Turncoat

II

“BASS.”

The dun-robed secretary, with hair and face both so pale that they seemed one pasty, incongruous mass, opened her mouth for the single syllable and then shut it again, like a trap. Her myopic eyes looked not at him, or even through him, but beyond, at something indescribable in an undefined direction and at an unguessable distance.

Twice, in the half-hour Bass had been waiting, she had stood up, walked directly to the single window that opened on an airshaft, lifted her hand to open it, and then frozen there, listening, before she turned and walked mechanically back. A suicidal type, evidently; in the bad old days she would have jumped out.

Bass stood up, numb from the hardness of the long bench. Murmuring excuses, he worked his way past his neighbors’ knees to the end of the row. His legs carried him up the aisle.

The door slid open at his approach, and closed smoothly behind him.

The inner office was paneled in white oak and ebony. Facing Bass as he entered, behind the desk, were three tall casement windows through which he could see the sunlit Glenbrook hills; the hangings on either side of them were of green-flushed silver damask. On the walls, in ornate ebony frames, were hung a few of the usual mottoes:

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS WRONG

PARSIMONY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL

A MORTIFIED CUSTOMER IS OUR BEST ADVERTISEMENT

WEAR IT OUT; TRADE IT IN; USE IT UP; START AGAIN

Behind the desk, watching him expressionlessly as he advanced, were two men. One, with a round, pink face that would have been cherubic except for the hardness of the slitted eyes, wore the white-bordered black robes of Manager’s rank. That would be Wooten; but he was standing at the desk, leaning the heels of his hands upon it. The lean, white-haired old man who sat beside him, fingering a sheaf of red file folders, wore the ruffles and scarlet lace of an Archdeputy.

“This is Bass, Your Excellency,” said the man in the black robe. “Bass, I am Manager Wooten. This is Archdeputy Laudermilk, who will interview you.”

“Onward, Your Excellency, Your Worship,” Bass said.

“Onward,” Laudermilk answered in a surprisingly deep and resonant voice. “Sit down, Bass. Now, let’s see… .” He lifted a page of the dossier before him, glanced at the one under it, and went back to the first page. “You’re twenty-one,” he said. “Eyes brown, hair black, complexion fair, build medium, no scars or distinguishing marks. Yes. Both parents Consumers; both dead. Nothing extraordinary in your lineage; well, that’s as often good as bad. No surviving brothers or sisters, I see. Well. You’ve lived with an aunt and uncle since you were quite young, is that so, Bass?”

“Yes, Your Excellency. My parents, and my brothers and sisters were all killed in an accident when I was ten. I’m the only one left.”

“Yes, I see. Now, Bass, tell me something about yourself. Not this sort of statistics—” he closed the folder and leaned his forearms on it—“but just anything at all that occurs to you. What you like; what you don’t like. What you think about things.” He stared across the desk with an expression of rapt interest.

Bass cleared his throat nervously. “Well, Your Excellency—I like most things. I like my work. That is, I liked—”

Laudermilk nodded, smiling and squinting his eyes sympathetically. “What else? What do you do when you’re not in Store?”

“I have classes, four hours a day, at the University—”

“Yes, that’s right; I have that here. What do you study there?”

“It’s the usual course, Your Excellency I mean, I haven’t got a dispensation. Mercantile history, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, religious economics and Consumer psychology.”

“And do you like studying that?”

What was he getting at? “Yes, Your Excellency, I like it main we— I like if very much.”

Laudermilk ignored the slip. “Which study do you like best?”

Bass hesitated. “Well, they’re all interesting, Your Excellency, but I guess —economics and psychology. I like them a little better than the others.”

LAUDERMILK nodded. “A leaning toward the scientific,” he said. “Yes. Your Dean tells me that you have distinguished yourself in those two studies, although you have fallen somewhat behind in rhetoric and philosophy. That’s quite understandable. Yes, Bass, I have a feeling that you weren’t meant for a Salesman.” He pursed his lips, tapping a long, exquisitely manicured middle finger against the desk-top.

Something in Bass’s chest suddenly lost its buoyancy and sank to the bottom without a bubble. He had been trying hard not to allow himself to hope for anything other than dismissal, and had ignorantly believed that he was succeeding; now he knew better.

“Now, tell me something, Bass,” said Laudermilk, animated again. “Suppose you had an opportunity to study other things—things that aren’t in the ordinary curriculum—would you like that? Think it over. Do you think you would be interested enough—could you make a vocation of it?”

Bass stopped breathing for a moment. The sunken organ, whatever it was, suddenly dropped its ballast and leaped to the surface, choking him. To study the Mysteries—if, incredibly, that was what Laudermilk meant—to become a lay Doctor of Science or a Store Deacon! He would give his soul for that.

