“Do you feel like telling me about the ants?” the big man asked. And Dicky realized that he did.
DICKY’S MOTHER demanded shakily, “But, Doctor, what did we do wrong?”
“We’ve tried to bring the boy up with every scientific advantage,” his father muttered uncertainly.
The man in white sighed imperceptibly. Here were two normally intelligent and well-intentioned people. But obviously the explanations he had just given them in terms of reality had not conveyed a great deal to them. Public education, even in this day and age, left much to be desired.
He said patiently, “So far as I can tell you haven’t done anything seriously wrong. You’ve provided the child with approved play materials, and you’ve proceeded quite properly in supplying him with safely limited opportunities for aggression against authority. Perhaps you’ve left him alone a little too much. What has happened is that in the absence of adult guidance an unhealthy fantasy element has crept into his play.
“When you come back tomorrow, we’ll go over the home environment in detail and I may suggest a few changes. Then, with the prescription I’ve given you, and with Dicky coming to see me once a week, I think we’ll have him entirely straightened out by the time school starts.”
“Oh, I hope so!” exclaimed the mother prayerfully.
The psychologist cast an approving glance at her, and said reassuringly, “You shouldn’t be unduly alarmed. It’s important to remember that at Dicky’s age an occasional emotional explosion—laughter, tears, rage, or the like—isn’t necessarily a sign of dangerous emotional instability. After all,” he smiled faintly, “a hundred years ago your Dicky’s behavior would have been considered quite normal.”
“Normal?” said the father with corrugated brow.
“Ideas of normality differ in different eras. Our ancestors considered laughter—even violent laughter in public—quite permissible . . . though they would have frowned on various other types of emotional exhibition. At sundry times and places there have been societies which condoned or even encouraged orgies of grief and guilt—megalomaniac outbursts, religious ecstasies, public sexual excesses.
“Our own forebears continued to laugh right into the twentieth century, at a time when psychiatry had already taken its first great steps forward—steps hampered, naturally, by the cultural bias . . . The popular psychology of the period even worked out a theory of the alleged value of ‘emotional cutlets,’ disregarding, of course, the fact that energy going into such outlets was wasted. The steam that blows the whistle doesn’t turn the wheels.”
The parents nodded with an understanding that pleased the psychologist. Maybe there was still hope for public education.
“No doubt,” he went on, “some of those immature societies I referred to—when population was sparse and resources under-developed—could afford their eccentricities. But modern civilization requires that all the individual’s inborn aggressive energy be channeled into effective action, directed by the reality principle.
“Before we could accomplish that, we had to get rid of our forefathers’ sterile idea of ’happiness,’ ideas which the early psychiatrists actually regarded as a therapeutic goal. They tried to alleviate human misery without realizing that it was only one face of the coin, and that to succeed they must also study the causes and cure of happiness!
“So—” The psychologist caught himself with a glance at his watch, which had begun to buzz quietly but insistently to remind him of an appointment. “Don’t worry. You see, a century ago Dicky would have gone without treatment. Upon reaching the age of puberty, he might have fallen in love, or developed other psychosomatic ills—”
The parents exchanged horrified glances.
“But nowadays we know just what to do. You haven’t a thing to worry about.”
He ushered them to the door beyond which Dicky waited with the nurse.
FALL WAS coming, a first chill in the air. Dicky stood at the edge of the green lawn, looking down the bare slope toward the fence and the brook beyond.
The backyard slope was no longer forbidden to him—hadn’t been since the day the lawn-tender had clicked and buzzed its way along it, mowing the weeds. But he no longer felt any particular urge to explore.
Once, a long time ago in the summer, there had been something very special about the brook and the footbridge over it. But now he couldn’t remember what had seemed so important. He remembered, of course, that he had walked along the brook, and had seen a frog. But he’d been much younger then.
Now summer was over, and in a few days Dicky would be starting to school.
He scuffed his new shoes down the weedless slope aimlessly—as far as the fence and back again. Suddenly he stopped, noticing that the ants were still there. They seemed fewer than they had been, and not so active as they straggled in thinning lines across a patch of ground completely denuded of forage.
The ants reminded him of the big man in white, who was so good at explaining things so that Dicky could understand. One thing he’d explained on request was why ants couldn’t see you, even when you stood right over them.
They couldn’t see you because you were too big. That seemed a strange idea, but the big man, in his patient way, had made it all sound perfectly reasonable. If ants could see you, they’d be scared, but only because you were so much bigger that they couldn’t do anything to help themselves. So it was better for them not even to know you were there.
Dimly, as an echo, he remembered too how he’d watched the ants on a sunny afternoon, and wished he could be as small as they were. That was a silly thought, fit only for little kids that laughed and cried and wet their pants.
But it would be fun to be a very big giant, so big that all the people and cars in all the streets would look like little ants running around. So big they couldn’t even see you, because if they could it wouldn’t do them any good.
“Black bugs’ blood!” said Dicky abruptly to himself.
The hard sharp heel of his new shoe ground into the anthill, obliterating the entrance, burying the frantic workers under tumbled dust. He stamped the ant hill flat with careful thoroughness.
