“I think Tombo will be back,” he said.
“Sure,” said Ryan, scooping up a knifeful of split peas and then, eating them, gesturing toward the unseen land, “and I’m thinking he’ll be back with twenty sail or more.”
“It isn’t Tombo I’m worrying about,” said Tiger. “Arif-Emir may come down on us. And he’ll be twice as mad. It’s his diamond.”
“It ain’t either,” said Walleye. “It’s ours. Possession is ten points of the law on the high seas. I wonder if we’ll ever live to make liberty on its value.”
“I dunno,” said Tiger. “Pass the salt horse.”
Chapter Eight
The Williwaw
The doctor finished binding Jan’s head up. “You might have died,” he said cheerfully. “An inch to the right and you’d have had a fracture of the skull. The cranium, however, is a most remarkable structure. It has inherent design, according to some engineer up at MIT., which resists such injuries to the maximum extent. The skull, he says, is stress-analyzed on the principle of arch supports so that there are at least seven primary arches resisting destruction in the face alone. I believe—”
Jan groaned. He was sitting in the living room where the servants had carried him and the morning sunlight which streamed in was entirely too cheerful to fit his mood. A canary was twittering handsomely beside the yellow drapes and a jay in the branches of a tree outside was making critical comments about the canary’s tone truth. The Swede girl was getting in people’s way, weeping and apologizing for Jan, and in describing his assailant to the police, had discovered her liaison with the criminal to her own astonishment.
The doctor went on with his lively discussion of the resistances of the skull, completing his bandaging. Alice sat at a secretary desk writing notes of invitation to a tea party and commenting sideways now and then on her amazement that Jan would lie down in his study all night without calling anyone and on her concern that he might miss out on a board meeting scheduled for that afternoon.
Jan, unable to follow anyone’s discourse fully and being dazed in the bargain, followed none. Instead he gloomed about his diamond. Lately, he realized, there had been a change. Alice had changed, he had changed. There was something missing but he could not know what it was. There was the matter of the diamond. Somehow, when that had appeared, life had altered. But it had not altered because of the diamond, possibly. The diamond was part of a picture. Jan wanted to know the whole picture. The diamond, he had felt, would have changed things again and for the better. But now it was gone, never, he felt, to be regained.
Alice remarked for the severalth time that, after all, he did have a board meeting and he took this fact between thoughts and used it as his excuse to get away from these people.
He tottered upstairs, the Swede girl following after, wringing her fingers and hoping she was not going to be blamed. Jan closed the door to his bathroom and so separated himself from her wailing.
He shaved gingerly, nicking himself several times. The act tired him and when he came out he was unable to face the additional task of changing his pants. Besides, the Swede girl was still there. He put on a clean shirt, for the old one was stained with his blood, and squirmed into a sport coat. He staggered down the stairs, the Swede girl following him. Alice was at the bottom.
“Dear, I hope you feel better,” she said. But before he had a chance to warm to this, she added: “And please mail these letters on your way to the office. It will take a load off me. I am so busy.”
Jan took the letters. He was about to reply submissively when he astonished himself. “Mail your own damned letters!” he said. “What the Great Horn Spoon’s the idea trying to make me run your errands? What am I, an errand boy? And as for you,” he roared, turning on the Swede girl, “go down to your galley and stay there and shut up that confounded yapping! And if I ever catch you haying around with another condemned Commie I’ll give you exactly what you deserve, a taste of the cat! Now!” he barked, dropping the letters and thrusting Alice aside, “get out of my way and stay out of my way.”
He left and the two women promptly collapsed into one another’s arms in an orgy of tears.
Jan reached his car and recollected himself. He was somewhat startled now that he looked back on his own conduct. He was almost remorseful when he thought of the stricken look on Alice’s face. After all, she had done nothing—she had so often said so and was oh, so very right. But a sterner gleam came into his eye and he drove workwards at great speed and with considerable recklessness.
