Tomorrow! Page 12

  “That’s your opinion?” Henry stared. “It’s darn beautiful out there.”

  “Darned congested, too, Hank. And darned inflammable, if you want to think of that.”

  The square, firm head of the chief accountant of a chain of hardware stores, the head of a father of a family, a husband, a citizen and a good neighbor was fixed for a while so its eyes could drink in the view; then a hand scratched its grizzled hair. “I know. I know all that stuff. I know it so well it sounds sometimes like jibberish. As if the meaning had gone out. Blast, heat, radiation, fire storm—all that. Nuts.”

  “Nuts is the perfect word. Insane. Completely mad.”

  “You mean people?”

  “I mean people.”

  Henry hardly knew how to say all that was on his mind. His deep respect for Coley Borden made him prefer to appear the easy-going, almost “folksy” kind of individual for whom he was generally taken. Lacking much formal education, he hesitated even to display the insights he had gained through reading and observation. Finally he put a question. “Know much about psychology, Coley?”

  “Read a lot of books. Seems the psychologists don’t know too much themselves! Keep arguing . . .”

  Henry nodded, smiled a little. “Sure. You read much about the unconscious mind?

  Subconscious? Whatever they call it?”

  “Some, Henry. Why?”

  “You believe in it?”

  The editor laughed. “Have to. Can’t explain a single thing otherwise. Take you and Alton Bowers. You agree on every solitary fact taught in school. Comes to religion—you’re a Presbyterian, Alt’s a Baptist. Why? Something unconscious, something not faced fair and square by you both, right there.”

  “Never thought of it that way,” Henry admitted. “I was only thinking about Civil Defense. Atom bombs. I get a lot of what the Government calls ‘Material.’ Even psychology stuff. It’s all about how people will act. It’s all based on studies of how they did act in other disasters. But if people have unconscious minds, how in Sam Hill can any psychologist figure what they’d do, facing utterly new terrors?”

  “Some psychologists know a lot about how even the unconscious mind works—and why.”

  “Not the ones the Government hires! All their birds are mighty chirky about the American people. Think they’d do fine if it rained brimstone. I’m not so sure. I’m far from sure!

  I suspect the worst thing you can do, sometimes, is to keep patting people’s backs. Keep promising them they’re okay because they’ll do okay in a crisis. Makes ‘em that much more liable to skittishness, to loss of confidence, if the crisis rolls around and they find they’re not doing letter perfect.”

  Coley nodded. “I’ll buy that. It’s like the armed forces. Always calculating what’s going to happen on the basis of what happened before. Trying to convince themselves, even now, that an atom bomb is just another explosion—when it’s that, times a million, plus an infinite number of side effects, and not counting the human factor. The factor you call ‘unconscious’-and rightly.” The editor nodded. “They ought to look back over the military panics that have followed novel weapons. Next, they ought to reckon on how much less a civilian is set for uproar than troops. People go nuts, easy.”

  “And then,” Henry went on slowly, “what about the people that are nuts? Seems to me I’ve read someplace that about a third of all the folks think they’re sick are merely upset in their heads. That’s a powerful lot of people, to begin with. Then, a tenth of us are more or less cracked. Neurotic, alcoholic, dope-takers, emotionally unstable, psycopaths, all that sort. Plus the fact that half the folks in hospital beds this very day are out-and-out nuts!”

  “What’s your procedure with them?”

  Henry shook his head. “What can it be? They’re uneducatable. Can’t teach ‘em to behave properly in normal situations. How’n hell you teach ‘em to face atom bombing? A tenth of the whole population is worse than a dead loss. It’s a dangerous handicap, come real trouble.”

  The editor smiled. “Only a tenth, Henry? More likely a third of the people are neurotic.

  Already over-anxious, fearful, insecure. What about the have-not people? People with hate in their hearts? People who never were free, who never had an even and equal chance? What would they do, if things blew sky-high? Stand firm and co-operate? Like hell!”

  “I know,” Henry murmured.