“Physics,” said Laudermilk. “Electronic engineering. That sort of thing, was what I had in mind. Take all the time you want to answer.”

Bass managed, “I’d like that more than anything in the world, Your Excellency.”

“Good. Good. I believe you would. Well, now I’d better explain what this is all about. Every year at this time, Bass, the various institutions of restricted learning have to recruit a whole new class of scholars. That’s why I’m here. We usually do most of our looking among the newer candidates for Salesmanship and other Mercantile ranks, because the type of young person we need generally does go into the Store on his own initiative. Now, the quota I happen to be filling is that of the College of Religious Sciences of California Mercantile University in Pasadena, It’s a seven-year course, leading to a degree of S. R. D., and, as a rule, an immediate Deputy Assistant Deaconship. Now, let me warn you before I arouse your enthusiasm too much—it’s a long, hard course. It has other disadvantages, too; you’ll be confined to the campus for the entire seven years, and if you marry, your wife will have to undergo the same confinement. Neither of you will see anyone not connected with the College until you graduate—if you do, of course. Not everyone succeeds. And afterwards, naturally, you’ll find yourself rather cut off from the sort of people you used to know, even your own family. I must warn you, it isn’t a thing to go into lightly.”

“I know that, your excellency,” Bass said as solemnly as he could. “I’m certain I won’t change my mind.”

“Good. Very good. Now, let’s see… .” He flipped the pages of the dossier, one after another, studied something on the last one, folded them down again. “Tell me, Bass, how do you get along with your angel?”

BASS had half-expected the question, but he felt his ears growing red. “I —haven’t seen him for years, Your Excellency.”

“H-m. Yes. Well, that’s nothing to be ashamed of, Bass. You’re what is known as an ‘inherently stable’ type: It’s rather rare, though not as much so as it used to be, but it isn’t anything that need interfere with your career. On the contrary, we’re always on the lookout for personalities of your type, I’ll tell you in confidence; they do very well in the restricted sciences.

“Well—” the Archdeputy leaned over, picked up something from the floor beside him and put it carefully on the desk: it was an oblong box-shape, a foot high, draped in a yellow cloth.

“Stand up, Bass … come a little nearer. That’s it. Now don’t be frightened. Do just as I tell you, and we’ll be all right.”

Without warning, Laudermilk whipped the yellow cloth free of the box. It was frontless.

Inside, vivid against the black-enameled metal, stood a red plastic bag, labeled in yellow:

MARMON’S BEST

SEEDLESS HYBRID RAISINS

1 POUND

Cr./45

But in the upper right-hand corner, instead of the familiar red and white “GP” for “General Products,” was an obscenity: a yellow circle with a spidery black “U/M” inside it.

“Pick it up!” said the Archdeputy sharply.

Bass’s head felt suddenly very large and light; his lips and tongue, especially, felt impossibly enlarged, as if they were balloons that somebody had blown up. His feet were a long way away. He swayed, and righted himself with difficulty. “Pick it up!” said the Archdeputy again.

Bass stretched out his hand to the red bag: It seemed to take a long time, and yet he wished passionately that he dared make it go more slowly. His fingers were within an inch of the thing; half an inch—

He screamed and snatched his hand back.

He was groveling on the floor in an ecstasy of fear, blubbering and sobbing, tears leaking between the fingers he had clamped over his eyes.

“No!” he shouted. “I never will. I never will again!”

“There, son, there. It’s all right.” Hands were under his armpits, lifting him; he groped behind him for the chair and slumped down with his face in his hands.

“Take your time.”

Bass scrubbed his face with the palms of his hands and sat up straight again. He was still shaking; his eyelids were swollen and his vision blurred.

“Tell me what he said to you, son.”

Bass swallowed heavily. Thoughts were swirling in his hands like trails of phosphorescence in dark water; they moved too quickly to follow, and yet he knew that he had to speak.

The words came. “He—he had a sword that was all dripping with fire,” he said. “But it was his face that was the worst. He said, ‘If you ever do that again, Arthur Bass, I will kill you.’ ”

“How many times did he say it?”

How many … ? “Three times. Then he went away.” Bass shuddered and lowered his head again for an instant.

“All right. Now, I’m sorry I had to put you through that, but we have to be sure. You’ll do, Bass. Let’s see, where —yes, here’s the list. Bass, Arthur D. Dossier TD03080510.”

Then there was something about termination pay, and plane reservations, and the Archdeputy shaking his hand; and then he was walking out past the paste-headed secretary and the rows of people in the outer office, blind to their stares.

IT WAS still early in the afternoon I when he emerged from the colossal northern face of the Stamford Store; the lesser buildings that clustered around it, pebbles beside a boulder, were joined by short, violet-tinged shadows, harshly outlined on the clean glitter of vitrin and stone.

