John D MacDonald

Trojan Horse Laugh

I

DIVERT YOUR PSYCHE ADJUST YOUR ID JOIN THE CROWD AND GROOVE YOURSELF, KID.

“Like honey on a slow fire,” Joe Morgan said in a mildly nauseated tone. “Where’ll earth they get babes with those voices?”

Sadie Barnum, beside him on the front seat of Joe’s vast and asthmatic monster of an automobile, grinned in the darkness, crooned low in a throat, singing an almost perfect imitation of the radio commercial. “...and groove yourself, kid.”

“Oh, no!” said Joe. “No!”

The car was in the park above the city, nuzzling the stone wait cheek and jowl with the newer and shinier models on either side. The commercial had originally come from the radio in the car on their left.

Below them, the lights of the city of Daylon made it a very nice looking night indeed.

“You could turn my overpowering love to hate, Barnum,” Joe said. “Let us get back to what we came for.” He reached for her.

Sadie, her jaw set, fended him off deftly. She had turned so that the dim light touched her face. It was a small, alert, vital face, some of the force of it stolen by eyes that were big and sea-gray and an invitation to drown quietly.

“Now that the subject has been brought up, Joseph,” she said firmly, “we will dwell on it apace.”

Joe skimped grimly behind the wheel. He was a longheaded citizen, a crisp black crew-cut peppered with premature gray, a limp and lazy body which he threw into chairs in the manner of someone tossing a wet towel, which body, during war years, he had tossed out of various and sundry aircraft.

“Go dwell,” he said.

She held up a small hand, counting firmly on her fingers. “One — Daylon is a test city for Happiness, Incorporated. Thus the price is reasonable. Two — it doesn’t hurt a bit. Marg told me that. Three — you are a moody cuss and I expect to marry you the next time you ask me and you’re going to be rugged to live with unless we get adjusted.” Her voice began to quaver. “Besides, I think you’re just being... oh, stuffy and narrow-minded about the whole thing.”

Joe sighed. He had heard it before. And always before he had managed to change the subject before he was pinned down. But something in Sadie’s tone made him realize that this time it wasn’t going to be quite as simple.

He collected his forces, turned in the seat, took her small hands in his and said: “Honey, maybe you have the idea that Joseph Morgan, reporter for the News, likes to think of himself as a rugged individualist. Maybe you think it’s a pose with me. Look, Barnum, I’m Joe Morgan and I’m the guy you happen to love. At least I think you do. I’m not a conformist and it isn’t a pose. I don’t run around in the same mad little circles as other people because I’m not sold on the idea that what they’re after is a good thing.”

In a small voice she said: “But they’re after happiness, and security, and a home, and kids. Is that bad?”

“By itself, no. But what happens to their heads? Nobody talks any more. Nobody thinks. All those things are fine if you can get them without losing intellectual self-respect. Why do you think I drive this crate instead of a new one? Just because I won’t play pally-cake with the people I’m supposed to play patty-cake with. When I want to be amused, I don’t have to go to the movies or turn on the TV or go see a floor show. I’m the unmechanized man, baby. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s no pose.”

“But Joe, darling what’s that got to do with going and taking the shots?”

“Everything, I don’t want any needles stuck in me to make me joyous. I don’t want my emotional cycle analyzed and adjusted to match everybody else’s cycle. I want to be my own man, all the way.”

“You don’t let that attitude creep into the feature stories you’ve been writing about Happiness, Incorporated.”

“Because I’m a conscientious hack, baby. I make the little words do what I want them to do.”

“But, Joe—”

His tone softened. He said; “Sadie, if we both went and got adjusted, we’d never know how much of our happiness together was due to a gent with a needle and a mess of charts, and how much was due to Sadie and Joe. Let’s make our own music, without outside help.”

She came into his arms, her lips close to his car. “That’s the first argument that’s made any sense, Joseph,” she said.

In a very few moments all thoughts of Happiness, Incorporated fled from the minds of Joe and Sadie. But, even as they were fleeing, Joe thought, a trifle darkly, of Dr. August Lewsto and the field crew he had brought to Day Ion. There was something odd about Lewsto, vaguely unsavory, vaguely disquieting.

There was a great deal of money behind Happiness, Incorporated. They had arrived three months before and it was a newsworthy item that Daylon had been selected as the test city.

Joe Morgan had been assigned the task of gathering the data for the first story. Lewsto had received him in the hotel suite with all courtesy, Lewsto was a gaunt man in his early fifties with hollow eyes, thin, nervous hands and a habit of smiling broadly at nothing at all.

“Of course, of course. Do sit down, Mr.—”

“Morgan. Of the News. Maybe you can give me the dope on this happiness you expect to peddle. It sounds like a tough thing to do.”

Lewsto smiled broadly. “Not at all, Mr. Morgan. Our procedure has been tested and approved by the foremost medical associations. It is a bit difficult to explain it to the layman.”

“You can try me, Doc.”

“Everyone, Mr. Morgan, has an emotional cycle. The period between the peaks varies with the individual, as does the degree of inclination and declination. Call this cycle the emotional rhythm of the individual. This chart shows you the emotional cycles of each individual in a family of four. Note how the mother’s cycle is of ten days’ duration, a very short cycle, and also note how the peak in each case is so high as to be almost psychotic. In the depths of depression she is often close to suicidal. A very difficult home life for the family.”

“I imagine.”

“This basic life rhythm is the product, Mr. Morgan, of the secretions of the glands and variations in the intensity of the electrical- impulses within the brain itself. Now look at this chart. This shows the same family after adjustment. We have not eliminated the cycle. We have flattened the woman’s cycle, made the man’s a bit more intense, and adjusted the cycles of the two children. Now this family can plan ahead. They know that during each thirty-day period they will feel increasingly better for twenty days. Then there will be five days of warm joy, and a five day decline, not too abrupt, to the starting point. They will feel good together, mildly depressed at the same time. They can plan holidays accordingly and they can always judge the mood of the other members of the family by their own mood.”

“I suppose you have to get the glands and the electricity in line, eh?”

“Quite right. We chart the cycle of each person by a method which, I am afraid, must be kept secret. Then, for each individual, we prepare an injection designed to stimulate certain endocrinological manifestations, and suppress others. After thirty days a booster shot is necessary.”

“How big a staff do you have?”

“I brought forty persons with me. More will be employed locally. Certain equipment is being shipped to me and I am negotiating to rent a building on Caroline Street.”

“You are going to advertise?”

“Oh, certainly! Radio, sky writing, posters, newspaper ads, direct mail and a team of industrial salesmen.”

“What do you mean by industrial salesmen?”

“Take Company X. It employs three hundred men. A round dozen are chronic complainers and troublemakers. Others have bad days when their work is poor. Morale is spotty. If one hundred percent of the employees are adjusted, the personnel director will know what the plant morale will be at any time. It will thus be possible to plan ahead and set production schedules accordingly. Labor difficulties are minimized and profit goes up.”

“Sounds like Nirvana,” Joe Morgan said dryly. “What does paradise cost?”

“Ten dollars for the individual. Right dollars per person for industrial contracts. Frankly, Mr. Morgan, that is less than our costs, though I do not wish you to print that information.”

At that moment there was a knock at the door. Dr. Lewsto went to the door, brought in a very tall, very grave young woman who, in spite of her severe dress, her air of dignity, seemed to walk to the haunting beat of a half-heard chant.

“Mr. Morgan, this is Miss Pardette, our statistician.”

Her handshake was surprisingly firm. Dr. Lewsto continued, “Miss Pardette has been in Daylon for the past month with her assistants, compiling statistics on industrial production, retail sales and similar matters. She will compile new figures as our work progresses.” Lewsto’s voice deepened and he took on a lecture platform manner. “It is our aim to show, with Daylon as our test city, that the American city can, through Happiness, Incorporated, be made a healthier, happier and more profitable place in which to live.”

Joe Morgan gravely clapped his hands. Both Miss Pardette and Dr. Lewsto stared at him without friendliness.

Dr. Lewsto said: “I’m afraid, Mr. Morgan, that I detect a rather childish sort of skepticism in your manner. You should not be blind to progress.”

“How could you say such a thing, Doc?” Joe asked blandly. “I’m impressed. Really impressed. Every red-blooded American wants happiness. And you’re the man to see that he gets it.”

Lewsto Said, visibly molting, “Ah... yes. Yes, of course. Forgive me, Mr. Morgan.”

But Joe felt the cold eye of Miss Pardette on him.

He said quickly, “Am I to assume, Dr. Lewsto, that you will give every one of your patients the same basic emotional cycle?”

“Yes. That is the key to the whole picture. Instead of a tangled maze of cycles, everyone we treat will have exactly the same cycle, co-ordinated with everyone else.”

II

WHERE’D YOU GET THAT EMOTIONAL BINGE? IT’S AS OUT OF STYLE AS A RUSTY HINGE. WIPE THAT FROWN OFF YOUR SULKY BROW — WITH A TEN DOLLAR BILL GET ADJUSTED NOW!

Main Street. It just happens to be Daylon. It could be anybody’s main street. Warm May sun, sweating cops implementing the street lights at the busiest corners. A rash of panel delivery trucks, housewives cruising looking for a place wide enough in which to park, music blaring from a radio store.

Three blocks from the very center of the city another cop has been detailed to keep the line orderly in front of number thirty-four, Caroline Street. It is a small budding, and across the front of it is a huge sign — “HAPPINESS, INCORPORATED”.

