Someone pounded on the door. “Go away, I’m fine,” Helmut said. Then, to Alethea: “Would you like to come back to bed?”
Her mouth fell open in disbelief. She thought she would rather die than be touched by him again. Her clothes were in a pile beside the bed, and she began to pull them on.
“I won’t be back,” she said.
She pulled her sweater over her head. She felt strong, clean. “I’m free of you, Helmut. Just as if you’d killed me-—or I’d killed you.”
He smiled and tossed the gun aside. “Once you realize you are too weak to do what is necessary, you are a slave.”
The People’s Acceptance Hospital in Omaha had been a regional Veteran’s Administration hospital before the PPP changed its name. It was a huge, red-brick building, erected in the 1920s, surrounded now by a bright new electrified fence. National guardsmen manned the gatehouse and patrolled the lobby. One of the guardsmen stood stiffly beside a door on the west side of the lobby. A sign on the door said Keep
Out—No Admittance. On the other side was a long corridor that led to the hospital’s west wing, the psychiatric unit.
It was through these doors and into this closely guarded wing that the limp, tom body of Justin Milford had been brought several hours after his motorcycle set off a land mine along the Colorado border.
Now he was in a large ward that contained a dozen beds. The patients were mostly young men, each on an intravenous hookup, some asleep and others awake. One morning, several days after Justin’s arrival, three doctors entered the ward and walked slowly past the patients. Those who were awake watched the medical team with silent, suspicious eyes—-alert eyes, suggesting alert minds, trapped in bodies that were all but lifeless.
Justin had slept, assisted by various medications, for seventy-two hours. Now he was awake, his eyes smoldering with fear and confusion as he looked from one doctor to another.
One of them, a tall, middle-aged woman with bushy eyebrows behind thick glasses, smiled at him. “Well, Mr. Milford, you’re finally awake.”
The two other doctors were men. One was a slender young man named Jan. He muttered to the other doctors, “He’s in an eighty percent physical block— ECy2.”
The woman kept on smiling. “My name is Helen, Justin. I’m one of your doctors. You had quite an
accident.”
It was with great effort that Justin spoke. “Am I ... is anything . . . ?”
“Everything’s intact. You won’t be hobbling around on anything artificial.”
Justin managed to nod. “When . . . can I leave?”
The older doctor was gaunt and grim. “Not for some time,” he said. “How soon you get out depends on how well you respond to treatment.” ]
Justin was confused. He fried to speak, but was too weak.
“You’ve exhibited some very destructive tendencies,” Helen said. “We’re going to help you get over some of the bad things that have contributed to your attitude and response so that you have a chance to be a more productive member of society. You’d like to have a good life, wouldn’t you?”
Jan stepped closer to the bed. “We have no restraints here,” he said, with a chilly smile. “Our rule is, Make it out the door and you’re free. Go ahead!”
He pulled back the sheet. Justin gasped for breath.
He lifted one hand a few inches off the bed. He tried to raise his head. One leg trembled. But he could do no more. He fell back onto the bed, exhausted.
“We’ll come visit you soon, Justin,” Helen said, and the doctors started back toward the door. Bright sunlight filled the ward. Spring was on the way.
The first thing Devin saw when he reached Chicago was a huge billboard across the street from the train station. It showed two smiling faces, twenty feet tall, of a man and a woman. They looked wholesome, well fed, prosperous, and their gazes were pointed upward as if they had found the truth. Underneath the faces were , the words For the Heartland!
Devin, unnerved, leaned against the side of the j terminal.
“What’s the matter?” Clay said. “You look like j you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Up there,” Devin said. “That’s my wife. And Peter
Bradford. I knew he was being considered for some kind of big job, but with Marion?”
“Looks like they’re destined for great things,” Clay said. “Come on, let’s keep moving.”
Clay led them to-a safe house in a north-side ghetto, where a black woman named Emma fed them and gave them a floor to sleep on. The next morning, after breakfast, Clay informed Devin that they were going to a meeting.
“Where? Who with?” Devin asked.
