But why had the Guard told that clumsy lie? The question and the answer came almost simultaneously. Remembering the fat man in the Glenbrook Store, Bass thought: They don’t want to start a panic.
There was no time to reason out his chances. Bass turned to the nearest citizen—a dropsical dull-eyed man with pendulous nose and lips—and blurted : “They’re not telling the truth—they don’t want to alarm us. There’s a demon loose in the crowd!”
The man stared at him for a moment and said, “You’re drunk, man. Forget it.”
Bass said desperately, “Look!” Seizing the man’s cape in one hand, with the other he flung his own cape open to show the blood-stained overshirt with its damning, plainly visible “GP.”
The man pulled away calmly. His eyes, Bass saw now, barely focused: it was unlikely that he could see the overshirt, let alone the trademark on it.
He tried a woman, and then an acne-scarred boy, with the same result. The crowd moved on. Bass found himself near the loose-lipped man again. Suddenly inspired, he grasped the fellow’s cape in both hands and swung him around to face him. “Y’ drunk,” said the man, and gurgled a parody of laughter.
“Listen,” said Bass. “U/M products are no good. The Stockholders all have bad breath. The Executives eat dirt. The Salesmen—”
The man had staggered back, his eyes goggling in sudden sobriety. Halfway through Bass’s third sentence, he violently wrenched himself free and darted with loud bellowings into the crowd.
Bass pushed his way a dozen steps to the right, seized a nervous-looking woman and repeated his blasphemy. Her shrieks were gratifyingly audible as she ran. By the time Bass found his fourth customer, the word had spread; he could hear it echoing shrilly from every side: “A demon!” The crowd was beginning to move faster.
Despairing of making himself heard any longer, Bass resorted to pinching everyone within reach. The crowd’s forward motion accelerated to a fast walk, to a run, to a stampede.
He saw the wreckage of a wooden barricade, flanked by shouting, impotent Guardsmen, as the flood swept past the intersection.
In spite of the pulsing pain in his side, Bass kept up with a segment of the crowd that fled eastward, straight up the hill. Sirens were howling again, from every direction—the most beautiful sound he had ever heard, because it meant that his enemies no longer knew where to look for him.
But half a mile further on, the first dozen or so of the scattered crowd began to stream past him, running in the other direction as if salvation depended on it. Dropping out, Bass saw why.
At the crest of the hill was a barricade—a real one, this time, with swinging searchlights, massed cars and copters, and an army of men with bulky weapons.
VI
BASS stood with one shoulder against the rough clapboards of a house, half-supporting himself against it, and stared down the long slope at the lights of the city. Behind him, in the darkness, the rising wind howled through the dry sorted house. The air was chill on his sweaty skin, and his hurt side was one solid, throbbing pain from chest to groin but he did not move.
He had paralleled the barricade for eight blocks, all the way to the Wall. The Guard was there, too—one man every hundred and fifty yards, standing atop the Wall itself, with a searchlight aimed down into no man’s land.
From where he stood he could see a part of that chain of light, tiny with distance. First came the streetlights of the residential area, dipping in precise converging lines to the cubical bulk of the Store. The top of the building was lost against the sky, but the doorways along its base, like the gaps between the teeth of a jack-o’-lantern, spilled wedges of orange radiance.
Beyond, clear and perfect, other rows of street lights marched up the gentle counter-slope. Then came the Guard’s Winking search beams, outlining the long catenary curve of the Wall; and beyond that Bass could see a wan glow rising from the other side.
The glow was Glenbrook. How often, Bass thought, had he looked at another ghostly light in the sky from the other side of that hill—the glow that was Stamford?
And how often, from the high ground, had he looked over on a clear day and seen the checker-work pattern that looked like rooftops—seen the shapes that looked like copters rising, the crawling dots that counterfeited trucks and buses, all the evidences of ordinary human activity—and seen them only as illusions?
He turned wearily and looked up the slope. Lights were there, too, a long straight line of them—tiny points blink-jaw from the next hill. The line was nearer than it had been half an hour ago.
The Guard was working slowly westward across the city, searching each block in turn, moving the barricade up to the next street, searching again. They were being very slow, very careful. He had perhaps an hour and a half or two hours before they drove him down into the business section again.
The Store’s bell had begun to toll half an hour ago; by now everyone in the city except Bass and the Guardsmen would be inside that enormous building. Once they had contracted their circle to the business area, the rest of their work would be easy.
He was going to die. That was a surprising thing, still; but his fatigue-numbed mind could accept it. The intolerable thing was that he couldn’t strike back; he couldn’t leave any memory of himself behind, even in the minds of his persecutors. Over there in Glenbrook there might be—there must be—others like himself. One after another, they might be thrust into the same grim comedy that he had been acting out; there was nothing he could do to prevent it. The Juggernaut would roll over him, erase him, and move on.
He thought of Consumers and Salesmen, Deacons and Deputies, Executives and Stockholders. He thought of the house he had grown up in—flimsy and rotten, because house-building took too many man-hours, was not profitable enough to the Store—crowded, because it was a sin to curb the size of Consumer families; the Store must have customers. He thought of his father, old at forty; of his mother, who had borne ten children before she died.
He thought of the scanty meals that had been set on their table, and the thin edge of hunger that was never quite warn away; because gluttony was a sin ; because a Consumer didn’t need fat, only muscle, to be an efficient worker; because there were too many mouths, and more every year.
All of it fell into one huge, simple pattern—the walls around men’s cities, and the walls around their minds.
The pressure of the book in the pocket of his cape reminded him of the other book which he had not taken, though it would have been a hundred times more useful if he had got away—the atlas. He felt no curiosity about it now; he knew what he would have seen if he had opened it to the map of the continent.
LINE for line, area for area, the map would have been the same as the one he knew, except that the blank areas would have been filled in, and the filled-in ones blank. Like two parts of an interlocking puzzle, he thought: if you put the two maps together they would make one continuous chart of information, one solid, enormously comforting chart of a world totally inhabited, totally civilized, without fear.
That knowledge was the most important in the world—and there was no way you could communicate it. Even if he had got free of the Stamford Guard, nothing he could conceivably have done would have convinced a single other person of the truth.
If you kidnaped one person a day and showed him the truth, and if one out of a hundred, knowing the truth, could stand up against his angel—which was unlikely—and if each of those kidnaped one person a day in his turn … Bass groaned abruptly and tugged at his hair. There had to be a way; there had to be something he could still do.