‘No, Major, you may keep your sword,’ said Jack Tighe kindly. ‘And all of the officers may keep their Pinpoint Levl-Site No-Jolt sidearms.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ wept the major, and blundered back into the officer’s club which the Headquarters Detachment had never stopped building.
Jack Tighe looked after him with a peculiar and thoughtful expression.
William LaFarge, swinging a thirty-inch hickory stick - it was all he’d been able to pick up as a weapon - babbled: ‘It’s a great victory! Now they’ll leave us alone, I bet!’
Jack Tighe didn’t say a single word.
‘Don’t you think so, Jack? Won’t they stay away now?’
Jack Tighe looked at him blankly, seemed about to answer and then turned to Charley Frink. ‘Charley. Listen. Don’t you have a shotgun put away somewhere?’
‘Yes, Mr. Tighe. And a .22. Want me to get them?’
‘Why, yes, I think I do.’ Jack Tighe watched the youth run off. His eyes were hooded. And then he said: ‘Andy, do something for us. Ask the major to give us a P.O.W. driver who knows the way to the Pentagon.’
And a few minutes later, Charley came back with the shotgun and the .22; and the rest, of course, is history.
The Waging of the Peace
1
After old man Tighe conquered the country (oh, now, listen. I already told you about that. Don’t pester me for the same story over and over again. You remember about the Great March, from Pung’s Corners to the Pentagon, and how Honest Jack Tighe, the Father of the Second Republic, overcame the massed might of the greatest nation of the world with a shotgun and a .22 rifle. Of course you do.)
Anyway. After old man Tighe conquered the country, things went pretty well for a while.
Oh, it was a pleasant time and a great one! He changed the world, Jack Tighe did. He took a pot of strong black coffee into his room - it was the Lincoln Study, as it was called at the time; now, of course, we know it as Tighe’s Bedchamber - and sat up all one night, writing, and when the servants came wonderingly to him the next morning, there it was: the Bill of Wrongs.
See if you can remember them. Everybody learns them by heart. Surely you did too:
1. THE FIRST WRONG THAT WE MUST ABOLISH IS THE FORCED SALE OF GOODS. IN FUTURE, NO ONE SHALL SELL GOODS. VENDORS MAY ONLY PERMIT THEIR CUSTOMERS TO BUY.
2. THE SECOND WRONG THAT WE MUST ABOLISH IS ADVERTISING. ALL BILLBOARDS ARE TO BE RIPPED DOWN AT ONCE. MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS WILL CONFINE THEIR PAID NOTICES TO ONE QUARTER-INCH PER PAGE, AND THESE MAY NOT HAVE ILLUSTRATIONS.
3. THE THIRD WRONG THAT WE MUST ABOLISH IS THE COMMERCIAL. ANYBODY WHO TRIES TO USE GOD’S FREE AIR FOR PUSHING COMMODITIES OFFERED FOR SALE IS AN ENEMY OF ALL THE PEOPLE, AND HAS TO BE EXILED TO ANTARCTICA. AT LEAST.
Why, it was the very prescription for a Golden Age! That’s the way it was, and the way the people rejoiced was amazing.
Except - well, there was the matter of the factories in the caverns.
For instance, there was a man named Cossett. His first name was Archibald, but you don’t have to bother remembering that part; his wife had a strong stomach, but that was more than she could put up with, and she mostly called him Bill, They had three kids - boys - named Chuck, Dan and Tommy, and Mrs. Cossett considered herself well off.
One morning she told her husband so: ‘Bill, I love the way Honest Jack Tighe has fixed everything up for us! Remember how it was, Bill? Remember? And how, why - well, look. Don’t you notice anything?’
‘Hm?’ inquired Cossett.
‘Your breakfast,’ said Essie Cossett. ‘Don’t you like it?’
Bill Cossett looked palely at his breakfast. Orange juice, toast, coffee. He sighed deeply.
‘Bill! I asked you if you liked it!’
‘I’m eating it, aren’t I? When did I ever have anything different?’
‘Never, honey,’ his wife said gently. ‘You always have the same thing. But don’t you notice that the toast isn’t burned?’
Cossett chewed a piece of it without emotion. ‘That’s nice,’ he said.
‘And the coffee is fit to drink. And so’s the orange juice.’
Cossett said irritably: ‘Essie, it’s great orange juice. It will be remembered.’
Mrs. Cossett flared: ‘Bill, I can’t say a thing to you in the morning without your flying completely off the -’
‘Essie,’ shouted her husband, ‘I had a bad night!’ He glared at her, a good-looking man, still young, fine father and good provider, but at the end of his rope. ‘I didn’t sleep! Not a wink! I was awake all night, tossing and turning, tossing and turning, worrying, worrying, worrying. I’m sorry!’ he cried, daring her to accept the apology.
‘But I only-’
‘Essie!’
Mrs. Cossett was wounded to the quick. Her lip quivered. Her eyes moistened. Her husband, seeing the signs, accepted defeat.
He sank back against his chair as she said meekly: ‘I only wanted to point out that it isn’t ruined. But you’re so touchy, Bill, that - I mean,’ she said hurriedly, ‘do you remember what it was like in the old days, before Jack Tighe freed us all? When every month there was a new pop-up toaster, and sometimes you had to dial each slice separately for Perfect Custom Yumminess, and sometimes a red Magic Ruby Reddy-Eye did it for you? When the coffee maker you bought in June used coarse percolator coffee grind and the one you got to replace it in September took drip?
‘And now,’ she cried radiantly, her momentary anger forgotten, ‘and now I’ve had the same appliances for more than six months! I’ve had time to learn to use them! I can keep them until they wear out! And when they’re gone, if I want I can get the exact same model again! Oh, Bill,’ she wept, quite overcome, ‘how did we get along in the old days, before Jack Tighe?’
Her husband pushed his chair back from the table and sat regarding her without a word for a long moment.
Then he got up, reached for his hat, groaning, ‘Ah, who can eat?’ and rushed out of the house to his place of business.
The sign over his store read:
A. COSSETT & CO.
Authorized Buick Dealer
He sobbed all the way down to the shop.
You mustn’t feel too sorry for old Bill Cossett; there were a lot like him those days. But it was pretty sad, no doubt of it.
When he got to the shop, he wanted to sob some more, but how could he, in front of the staff? One little break from him and all of them would have been wailing.
As it was, his head salesman, Harry Bull, was in a dither. He was lighting one cigarette after another, taking a single abstracted puff and placing each of them neatly, side by side like spokes, along the rim of his big glass ashtray. He didn’t know he was doing it, of course. His eyes were fixed emptily on the ashtray, all right, but what his glazed vision beheld were the smouldering ashes of hellfire.
He looked up when his boss came in.
‘Chief,’ he burst out tragically, ‘they’ve come in! The new models! I had the Springfield office on the phone a dozen times already this morning, I swear. But it’s the same answer every time.’
Cossett took a deep breath. This was a time for manhood. He stuck his chin out proudly and-said, his voice perfectly leveclass="underline" ‘They won’t cancel, then.’
‘They say they can’t,’ said Harry Bull, and stared with a corpse’s eyes at the crowded showroom. ‘They say the caverns are raising all the quotas. Sixteen more cars,’ he whispered dully, ‘and that’s just the Roadmasters, Chief. I didn’t tell you that part. Tomorrow we get the Specials and the Estate Wagons, and -and-