The fourth panel was twice the size of the others. The aerial view was still centered on the United States but pulled way back so that the arc of the Earth showed. The perspective was as through a fish-eye lens. The stockade fences were replaced with stone walls, outlining the entire boundary of the country. Alaska was also surrounded by a fortress wall, as was a tiny Hawaii distorted by perspective. Distorted coastlines crept over the horizon on the far shores of the oceans to the east and west, most of the hemisphere showed to the south. All the lands outside the walls were filled with enemies. To the east, a mustachioed figure in a WWI spiked dress helmet stood glaring across the ocean. At his shoulder, a steely-eyed figure in black SS, his right arm raised in salute to ranks of gray figures in WW II coal-scuttles. Behind them, a Stalin caricature pointed towards New York, instructing a team of fur-hatted soldiers in the aim of a huge mobile missile. To the south of them, a wild-eyed stubble-faced Arab in traditional dress straddled the Sinai Peninsula, guarding a field of Texas-type oil derricks. He held a round cartoon bomb in one hand, fuse lit, and a dagger in the other. South Central Africa held a single figure, a half-naked black warrior with a spear raised in threat. To the west, across the Pacific, rank on rank of round-faced Chinese in Mao jackets stood behind a Japan filled with evil-looking figures in WW II army uniforms, cheering on a huge war fleet spreading radially out from the island like steel cockroaches. South of the Chinese, large trees half hid black-clad figures in conical hats pointing rifles at the coast of California. North of the Chinese, mountains hid the figures of snipers firing across the Pacific at Oregon; only their faces, topped with close-cropped hair, showed over their rifle barrels. The Indian subcontinent peeked over the horizon, crammed with a sari-clad horde surrounding a missile tipped with a trefoil-marked warhead. South America was filled with enemies too. Fat dictators in fanciful uniforms, chests full of medals, sat on mountain thrones directing the action. Stake trucks dropped sombreroed peasants at the Mexican wall, where they joined others with pickaxes and shovels in its destruction. A smarmy Latin in a tailored suit held out both hands to the border in offering; three hypodermics laid out on one hand, a half-dozen small flat bags on the other. Stereotypical banditos hacked and burned the Brazilian rain forest. Cuba bristled with missiles and sent makeshift rafts to break up on the wall surrounding Florida. Canada, oddly, was depopulated. It was covered by mountains, trees, and a single, oblivious moose drinking from the St. Lawrence River.
Inside the fortress wall, all was determined and orderly activity. Women in overalls and bandannas entered smoking factories from which floods of munitions gushed. Men in uniform peered over the walls, backed by artillery and missiles. Warplanes of all periods lifted into the air, headed east, west and south. The capitol building in Washington, D.C., stood prominent, fronted by a man in a suit at a microphone, exhorting a cheering crowd of other men in uniform. In the Midwest, a man stood in the center of a packed football stadium, holding aloft a book with a cross on it. Across the country similar men held open the doors of churches to eager throngs. Alaska was covered with incongruous Texas oil derricks; tanks guarded a pipeline running through depopulated Canada from the Alaskan wall to the wall around the lower forty-eight. The detail throughout was painstaking.
The caption on this oversized panel blandly read, “Many saw our beautiful land and got jealous and wanted to take it from us. For a long time, we had to fight to keep what we had been given.”
The final panel was back to the size of the first three with the view closer in and once more showing only the North American continent. Canada was still depopulated; even the moose was gone. Across the country, everything was at peace once again. Clean factories swept in an arc from the Great Lakes to the capitol building in D.C Farms dotted the landscape here and there in the South and Midwest. A couple of cowboys in the far West herded cattle toward a handful of lumbermen in the Northwest. A movie director peered through his camera in southern California. Those not dressed for some specific occupation wandered the landscape in the current retro-style suits and dresses, entering or leaving the still-prevalent churches or talking quietly in small groups.
The wall remained in place, but now it was broken at New York, Miami and Tijuana. In the gaps stood large square buildings. Outside the wall, each building was the focus of a funneled crowd. On the Mexican border, peasants bearing hoes waited for entrance; outside New York, shiploads of people in anachronistic ethnic European dress waited their turn to land; outside Miami, boats and rafts floated at anchor, loaded with patient Latins and blacks dressed mostly in ragged shorts. A much smaller number left the building exits inside the walls; those that did were all done up in suits and dresses. The caption on this panel closed the story with, “But those people soon learned that we cannot be conquered. They can come and live with us anytime they want, but only if they come in peace and only if they learn our ways. Because that is how we are one country.”
By this time, Jack was beyond reaction. He turned away from the board and grimly walked the rest of the circuit and down the stairs. At the bottom, something caught his eye; the library entrance had changed. A large easel holding a poster now stood to one side of the double doors. Across the top of the poster were the words “We give thanks for our unity.” Below it, some kind of text art that he couldn’t work out right away. A sort of a yellow spiral expanded as it unwound and threw off a yellow path to something in a kind of greenish halo at the end. He moved closer and studied the green thing. It was a single word, made up of caps, but each letter squeezed or expanded, distorted, jumbled, varying in height, together giving the impression of a huddle of buildings, the whole washed in luminous green as if it glowed from within. That big one in the middle, stretched above them all like a tower; no, a steeple, there was a little cross on the top. The letter A? Suddenly it snapped into focus: the word was “EQUALITY.” He rapidly deciphered the rest of the lettering on the yellow strip: “Conformity is the path to equality.”
Now he recognized the image, too: the yellow brick road and the Emerald City. It was from the MGM version, he noted, not the real thing. Thank God for small favors. He took a deep breath to calm himself and turned away, soiled.
Franklin’s bust still stood on its pedestal opposite, stone eyes staring at the easel. “Aw, Ben,” said Jack, “at least they could have given you a blindfold.” He turned on his heel stalked out of the building and walked into the rain.
Jack arrived at home with his anger damped and a funk building in its place. He shook off the wet, tried to shake off his mood, and went upstairs to find Billy in his room with a word game of some kind on the computer. Bunter was rigged in a kind of handmade string sling around Billy’s neck. Jack waited quietly in the doorway.
“Tabby,” said Bunter, “t-a-b-b-y.”
“I don’t think so,” said Billy. “It says ‘famous cat.’ ‘Tabby’ is a kind of cat. Not a name.” Bunter was silent.
“Felix, I bet,” said Billy and typed the word with one finger.
“You are right, sir!” the computer blatted with a canned clip of Ed McMahon. “See?” said Billy. Bunter remained silent.
“OK, try this next one: ‘Famous mouse,’ six letters with an I.”