The line moves slowly toward the doorway. Inside, it is rapidly and efficiently split into the appropriate groups. Those who are arriving for the first time pay at the desk on the right, receive their number. There are a hundred thousand people in Daylon. The new numbers being issued are in the eleven thousand series.

Those whose cycles have been charted, are shunted up the stairs to where a small vial awaits, bearing their number. A smaller group files toward the back of the building for the essential booster shots.

A plump little man sulks in line, herded along by his wife who looks oddly like a clipper ship under a full head of sail.

She says, “And you listen to me, Henry. After nineteen years of put-ting up with your childish moods this is one time when you are going to—”

Her voice goes on and on. Henry pouts and moves slowly with the crowd. He tells himself that no shot in the arm is going to make his life any more enjoyable. Not with the free-wheeling virago he has endured for these many years.

The policeman on the beat is sweating but he smiles fondly at the line. Fastened to the lapel of his uniform is a tiny bronze button with an interlocked II and I. Happiness, Incorporated. The bronze button is issued with the booster shot.

Back to the main drag. A diaper delivery truck tangles fenders with a bread truck. Both drivers are at fault. They climb out, and, through force of habit, walk stiff-legged toward each other, one eye on the damage. They both wear the little bronze button. They smile at each other.

“No harm done, I guess. Anyway, not much.”

“Same here. Hey, you’re one of the happiness boys, too.”

“Yeah, I got herded into it by the wife.”

“Me too, and I’m not sorry. Gives everything a glow, sort of.”

They stand and measure each other. The cycle is on the upswing. Each day is better than the last. The peak is approaching. It is but three days away.

“Look, let’s roll these heaps around the corner and grab a quick beer?”

Main Street in May. A small, ruffian child, pressed too closely in a department store, unleashes a boot that bounces smartly off the shin of an elderly matron.

The matron winces, smiles placidly at the child’s mother, limps away.

The mother grabs the infant by the ear. “You’re lucky she was one of the adjusted ones, Homer. I’m going to take you home and belt you a few, and then I’m going to take you and your father down and get both of you adjusted.”

Main Street with a small difference. People smile warmly at strangers. There is a hint of laughter in the air, a hint of expectancy. The little bronze buttons catch the sun. The unadjusted stare bleakly at the smiles, at the little buttons, and wonder what has happened to everybody. They begin to feel as though they were left out of something.

Joe Morgan walks dourly along the street, rigidly suppressing an urge to glare at every smile.

A man hurrying out of a doorway runs solidly into him. Joe, caught off balance, sits down smartly. He is hauled to his feet, brushed off. His hand is pumped up and down by the stranger,

“Whyn’t yah look where you’re running?” Joe asks.

“Fella, I’m sorry. I was just plain clumsy. Say, can I buy you a drink? Or can I take you anywhere? My car’s right around the corner.”

Joe squints at the little bronze button, says, “Skip it,” walks down the street.

Joe is unhappy. The managing editor, proudly sporting a little bronze button, has set up a permanent department called, “The Progress of Happiness,” and he has assigned Joe Morgan to run it. Joe is out tracking down progress.

He stands across the street and glares at the long line waiting to be processed. He is torn by doubts, wonders vaguely whether he ought to join the line and be adjusted. But he cannot permit such a violation of his right of privacy.

He goes into the offices assigned to Miss Pardette.

Miss Pardette was busy. Joe Morgan sat near her desk, cocked his head to one side and listened carefully to the music she seemed to carry around with her. He couldn’t help thinking of Alice Pardette as wasted talent. All she would have to do in any floor show would be to walk across the floor. In the proper costume she would make strong men clutch the tablecloth and signal for another drink. The vitality of her seemed to press against the dark suit she wore like a torrential river held taut by a new dam.

At last she looked up. Joe said: “What’s new on delirium today, kitten?”

“I find your attitude offensive,” she said. The words were prim and proper. The tone was husky gold, a warm wrapping for hidden caress.

Joe smiled brightly. “I find happiness offensive. So we’re even. What can I put in the paper, Mona Lisa?”

She shuffled the papers on her desk. “I have just compiled a report on the first month of operation of the Quinby Candy Company since the last of their employees received the booster shot. You will have to clear this report with Mr. Quinby before publishing it. He reports a six point three percent drop in absenteeism, a two percent drop in pilferage, an eleven percent drop in tardiness. Total production was up eight point eight percent over the preceding month, with a drop in rejections and spoilage and consequent increase in estimated net profit from the yearly average of four point six percent to five point three percent. The fee to adjust his workers was two thousand three hundred four dollars. It is Mr. Quinby’s estimate that he recovered this initial cost in the first two weeks of operation.”

“How nice for him,” Joe said, glancing at the figures he had scribbled in his notebook. He said: “How did a dish like you get into this racket?”

“Dr. Lewsto employed me.”

“I mean in the statistics game.”

She gave him a long, steady look. “Mr. Morgan, I have found that figures are one of the few things in life you can depend upon.”

“I thought you could depend on the kind of happiness that you people sell.” He looked at the bronze button she wore.

She followed the direction of his glance, looked down at the button. She said: “I’m afraid I’m not entitled to wear this. Dr. Lewsto insisted that it would be better for morale for me to wear it. But a statistician must maintain a rigidly objective attitude. To become adjusted might prejudice that altitude.”

“How about Lewsto? He wears one.”

“It is the same thing with him. The backers felt that, as administrator, he should refrain from becoming adjusted.”

“Just like the restaurant owner who goes out to lunch?”

He saw her first smile. It rang like hidden silver bells. “Something like that, Mr. Morgan.”

He sighed. “Well, how far are we as of today?”

“New patients are in the eleven thousand series. Fifty-nine hundred totally adjusted.”

“Where are those fifty-nine hundred on the chart?”

She stood up, took a pointer and touched it to the big chart on the wall behind her. “Right hero. In three days they will be at the peak. They will remain at the peak for five days, then five days of regression before they begin the climb back up again.”

Joe said softly: “It gives me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. AU those people being pushed through an emotional cycle like cattle being herded down the runways in Chicago.”

“You’d change your attitude if you would submit to adjustment.”

Joe stood up and stretched. “Exactly what I’m afraid of, friend. Morgan, the Unadjusted. That’s me.”

At the door he turned and waved, at her. But she was studying reports and she did not look up.

III

FROM GIMMY RIKER’S COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK STANDARD TRIBUNE: “The bays with the beards couldn’t find anything wrong with one Doc Lewsto and his gland hand, so, financed by mysterious backers. Doc Lewsto is turning the tanktown of Daylon into a carnival of joy. They say that things are so gay over there lately that the Federal Narcotics people are watching it. If the national debt is getting you down, maybe you ought to run over and let the good doctor give you the needle?”

FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE HOTEL-KEEPERS’ GUIDE FOR JUNE: “If this sale of Happiness is extended on a country-wide basis, it is evident from reports we have received from our Daylon members, that managers of bars, clubs and hotels will have to make alterations in basic policy. The money coming into the till closely follows the emotional cycle set up by Dr. August Lewsto to such a degree that during the peak of the curve our members were unable to meet the demand, whereas, at the bottom of the curve, business felt off to nothing. However, the overall picture on a monthly basis showed a fifteen to eighteen percent improvement.”

FROM THE MINUTES OF A SECRET MEETING IN THE PENTAGON BUILDING, EXCERPT FROM THE SUMMARY BY LIEUTENANT GENERAL GRADERSBY: “Thus, gentlemen, we can conclude that this sociological experiment in Daylon constitutes no threat to our essential defense production at the X plant four miles distant. In fact, production has improved as has the quality of the end product. It is agreed that it is only coincidence that this experiment by Happiness, Incorporated was set up in the nearest city to X plant, the only current manufacturer of that item so essential to our military strength. However, it is recommended that a committee be formed to consider the question of setting up an alternate facility and that all necessary steps be taken to implement and facilitate the formation of such a committee and that the workings of this committee be facilitated by a further implementation of—”

DECODED EXCERPT FROM AN INNOCENT-APPEARING PERSONAL LETTER SENT TO DR. AUGUST LEWSTO: “Units B, C, D and E have arrived at the key cities originally indicated. Your reports excellent, providing basis for immediate industrial contracts, one of which already signed involving five thousand workers in basic industry with subcontract for propulsion units. Forward subsequent reports of progress directly to men in charge of indicated units, detailing to each of them five trained technicians from your staff. Report in usual way when booster shot record reaches fifty percent total population Daylon.”

Joe Morgan, before going up to the news room, went into the room off the lobby of the News Building where Sadie Barnum and two other girls handled many details including the taking of classified advertising.

He didn’t see Sadie, Julie, the redhead, winked over the shoulder of a man laboriously writing out an ad. Joe leaned against the wall until the man had paid and gone.

“Where‘s my gal?” Joe asked.

“Which one. I’m here, Joey.”

“You’re for Thursdays. I want today’s gal, the ineffable, Miss Barnum?”

“She hit Glance for an extra hour tacked onto her lunch hour. Love must wait.”

Joe turned toward the door. “Tell her to buzz me when she gets in.”

He went up winked at the city editor, walked down to his desk, rolled a sheet of paper into the machine and stared glumly at it. Small warning bells seemed to be ringing in the back of his mind. Lie was all set to write the story of the second big period of depression, of what happened to Daylon when twenty-two thousand of the adjusted had a simultaneous slump, but he couldn’t get his mind off Sadie. She had been a bit difficult about his refusal to be adjusted the night before.

On a hunch he hurried out, climbed into his asthmatic car and roared to Caroline Street. He parked in the bus stop, went down the line looking for Sadie. When he did not see her, he began to breathe more slowly. He had a hunch that it would somehow turn out to be a very bad thing if Sadie were inoculated.

