“Yes,” Dragnie said in a mocking tone of facetiousness. “And is the real Doc Hastings around? Or only his stand-in?”
“Oh, the actual McCoy, I assure you. He’s expecting you tomorrow morning at ten a.m. And by the way—“ He indicated Dragnie’s wrist watch. “You’ll have to adjust your watch and any travel clocks you may have brought. We have our own time zone here in the Gorge, which differs from the Standard Time of the outside world by forty-two minutes and twelve seconds. We prefer not to be chronologically co-ordinated with the moochers, the leeches, the looters, the kootchie-koo-ers, the hoochy-coochers, and the hot-cha-cha-ers, if you know what I mean.”
“I do.” Dragnie spoke with unflinching honesty. Because she did know what he meant.
“My, my. Dragnie Tagbord. It’s been awhile.”
“Yes. It has.”
Dragnie was seated in Doc Hastings’ office, a small, wood-paneled room beyond which was an examination room that fronted a larger surgical suite. Hastings reclined in his chair behind his desk. He wore a white lab coat because he was a doctor. He was tall, lean, and tanned. His white hair floated in wisps above his flaring white eyebrows and strong hooked nose. “You’re sure you’re with child?”
“I’m sure.”
“But why come to me? Don’t they have doctors in New York City?”
“You’re the only one I trust.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised. You hear I cured cancer?”
“No.”
“Well. Not all of it. Leukemia. Figured it out last year—” He pointed to the room beyond. “—right in there. Not gonna give it to them, though, I can tell you that. Damn thieving bastards.”
“I know it.”
“M.S., too. Multiple whatachamcallit. Sclerosis. Had an idea, followed it through, bingo. Think I’ll let anyone in on it? Don’t make me laugh. Mooching swine.”
“Yes.”
“Plus, get a load of this…” He yanked open the long horizontal drawer of the desk and rummaged around in it. He produced an object resembling a blood-pressure monitor, although attached to the flexible cuff was, not a squeezable rubber bulb, but a device resembling a transistor radio. “Know what this does?”
“No.”
“Cures arthritis, gout, shingles, and acne with cosmic rays. Transforms stray gamma into what I call ‘revivification energy.’ Wrap it on your ankle or around your face, tune ‘er in, set the timer, listen for the ding, and you’re done. Guess where it’s going. Right back in here, is where.” He returned the device to the drawer and slammed it shut. “So. When do you want to do this?”
“How about right now?”
“Right now it is. Follow me.”
They went into the surgical suite at the rear of the building, where Doc Hastings had Dragnie replace her clothes with a hospital gown and lie on a gynecological exam chair with stirrups. He had opened a cabinet containing chemicals and syringes, when he turned and asked, “You want to be out cold for this, or awake on a local?”
“Awake, if that’s all right.”
“Good. A woman should see what men do to her.” He prepared an injection, then disappeared into an anteroom, from which Dragnie heard the sounds of water running and Hastings scrubbing up. He returned a moment later in a wrinkled, faded surgical gown and face mask. ”Let’s get this done. There’ve never been any children at Glatt’s Gorge and we’re not about to start having any now. Damn freeloaders.”
He injected her with the anesthetic and, while waiting for it to take effect, shared his views on existence. Finally, a few minutes later, seated between her splayed legs and his hands obscured beneath the covering sheet, he asked, “Feel that?”
“No.”
“Good.”
She lay back, facing the ceiling. He made small sounds of concentration until a question occurred to her, and she said, “Doc Hastings, why did you stay here? When nearly everyone else went back into the world with John?”
He paused in his activities and emerged from under the sheet over her legs. He scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you, Dragnie.” Returning back under the sheet, he continued answering in a firm, clear voice. “I stayed here because I could no longer live in a world in which practically no one believed that the mind existed. I stayed because I couldn’t bear to return to a world in which rational people are penalized, brutalized, and tortured, while lunatics and crazy people thrived. Of course, as it is today, so it has ever been. Throughout history, wild-eyed madmen have succeeded in attaining positions of authority and power, while men dedicated to rationality and reason have been consigned to condemnation, ignominy and worse. The men of the mind—scientists, inventors, and industrialists—have always been condemned by society, while shrieking psychopaths who play with their own feces have been elevated to positions of authority and prestige. Everywhere, in every corporate board room, university, newspaper office, publishing house, scientific laboratory, industrial facility, television network, and government bureau, you hear men say that there is no such thing as thought, that reason is an illusion, and that only magic, mysticism, and madness are the appropriate tools for running the world. Is it any wonder, Dragnie, that every company in the Fortuitous 500 is headed by a certified schizophrenic? Is it any wonder that every university in the nation is ruled by a committee of gibbering maniacs in strait jackets? Everywhere, the men who actually make the world function—entrepreneurs, tycoons, industrialists, businessmen—are victimized, subjected to an endless onslaught of torture and abuse. They are forced to live in segregated communities surrounded only by people of their own kind. They are forced to vacation in remote areas, on distant islands under the glare of a tropical sun, or sliding down snow-covered mountain tops, which are costly to reach. They are forced to eat in restaurants unfrequented by and unfamiliar to the common man. They are compelled to pay five, ten, a hundred, a thousand times what ordinary men pay for such basic necessities as wristwatches, automobiles, and three-piece suits. They are required to spend millions of dollars to influence a political system merely in order to manipulate it into giving them what they want. They must endure the hardship, not only of devising ways to make money, that their immediate needs may be met, but of devising ways that their money may make money, inflicting a double burden upon them, about which they scarcely utter a word of complaint. I stayed here because, once I had come to Glatt’s Gorge, once I had gone on strike against that world, once I had withdrawn myself from the world in which the rational men are constantly victimized and the raving, delusional masses live lives of undeserved leisure and luxury, I discovered I could not go back to it.”
She nodded. “But there’s still one thing I don’t understand, Doc,” she said. “Why has the rest of the world turned against us?”
“Why has every country on earth become a People’s State of the People, you ask? Why has the entire world welcomed collectivization, with its centralized health care and its safety nets and its trade unions and its social protections, you inquire? Why has every human being on earth—including, now, apparently, the ones in Goa—given up on our dream, the American dream, the dream of one day having a job that will sustain us in our hope that we may, one other day, somehow, become rich, you query? But the answer is simple, Dragnie. They have turned on us because of who we are. The people of the world would rather live stable middle-class lives than dare to do what you did, and inherit a railroad empire from their father. They hate us for our success. They hate us for our excellence. They hate us for our freedom. We, the greatest country that ever existed—it was inevitable that one day the rest of humanity would, in contemplation of our superiority, deform, deprive, and destroy itself out of sheer resentment, jealousy, and spite. Nations have always obliterated themselves when confronted with another nation whom they wished to make feel bad. Let two men run a foot race. Let one of them win, while the other loses. Now observe the behavior of that second man. What does he do? He drinks a fifth of bourbon and then leaps into the reservoir. You see, Dragnie, most men would rather stab themselves in the chest with a bread knife, than admit, to another man, ‘you run faster than I.’ In this way the weak have always victimized the strong by harming themselves and then saying, ‘you did this to me.’ It is, quite simply, a fact of history, and has been ever since we overcame our second-rate, inferior status in the world and rose to the pre-eminence we enjoy today.”