“Sure, Hank.”
“Out of my area, we had darn near a thousand volunteers, all told.” His eyes, clear and blue like Nora’s eyes, sparkled a little. “Three quarters of ’em roughly were just plain people, working people, running from masons and carpenters and delicatessen owners to the middle category, folks like us Conners. I wouldn’t say more than a quarter—if that, quite—came from the big places around Crystal Lake or up in the chichi district toward Cold Spring. Just a cross section of ordinary city people, you might say. And I’m tolerably sure that out of the thousand not every man-jack—or woman-jill—would show up set and ready, if my outfit ever got asked to do what it’s here for.
“The point is, Coley, these people are the backbone of not just Green Prairie or the Sister Cities, or a couple of states, but the whole doggoned country. Les Brown may just be a handyman. But if you were cast on a desert island for a few years, you’d be smart to take Les—for company and comforts. Alton Bowers may own ten acres of lawn and landscaped gardens and a big mansion, and he may own a pile of grain elevators, but he’s as close to Christian as Baptists ever get!” Hank, a Presbyterian, let the joke linger for a moment. Then the brightness left his eyes, he came back and sat down. “Called a meeting of the whole gang at the South High yesterday, Coley.” Hank looked at his pipe. “Forty-three people showed up.”
“Good Lord!”
Henry sighed. “We usually turned out around five, six hundred.”
“What do you want me to do, Henry?”
The bulky man stirred in his chair, frowned, rubbed his thorny cheek and said, “Talk, first of all. Get out from behind Minerva Sloan’s skirts and talk!” He reached around his neck and wrestled, one-handedly, with his vertebrae, disarranging his neat blue suit. “I’ve always had a good deal of respect for you. You’ve been right about things in this man’s town—sometimes when I was wrong. You’ve got a good mind, Coley. You’ve read a lot of history. You know a lot about this science stuff. Your paper’s been wide awake. Now, all of a sudden, because we jam up traffic—and it’s not the first time we’ve done it but maybe the tenth—you change tack on us.”
Coley Borden’s face wrinkled with intensity, glowed with a burning expression, like helpless sympathy. It was a brownish face, as if perennially suntanned; and the eyes were too big for it. Time, not very much time at that, for Borden was contemporary with Henry Conner, had bent and gnarled the editor. “I can imagine how you feel, Henry.”
“The point is—why I came here, is—what do you really think? I’ve talked to lots of people, last few weeks. People in CD and even people from River City who think the whole show is some kind of boondoggle. Those folks haven’t even got enough organization on paper. I talked to Reverend Bayson, he’s a fire fighter in my outfit. I talked to a couple of professors. I kept asking, ‘Should we go on? Is it worth it? Are we doing anything valuable? Or are we what they call us—a bunch of Boy Scouts’? I decided to put you on my list of people to talk to.”
“Thinking of quitting, yourself?”
Henry Conner looked squarely at the editor. “That’s it.” He recrossed his legs as if his body dissatisfied him. “Not right off. I don’t mind looking ridiculous to other people, so long as I don’t feel that way myself. Well. What about it?”
“If I were you,” Coley said, “I wouldn’t quit if hell itself froze over.”
Henry stared for a moment. “Be damned,” he breathed. “Why?”
“Because men like you, Hank, are the only life insurance left to the people of U.S.A. The other policies have all run out. First, Soviet friendship; then, our lead on the bombs; next, our superiority and our H-bomb. All gone.”
“They’re talking peace, hard. They made those deals and kept their word, so far.” It was almost a question.
“How many times have they jockeyed our politicians into a peace mood? Fifty? Then snatched something. It’s got so the people of the United States are scared to say or do anything that sounds hostile, even disagree, for fear they’ll spoil some new ‘chance’ at ‘world peace.’
Makes a man sick! Can you imagine, twenty years ago, Senators pussyfooting around, trying to stop free men from freely saying what they think for fear Russia would be ‘antagonized’ or made ‘suspicious’? I say—the more suspicious they are the better, and the more antagonized the better.”
“Then why print in the Transcript that Civil Defense preparations in America discourage honest peace desires in the Kremlin?”
“Minerva Sloan.”
“Who does she think she is,” Hank asked enragedly, “Mrs. God?”
“You’ve hit it. Yes. Mrs. God.”
“If I could only be sure,” Hank murmured. He got up, went to the window, saw the moonlight and murmured, “Pretty view.”
“I like it,” the editor said and switched out the fluorescent lamps in the office. That allowed Henry Conner to absorb, as his eyes grew accustomed to the soft silver outdoors, the same panorama that so frequently held Coley fixed at his window.
“Be a shame,” Henry said at last, in a quiet tone, “to wreck it.”
“Lot of lives. Lot of work.”
“You think they’ll ever try?”
“That,” Coley answered, coming around his desk in the dark and standing beside Hank, “is not the question. The question is, Could they if they tried. And the answer is, They could. So long as that’s the answer, Hank, we need you where you are.”
“That’s your opinion?” Henry stared. “It’s darn beautiful out there.”
“Darned congested, too, Hank. And darned inflammable, if you want to think of that.”
The square, firm head of the chief accountant of a chain of hardware stores, the head of a father of a family, a husband, a citizen and a good neighbor was fixed for a while so its eyes could drink in the view; then a hand scratched its grizzled hair. “I know. I know all that stuff. I know it so well it sounds sometimes like jibberish. As if the meaning had gone out. Blast, heat, radiation, fire storm—all that. Nuts.”
“Nuts is the perfect word. Insane. Completely mad.”
“You mean people?”
“I mean people.”
Henry hardly knew how to say all that was on his mind. His deep respect for Coley Borden made him prefer to appear the easy-going, almost “folksy” kind of individual for whom he was generally taken. Lacking much formal education, he hesitated even to display the insights he had gained through reading and observation. Finally he put a question. “Know much about psychology, Coley?”
“Read a lot of books. Seems the psychologists don’t know too much themselves! Keep arguing…”
Henry nodded, smiled a little. “Sure. You read much about the unconscious mind?
Subconscious? Whatever they call it?”
“Some, Henry. Why?”
“You believe in it?”
The editor laughed. “Have to. Can’t explain a single thing otherwise. Take you and Alton Bowers. You agree on every solitary fact taught in school. Comes to religion—you’re a Presbyterian, Alt’s a Baptist. Why? Something unconscious, something not faced fair and square by you both, right there.”