People around Traub were shaking their fists now. Their eyes were narrowed their mouths turned down at the corners. A woman fainted.
“Come on,” shouted Weltmer. “Let’s feel it!”
Under the spell of the speaker Traub was suddenly horrified to find that his blood was racing, his heart pounding. He felt anger surging up in him. He could not believe he hated Ketteridge. But he could not deny he hated something.
“On the souls of your mothers,” Weltmer was saying, “on the future of your children, out of your love for your country, I demand of you that you unleash your power to despise. I want you to become ferocious. I want you to become as the beasts of the jungle, as furious as they in the defense of their homes. Do you hate this man?”
“Yes!” roared the crowd.
“Fiend!” cried Weltmer, “Enemy of the people— Do you hear, Ketteridge?”
Traub watched in dry-mouthed fascination as the slumped figure in the chair straightened up convulsively and jerked at his collar. At this first indication that their power was reaching home the crowd roared to a new peak of excitement.
“We plead,” said Weltmer, “with you people watching today on your television sets, to join with us in hating this wretch. All over America stand up, if you will, in your living rooms. Face the East. Face New York City, and let anger flood your hearts. Speak it out, let it flow!”
A man beside Traub sat down, turned aside, and vomited softly into a handkerchief. Traub picked up the binoculars the man had discarded for the moment and fastened them on Ketteridge’s figure, twirling the focus-knob furiously. In a moment the man leaped into the foreground. Traub saw that his eyes were full of tears, that his body was wracked with sobs, that he was in obvious pain.
“He is not fit to live,” Weltmer was shouting. “Turn your anger upon him. Channel it. Make it productive. Be not angry with your family, your friends, your fellow citizens, but let your anger pour out in a violent torrent on the head of this human devil,” screamed Weltmer. “Come on! Let’s do it! Let’s get it over with!”
At that moment Traub was at last convinced of the enormity of Ketteridge’s crime, and Weltmer said, “All right, that’s it. Now let’s get down to brass tacks. Let’s concentrate on his right arm. Hate it, do you hear. Burn the flesh from the bone! You can do it! Come on! Burn him alive!”
Traub stared unblinking through the binoculars at Ketteridge’s right arm as the prisoner leaped to his feet and ripped off his jacket, howling. With his left hand he gripped his right forearm and then Traub saw the flesh turning dark. First a deep red and then a livid purple. The fingers contracted and Ketteridge whirled on his small platform like a dervish, slapping his arm against his side.
“That’s it,” Weltmer called. “You’re doing it. You’re doing it. Mind over matter! That’s it. Burn this offending flesh. Be as the avenging angels of the Lord. Smite this devil! That’s it!”
The flesh was turning darker now, across the shoulders, as Ketteridge tore his shirt off. Screaming, he broke away from his chair and leaped off the platform, landing on his knees on the grass.
“Oh, the power is wonderful,” cried Weltmer. “You’ve got him. Now let’s really turn it on. Come on!”
Ketteridge writhed on the grass and then rose and began running back and forth, directionless, like a bug on a griddle.
Traub could watch no longer. He put down the binoculars and staggered back up the aisle.
Outside the stadium he walked for 12 blocks before he hailed a cab.
HOME THERE’S NO RETURNING
by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore
If the last story was uncomfortably close to home, be warned that this is even closer. But don’t quit now. It’s the last one in the book, so you may be certain it will have a happy ending—of sorts. And, being the work of science-fantasy’s foremost collaborators, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Kuttner, you may be equally certain that the background of the fable will be painted in clear glowing colors; that the action of the story will move at a pulse-beat pace; and that the moral, when it comes, will be stated with an appropriate question mark.
The General opened the door and came softly into the big, bright underground room. There by the wall under the winking control panels lay the insulated box, nine feet long, four feet wide, just as it always lay, just as he always saw it—day or night, waking or sleeping, eyes open or closed. The box shaped like a tomb. But out of it, if they were lucky, something would be born.
The General was tall and gaunt. He had stopped looking at himself in the mirror because his own face had begun to frighten him with its exhaustion, and he hated to meet the look of his own sunken eyes. He stood there feeling the beat of unseen machinery throb through the rock all around him. His nerves secretly changed each rhythmic pulse into some vast explosion, some new missile against which all defenses would be useless.
He called sharply in the empty laboratory, “Broome!” No answer. The General walked forward and stood above the box. Over it on the control panel lights winked softly on and off, and now and then a needle quivered. Suddenly the General folded up his fist and smashed the knuckles down hard on the reverberent metal of the box. A sound like hollow thunder boomed out of it.
“Easy, easy,” somebody said. Abraham Broome was standing in the doorway, a very old man, small and wrinkled, with bright, doubtful eyes. He shuffled hastily to the box and laid a soothing hand on it, as if the box might be sentient for all he knew.
“Where the hell were you?” the General asked.
Broome said, “Resting. Letting some ideas incubate. Why?”
“You were resting?” The General sounded like a man who had never heard the word before. Even to himself he sounded strange. He pressed his eyelids with finger and thumb, because the room seemed to be dwindling all around him, and the face of Broome receded thinly into gray distances. But even with shut eyes he could still see the box and the sleeping steel giant inside, waiting patiently to be born. Without opening his eyes, he said, “Wake it up, Broome.”
Broome’s voice cracked a little. “But I haven’t fin—”
“Wake it up.”
“Something’s gone wrong, General?”
General Conway pressed his eyelids until the darkness inside reddened—as all this darkness underground would redden when the last explosions came. Perhaps tomorrow. Not later than the day after. He was almost sure of that. He opened his eyes quickly. Broome was looking at him with a bright, dubious gaze, his lids sagging at the outer corners with the weight of unregarded years.
“I can’t wait any longer,” Conway said carefully. “None of us can wait. This war is too much for human beings to handle any more.” He paused and let the rest of his breath go out in a sigh, not caring—perhaps not daring—to say the thing aloud that kept reverberating in his head like steadily approaching thunder. Tomorrow, or the day after —that was the deadline. The enemy was going to launch an all-out attack on the Pacific Front Sector within the next forty-eight hours.
The computers said so. The computers had ingested every available factor from the state of the weather to the conditions of the opposing general’s childhood years, and this was what they said. They could be wrong. Now and then they were wrong, when the data they receivedwas incomplete. But you couldn’t go on the assumption that they would be. You had to assume an attack would come before day after tomorrow.