He was glad that he had been wrong. He glanced back at his car, saw the cop writing out a ticket. As he turned to hurry back, he saw Sadie come out the exit door of Happiness, Incorporated.

Muttering, he ran to her, look hold of her arm, spinning her around.

“Hey, my vaccination!” she said, looking up at him with a wide smile.

“You little dope!” he said. “You feather-headed little female cretin! What on earth possessed you to join this rat race.”

She didn’t seem disturbed. “Somebody had to take the first step, Joseph, and it didn’t look as though you would. So I had to. Now you’ll do it too, won’t you, darlin’?”

He saw that her smile was brave, but that there were tears behind it. “No,” he said flatly. “I stay like I am. I suppose you sneaked off and had your cycle charted last week?”

She nodded. “But, Joe, there isn’t any harm in it! It’s been so wonderful for everybody. Please, Joe.”

He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Oh, wonderful! It’s been ducky! You should know that—” He stopped suddenly as some of the information in the back of his mind assumed new meaning, new ominous meaning. He turned on his heel and walked away from her. She called out to him but he didn’t stop. He climbed into his car, drove through the grim streets of unsmiling people.

Score for Daylon. May — 5,900. June — 14,100. July — 22,000. August — 31,000. September — 50,200.

Over half the population of the city.

The period of intense joy in September has been a time of dancing in the street, of song, of an incredible gaiety almost too frantic to be endured.

And the slump touched the bitter depths of despair.

Slowly the city climbs back up into the sunlight. The slumped shoulders begin to straighten and the expressions of bleak apathy lighten once more. The road leads up into the sunlight.

And then the building is as it was before. The big sign, “HAPPINESS, INCORPORATED” has been taken down. People gather in the street and stare moodily at it. They are the ones who were going to be adjusted “tomorrow”.

They have read the article in the paper by Dr. Lewsto. “I wish to thank the citizens of Daylon who have co-operated so splendidly in helping us advance the frontiers of human knowledge in the realm of the emotions. It is with more than a trace of sadness that I and my staff leave Daylon to set up a similar project in another great American city. But we leave, armed with the statistics we have acquired here, confident in the knowledge that, through our efforts, more than half of you have at last attained that ultimate shining goal of mankind — HAPPINESS!”

Yes, the building is empty and the line has ceased to worm slowly toward the open doors. Two technicians remain in a hotel suite to administer the booster shots yet remaining to be given.

Joe Morgan spends five days with Sadie, watching her sink lower and lower into despondency, trying vainly to cheer her, infected himself by her apathy, learning to think of her as a stranger.

He walks into the office where she works. She gives him a tremulous smile. She has a fragile look, a convalescent look.

“Honey,” he said, “it’s nice to see that you can smile.”

“But it’s worth it, Joe. Believe me. Look what I have ahead of me. Twenty-five days without a blue moment, without a sad thought, without a bit of worry.”

“Sure, sure,” he said, his voice rough. “It’s lovely.”

She said: “Joe, I’ve been thinking. There’s no point to out going on together. I want somebody I can laugh with, be gay with for the days ahead.”

He was amazed at the deep sense of relief inside of him. He pretended hurt. He said: “If that’s the way you feel about it—”

“I’m awfully sorry, Joe. But I don’t want the slightest cloud on my happiness now that I’ve got it. Not the tiniest cloud. You do see, don’t you?”

“It hasn’t been the same since this whole thing came to town, this grin circus, has it?”

“Not really, Joe. Before I was... well, I was just walking in the shadows. Now I’m out in the sun, Joe. Now I know how to be happy.”

Her hand was small and warm in his. “Be good, kid,” he said softly.

He went up to his desk. The city editor had blue-penciled a huge X across the copy Joe had turned in. Joe snatched the sheet, went up to him, “Look, Johnson, this is news. Understand? En ee doubleyou ess. What cooks?”

Johnson touched his fingertips lightly to the bronze button in his lapel, smiled faintly. “I don’t think it would be good for the city. Nice job and all that, Morgan. But it’s against policy.”

“Whose policy?”

“The managing editor’s. I showed it to him.”

Joe said firmly and slowly, with emphasis on each word: “Either it goes in the paper or Morgan goes out the door.”

“There’s the door, Morgan.”

Joe went back to his room, rage in his heart. He uncovered his own typewriter, rewrote his copy in dispatch style, made five carbons, addressed the envelope and sent them out special delivery.

And when that was done, in the late afternoon, he found a small bar with bar stools, took a corner seat, his shoulder against the wall, began treating himself to respectable jolts of rye.

No girl, no job — and a fear in the back of his mind so vast and so shadowy as to make his skin crawl whenever he skirted the edge of it.

Business was poor in. the bar. He remembered happier, more normal times, when every day at five there was a respectable gathering of the quick-one-and-home-to-dinner group.

A sleepy bartender wearing a myopic smile lazily polished the glasses and sighed ponderously from time to time. He moved only when Joe raised his finger as a signal for another.

The bar had achieved an aching surrealistic quality and Joe’s lips were numb when she slid up onto the stool beside him.

He focused on her gravely. “I thought you left town with the rest of the happy boys,” he said.

Alice Pardette said: “I was walking by.” She stared at his shotglass. “Would those help me?”

“What’ve you got?”

“The horrors, Mr. Morgan.”

“The name is Joe and if a few of these won’t help, nothing; will. Why are you still in town?”

As the bartender poured the two shots she said: “When I finished the statistical job, Dr. Lewsto said I could go along with them in an administrative capacity.”

“And why didn’t you?”

The professional look had begun to wear off Alice Pardette. Joe noticed that her dark eyebrows inscribed two very lovely arcs. He noticed a hollowness at her temples and wondered why this particular and illusive little element of allure had thus far escaped him. He wanted to plant a very gentle kiss on the nearest temple.

“Joe, they wanted to adjust me.”

“I hear it’s very nice. Makes you happy, you know.”

“Joe, maybe I’m afraid of that kind of happiness.” She finished her shot, gasped, coughed, looked at him with dark brimming eyes. “Hey,” she said, “you didn’t go and get—”

“Not Morgan. No ma’am. Uh uh. All that happened to me is that my girl got herself adjusted and gave me up for the duration. And today I was tired because I had an article they wouldn’t print. Oh, I’ve been adjusted, but not with a needle.”

She giggled. “Hey, these little things are warm when you get them down. Gimme another. What was the article about, Joe?”

“Suicides,” he said solemnly. “People gunning holes ill their heads and leaping out windows and hanging themselves to the high hook in the closet wearing their neckties the wrong way.”

“Don’t they always do that?”

“In the five days of depression, baby, fourteen of them joined their ancestors. That is more in five days than this old town has seen in the last seventeen months.”

He watched the statistical mind take over. “Hm-m-m,” she said.

“And ‘hm-m-m’ again,” Joe said. “As far as ethical responsibility is concerned, who knocked ’em off? Answer me that.”

“Ole Doc Lewsto, natch.”

“Please don’t use that expression, Pard. And who helped ole Doc by compiling all those pretty figures? Who hut our girl, Alice? Wanna stand trial, kitten?”

She looked at him for long seconds. “Joe Morgan, you better buy me another drink.”

He said: “I mailed out releases to a batch of syndicates. Maybe somebody’ll print the stuff I dug up.”

IV

FROM DELANCEY BOOKER’S COLUMN IN THE WASHINGTON MORNING SENTINEL: Happiness, Incorporated, is expanding their operations at an amazing speed. It is only a week since their Washington Agency was established and already it is reported that over seven thousand of our fellow citizens have reported to have profiles made of their emotional cycles. As usual with every move intended to approve the lot of the common mail, several Congressmen who represent the worst elements of isolationism and conservatism are attempting to jam through a bill designed to ham-string Happiness, Incorporated. These gentlemen who look at life through a perpetual peashooter are trying to stir up public alarm on the basis that the procedures used by Happiness, incorporated, have not been properly tested. They will find the going difficult, however, because, though they do not know it, some of their enemies in Congress have already received the initial inoculation. Your columnist saw them there while having his own cycle plotted.

EXCERPT FROM THE INFORMAL TALK GIVEN TO ALL EXECUTIVES OF THE HEATON STEEL COMPANY BY THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD: “Using our Daylon Plant as a test, it has been conclusively proven that Happiness, Incorporated, is the answer to industrial unrest, high taxes and dwindling profit Consequently you will be glad to know that, starting tomorrow morning, we have made special arrangements with Happiness, Incorporated, to set up an inoculation center in every one of our fourteen plants. Within forty days the entire hundred and sixteen thousand employees of Heaton Steel will be happy and adjusted. This procedure will be optional for executives. Any man who refuses to be so treated will please rise.”

NOTE ON BULLETIN BOARD AT PAKINSON FIELD, HEADQUARTERS OF THE 28th BOMBARDMENT GROUP: “All personnel is advised that, beginning tomorrow, 18 Sept., Bldg. 83 will be set aside for civilian employees of Happiness Incorporated. Any military personnel desirous of undergoing adjustment can obtain, for a special price of five dollars, a card entitling him or her to receive a complete emotional adjustment Styled to fit the Optimum curve. In. this matter you will notice that the Air Corps has once again moved with greater rapidity than either the Army or the Navy — 2nd Lt. Albert Anderson Daley, Post Exchange Officer.”

