Not This August (16 page)

“Isn’t that awful? I wonder if you boys’d try what you can do. I’ll just stay here in case you need help from the engine—”

They got out in the snow and heaved and looked for rocks to lay as a tread under the spinning wheels and from time to time asked her to try driving out. They got snow spun into their faces and bruised their fingers on frozen rocks. They talked in whispers. The woman’s ruddy face was hanging out the window; she was watching with interest.

“Blackmailing old—”

“Steady on, William.”

“We shouldn’t have got in the car.”

“Is
her
salvation unimportant for some reason known to you? We must give each person we meet his or her chance.”

“The only way you can save that type is with a firing squad. The neighborhood gossip, the village terror, hand in hand with the Reds. She’ll get hers the way Croley’s going to.”

“Mr. Croley has been charitable to me.”

“Sure. Croley’s smart enough to play
all
the sides—not like her.” Justin pounded a rock under the wheel with another rock. “Give her a try, ma’am,” he said aloud.

“I certainly hope it works, boys,” she said. “I’m getting awfully chilly.” She roared the motor, let in her clutch, and was off in a shower of slush and small stones.

Justin waited for her to stop on the road for them but she chugged on. When the Ford vanished around a distant curve, he did some swearing and wound up: “At least we don’t have to listen to her any more.”

“No,” Mr. Sparhawk said, and for a moment Justin thought the look he gave him was compassionate.

The woman must have hurried home and put in a phone call. Half an hour later a pair of Red jeeps overtook them. An hour later they were being booked for sabotage, counter-revolutionary wrecking, and sedition in what had once been the principal’s office of the Leechburg Consolidated School.

The next day they were on the Conveyor.

Justin sat in the dark and absently rubbed his aching neck. The session had lasted for six hours, and Lieutenant Sokoloff had been yawning at the end of it. It was not surprising; Sokoloff was merely a cop and he himself was merely a vagrant against whom a routine accusation had been brought. Sokoloff would sleep now for eight hours; Justin would be kept awake and presumably irritated just below the threshold of pain by irregular switching on and off of the lights, peering guards with raucous orders, the steel-pipe bunk without bedding, to corrugate his back.

Then, rested and refreshed, Sokoloff would plump himself into a padded swivel chair, Justin would sit bolt upright on a too-low stool, the dazzling light would be switched on, and the interrogation would proceed.

The bright cell lights flashed on and a soldier’s heavy face peered through the bars. He pounded on them with a night stick and growled, “Prisoner hobey hord-erss,” and stood waiting. Justin obediently went and lay down on the steel-pipe cot, face up, hands at his side, and closed his eyes. The light beat through his eyelids. The transverse pipes bit into his heel tendons, his calfs, thighs, buttocks, back, neck, and skull. Orders were being obeyed. He was not being physically tortured. He was merely lying on a bunk, and if the bunk was somewhat uncomfortable, what in heaven’s name could you expect to find in a detention cell? Their strange passion for legality again—a sort of legality, at least.

It showed up strongly in the questions during interrogation. Justin was at sea several times until he inferred the hypothesis behind such a question as: “Did the prisoner ever take part in the workers’ struggle before organized assistance to the clandestine N.A.P.D.R. began to arrive?” What Sokoloff wanted to know was had Justin been a Communist before the war. Justin had not been a Communist before the war, and if he answered “No” to the question as Sokoloff phrased it, he was saying a great deal more than that he had not been a Communist before the war. He was admitting Sokoloff’s premise about “organized assistance to the clandestine N.A.P.D.R.” He was agreeing with Sokoloff that the war was not a war of aggression at all but an internal revolution by the Communist Party with some assistance from the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic. Therefore he could not answer such questions yes or no, and therefore Sokoloff became very angry and turned the light that glared in his eyes brighter. But that wasn’t torture, of course. Could one expect an interrogation room to function without a light by which notes could be jotted and the expression of the prisoner observed?

Justin didn’t know where Mr. Sparhawk was except that he was in some place exactly like this, or what he was doing except that it was exactly what Justin was doing: hanging on.

A sacrament, Mr. Sparhawk called it, innocently blasphemous.

“Is the prisoner aware that to absent oneself from one’s assigned agricultural holdings is sabotage of food production?”

“Spreading the Word of God comes first, Lieutenant Sokoloff. Under the guarantees of religious freedom of the North American People’s Democratic Republic no functionary is empowered to interfere with the private or public worship of a religious body.”

The passion for legality cut both ways.

“The prisoner is not a religious body!”

“I consider myself the disciple of Mr. Sparhawk, Lieutenant Sokoloff, and I consider Mr. Sparhawk a lay preacher.”