Then he turned without another glance, not laughing or crying any more, and walked sedately up the slope to the house.
HOUR WITHOUT GLORY
A brief and vivid glimpse of a key-incident in a war to come . . . and not the war you may (at least consciously) be fearing.
ALL THROUGH THE CHILLING AFTERnoon, under gray skies and blowing clouds, the rainy fields had been plowed and trampled by the army in retreat. On every way through the rolling hills to the river bottom, machines and men had churned the red Oklahoma earth into a footingless swamp.
The General’s jeep lay askew in the ditch where it had slid. The General’s right leg was buckled beneath it—broken or not, he couldn’t be sure, but he had made painfully certain that he wasn’t going to be able to free himself without help. He’d made sure, too, that he couldn’t reach the flare pistol in the jeep, beside the dead driver.
His leg had been numb, but now it hurt abominably. Nobody had come near since, half an hour ago by the General’s wristwatch, the enemy planes had made their final pass and screamed off into the overcast.
The rumble of movement and explosions far away, dominated by the gruff thunder of heavy artillery firing from its new emplacements beyond the river, told him that the rearguard action went on. But it was lonely here.
He should have been over there, in contact with his staff and field commanders—directing the action, whipping the army into defensive positions along the Red River line. The battle to northward was catastrophically lost, but if they could stop the enemy’s advance at the river they could probably hold till spring. They had to. Winter was already in the air, and winter was a desperate threat to an army beaten and pushed—mud and more mud, struggles with the motorized equipment, freezing bivouacs, the blizzards from the plains . . .
He should have been over there, making the decision that now h
ad to be made.
The General clamped his teeth together hard and wrenched again at his pinioned leg. The slippery red mud gave him no purchase. Pain flared before his eyes, and he fought back a feeling of swimming away.
He gave it up, panting, and instead raised himself as high as he could.
He couldn’t see far. A little way off stood a burned-out truck, slewed crosswise of the ruts, abandoned by the survivors if there had been any. Farther away, a farmhouse was still burning, flames briskly crisping, blackening, unattended. . . . Flames eating, perhaps, at solid planks and beams first raised by folk who had ventured into this country when it was raw and new, when the danger was of Indians riding when the moon was full. . . . No sign of life, nothing to show if anyone had remained in the house when the enemy planes came whooping in with their rockets and their napalm. But it was possible; these people clung hard to their red land.
“Here!” shouted the General hoarsely. “Help!”
No answer but the whistling roar of a flight of aircraft somewhere beyond the cloud blanket. Enemy planes, most likely.
Had that been his fatal mistake—underestimating the enemy’s air superiority? Or . . . But there was no use thinking along those lines just now.
The General’s leg throbbed, and he was beginning to feel a little lightheaded.
Cold comfort to recall that, by the illogic of military history, commanders seemed to loom largest in defeat. Hannibal . . . Rommel . . . Robert E. Lee . . . Even Napoleon, about whom everyone first remembers Waterloo and then perhaps the retreat from Moscow.
But the General had learned and believed that the end of war is victory: victory as quick, economical, and decisive as possible, achieved by skilled use of the uttermost force.
The uttermost force . . . but in this war . . .
This isn’t the war I was trained to fight. Not the one we were looking toward when I was at West Point, nor yet the one we expected to have to fight when I got my first star . . . Not the war with Russia, nor the war with Germany, nor anything like that.
No; this is the war that couldn’t happen: the Second American Civil War.
No doubt when it was over the historians would explain neatly how inevitable it had been. But on its very eve it had still seemed inconceivable . . . even though you knew it had happened before, and that, by the cold thousand-year record of the books, it was an almost unheard-of thing for any great nation to live through a century without being torn asunder by the winds of wrath and rebellion.
Some things were politics. A good soldier had as little as possible to do with politics, and fought, when he must, for the true and lawful government of the United States of America. But now familiar landmarks had been displaced or defaced, and the truth made hard to read.
In the First Civil War, he had sometimes thought bitterly, it must have been simpler, A man’s loyalty was to his native state or to the Union, and the issues were plain.
But . . . if the President’s death had been what they said it was . . . if the Vice President had been, as they claimed, an incompetent hack, a tool for traitors . . . Even a soldier had to decide, as Lee had decided for Virginia.
Like things had happened before, and often. But even history has its firsts. And never before had the storm of anger broken upon a nation which could be so mighty in its anger. Never had the stakes been piled so high on the decisions which, when things had gone too far, must be made on the fighting front.
A misty rain was beginning to fall once more, obscuring nearer and nearer distances, drenching and chilling.
For no good reason a tune ran through the General’s head, with some words of a song that had been a jukebox nuisance you couldn’t help hearing two or three years ago:
Don’t be afraid
Of the rain and the snow—
Turn on the lights,
Turn on the radio. . . .
The gray mist washed out all color in the world around, save for the raw red of the tom earth close at hand. And, still unwillingly, the General’s mind slipped back to something seen less than an hour ago from his jeep as it slithered along the road in the path of the retreat, minutes before the air attack.
