Trojan Horse Laugh

VI

The fat guard said: “I shouldn’t do this, you know.”

Joe said: “Sure, I know. But we just happened to keep your kid from being burned to death and you want to snake it up to us.”

“Yeah,” the guard said. “You wait in here. I’ll go get her.”

Joe waited five minutes before Alice was brought into the small room. She was wan and colorless, dressed in a gray cotton prison dress. She gave Joe one incredulous look and then ran to him. He felt her thin shoulders shake as he held her tightly.

“Hey, they can’t put you in here!” he said softly, was rewarded by her weak smile. He winked over her shoulder at the guard. “Wait in the hall, junior.”

The guard shrugged, left them alone in the room.

Alice said: “Why are they doing this to us?”

“They’ve got to be sore at somebody, you know. They’ve got to take a smack at something. Only they aren’t taking it at the right people, that’s all. Besides, we’ve got nothing to fret about.”

She regained her old fire. “Just what do you mean, Joe Morgan?”

He grinned. “When does our case come up for trial?”

“November 10th they said,” Alice said, her head cocked on one side.

“And before that we walk out of here during the next little attack of ‘hysteria’.”

“Oh, Joe!” she said. “It isn’t going to happen again! Not again!”

“The way I see it, baby, it’s going to keep right on happening. So get the earmuffs ready.”

“Keys, Joe!” she said in a half whisper.

“Leave that to me.”

Once again the spring is wound taut in Daylon. Once again the joy comes bubbling up, the joy and the anticipation. There is no more mourning for the dead. The streets are festive. The October days are crisp and cool. Many have sudden little twinges of fear, but the fear is forgotten in the heady flood of anticipation of delights to come.

Two dozen cities have passed the fifty percent: mark. Among them are Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, Buffalo, Los Angeles, Houston, Portland, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Atlanta — and ten other big cities. A round three dozen smaller cities are above forty percent.

And then all of the clinics are suddenly closed. Millions are infuriated at missing their chance.

But the clinic personnel all show up in New York City. Mobile units are established and the price of inoculation is cut to fifty cents. New methods speed up the work. The clinics work day and night.

All over the country happiness grows constantly more intense. It can be felt everywhere. Man, for a time, is good to his neighbor and to his wife.

All over the country the vast spring is wound tighter and tighter. At the eleventh hour the original personnel of all the clinics, and they are a surprisingly small number, board a steamship at a Brooklyn dock. Reservations have been made weeks in advance.

On the morning of explosion, the ship is two hundred miles at sea.

And fifty-one percent of the population of Greater New York have been inoculated.

A famed public document speaks of “the pursuit of happiness.”

It has been pursued and it has been at last captured, a silver shining grail, throughout the ages always a misty distance ahead, but now at last, in hand. It is a grail of silver, but it is filled with a surprising bitterness.

On the morning of explosion, every channel of communication, every form of public conveyance, all lines of supply are severed so cleanly that they might never have existed.

An air lines pilot, his plane loaded with a jumbled heap of gasping and spasmed humanity, makes pass after pass at the very tip of the Empire State Building until at last the radio tower rakes off one wing and the plane goes twisting down to the chasm of the street.

On a holly wood sound stage a hysterical cameraman, aiming his lens at the vista of script girls and sound men and actresses and agents takes reel after reel of film which could not have been duplicated had he been transported back to some of the revels of ancient Rome.

In New Mexico screaming technicians shove a convulsed and world-famous scientist into the instrument compartment of a V-2 rocket and project him into a quick death ninety miles above the clouds.

In Houston a technician, bottle firmly clutched in his left hand, opens the valves of lank after tank of gasoline.

He is smiling as the blue-white explosion of flame melts the bottle in a fraction of a second.

When he opened the door to her cell, Alice had a taut, mechanical smile on her lips. He slapped her sharply until she stopped smiling. He carried two guns taken from the helpless guards who rolled on the floor in the extremity of their glee at this ludicrous picture of two prisoners escaping.

He found a big new car with a full tank of gas a block from the jail. Together they loaded it with provisions, with rifles and cartridges, with camping equipment. And, five miles from the city he was forced to stop the car.

It was twenty minutes before he could stop trembling sufficiently to drive. He told her of his plans, and of what he expected and about their destination.

At dusk he drove down to the lake shore, the tall grasses scraping the bottom of the car. There were kerosene lamps in the small camp, a drum of kerosene in the shed back of the kitchen.

The last of the sunset glow was gone from the lake. The birds made a sleepy noise in the pines. The air was sweet and fresh.

While Alice worked in the kitchen, he went out and tried the car radio. He heard nothing but an empty hum. His heart thudded as he found one station. He listened. He heard the dim jungle-sound of laughter, of the sort of laughter that floods the eyes and cramps the stomach and rasps the throat. With a shudder of disgust, Joe turned off the radio.

They finished the meal in odd silence. He pushed his plate away and lit two cigarettes, passed one to her.

“Not exactly cheery, are we?” she said.

“Not with our world laughing itself to death.”

She hunched her shoulders. “To death?”

He nodded. “Lewsto was a phony. He knew what would happen, you know. He had a plan. He was tinder orders.”

“Whose?”

“How should I know? The country is laughing itself to death. They’ll wait, whoever they are. They’ll wait for the full five days of hysteria and the first few days of mass suicide — and then they’ll move in. Maybe there’ll be enough of us left to make an honest little scrap of it.”

“But why, Joe? Why does it work that way?”

“You ever hear of resonance?”

“Like a sound?”

“The word covers more than that, Alice. It covers coffee sloshing out of a cup when you walk with it, or soldiers breaking step crossing a bridge. Daylon and the other cities were fine when everybody had their own pattern. But now all the patterns are on the same groove. Everybody is in step. Everybody adds to everybody else’s gaiety and it builds up and up to a peak that breaks men apart, in their heads. Pure resonance. The same with the depression. Ever hear one of those records with nothing but laughter on them. Why’d you laugh? You couldn’t help it. The laughter picked you up and carried you along. Or did you ever see people crying and you didn’t know the reason and you felt your eyes sting? Same deal.”

“What’s the answer, Joe?”

“Is there any? Is there any answer at all? We had the best ships and the best planes and the best bombs and the biggest guns. But we’re laughing ourselves out of them.”

He stood up abruptly, grabbed his jacket off the hook and went out onto the long porch of the camp overlooking the dark lake. Porch and lake that were a part of his childhood, and now a part of his defeat.

There was only a faint trace of irony left in him. He grieved for his nation and he felt the helpless stir of anger at this thing which had been so skillfully done, so carefully done, so adequately done.

She came out and stood beside him and he put his arm around her waist.

“Don’t leave me, Joe,” she whispered. “Not for a minute.”

His voice hoarse, he took the massive seal ring off his finger, slipped it over hers, saying, “With this ring I thee wed. Fugitives get cheated out of the pageantry, angel.”

She shivered against the night, said; “Dandy proposal. I’m wearing the ring before I can open my mouth to say no.”

“Then give it back.”

“A valuable ring like this! Don’t be silly.”

He laughed softly. She moved away from him. Her face was pale against the darkness. “Please don’t laugh, Joe. Ever. I never want to hear laughter again.”

Her hands were like ice and her lips were tender flame.