MEMO TO ALL MEMBER STATIONS, INTERCOAST BROADCASTING COMPANY: In the spot commercials previously contracted for, kindly revise lyric to read as follows, utilizing local talent until new disks can be cut:

Divert your psyche

Repair your Id

Join the crowd and

Adjust yourself kid.

Remainder to be, “Go to your nearest adjustment station set up in your community by Happiness, Incorporated. See those happy smiles? Do not wait... et cetera... et cetera... et cetera.

FROM THE SCRIPT OF THE CAROLAX PROGRAM, FEATURING BUNNY JUKES AND HIS GANG:

Bunny:...yeah, and fellas, I went in and they fastened those gimmicks on my head and they started plotting my cycle.

Others: And what happened, Bunny?

Bunny: While they were working this dolly walked through the office and boy, do I mean dolly! My tired old eyes glazed when she gave me that Carolax smile, what I mean.

Stooge: And what then? (eagerly)

Bunny: The doc looks down at the drum where the pen is drawing my cycle and he says, ‘Mr. Jukes, you are the first patient in the history of Happiness, Incorporated, whose cycle forms the word — WOW!

Audience: Laughter.

Daylon in transition. For twenty days the spiral has been upward. Tomorrow it will reach a peak. There is laughter in the streets and people sing.

The city has a new motto. The Original Home of Happiness. The city is proud of being the first one selected.

Everyone walks about with a look of secret glee, as though barely able to contain themselves with the thought of the epic joy that the morrow will bring.

And those that have not been adjusted find that they, too, are caught up in the holiday spirit, in the air of impending revel. Strangers grin at each other and whole buses, homeward bound from work, ring with song as everyone joins in. Old songs. “Let a Smile be Your Umbrella”, “Singing in the Rain”, “Smiles”, “Smile the While”.

Joe Morgan and Alice Pardette have grown very close in the past twenty days. To him it is a new relationship — a woman who can think as frankly and honestly as any man, who has about her none of the usual feminine deviousness, though physically she is so completely feminine as to make his pulse pound.

And Alice, too, finds something in Joe she has never before experienced. A man willing to take her at face value, a man who does not try to force their relationship into channels of undesired intimacies, a man who listens to what she says and who will argue, person to person, rather than man to woman.

Dusk is over the city and the buzzing neon lights up the overcast in hue of pink-orange. The old car is parked where often he parked with Sadie Barnum. H wonders what Sadie is doing. They look out over the city and they are not at case.

“Joe,” she said suddenly, “don’t you feel it when you’re down there with them?”

“You mean feel as though I want to go around grinning like an idiot, too? Yes, and it scares me, somehow. I knew a few other guys who didn’t want to have anything to do with being adjusted. Now they’re as bad as the ones who had the shots. That good cheer is like a big fuzzy cloud hanging over the city.”

“And it’s worse than last time, isn’t it, Joe?” she asked softly.

He nodded. “Worse in a funny way. It’s sort of like the city was a big machine and now the governor is broken and it’s moving too fast. It’s creaking its way up and up and up to where maybe it’ll spin apart.”

She said: “Or like a boat that was going over gentle regular waves and now the waves are getting bigger and bigger.”

He turned and grinned at her. “You know, we can scare each other into a tizzy.”

Alice didn’t respond to his grin. She said in a remote voice: “Tomorrow is going to be... odd. I feel it. Joe, let’s stay together tomorrow. Please.”

She rested her hand on his wrist.

Suddenly she was in his arms. For the first time.

Thirty seconds later Joe said unsteadily, “For a statistician you—”

“I guess you’d better make a joke of it, Joe. I guess maybe it’s the only thing you can do, Joe. I guess... it wasn’t ever this way before.”

Like a slow rocket rising for twenty days, bursting into a bright banner of flame on the twenty-first day.

Joe walked out of his apartment into the street, turned and stared incredulously at an elderly man who, laughing so hard that he wept, held himself up by clinging to a lamp-post. The impossible laughter was contagious, even as it frightened. Joe felt laughter stretching his lips, painting itself across his mouth.

At that moment he dodged aside, barely in time. A heavy convertible, a woman with tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks behind the wheel, bounced up over the curb. The old gentleman, still laughing, was cradled neatly on the bumper, was carried over and crushed against the gray stone front of the apartment building.

Blood ran in a heavy slow current down the slope of the sidewalk toward the gutter. The crowd gathered quickly. For just a fleeting second they wore solemn and then someone giggled and they were off. They howled with laughter and pounded each other’s shoulders and staggered in their laughter so that the blood was tracked in wavered lines back and forth.

Joe fought free of them, and, even with the horror in his mind, he walked rapidly down the street, his lips pulled back in a wide grin. Behind him he could hear the woman, between great shouts of laughter explaining, “I... I got laughing and the car... it came over here... and he was standing there and he... and he—” She couldn’t go on and her voice was drowned by the singing and laughing around her.

They were singing, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

The counterman where Joe usually had breakfast had just finished printing a large crude sign. “Everything on the house. What will you have?”

The girl next to Joe yelped and grabbed his arm, laughed into his face and said: “Tell’m I want gin.”

The man beyond the girl, holding his belly, wavered to the door, whooping with laughter. He kicked the front window out of the nearby liquor store, came back with the gin.

The girl ripped the lop off, lifted the bottle and drank heavily. More bottles were passed around. The liquor store man came in with an armful.

As Joe tried vainly to order his eggs, the girl, gin heavy on her breath, ran warm fingers up the back of Joe’s neck and, breathing rapidly, said: “Honeylamb, I don’t know who you are, but you’re cute as a hug. Who can work on a happy day like this? Come on along with me, huh?”

Joe, still feeling that infuriating smile on his lips, scared al her. She had a very respectable look about her, and she was well-dressed.

Joe meant to say, “No thanks.” He heard himself saying eagerly, “Sure. That sounds fine.”

They went arm in arm along the street and she stopped every ten paces to take another swig out of the bottle. Two blocks further she gave a little sigh, slipped down onto the sidewalk, rolled over onto her back and passed out. She had a warm smile on her lips.

Joe stood over her, laughing emptily, until a whole crowd of people, arm in arm, swept down on him, pushing him along with them. He saw a heavy heel tear open the mouth of the girl on the sidewalk, but Joe couldn’t stop laughing.

He went down Main Street and it was a delirium of laughter and song and the crash and tinkle of plate glass, the crunch of automobile accidents.

There was an enormous scream of laughter, getting closer every moment, and a large woman fell from a great height onto the sidewalk, bursting like a ripe fruit. Joe grew dizzy with laughter. The crowd who had caught him up passed by and Joe Morgan loaned against a building, tears running down his face, his belly cramped and sore from the laughter, but still horror held lightly to his mind with cold fingers.

Through brimming eyes ho saw the street turn into a scone of wild, bacchanalian revel where people without fear, without shame, without modesty, with nothing left but lust and laughter, cavorted, more than half mad with the excesses of their glee.

Slowly he made his way to the News Building. In the lobby he saw Sadie Barnum with a stranger. He saw how eager her lips were and she turned glazed eyes toward Joe and laughed and turned back to the man.

And then he stumbled out, bumping into an old man he had seen in the bank. The old man, with an endless dry chuckle, walked slowly wearing a postman’s mailbag. The bag was crammed full of bills of all denominations. He cackled into Joe’s face, stuffed a handful of bills into Joe’s side pocket, went on down the street, throwing handfuls into the air. The wind whipped them about and they landed on the sidewalk where they wore trampled by people who had no inclination to pick them up.

A fat grinning man sat in the window of the jewelry store, cross-legged, throwing rings out onto the sidewalk through the shattered window.

“Happy New Year!” he yelled as Joe went by.

And then a woman had come from somewhere and she clung to Joe’s neck with moist hands and her eyes were wide and glassy.

Her weight knocked Joe down. He got to his feet and. she lay there and laughed up at him. Joe looked across the street to where a burly man strode along dragging another woman by the wrist. A small cold portion of Joe’s mind told him, “There is Alice. That is Alice. You have to do something.”

He ran between the spasms of helpless laughter and at last he spun the big man around. He wanted to hit him, but instead he collapsed against him and they both howled with insane glee.

Alice sat on the sidewalk, the tears dripping off her chin, her mouth spread in a fantastic smile. He picked her up, held her tightly, staggered off with her. She kept trying to kiss him.

He knew that he had to get her out of there, and soon.

Twice she was taken away from him by men who roared with joy and twice he staggered back, got hold of her again.

A crowd of men were going down the street, tipping over every car, having the time of their lives. A grinning cop watched them. One of the men took out a gun, pointed it at the cop and emptied it. The cop sat down on the street and laughed and hugged his perforated belly until he died.

Two men stood playing Russian Roulette. They passed the gun back and forth and each man spun the chamber before sucking on the barrel, pulling the trigger.

As Joe staggered by, clutching Alice, the gun went off, spattering them both with tiny flecks of brain tissue from the exploded skull. The man lurched into them, yelled, “Wanna play? Come-on, play with me!”

“Play his game, Joe,” Alice squealed.

But Joe, spurred by his hidden store of horror, pulled her along, got her to the car. He shoved her in, climbed behind the wheel, got the motor started.

In the first block a woman tried to ram him. He slammed on the brakes. She went across his bows, smashed two people on the sidewalk and crashed through the main window of a supermarket.

Joe, with Alice gasping helplessly beside him, went three blocks north, turned onto Wilson Avenue and headed out of town. His eyes streamed so that he could barely see.

Ten miles from Daylon he turned up a dirt road, parked in a wide shallow ditch, pulled Alice out of the car, hauled her up across a sloping field to where a wide grassy bank caught the morning sunshine.

