walked down to his desk, rolled a sheet of paper into the machine and stared glumly at it. Small warning bells seemed to be ringing in the back of his mind. Lie was all set to write the story of the second big period of depression, of what happened to Daylon when twenty-two thousand of the adjusted had a simultaneous slump, but he couldn’t get his mind off Sadie. She had been a bit difficult about his refusal to be adjusted the night before.

On a hunch he hurried out, climbed into his asthmatic car and roared to Caroline Street. He parked in the bus stop, went down the line looking for Sadie. When he did not see her, he began to breathe more slowly. He had a hunch that it would somehow turn out to be a very bad thing if Sadie were inoculated.

He was glad that he had been wrong. He glanced back at his car, saw the cop writing out a ticket. As he turned to hurry back, he saw Sadie come out the exit door of Happiness, Incorporated.

Muttering, he ran to her, look hold of her arm, spinning her around.

“Hey, my vaccination!” she said, looking up at him with a wide smile.

“You little dope!” he said. “You feather-headed little female cretin! What on earth possessed you to join this rat race.”

She didn’t seem disturbed. “Somebody had to take the first step, Joseph, and it didn’t look as though you would. So I had to. Now you’ll do it too, won’t you, darlin’?”

He saw that her smile was brave, but that there were tears behind it. “No,” he said flatly. “I stay like I am. I suppose you sneaked off and had your cycle charted last week?”

She nodded. “But, Joe, there isn’t any harm in it! It’s been so wonderful for everybody. Please, Joe.”

He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Oh, wonderful! It’s been ducky! You should know that—” He stopped suddenly as some of the information in the back of his mind assumed new meaning, new ominous meaning. He turned on his heel and walked away from her. She called out to him but he didn’t stop. He climbed into his car, drove through the grim streets of unsmiling people.

Score for Daylon. May — 5,900. June — 14,100. July — 22,000. August — 31,000. September — 50,200.

Over half the population of the city.

The period of intense joy in September has been a time of dancing in the street, of song, of an incredible gaiety almost too frantic to be endured.

And the slump touched the bitter depths of despair.

Slowly the city climbs back up into the sunlight. The slumped shoulders begin to straighten and the expressions of bleak apathy lighten once more. The road leads up into the sunlight.

And then the building is as it was before. The big sign, “HAPPINESS, INCORPORATED” has been taken down. People gather in the street and stare moodily at it. They are the ones who were going to be adjusted “tomorrow”.

They have read the article in the paper by Dr. Lewsto. “I wish to thank the citizens of Daylon who have co-operated so splendidly in helping us advance the frontiers of human knowledge in the realm of the emotions. It is with more than a trace of sadness that I and my staff leave Daylon to set up a similar project in another great American city. But we leave, armed with the statistics we have acquired here, confident in the knowledge that, through our efforts, more than half of you have at last attained that ultimate shining goal of mankind — HAPPINESS!”

Yes, the building is empty and the line has ceased to worm slowly toward the open doors. Two technicians remain in a hotel suite to administer the booster shots yet remaining to be given.

Joe Morgan spends five days with Sadie, watching her sink lower and lower into despondency, trying vainly to cheer her, infected himself by her apathy, learning to think of her as a stranger.

He walks into the office where she works. She gives him a tremulous smile. She has a fragile look, a convalescent look.

“Honey,” he said, “it’s nice to see that you can smile.”

“But it’s worth it, Joe. Believe me. Look what I have ahead of me. Twenty-five days without a blue moment, without a sad thought, without a bit of worry.”

“Sure, sure,” he said, his voice rough. “It’s lovely.”

She said: “Joe, I’ve been thinking. There’s no point to out going on together. I want somebody I can laugh with, be gay with for the days ahead.”

He was amazed at the deep sense of relief inside of him. He pretended hurt. He said: “If that’s the way you feel about it—”

“I’m awfully sorry, Joe. But I don’t want the slightest cloud on my happiness now that I’ve got it. Not the tiniest cloud. You do see, don’t you?”

