But what does it matter? Even if Doctor Goebbels is deposed and Operation Dandelion is canceled? They will still exist, the blackshirts, the Partei, the schemes if not in the Orient then somewhere else. On Mars and Venus.
No wonder Mr. Tagomi could not go on, he thought. The terrible dilemma of our lives. Whatever happens, it is evil beyond compare. Why struggle, then? Why choose? If all alternatives are the same.
Evidently we go on, as we always have. From day to day. At this moment we work against Operation Dandelion. Later on, at another moment, we work to defeat the police. But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.
He thought, We can only hope. And try.
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.
The Daimler started with Captain Wegener in the back, a blackshirt on each side, machine gun on lap. Blackshirt behind the wheel.
Suppose it is a deception even now, Wegener thought as the sedan moved at high speed through Berlin traffic. They are not taking me to SS General Heydrich at the Leibstandarte Division OKW; they are taking me to a Partei jail, there to maim me and finally kill me. But I have chosen; I chose to return to Germany; I chose to risk capture before I could reach Abwehr people and protection.
Death at each moment, one avenue which is open to us at any point. And eventually we choose it, in spite of ourselves. Or we give up and take it deliberately. He watched the Berlin houses pass. My own Volk, he thought; you and I, again together.
To the three SS men he said, “How are things? Any recent developments in the political situation? I’ve been away for several weeks, before Bormann’s death, in fact.”
The man to his right answered, “There’s naturally plenty of hysterical mob support for the Little Doctor. It was the mob that swept him into office. However, it’s unlikely that when more sober elements prevail they’ll want to support a cripple and demagogue who depends on inflaming the mass with his lies and spellbinding.”
“I see,” Wegener said.
It goes on, he thought. The internecine hate. Perhaps the seeds are there, in that. They will eat one another at last, and leave the rest of us here and there in the world, still alive. Still enough of us once more to build and hope and make a few simple plans.
At one o’clock in the afternoon, Juliana Frink reached Cheyenne, Wyoming. In the downtown business section, across from the enormous old train depot, she stopped at a cigar store and bought two afternoon newspapers. Parked at the curb she searched until she at last found the item.
Sought for questioning concerning the fatal slashing of her husband in their swank rooms at the President Garner Hotel in Denver, Mr. Joe Cinnadella of Canon City, according to hotel employees, left immediately after what must have been the tragic climax of a marital quarrel. Razor blades found in the room, ironically supplied as a convenience by the hotel to its guests, apparently were used by Mrs. Cinnadella, described as dark, attractive, well-dressed and slender, about thirty, to slash the throat of her husband, whose body was found by Theodore Ferris, hotel employee who had picked up shirts from Cinnadella just half an hour earlier and was returning them as instructed, only to come onto the grisly scene. The hotel suite, police said, showed signs of struggle, suggesting that a violent argument had…