They lay side by side and the gasps of laughter came with less and less frequency. Alice, her eyes tortured, pulled herself to her feet, went over behind the shelter of a line of brush and he could hear that she was being very ill. In a few moments the reaction hit him. He was ill, too.

They found a brook at the foot of the field and cleaned up. Their clothes were smeared with dots of blood from the city.

Back on the grassy bank she rolled onto her stomach, cradled her head in her arms and cried monotonously while he gently stroked her dark hair.

Finally she got control of herself. She sat up and he gave her a lighted cigarette.

She said: “I’ll never be without the memory of those hours, Joe. Never.”

He thought of the scenes, still vivid in his mind, “Do you think you’re different?”

“Thank God, Joe, that you found file when you did. Thank God that you kept hold of a little bit of sanity! There was a cold objective place down in me and I could see everything around me and I knew the horror of it, but I couldn’t stop joining in.”

“Me, too. My mouth’s sore from laughing. And my sides.”

Because it had to be talked out, because it couldn’t be permitted to stay inside to fester, they told of what they had seen, leaving much unsaid, but nothing misunderstood.

He told her about Sadie Barnum and her eyes were soft with pity.

After a long silence he said: “What can we do?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? I won’t let you go back, Joe.”

“What could I do if I went back? Pick the money off the streets?”

He remembered the old man with the mailbag. He took the crumpled bills out of his pocket. Seven hundreds, three fifties and four ones.

Her fingers were light on his arm. “Joe, we’ve got to let the rest of the country know what happens.”

He shrugged. “They wouldn’t even print my dispatches. Why should they listen to me now?”

“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.”

The fat guard said: “I shouldn’t do this, you know.”

Joe said: “Sure, I know. But we just happened to keep your kid from being burned to death and you want to snake it up to us.”

“Yeah,” the guard said. “You wait in here. I’ll go get her.”

Joe waited five minutes before Alice was brought into the small room. She was wan and colorless, dressed in a gray cotton prison dress. She gave Joe one incredulous look and then ran to him. He felt her thin shoulders shake as he held her tightly.

“Hey, they can’t put you in here!” he said softly, was rewarded by her weak smile. He winked over her shoulder at the guard. “Wait in the hall, junior.”

The guard shrugged, left them alone in the room.

Alice said: “Why are they doing this to us?”

“They’ve got to be sore at somebody, you know. They’ve got to take a smack at something. Only they aren’t taking it at the right people, that’s all. Besides, we’ve got nothing to fret about.”

She regained her old fire. “Just what do you mean, Joe Morgan?”

He grinned. “When does our case come up for trial?”

“November 10th they said,” Alice said, her head cocked on one side.

“And before that we walk out of here during the next little attack of ‘hysteria’.”

“Oh, Joe!” she said. “It isn’t going to happen again! Not again!”

“The way I see it, baby, it’s going to keep right on happening. So get the earmuffs ready.”

“Keys, Joe!” she said in a half whisper.

“Leave that to me.”

Once again the spring is wound taut in Daylon. Once again the joy comes bubbling up, the joy and the anticipation. There is no more mourning for the dead. The streets are festive. The October days are crisp and cool. Many have sudden little twinges of fear, but the fear is forgotten in the heady flood of anticipation of delights to come.

Two dozen cities have passed the fifty percent: mark. Among them are Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, Buffalo, Los Angeles, Houston, Portland, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Atlanta — and ten other big cities. A round three dozen smaller cities are above forty percent.

And then all of the clinics are suddenly closed. Millions are infuriated at missing their chance.

But the clinic personnel all show up in New York City. Mobile units are established and the price of inoculation is cut to fifty cents. New methods speed up the work. The clinics work day and night.

All over the country happiness grows constantly more intense. It can be felt everywhere. Man, for a time, is good to his neighbor and to his wife.

All over the country the vast spring is wound tighter and tighter. At the eleventh hour the original personnel of all the clinics, and they are a surprisingly small number, board a steamship at a Brooklyn dock. Reservations have been made weeks in advance.

On the morning of explosion, the ship is two hundred miles at sea.

And fifty-one percent of the population of Greater New York have been inoculated.

A famed public document speaks of “the pursuit of happiness.”

It has been pursued and it has been at last captured, a silver shining grail, throughout the ages always a misty distance ahead, but now at last, in hand. It is a grail of silver, but it is filled with a surprising bitterness.

On the morning of explosion, every channel of communication, every form of public conveyance, all lines of supply are severed so cleanly that they might never have existed.

An air lines pilot, his plane loaded with a jumbled heap of gasping and spasmed humanity, makes pass after pass at the very tip of the Empire State Building until at last the radio tower rakes off one wing and the plane goes twisting down to the chasm of the street.

On a holly wood sound stage a hysterical cameraman, aiming his lens at the vista of script girls and sound men and actresses and agents takes reel after reel of film which could not have been duplicated had he been transported back to some of the revels of ancient Rome.

In New Mexico screaming technicians shove a convulsed and world-famous scientist into the instrument compartment of a V-2 rocket and project him into a quick death ninety miles above the clouds.

In Houston a technician, bottle firmly clutched in his left hand, opens the valves of lank after tank of gasoline.

He is smiling as the blue-white explosion of flame melts the bottle in a fraction of a second.

When he opened the door to her cell, Alice had a taut, mechanical smile on her lips. He slapped her sharply until she stopped smiling. He carried two guns taken from the helpless guards who rolled on the floor in the extremity of their glee at this ludicrous picture of two prisoners escaping.

He found a big new car with a full tank of gas a block from the jail. Together they loaded it with provisions, with rifles and cartridges, with camping equipment. And, five miles from the city he was forced to stop the car.

It was twenty minutes before he could stop trembling sufficiently to drive. He told her of his plans, and of what he expected and about their destination.

At dusk he drove down to the lake shore, the tall grasses scraping the bottom of the car. There were kerosene lamps in the small camp, a drum of kerosene in the shed back of the kitchen.

The last of the sunset glow was gone from the lake. The birds made a sleepy noise in the pines. The air was sweet and fresh.

While Alice worked in the kitchen, he went out and tried the car radio. He heard nothing but an empty hum. His heart thudded as he found one station. He listened. He heard the dim jungle-sound of laughter, of the sort of laughter that floods the eyes and cramps the stomach and rasps the throat. With a shudder of disgust, Joe turned off the radio.

They finished the meal in odd silence. He pushed his plate away and lit two cigarettes, passed one to her.

“Not exactly cheery, are we?” she said.

“Not with our world laughing itself to death.”

She hunched her shoulders. “To death?”

He nodded. “Lewsto was a phony. He knew what would happen, you know. He had a plan. He was tinder orders.”

“Whose?”

“How should I know? The country is laughing itself to death. They’ll wait, whoever they are. They’ll wait for the full five days of hysteria and the first few days of mass suicide — and then they’ll move in. Maybe there’ll be enough of us left to make an honest little scrap of it.”

“But why, Joe? Why does it work that way?”

“You ever hear of resonance?”

“Like a sound?”

“The word covers more than that, Alice. It covers coffee sloshing out of a cup when you walk with it, or soldiers breaking step crossing a bridge. Daylon and the other cities were fine when everybody had their own pattern. But now all the patterns are on the same groove. Everybody is in step. Everybody adds to everybody else’s gaiety and it builds up and up to a peak that breaks men apart, in their heads. Pure resonance. The same with the depression. Ever hear one of those records with nothing but laughter on them. Why’d you laugh? You couldn’t help it. The laughter picked you up and carried you along. Or did you ever see people crying and you didn’t know the reason and you felt your eyes sting? Same deal.”

“What’s the answer, Joe?”

“Is there any? Is there any answer at all? We had the best ships and the best planes and the best bombs and the biggest guns. But we’re laughing ourselves out of them.”

He stood up abruptly, grabbed his jacket off the hook and went out onto the long porch of the camp overlooking the dark lake. Porch and lake that were a part of his childhood, and now a part of his defeat.

There was only a faint trace of irony left in him. He grieved for his nation and he felt the helpless stir of anger at this thing which had been so skillfully done, so carefully done, so adequately done.

She came out and stood beside him and he put his arm around her waist.

“Don’t leave me, Joe,” she whispered. “Not for a minute.”

His voice hoarse, he took the massive seal ring off his finger, slipped it over hers, saying, “With this ring I thee wed. Fugitives get cheated out of the pageantry, angel.”

She shivered against the night, said; “Dandy proposal. I’m wearing the ring before I can open my mouth to say no.”

“Then give it back.”

“A valuable ring like this! Don’t be silly.”

He laughed softly. She moved away from him. Her face was pale against the darkness. “Please don’t laugh, Joe. Ever. I never want to hear laughter again.”

Her hands were like ice and her lips were tender flame.

VII

FOURTH BULLETIN OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT, NOV. 12: “Remnants of the 11th and 14th Army Corps, fighting without air cover, today bent the left prong of the pincer movement of the two enemy columns converging on the provisional capital at Herkimer, Idaho. In spite of determined resistance, eventual capture of the provisional capital seems imminent. All troops and irregulars isolated by enemy columns will endeavor to make their way through enemy lines to bolster our position. Live off the land. Conserve ammunition. Make each shot mean the death of an invader. All troops and irregulars who did not undergo adjustment under the auspices of the invader’s Trojan Horse, miscalled Happiness, Incorporated, will be careful to stay away from the cities. All commanders will discover which men under their command have been ‘adjusted’ and will mark these men unfit for further duty.”