“It hasn’t been the same since this whole thing came to town, this grin circus, has it?”

“Not really, Joe. Before I was... well, I was just walking in the shadows. Now I’m out in the sun, Joe. Now I know how to be happy.”

Her hand was small and warm in his. “Be good, kid,” he said softly.

He went up to his desk. The city editor had blue-penciled a huge X across the copy Joe had turned in. Joe snatched the sheet, went up to him, “Look, Johnson, this is news. Understand? En ee doubleyou ess. What cooks?”

Johnson touched his fingertips lightly to the bronze button in his lapel, smiled faintly. “I don’t think it would be good for the city. Nice job and all that, Morgan. But it’s against policy.”

“Whose policy?”

“The managing editor’s. I showed it to him.”

Joe said firmly and slowly, with emphasis on each word: “Either it goes in the paper or Morgan goes out the door.”

“There’s the door, Morgan.”

Joe went back to his room, rage in his heart. He uncovered his own typewriter, rewrote his copy in dispatch style, made five carbons, addressed the envelope and sent them out special delivery.

And when that was done, in the late afternoon, he found a small bar with bar stools, took a corner seat, his shoulder against the wall, began treating himself to respectable jolts of rye.

No girl, no job — and a fear in the back of his mind so vast and so shadowy as to make his skin crawl whenever he skirted the edge of it.

Business was poor in. the bar. He remembered happier, more normal times, when every day at five there was a respectable gathering of the quick-one-and-home-to-dinner group.

A sleepy bartender wearing a myopic smile lazily polished the glasses and sighed ponderously from time to time. He moved only when Joe raised his finger as a signal for another.

The bar had achieved an aching surrealistic quality and Joe’s lips were numb when she slid up onto the stool beside him.

He focused on her gravely. “I thought you left town with the rest of the happy boys,” he said.

Alice Pardette said: “I was walking by.” She stared at his shotglass. “Would those help me?”

“What’ve you got?”

“The horrors, Mr. Morgan.”

“The name is Joe and if a few of these won’t help, nothing; will. Why are you still in town?”

As the bartender poured the two shots she said: “When I finished the statistical job, Dr. Lewsto said I could go along with them in an administrative capacity.”

“And why didn’t you?”

The professional look had begun to wear off Alice Pardette. Joe noticed that her dark eyebrows inscribed two very lovely arcs. He noticed a hollowness at her temples and wondered why this particular and illusive little element of allure had thus far escaped him. He wanted to plant a very gentle kiss on the nearest temple.

“Joe, they wanted to adjust me.”

“I hear it’s very nice. Makes you happy, you know.”

“Joe, maybe I’m afraid of that kind of happiness.” She finished her shot, gasped, coughed, looked at him with dark brimming eyes. “Hey,” she said, “you didn’t go and get—”

“Not Morgan. No ma’am. Uh uh. All that happened to me is that my girl got herself adjusted and gave me up for the duration. And today I was tired because I had an article they wouldn’t print. Oh, I’ve been adjusted, but not with a needle.”

She giggled. “Hey, these little things are warm when you get them down. Gimme another. What was the article about, Joe?”

“Suicides,” he said solemnly. “People gunning holes ill their heads and leaping out windows and hanging themselves to the high hook in the closet wearing their neckties the wrong way.”

“Don’t they always do that?”

“In the five days of depression, baby, fourteen of them joined their ancestors. That is more in five days than this old town has seen in the last seventeen months.”

He watched the statistical mind take over. “Hm-m-m,” she said.

“And ‘hm-m-m’ again,” Joe said. “As far as ethical responsibility is concerned, who knocked ’em off? Answer me that.”

“Ole Doc Lewsto, natch.”

“Please don’t use that expression, Pard. And who helped ole Doc by compiling all those pretty figures? Who hut our girl, Alice? Wanna stand trial, kitten?”

She looked at him for long seconds. “Joe Morgan, you better buy me another drink.”

He said: “I mailed out releases to a batch of syndicates. Maybe somebody’ll print the stuff I dug up.”