“But we can’t just sit here! Think of the children back in the city, Joe. Can’t we... save any of them?”
“Let me think,” he said. “Let me think of some way we could keep from getting infected by that... that insanity back there.”
She said softly: “Suppose you couldn’t hear all that... that laughing around you?”
He jumped up and snapped his fingers. “I’ll bet that’s part of it. Not all of it, because deaf men join lynch mobs. But some of it. If you couldn’t see and couldn’t hear, you’d still sense the excitement around you and some of it would still get to you. You need something to take your mind off it, like in the old days when they bit on bullets, you know, for operations.”
“Like a toothache,” she said.
“I’m going to try it, kitten,” Joe Morgan said. “With my ears stuffed up with cloth and with my pet filling removed and a pebble in the socket where I can bite down on it. I have to see what’s going on down there.”
“And I go with you, Joe. I won’t stay here alone and I can help and if it should start to get you, darling, I’ll be there to... to help you.”
V
Joe Morgan, his crooked grin loosely in place, and Alice Pardette, pale and shaking with the white horror of what they had seen in the streets, stood in the almost deserted telephone building.
“You sure you call run cue of those long distance switchboards?”
“I did that work for over a year. Come on.”
Her fingers were quick with the plugs. He said: “Get the state capital. See if you can land the governor himself.”
She talked into the mouthpiece, her tone flat and insistent. At last she motioned to him. He picked up the phone off the nearby desk.
A warm, hearty voice said: “Gudlou speaking. Who did you say this is?”
“Governor, this is Joseph Morgan speaking from Daylon. I want to make an immediate appeal, for help. Call out the National Guard. Get men here. Men and ambulances and tear gas. The town has gone crazy.”
“Is this some sort of a joke?”
“Check with the phone company and the telegraph people. Try to get our local station on your radio, sir. Believe me, this is a terrible mess here.”
“But I don’t understand! What has happened there?”
“This Happiness, Incorporated, thing, sir.”
The governor laughed heartily. “Very clever publicity stunt, Morgan, or whatever your name is. Sorry, my boy, but we can’t use the National Guard to promote your product, even if I do have an appointment for my first shot”
“Look, sir, send over a plane. Get pictures—”
But the fine was dead. Joe sighed heavily. “Didn’t work, angel. See if you can get me the President.”
But after two hours of fighting their way up through the ranks of incredulous underlings, they were forced to give up. The world would know soon enough. With the trains halted, buses and trucks stalled in the city, all communications cut, the world will begin to wake up and wonder what had happened to Daylon.
One day of madness, and another, and another, and another. The streets resound with hoots of hoarse laughter. Bodies lie untended. It is discovered that detachments sent in to help fall under the general spell. News planes circle overhead by day and all roads leading to town are jammed with the cars of the curious, those who come to watch. Many of them get too close, stay to revel and to die.
The power plants have failed and at night the city is lighted by fires that burn whole blocks.
The laughter and the madness go on.
Throughout the nation the various clinics set up by Happiness, Incorporated, cut the fees and go on twenty-four hour operation. The spokesmen for Happiness, Incorporated, say that the riots in Daylon are due to an organized group attempting to discredit the entire program.
And at the end of the fifth day the laughter stops as though cut with a vast knife.
Joe Morgan, unshaven and pale with fatigue, drove the last busload of screaming children out of Daylon. With the money he and Alice had taken on that first day, nearly two million dollars of cash, they had set up emergency headquarters in Lawper, a fair-sized village seventeen miles from Daylon. Renting space, hiring a large corps of assistants, they had managed to evacuate nearly thirty-six hundred children, lend their wounds, feed them and house them.
Organized agencies were beginning to take some of the administrative burden off their hands.
Alice, looking pounds thinner, stood by him as the attendants took the children off for medical processing.
“What was it like, Joe?” she asked.
“The whole city has a stink of death. And the laughter has slapped. It’s quiet now. I saw some of them sitting on the curb, their faces in their hands. I think it’s going to get worse.”
VI
NEWS BULLETIN, 6 P.M., OCT. 3rd: “First in the news tonight is, as usual, the city of Daylon. The stupendous wave of suicides is now over and the city is licking its wounds. Those wounds, by the way, are impressive. Twenty-one hundred known dead. Four thousand seriously injured. Fifteen hundred missing, believed dead. Property damage is estimated at sixty millions, one third of the city’s total assessed valuation. Today the Congressional Investigating Committee arrived at Daylon, accompanied by sortie of the nation’s outstanding reporters of the news. The courage with which the good people of Daylon are going about the repair of their city is heartwarming. Psychologists call this a perfect example of mass hysteria, and the cause is not yet explained.”
FROM THE DETROIT CITIZEN BANNER, OCT. 7th: “Judge Fawlkon today refused to allow an injunction against the three local clinics of Happiness, Incorporated, brought by the Detroit Medical Association who state that the Daylon disaster may have its roots in the inoculations given in that city, used as a test locale by Happiness, Incorporated. Judge Fawlkon stated that, in his considered judgment, there was no logical reason to link these two suppositions. Court was adjourned early so that the judge could keep his, appointment at the nearest clinic of Happiness, Incorporated.”
FROM THE BUNNY JUKES PROGRAM:
Stooge: Hey, Bunny, I understand that you’ve got the lowdown on what happened over there in Daylon.
Bunny: Don’t tell anybody, hut Daylon was the first place where the new income tax blanks were distributed.
Audience: Laughter.
EDITORIAL IN THE DAYLON NEW’S: “The attitude of the courts in making no effort to prosecute citizens of Daylon who unknowingly committed crimes during the recent Death Week is an intelligent facing of the facts. However, this paper feels that no such special dispensation should be made in the case of the codefendants Joseph Morgan, one-time reporter on this newspaper, and Alice Pardette, one-time employee of Happiness, Incorporated. It has been proven and admitted that the codefendants were able to resist the inexplicable hysteria and did knowingly enter the city and make away with close to two million dollars in cash. The fact that a portion of this money was used to evacuate children is mildly extenuating, but, since the codefendants were captured by police before they had fulfilled their expressed ‘intent’ to return the balance of the funds, their position is feeble indeed. Other organizations were prepared to aid the children of this city. It is hoped that Joseph. Morgan and Alice Pardette, when their cast comes to trial, will be punished to the full extent of the law, as their crime is indeed despicable.”
EXCERPT FROM TOP SECRET MEETING IN THE PENTAGON, GENERAL OF THE ARMIES LOEFSTEDTER PRESIDING: “To summarize, a key utility, the X Plant, has been almost totally destroyed in the Daylon hysteria. We believe that the riot was fomented by enemies of this nation for the express purpose of destroying the plant. The report of the Committee on the Establishment of Alternate Facilities will be ready at next month’s meeting at which time decisions can be made and contracting officers appointed. As the finished products in storage at the X Plant were also destroyed by fire, our situation is grave. Head of Field Service will immediately suspend all tests at the Proving Ground and assembled items in the hands of troops will be strictly rationed.”