PAMPHLET AIR-DROPPED BY BOMBERS OF THE INVADER EXPEDITIONARY FORCES: “Americans! Lay down your arms. Further resistance is useless. Your active army is outnumbered five to one and virtually without equipment. You have lost the war. Help to make the peace as easy on you as possible. For each day of ten-tinned resistance your eventual food ration will be cut a certain percentage. Lay down, your arms!”

“Drop it!” Joe Morgan snapped. He held the rifle leveled. The two men in ragged field uniform, swaying with weariness dropped their weapons, a carbine and a submachine gun. They were dirty and unshaven and one of them had a bandage, dark-stained with blued across his left hand.

“Move over to the side!” he ordered. The men obeyed meekly. Alice went down the steps and picked up the weapons, staying well out of the line of fire.

“Who are you?” Joe demanded.

The older of the two said, deep weariness in his voice: “Baker Company, Five oh eight battalion, Eighty-third.” Then he added, with a note of ironic humor, “I think maybe Harry and me are the whole company.”

“You’ve given up, eh? You’re looking for a hole to hide in.”

The younger one took two heavy steps toward the porch. He said: “Put down that pop-gun, junior, and we’ll talk this over. I don’t like what you said.”

“Shut up, Harry,” the older one said. “Mister, yesterday we picked us a nice spot and kept our heads down until they come along with a high-speed motor convoy. They were too close together. We killed the driver in the lead truck and piled up the convoy. We sprayed ’em real nice and got away up the hill. As long as we got a few rounds we’re not through?”

Joe grinned. “Then welcome to the Morgan Irregulars. Come on in. We’ve got food and hot water and some bandages for that hand. How close do you guess they are?”

“Fifteen miles, maybe. But they’re not headed this way. They’re using the main road as a supply line, I think.”

The men came up on the porch. Joe stood his rifle beside the door. The older man said: “What makes you think we won’t bust you one and take your food and take over your nest, mister?”

“Because,” Joe said, “you have a hunch that maybe I can help you be a little more effective. You don’t know what I got up my sleeve. And besides, you’re not the first guys to get here, you know. If you’d made a move toward that rifle, you would have caught a surprise from the brush out there.” He turned and said, “O.K., guys. These two will do.”

By twos and threes about fifteen well-armed men sauntered out of the brush.

America in turmoil. Not a man but who, at some time in his life, had speculated on how the country would behave under the iron heel of an invader. Had the softness of life in this big lush country destroyed the hidden focus of resistance? Where was the heart of the country?

Gaunt and bearded men, with nothing left but fury, rushed the armored columns with home-made bombs of rags and gasoline. The jacketed bullets smashed them down hut always a few got dose enough to throw the bomb and die. And black greasy smoke wound up into the fall sky and the blackened hull of a vehicle was towed off onto the shoulder, sentinel of death, monument to valor.

In the night an absurdly young man wormed on his belly behind the hangars, killed the guard with a knife, crawled into the cockpit of the jet fighter, ripped off into the pink dawn. They climbed after him. He went around in a screaming arc, leveled out twenty feet above the ground, and smashed himself and the alien ship into whining fragments — but he took with him six of the enormous bombers.

A destroyer, the last of the fuel almost gone, cut all lights, drifted like a wraith through the night, drifted with the tide into a vast harbor where the enormous supplies of invasion were being unloaded under the floodlights.

Erupting with all weapons, with the boiling wake of torpedoes, the can fought and smashed its way down the line of freighters, drifting at last, a flaming ruin into one last supply ship, blanketing it in the suicide flame.

In the Sangre de Cristo Mountaintains three full divisions hide, and at night the patrols in strength smash invader communications, blow up ammunition dumps. When the bombers sail out at dawn to punish such insolence, nothing can be seen but the raw real rock of the mountains.

The Invader, taunted and stung from every side, lashes in fury, destroying without cause, forsaking all plans of gentle administration to rule by flame and by the firing squad and with machine guns aimed down the descried streets of the silent towns.

The common denominator is fury, and the pain of loss. But thirty-five millions, the city dwellers, are yet hostage to the new weapon of emotional resonance, and as the long days go by, the empty and hopeless days, once again within them builds up the cretin joy, the mechanical gaiety, the vacuous death-dance, threatening to explode once more into crazy violence.

Thirty-five millions, tied, one to another, by a life-rhythm so carefully adjusted as to be the final indignity meted out to the human spirit.

They have not left their cities and neither the attacks of the Invader nor the destructive joy of the adjusted has served to destroy those cities.

The Invader, wise in the ways of his own weapon, evacuates his troops from the afflicted cities during the week before the emotional peak is reached.

Joe Morgan, grown to new stature during this time of trial, has carefully husbanded his strength, has made no move so flagrant as to cause a punitive column to be sent to the small take. He has sent his men on recruiting missions and his force has grown to over two hundred.

Seventy miles away is a small city where, before the invasion, there was a splendid medical center. A spy returns and reports to Joseph Morgan that the doctors from the medical center have been impressed into the medical service of the Invader, that they work in the original medical center, now filled with Invader troops.

Joe Morgan remembers a feature story he once wrote — on a certain Dr. Horace Montclair.

Five days before the adjusted were to reach their emotional peak, their five-day orgy, Joe Morgan, leading a picked group of ten men, crouched in the back of a big truck while another of his men, dressed in a captured uniform, drove the truck up to the gate of the medical center.

The gate guard sauntered over to the cab window, reached a hand up for the transportation pass. The entrenching tool smashed the guard’s throat and he dropped without a sound. The truck rolled up to the main building and Joe led the ten men inside.

In the stone corridor the weapons made a sound like a massive hammering on thick metal.

But four men backed with Joe out the door to the waiting truth. One of them was Dr. Montclair.

The dead guard had been found. Whistles shrilled near the gate. Joe, at the wheel, raced the truck motor, smashed the slowly closing gates, rode down the men who stood in his path.

He took the road west out of town, as planned, pursuit in swifter vehicles shrilling behind them.

At the appointed place he stopped the truck. The five of them ran awkwardly across the field, dropped into a shallow ditch. The pursuit screamed to a stop by the abandoned truck. A patrol spread out, advanced slowly across the field.

At the proper moment Joe shouted. The rest of his command, the full two hundred, opened up with a curtain of fire. Two men of the patrol turned, tried to race back, and they, too, were smashed down by the aimed fire.

In the black night they circled the town, headed back across country to the quiet lake. The return trip took three days.

The windows of the cabin were carefully sealed. Joe Morgan sat at the table facing Dr. Montclair. They were alone, except for Alice who sat back in the shadows. She, like Joe Morgan, had acquired a new strength, a new resolution, born both of anger and despair and the shared weight of command.

“It was daring, my friend,” the doctor said. He was a small man with too large a head, too frail a body, looking oddly like an aging, clever child.

“It was something we had to do,” Joe said, “or go nuts sitting here waiting for company.”

“I didn’t care for you, Mr. Morgan, when you interviewed me. I thought you lacked integrity of any sort.”

Joe grinned, “And now I’ve got some?”

“Maybe that wryness which is an essential part of you is what all men need in these times. But we are getting too philosophical, my friend. What can I do for you?”

“Doc, you’ve studied this Trojan Horse of theirs, where the people defeat themselves. What’s the answer?”

“Just like that? The answer?” Dr. Montclair snapped his fingers. “Out of the air? Answers have to be tested. I have suppositions only.”

“There isn’t much time to set up a lab to do the testing. Just pick your best supposition and we’ll work on it.”

Dr. Montclair rubbed his sharp chin, stared at the table top. “Obviously one of the basic qualities of the disease, and we will call it that, is the progressive infectiousness of it. The peaks are intensified by the proximity of the other victims. Thus one possible answer is isolation. But the infected must be thinned out to such an extent that they do not, in turn, infect their neighbors, eh?”

“Oh, sure. Thirty-something million people, so we isolate them.”

“Do not be sarcastic, Mr. Morgan. Another thought is whether, if a man were drugged heavily enough, it would delay his cycle so that his peak would come at a different time, thus destroying the synchronization which appears to be the cause of resonance.”

“Look, Doc, those suppositions are interesting, but we have a little war on our hands. I’ve been wondering how we can turn their Trojan Horse against them. A horse on them, you might say.”

“They have withdrawn from the focal points of infection, my boy. They are unwilling to risk infection of their troops.”

“How many men would you say they have inside our borders?”

“I can make a guess through having seen consolidated medical reports. Forty divisions, I believe. With service troops you could estimate the total strength at one and a quarter millions.”

Joe Morgan whistled softly.

He said: “In two days the peak of hysteria hits again. The cities will be like... like something never seen before on earth. How does the invader plan to handle it after all resistance has stopped?”

Montclair spread his hands, shrugged his shoulders. “Do they care? Left alone the thirty-something millions will at least tear themselves apart. The human mind cannot stand that constant pattern. Suicide, laughing murder. They will cease to be a problem and then the empty cities can be occupied safely.”

“There’s nothing we can do in time for the next big binge?”

“Nothing,” Montclair said sadly.

“Then we’ve got roughly thirty-two days to dream up a plan and put it in operation. What’ve we got? A few hundred men, ample supplies, a hidden base and some expert technical knowledge. We’re not too bad off, Doc. Not too bad off at all.”