“You’ll see.”
They walked to the Loop and Clay guided them to what remained of the John Hancock building. The windows at street level were boarded up and winos slept in the lobby. Every knob or fixture of any possible value had been stolen. The elevators no longer worked, of course, and Clay led them up the stairs. They stopped at the tenth floor to catch their breath.
“There’re lots of deserted skyscrapers now,” Clay explained. “Vertical slums. This was an insurance building, but who needs insurance when Big Brother takes care of us all?”
They started climbing again.
“How much farther?” Devin asked.
“Courage. The higher, the safer. Squatters live in the first ten floors or so. A lot of kids in the next few.” “Kids?”
“Yeah, ten or twelve years old, homeless. They beg, sell drugs, sell themselves, form gangs, and fight wars. The authorities pretty much leave them alone. Too expensive to put them in jail. Anyway, if you can make it to, oh, the twentieth floor, you’re home free. The cops are too fat to climb that far. Here we are, ladies and gentlemen, twentieth floor, cosmetics, ladies’ lingerie, and on your left, antigovemment plots. Last stop on the underground railroad.”
Clayton pushed open the door that led to what once had been a huge office complex.
“Raise your arms and move slowly,” he said.
Devin did as he was told. They moved through a maze of what had once been small offices, then encountered a black man leaning against a wall.
“Jeffrey,” Clay cried.
“Clayton, my man.”
The two embraced.
“Still twisting the news?” Clay quipped.
“Night and day.” Jeffrey grinned. “I am the Dan Rather of disinformation.” He turned to Devin and extended his hand. “Glad to meet you, man. Been an admirer—you know. Come and meet the group.” Jeffrey led them into what had once been a conference room, where highly paid actuaries had discussed mortality rates and term-insurance options. All that remained now was a magnificent view of the Chicago skyline—no one could steal that. Eight men and women awaited them, and they soon gathered around Devin, greeting him with handshakes and warm words. They greeted Clayton with affection, too, and in time they settled in a circle on the floor.
“Well, this is it, the movement in Chicago,” Jeffrey said. “Each of us represents a group, cells you might say; some are a part of the establishment, others underground. We don’t interact much, except on very special occasions, like greeting Devin Milford.” “There’s no leaders,” declared a man named Quinlan, a tough-looking fellow in workclothes. “We do our own stuff. That way we don’t get hooked into nothin’ that don’t measure up. Leaders screw things up.”
His outburst was greeted with an awkward silence. Devin guessed he was being reminded that he had been one of those leaders who failed.
“Look, let’s get something out in the open,” Jeffrey said. “Nobody blames you for what happened when you ran for president. You got our hopes up and then the bubble burst, but that wasn’t your fault. Maybe we were all unrealistic. The thing you may not know is that while you were gone you became a hero, kind of a folk hero, to a lot of people. I don’t think the Russians understand it or you wouldn’t be here now. But whether you like it or not, you’ve got it.”
Devin nodded but didn’t reply. He didn’t want to b
e a hero. He wanted their help, but he knew to let things unfold in their own way.
“But listen,” Jeffrey continued, “I’m a journalist, and I’ve got this pesky habit of wanting to know how the pieces of a story fit together. You don’t owe us any explanations, and if you want to skip the whole business, that’s fine. But I confess to being curious as hell about how you and Marion Andrews ever got together, and about how it happened that the two of you turned out as wildly different as you did.”
It was not a question, exactly, but it hung heavy in the silence that followed, and Devin, surrounded by people he instantly trusted, found himself thinking back over long-distant events he hadn’t let himself reflect on in years.
He laughed. “Well,” he began, talking more to himself than to the others, “we met at Harvard. How’s that for an elitist backdrop? I was in law school, Marion was still an undergraduate. We met at a party and . . . well, let me be candid. I wanted to go to bed with her because of the way she could argue politics. She was a fireball—incisive, committed, smart as hell. And beautiful. She moved in with me. We got married. And eventually we both practiced law. Viewed from the outside, we were the perfect young American professional couple.
