by Algis Budrys
Oh, no! Jim thought, wishing a thunderclap would come to erase the entire scene. Even his mother looked at Bob with complete astonishment. Jim didn’t dare look at his father.
Ted looked up without seeming to be surprised at all. “Sounds like that’s been building up a long time, Bob,” he said quietly. “Want to tell me about it?”
Jim sighed as quietly as he could, feeling the shocked tension drain out of his father’s body beside him. His mother, too, relaxed, and Mary, who had put down her fork and looked evenly at Bob, started eating again.
He took over, Jim thought. Ted had absorbed the force of Bob’s explosion and removed its impact from them all, and now it was his responsibility, and his alone. And while Matt Garvin held his eyes riveted on his younger son, and no matter what he might feel, he did not speak.
Bob held his eyes level with Ted’s, but Jim could see it was an effort. Finally, he said, “Yes, it has.” His voice was low, but taut and desperate, and for one brief moment Jim caught a flash of what he must be feeling. He had thrown a stone into a pond, made an unexpectedly insignificant splash, and was now somehow in over his head. Jim wanted to smile grimly, but realized that this was no time for it.
“Yes, it has,” Bob repeated, his voice rising. “I’ve been sitting here watching you take over in all directions, and I think it stinks!” His breathing was harsh, his face scarlet. He had put himself in an impossible position, and there was no direction in which to go but forward.
Ted nodded slowly. “I think you’re right.”
And, once again, Bob was helpless.
“I think you’re right because I don’t think anybody should be in my position,” Ted continued, still without changing the quiet level of his voice. “Unfortunately, I seem to have grown into it.”
“With a lot of force-feeding!” Bob shot back, recovering.
Ted shrugged, letting an uncharacteristic sigh seep out between his closed lips. “That’s the nature of the times, Bob. If you’re implying that I’m exercising some sort of pressure, I’d like to ask you where you think I got the authority to back it with. Rather than accept that premise, I’d say that the times are such that they produce the pressure which forces one man to make more decisions than another man. There’s a certain step-by-step logic, inherent in human nature and the peculiarities of human psychology, which ensures that Man will always organize into the largest possible group. Civilization is inevitable, if you want a pat phrase. It so happens that, at this stage, we are in transition from a city-state to a national culture. Such a move always requires that the separate elements be welded into one by force. I’d like to remind you that Greece was nothing but a collection of enlightened but small, ineffectual, and squabbling city-states until the advent of Philip of Macedon.”
Bob saw his opening. His mouth curved into its characteristic thin crook of a smile, and his voice gathered confidence again.
“Heil Berendtsen!”
Ted nodded. “If you want it that way, yes. Though I’d prefer—if that’s the word—an analogy to Caesar. And if you think I enjoy the thought—” His voice hardened for the first time, and Jim paled as he saw something of the restless beast that prowled Ted’s mind of nights, “—then, Bob, I’d suggest that you read your Gibbon more thoroughly.”
“Very pretty,” Bob answered. “Very pretty. Destiny has chosen a son, and all the stars point to Berendtsen! Thank you, I’ll stick to Hitler.”
“I’m afraid you’re stuck with me,” Ted said, and finished his peas.
“Why, you egocentric—”
“Robert, you’ll go to your room and stay there!” his mother exclaimed, half-rising, her cheeks flushed. “Ted, I’m very sorry about all this. I don’t know what to say.”
Ted looked up. “I wasn’t simply being polite when I said he was right, you know.”
Margaret Garvin looked as bewildered as Bob had. “Well. Well,” she fumbled, “I don’t know…”
“Suppose we just finish supper,” Matt said, and for a moment Jim hoped he would be obeyed. But Bob pushed his chair farther back and stood up.
“I don’t think I particularly care to eat here right now,” he delivered, and strode out of the apartment.
“Forgot his carbine,” Jim commented, glad of the opportunity to say something at last.
Ted looked at him, his lips twitching into a thin smile. “Wouldn’t go too well with his attitude right now, would it?”
“Guess not,” Jim admitted. He dropped his eyes to his plate, realizing that he had learned something about Ted Berendtsen today, but was still unable to see what it was that let him project the force of his calm authority as though it were a physical strength.
Jim looked up again, and saw Ted staring across the room at the blank wall, his eyes as old as Matt’s, who was trying to reach across the length of the table and silently explain to Margaret with his expression alone.
“You ought to give him a district to run, pretty soon, Matt,” Berendtsen said unexpectedly. He smiled at Matt’s astonished look. “He uses his head.”
Matt snorted—a somehow painful sound. The sound a man makes when he condemns something dear to him.
“It’s still a republic,” Ted reminded him. “I’d rather have him argue with me than have him sit there nodding dumbly. Right now, he’s learning to think. Give him a little practice, and he’ll be ready to learn how to think past his emotions. Don’t forget, we’re going to need administrators by the dozens.”
Matt nodded slowly, some of his lost pride in his son returning. “I’ll see.”
“Do you suppose he was right?” Mary asked, looking gravely at her husband.
Jim turned his glance toward his sister. Her remark was completely characteristic. She sat quietly for hours, watching and listening, and what went on in her mind, perhaps Ted Berendtsen alone could guess. Perhaps not even he. And then finally, she said a few words much as she had now.
“Heil Berendtsen? I don’t know,” Ted admitted. “I don’t think so—but then, a man can’t tell when he’s going paranoid, can he?”
And Jim caught another glimpse of the special hells that Berendtsen reserved for himself.
* * *
Boston was easy, by the time they came to it. They occupied the suburbs, isolating the city proper, and Matt sent a light naval force to control the harbor. The news of how Providence had fallen must have reached the city, for the opposition was light. It was not so much the overwhelming weight of Berendtsen’s men that forced the surrender—it was the far more crushing power of the past year’s bloody history. By the time they reached Boston, it was the dead, more than the army’s living, who fought Berendtsen’s battles.
An army they were, by now; The Army of Unification, no longer simply “the New York bunch.” Men from Bridgeport and Kingston marched with them, beside others, now, from Lexington and Concord.
James Garvin, Sergeant-Rifleman, stood on a hilltop with his corporal, a lean-jawed, pipe-sucking man named Drumm, and watched the men forming up.
“The Army of Unification,” Drumm said, his face reflective. “Another one of your brother-in-law’s casually brilliant ideas. No regional tag, and a nice idealistic implication. No disgrace to be beaten by it, since it’s an ‘army,’ and much easier to convince yourself into joining, since it has the built-in ideal of ‘unification’ to recommend it. You know, I’m more and more convinced that Berendtsen is one of your rare all-around geniuses.”
Jim grunted and stuffed his own pipe full of the half-cured Connecticut tobacco he was gradually becoming accustomed to. He liked Drumm. He’d been a good man ever since he’d joined up, and he was somehow comfortable to talk to. “He does all right,” Jim agreed.
Drumm smiled slightly. “He does a shade better than that.” A reflective look crossed his face, and he turned his head to focus on the knot of officers clustered around Berendtsen’s figure as he passed out orders. “I wonder, sometimes, what a man like that thinks of himself. Is he his own hero, or does he fe
el some gospel burning inside him? Does he perhaps think of himself as nothing more than a man doing a job? Does he shut out the signs that tell him some of his men hate him, and some love him? Does he understand that there are men, like us, who stand to one side and try to analyze every move he makes?”
“I don’t know,” Jim said. It was an old topic, and they found themselves bringing it up again and again. “My kid brother has a theory about him.”
Drumm spat past his pipestem. “Had a theory—he’s developed a dozen since, or he’s false to type.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose we have to have young intellectuals, if we’re ever to survive to be middleaged philosophers. But I wish some of them, at least, would realize that they themselves encourage the high mortality rate among them.” He grinned wryly. “Particularly in these peculiar times. Well—” he nodded down at the men, “time to put it on the road again. Maine, here we come, ready or not.”