VIII

STATUS SUMMARY, RADIO REPORT BY COMMANDING GENERAL, EXPEDITIONARY FORCES: Resistance continued to stiffen up until ten days ago. Then, when the peak of hysteria was reached, the cities ceased to operate as supply bases for guerrilla forces. Death in the cities was high, our forces having withdrawn to safe positions to avoid contagion. The breathing space was used to track down and eliminate hundreds of irregular groups engaging in punishing ambushing tactics. Our lines were consolidated. Resistance by organized and uninfected detachments of the enemy army continues high, but their position is, of course, hopeless. With amazing ingenuity they have constructed certain airfields which our bombers have, as yet, been unable to locate. But it is merely a question of time. It is regretted that so many of the naval vessels of the enemy were permitted to escape the surprise attacks, as they are definitely hampering supply.

REPORT BY COMMANDING GENERAL, ARMIES OF DEFENSE, TO THE PROVISIONAL PRESIDENT: Supply and manpower is no longer adequate to permit the utilization of standard military tactics. All our forces are now concentrated in mountainous regions in positions which cannot be overrun except by Invader infantry. Alt labor battalions are now engaged in the construction of defensive points. All future offensive action will be limited to patrols. It is thus recommended that the production facilities now housed in the natural caves be utilized entirely for small arms ammunition, mortar projectiles, pack howitzer ammunition. Strategy will be to make any penetration of our lines too expensive to be undertaken. The critical factor is, as previously stated, food supply.

EXCERPT FROM STENOGRAPHIC RECORD, MEETING OF PROVISIONAL CABINET CALLED BY PRESIDENT TO HEAR PROPOSAL OF GUERRILLA LEADER:

President: I wish to explain, gentlemen, that Joseph Morgan, with four of his men parachuted behind our lines from an aircraft stolen, at great cost to his organization, from the Invader airfield twenty miles west of Daylon. Two of his men were shot by our troops as they landed.

Morgan: We had no way to identify ourselves.

War: Do you have any way to identify yourself now? Some of our people have been willing to turn traitor for the sake of their future safely.

Morgan: Don’t you think I could have picked an easier way?

President: Gentlemen, please! Joseph Morgan has been thoroughly interrogated by our experts and they are satisfied. Mr. Morgan has been in conference at his base with a Dr. Montclair, an endocrinologist of international reputation. He brings us a proposal which I, at first, refused to countenance. Its cost is enormous. But it may end this stalemate. I ask you to listen to him. I could not make this decision by myself. I have not the courage.

Finance: This is not a stalemate. This is slow defeat. I will favor any plan, no matter how costly, which will give us a shred of hope.

Morgan: I’ll outline the plan and then give you Montclair’s reasoning.

Winter war. December has blanketed the cast with a thin wet curtain of snow. Winter is hard on the irregulars, but works no hardship on the troops of the Invader. The vast food stocks of the nation are his, as are the warm barracks, the heated vehicles, the splendid medical care.

A guerrilla with a shattered ankle dies miserably in the cold brush, near the blasted fragments of the house in which he took shelter.

The cities are thinned of people. For the first time it is noticeable. The last emotional debauch took five millions. Now there are thirty millions left. They have a breathing spell.

Invader troops are given leave in the cities. They go armed. They sample the wines, flirt with the women and sing their barbaric songs and gawp at the huge trenches which were dug to bury the dead of the cities.

Once again there is light arid heat in the cities. The winter is cruel, but there is heat. And there is foodstuffs in the markets, though not enough. Not nearly enough.

Were it warm summer, possibly the adjusted would leave their cities, would go into the countryside to be away from the places of horror. In the south and in California they try to leave, are roughly herded back by the Invader who seems to say, “Stay in the traps I have prepared for you and die there.”

This is a policy decreed by a man named Lewsto who, high in the councils of the Invader, walks with pigeon tread and squared shoulders, the new and highest medal of his country shining on the left breast of the drab uniform.

Cyclical nightmare. The slow upward climb toward crescendo has begun once again, and no man looks squarely into the face of his neighbor, knowing that he will see there some of the fear and horror that has coldly touched his heart. And yet, each man and woman has a secret place which revels in the thought of the nightmare to come. It is like an addiction to a strange drug. Nightmare there must be, and death there must be, but with guttural shouts of animal joy, with a wild, unheeding passion of insane laughter, when consequences are not considered, nor are the customary mores and folkways.

Each adjusted person in the city feels shame in his heart because, though he knows that pure nightmare lies ahead, nightmare which he may not survive, he yet anticipates it with a certain warm and soiled sense of expectancy.

This, then, is the conquered country, the proud race, the men who know defeat, and yet cling to the manner of their defeat, an overripe fruit, plucked once each month.

In a silent cabin Alice sits at the rude table and the glow of the lantern highlights the strong cheekbones, the limpid mouth, and she is beautiful indeed.

Dr. Montclair sits opposite her. Quickly he touches her hand. “He will make it, Alice. I know he made it.”

“He’s gone. That’s all I know. Somebody else could have gone. But he had to go?”

In the brush there is the quick and angry spat of a rifle, the answering sound of an automatic weapon, like some vast fabric being torn, the fabric of the night.

As Montclair takes the weapon propped against his chair, she quickly blows out the lantern and, together in the darkness, they listen.

Hoarse shouts from the brush, the authoritative crump of a mortar, alarmingly close, a scarlet blossom against which each bare twig stands out with the bland clarity of death.

“They’re coming in from both sides,” she whispers.

The rifle fire fades and slugs grind against the cabin walls, throwing splinters that whine.

Montclair is on his belly on the porch, Alice behind him in the doorway. As they come running across the slope toward the porch, running with the heavy thump of men in full equipment, Montclair sprays a line of fire across them. Many fall, but the others rush the porch. She fires again and again, seeing Montclair die suddenly, firing until the hand slaps the rifle away.

She is thrust into a corner and there are six of them in the room, seeming to fill the cabin. The lantern is lit and they look at her and talk among themselves and she knows that she should have saved one of the rifle bullets.

Two of them advance toward her slowly. They spin and snap to attention as the officer enters. He looks at her, snaps something at the men. Then, with surprising gentleness be lifts her to her feet. He leads her up through the brush to the waiting vehicle. She turns and whimpers in her throat as she sees through the black lace work of trees, the flower of flame that grows from the cabin.

Every remaining plane is committed to the venture. Every last one.

Brave men have managed, somehow, to set up the short wave radios behind the Invader lines.

The teams are carefully instructed. And there are several teams for each portion of the venture, as losses will be high.

At last the word conies. The great emotional springs are once again winding taut. The word comes. “Today the Invader moved all personnel out of the cities.”

Joe Morgan, burdened with sixty pounds of equipment, climbed laboriously into the belly of the transport. The interior of the aircraft was dark. Cigarette ends glowed and the men laughed with the calculated steadiness of men who are gambling life itself.

The officer stood in the doorway and said: “Team Eighty-two?”

Joe answered, “Eighty-two, Morgan commanding. All present and accounted for.”

The officer jumped down and the big door slammed. The huge cavern in the side of the mountain reverberated to the roar of many motors. The very air shook and quivered with the vibration. Outside the dozers were dragging the rocks off the runway.

At last the cave doors were rolled back. The first transports rumbled awkwardly to the doorway, gaining speed, gaining agility, moving out, roaring along the runway, lifting off into the night.

Team Eighty-two was airborne and Joe, squinting through the side window saw the streaked jets of the fighter cover.

The scene was duplicated at other hidden fields.

Ten minutes before interception on the basis of radar watch over the mountains.

Interception came. Invader pursuit ships were dark lances in the night. Distant flames, like weak candles, blossomed briefly and were gone in a red line of fire toward the sleeping earth.

The lumbering transport weaved heavily through the night, and Joe Morgan sat in a cold agony of fear.

From time to time he glanced at the illuminated dial of his watch. At last he said loudly, over the motor roar: “Fasten static lines.”

He reached up and snapped his own, tugged on it to test it.

Ten minutes, twelve, fifteen. The wing lifted and the transport slipped down, down, to where the city lights glimmered through the overcast. Spiraling down.

The plane seemed to brake in the air as the flaps caught hold, seemed to waver on the very edge of instability.

The wind was a shrill blast through the open door. “What are you doing here, Morgan?” Joe asked himself softly.

He braced his hands against the sides of the door, saw the target area below. The man behind him had a hand on Joe’s shoulder.

Joe stepped out into the night, into the cold, tumbling night, and the flatness of the city spun around him like a vast wheel. The sharp jolt caught him and he swung pendulum-wise toward the darkened earth, swinging under the pale flower of silk.

Then he was tumbling on the frozen ground of the park of the big city, grasping the shroud lines, bracing his feet, fumbling with the buckles. The chute collapsed and he stepped dear of the harness.

“Over here,” he yelled. “Over here.”

Roll call. “Peterson, Barnik, Stuyvessant, Simlon, Garrit, Reed, Walke, Punch, Norris, Humboldt, Crues, Riley, Renelli, Post, Charnevak.”

All but one. One was imbedded to half his thickness in the frozen earth.

They were in a silent circle around hint

He said: “You all know this town like the palm of your hand. You each have your sectors and your instructions. You know the plan and you know that it has to work.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said: “After it goes off, it’s every man for himself. We meet back here. Good luck.”

At base headquarters of the Invader, the commanding general listened gravely to the report of his Air Intelligence,

After listening, he made his decision. “Apparently they desire to set up, within the cities, focal points of resistance. You believe that men were airdropped into every one of the major cities and most of the smaller cities which are infected. It is obvious to me that they underestimate the extent of hysteria which will hit the cities within four days. We will wait until after the hysteria, until after the suicide period, and then we will go in and eliminate the men who were airdropped.”

The reporting officer saluted, turned smartly and left the office.

Joe Morgan stood in the cold gray morning and looked at Daylon. He had found and taken over one of the many empty rooms in the city. The city had suffered greatly.