“The problem,” Devin went on, “was competitiveness, and politics turned out to be what the competition focused on. I’d been active for years. I was radicalized by Vietnam, I was disgusted by the Nixon scandals, I was depressed by the apathy and nest-feathering indifference that came after. I made my feelings known, and in 1982 I was drafted to run for the state legislature. This was Cambridge, remember, liberal land, and a guy like me could win without a major party machine behind me.” He broke off and gave a rueful laugh. “It never dawned on me that Marion wanted to run herself.”
“Well, I ran and I won. In eighty-six, a congressional seat opened up, and I was asked to go for it. By then I’d realized that my marriage was being corroded and that Marion was furious. I would have gladly stepped aside and let her run—she would have made the better politician, as later events have shown. But by then the whole machinery of the system was cranked up: I was the one with two terms’ experience, not her; I was the one who could win and get to Washington to represent what I believed in. So what was I to do: make the gallant gesture and let the conservatives win the seat, or win the seat and jeopardize my marriage?
“I went to Congress. Chalk that up as mistake number four-twenty-three. Then in D.C. as a freshman rep, I made errors four-twenty-four through ten thousand. Jesus, I was green! Protocol, lobbies—it was Greek to me, but by God I said what was on my mind, and my constituents sent me back for more in eighty-eight. I went, along with one of the most frustrated political wives in a city full of them.
“Then World War III came and went practically without anybody noticing. Even now, I’m staggered by how it happened. Remember air raids in grade school? The nuke freeze movement? The nightmares of mushroom clouds and radioactive milk? Those unspeakable horrors at least made a certain kind of sense: something cataclysmic would happen, and the whole world would be changed. But now nothing had happened—some magnetism in the sky!—and America was gone.
“Congress, like everyone else, was dumbfounded, paralyzed. Resolutions were passed. Speeches were made. No one would face up to what the surrender terms to the Soviets really meant. I faced up to it, for better or worse. I knew that America was no more. The United States was occupied territory, as pathetic as any newsreel you ever saw of Czechoslovakia or Poland.
“Marion was smarter than I was—as she’d been all along. Sh6 was among the very first to see the writing on the wall and to grasp how to turn it to her advantage. I’d been the star under the old system of American democracy. Okay. She’d be the star under the New Understanding. She joined the PPP practically before the PPP was instated. She was on her way.
“That’s about the time I decided to run for president,” Devin said, shaking his head at what seemed now to have been an act of pure quixotic folly. “I didn’t have a chance, you understand. The Democrats and the Republicans had put up party-approved stooges, who were well financed and who had access to the media. Even if by some miracle I could win the balloting, there was nothing to stop the authorities from diddling with the vote count. But I wanted a forum. I wanted to tell my fellow Americans that the country was being raped, that the idea of cooperation was a sham, that the thought that the Soviets would ever leave was a grotesque illusion.
“If no one believed me, everything would have been fine. But of course I was just the mouthpiece for what everyone already knew but lacked the gumption to acknowledge. I spoke people’s own thoughts back to them—and that, I guess, is what made them think of me as dangerous. You see, I wasn’t brilliant, I wasn’t intellectual. And God knows I wasn’t subtle.
“Marion used to taunt me about that, in fact.” He gave a wistful laugh. “ ‘Be a little subtle,’ she used to tell me. And watch your blind side.’ Well, the blind side is exactly where they hit me. One day I was the dark-horse contender for president; next day, according to the official dispatch, I was a lunatic who had cracked under the pressures of campaigning and needed to be hospitalized. Going by the record, I’ve spent the last five years recuperating from a nervous breakdown that I never had. And I guess that brings you up to date.”
Devin broke off his narration with a self-effacing shrug, as if denying the import of his personal travail. His listeners sighed and rearranged themselves on their aluminum chairs.
“The thing I still don’t understand, though,” Jeffrey said, “is when the real rift came, when your wife turned against you.”
