In the basement, his key opened a locker. He reached in and seized the submachine pistol and two clips of cartridges. He stuffed one into a side pocket, slapped the other into the gun, threw off the safety. Already he was hurrying down the corridor toward the heating plant. He was counting on the fact that the security police had not had sufficient time to discover that this building shared its central heating and air-conditioning plant with the apartment house adjoining.
Evidently, they hadn’t.
A freight elevator shot him to the roof of the next building. From here, given luck, he could cross to a still further building and make his getaway.
He emerged on the roof, shot a quick glance around.
Fifty feet away, their backs to him, stood three security police agents. Two of them armed with automatic rifles, the other with a handgun, they were peering over the parapet, probably at the windows of his apartment.
His weapon flashed to position, but then the long weariness overtook him. No more killing. Please. No more killing. He lowered the gun, turned and headed quietly in the opposite direction.
A voice behind him yelled, “Hey! Stop! You—”
He ran.
The burst of fire caught Warren Casey as he attempted to vault to the next building. It ripped through him and the darkness fell immediately, and far, far up from below, the last thought that was ever signaled was That’s right!
Fifteen minutes later Senator Phil McGivern scowled down at the meaningless crumpled figure. “You couldn’t have captured him?” he said sourly.
“No, sir,” the security sergeant defended himself. “It was a matter of shoot him or let him escape.”
McGivern snorted his disgust.
The sergeant said wonderingly, “Funny thing was, he could’ve finished off the three of us. We were the only ones on the roof here. He could’ve shot us and then got away.”
One of the others said, “Probably didn’t have the guts.”
“No,” McGivern growled. “He had plenty of guts.”
During 1964 the young rebels of America found themselves a spokesman.- a skinny, tangle-haired, booted and suede-jacketed, whiney-voiced, snarling young troubador named Bob Dylan.
For those less than totally familiar with the diction of the “country and Western” singers, Dylan’s records are close to incomprehensible at first hearing. They are well worth a second. Dylan has not just something, but a great deal to say; and he says it vigorously, poetically, effectively, colloquially. He is alternately angry, sad, threatening, angry, cajoling, nostalgic, and angry. His anger is diffused: the youths who gathered their forces for the mass protests of early 1965 (the inanity of Berkeley—the dignity of Selma—the controversy of the Vietnam picketing in Washington) are people who dig Dylan—as do I.
There’s one song, “Talking World War Three Blues,” that starts (as near as I can make out) “One time ago crazy dream came t’me— I dreamed I was walkin’ in World War Three.” He walks up and down the lonesome town—lights a cigarette on a parking meter, tries to break into a shelter, steals a Cadillac, and sees one other man—who runs away. “Thought I was a communist.”
He tells his dream to a psychiatrist who, it seems, has had the same dream—except that he was the only one left in his version. And then it turns out, “everybody’s havin’ these dreams,” says Dylan. “I’ll let you be in my dream, if you’ll let me be in yours.”
THE NEW ENCYCLOPAEDIST
Stephen Becker
Gill, Robert 1930-2022
Leader of the “Irreconcilables” and one of the founders of our present civilization. The Irreconcilables refused, on the grounds of good taste and “freedom of association,” to join their fellow citizens in the vast, complex network of underground shelters constructed by “Civil Defense” authorities (à Opera Buffa) between 1965 and 1970 at the cost of all the prosperity, liberties, and amenities that free men everywhere were struggling for. “Gill’s Bull” predicted accurately that underground society would necessarily be authoritarian. During the Great Alert of 1973 some 30,000 Irreconcilables remained above ground. When, because all potential enemies were also underground, nothing happened during the obligatory sixty-day period, and populations sheepishly regained the surface, Gill delivered his famous Report: “The West Side Highway was clear; there were no schoolchildren in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and there was no television. We all caught up on our correspondence.” As a consequence, during the Second Great Alert of 1977, the populations refused to go underground; the Irreconcilables therefore did, and enjoyed sixty days of luxurious solitude, gourmandise, and meditation, making free use of the libraries, cinemas, galleries, monorails, and restaurants planned for a subcivilization of 200,000,000 people. Emerging after two months, they found a world barren of life except for their counterparts in other nations, though many buildings, vehicles, power plants, etc., were perfectly usable. From these groups sprang our present highly literate, healthy, and peaceable world population of 12,-000,000, including only three psychiatrists and no soldiers. (à Quantum Jump; also Darwin, Charles and “Survival of the Fittest.”)
Porphyry, Jasper 1935-2014).
Enunciator of Porphyry’s Categories, P’s Lament; instigator of P’s Literary Schizophrenia. The Categories (1968) were an American literary achievement, and were three. (1) comprised 90% of the writers of the time. Their “talent,” as described by P, consisted of a middling facility in the manipulation of a minimal vocabulary rudimentary perceptions; unsullied ignorance of man’s history; disdain of reason; and a violent, probably psychotic, attachment to the sentimental. Writers of this group were barely distinguishable in style or attitude and naturally set great store by publicity, as only the public’s automatic responses (àPavlov, I.P.) maintained them. They accepted without question the prevalent mythos (then known as “reality”) and manufactured novel after novel in its support, almost all about hanky-panky (urban, suburban, rural), with animadversions on the “emotional” conflicts of the era, which were not truly emotional, but simple oppositions of childish egos or absurd fears. These writers were essentially masochistic and their technique was in the juvenile tradition: an uninterrupted series of insignificant events in the lives of unbelievable characters, reported in conscientiously pedestrian prose. This was called “the writer’s obligation to the reader,” or “narrative power,” the latter a phrase used often by reviewers, seldom by critics. First novels by any of this group were usually said either to have “catapulted him into the first rank of American novelists” or to “show an immense promise.”
(2) were the opposition, sometimes called the avant-garde. They protested the mythos angrily but failed to see that by doing so they were investing it with all the power the Yahoos had claimed for it (àSwift, Jonathan). Their protests naturally failed to reform society and were consequently characterized, and vitiated, by a progressively surlier sadism. These men did, however, rouse the public to an imitation of thought. A few had a serious talent for language and some understanding of their culture, and when they resisted absorption by the equestrian classes they were an influence for awareness and sanity. They were called anti-Puritans, and were said to concentrate on sex. P pointed out that a typewriter was not a woman.
(3) was a woefully small group that looked upon the mythos with generous compassion and therefore transcended it. In a professional sense they were somewhat indifferent to it. They were required for survival to acknowledge it, but in their novels they went about the business of a writer, which was, again in P’s words, “to get inside readers by making them feel what they are, and not by piercing them with exclamation points.” They derived neither from àRichardson and àRonsard nor from àDostoievski and àZola, but from àRabelais, àCervantes, and àFielding. Each had an individual and arresting style. They all knew how to laugh. They enlarged their readers. This third force of novelists (not to be lightly confused with the political third force of the time) did, as we know, endure. (àBellow, Saul; Cheever, John)