The girl stared downward. “Of course I do. I do, really. But it was such a long time ago.”
“Not so long! Where I work—listen to me—they have books. You know, I told you about books? I’ve read them, Mina. I learned what the words meant from other books. It’s only been since the use of artificial insemination—not even five hundred years ago.”
“Yes,” the girl said, sighing, “I’m sure that’s true.”
“Mina, stop it! We are not the unnatural ones, no matter what they say. I don’t know exactly how it happened—maybe as women gradually became equal to men in every way—or maybe solely because of the way we’re born—I don’t know. But the point is, darling, the whole world was like us, once. Even now,” he said, desperately, “look at the animals.”
“Jesse, don’t you dare talk as though we’re like those horrible little dogs and cats and things.”
Jesse took a deep swallow of his drink. He had tried so often to tell her, show her, make her see. But he knew what she thought, really. She thought she was exactly what the authorities told her she was.
God, maybe that’s how they all think, all the Crooked People, all the “unnormal ones” . . .
The girl’s hands caressed his arms and the touch of them became strange to him. I love you, Mr. Martin, even though you do have two heads . . .
Forget it, he thought. Never mind. She’s a woman, a very satisfying, desirable woman, and she may think you’re both freaks, but you know different, indeed you do, you know she’s wrong, just as they’re all wrong . . .
Or, he wondered, are you the insane person of old days who was insane because he was so sure he wasn’t insane because-
“Disgusting!”
It was the fat man, the smiling masher, E. J. Hobart. But he wasn’t smiling now.
Jesse got up quickly and stepped in front of Mina. “What do you want?” he said. “I thought I told you--”
The man pulled a metal identification disk from his trunks. “Vice-squad, my friend,” he said. “Better sit down.”
The man’s arm went out through the curtain and two other men came in, equipped with weapons.
“I’ve been watching you quite a while, Mister,” the man said. “Quite a while.”
“Look,” Jesse said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I work at Centraldome and I’m seeing Miss Kirkpatrick here on some business.”
“We know all about that kind of business,” the man said.
“All right—I’ll tell you the truth. I forced her to come here. She didn’t want to, but I--”
“Mister, didn’t you hear me? I said I’ve been watching you. Let’s go.”
One man took Mina’s arm, roughly; the other two began to propel Jesse out through the club. Heads turned. Tangled bodies moved embarrassedly.
“It’s all right,” the fat man said, his white skin glistening with perspiration. “It’s all right, folks. Go on back to whatever you were doing.” He grinned and tightened his grip on Jesse’s wrist.
Mina, Jesse noticed, did not struggle. He looked at her and felt something suddenly freeze into him. She had been trying to tell him something all evening, but he hadn’t let her. Now he knew what he had feared. He knew what she had come to tell him: that even if they hadn’t been caught, she would have submitted to the Cure voluntarily. No more worries then, no more guilt. No more tender moments, either, but wasn’t that a small price to pay, when she could live the rest of her life without feeling shame and dirt? Yes. It was a small price, now that the midnight dives and brief meetings were all they had left.
She did not meet his look as they took her out into the street. He watched her and thought of the past when they had been close, and he wanted to scream.
“You’ll be okay,” the fat man was saying. He opened the wagon’s doors. “They’ve got it down pat now—couple days in the ward, one short session with the doctors; take out a few glands, make a few injections, attach a few wires to your head, turn on a machine: presto! You’ll be surprised.”
The fat officer leaned close. His sausage fingers danced wildly near Jesse’s face.
“It’ll make a new man of you,” he said.
Then they closed the doors and locked them.
<
~ * ~
WHO SHALL DWELL
BY H. C. NEAL
This is a strongly pacifist story. The knowledge that it was written by a man who spent ten years of his life in the army as a paratrooper, making combat jumps in Germany and Korea, only increases its power. Mr. Neal’s life is quieter now —he is the news editor and prize-winning columnist of two small-town Oklahoma weeklies. In “Who Shall Dwell,” he says more about the need for brotherhood among the earth’s peoples than any amount of pious rhetoric, and he does it by use of a device the efectiveness of which is matched by its utter simplicity.
~ * ~
IT CAME on a Sunday afternoon and that was good, because if it had happened on a weekday the father would have been at work and the children at school, leaving the mother at home alone and the whole family disorganized with hardly any hope at all. They had prayed that it would never come, ever, but suddenly here it was.
The father, a slender, young-old man, slightly stooped from years of labor, was resting on the divan and half-listening to a program of waltz music on the radio. Mother was in the kitchen preparing a chicken for dinner and the younger boy and girl were in the bedroom drawing crude pictures of familiar barnyard animals on a shared slate. The older boy was in the tack shed out back, saddle-soaping some harnesses.
When the waltz program was interrupted by an announcer with a routine political appeal, the father rose, tapped the ash from his pipe, and ambled lazily into the kitchen.
