In the British Isles, Western Europe and Scandinavia, the early symptoms of the Western hemisphere’s disaster were beginning to appear: the stricken slaughterers and fishermen, the unease in prisons, the freaks of violence.
An unprecedented number of political refugees turned up on the East-German side of the Burnt Corridor early Saturday morning.
Late the same day, a clash between Sikh and Moslem guards on the India-Pakistan border near Sialkot resulted in the annihilation of both parties.
And on Sunday it hit the fighting in Indo-China.
Allied and Communist units, engaging at sixty points along the tight-hundred-mile front, fell back with the heaviest casualties of the war.
Red bombers launched a successful daylight attack on Luangprabang: successful, that is, except that nineteen out of twenty planes crashed outside the city or fell into the Nam Ou.
Forty Allied bombers took off on sorties to Yen-bay, Hanoi and Nam-dinh. None returned.
Nobody knew it yet, but the war was over.
Still other things happened but were not recorded by the press:
A man in Arizona, a horse gelder by profession, gave up his business and moved out of the county, alleging ill health.
So did a dentist in Tacoma, and another in Galveston.
In Breslau an official of the People’s Police resigned his position with the same excuse; and one in Buda; and one in Pest.
A conservative Tajik tribesman of Indarab, discovering that his new wife had been unfaithful, attempted to deal with her in the traditional manner, but desisted when a critical observer would have said he had hardly begun; nor did this act of compassion bring him any relief.
And outside the town of Otaru, just two hundred and fifty miles across the Sea of Japan from the eastern shore of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, Aza-Kra used his anesthetic gas again—on me.
I had been bone-tired when we left Port Blair shortly before midnight, but I hadn’t slept all the long dark droning way to Manila; or from there to Tokyo, with the sun rising half an hour after we cleared the Philippines and slowly turning the globe underneath us to a white disk of fire; or from Tokyo north again to Otaru, bleak and windy and smelling of brine.
In all that time, I hadn’t been able to forget Wheelwright except for half an hour toward the end, when I picked up an English-language broadcast from Tokyo and heard the news from the States.
The first time you burn yourself playing with matches, the chances are that if the blisters aren’t too bad, you get over it fast enough; you forget about it. But the second time, it’s likely to sink in.
Wheelwright was my second time; Wheelwright finished me.
It’s more than painful, it’s more than frightening, to cause another living creature pain and feel what he feels. It tears you apart. It makes you the victor and the victim, and neither half of that is bearable.
It makes you love what you destroy—as you love yourself—and it makes you hate yourself as your victim hates you.
That isn’t all. I had felt Wheelwright’s self-loathing as his body cringed and the tears spilled out of his eyes, the helpless gut-twisting shame that was as bad as the fear; and that burden was on me too.
Wheelwright was talented. That was his own achievement; he had found it in himself and developed it and trained himself to use it. Wheelwright had courage. That was his own. But who had made Wheelwright afraid? And who had taught him that the world was his enemy?
You, and I, and every other human being on the planet, and all our two-legged ancestors before us. Because we had settled for too little. Because not more than a handful of us, out of all the crawling billions, had ever had the will to break the chain of blows, from father to daughter to son, generation after generation.
So there was Wheelwright; that was what we had made out of man: the artistry and the courage compressed to a needle-thin, needle-hard core inside him, and that only because we hadn’t been able to destroy it altogether; the rest of him self-hatred, and suspicion, and resentment, and fear.
But after breakfast in Tokyo, it began to seem a little more likely that some kind of a case could be made for the continued existence of the human race. And after that it was natural to think about lions, and about the rioting that was going on in America.
For all his moral nicety, Aza-Kra had no trouble in justifying the painful extinction of carnivores. From his point of view, they were better off dead. It was regrettable, of course, but...
But, sub specie aeternitatis, was a man much different from a lion?
It was a commonplace that no other animal killed on so grand a scale as man. The problem had never come up before: could we live without killing?
I was standing with Aza-Kra at the top of a little hill that overlooked the coast road and the bay. The bus that had brought us there was dwindling, a white speck in a cloud of dust, down the highway toward Cape Kamui.
Aza-Kra sat on a stone, his third leg grotesquely bulging the skirt of his coat. His head bent forward, as if the old woman he was pretending to be had fallen asleep, chin on massive chest; the conical hat pointed out to sea.
I said, “This is the time of crisis you were talking about, for America.”
“Yes. It begins now.”
“When does it end? Let’s talk about this a little more. This justice. Crimes of violence—all right. They punish themselves, and before long they’ll prevent themselves automatically. What about crimes of property? A man steals my wallet and runs. Or he smashes a window and takes what he wants. Who’s going to stop him?”
He didn’t answer for a moment; when he did the words came slowly and the pronunciation was bad, as if he were too weary to attend to it. “The wallet can be chained to your clothing. The window can be made of glass that does not break.”
I said impatiently, “You know that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the problem as it affects everybody. We solve it by policemen and courts and prisons. What do we do instead?”
“I am sorry that I did not understand you. Give me a moment.___”
I waited.
“In your Middle Ages, when a man was insane, what did you do?”
I thought of Bedlam, and of creatures with matted hair chained to rooftops.
He didn’t wait for me to speak. “Yes. And now, you are more wise?”
“A little.”
“Yes. And in the beginning of your Industrial Revolution, when a factory stopped and men had no work, what was done?”
“They starved.”
“And now?”
“There are relief organizations. We try to keep them alive until they can get work.”
“If a man steals what he does not need,” Aza-Kra said, “is he not sick? If a man steals what he must have to live, can you blame him?”
Socrates, in an onyx-trimmed dress, three-legged on a stone.
Finally I said, “It’s easy enough to make us look foolish, but we have made some progress in the last two thousand years. Now you want us to go the rest of the way overnight. It’s impossible; we haven’t got time enough.”
“You will have more time now.” His voice was very faint. “Killing wastes much time ... . Forgive me, now I must sleep.”
His head dropped even farther forward. I watched for a while to see if he would topple over, but of course he was too solidly based. A tripod. I sat down beside him, feeling my own fatigue drag at my body, envying him his rest; but I couldn’t sleep.