“According to several of the Chief’s councilors, the Soviet Russians were having a good deal of difficulty with people called Tatars. I think they were called Tatars. But, my good sir, you should be on your way.”
Jerry leaned down further and grasped his hand. “Thanks,” he said. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble for me. I’m grateful.”
“That’s quite all right,” said Mr. Thomas earnestly. “After all, by the rocket’s red glare, and all that. We were a single nation once.”
Jerry moved off, leading the other two horses. He set a fast pace, exercising the minimum of caution made necessary by the condition of the road. By the time they reached Route 33, Sam Rutherford, though not altogether sober or well, was able to sit in his saddle. They could then untie Sarah Calvin and ride with her between them.
She cursed and wept. “Filthy paleface! Foul, ugly, stinking whiteskins! I’m an Indian, can’t you see I’m an Indian? My skin isn’t white—it’s brown, brown!”
They kept riding.
Asbury Park was a dismal clatter of rags and confusion and refugees. There were refugees from the north, from Perth Amboy, from as far as Newark. There were refugees from Princeton in the west, flying before the Sioux invasion. And from the south, from Atlantic City—even, unbelievably, from distant Camden—were still other refugees, with stories of a sudden Seminole attack, an attempt to flank the armies of Three Hydrogen Bombs.
The three horses were stared at enviously, even in their lathered, exhausted condition. They represented food to the hungry, the fastest transportation possible to the fearful. Jerry found the saber very useful. And the pistol was even better—it had only to be exhibited. Few of these people had ever seen a pistol in action; they had a mighty, superstitious fear of firearms.
With this fact discovered, Jerry kept the pistol out nakedly in his right hand when he walked into the United States Naval Depot on the beach at Asbury Park. Sam Rutherford was at his side; Sarah Calvin walked sobbing behind.
He announced their family backgrounds to Admiral Milton Chester. The son of the Undersecretary of State. The daughter of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The oldest son of the Senator from Idaho. “And now. Do you recognize the authority of this document?”
Admiral Chester read the wrinkled commission slowly, spelling out the harder words to himself. He twisted his head respectfully when he had finished, looking first at the seal of the United States on the paper before him, and then at the glittering pistol in Jerry’s hand.
“Yes,” he said at last. “I recognize its authority. Is that a real pistol?”
Jerry nodded. “A Crazy Horse forty-five. The latest. How do you recognize its authority?”
The admiral spread his hands. “Everything is confused out here. The latest word I’ve received is that there are Ojibway warriors in Manhattan—that there is no longer any United States Government. And yet this”—he bent over the document once more—“this is a commission by the President himself, appointing you full plenipotentiary. To the Seminole, of course. But full plenipotentiary. The last official appointment, to the best of my knowledge, of the President of the United States of America.”
He reached forward and touched the pistol in Jerry Franklin’s hand curiously and inquiringly. He nodded to himself, as if he’d come to a decision. He stood up, and saluted with a flourish.
“I hereby recognize you as the last legal authority of the United States Government. And I place my fleet at your disposal.”
“Good.” Jerry stuck the pistol in his belt. He pointed with the saber. “Do you have enough food and water for a long voyage?”
“No, sir,” Admiral Chester said. “But that can be arranged in a few hours at most. May I escort you aboard, sir?”
He gestured proudly down the beach and past the surf to where the three forty-five-foot gaff-rigged schooners rode at anchor. “The United States Tenth Fleet, sir. Awaiting your orders.”
Hours later when the three vessels were standing out to sea, the admiral came to the cramped main cabin where Jerry Franklin was resting. Sam Rutherford and Sarah Calvin were asleep in the bunks above.
“And the orders, sir…?”
Jerry Franklin walked out on the narrow deck, looked up at the taut, patched sails. “Sail east.”
“East, sir? Due east?”
“Due east all the way. To the fabled lands of Europe. To a place where a white man can stand at last on his own two legs. Where he need not fear persecution. Where he need not fear slavery. Sail east, Admiral, until we discover a new and hopeful world—a world of freedom!”
Afterword
In 1957, Anthony Boucher retired from the wonderful magazine he had helped found, The Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction. Bob Mills, the managing editor, needed someone with a substantial background in science fiction to temporarily take Tony’s place, so Cyril Kornbluth was hired as Consulting Editor. There was a heavy snowfall in New York about that time, and Cyril, who suffered from very high blood pressure, made the mistake of hurriedly shoveling his driveway clear so he could get his car out and keep an appointment with Mills. He dropped dead, I believe, in the driveway.
Mills called me and asked me to take a short-time appointment, now filling Cyril’s place. I told him I was honored.
I worked there for about four months, trying to empty one large file drawer where Tony had stashed stories that were just not quite good enough to be published, but still too good to have been rejected. Each story had a special problem: one, for example, by Robert Bloch, “That Hell-Bound Train,” was an absolutely fine piece of work that just didn’t have a usable ending. It was my job, among other things, to come up with such an ending and persuade the writer to write it. I developed a great respect for the editors—chief among them John W. Campbell and Horace L. Gold—I had known and quarreled with a lot, an awful lot.
One of the things Bob Mills asked me to do right off was give him a story by me for the tenth anniversary issue of the magazine. I agreed, and promptly forgot about it as I wrestled with the thick inventory of science fiction written by people I much admired but which always lacked some essential quality or passage.
And then Mills came to my desk at 4:45 p.m. on a Wednesday as I was getting ready to leave, and asked me where it was.
I got into my coat and stared at him. Where what was?
“The story for the anniversary issue. It goes to bed tomorrow. Thursday morning. Dead deadline, Phil!”
In an emergency, my mother had taught me, always lie. “Oh, it’s home,” I said. “I’ll bring it in with me tomorrow morning. I’m pretty sure you’ll like it.”
“How long is it?” Mills wanted to know. “I hope it’ll fit the book. We can’t use much more than about six thousand words.”
“That’s just about what I have,” I told him. “Six or six five. I haven’t counted it yet.”
And I got out of the place.
All the subway ride home, I plotted feverishly, to absolutely no avail. I couldn’t think of a single good idea, certainly none I wanted to write. But as I got out at my station, a large poster advertisement on the platform caught my eye. It was the latest in a group that advertised a Jewish rye bread, each showing a color photograph of someone of a different, non-Jewish ethnic group proclaiming that he or she simply adored Jewish rye. This one was of an American Indian in full feathered headdress.