I wanted to learn to read the signs of his emotions; or failing that, to catch him in a lie.
A dozen times I thought I had trapped him into a contradiction, and each time, wearily, patiently, he explained what I had misunderstood. As for his emotions, they had only one visible sign that I was able to discover: the stiffening and trembling of his neck-spines.
Gestures of emotion are arbitrary. There are human tribes whose members never smile. There are others who smile when they are angry. Cf. Dodgson’s Cheshire Cat.
He was doing it more and more often as the time went by; but what did it mean? Anger? Resentment? Annoyance? Amusement?
The riots in the United States ended on the 9th and 10th when interfaith committees toured each city in loudspeaker trucks. Others began elsewhere.
Business was at a standstill in most larger cities. Galveston, Nashville and Birmingham joined in celebrating Hallelujah Week: dancing in the streets, bonfires day and night, every church and every bar roaring wide open.
Russia’s delegate to the United Nations, who had been larding his speeches with mock-sympathetic references to the Western nations’ difficulties, arose on the 9th and delivered a furious three-hour tirade accusing the entire non-Communist world of cowardly cryptofascistic biological warfare against the Soviet Union and the People’s Republics of Europe and Asia.
The new staffs of the Federal penitentiaries in America, in office less than a week, followed their predecessors in mass resignations. The last official act of the wardens of Leavenworth, Terre Haute and Alcatraz was to report the “escape” of their entire prison populations.
Police officers in every major city were being frantically urged to remain on duty.
Queen Elizabeth, in a memorable speech, exhorted all citizens of the Empire to remain calm and meet whatever might come'with dignity, fortitude and honor.
The Scots stole the Stone of Scone again.
Rioting and looting began in Paris, Marseilles, Barcelona, Milan, Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin.
The Pope was silent.
Turkey declared war on Syria and Iraq; peace was concluded a record three hours later.
On the 10th, Warsaw Radio announced the formation of a new Polish Provisional Government whose first and second acts had been, respectively, to abrogate all existing treaties with the Soviet Union and border states, and to petition the UN for restoration of the 1938 boundaries.
On the 11th East -Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Latvia and Lithuania followed suit, with variations on the boundary question.
On the 12th, after a brief but by no means bloodless putsch, the Spanish Republic was re-established; the British government fell once and the French government twice; and the Vatican issued a sharp protest against the ill-treatment of priests and nuns by Spanish insurgents.
Not a shot had been fired in Indo-China since the morning of the 8th.
On the 13th the Karelo-Finnish S. S. R., the Estonian S. S. R., the Byelorussian S. S. R., the Ukrainian S. S. R., the Azerbaijan S. S. R., the Turkmen S. S. R. and the Uzbek S. S. R. declared their independence of the Soviet Union. A horde of men and women escaped or released from forced-labor camps, the so-called Slave Army, poured westward out of Siberia.
6
On the 14th, Zebulon, Georgia (pop. 312), Murfreesboro, Tennessee (pop. 11,190) and Orange, Texas (pop. 8,470) seceded from the Union.
That might have been funny, but on the 15th petitions for a secession referendum were circulating in Tennesee, Arkansas, Louisiana and South Carolina. Early returns averaged 61% in favor.
On the 16th Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia and—incongruously—Rhode Island and Minnesota added themselves to the list. Separatist fever was rising in Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador. Across the Atlantic, Catalonia, Bavaria, Moldavia, Sicily and Cyprus declared themselves independent states.
And that might have been hysteria. But that wasn’t all.
Liquor stores and bars were sprouting like mushrooms in dry states. Ditto gambling halls, horse rooms, houses of prostitution, cockpits, burlesque theaters.
Moonshine whisky threatened for a few days to become the South’s major industry, until standard-brand distillers cut their prices to meet the competition. Not a bottle of the new stocks of liquor carried a Federal tax stamp.
Mexican citizens were walking across the border into Arizona and New Mexico, swimming into Texas. The first shipload of Chinese arrived in San Francisco on the 16th.
Meat prices had increased by an average of 60% for every day since the new control and rationing law took effect. By the 16th, round steak was selling for $10.80 a pound.
Resignations of public officials were no longer news; a headline in the Portland Oregonian for August 15th read:
WILL STAY AT DESK, SAYS GOVERNOR.
It hit me hard.
But when I thought about it, it was obvious enough; it was such an elementary thing that ordinarily you never noticed it—that all governments, not just tyrannies, but all governments were based on violence, as currency was based on metal. You might go for months or years without seeing a silver dollar or a policeman; but the dollar and the policeman had to be there.
The whole elaborate structure, the work of a thousand years, was coming down. The value of a dollar is established by a promise to pay; the effectiveness of a law, by a threat to punish.
Even if there were enough jailers left, how could you put a man in jail if he had ten or twenty friends who didn’t want him to go?
How many people were going to pay their income taxes next year, even if there was a government left to pay them to?
And who was going to stop the landless people from spilling over into the nations that had land to spare?
Aza-Kra said, “These things are not necessary to do.”
I turned around and looked at him. He had been lying motionless for more than an hour in the hammock I had rigged for him at the end of the room; I had thought he was asleep.
It was raining outside. Dim, colorless light came through the slotted window blinds and striped his body like a melted barber pole. Caught in one of the bars of light, the tips of two quivering neck-spines glowed in faint filigree against the shadow.
“All right,” I said. “Explain this one away. I’d like to hear you. Tell me why we don’t need governments any more.”
“The governments you have now—the governments of nations—they are not made for use. They exist to fight other nations.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true. Think. Of the money your government spends, in a year, how much is for war and how much for use?”
“About sixty per cent for war. But that doesn’t—”
“Please. This is sixty per cent now, when you have only a small war. When you have a large war, how much then?”
“Ninety per cent. Maybe more, but that hasn’t got anything to do with it. In peace or wartime there are things a national government does that can’t be done by anybody else. Now ask me for instance, what.”
“Yes. I ask this.”
“For instance, keeping an industrial country from being dragged down to coolie level by unrestricted immigration.”
“You think it is better for those who have much to keep apart from those who have little and give no help?”
“In principle, no, but it isn’t just that easy. What good does it do the starving Asiatics if we turn America into another piece of Asia and starve along with them?”