  “And the merely poor people! With a feeling they’ve heen gypped. And look! Five per cent of the total population of River City and Green Prairie, like the people in every city, are folks with criminal records. Not just unpredictable. You can predict that—sure—a few will become noble in a disaster. lust as sure, you know the most of ‘em will keep on being criminal and take advantage of every chance. Loot, for instance. Kill, if they’re that type. Rape, if they’re in that sex-offense category. Everything! What’s procedure there?”

  “Green Prairie has a lot of volunteer auxiliary police and the cops train ‘em. River City?

  You tell me how they’d handle things. They’ve got nothing.”

  “What’s Federal policy?” Coley persisted. “After all, the Government must realize that somewhere between a quarter and a half of your big-city people aren’t what could be called at all emotionally stable. They’re pushovers for panic and naturals for improper reaction.”

  “No policy,” the other replied. “Except force. Police effort. How can there be?”

  “And psychological contagion?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “If the nuts, the near-nuts, the neurotic, the criminal, the have-not people and the repressed minorities go haywire—why, how many of the rest will catch it? What’s more catching than panic?”

  “You got me,” Henry said. He sighed and stood. “All I believe is, the more people face what might happen, ahead of time, without being deluded about how ‘firm’ they are, the fewer’ll go wild.” He glanced around the office as if it symbolized something he cherished and had reluctantly hurt. ‘‘I’m sorry to come up here with all this on my mind, Coley. . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Guess you do. Well. . . !”

  They shook hands warmly.

  When the lights had been turned on, when Henry Conner had gone, saying it was past his bedtime, chuckling, walking out with square shoulders, Coley Borden sat a while and then buzzed for Mrs. Berwyn. She came in—red hair piled high, greenish eyes mapped out as usual with mascara, all her brains and kindness and unanchored tenderness concealed in the outlandish aspect of her homely face and big body. (After Nan died, he thought, I should have married Beatrice; she’d be terrific—you’d only have to have it dark.)

  “Get your book, Bea,” he said over his shoulder. He was standing again, looking along shelves for a volume which, presently, he took down. When he turned, she was sitting; she had brought her pencils and stenographic notebook with the first buzz.

  “How old are you, Bea?” he asked, opening the book and looking from page to page. “You never asked me that.” Her voice was clear and rather high.

  “Asking now.”

  “Fifty-three.”

  “I’ll be damned!”

  “Why? Didn’t a woman ever tell you her right age before?”

  He gazed at her and his lips twitched. “Sure. Once. I thought it was going to land me in prison, too. She was seventeen.”

  “Your dissolute ways!” the green eyes flickered.

  “I was kind of surprised,” he said quietly, “because you’re a year older than me. That’s all.”

  “Oh.” She looked at the Door. “From you, that’s a compliment.”

  “Right. We’re going to do some work. An editorial.”

  “For morning? The page is in.”

  “Yeah. If it comes out right, it’ll be for morning. I’m kind of rusty, Bea. But I’ll take a crack at it and maybe I’ll run it. Ready?”

  She nodded.

  He began to walk in front of his desk and to dictate:

&nbs
p; “Ten years ago and more, this nation hurled upon its Jap foe a new weapon, a weapon cunningly contrived from the secrets of the sun. Since that day the world has lived in terror.

  “Every year, every month, every hour, terror has grown. It is terror compounded of every fear. Fear of War. Fear of Defeat. Fear of Slavery. These fears are great, but they are common to humanity. Man in his sorrow has sustained them hitherto. But there are other fears in the composition of man’s present terror. These are fears that his cities may be reduced to rubble, his civilization destroyed, humanity itself wiped out; in sum, fear that man’s world will end. And this last fear has been augmented through the long, hideous years by hints from the laboratories that, indeed, the death of life is possible—and even the incineration of the planet may soon be achievable, by scientific design or by careless accident.

  “Fears of mortal aggression and human crimes are tolerable, however dreadsome. But men have never borne with sanity a fear that their world will end. To all who accept as likely that special idea, reason becomes inaccessible; their minds collapse; madness invades their sensibilities. What they then do no longer bears reasonably upon their peril, however apt they deem their crazed courses. They are then puppets of their terror. And it is as such puppets that we Americans have acted for ten years, and more.”

  Coley paused. Bea looked up and nodded appreciatively at his rhetoric. But when he did not immediately continue, she said, “I think, if you asked the first hundred people on the street if they were terrified, they’d laugh.”

  “That’s a fact,” he answered. “Good suggestion.” He went on:

  “Man has always reacted with universal panic to notions of the world’s end. Time and again in the Dark Ages, some planetary conjunction, the appearance of a comet, or an eclipse led to general convulsion. Business stopped. Mobs Bed the cities. Cathedrals were thronged.

  Hideous sacrifices, repulsive persecutions, stake burnings and massacres were hysterically performed in efforts to stay the catastrophe. Futile efforts. Yet, whenever the people were thus frightened, they turned to violence, sadism and every evil folly. Time and again, multitudes on hilltops, awaiting to ascend to heaven, trampled each other to death while sparring for the best position from which to be sucked up by a demented Jehovah.

  “The end of the Dark Ages did not alter this sinister trait. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries our American hills have seen the scramble of the doomed as they awaited Judgment. At the beginning of this very century, the country was stricken by awe when it learned Earth would pass through the tail of Halley’s Comet. By that day, to be sure, science had so prospered in a climate of liberty that many millions stood steadfast in the presence of the celestial visitation. These restrained the rest. Blood did not flow on the altars of our churches; infants were not dashed against cathedral walls in atonement for presumed guilt; mobs of True Believers did not loot their own institutions and rape their own relatives in a last ecstasy of zealous horror. But today it is not the priest, not the self-appointed prophet with his crackpot interpretation of Daniel or the Book of Revelation, who says, ‘The earth may end.’ It is that very group of reasonable, orderly, unhysterical men upon whom society has learned, a little, to lean for comfort and truth: the scientists themselves!”

  Mrs. Berwyn interrupted. “Two hundred thousand church-going subscribers of the Transcript are going to view that dimly.”

  “True, isn’t it?”

  She reflected, tapping her lush lips with a pencil. “Yes. I suppose it’s all perfectly true.

  But . . . .”

  A muscle tensed visibly in his jaw. He paced away from her, swung around, came jauntily back:

  “The more civilized a man may be, or a woman, or child, the less readily he, or she, or the child will admit panic. That is what ‘civilized’ means: understanding, self-control, knowledge, discipline, individual responsibility. What happens, then, if a civilized society finds itself confronted with a reasonable fear, yet one of such a magnitude and nature that it cannot be tolerated by the combined efforts of reason and the common will? Such luckless multitudes, faced with that dilemma, will have but one solution. Feeling a gigantic fear they cannot (or they will not) face, they must pretend they have no fear. They must say aloud repeatedly, There is no reason to be afraid.’ They must ridicule those who show fear’s symptoms. Especially, they must pit themselves, for the sake of a protective illusion, against all persons who endeavor to take the measure of the common dread and respond sensibly to its scope. To act otherwise would be to admit the inadmissible, the fact of their repressed panic.

  “Thus a condition is set up in which a vast majority of the citizens, unable to acknowledge with their minds the dread that eats at their blind hearts, loses all contact with reality. The sensible steps are not taken. The useful slogans are outlawed. The proper attitudes are deemed improper. Appropriate responses to the universal peril dwindle, diminish and at last disappear.

