He took one step.
“Risha!” came floating down from the terrace.
And he looked up. “Here,” he piped.
I saw the woman’s head, tiny at the top of the terrace. She called something I didn’t hear; I was standing up, squeezed tight with anger.
Then the wind shifted. It blew from me to the boy. He whirled around, his eyes big, and clapped a hand to his nose.
“Oh, what a stench!” .
He turned to shout, “Corning!” and then he was gone, hurrying back up the road, into the unstable blur of green.
My one chance, ruined. He would have seen the image, I knew, if it hadn’t been for that damned woman, and the wind shifting... They were all against me, people, wind, and all.
And the figurine still sat, blind eyes turned up to the rocky sky.
There was something inside me that told me to take my disappointment and go away from there and not come back.
I knew I would be sorry. I did it, anyway: took the image out of the niche, and the paper with it, and climbed the slope. At the top I heard his clear voice laughing.
There was a thing that might have been an ornamental mound, or the camouflaged top of a buried house. I went around it, tripping over my own feet, and came upon the boy kneeling on the turf. He was playing with a brown-and-white puppy.
He looked up, with the laughter going out of his face. There was no wind, and he could smell me. I knew it was bad. No wind, and the puppy to distract him—everything about it was wrong. But I went to him blindly, anyhow, and fell on one knee, and shoved the figurine at his face.
“Look—” I said.
He went over backwards in his hurry; he couldn’t even have seen the image, except as a brown blur coming at him. He scrambled up, with the puppy whining and yapping around his heels, and ran for the mound.
I was up after him, clawing up moist earth and grass as I rose. In the other hand I still had the image clutched, and the paper with it.
A door popped open and swallowed him and popped shut again in my face. With the flat of my hand I beat the vines around it until I hit the doorplate by accident and the door opened. I dived in, shouting, “Wait,” and was in a spiral passage, lit pearl-gray, winding downward. Down I went, headlong, and came out at the wrong door—an underground conservatory, humid and hot under the yellow lights, with dripping rank leaves in long rows. I went down the aisle raging, overturning the tanks, until I came to a vestibule and an elevator.
Down I went again to the third level and a labyrinth of guest rooms, all echoing, all empty. At last I found a ramp leading upwards, past the conservatory, and at the end of it voices.
The door was clear vitrin, and I paused on the near side of it, looking and listening. There was the boy, and a woman old enough to be his mother, just—sister or cousin, more likely—and an elderly woman in a hard chair holding the puppy. The room was comfortable and tasteless, like other rooms.
I saw the shock grow on their faces as I burst in; it was always the same; they knew I would like to kill them, but they never expected that I would come uninvited into a house. It was not done.
There was that boy, so close I could touch him, but the shock of all of them was quivering in the air, smothering, like a blanket that would deaden my voice. I felt I had to shout.
“Everything they tell you is lies!” I said. “See here—here, this is the truth!” I had the figurine in front of his eyes, but he didn’t see.
“Risha, go below,” said the young woman quietly. He turned to obey, quick as a ferret.
I got in front of him again. “Stay,” I said, breathing hard. “Look—”
“Remember, Risha, don’t speak,” said the woman.
I couldn’t stand any more. Where the boy went I don’t know; I ceased to see him. With the image in one hand and the paper with it, I leaped at the woman. I was almost quick enough; I almost reached her, but the buzzing took me in the middle of a step, louder, louder, like the end of the world.
It was the second time that week. When I came to, I was sick and too faint to move for a long time.
The house was silent. They had gone, of course... the house had been defiled, having me in it. They wouldn’t live here again, but would build elsewhere.
My eyes blurred. After a while I stood up and looked around at the room. The walls were hung with a gray closewoven cloth that looked as if it would tear, and I thought of ripping it down in strips, breaking furniture, stuffing carpets and bedding into the oubliette... But I didn’t have the heart for it. I was too tired.
At last I stooped and picked up the figurine and the paper that was supposed to go under it—crumpled now, with the forlorn look of a message that someone has thrown away unread.
I smoothed it out and read the last part.
YOU CAN SHARE THE WORLD WITH ME. THEY CAN’T STOP YOU. STRIKE NOW—PICK UP A SHARP
THING AND STAB, OR A HEAVY THING AND CRUSH. THAT’S ALL. THAT WILL MAKE YOU FREE. ANYONE CAN DO IT.
Anyone. Anyone.
THE PUBLIC HATING
by Steve Allen
I can hardly presume to tell the American public anything about Steve Allen—except to point with delight (being an Allen fan anyhow) and say: “Look, maw! He can write!”
This story follows the Knight because it is also about hate, and because it is not at all about Utopia.
The weather was a little cloudy on that September 9, 1978, and here and there in the crowds that surged up the ramps into the stadium people were looking at the sky and then at their neighbors and squinting and saying, “Hope she doesn’t rain.”
On television the weatherman had forecast slight cloudiness but no showers. It was not cold. All over the neighborhood surrounding the stadium, people poured out of street-cars and busses and subways. In ant-like lines they crawled across streets, through turnstiles, up stairways, along ramps, through gates, down aisles.
Laughing and shoving restlessly, damp-palmed with excitement, they came shuffling into the great concrete bowl, some stopping to go to the restrooms, some buying popcorn, some taking free pamphlets from the uniformed attendants.
Everything was free this particular day. No tickets had been sold for the event. The public proclamations had simply been made in the newspapers and on TV, and over 65,000 people had responded.
For weeks, of course, the papers had been suggesting that the event would take place. All during the trial, even as early as the selection of the jury, the columnists had slyly hinted at the inevitability of the outcome. But it had only been official since yesterday. The television networks had actually gotten a slight jump on the papers. At six o’clock the government had taken over all network facilities for a brief five-minute period during which the announcement was made.
“We have all followed with great interest,” the Premier had said, looking calm and handsome in a gray double-breasted suit, “the course of the trial of Professor Ketteridge. Early this afternoon the jury returned a verdict of guilty. This verdict having been confirmed within the hour by the Supreme Court, in the interests of time-saving, the White House has decided to make the usual prompt official announcement. There will be a public hating tomorrow. The time: 2:30 p.m. The place: Yankee Stadium in New York City. Your assistance is earnestly requested. Those of you in the New York area will find. . . . .”
The voice had gone on, filling in other details, and in the morning, the early editions of the newspapers included pictures captioned, “Bronx couple first in line,” and “Students wait all night to view hating” and “Early birds.”