"I hope some of you understood. Li Po would have, a little, but he's dead.
"I'm going away now. You've been kind to me and all I've done is make trouble. I'm sorry."
He fumbled on the ground and found the samurai's flashlight. With it he hunted the village's outskirts until he found the Japanese's buckboard car. He started the motor with its crank and noisily rolled down the dirt track from the village to the highway.
Royland drove all night, still westward. His knowledge of southern California's geography was inexact, but he hoped to hit Los Angeles.
There might be a chance of losing himself in a great city. He had abandoned hope of finding present-day counterparts of his old classmates like Jimmy Ichimura; obviously they had lost out. Why shouldn't they have lost? The soldier-politicians had won the war by happenstance, so all power to the soldier-politicians! Reasoning under the great natural law post hoc ergo propter hoc, Tojo and his crowd had decided: fanatic feudalism won the war; therefore fanatic feudalism is a good thing, and it necessarily follows that the more fanatical and feudal it is, the better a thing it is. So you had Sukoshi Village, and Ugetsu Village; Ichi Village, Ni Village, San Village, Shi Village, dotting that part of Great Japan formerly known as North America, breeding with the good old fanatic feudalism and so feudally averse to new thought and innovations that it made you want to scream at them—which he had.
The single weak headlight of his buckboard passed few others on the road; a decent feudal village is self-contained.
Damn them and their suicidal cheerfulness! It was a pleasant trait; it was a fool in a canoe approaching the rapids saying: "Chin up!
Everything's going to be all right if we just keep smiling."
The car ran out of gas when false dawn first began to pale the sky behind him. He pushed it into the roadside ditch and walked on; by full light he was in a tumble-down, planless, evil-smelling, paper-and-galvanized-iron city whose name he did not know. There was no likelihood of him being noticed as a "white" man by anyone not specifically looking for him. A month of outdoor labor had browned him, and a month of artistically composed vegetable plates had left him gaunt.
The city was carpeted with awakening humanity. Its narrow streets were paved with sprawled-out men, women, and children beginning to stir and hawk up phlegm and rub their rheumy eyes. An open sewer-latrine running down the center of each street was casually used, ostrich-fashion—the users hid their own eyes while in action.
Every mangled variety of English rang in Royland's ears as he trod between bodies.
There had to be something more, he told himself. This was the shabby industrial outskirts, the lowest marginal-labor area. Somewhere in the city there was beauty, science, learning!
He walked aimlessly plodding until noon, and found nothing of the sort.
These people in the cities were food-handlers, food-traders, food-transporters. They took in one another's washing and sold one another chop suey. They made automobiles (Yes! There were one-family automobile factories which probably made six buckboards a year, filing all metal parts by hand out of bar stock!) and orange crates and baskets and coffins; abacuses, nails, and boots.
The Mysterious East has done it again, he thought bitterly. The Indians-Chinese-Japanese won themselves a nice sparse area. They could have laid things out neatly and made it pleasant for everybody instead of for a minute speck of aristocracy which he was unable even to detect in this human soup …but they had done it again. They had bred irresponsibly just as fast as they could until the land was full. Only famines and pestilence could "help" them now.
He found exactly one building which owned some clear space around it—and which would survive an earthquake or a flicked cigarette butt.
It was the German Consulate.
I'll give them the Bomb, he said to himself. Why not? None of this is mine. And for the Bomb I'll exact a price of some comfort and dignity for as long as I live. Let them blow one another up! He climbed the consulate steps.
To the black-uniformed guard at the swastika-trimmed bronze doors he said: "Wenn die Lichtstdrke der van einer Fl'dche kommen-den Strahlung dem Cosinus des Winkels zwischen Strahlrichtung und Flachennormalen proportional ist, so nennen wir die Fl'dche eine volkommen streunde Flache." Lambert's Law, Optics I. All the Goethe he remembered happened to rhyme, which might have made the guard suspicious.
Naturally the German came to attention and said apologetically: "I don't speak German. What is it, sir?"
"You may take me to the consul," Royland said, affecting boredom.
"Yes, sir. At once, sir. Er, you're an agent of course, sir?"
Royland said witheringly: "Sicherheit, bitte!"
"Yessir. This way, sir!"
The consul was a considerate, understanding gentleman. He was somewhat surprised by Royland's true tale, but said from time to time:
"I see; I see. Not impossible. Please go on."
Royland concluded: "Those people at the sulfur mine were, I hope, unrepresentative. One of them at least complained that it was a dreary sort of backwoods assignment. I am simply gambling that there is intelligence in your Reich. I ask you to get me a real physicist for twenty minutes of conversation. You, Mr. Consul, will not regret it. I am in a position to turn over considerable information on atomic power." So he had not been able to say it after all; the Bomb was still an obscene kick below the belt.
"This has been very interesting, Dr. Royland," said the consul gravely.
"You referred to your enterprise as a gamble. I too shall gamble. What have I to lose by putting you en rapport with a scientist of ours if you prove to be a plausible lunatic?" He smiled to soften it. "Very little indeed. On the other hand, what have I to gain if your extraordinary story is quite true? A great deal. I will go along with you, doctor. Have you eaten?"
The relief was tremendous. He had lunch in a basement kitchen with the Consulate guards—a huge lunch, a rather nasty lunch of stewed lungen with a floured gravy, and cup after cup of coffee. Finally one of the guards lit up an ugly little spindle-shaped cigar, the kind Royland had only seen before in the caricatures of George Grosz, and as an afterthought offered one to him.
He drank in the rank smoke and managed not to cough. It stung his mouth and cut the greasy aftertaste of the stew satisfactorily. One of the blessings of the Third Reich, one of its gross pleasures. They were just people, after all—a certain censorious, busybody type of person with altogether too much power, but they were human. By which he meant, he supposed, members of Western Industrial Culture like him.
After lunch he was taken by truck from the city to an airfield by one of the guards. The plane was somewhat bigger than a B-29 he had once seen, and lacked propellers. He presumed it was one of the "jets" Dr.
Piqueron had mentioned. His guard gave his dossier to a Luftwaffe sergeant at the foot of the ramp and said cheerfully: "Happy landings, fellow. It's all going to be all right."
"Thanks," he said. "I'll remember you, Corporal Collins. You've been very helpful." Collins turned away.
Royland climbed the ramp into the barrel of the plane. A bucket-seat job, and most of the seats were filled. He dropped into one on the very narrow aisle. His neighbor was in rags; his face showed signs of an old beating. When Royland addressed him he simply cringed away and began to sob.
The Luftwaffe sergeant came up, entered, and slammed the door. The
"jets" began to wind up, making an unbelievable racket; further conversation was impossible. While the plane taxied, Royland peered through the windowless gloom at his fellow-passengers. They all looked poor and poorly.
God, were they so quickly and quietly airborne? They were. Even in the bucket seat, Royland fell asleep.