Jim walked down the hill toward his platoon. Maine, here we come, he thought. And then back down the coast again, and home. And after that, out again, southward. The dirty, bitter, smoking frontier, and behind it, union. More and more, he could feel his own motives shifting from expediency to a faith in the abstract concept of a new nation, and civilization pushing itself upward again. But the dirt and the bitterness went first, and he and Harvey Drumm walked with it, following Ted Berendtsen.
* * *
They were deep in Connecticut on the backward swing, cleaning out a few pockets that had been missed, when Jack Holland, who was Jim’s company commander now, came up to him.
Jack was still the same self-contained, controlled, fighting man he had been. His face, like Jim’s, was burned a permanent brown, and he wore an old Army helmet, but he hadn’t changed beyond that. His rifle was still slung from his shoulder at the same angle it had always held, and his eyes were steady. But his expression was set into a peculiar mask today, and Jim looked at him sharply.
“Ted wants to talk to you, Jim,” he said, his voice unreadable. “You free?”
“Sure.” Jim waved a hand to Drumm, and the corporal nodded.
“I’ll keep their pants dry,” he said, raising a chorus of derisive comments from the men.
“Okay, let’s go,” Jim said, and walked back beside Holland, who remained silent and gave him no opening to learn what had happened. They reached Berendtsen, who was standing alone without his usual group of officers waiting for instructions, and, once again, Jim frowned as he saw that even Berendtsen’s mask was more firm than usual. There was something frightening in that.
“Hello, Jim,” Berendtsen said, holding out his hand.
“How’s it going, Ted?” Jim said. The handshake was firm, as friendly as it ever had been, and Jim wondered if it had been his own attitude that made him think they were far more apart than they once had been.
Berendtsen let a grim smile flicker around the corners of his mouth, but when it was gone his face was sadder than Jim ever remembered seeing it.
“Bob just called me on the radio,” he said gently. “Matt died yesterday.”
Jim felt the chill stretch the skin over his cheekbones, and he knew that Jack had put his hand on his shoulder, but for those first few seconds, he could not really feel anything. He could never clearly remember, through the rest of his life, exactly what that moment had been like.
Finally he said, “How’d it happen?” because it was the only thing he could think of to say that would sound nearly normal and yet not snowball within him into more emotion than he could hide.
“He died in bed,” Berendtsen said, his voice even softer. “Bob couldn’t know what it really was. There are so many things to go wrong with a man that could be handled easily, if we had any trained doctors. But all we have are some bright young men who’ve read a lot of medical books and are too proud to admit they’re plumbers.”
It was a sign of how much he’d thought of Matt, that Ted should be openly bitter.
* * *
All the way back along the Hudson, Harvey Drumm was the most important thing on Jim Garvin’s mind. Harvey Drumm, and something he’d said and done.
They had been bivouacked outside Albany. Jim and Harvey had been leaning their backs against a tree and smoking quietly in the darkness.
“Well,” Drumm said at last, “you won’t be seeing me in the morning, I guess. That Sawtell boy in the third squad’ll make a good corporal. You can replace Miller with him, and move Miller up into my spot. How’s it sound?”
“Sounds fine for Miller and Sawtell,” Jim answered. “I’m not sure I like it. You going over the hill?”
Drumm sucked on his pipe. “Yes and no. You might say I was going out to do missionary work.”
That didn’t make much sense. “You’re crazy,” Jim said perfunctorily.
Drumm chuckled. “No. The only thing insane about me is my curiosity. Trouble is, it keeps getting satisfied, and then I have to take it somewhere else. That, and my mouth. My mouth wants to satisfy other people’s curiosity whether they want it or not. It’s time to take ’em both over the hill. Over the next range of hills, maybe.”
“Look, you know I’m your superior officer and I could have you shot.”
“Shoot me.”
“Oh, God damn it! What do you want to get out now, for? Ted’s going to be taking the army lots of new places. Don’t you want to be along, if you’re so curious?”
