by Algis Budrys
Hollis,
C.I.C., SFAR
The operator who read the message had a nervous voice.
Holland raised an eyebrow. “Berendtsenism?”
For a moment, a savage light gleamed in his and Jim’s eyes, washing out the dull resignation that had begun to settle there.
“Do you suppose Ted wasn’t as dumb as New York thought he’d be?” Jim asked. “It sounds just a little bit like things are going to pieces up there. Suppose he realized that he might want somebody to break out, and hung on to Eisner for that purpose? And maybe he threw us in here to hole up until New York worked itself into the ground?”
Holland shook his head in bafflement. “I don’t know. You could never tell with Ted. You could only wonder.”
* * *
Robert Garvin spun around as Mayor Hammersby came through the door.
“Well?” he snapped.
Hammersby shrugged. “Not yet.”
“What’s the matter with them!”
Hammersby gave him a sidelong look. “Easy, Garvin. It’ll happen.”
Robert Garvin stared at him through a film of over. powering rage. It almost seemed as though even Hammersby were drawing a sort of insolence out of the impossible situation.
“We can’t wait any longer. The old Army men have already delayed us with their talking. If we hold off much more, we’ll have a revolution on our hands.”
“Isn’t that the theory?” Hammersby asked dryly. “Armed freemen, choosing their own leaders? Why should you object?”
The words dashed themselves against Robert Garvin like cold surf. Hammersby was right, of course. The people had a perfect right to choose for themselves, to kill or not to kill.
“Berendtsen’s got to die!” he suddenly shouted. “Send out one of Hollis’s patented mobs.”
“The people will rule, eh? With an occasional nudge.”
“Damn it, Hammersby!”
“Oh, I’ll do it, all right. I’m just as worried about my neck as you are.” The Mayor turned and left, with Garvin staring angrily at his back.
He couldn’t shoot a man in the back, of course.
* * *
The last message from New York came metallically into the radio shack:
“To be re-broadcast to the general population at your discretion”:
This is what Theodore Berendtsen said to his judges. It is the only public speech he ever made, and he made it surrounded by men who had been his friends. He did not look at anyone when he said this. His eyes were on something none of us, in that room with him, could see. But I am sure he saw it, as I am sure that, when someone reads these words, a hundred years from now, he will know that a man living in our time was great enough to plan beyond his own life.
The voice was a completely unknown one, and trembled with feeling. It might be false, or it might be real. Almost certainly, the man speaking was in the grip of an overpowering emotion, and would grin sheepishly at himself when he remembered it later. But some obscure one of Berendtsen’s judges had performed that judgment better than had been expected of him. Jim felt a cold chill run along his hackles as he listened, and, when he touched a switch, heard the speakers echoing mournfully outside.
He got to his feet and swung himself carefully over to the window, leaning heavily on his crutches and watching the faces of the people as they listened. And then the tape-recorded voice cut in, and Garvin saw the people gasp.
“I am not here to defend myself,” Berendtsen said. “For I am indefensible. I have burned, killed, and looted, and my men have done worse, at times.
“I killed because some men would rather destroy than build—because their individual power was sweeter to them than the mutual liberty of all men. I killed, too, because I was born to a society, and men would not accept that society. For that, I am doubly guilty—but I could do nothing else. Some issues are not clear- cut. Whatever the evils of our society might be, I can only say that it was my firm conviction that it would have been intolerable to us had some outside way of life sup planted it. In the last analysis, I made few judgments. I am not a superhuman hero. I am a man.
“I burned as a weapon of war—a war not against individuals, but against what seemed to me to be darkness. I looted because I needed the equipment with which to kill and burn.
“I did these things in order to bring union to what had been scattered tribes and uncoordinated city-states. We stood on the bare brink of the jungle we had newly emerged from, and, left alone, it would have been centuries before the scattered principalities fought out such a bloody peace as would, at last, have given us civilization again—after it was too late, after the books had rotted and the machinery rusted.
