"Yes. Quite so," said Halyard hollowly. "Well, best we should go. See you in the morning."
"Wouldn't miss it for the world."
Doctor Roseberry turned back to Buck Young, as Halyard, his face somber, shepherded the Shah and Khashdrahr into the Ithaca night. The Shah was sneezing violently.
"Well, kid," said Roseberry. "What say to thirty-five grand? Yes or no?"
"I -"
"Thirty-six."
"Yes," whispered Buck. "Hell yes."
When the two went back into The Dutch to drink to the deal, Purdy and McCloud were still talking gloomily in their dark corner.
"Sure," said Purdy, "Roseberry's a tough guy to work for, but thank God you ain't workin' for Harvard."
McCloud nodded. "Yeah, work there, and 'ey won't letch wear nothin' but dark-gray flannels in the winter, and seersucker in the summer."
They both shuddered, and furtively refilled their glasses from a half-case hidden under the table.
"Wit'out shoulders," said Purdy.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
DOCTOR PAUL PROTEUS, to all practical purposes Mr. Paul Proteus, dreamed of nothing but pleasant things under the benign drug, and spoke simultaneously, without reflection but truthfully, on whatever subject was brought to his attention. The talking he did, the answering of questions, went on as though it were being done by a person hired to represent him, while Paul personally gave his attention to entertaining phantasmagoria within the privacy of his closed eyelids.
"Did you really get fired, or was it a pretense?" said the voice.
"Pretense. Supposed to get into the Ghost Shirt Society and find out what they're up to. Only I quit, and they don't know that, yet." Paul chuckled.
And in his dream, Paul danced powerfully, gracefully, to the hectic rhythms of the Building 58 Suite.
"Furrazz-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ak! ting!" went lathe group three, and Paul leapt and spun among the machines, while, pink amid the gray machines in the building's center, Anita lay invitingly in a rainbow-colored nest of control wires. Her part in the dance called for her only to lie there motionless, while Paul approached and fled, approached and fled in frenzied, random action.
"Why are you quitting?"
"Sick of my job."
"Because what you were doing was morally bad?" suggested the voice.
"Because it wasn't getting anybody anywhere. Because it was getting everybody nowhere."
"Because it was evil?" insisted the voice.
"Because it was pointless," said Paul's representative, as Kroner joined the ballet, ponderously, earthbound, with a methodical marching to the voices of the punch presses in the basement: "Aw-grumph! tonka-tonka. Aw-grumph! tonka-tonka . . ."
Kroner looked lovingly at Paul, caught him as he bounded past, and carried him in a bearlike embrace toward Anita. Paul squirmed free in the nick of time, and off he went again, leaving Kroner in tears, urging Anita to follow him into the out-of-doors.
"Then you're against the organization now?"
"I'm not with them now."
Shepherd, clumsily but energetically, entered the growing tableau from the basement, choosing as his theme the hoarse voices of the welders: "Vaaaaaaa-zuzip! Vaaaaaaa-zuzip!" Shepherd marked time with one foot, watching Paul's gyrations, another rejection of Kroner, another effort to coax the dead-panned Anita from her nest amid the machines. Shepherd watched with puzzlement and disdain, shrugged, and walked straight to Kroner and Anita. The three settled in the nest of wires, and together followed Paul's movements with baffled, censorious eyes.
Suddenly, a window by which Paul was bounding flew open, and Finnerty's face was thrust into the opening.
"Paul!"
"Yes, Ed?"
"You're on our side now!"
The Building 58 Suite stopped abruptly, and a black curtain fell between Paul and the rest of the cast, save Finnerty.
"Hmmm?" said Paul.
"You're on our side," said Finnerty. "If you're not with them, you're with us!"
Paul's head was aching now, and his lips were dry. He opened his eyes and saw Finnerty's face, gross, caricatured by its closeness.
"With who? Whom?"
"The Ghost Shirt Society, Paul."
"Oh, them. What do they think, Ed?" he asked drowsily. He was on a mattress, he realized, in a chamber whose air was still and damp, dense with the feel of dead mass pressing down from above. "What they think, Ed?"
"That the world should be restored to the people."
"By all means," said Paul, trying to nod. His muscles were only faintly connected to his will, and his will, in turn, was a fuzzy, ineffectual thing. "People oughta get it back."
"You're going to help."
"Yup," murmured Paul. He was in a highly tolerant mood, full of admiration and well-wishing for anyone with convictions, and cheerfully hors de combat under the influence of the drug. Obviously, he couldn't be expected to do anything. And Finnerty began to fade again, and Paul danced once more in Building 58, danced God knows why, uncertain that there was an audience anywhere to appreciate his exertions.
"What do you think?" he heard Finnerty say.
"He'll do nicely," he heard another voice reply, and he recognized the voice as Lasher's.
"What's a ghost shirt?" murmured Paul between prickling lips.
"Toward the end of the nineteenth century," said Lasher, "a new religious movement swept the Indians in this country, Doctor."
"The Ghost Dance, Paul," said Finnerty.
"The white man had broken promise after promise to the Indians, killed off most of the game, taken most of the Indians' land, and handed the Indians bad beatings every time they'd offered any resistance," said Lasher.
"Poor Injuns," murmured Paul.
"This is serious," said Finnerty. "Listen to what he's telling you."
"With the game and land and ability to defend themselves gone," said Lasher, "the Indians found out that all the things they used to take pride in doing, all the things that had made them feel important, all the things that used to gain them prestige, all the ways in which they used to justify their existence - they found that all those things were going or gone. Great hunters had nothing to hunt. Great fighters did not come back from charging into repeating-arms fire. Great leaders could lead the people nowhere but into death in hopeless attack, or deeper into wastelands. Great religious leaders could no longer show that the old religious beliefs were the way to victory and plenty."
Paul, suggestible under the drug, was deeply disturbed by the plight of the redskins. "Golly."
"The world had changed radically for the Indians," said Lasher. "It had become a white man's world, and Indian ways in a white man's world were irrelevant. It was impossible to hold the old Indian values in the changed world. The only thing they could do in the changed world was to become second-rate white men or wards of the white men."
"Or they could make one last fight for the old values," said Finnerty with relish.
"And the Ghost Dance religion," said Lasher, "was that last, desperate defense of the old values. Messiahs appeared, the way they're always ready to appear, to preach magic that would restore the game, the old values, the old reasons for being. There were new rituals and new songs that were supposed to get rid of the white men by magic. And some of the more warlike tribes that still had a little physical fight left in them added a flourish of their own - the Ghost Shirt."
"Oho," said Paul.
"They were going to ride into battle one last time," said Lasher, "in magic shirts that white men's bullets couldn't go through."
"Luke! Hey, Luke!" called Finnerty. "Stop the mimeo machine a second and come on over here."