Devin blinked, paused, looked down at Ms fingernails. Absently, he shook his head no as he spoke. “She didn’t turn against me. She wasn’t there. I. . . I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
Jeffrey retreated from his aggressive interviewer stance. He glanced quickly at the others in the room and silenced them with his eyes. Then he forced a smile and threw an arm around Devin Milford’s shoulders. “But tell me, brother, what can we do for you while you’re here?”
Devin hesitated, as if he needed to rid himself of the taste of something rotten before he could speak again. “I’m here to see my sons,” he said. “It’s a personal matter. Maybe it doesn’t concern you at all.”
“No, we’ll help you,” said one of the policemen. “We owe that much to Devin Milford. It won’t be easy, believe me, but we’ll give it a shot. Then, maybe once you’ve got your personal affairs in order, you’ll care about politics again.”
Chapter 10
It had been the worst time of Amanda’s life. The carnage at the exile camp, the confrontation with Major Gurtman, the burial of the dead Exiles, the forced evacuation of the survivors to Omaha, the new curfew—to endure all this, and without Peter, was almost more than she could bear.
Yet she had survived. She had made the decisions that otherwise would have been Peter’s. She and others had defied the curfew to attend the mass funeral service at the exile camp and the SSU had backed down. She kept trying to reach Peter, kept expecting him to call, but it was as if Milford had been isolated from the rest of the universe.
On the second morning after the funerals, she and the children were in their kitchen when several military vehicles stopped in front of the house.
“What’s going on?” Scott demanded.
Amanda hurried to the door, expecting to confront armed soldiers, but instead she found a pert, darkhaired young woman on her front porch.
“Mrs. Bradford, I’m Margaret Sawyer, your new aide.”
“Aide?” Amanda said, quite bewildered.
“Actually, I’m on the governor-general’s staff, but I’ve been detailed to help you with the move and all your new responsibilities.”
“Move? What move are you talking about?”
“To Omaha. His headquarters are there, and we were sent to help you move.”
“I’ve got to talk to my husband,” Amanda said, looking out into the
yard, where soldiers were taking up defensive positions. She wondered: against what? “He’s been in Washington,” she added. “I haven’t talked to him in several days.”
“But didn’t you see his speech to Congress on TV?” “Yes, we saw him,” Amanda said wearily.
“I thought he was wonderful.”
“Yes, he was.” Amanda sighed. She thought that if her husband was speaking to Congress and yet could not get through to his wife on the phone, then something was very wrong, something that neither of them understood; all she wanted was Peter safe at home with her, and for their lives to return to where they had been before all this political madness began.
“If you’re my aide,” she said, “please get my husband on the phone.”
The rusted step-van said A&A Plumbing on its side in faded red letters. It was parked in a deserted warehouse on Chicago’s south side just a few blocks from Comiskey Park. Devin and Clayton were standing beside the truck, along with two of their Chicago allies, Quinlan and a man named Miller.
“We followed your boys for two days,” Quinlan said. “So the driver knows the routes.”
“You’ve got to decide if you make your move at school or at home,” Miller said. “You have to realize they may not recognize you. They may panic at first. But don’t wait too long. Once their mother gets back in town, it’ll just be harder.” He extended his hand. “Good luck.”
Devin shook Miller’s hand, then Quinlan’s. “I appreciate it more than I can say,” he told them.
Devin opened the back of the truck and climbed in amid a jumble of pipes and plumbers’ tools. He held out his hand to Clayton, who did not take it.
“I think I’ll tag along,” Clayton said, and jumped into the truck with Devin.
“What about your other work?” Devin asked.
“Close it up and let’s go,” Clayton yelled to the driver.
Quinlan slammed the door shut and the truck eased out of the warehouse.
As they pulled away, Clayton said, “You asked about my other work. You know what, I don’t really know what I’ve been doing. Since I left the church I’ve been helping people to escape. To where? It’s like shuffling beads. The truth is, we’ve reached the first time in history where there’s no place left to escape to. America, England, Israel, Canada, there was always a beacon of hope somewhere. Now there’s just one world and it’s all bad. So it’s time to build a better one. Maybe helping you is as good a first step as any.”
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