“I know Ted’s story from here on. I think maybe he does, too.” Drumm’s voice no longer had anything humorous in it. “I think maybe he read the same books I did, after he realized what his job was. Not that we go about it in the same way, but the source books are the same.
“See, you can learn a lot from books. They’ll tell you simple, practical things. Things like what relationship a wrench has to a bolt, and what a bolt’s function is. They won’t tell you what the best way for you to hold a wrench might be, so you can do the best job. If you’re any good, you can figure it out for yourself And it’s the same way with much more complicated things, too.
“You know, just before the plague, the United States was almost sure it was going to have a war with a country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At first they thought the principal weapons would be bombs. But after a while, the best opinion was that rather than wreck all the useful machinery, and poison the countryside for centuries, the weapons used would be bacteriological ones. Diseases. Short-term plant poisons. And crippling chemicals. To this day, nobody knows for sure whether the plague that hit us wasn’t something designed to evade all the known antibiotics and bacteriophages—something that got away from somebody’s stockpile, by accident. Everyone denied it, of course. I don’t suppose that part of it matters.
“But just suppose somebody had written a book about what it would be like —really be like—for the people who lived through it. And suppose thousands of copies of that book had been lying around, out in the open in thousands of stores, for people to find after the plague.
“Think of the mistakes it might have saved them.
“That’s what books are for. Books, and mouthy, curious people like me. We soak up a lot of stuff in our heads, while other people are too busy doing practical things. And then we go out, and give it to them as they need it.
“So I think I’m due to go off. There must be people out in the wide world who need somebody to tell ’em what a bolt does, and what a wrench does to a bolt.”
“They’ll shoot you as soon as you show up, most likely.”
“So they’ll shoot me. And then they’ll never know. Their tough luck.”
Jim Garvin sighed. “All right. Harv, have it your way.”
“Almost always do.”
“Where you headed?”
“South, I guess. Always hated the cold rain. South, and over the mountains. I don’t figure Berendtsen’ll have time to get to New Orleans. Shame. I hear it’s a beautiful place.”
“Well, if you’re going, you’re going,” Jim said, passing over the
Berendtsen part of what Harv had said. He’d be there himself to see about that. “I wish you weren’t. For a mouthy guy, you make a good noncom.”
“Sorry, Jim. I’d rather conquer the world.”
They’d shaken hands in the darkness, and the last Jim Garvin ever saw of Harv Drumm, the long-legged man was walking away, whistling an old song Drumm used to sing around campfires, now and then. It was an old Australian Army marching song, he’d said: “Waltzing Matilda,” it was called, and some of the words didn’t make much sense.
“Well, what’re you going to do?” Bob Garvin demanded, his mouth hooked to one side. The passage of a handful of years had not changed him.
Berendtsen looked at him coldly. “Take the army south. As soon as possible. Trenton’s been taken over by the Philadelphia organization. You’re more aware of that than I am. You got the original report.”
Bob smiled thinly, and Jim, looking at him, winced. He tried to find some sort of comfort in his mother’s expression, but she simply sat with her hands in her lap, her face troubled.
“Still a few worlds left to conquer, eh? Well, go and good riddance to you.”
Mary looked up. “I don’t think you should, Ted. You know as well as I do what he’s up to. He got this man, Mackay, elected to Mayor. He’s got half the minor administrative posts in his pocket. The reason he’s so anxious to see you out of New York is because then he’ll be able to take over completely.”
Ted, like Mary, ignored Bob completely, and Jim smiled at his brother’s annoyance.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” Berendtsen said gently, “but this is a republic. Bob has every right to try and bring his group into a position of leadership. If the people decide they want him in, I have no right to block him with whatever prestige the Army might give me.
“And I do have to go out again. It’s become increasingly clear to me that as much of the country has to be unified as possible. I do not especially like the techniques necessary to that unification, but the important thing—the one, basic, important thing—is the union. Everything else follows after. After that, it’s up to the people to decide how that union’s going to function internally. But first the unification must be made.”