He carried a heavy suitcase. As he walked down the morning street he looked carefully at the houses. Whenever he saw an empty one he broke in quickly, opened the suitcase, took out a small package the size of a cigarette package.

In each house be left the package in a different place. But the favorite spot was in the cellar, wired to the rafters overhead.

He saw a few people that he knew. They looked blankly at him, smiled and went vaguely about their business.

The people of Daylon were lean and ragged and their eyes were hollow. But they smiled constantly.

In mid-morning, a smiling policeman in a dirty torn uniform asked him what he was doing. Joe said: “Come in here and I’ll show you.” The policeman followed Joe through the door Joe had forced.

Joe pivoted, hit the man on the chin with all his strength, walked back out of the house carrying the suitcase.

Carefully he covered the sector he had allotted to himself. Public buildings, houses, garages, stores. In many places he had to be extremely cautious. In stores lie hid the packages among slow-moving merchandise. The city went through the motions of existence, but on every face was the look of expectancy.

Four days before the explosion of emotions, before the laughing orgy of death. Three days. Two days. The last of the packages has been placed. But there are four much larger packages to be delivered.

And these are delivered at night.

At night he found a stout iron bar, used it to pry up the manhole covers. The large packages nestled comfortably against the welter of cables and pipes.

This is the day before the tight spring will snap. Already there is empty laughter in the streets of the city, in the streets of all the vast cities.

The armies of the Invader, well removed from the focal points of contagious hysteria, clamp severe restrictions on all areas to prevent the curious from sneaking off to the cities.

At eleven o’clock on the morning of the day before pandemonium will reign, the streets of the cities vibrate to the massive thump of subterranean explosions. Steel manhole covers sail up into the air, turning lazily, smashing pedestrians as they full. The underground caverns roar with burning gas and then the roaring is gone as the severed water pipes spill the contents underground.

All electricity ceases to flow.

One hundred and seventy-one teams won through. Sixteen men to a team. Four bombs and one thousand of the deadly half-ounce packages to each man. Ten thousand nine hundred and forty-four explosions in the bowels of the great cities. Two million, seven hundred and thirty-seven thousand of the deadly packages distributed.

For this is a kind of suicide, oil a vast and generous scale.

The packages are closely co-ordinated. A few sputter prematurely, but within a few minutes after the explosions, the acid has eaten through the lead shields within more than half of them. They flame into life, burning with a white dazzling flame that has an intensity of twenty-four hundred degrees Fahrenheit and a duration of twenty minutes. All of the fading resources of an almost-conquered nation has gone into the preparation of these packages of death.

With the water supply crippled, there is no possibility of fighting the fires.

Whole streets erupt into flame and the melted glass of the windows runs across the pavement.

It is almost too successful. The densely populated eastern seaboard is one vast pall of smoke drifting in the crisp December air.

Too many die in the flames. Far too many.

But from the roaring furnaces of the cities nearly thirty millions wind like sluggish worms into the countryside.

They have fear of the flames, fear of death, fear of pain — but it is not until tomorrow that they will be unable to feel fear.

And so, with empty idle smiles, with vacuous eyes, they move toward the vast camps of the Invader.

The Invader is outnumbered by the victims of his satanic adjustment — twenty-five to one.

Too late, the danger is seen.

The camps of the Invader are near the cities. They straddle the main, roads. Machine guns are manned and white-lipped men fire prolonged bursts into the crowds that move so slowly. And at last they are revolted by the slaughter of these who smile, even in death, and they refuse to obey orders.

The day darkens and in the night the cities are vast pyres that redden the sky. The cities of America burn with a brave flame and the sound of the roaring can be heard for many miles. The fire is behind them and the guns, unmanned by now, are ahead of them.

At dawn the Invader orders the armies to retreat away from these mad ones, to retreat to the fastness of the hills.

But already the infection is at work. Already the spirit of spontaneous hysteria has begun to infect the troops of the Invader.

Massive tanks sit empty while men shout hoarsely and dance in the street. The planes are idle, the guns unmanned, the officers joining their men in a frenzied rapport with the victims of disaster.

Suddenly the spirit grows among them that they are celebrating victory. Victor and vanquished revel until they fall exhausted, sleep, rise to bellow with laughter, to stare with glazed eyes at the winter sky, howl with the voices of wolves.

It is a party of death, lasting for day after day, with all thought of food forgotten, and the cities burn brightly every night and the winter sun by day is shrouded with the drifting black smoke of utter destruction.

STATUS REPORT, HQ, ARMIES OF DEFENSE: Al dawn today all columns were within striking distance of all corps headquarters of the Invader forces. Scouts report utter exhaustion in enemy ranks, black depression among individuals, a constant sound of small-arms fire indicating a high incidence of suicide among the Invader troops. All personnel has strict instructions about the destruction of equipment. The attack will begin at dusk.

INTERCEPTED RADIO FROM CONVOY COMMANDER: Convoy taking reinforcements to our armies attacked at dawn by Strong naval force of enemy. Some of our ships, manned by enemy, were among attacking vessels. Numerous troop ships bombed by our own planes, apparently manned by enemy forces. Loss incidence so high that we were forced to turn back at ten hundred hours. Request immediate air cover if convoy is to proceed.

Joe Morgan held tightly to the trunk of a small tree halfway up the slope six miles from Daylon. Even at this distance he could feel the intermittent waves of heat against his face.

But five men were left of his group. They wire scorched, blackened, drugged with weariness.

“Listen!” he said.

The six men stood, listening intently. They heard the rising sound of battle, the hammer blows of artillery, the distant thin crackling of small-arms fire.

The crescendo of battle rose sharply, faded, subsided, until they could hear nothing.

“Five bucks says we took them,” Joe said.

IX

FIRST NATIONAL PROCLAMATION: The determined attack to land another force on our shores has been beaten back with heavy losses to the enemy. At the moment our continental limits are intact once more. Hourly we grow stronger as we manufacture weapons to supplement those taken from the Invader armies after the burning of the cities. The Invader has been weakened by the loss of the Cream of his troops, the most modern of his equipment. Three of our naval teams are pursuing the shattered remnants of the Invader convoys. This morning the Invader capital was subjected to intensive bombing and his principle port was rendered untenable by an underwater explosion of an atomic bomb in the main ship basin.

Joe Morgan stood in the barren hallway of the temporary building which housed the hospital and said, uneasily, to the young doctor: “Is there anything I shouldn’t bring up? I mean, she had such a rough time that maybe—”

The young doctor smiled. “A week ago I would have restricted the conversation. But that was the day she found out that you were safe. A powerful medicine, Mr. Morgan.”

“Can I—”

“Go right in. She’s expecting you.”

Alice was pale against the pillow, and, as she stretched her hands toward him her eyes filled with tears.

Joe held her close for long minutes, then said: “Tell me about it if it’ll help. If it won’t help, I’m not going to insist.”

“You know about the camp?”

“Yes. Montclair’s body was still on the charred porch.”

“A young officer took me in a staff car to their central headquarters. They had taken one of your men, one that was wounded when you took the plane from the field near Daylon. They... they made him talk, but he didn’t know enough. They thought I would know more.”

Joe’s fists lightened.

“Lewsto was there. When they were taking me down a long hall I met him face to face. He went to someone in authority and got permission to interview me, I didn’t want to be... hurt. So I told him a few things. Almost right, but not quite right. He believed me.

“The day the fires started he came to the room where I was held. He knew I had tricked him. He sent the matron out of the room. I had stolen the matron’s scissors. I... I slabbed him in the side of the throat with them. It didn’t kill him quickly enough. He shot me as I left the room.”

He stroked her hair back from her forehead. She smiled, “Don’t look so grim, darling. It’s all right now. Honestly. I was in their hospital when the people came from the city. It was madness. Worse... much worse than the time when you saved me in Daylon. That seems a thousand years ago.”

“It was a thousand years ago.”

“We... we’re winning now, aren’t we?”

Joe smiled. “We’ve won. That is, if it’s possible to win a war.”

“What will we do now, Joe? They’ll let me up in a few days.”

There was a window in the hospital room. From it he could see the distant blackened skyscrapers of what had once been a city.

He said slowly: “They’ve isolated all the ‘adjusted’ ones. There’s a pitifully small number left, you know. The medics are making progress on undoing the adjustment, on fitting the people back into their original, individual pattern. Isolated, the peaks aren’t as high or the depths as low. So that work is going well, and now all we have to look out for are the fools.”

“Fools?” she asked.

He gave her a tired smile. “A lot of people want to rebuild the cities. They’re stuck in the past. The city is an extinct beast, like the dodo. We burned beautiful and irreplacable things, but we also burned mile after mile of squalid streets and dirty slums.

“No man should live crammed into a dark room near his neighbors. We have room to expand, and to grow. This has to be a nation of small towns and villages. In no other way could we have got rid of those vast, ugly, nerve-jangling cities of ours. To regain our strength we will have to live closer to the land. Our transportation is efficient. Factories can be placed among wooded hills.”

He turned back and looked quickly at her as he heard her warm laugh.

“What cooks, angel?”

“Oh, Joe,” she said, “and I asked you what we would do. There’s a lot to be done, isn’t there?”

“An awful lot.”

“Would it be all right to have just one thing rebuilt? Just one place?”

He walked back to her and took her hand. “Angel, if you mean that miserable little cabin, you might be interested to know that reconstruction starts next week. It’ll be finished when you’re ready to leave this outfit.”

Content

John D MacDonald
Trojan Horse Laugh

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX