A comedian.
The only Channel boat leaving before late afternoon turned out to be an excursion steamer—round trip, two guineas. The boat wasn’t crowded; it was the tag-end of the season, and a rough, windy day. I found a seat without any trouble and finished sorting out my stack of papers by date and folio.
British newspapers don’t customarily report any more of our news than we do of theirs, but this week our supply of catastrophes had been ample enough to make good reading across the Atlantic. I found all three of the Chicago stories —trimmed to less than two inches apiece, but there. I read the first with professional interest, the second skeptically, and the third with alarm.
I remembered the run of odd items I’d read in that Washington hotel room, a long time ago. I remembered Frisbee’s letter to Parst: “Some possibility appears to exist that A.K. is responsible for recent disturbances in your area...
I found two of the penitentiary stories, half smothered by stop press, and I added them to the total. I drew an imaginary map of the United States in my head and stuck imaginary pins in it. Red ones, a little cluster: Des Moines, Kansas City, Decatur, St. Louis. Blue ones, a scattering around them: Chicago, Leavenworth, Terre Haute.
Down toward the end of the cabin someone’s portable radio was muttering.
A fat youth in a checkered jacket had it. He moved over reluctantly and made room for me to sit down. The crisp, controlled BBC voice was saying, “... in Commons today, declared that Britain’s trade balance is more favorable than at any time during the past fifteen years. In London, ceremonies marking the sixth anniversary of the death ...” I let the words slide past me until I heard:
“In the United States, the mysterious epidemic affecting stockyard workers in the central states has spread to New York and New Jersey on the eastern seaboard. The President has requested Congress to provide immediate emergency meat-rationing legislation.”
A blurred little woman on the bench opposite leaned forward and said, “Serve ’em right, too! Them with their beefsteak a day.”
There were murmurs of approval.
I got up and went back to my own seat.... It all fell into one pattern, everything: the man who kicked his wife, the prizefighters, the policeman, the wardens, the slaughterhouse “epidemic.”
It was the lex talionis—or the Golden Rule in reverse: Be done by as you- do to others.
When you injured another living thing, both of you felt the same pain. When you killed, you felt the shock of your victim’s death. You might be only stunned by it, like the slaughterhouse workers, or you might die, like the policeman and the schoolboy murderer.
So-called mental anguish counted too, apparently. That explained the wave of humanitarianism in prisons, at least partially; the rest was religious hysteria and the kind of herd instinct that makes any startling new movement mushroom.
And, of course, it also explained Chillicothe: the horrible blanketing depression that settled anywhere the civilian staff congregated—the feeling of being penned up in a place where something frightful was going to happen—and the thing the two psychiatrists had been arguing about, the pseudo-claustrophobia... all that was nothing but the reflection of Aza-Kra’s feelings, locked in that cell on an alien planet.
Be done by as you do.
And I was carrying that with me. Des Moines, Kansas City, Decatur, St. Louis, Chicago, Leavenworth, Terre Haute—New York. After that, England. We’d been in London less than an hour—but England is only four hundred-odd miles long, from Spittai to Lands End.
I remembered what Aza-Kra had said: Now you must learn the other law, not to kill.
Not to kill tripeds.
My body was shaking uncontrollably; my head felt like a balloon stuffed with cotton. I stood up and looked around at the blank faces, the inward-looking eyes, every man, woman and child living in a little world of his own. I had an hysterical impulse to shout at them, Look at you, you idiots! You’ve been invaded and half conquered without a shot fired, and you don’t know it!
In the next instant I realized that I was about to burst into laughter. I put my hand over my mouth and half-ran out on deck, giggles leaking through my fingers; I got to the rail and bent myself over it, roaring, apoplectic. I was utterly ashamed of myself, but I couldn’t stop it; it was like a fit of vomiting.
The cold spray on my face sobered me. I ieaned over the rail, looking down at the white water boiling along the hull. It occurred to me that there was one practical test still to be made: a matter of confirmation.
A middle-aged man with rheumy eyes was standing in the cabin doorway, partly blocking it. As I shouldered past him, I deliberately put my foot down on his.
An absolutely blinding pain shot through the toes of my right foot. When my eyes cleared I saw that the two of us were standing in identical attitudes—weight on one foot, the other knee bent, hand reaching instinctively for the injury.
I had taken him for a “typical Englishman,” but he cursed me in a rattling stream of gutter French. I apologized, awkwardly but sincerely—very sincerely.
When we docked at Dunkirk I still hadn’t decided what to do.
What I had had in mind up till now was simply to get across France into Switzerland and hold a press conference there, inviting everybody from Tass to the UP. It had to be Switzerland for fairly obvious reasons; the English or the French would clamp a security lid on me before you could say NATO, but the Swiss wouldn’t dare—they paid for their neutrality by having to look both ways before they cleared their throats.
I could still do that, and let the UN set up a committee to worry about Aza-Kra—but at a conservative estimate it would be ten months before the committee got its foot out of its mouth, and that would be pretty nearly ten months too late.
Or I could simply go to the American consulate in Dunkirk and turn myself in. Within ten hours we would be back in Chillicothe, probably, and I’d be free of the responsibility. I would also be dead.
We got through customs the same way we’d done in London.
And then I had to decide.
The cab driver put his engine in gear and looked at me over his shoulder. "Un hotel?”
“... Yes,” I said. “A cheap hotel. Un hotel a bon marche.”
"Entendu.” He jammed down the accelerator an instant before he let out the clutch; we were doing thirty before he shifted into second.
The place he took me to was a villainous third-rate commercial-travelers’ hotel, smelling of urine and dirty linen. When the porters were gone I unlocked the trunk and opened it.
We stared at each other.
Moisture was beaded on his blue-gray skin, and there was a smell in the room stronger and ranker than anything that belonged there. His eyes looked duller than they had before; I could barely see the pupils.
“Well?” I said.
“You are half right,” he buzzed. “I am doing it, but not for the reason you think.”
“All right; you’re doing it. Stop it. That comes first. We’ll stay here, and I’ll watch the papers to make sure you do.”
“At the customs, those people will sleep only an hour.”
“I don’t give a damn. If the gendarmes come up here, you can put them to sleep. If I have to I’ll move you out to the country and we’ll live under a haystack. But no matter what happens we’re not going a mile farther into Europe until I know you’ve quit. If you don’t like that, you’ve got two choices. Either you knock me out, and see how much good it does you, or I’ll take that air-machine off your head.”