He entered the Palmer Building, conscious of a headache but caring nothing about it. He swept through the outer offices of Bering Steam like an Alaskan williwaw, leaving papers to spin and settle in his wake. He entered his office, shot all the correspondence off his desk which, of old, he slavishly signed and began to push buttons.
The board had decided the name of the lately launched ship. He himself had considered Zachariah Palmer an avaricious, selfish disgrace to the race, who knew no interest that was not dollar marked. The board had blandly overridden his objections just as they had been overriding everything he said lately. He was conscious that he had known for days now that three members were jockeying Bering stock to get an advantage. With that advantage they would monopolize certain portions of Alaskan trade in such a way that freight rates would soar. In capitalistic short-termism this same group had overridden the Alaskan Highway, thinking it would injure Bering’s trade traffic, overlooking the fact that you need a population to have trade and that you need fast highway transport to have a population. Jan wanted that ship named Greg Palmer after the only Palmer he had ever respected. And he wanted Bering to throw its weight behind an Alaskan Highway that was a highway, not a military miscarriage designed to favor Canadian mining interests. And he punched the buttons loud and long.
But he didn’t get members of the board or vice-presidents right off. He got instead a squat, square, self-assured, bad-mannered example of the underprivileged called a Union Delegate. This individual happened to be a member of the Friends of Russia Communist International Objectors Seaman’s Union Local No. 530 and he dwelt under the remarkable assumption that anyone who belonged to a democracy or indulged in trade was a capitalist and that only Communists were free and he believed besides that the only way Communism could make the world free was to enslave it and the only way to do that was to set up a supercapitalism called Sovietism. But however confused might be this character’s ideologies, his manner was forthright. He had just finished intimidating two Bering captains into thinking that the crew really commanded the ship through the Union Delegate and, having heard that young Palmer had “gone soft in the head lately,” was commenced upon a course of persuading them that the crews really commanded the company as well. This individual, by name, Simon Lucar, came in, picking his teeth, his hat on the back of his head.
Knowing well that the best defense is an attack, Lucar sought to unsettle his opponent by beginning, “We’ve had a lot of charges lately about racial discrimination, Palmer. People with no other nationality than ‘United States’ have been permitted to hold jobs on your ships! This discriminates against all the minorities! I want it stopped! I want to inform you here and now that by the terms of our contracts, our hiring hall gets to appoint all the jobs on every ship whether the men can do the work or not. You have let two men be hired as oilers just because they knew their work. Did you inquire if they were minority members? No! Did you pay them the same wages as the downtrodden minority members like the Bulgarians? Yes! This is intolerable! I—”
Jan had measured him up and down. “Who the hell are you?”
Lucar drew himself up. “I am the Union Delegate from the Seaman’s Local No. 530. I—”
“We deal with American unions only and you know it!” said Jan. “We use you only when your dirty tactics make us short on crews. Get out!”
“You can’t bully me, you—you capitalist!”
“You get out or I’ll throw you out!”
&n
bsp; “Racist!” jeered Lucar, measuring up Jan’s slightness inaccurately.
There was a crash. It was Lucar going backwards through the glass door. There was another crash. That was Lucar being picked up and launched battering-ram fashion across the hall to bring up against the men’s room. “I’ll get you!” whined Lucar, struggling up.
“Go to hell!” said Jan.
Lucar instantly collapsed. He collapsed in a very peculiar way. He collapsed as does a man when he is dead.
Jan started to grab his collar but the pallor on the man’s face told him something. His rage cooled. His timidity returned. He bent and felt for a heartbeat. There was none!
Jan began to tremble a little. The man was dead. He was not cut or badly bruised. But he was dead. Peering stenographers gathered. Somebody sent for a doctor. Somebody else sent for the police.
