"Don't know!" Neva drove fast, staring ahead.
"This is the summer. Holocaust just around the bend. I'm thinking so swift it hurts my eyeballs, cracks my head. I'm liable to explode in a fireball with just plain disconnected thought. Why--why--why--"
Neva swallowed hard. Doug held his breath.
Quite suddenly they were terrified. For the man simply idled on with his talk, looking at the shimmering green fire trees that burned by on both sides, sniffing the rich hot dust that flailed up around the tin car, his voice neither high nor low, but steady and calm now in describing his life: "Yes, sir, there's more to the world than people appreciate. If there can be seventeen-year locusts, why not seventeen-year people? Ever thought of that?"
"Never did," said someone.
Probably me, thought Doug, for his mouth had moved like a mouse.
"Or how about twenty-four-year people, or fifty-seven-year people? I mean, we're all so used to people growing up, marrying, having kids, we never stop to think maybe there's other ways for people coming into the world, maybe like locusts, once in a while, who can tell, one hot day, middle of summer!"
"Who can tell?" There was the mouse again. Doug's lips trembled.
"And who's to say there ain't genetic evil in the world?" asked the man of the sun, glaring right up at it without blinking.
"What kind of evil?" asked Neva.
"Genetic, ma'am. In the blood, that is to say. People born evil, growed evil, died evil, no changes all the way down the line."
"Whew!" said Douglas. "You mean people who start out mean and stay at it?"
"You got the sum, boy. Why not? If there are people everyone thinks are angel-fine from their first sweet breath to their last pure declaration, why not sheer orneriness from January first to December, three hundred sixty-five days later?"
"I never thought of that," said the mouse.
"Think," said the man. "Think."
They thought for above five seconds.
"Now," said the man, squinting one eye at the cool lake five miles ahead, his other eye shut into darkness and ruminating on coal-bins of fact there, "listen. What if the intense heat, I mean the really hot hot heat of a month like this, week like this, day like today, just baked the Ornery Man right out of the river mud. Been there buried in the mud for forty-seven years, like a damn larva, waiting to be born. And he shook himself awake and looked around, full grown, and climbed out of the hot mud into the world and said, 'I think I'll eat me some summer.'"
"How's that again?"
"Eat me some summer, boy, summer, ma'am. Just devour it whole. Look at them trees, ain't they a whole dinner? Look at that field of wheat, ain't that a feast? Them sunflowers by the road, by golly, there's breakfast. Tarpaper on top that house, there's lunch. And the lake, way up ahead, Jehoshaphat, that's dinner wine, drink it all!"
"I'm thirsty, all right," said Doug.
"Thirsty, hell, boy, thirst don't begin to describe the state of a man, come to think about him, come to talk, who's been waiting in the hot mud thirty years and is born but to die in one day! Thirst! Ye Gods! Your ignorance is complete."
"Well," said Doug.
"Well," said the man. "Not only thirst but hunger. Hunger. Look around. Not only eat the trees and then the flowers blazing by the roads but then the white-hot panting dogs. There's one. There's another! And all the cats in the country. There's two, just passed three! And then just glutton-happy begin to why, why not, begin to get around to, let me tell you, how's this strike you, eat people? I mean--people! Fried, cooked, boiled, and parboiled people. Sunburnt beauties of people. Old men, young. Old ladies' hats and then old ladies under their hats and then young ladies' scarves and young ladies, and then young boys' swim-trunks, by God, and young boys, elbows, ankles, ears, toes, and eyebrows! Eyebrows, by God, men, women, boys, ladies, dogs, fill up the menu, sharpen your teeth, lick your lips, dinner's on!"
"Wait!" someone cried.
Not me, thought Doug. I said nothing.
"Hold on!" someone yelled.
It was Neva.
He saw her knee fly up as if by intuition and down as if by finalized gumption.
Stomp! went her heel on the floor.
The car braked. Neva had the door open, pointing, shouting, pointing, shouting, her mouth flapping, one hand seized out to grab the man's shirt and rip it.
"Out! Get out!"
"Here, ma'am?" Then man was astonished.