“What binds an organization of people is unimportant. Political ideologies change. Purposes change. The rule of one man comes to an end. But the fact of organization continues, no matter what changes occur within that organization.
“I have committed my last crime against today. I leave you an organization to do with as you will. I have set my hand on today, but I have not presumed upon tomorrow.”
There was a moment’s crackling silence, and then the New York broadcaster cut off, but the name he signed to the message was completely devoid of title or military rank, and there was no mention of Hollis or the SFAR, or of Robert Garvin. Whatever had brewed in New York was over, and this, not the blank, deadly silence, was the proper end to Theodore Berendtsen’s time.
* * *
“What the hell is that thing?” Jim said, squinting up into the sun.
“Helicopter, I guess. Looks like the picture,” Holland answered. “You notice the cabin’s got a blue-red stripe on it?”
Garvin nodded. “Yeah, I saw it.” He leaned more heavily on his crutches.
There was a crowd of villagers around them, straining against the militiamen who were uncertain enough of their present authority to let the line bulge out raggedly.
“You notice that?” Holland said, pointing.
Jim looked at the ugly pockmarks of bullet scars on the cabin and nodded. Then the aircraft stormed over them, gargling its way downward until the landing skids touched the ground and the engine died. The cabin door opened.
“So that’s what happened to Bob,” Jim said softly. He smiled crookedly and began swinging toward the craft, Holland keeping pace with him. They were almost beside it when Holland suddenly touched Jim’s arm.
Another man had gotten out with Bob, and now both of them were turning around to help the other passenger out. The breath caught in Jim’s throat as he recognized his mother. Then he stopped and braced himself. When his mother looked at him, the shock of recognition in her eyes followed instantly by pain and indecision, he was ready.
“Hello, Mom,” he said. “Nothing big—I’ll be all right in a couple of weeks.” She looked at him uncertainly, and finally put her arm through Bob’s.
“Hello, Jimmy,” she said. She had grown much older than he remembered her, and needed Bob to support her after the long trip. Jim smiled and nodded reassuringly again.
“Hello, Holland,” Bob said, licking his lips nervously. “This is Merton Hollis,” he added, indicating the other man, who looked at the crowd uneasily, the arrogant lines of his face lost in the lax indecision of his face.
Holland raised his eyebrows.
“Can you—can you find us a place to stay here?” Bob asked.
Holland grinned crookedly. “Permanently, I take it? Exile is such a nasty word, isn’t it?”
Garvin winced, but said nothing.
“Hello, Bob,” Jim said.
“Hello, Jim,” his brother answered without looking at him.
“I guess there’s lots of room around here,” Holland said. He grinned savagely. “Just one thing—I’m staying around. There’s three sisters with a big farm and no man around. I kind of like one of them. One thing, like I said. Don’t trespass.” He patted the stock of his rifle.
“What happened to Mary, Mom?” Jim asked her.
/> Slow tears began to seep over Margaret Garvin’s face. “She’s dead, Jimmy. She and Ted. The—the people came and…and they…” She looked at Jim with complete bewilderment. “But now the people say they’re sorry. Now they say they love them, and they keep telling me they’re sorry…I don’t understand, Jimmy.”
Jim and Holland looked at Bob’s face, and found corroboration in it. Jim laughed at his expression. Then he swung himself forward and looked into the helicopter’s cabin. “Take a passenger back to New York, buddy?” he asked the pilot.
The man shrugged. “Makes me no never-mind. You’ll have to wait a couple of minutes, though.” He pulled a jackknife out of his pocket and jumped to the ground. He began to scrape out the blue-red stripe.
“Hey, don’t be an idiot, Jim.” Garvin cried. “They ask you what kind of a Garvin you are, nowadays.”
Jim looked at him wearily. “When you find out, let me know, huh?”
He happened to glance at the crowd, and saw Edith, pressed forward by the villagers.