“How about joining me in a little glass of wine?” he asked, patting his wife affectionately on the hip.
“If you don’t think it would be too crowded,” she replied, smiling easily at their standing jest.
He grinned amiably and reached into the cupboard for the bottle and glasses.
Suddenly the radio message was abruptly cut off. A moment of humming silence. Then, in a voice pregnant with barely controlled excitement, the announcer almost shouted:
“Bomb alert! Bomb alert! Attention! Attention! A salvo of missiles has just been launched across the sea, heading this way. Attention! They are expected to strike within the next sixteen minutes. Sixteen minutes! This is a verified alert! Take cover! Take cover! Keep your radios tuned for further instructions.”
“My God!” the father gasped, dropping the glasses. “Oh, my God!” His ruggedly handsome face was ashen, puzzled, as though he knew beyond a shadow of doubt that this was real—but still could not quite believe it.
“Get the children,” his wife blurted, then dashed to the door to call the older boy. He stared at her a brief moment, seeing the fear in her pretty face, but something else, too, something divorced from the fear. Defiance. And a loathing for all men involved in the making and dispatch of nuclear weapons.
He wheeled then, and ran to the bedroom. “Let’s go,” he snapped, “shelter drill!” Despite a belated attempt to tone down the second phrase and make it seem like just another of the many rehearsals they’d had, his voice and bearing galvanized the youngsters into instant action. They leaped from the bed without a word and dashed for the door.
He hustled them through the kitchen to the rear door and sent them scooting to the shelter. As he returned to the bedroom for outer garments for himself and his wife, the older boy came running in.
“This is the hot one, Son,” said his father tersely, “the real one.” He and the boy stared at each other a long moment, both knowing what must be done and each knowing the other would more than do his share, yet wondering still at the frightening fact that it must be done at all.
“How much time we got, Dad?”
“Not long,” the father replied, glancing at his watch, “twelve, maybe fourteen minutes.”
The boy disappeared into
the front room, going after the flashlight and battery radio. The father stepped to the closet, slid the door open and picked up the flat metal box containing their vital papers, marriage license, birth certificates, etc. He tossed the box on the bed, then took down his wife’s shortcoat and his own hunting jacket. Draping the clothing over his arm, he then picked up the metal box and the big family Bible from the headboard on the bed. Everything else they would need had been stored in the shelter the past several months. He heard his wife approaching and turned as she entered the room.
“Ready, Dear?” she asked.
“Yes, we’re ready now,” he replied, “are the kids gone in?”
“They’re all down,” she answered, then added with a faint touch of despairing bewilderment, “I still can’t believe it’s real.”
“We’ve got to believe it,” he said, looking her steadily in the eye, “we can’t afford not to.”
Outside, the day was crisp and clear, typical of early fall. Just right for boating on the river, fishing or bird shooting. A regular peach of a day, he thought, for fleeing underground to escape the awesome hell of a nuclear strike. Who was the writer who had said about atomic weapons, “Would any self-respecting cannibal toss one into a village of women and children?” He looked at his watch again. Four minutes had elapsed since the first alarm. Twelve minutes, more or less, remained.
Inside the shelter, he dogged the door with its double-strength strap iron bar, and looked around to see that his family was squared away. His wife, wearing her attractive blue print cotton frock (he noticed for the first time), was methodically checking the food supplies, assisted by the older son. The small children had already put their initial fright behind them, as is the nature of youngsters, and were drawing on the slate again in quiet, busy glee.
Now it began. The waiting.
They knew, the man and his wife, that others would come soon, begging and crying to be taken in now that the time was here, now that Armageddon had come screaming toward them, stabbing through the sky on stubbed wings of shining steel.
They had argued the aspects of this when the shelter was abuilding. It was in her mind to share their refuge. “We can’t call ourselves Christians and then deny safety to our friends when the showdown comes,” she contended, “that isn’t what God teaches.”
“That’s nothing but religious pap,” he retorted with a degree of anger, “oatmeal Christianity.” For he was a hard-headed man, an Old Testament man. “God created the family as the basic unit of society,” he reasoned. “That should make it plain that a man’s primary Christian duty is to protect his family.”
“But don’t you see?” she protested, “we must prepare to purify ourselves ... to rise above this ‘mine’ thinking and be as God’s own son, who said, ‘Love thy neighbor.’”
“No,” he replied with finality, “I can’t buy that.” Then, after a moment’s thought while he groped for the words to make her understand the truth which burned in the core of his soul, “It is my family I must save, no one more. You. These kids. Our friends are like the people of Noah’s time: he warned them of the coming flood when he built the ark on God’s command. He was ridiculed and scoffed at, just as we have been ridiculed. No,” and here his voice took on a new sad sureness, an air of dismal certainty, “it is meant that if they don’t prepare, they die. I see no need for further argument.” And so, she had reluctantly acquiesced.