"Here, here, here, out, out, out!"
"But, ma'am...!"
"Out, or you're finished, through!" cried Neva, wildly. "I got a load of Bibles in the back trunk, a pistol with a silver bullet here under the steering wheel. A box of crucifixes under the seat! A wooden stake taped to the axle, with a hammer. I got holy water in the carburetor, blessed before it boiled early this morning at three churches on the way: St. Matthew's Catholic, the Green Town Baptist, and the Zion City High Episcopal. The steam from that will get you alone. Following us, one mile behind, and due to arrive in one minute, is the Reverend Bishop Kelly from Chicago. Up at the lake is Father Rooney from Milwaukee, and Doug, why, Doug here has in his back pocket at this minute one sprig of wolfbane and two chunks of mandrake root. Out! out! out!"
"Why, ma'am," cried the man. "I am!"
And he was.
He landed and fell rolling in the road.
Neva banged the car into full flight.
Behind, the man picked himself up and yelled, "You must be nuts. You must be crazy. Nuts. Crazy."
"I'm nuts? I'm crazy? said Neva, and hooted. "Boy!"
"...nuts ... crazy..." The voice faded.
Douglas looked back and saw the man shaking his fist, then ripping off his shirt and hurling it to the gravel and jumping big puffs of white-hot dust out of it with his bare feet.
The car exploded, rushed, raced, banged pell-mell ahead, his aunt ferociously glued to the hot wheel, until the little sweating figure of the talking man was lost in sun-drenched marshland and burning air. At last Doug exhaled: "Neva, I never heard you talk like that before."
"And never will again, Doug."
"Was what you said true?"
"Not a word."
"You lied, I mean, you lied?"
"I lied." Neva blinked. "Do you think he was lying, too?"
"I don't know."
"All I know is sometimes it takes a lie to kill a lie, Doug. This time, anyway. Don't let it become customary."
"No, ma'am." He began to laugh. "Say the thing about mandrake root again. Say the thing about wolfbane in my pocket. Say it about a pistol with a silver bullet, say it."
She said it. They both began to laugh.
Whooping and shouting, they went away in their tin-bucket-junking car over the gravel ruts and humps, her saying, him listening, eyes squeezed shut, roaring, snickering, raving.
They didn't stop laughing until they hit the water in their bathing suits and came up all smiles.
The sun stood hot in the middle of the sky and they dog-paddled happily for five minutes before they began to really swim in the menthol-cool waves.
Only at dusk when the sun was suddenly gone and the shadows moved out from the trees did they remember that now they had to go back down that lonely road through all the dark places and past that empty swamp to get to town.
They stood by the car and looked down that long road. Doug swallowed hard.
"Nothing can happen to us going home."
"Nothing."
"Jump!"
They hit the seats and Neva kicked the starter like it was a dead dog and they were off.
They drove along under plum-colored trees and among velvet purple hills.
And nothing happened.
They drove along a wide raw gravel road that was turning the color of plums and smelled the warm-cool air that was like lilacs and looked at each other, waiting.
And nothing happened.
Neva began at last to hum under her breath.
The road was empty.
And
then it was not empty.
Neva laughed. Douglas squinted and laughed with her.
For there was a small boy, nine years old maybe, dressed in a vanilla-white summer suit, with white shoes and a white tie and his face pink and scrubbed, waiting by the side of the road. He waved.
Neva braked the car.
"Going in to town?" called the boy, cheerily. "Got lost. Folks at a picnic, left without me. Sure glad you came along. It's spooky out here."
"Climb in!"
The boy climbed and they were off, the boy in the back seat, and Doug and Neva up front glancing at him, laughing, and then getting quiet.
The small boy kept silent for a long while behind them, sitting straight upright and clean and bright and fresh and new in his white suit.
And they drove along the empty road under a sky that was dark now with a few stars and the wind getting cool.
And at last the boy spoke and said something that Doug didn't hear but he saw Neva stiffen and her face grow as pale as the ice cream from which the small boy's suit was cut.
"What?" asked Doug, glancing back.
The small boy stared directly at him, not blinking, and his mouth moved all to itself as if it were separate from his face.
