Chaney left a sign for Major Moresby. He placed a shiny new quarter on the concrete sill of the locked door. A moment later he turned the key in the ignition and drove off toward the main gate.
The gatehouse was lighted on the inside and occupied by an officer and two enlisted men in the usual MP uniforms. The gate itself was shut but not locked. Beyond it, the black-topped road stretched away into the distance, aiming for the highway and the distant city. A white line had been newly painted — or repainted — down the center of the road.
“Are you going off station, sir?”
Chaney turned, startled by the sudden question. The officer had emerged from the gatehouse.
He said: “I’m going into town.”
“Yes, sir. May I see your pass and identification?”
Chaney passed over his papers. The officer read them twice and studied the photograph affixed to the ID.
“Are you carrying weapons, sir? Are there any weapons in the car?”
“No, to both.”
“Very good, sir. Remember that Joliet has a six o’clock curfew; you must be free of the city limits before that hour or make arrangements to stay overnight.”
“Six o’clock,” Chaney repeated. “I’ll remember. Is it the same in Chicago?”
“Yes, sir.” The officer stared at him. “But you can’t enter Chicago from the south since the wall went up. Sir, are you going to Chicago? I will have to arrange for an armed guard.”
“No — no, I’m not going there. I was curious.”
“Very well, sir.” He waved to a guard and the gate was opened. “Six o’clock, sir.”
Chaney drove away. His mind was not on the road.
The warning indicated that a part of the Indic report had correctly called the turn: the larger cities had taken harsh steps to control the growing lawlessness, and it was likely that many of them had imposed strict dusk-to-dawn curfews. A traveler not out of town before dusk would need hotel accommodations to keep him off the streets. But the reference to the Chicago wall puzzled him. That wasn’t foreseen, nor recommended. A wall to separate what from what? Chicago had been a problem since the migrations from the south in the 1950s — but a wall?
The winding private road led him to the highway. He pulled up to a stop sign and waited for a break in traffic on route 66. Across the highway, an officer in a parked state patrol car eyed his license plate and then glanced up to inspect his face. Chaney waved, and pulled into traffic. The state car did not leave its position to follow him.
A second patrol car was parked at the outskirts of town, and Chaney noted with surprise that two men in the back seat appeared to be uniformed national guardsmen. The bayonet-tipped rifles were visible. His face and his license were given the same scrutiny and their attention moved on to the car behind him.
He said aloud (but to himself): “Honest, fellas, I’m not going to start a revolution.”
The city seemed almost normal.
Chaney found a municipal parking lot near the middle of town and had to search for the rare empty space. He was outraged to learn it cost twenty-five cents an hour to park, and grudgingly put two of Seabrooke’s quarters into the meter. A clerk sweeping the sidewalk before a shuttered store front directed him to the public library.
He stood on the steps and waited until nine o’clock for the doors to open. Two city squad cars passed him while he waited and each of them carried a guardsman riding shotgun beside the., driver. They stared at him and the clerk with the broom and every other pedestrian.
An attendant in the reading room said: “Good morning. The newspapers aren’t ready.”
She hadn’t finished the chore of rubber-stamping the library name on each of the front pages, or of placing the steel rods through the newspaper centerfolds. A hanging rack stood empty, awaiting the dailies. An upside-down headline read: JCS DENIED BAIL.
Chaney said: “No hurry. I would like the Commerce and Agriculture yearbooks for the past two years, and the Congressional Record for six or eight weeks.” He knew that Saltus and the Major would buy newspapers as soon as they reached town.
“All the governmental publications are in aisle two, on your left. Will you need assistance?”
“No, thanks. I know my way through them.”
He found what he wanted and settled down to read.
The lower house of Congress was debating a tax reform bill. Chaney laughed to himself and noted the date of the Record was just three weeks before election. In some few respects the debate seemed a filibuster, with a handful of representatives from the oil and mineral states engaging in a running argument against certain of the proposals on the pious grounds that the so-called reforms would only penalize those pioneers who risk capital in the search for new resources. The gentleman from Texas reminded his colleagues that many of the southwestern fields had run dry — the oil reserves exhausted — and the Alaskan fields were yet ten years from anticipated capacity. He said the American consumer was facing a serious oil and gasoline shortage in the near future; and he got in a blow at the utility people by reminding that the hoped-for cheap power from nuclear reactors was never delivered.
The gentleman from Oregon once injected a plea to repeal the prohibition on cutting timber, claiming that not only were outlaw lumberjacks doing it, but that foreign opportunists were flooding the market with cheap wood. The presiding officer ruled that the gentleman’s remarks were not germane to the discussion at hand.
The Senate appeared to be operating at the customary hectic pace.
The gentleman from Delaware was discussing the intent of a resolution to improve the lot of the American Indian, by explaining that his resolution would direct the Bureau of Indian Affairs to act on a previous resolution passed in 1954, directing them to terminate government control of the Indians and return their resources to them. The gentleman complained that no worthwhile action had been taken on the 1954 resolution and the plight of the Indian was as sorry as ever; he urged his fellows to give every consideration to the new resolution, and hoped for a speedy passage.
The sergeant-at-arms removed several people from the balcony who were disturbing the chamber.
The gentleman from South Carolina inveighed against a phenomenon he called “an alarming tide of ignorants” now flowing from the nation’s colleges into government and industry. He blamed the shameful tide on “the radical-left revamping and reduction of standard English courses by misguided professors in our institutions of higher learning,” and urged a return to the more rigorous disciplines of yesteryear when every student could “read, write, and talk good American English in the tradition of their fathers.”
The gentleman from Oklahoma caused to be inserted in the Record a complete news item circulated by a press wire service, complaining that the nation’s editors had either ignored it or relegated it to the back pages, which was a disservice to the war effort.
Saigon (AP): General David W. Grinnell arrived in Saigon Saturday to assess what progress South Asian Special Forces have made in assuming a bigger share of the fighting chores.
Grinnell, making his third visit to the war zone in two years, said he was keenly interested in the course of the so-called Asian Citizen Program, and planned to talk to the fighting men in the countryside to find out first-hand how things were going.
With additional American troop commitments pegged in part on the effectiveness of South Asian Special Forces (SASF), Grinnell’s visit sparked rumors of a fresh troop build-up in the hard hit northern sectors. Unofficial estimates set a figure of two million Americans now in combat in the Asian Theater, which the military command refuses to confirm or deny.
Asked about new arrivals, Grinnell said: “That is something the President will have to decide at the proper time.” General Grinnell will confer with American military and civilian officials on all fighting fronts before returning to Washington next week.