“Why is he taking out the stripe?” she was saying excitedly to a militiamen. “Why is he doing that? That’s the freedom flag! He can’t do that.”
“Got a tip for you, Bob,” Jim said, smiling thinly. “You’ve got one friend here, anyway.” He wondered how that would work out.
He wondered, as the helicopter jounced northward, how a lot of things would work out. He wondered just exactly what legacy Ted Berendtsen had left the human race.
Had he died just in time, or too soon?
And Jim knew that no historian, probing back, could ever know, any more than he or Jack could know. Even now, even in the end, you had to trust Berendtsen’s judgment.
CHAPTER SEVEN
This happened in New Jersey a generation later, with Robert Garvin and Merton Hollis both dead in a duel with each other. Robert Garvin left a legacy, and this is what happened to it:
Cottrell Slade Garvin was twenty-six, and had been a sex criminal for three years, when his mother called him into her parlor and explained why she could not introduce him to the girl on whom he had been spying.
“Cottrell, darling,” she said, laying her delicately veined hand on his sun-darkened own, “You understand that my opinion of Barbara is that she is a fine girl; one whom any young man of your class and station would ordinarily be honored to meet, and, in due course of time, betroth. But, surely, you must consider that her family,”—there was the faintest inhalation through the fragile nose—“particularly on the male side, is not one which could be accepted into our own.” Her expression was genuinely regretful. “Quite frankly, her father’s opinion on the proper conduct of a domicile…” The sniff was more audible. “His actions in accord with that opinion are such that our entire family would be embroiled in endless Affairs of Integrity, and you yourself would be forced to bear the brunt of most of these encounters. In addition, you would have the responsibility of defending the notoriously untenable properties which Mr. Holland pleases to designate as Barbara’s dowry.
“No, Cottrell, I’m afraid that, much as such a match might appeal to you at first glance, you would find that the responsibilities more than offset the benefits.” Her hand patted his as lightly as the touch of a falling autumn leaf. “I’m sorry, Cottrell.” A tear sparkled at the corner of each eye, and it was obvious that the discussion had been a great strain to her, for she genuinely loved her son.
Cottrell sighed. “All right, mother,” he said. There was nothing more he could do, at this time. “But, should circumstances change, you will reconsider, won’t you?” he asked.
His mother smiled, and nodded as she said, “Of course, Cottrell.” But the smile faded a bit. “However, that does seem rather unlikely, doesn’t it? Are there no other young ladies?” At his expression, the smile returned, and her voice became reassuring. “But, we’ll see. We’ll see.”
“Thank you, mother.” At least, he had that much. He rose from his chair and kissed her cheek. “I have to be sure the cows have all been stalled.” With a final smile exchanged between them, he left her, hurrying across the yard to the barn. The cows had all been attended to, of course, but he stayed in the barn for a few moments, driving his work-formed fist into a grain sack again and again, sweat breaking out on his forehead and running down his temples and along the sides of his face, while the breath grunted out of his nostrils and he half-articulated curses that were all the more terrible because he did not fully understand at whom or what they were directed.
Vaguely sick to his stomach, he gently closed the barn door behind him, and saw from the color of the sunset and the feel of the wind, that it would be a good night. The realization was one that filled him with equal parts of anticipation and guilt.
The air temperature was just right, and the dew had left a perfect leavening of dampness in the night. Cot let the false door close quietly behind him, and slipped noiselessly up and across the moist lawn at an angle that brought him out on the clay road precisely at the point where his property ended and Mr. Holland’s began.
He walked through the darkness with gravel shifting silently under his moccasins, his bandolier bumping gently against his body, with the occasional feel of oily metal against his cheek as the carbine, slung from his shoulder, touched him with its curving magazine. It was a comforting sensation—his father had felt it before him, and his father’s father. It had been the mark of free men for all of them.