The car's engine missed fire and died.
They were slowing to a dead stop.
Doug saw Neva kicking and fiddling at the gas and the starter. But most of all he heard the small boy say, in the new and permanent silence: "Have either of you ever wondered--"
The boy took a breath and finished:
"--if there is such a thing as genetic evil in the world?"
A Piece of Wood
"Sit down, young man," said the Official.
"Thanks." The young man sat.
"I've been hearing rumors about you," the Official said pleasantly. "Oh, nothing much. Your nervousness. Your not getting on so well. Several months now I've heard about you, and I thought I'd call you in. Thought maybe you'd like your job changed. Like to go overseas, work in some other War Area? Desk job killing you off, like to get right in on the old fight?"
"I don't think so," said the young sergeant.
"What do you want?"
The sergeant shrugged and looked at his hands. "To live in peace. To learn that during the night, somehow, the guns of the world had rusted, the bacteria had turned sterile in their bomb casings, the tanks had sunk like prehistoric monsters into roads suddenly made tar pits. That's what I'd like."
"That's what we'd all like, of course," said the Official. "Now stop all that idealistic chatter and tell me where you'd like to be sent. You have your choice--the Western or the Northern War Zone." The Official tapped a pink map on his desk.
But the sergeant was talking at his hands, turning them over, looking at the fingers: "What would you officers do, what would we men do, what would the world do if we all woke tomorrow with the guns in flaking ruin?"
The Official saw that he would have to deal carefully with the sergeant. He smiled quietly. "That's an interesting question. I like to talk about such theories, and my answer is that there'd be mass panic. Each nation would think itself the only unarmed nation in the world, and would blame its enemies for the disaster. There'd be waves of suicide, stocks collapsing, a million tragedies."
"But after that," the sergeant said. "After they realized it was true that every nation was disarmed and there was nothing more to fear, if we were all clean to start over fresh and new, what then?"
"They'd rearm as swiftly as possible."
"What if they could be stopped?"
"Then they'd beat each other with their fists. If it got down to that. Huge armies of men with boxing gloves of steel spikes would gather at the national borders. And if you took the gloves away they'd use their fingernails and feet. And if you cut their legs off they'd spit on each other. And if you cut off their tongues and stopped their mouths with corks they'd fill the atmosphere so full of hate that mosquitoes would drop to the ground and birds would fall dead from telephone wires."
"Then you don't think it would do any good?" the sergeant said.
"Certainly not. It'd be like ripping the carapace off a turtle. Civilization would gasp and die from the shock."
The young man shook his head. "Or are you lying to yourself and me because you've a nice comfortable job?"
"Let's call it ninety percent cynicism, ten percent rationalizing the situation. Go put your Rust away and forget about it."
The sergeant jerked his head up. "How'd you know I had it?" he said.
"Had what?"
"The Rust, of course."
"What're you talking about?"
"I can do it, you know. I could start the Rust tonight if I wanted to."
The Official laughed. "You can't be serious."
"I am. I've been meaning to come talk to you. I'm glad you called me in. I've worked on this invention for a long time. It's been a dream of mine. It has to do with the structure of certain atoms. If you study them you find that the arrangement of atoms in steel armor is such-and-such an arrangement. I was looking for an imbalance factor. I majored in physics and metallurgy, you know. It came to me, there's a Rust factor in the air all the time. Water vapor. I had to find a way to give steel a 'nervous breakdown.' Then the water vapor everywhere in the world would take over. Not on all metal, of course. Our civilization is built on steel, I wouldn't want to destroy most buildings. I'd just eliminate guns and shells, tanks, planes, battleships. I can set the machine to work on copper and brass and aluminum, too, if necessary. I'd just walk by all of those weapons and just being near them I'd make them fall away."
The Official was bending over his desk, staring at the sergeant. "May I ask you a question?"
"Yes."
"Have you ever thought you were Christ?"
"I can't say that I have. But I have considered that God was good to me to let me find what I was looking for, if that's what you mean."