He turned up the High Street, past a row of lumpish service shops and offices, past the County Bakery, poisoning the air with freshness; past the Guard station and the cinema, into the residential area: two-and three-story frame houses, for the most part, gleaming with new paint but sagging out of plumb. Old houses—two hundred years old, many of them. They had a faint smell that no amount of deodorant could eradicate—a mustiness, a smell of memories and decay.

The quality of the light changed imperceptibly as he walked; from blue the sky turned golden, outlines softened and blurred, the shadows became mere rudly smudges. Everything was bright, hazy and depthless, like the golden landscapes in old paintings; the few people in the streets walked with bright haloes around them.

Rain began to fall in the full sunlight, so thin and gentle that Bass was scarcely aware of it until the moisture began to drip from his hat-brim.

He opened his pouch automatically and took out his raincoat; he pulled its folds apart awkwardly, so that it tore at the shoulder seam. He put it on anyhow. Better to be seen with a cheap coat than a torn one. Better to be seen with a torn coat than with none at all. …”

HE PASSED through the ring of new apartment houses that surrounded what was left of the park, and walked up one of the curving paths until he reached the bench, screened by a clump of alders, where he sometimes met Gloria on her way home from the bakery. There was no use waiting for her now; she wasn’t on the Sunday crew. She’d be in Store now, or helping with Sunday dinner, like everybody else —but the bench was sheltered by the trees’ overhang, and fairly dry, and he sat on it.

He tried to think about it clearly.

Incredible, incredible … he had put out his hand to the bag, thinking about nothing but the effort it took, watching for his angel to appear—and then suddenly, without any transition, he had known:

There was no angel.

The Man Without an Angel—the book they had studied in the fourth year, in Miss Davenport’s class. She had a brown mole on her cheek, with two hairs growing out of it.

No angel.

But until that instant, even though he hadn’t seen his angel since he was nine or ten, he’d believed that was simply because he’d never tried to do anything wrong—hadn’t he? And yet something in his mind, something of which he was not even conscious, had taken over then, smoothly, without hesitating a second—had sent him back screaming and wallowing on the floor—and when he was questioned, had put the words into his mouth: words from an old book he’d found in his father’s study, dusty years ago—The Detection of Demons. Something in his mind… .

A demon!

So this is what it feels like, he told himself numbly. But he felt no difference: no unholy ecstasy, no thrill of evil along his nerves. He looked at his hands, pinched his cheeks. They were the same.

But there must be some mistake! If he had waited an instant longer; if his hand had come a fraction of an inch closer to the bag—

Well, that could be tested.

Uneasily, Bass looked around him. No one was near; no one on the path or the lawns; nothing but the luminous pearl-gray curtain of rain.

He clenched his jaws. Unwillingly forcing the words, he ground out: “General Products … are no good.”

It was true, then. He could say the hideous words again, he knew he could say worse things; he could do worse things; no angel would stop him.

He could kill. He could strip himself in public. He could expose himself needlessly to danger. He could make love to a woman without marrying her first. He could insult a Salesman, or even an Executive or a Stockholder.

If another bag of raisins, or a pair of gloves, or a package of cigarettes, with that label on it, were offered to him, he could buy it.

He could eat the raisins, smoke the cigarettes, wear the gloves…

Well, an insistent voice in his mind kept repeating, what are you going to do about it?

Unfortunately, the question had only one obvious answer—he would have to go back down the hill to the Guard station, and give himself up.

He had known that from the beginning, but he hadn’t done it. Even now, he could imagine himself walking into ate Guard station, saying to the black-masked desk sergeant, “Arrest me. I have a demon.” But the instant he prepared to get up, his legs refused to obey him; the whole idea became incredible. All his life he had been afraid of those silent men, whose faces were masked because they were too frightful to be seen: they were the faces of half-souled men, men whose angels permitted them to do violence, even to kill.

Miserably, he fell back an another question:

Why?

Why had it happened to him? What monstrous thing could he possibly have done without knowing it, to deserve the worst thing that could happen to a human being?

Perhaps if he understood that, then it would be easier; he could resign himself … and at the worst, it would be less painful to turn himself over to a friend than to a Guardsman.

It would be no use going to his aunt and uncle; they were fine people, but Consumers, with no more grasp of the finer points of theology than Consumers generally had. There would be nobody at the Store with time to advise him, not on a Sunday, but there was Dean Horrock, a fine scholar, who was always ready to listen to anybody’s troubles, and who, besides, could make the knottiest doctrines clearer than many a Salesman.

As he walked up the hill, a thin trickle of hope began to rise in him. It was pure self-deception, he knew perfectly well; but it was better than nothing.