“It would have been different,” Getty finished. “Yes. Maybe so. But he didn’t.” He sat beside January. “Cigarette?” He held out a pack, and January noticed the white wartime wrapper. He frowned.
“You haven’t got a Camel?”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Oh well. That’s all right.” January took one of the Lucky Strikes, lit up. “That’s awfully good news.” He breathed out. “I never believed Truman would pardon me anyway, so mostly you’ve brought good news. Ha. They missed. You have no idea how much better that makes me feel.”
“I think I do.”
January smoked the cigarette.
“... So I’m a good American after all. I am a good American,” he insisted, “no matter what Truman says.”
“Yes,” Getty replied, and coughed. “You’re better than Truman any day.”
“Better watch what you say, Father.” He looked into the eyes behind the glasses, and the expression he saw there gave him pause. Since the drop every look directed at him had been filled with contempt. He’d seen it so often during the court-martial that he’d learned to stop looking; and now he had to teach himself to see again. The priest look at him as if he were ... as if he were some kind of hero. That wasn’t exactly right. But seeing it ....
January would not live to see the years that followed, so he would never know what came of his action. He had given up casting his mind forward and imagining possibilities, because there was no point to it. His planning was ended. In any case he would not have been able to imagine the course of the post-war years. That the world would quickly become an armed camp pitched on the edge of atomic war, he might have predicted. But he never would have guessed that so many people would join a January Society. He would never know of the effect the Society had on Dewey during the Korean crises, never know of the Society’s successful campaign for the test ban treaty, and never learn that thanks in part to the Society and its allies, a treaty would be signed by the great powers that would reduce the number of atomic bombs year by year, until there were none left.
Frank January would never know any of that. But in that moment on his cot looking into the eyes of young Patrick Getty, he guessed an inkling of it—he felt, just for an instant, the impact on history.
And with that he relaxed. In his last week everyone who met him carried away the same impression, that of a calm, quiet man, angry at Truman and others, but in a withdrawn, matter-of-fact way. Patrick Getty, a strong force in the January Society ever after, said January was talkative for some time after he learned of the missed attack on Kokura. Then he became quieter and quieter, as the day approached. On the morning that they woke him at dawn to march him out to a hastily constructed execution shed, his MPs shook his hand. The priest was with him as he smoked 3 final cigarette, and they prepared to put the hood over his head. January looked at him calmly. “They load one of the guns with a blank cartridge, right?”
“Yes,” Getty said.
“So each man in the squad can imagine he may not have shot me?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
A tight, unhumorous smile was January’s last expression. He threw down the cigarette, ground it out, poked the priest in the arm. “But I know.” Then the mask slipped back into place for good, making the hood redundant, and with a firm step January went to the wall. One might have said he was at peace.
Brains on the Dump
Nicholas Emmett
A small boy named John balanced the rock on the edge of an orange-coloured balcony. It was heavy, and he was tired. Searching for it on the dump had not been easy, nor had the struggle up the four flights of stairs, and he thinking, and thinking, about Willie Byrne.
If Willie had only gone away after hitting him on the nose. Why did Willie force him down, rub his face into the cow dung that lay on the street, and stand there while the others laughed. Maybe if Willie had not made him look ridiculous he would not—.
His fingers tightened on the rough edge of rock, while directly below him, sleeping peacefully in a large green pram, lay the white swathed bundle of Willie’s baby sister.
John was nineteen when the gelignite blew him to pieces. How cold and wet he had been, as he prepared the booby trap for the expected jeep. How suddenly the charge exploded in his hands, causing that vague sense of identity that had been him to break into little bits.
One bit, his brain, landed on the edge of a footpath, and there considered the course of events that had brought it to its present undignified position. There had been the man he had met at the bus stop in Dublin, and the agreement reached that something should be done for one’s country. A large bare room had been entered, and his decision to join the organization accepted. And there had been the training in the use of explosives.
Here the brain tittered to itself, as the thought occurred that either the training or the gelignite had been faulty.
A late afternoon sunshine slanted painfully through the dusty streets when the machine came along. Efficiently, a shovellike mechanism shot from the side, scooped up John’s brain, and deposited it with a lot of other brains.
Trundle, trundle, it went into the approaching gloom, until it came to a broad river. Even now it did not stop, but trundled into the darkened water, for by now night was soaking darkly into everything.
After some time there was a thud, and he knew he and the other brains had been dropped through an opening onto the ground. Not that he cared, such an eventftil day, such tiredness, and now drifting into sleep.
Strong sunlight woke him, and he looked around. What a strange place, what a big dump, all those miles of lavatory and industrial waste, all shimmering, stinking, fermenting, and bubbling in the sun.
“Still it’s life, insecty life, wormy life, germy life, but still life,” said a voice behind John.
John spun his jellied remains around, and saw thousands and thousands of brains, all basking in the sunlight. The one speaking was a large purple specimen, and now it was speaking again.
“I am foreman here. I will tell you as economically as possible our situation.”
“First our comrades. They come from many places. Some were good Jews fighting the baddy Arabs, some baddy Jews fighting the goody Arabs, some were good protestants fighting the baddy catholics, some baddy protestants fighting the goody catholics, some were goody, or baddy, Viet Cong, black or white, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
“We did not eat what we killed, we did not need it for food, or to feed our young, or to use in any way towards the increase of life.
“Life, friend, that is the word. It is not the empty space between the stars, nor the unconscious mineral. But rather the movement from single cell, towards a jellied fish, bronzed weapon, space ship potential.
“Now, comrade, you enter a sun-bathed botanical garden, and you have life seeding, increasing, screaming its multi-coloured challenge towards the universe. We on the other hand, resting on this unperfiimed site, are the shrinking of life, on the way to the greatest horror of all, the nonconsciousness.
“And you, friend, and all our fellow members have offended. We stopped life without purpose, we stopped a cell on its journey from sea to star.”
John began to laugh, his jellied blob shaking and shaking and shaking, with merriment, and all the other brains began to laugh, until a great big gale of rusty laughter, went round and round, and round, the dump.