Jan pushed through the crowd and staggered back to his office, broken glass crunching underfoot. He leaned against the wall and reached into his pocket with a quivering hand to get his handkerchief and mop his face. But he did not contact a handkerchief. He contacted a cool something. He grabbed and hauled it forth.
The diamond!
Dizzily he went over the morning’s events and the events of the night before. The diamond had been stolen. But here it was in his pocket! It must have been in his pocket all morning! Big as it was he had not realized it!
The diamond. He had not done enough to this Commie to kill him. Besides, it is impossible to kill Commies with a tap on the head. This diamond swapped souls. What had happened? He was not the Commie and he wasn’t transferred anywhere. What had occurred?
Suddenly Jan flashed brightly. He had said something right there at the last. Something— Ah! He had said, “Go to hell!” Had the Commie actually gone?
Hurriedly Jan thrust his way through the crowd. He could hear the elevators bringing up people. He knew police would be there in an instant. He held the diamond close to the Commie. “Come back from hell!”
The Commie did not stir.
This added a frantic note to Jan’s voice. Something was wrong. He looked at the diamond. Suddenly he saw the tetrahedra within it. Banishing and conjuring signs were well known to Jan. The diamond was flat. The tetrahedron was pointed toward one flat surface. To conjure, or invoke, the point would have to be upwards.
“I conjure you to return from hell!” said Jan.
The Commie stirred! Jan’s breathing became a little less irregular. The stenographers drew back. Two police officers shouldered in. The Commie sat up, eyes caught for an instant by the flash of the diamond. Then he looked up and saw Jan. He let out a scream and wriggled back. He saw the police.
“Arrest that man!” said the Commie with that opportunism which has spread the ideology so far amongst morons. “He attacked me with a deadly weapon!”
“Who attacked who?” said one of the police.
“He attacked me!” yelped the Commie. “He suddenly went crazy! Insane!”
“Did you?” said the officer.
“Yes,” said Jan. “I—”
“Have to come along with us,” said the officer. “You too if you want to prefer charges,” he added to Lucar.
“But this is Mr. Palmer, president of Bering Steam,” said a clerk.
“Don’t care who he is,” said the officer. “Law is law.”
Unappreciative of this point in the mechanics of democracy and probably never realizing that if he had been up against a commissar, not a mere corporation head, he would, by now, have been riddled in his tracks, the Commie tailed triumphantly along. “He suddenly went insane,” he informed all who asked. And “went crazy and attacked me,” became the statement on the blotter.
At the station Jan was booked, fingerprinted, photographed and stripped of possessions. The diamond, as the dangerous weapon, had been taken from him immediately after arrest, before it could be used by Jan’s dazed wits. The diamond was placed, with Jan’s wallet, rings and tiepin, in a box and the box was put in the safe. Jan was herded into a cell.
He was confident that his attorney would have him bailed out of there in a matter of a few hours. In that confidence he was mistaken. The board of directors, intent upon blocking a highway, managed to dissuade the company lawyer from posting bail, and, in view of the fact that Jan had once been accused of murder, bought further delay by sending a psychiatrist down to see Jan in the jail, meanwhile informing Alice that her husband had been taken ill. These little tasks attended to, the board went on quietly with its meeting, hopeful that it could have another session tomorrow and the next day and the next and so settle things very much its own way throughout the concerns of Bering Steam. Palmer had been too definite lately, they agreed, forgetting the last few days of relapse.
The psychiatrist was a very learned man if not quite bright. He examined the idea that the blow on the head might have unsettled Jan’s wits, but being a rather backward individual the psychiatrist had neglected to read anything about Dianetics, though it was well known to his fellow psychiatrists.
Dr. Dyhard looked fixedly at Jan and tapped his pince-nez on his thumb.