When he had come as close to Mr. Holland’s house as he could without disturbing the dog, he left the road and slid into the ditch that ran beside it, cradling his carbine in the crooks of his bent arms, and bellycrawled silently and rapidly until he was as near the house as the ditch would take him.
He raised his head behind a clump of weeds he had planted during a spring rainstorm, and, using this as cover, swept the front of the house with his vision. For any of this to be possible without the dog’s winding him, the breeze had to be just right. On such nights, it was.
The parlor window—perhaps the only surface-level parlor window in this area, he commented to himself—was lighted, and she was in the room. Cot checked the sharp sound of his breath and sank his teeth against his lower lip. He kept his hands carefully away from the metalwork of his carbine, for his palms were sweated.
He waited until, finally, she put the light out and went downstairs to bed, then dropped his head and rested it on his folded arms for a moment, his eyes closed and his breath uncontrollably uneven, before he twisted quietly and began to crawl back up the ditch. Tonight, so soon after what his mother had told him, he was shocked but not truly surprised to discover that his vision was badly blurred.
He reached the point where it was safe to leave the ditch and stood up quietly. He put one foot on the road and sprang up to the clay surface of the road with an easy contraction of his muscles. He had no warning of a darker shadow among the dappled splotches thrown by the roadside weeds and bushes. Mr. Holland said “Hi, boy,” quietly.
Cot dropped his shoulder, ready to let the carbine he had just reslung slide down his arm and into his hand. He stood motionless, peering at Mr. Holland, who had stepped up to him.
“Mr. Holland!”
The old man chuckled. “Weren’t expecting me, huh?”
Cot took a measure of relief from the man’s obvious lack of righteous anger. “Good—uh—good evening, sir,” he mumbled. Apparently, he was not going to die immediately, but there was no telling what was going on in his neighbor’s mind.
“Guess I was right about that patch of weeds springing up kind of sudden.”
Cot felt the heat rush into his ears, but he said “Weeds, sir?”
“Pretty slick. You got the makings of a damn good combat man.”
Cot was thankful for the darkness as one cause for his flush was replaced by another. The lack of light, however, did not keep his voice from betraying more than it should have. Mr. Holland’s implication had been obvious. “My family, sir, prefers not to acknowledge those kin who
had sunk below their proper station. You will understand that, under differing circumstances, I might thus consider your remark to be, in the least, not flattering.”
Mr. Holland chuckled—a sound filled with the accumulated checks to hastiness acquired through a lifetime that was half over when Cot’s began.
“No insults intended, son. There was a time when a guy like you wouldn’t have stopped strutting for a week, after a pat on the back like that.”
Cot could still feel the heat in his cheeks, and its cause overrode his sharp sense of incongruity at this midnight debate, a completely illogical development of circumstances under which any other two men would long ago have settled the question in a normal civilized manner.
“Fortunately, sir,” he said, his voice now kept at its normal pitch with some effort, “we no longer live in such times.”
“You don’t maybe.” Mr. Holand’s voice was somewhat testy.
“I sincerely hope not, sir.”
Mr. Holland made an impatient sound. “Boy, your Uncle Jim was the best goddamned rifleman that ever took out a patrol. Any family that gets snotty notions about being better than him—” He chopped the end of the sentence off with a raw and bitter curse.
Cot recoiled from the adjective. “Sir!”
“Excuse me,” Mr. Holland said sarcastically. “I forgot you’re living in refined times. Not too refined for a man to go crawling in ditches to sneak a look at a girl, though. A girl sitting and reading a book!” he added with something like shock.
Cot felt the adrenaline-propelled tingle sweep through his bloodstream and knot his muscles. At any moment, Mr. Holland was obviously going to call an Affair of Integrity. Even while he formulated the various points for and against a right to defend himself even if surprised in so palpably immoral an action, his reflexes let the carbine slip to the angle of his shoulder and hang precariously from the sling, which now, despite careful oiling, gave a perverse squeak. Cot set his teeth in annoyance.