Trojan Horse Laugh

V

Joe Morgan, his crooked grin loosely in place, and Alice Pardette, pale and shaking with the white horror of what they had seen in the streets, stood in the almost deserted telephone building.

“You sure you call run cue of those long distance switchboards?”

“I did that work for over a year. Come on.”

Her fingers were quick with the plugs. He said: “Get the state capital. See if you can land the governor himself.”

She talked into the mouthpiece, her tone flat and insistent. At last she motioned to him. He picked up the phone off the nearby desk.

A warm, hearty voice said: “Gudlou speaking. Who did you say this is?”

“Governor, this is Joseph Morgan speaking from Daylon. I want to make an immediate appeal, for help. Call out the National Guard. Get men here. Men and ambulances and tear gas. The town has gone crazy.”

“Is this some sort of a joke?”

“Check with the phone company and the telegraph people. Try to get our local station on your radio, sir. Believe me, this is a terrible mess here.”

“But I don’t understand! What has happened there?”

“This Happiness, Incorporated, thing, sir.”

The governor laughed heartily. “Very clever publicity stunt, Morgan, or whatever your name is. Sorry, my boy, but we can’t use the National Guard to promote your product, even if I do have an appointment for my first shot”

“Look, sir, send over a plane. Get pictures—”

But the fine was dead. Joe sighed heavily. “Didn’t work, angel. See if you can get me the President.”

But after two hours of fighting their way up through the ranks of incredulous underlings, they were forced to give up. The world would know soon enough. With the trains halted, buses and trucks stalled in the city, all communications cut, the world will begin to wake up and wonder what had happened to Daylon.

One day of madness, and another, and another, and another. The streets resound with hoots of hoarse laughter. Bodies lie untended. It is discovered that detachments sent in to help fall under the general spell. News planes circle overhead by day and all roads leading to town are jammed with the cars of the curious, those who come to watch. Many of them get too close, stay to revel and to die.

The power plants have failed and at night the city is lighted by fires that burn whole blocks.

The laughter and the madness go on.

Throughout the nation the various clinics set up by Happiness, Incorporated, cut the fees and go on twenty-four hour operation. The spokesmen for Happiness, Incorporated, say that the riots in Daylon are due to an organized group attempting to discredit the entire program.

And at the end of the fifth day the laughter stops as though cut with a vast knife.

Joe Morgan, unshaven and pale with fatigue, drove the last busload of screaming children out of Daylon. With the money he and Alice had taken on that first day, nearly two million dollars of cash, they had set up emergency headquarters in Lawper, a fair-sized village seventeen miles from Daylon. Renting space, hiring a large corps of assistants, they had managed to evacuate nearly thirty-six hundred children, lend their wounds, feed them and house them.

Organized agencies were beginning to take some of the administrative burden off their hands.

Alice, looking pounds thinner, stood by him as the attendants took the children off for medical processing.

“What was it like, Joe?” she asked.

“The whole city has a stink of death. And the laughter has slapped. It’s quiet now. I saw some of them sitting on the curb, their faces in their hands. I think it’s going to get worse.”