With seven minutes left, the first knock rang the shelter door. “Let us in! For God’s sake, man, let us in!”
He recognized the voice. It was his first neighbor down the road toward town.
“No!” shouted the father, “there is only room for us. Go! Take shelter in your homes. You may yet be spared.”
Again came the pounding. Louder. More urgent.
“You let us in or we’ll break down this door!” He wondered, with some concern, if they were actually getting a ram of some sort to batter at the door. He was reasonably certain it would hold. At least as long as it must.
The seconds ticked relentlessly away. Four minutes left.
His wife stared at the door in stricken fascination and moaned slightly. “Steady, girl,” he said, evenly. The children, having halted their game at the first shouting, looked at him in fearful wonderment. He glared at his watch, ran his hands distraughtly through his hair, and said nothing.
Three minutes left.
At that moment, a woman’s cry from the outside pierced him in an utterly vulnerable spot, a place the men could never have touched with their desperate demands. “If you won’t let me in,” she cried, “please take my baby, my little girl.”
He was stunned by her plea. This he had not anticipated. What must I do? he asked himself in sheer agony. What man on earth could deny a child the chance to live?
At that point, his wife rose, sobbing, and stepped to the door. Before he could move to stop her, she let down the latch and dashed outside. Instantly a three-year-old girl was thrust into the shelter. He hastily fought the door latch on again, then stared at the frightened little newcomer in mute rage, hating her with an abstract hatred for simply being there in his wife’s place and knowing he could not turn her out.
He sat down heavily, trying desperately to think. The voices outside grew louder. He glanced at his watch, looked at the faces of his own children a long moment, then rose to his feet. There were two minutes left, and he had made his decision. He marveled now that he had even considered any other choice.
“Son,” he said to the older boy, “you take care of them.” It was as simple as that.
Unlatching the door, he thrust it open and stepped out. The crowd surged toward him. Blocking the door with his body, he snatched up the two children nearest him, a boy and a girl, and shoved them into the shelter. “Bar that door,” he shouted to his son, “and don’t open it for at least a week!”
Hearing the latch drop into place, he turned and glanced around at the faces in the crowd. Some of them were still babbling incoherently, utterly panic-stricken. Others were quiet now, resigned, no longer afraid.
Stepping to his wife’s side, he took her hand and spoke in a warm, low tone. “They will be all right, the boy will lead them.” He grinned reassuringly and added, “We should be together, you and I.”
She smiled wordlessly through her tears and squeezed his hand, exchanging with him in the one brief gesture a lifetime and more of devotion.
Then struck the first bomb, blinding them, burning them, blasting them into eternity. Streaking across the top of the world, across the extreme northern tip of Greenland, then flaming downrange through the chilled Arctic skies, it had passed over Moscow, over Voronezh, and on over Krasny to detonate high above their city of Shakhty.
The bird had been 19 minutes in flight, launched from a bomb-blasted, seared-surface missile pit on the coast of California. America’s retaliation continued for several hours.
<
~ * ~
DOUBLE TAKE
BY JACK FINNEY
Jack Finney is the author of the novels “Five Against the House,” “Good Neighbor Sam” “The Body Snatchers,” “The House of Numbers” and “Assault on a Queen”—every one of which became a film, the last-named starring Frank Sinatra (“Ingenious” The New York Herald Tribune said of the book, and The Baltimore Sun praised the swashbuckling plot as “a piece of piracy Blackbeard would boggle at”). His short-story collections, “The Third Level” and “I Love Galesburg in the Springtime” are treasure troves of delightful reading. He has a gentle touch with fantasy not quite like any other storyteller around. Of his playboy work, we are particularly fond of “Double Take” and we invite you to share this fondness right now.
~ * ~
WHEN JESSICA WALKED into the club car, everyone knew with one startled glance that this was somebody special, someone important, and I sat watching their eyes and mouths pop open. Out of the world’s three billion people there can’t be more than, say, a hundred women like Jessica Maxw
ell. Her red-brown hair was thick and shining with health, her brown eyes magnificent, her complexion so flawless your fingers ached to touch it, her figure marvelous. But that doesn’t tell you how beautiful she was; I can only say that if you were staggering toward a hospital with three bullets in your chest, you’d stop and turn to stare after Jessica if she walked past.
She said, “Hi, Jake,” smiled so that an actual chill ran up my spine, and sat down beside me. People sat sipping drinks, glancing out windows, turning pages and sneaking looks, but I was pretty sure no one actually recognized her. She’d been in only two pictures, in small parts; on the screen less than a minute in one of them. But of course they knew she almost had to be in pictures; we were out of Los Angeles station only 20 minutes, and with looks like hers what else could she be?
The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 30