  “All the while, the primordial alarms are kept kindled in the darkness of self-shuttered souls. Within them, in mortal quaking, march the impulses that set Inquisitions going, threw over liberty, brought down truth screaming, and assembled men repeatedly for bloody rites. Men’s

  ‘leaders,’ most of them, take up the suicidal expressions of the mob. For leadership, alas, is of two sorts: one, that courageous chieftainship which administers according to high principle, whatever the mob’s view at the moment; the other, specious and chimerical, a ‘leadership’ which merely rides upon the wave of mob emotion, capitalizing it for private aggrandizement, and no more truly leads than a man ‘leads’ the sea as it dashes him toward death on a rock. Such leaders—Hitler is an example—are in the end engulfed by that which sustained them. The other sort, true leaders—Lincoln was one—conduct the people by truth and reason through their panic to security, oftentimes against its stream.

  “There are no Lincolns among us today.”

  “That,” said Mrs. Berwyn, “will get you some dirty wires from Washington.”

  Coley sat down on the edge of his desk and dictated more quietly, sometimes kicking his heels against the bleached mahogany:

  “We, the people of the United States of America, have refused for more than a decade to face our real fear. We know our world could end. Every month, every year, several nations are discovering the fabricating instruments which make that ultimate doom more likely. The antagonism between a free way of life and a totalitarian way is absolute. And it appears to be unresolvable owing to the expressed, permanent irreconcilability of Communism.

  “What have we done about all this? The answer is shocking. We have failed to meet the challenge. We have shirked the duty of free men. We have evaded every central fact. We have relied on ancient instruments of security without examining the new risks—reinforcing military strength while we left relatively undefended and unarmed the targets of another war: our cities, our homes.

  “Many of us, intellectual men, liberals, humanistic in our beliefs, had stood about for upward of a decade muttering, ‘There must be no next war.’ That is childish; it is mad. Wars are generally made by unilateral decision: they are the aggressions of one nation. Not a single man among those who has insisted we get along, henceforward, ‘without war’—since war may spell the earth’s end—has offered a solitary idea or performed a solitary act that has lessened war’s likelihood. How could such people, who call their wishful thoughts ‘ideals,’ be anything but soothsayers? War, if it is to be avoided, must be quenched in the Kremlin and in the broad confines of Russia, taken with its captive states. But these people who say there must be no war are all in Illinois, or Arizona, or New York State—not Russia.

  “Others, feeling appalled and thus compelled to do something, however ineffectual, to assuage the pain of their anxieties, have limited their hostility to the here and the now, to the known—and so somewhat evaded, by the delusion, the real, external source of terror. These persons—and they number scores of millions of self-sati
sfied good Americans—have been content to launch a long and heated crusade against Communism at home, its dupes, its puppets and its sinister agents.

  “Conspiracy to destroy this Government by violence is treason. The mere desire to see liberty abolished in order that a compulsive, Communist state may replace it, seems vicious to every person who loves freedom. There is no doubt that domestic Communists are dangerous to liberty. But is it sensible to convert a true dread of the world’s end to a chase of putative traitors and minor spies, giving freedom, the while, no other service and no sacrifice at all? It is not.

  “Yet in that one process, multitudes of the people of America and many of their leaders in the Congress have also set aside the concept of freedom itself! They have seized the instruments and ideologies of their foe—with the notion of ‘fighting fire with fire.’ Every private right has been violated, under the Capitol’s dome. The innocent have been condemned without trial. Envy, spite, lies and malicious gossip have been brought to bear on solid citizens, destroying them. So the medieval lust of men cowering before holocaust has been exploited, to make little men look big. We have emulated the tricks of Hitler and Stalin. Today, when some of us pronounce the word ‘un-American,’ what we mean belies the significance of Americanism as every great citizen conceived it from the Founding Fathers until this day. A love of liberty, fair play, justice now is widely held synonymous with ‘un-Americanism!’ Today, a man who defends all we have ever stood for is liable to abuse as a ‘potential traitor.’ All liberty is being turned about: conformity, slavishness, sedulous sycophancy, these are being held true evidences of patriotism. Such traitor-hunting methodology is a sickness of the American mind, a cancer in the frightened soul of a formerly great people. ‘Set a thief to catch a thief,’ says a cynic’s proverb; even the cynic does not admonish, ‘To catch a thief, become one.’