At the crossing of a major highway—recognizable now by upended blocks of concrete around which the lighter traffic maneuvered with angry motor noise—what had been a man, fallen in the fighting that had swept back and forth past this point. Insignia of rank and allegiance were no longer distinguishable, nothing was left but a red smear in the red wallow for half a dozen yards, across the intersection where for hours the heavy weapons carriers had passed, the self-propelled guns, the halftracks, and the tanks.
Don’t be afraid . . .
As you used to see, on peacetime pavements, a rabbit or a cat, pounded flat, ignored in the hurry, smeared.
Turn off the lights . . .
Easy now. Can’t go getting delirious.
The General shook his head to rid it of the tune and the memory that somehow went together, and lifted himself dizzily to peer through the curtain of rain.
It was as if life had been swept from this land, this vacuum-pocket sucked empty by the withdrawal of the army. But the distant firing affirmed the continuing of life and war, in darkness and harsh weather.
The rain and the snow . . .
That damned tune again.
Turn on the radio . . .
There was a two-way radio in the jeep, but even if it was still in shape to be turned on it was out of his reach, as was the flare pistol, every chance of summoning aid.
If he didn’t get out—
Command of the army would of course devolve upon the Brigadier. Very clearly he pictured the Brigadier. A good man. A man of soldierly competence and great precision, whose knowledge of Army regulations was phenomenal. He had graduated second in the West Point class in which the General-to-be was first. He wore glasses now; they somehow always managed to hide his eyes.
Very clearly too he saw how the Brigadier would make the necessary decisions—make the decision.
The army is retreating—let’s face it, the army is routed, and it is doubtful whether we can make good the river crossing and dig in soon enough, even if the overcast continues to hamper the enemy air through tomorrow.
Sound tactics dictate the use of all available fire power against the enemy concentrations. Available fire power includes atomic weapons. Such weapons are within striking distance of the front and Supreme Headquarters has placed their use at the discretion of the field commander.
And the war would be almost over. Intelligence believed that the enemy was relatively deficient in tactical atomic weapons but had succeeded in seizing control of more of the original strategic stockpile. So no doubt the enemy would be the first—once the tacit agreement had been broken—to take the next logical step and bring the big ones into play, the hydrogen bombs, the cobalt bombs, the dusts. . . . But there would be plenty to go round.
Don’t be afraid
Of the rain and the snow—
And a red smear in the mud of an Oklahoma crossroads. The politicians messed their mess, and in the end a soldier had to decide.
Now, at this hour—when the warring factions stood over against one another like two who were once friends, and have quarreled and struck blows and drawn blood, but now stand face to face on the brink of the instant when this one or that will utter the unforgivable insult, commit the unforgivable deed, after which there will be no turning back. . . .
He’d stuck to what he believed in. Even though there had been bad moments. He had come close to resigning his post when the Russian military observers had showed up with their sly expectant Asiatic grins and prying eyes and credentials from Supreme Headquarters . . . but he could understand the situation as a soldier: that was the price of the Russian grain ships docking at Galveston, at New York and San Francisco, of the full stomach the armies needed sorely since the front had swept across the wheat country. But he wished they could have got by without making a deal with the goddamn R
eds. (And of course there were the rumors that the Russians were supplying the enemy too—underhandedly, through their satellites.)
A war is meant to be won.
But this is the wrong war. The enemy is American, too. And we never made those weapons to use on each other!
But what about the enemy? Rabble, led by rabble! Scarcely one of the leaders was what might be called a gentleman; he had even heard that some of them were foreign-born. Rather than allow the greatest nation on earth to fall into such hands—
Americans? They’re just people, like anybody else. Bring on the bombs!
The Brigadier wouldn’t go through any such complicated and tormented reflections. He would see the military problem more clearly, perhaps, in isolation; the larger, that is to say strategic, implications were the concern of Supreme Headquarters and the Government—but those authorities had already passed the responsibility down the chain of command.
The General was shocked alert by a gathering, drumming roar that came nearer, was passing overhead. No plane, that. He gazed upward and saw the helicopter flying, shadowy in the low grayness that was its safety from enemy planes, whirring steadily on and fading from sight as he watched helpless. . . . He knew they were looking for him, but they couldn’t hope to spot him under these conditions; they’d be expecting him, if still alive, to use the flare pistol.
The helicopter’s noise followed it out of hearing. The General sank weakly back and tried to relax in the mud and the mizzle.
Nothing he could do. He would have to lie here till the enemy’s patrols combed the area, then take his chances as a prisoner. No more decisions to make. His head buzzed feverishly.
Don’t be afraid . . .
“Shut up!” snapped the General.
A voice that was not his own asked, “What say?”
He twisted round. On the crumbled shoulder of the road above him stood two scarecrow figures. They were a man perhaps in his thirties, lanky, unkempt, and unshaven, and a boy of twelve or thirteen, with hair, straw-colored like the man’s, falling into a thin unhealthy-looking face. They were almost identically dressed in threadbare overalls. But the man’s face was expressionless as he looked down at the overturned vehicle and its prisoner; the boy’s was alive with interest.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 87