Whether from a remote mike or by some sound-gathering device, voices came suddenly into the Lisbon hotel room. The naked boy was saying, “Peace! Peace! Don’t shoot; look at us!” A girl crooned wordlessly, and the bald man recited the Lord’s Prayer.
Distantly someone called, “Hey, cease fire. They’re giving up. Squad! Hold it!”
The three continued to advance, but diverged as they came, first six, then twelve, then twenty-four or more yards separating each from his or her companions, as though each were determined to die alone. The screen could not longer encompass all three, and began to move nervously from one to the next as though afraid to miss the death of any. A soldier stood and motioned to the curly-bearded young man, indicating the midden of smashed concrete which had sheltered him. As the soldier did so he was shot, and fell backward. The curly-bearded young man turned toward his own lines shouting, “Stop! Stop!” and was shot in the back. The camera showed him writhing on the dusty pavement for a moment, then switched to the girl, now remote and fuzzy with distance but still large in the picture provided by the telephoto lens. Four soldiers surrounded her, and as they watched one put his arms about her and kissed her. Another jerked them apart, shoved the first aside, and tore away the girl’s thin shirt; as he did she exploded in a sheet of flame that embraced them all.
The bald man was walking rapidly toward a half-tracked combat car mounting quad-fifties; faintly they could hear him saying, “Hey, listen, the Giants won twenty-six straight in 1916, and the biggest gate in baseball was more than eighty-four thousand for a Yankees-Browns game in New York. The youngest big leaguer ever was Hamilton Joe Nuxhall—he pitched for Cincinnati when he was fifteen. Don’t you guys care about anything?” The crew of the half-track stared at him until an officer drew a pistol and fired. The bald man leaped to one side (Peters could not tell whether he had been hit or not) and ran toward him shouting something about the Boston Braves. The officer fired again and the bald man’s body detonated like a bomb. The voice of the young man with hieroglyphics on his forehead said, “I think we’re going to catch the Zen Banzai charge over on the west side now.” There was a sudden shift in picture and they saw a horde of ragged people with red cloths knotted around their heads and waists streaming toward a line of soldiers supported by two tanks. Some of the ragged people had firearms; more were armed with spears and gasoline bombs. For a moment they were falling everywhere—then the survivors had overwhelmed the tanks. Peters saw a soldier’s head still wearing its steel helmet, open-eyed in death and livid with the loss of blood, held aloft on a homemade spear. The picture closed on it as it turned and swayed above the crowd; it became the head of General Virdon, who said, “Now we’ve got you again. My communications people tell me we lost you for a few minutes, Mr. Lewis.” He sounded relieved.
Lewis said, “We had technical difficulties.”
The voice of the boy in Philadelphia announced, “I did that fade with the faces—it was pretty good, wasn’t it?”
Solomos asked Peters, “Why are you attacking? You should be defending. You have lost most of your country already.”
“We don’t think so,” Peters said.
“You have a few army camps and airdromes and some factories remote from centers of population; that is not the country. You survive thus far because they do not know how to fight, but they are learning, they are drilling armies everywhere, and you do not know how to fight either, and are not learning; after the defeat of the Germans and your small war in Korea you allowed your army to become only a consumer of your industrial production. What will this general do if they march from Chicago while his front is entangled in this street fighting?”
Donovan, appearing drink in hand from some remote part of the room, said, “I’m glad you asked that, Colonel Solomos. You see, that’s part of our plan—to get these people out into the open where our planes can get at them.”
Solomos made a disgusted sound. “Virdon has no reserve to cover his rear?”
“Certainly he does,” Donovan said. “Naturally I can’t tell you how many.” A moment afterward, when Solomos was talking to someone else, Donovan warned Peters, “Be nice to that guy; he represents the Greek army—its business interests. Lou is trying to contract for some Greeks to stiffen things along the coast.”
Peters said, “I’d think they’d be worrying about being nice to us, then. They ought to be glad to get the money.”
“There’s not a lot of real money around. Mostly we’re talking trade agreements after the war, stuff like that.”
A familiar voice asked, “Suppose one wished to get down a bit of a flier on this row; what’s the old firm offering?” It was Tredgold.
Donovan, a little puzzled to see someone he did not recognize, said, “I’m afraid I’ve already laid out as much as I can afford.”
Peters asked, “You’re betting against us?”
“Only for sport. The fact is, I’d back either, but I shouldn’t expect you to turn against your own chaps. Ten thousand escudos?”
“You’re on.” By a simultaneous operation of instinct both looked up at the screen, where General Virdon, looking much as though he were giving the weather, was outlining his battle plan in chalk.
Tredgold called loudly, “I say, there! Those marks show where you are now, eh? But where shall you be in an hour?” The general began laboriously sketching phantom positions across the heart of Detroit. “Well, we’ll see, eh?” Tredgold whispered to Peters.
Peters asked, “Have you had a drink?”
“Well, no, I haven’t, actually. Just arrived a moment or so ago, to tell the truth. Are my birds behaving?”
“Yes, they’ve been fine.” Peters waved over a tall dark girl whose hair, gathered behind her head in a cascade of curls, suggested a Greece not represented by Solomos. She smiled at each of them in turn, and they each took a drink—Peters was conscious that it was his third or fourth; he could not be sure which. “Listen,” he said to Tredgold when the girl had gone. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”
They found chairs at the back of the room, next to the window, and Peters said, “Can you set me up with that girl?”
“You didn’t need me, old boy; just ask her. Your chief is paying, after all.”
They talked of something else, Peters conscious that it was impossible— equally impossible to explain the impossibility. Time passed, and he knew that he would despise himself later for having missed this opportunity, though it was an opportunity that would only exist when it was too late. A few feet away Donovan was taking his wallet from his pocket, making a bet with a tall German; for some reason Peters thought of the recording company which, ultimately, employed Tredgold, and their trademark, a cluster of instruments stamped in gold, recalling the slow way it had turned round and round on the old-fashioned 33'' disk player in his grandmother’s house in Palmerton, Pennsylvania. Tredgold was recounting some story about a badger that had hidden from dogs in the cellar of a church, and Peters interrupted him to say, “What’s it like in England now?”
Tredgold said, “And so you see the poor blighters couldn’t explain what they were doing there,” and Peters realized that he had not spoken aloud at all and had to say again, “But what is it like in England now?”
Tredgold smiled. “I daresay we’re fifteen years behind you.”
“You’re expecting all this?” Peters waved a hand at the distant screen. “I mean, are you expecting it?”