“My boy,” said Dr. Dyhard, “I see definite indications here of a classic schizophrenia with paranoid delusions. You maintained this diamond was stolen from you last night by a Communist lumberjack. You committed mayhem on a Communist union leader today. The diamond was still in your possession this morning, therefore you must have merely fallen and bumped your head. I believe you consider yourself to be persecuted. As a capitalist you doubtlessly believe that your persecution comes from Communists. My boy, Communism is merely an ideology. It is just an idea. There is no danger from Communism. Communists were our firm allies in the last war. They are not persecuting anybody.
“Now I tell you what I propose to do. You once were accused of murder. You were jailed for it. Oh, I know, I know. You were acquitted. But here you are trying to murder somebody again. This is a dangerous situation. You must learn to control yourself. There is a new operation called the transorbital leukotomy which is just what you need.”
Jan hitched himself further back on the bed. “I don’t need any operation.”
“It is my belief you have delusions, my boy. We can cure you of anything with neurosurgery. It will adjust you. It will make it so that you don’t become angry. It will make you much more tractable.”
“A what?” said Jan.
“A transorbital leukotomy. It is a very simple operation. The patient is given an electric shock which burns out some of his troublesome brain. Then a long, thin instrument is inserted into the skull just above the left eyeball. The instrument is then delicately swept from left to right so that it tears up the neurons in the frontal lobes. Then the patient is given another electric shock, a mere 110 volts AC from temple to temple. The long, thin piece of steel is then inserted above the right eyeball, thrust in several inches as before, and gently swept from right to left which tears up the rest of the neurons in his frontal lobes. Then he is given another electric shock. A few days later he may recover. After that his delusions do not worry him. Nothing worries him. He is adjusted—”
“This is not a real operation!” cried Jan.
“Oh, but it is!” said the psychiatrist. “And that is exactly how it is done. We neurosurgeons have the answer to sanity, all right. People never give any trouble when we’re through with them. You’ll be adjusted, able to perform simple tasks like feeding yourself and you’ll have no further anger toward people—”
“Stop it!” cried Jan. “You’re giving me the creeps! This doesn’t really happen in this modern society! It sounds like the Dark Ages or Aztec sacrifices or—or—”
“Ah, but it is what is being used everywhere,” said the psychiatrist persuasively. “We have many, many techniques. First, there’s electric shock. That cures most people. Thirty or forty shocks and they aren’t much concerned about thinking anymore. Then there’s insulin shock—”
“What’s the difference between such treatm
ents and Bedlam?” cried Jan.
“Oh, a world of difference,” said the psychiatrist. “We are scientific about it. Then we have the prefrontal lobotomy. In the old days people used to recover from one—the neurons would grow back and they have been known to think again. But we have fixed that. Now we cut out a big piece of skull and take out a wide section of the frontal lobes—”
“But the frontal lobes are what make man a thinking animal!”
“Precisely. And insanity comes from thinking. Men think and men go insane, therefore thinking is insanity. We have worked it all out perfectly. Then we have the topectomy. This instrument is like an apple-corer. It takes long, cylindrical sections out of the brain—”
“That’s vivisection! You’re experimenting on human beings!”
“Ah, but they are all crazy human beings,” said the psychiatrist. “That is the difference. Everybody knows there will never be any cure for thinking. Freud has failed. Everyone has failed. And our patients are tractable, very tractable, most of them.”
“Most of them?”
“Well,” hedged the psychiatrist, “less than half of them get much worse after the operations but we can always keep them in institutions and out of sight.”
“People must get killed with these things!” cried Jan.
“Mortality rate is very, very low,” said the psychiatrist. “You’d be surprised. Less than a quarter of the people die on the table. My boy, we psychiatrists are scientists. We have said so. We do these operations on people in every institution in the land. Why, it is an automatic procedure. Once people are sent to an institution they come into our hands and what we say is right is right because we say it is right. And,” said the psychiatrist, getting angry at this rebuttal against authority, “if you think you or anybody else can question our right to do these things you are mistaken. Now I have tried to use persuasion. I will have to use force! You need treatment because I have said so. And you’re going to get treatment!”