The Official reached into his breast pocket and drew out an expensive ball-point pen capped with a rifle shell. He flourished the pen and started filling in a form. "I want you to take this to Dr. Mathews this afternoon, for a complete checkup. Not that I expect anything really bad, understand. But don't you feel you should see a doctor?"
"You think I'm lying about my machine," said the sergeant. "I'm not. It's so small it can be hidden in this cigarette package. The effect of it extends for nine hundred miles. I could tour this country in a few days, with the machine set to a certain type of steel. The other nations couldn't take advantage of us because I'd rust their weapons as they approach us. Then I'd fly to Europe. By this time next month the world would be free of war forever. I don't know how I found this invention. It's impossible. Just as impossible as the atom bomb. I've waited a month now, trying to think it over. I worried about what would happen if I did rip off the carapace, as you say. But now I've just about decided. My talk with you has helped clarify things. Nobody thought an airplane would ever fly, nobody thought an atom would ever explode, and nobody thinks that there can ever be Peace, but there will be."
"Take that paper over to Dr. Mathews, will you?" said the Official hastily.
The sergeant got up. "You're not going to assign me to any new Zone then?"
"Not right away, no. I've changed my mind. We'll let Mathews decide."
"I've decided then," said the young man. "I'm leaving the Post within the next few minutes. I've a pass. Thank you very much for giving me your valuable time, sir."
"Now look here, Sergeant, don't take things so seriously. You don't have to leave. Nobody's going to hurt you."
"That's right. Because nobody would believe me. Good-bye, sir." The sergeant opened the office door and stepped out.
The door shut and the Official was alone. He stood for a moment looking at the door. He sighed. He rubbed his hands over his face. The phone rang. He answered it abstractedly.
"Oh, hello, Doctor. I was just going to call you." A pause. "Yes, I was going to send him over to you. Lo
ok, is it all right for that young man to be wandering about? It is all right? If you say so, Doctor. Probably needs a rest, a good long one. Poor boy has a delusion of rather an interesting sort. Yes, yes. It's a shame. But that's what a Sixteen-Year War can do to you, I suppose."
The phone voice buzzed in reply.
The Official listened and nodded. "I'll make a note on that. Just a second." He reached for his ball-point pen. "Hold on a moment. Always mislaying things." He patted his pocket. "Had my pen here a moment ago. Wait." He put down the phone and searched his desk, pulling out drawers. He checked his blouse pocket again. He stopped moving. Then his hands twitched slowly into his pocket and probed down. He poked his thumb and forefinger deep and brought out a pinch of something.
He sprinkled it on his desk blotter: a small filtering powder of yellow-red rust.
He sat staring at it for a moment. Then he picked up the phone. "Mathews," he said, "get off the line, quick." There was a click of someone hanging up and then he dialed another call. "Hello, Guard Station, listen, there's a man coming past you any minute now, you know him, name of Sergeant Hollis, stop him, shoot him down, kill him if necessary, don't ask any questions, kill the son of a bitch, you heard me, this is the Official talking! Yes, kill him, you hear!"
"But, sir," said a bewildered voice on the other end of the line. "I can't, I just can't...."
"What do you mean you can't, God damn it!"
"Because..." The voice faded away. You could hear the guard breathing into the phone a mile away.
The Official shook the phone. "Listen to me, listen, get your gun ready!"
"I can't shoot anyone," said the guard.
The Official sank back in his chair. He sat blinking for half a minute, gasping.
Out there even now--he didn't have to look, no one had to tell him--the hangars were dusting down in soft red rust, and the airplanes were blowing away on a brown-rust wind into nothingness, and the tanks were sinking, sinking slowly into the hot asphalt roads, like dinosaurs (isn't that what the man had said?) sinking into primordial tar pits. Trucks were blowing away into ocher puffs of smoke, their drivers dumped by the road, with only the tires left running on the highways.
"Sir..." said the guard, who was seeing all this, far away. "Oh, God..."
"Listen, listen!" screamed the Official. "Go after him, get him, with your hands, choke him, with your fists, beat him, use your feet, kick his ribs in, kick him to death, do anything, but get that man. I'll be right out!" He hung up the phone.