“What is the name of your religion?”

“It has no name. It incorporates what Mr. Sparhawk finds inspired in all religions.”

“There are no such religions. The prisoner is a poseur. Is the prisoner aware that he has been denounced as a counter-revolutionary wrecker by a loyal adherent of the N.A.P.D.R., to whom he made inflammatory and seditious speeches?”

“If you please, Lieutenant, I made no speeches to the lady you mean. I would have spoken to her about God—but I never got the chance.”

Sokoloff’s face, dim on the fringes of the dazzling interrogation light, wrinkled into a brief grin. He knew the lady, then.

And so it went for six hours, the two of them pounding each other with stuffed clubs labeled respectively SABOTAGE and
FREEDOM OF WORSHIP.

Justin shifted on the bunk, acutely uncomfortable. That was supposed to be Lieutenant Sokoloff’s margin of victory. The lieutenant would rest well, he would rest not at all. The next session he would swing his padded club with less vigor while Sokoloff’s blows would be as strong as ever. At last, after a week or so of interrupted sleep, scanty meals, inflamed eyelids, and backache, Lieutenant Sokoloff would be flailing away as hard as ever and he would sit apathetically, without the strength or spirit to strike a blow. He would sign anything, admit anything, to sleep on a cement floor instead of the steel-pipe bunk.

In theory.

He tried one of Mr. Sparhawk’s heathen tricks which had served him on rainy nights before. He willed his muscles to relax one by one, from his toes up. He sent out his will to gather up his aches into a ball twelve inches in diameter and he floated the ball twelve inches above his forehead, where he could inspect it impersonally. The distractions kept trying to crowd in, but he succeeded in keeping them out by not giving a damn about them. When the ball slowly began to sag down and threatened to re-enter his body, he thought relaxedly that to do so would result in the discovery of the bombardment satellite and that therefore the ball should continue to float. It did, and he slept. Much better than young Lieutenant Sokoloff, who was tossing and turning and worrying about what to do with these lunatics he had been saddled with by that horrible woman.

The private ceremoniously kicked Mr. Sparhawk in the seat, booting him over the township line. Justin, moving fast, stepped across without assistance. They started down the road.

Behind them Lieutenant Sokoloff, dark bags under his eyes, yelled: “And don’t you ever come back into this area again, do you hear me?”

Mr. Sparhawk turned and waved. “Yes, Lieutenant. God bless you.”

They heard the jeep start up and roar away.

They had been five days on the Conveyor. They were skin and bones; their backs and buttocks were covered with bruises from all the hours spent rigid on the pipe bunks and hard interrogation light and the lights in their cells. They were filthy; it was part of the system to allow no water for washing and thereby further break down the morale of the prisoner. Mr. Sparhawk’s left thumb and index finger were broken and splinted; a guard, strictly against orders, had whacked him with his night stick. Six of Justin’s molars had been pulled; the unit dentist had examined them, decided fillings were needed, and done considerable drilling before further deciding they could not be saved after all. She had done her work without anesthetic and Lieutenant Sokoloff had stood by to distract the prisoner by chatting about the pleasures of the pretrial cells, which were furnished with regular army cots. These pretrial cells were only for prisoners who had cleared all preliminary hurdles, such as the signing of confessions.

His jaws ached horribly, he had ridden the Conveyor for five days and they were walking into the town of Washington, Pennsylvania.

They signed in first thing in the Transients book of the local SMGU. They explained to a puzzled English-speaking sergeant that they were ministers of the gospel and that he might check with his neighboring SMGU, where, through a misunderstanding, they had been detained, interrogated, and cleared. Then—it was about noon—they made their pitch on a busy corner of the main shopping street.

Mr. Sparhawk lectured on Conscience and Submission; Justin borrowed a hat and passed it. One of the people who dropped in coins was the salesman from Bee-Jay. “Meet me later,” Justin muttered. The man gave him a brief appraising stare and walked away.

After the lecture they almost quarreled. Justin was for finding a rooming house with a bath and taking a week’s lodgings. Mr. Sparhawk, now that Justin’s irrational desire to see Washington, Pennsylvania, had been gratified, was for a one-day stay mostly devoted to preaching.

They had dinner in a tavern, Mr. Sparhawk relenting to the point of taking a glass of watery beer and allowing Justin one. But no matter how longingly the disciple eyed the steam table of sausages and roast horse meat, they ate the vegetable plate.

The dispute was still unresolved when they checked in at a rooming house down near the railroad tracks. Justin’s jaws were aching badly but he didn’t care. The Bee-Jay salesman had passed by the tavern and glanced in while they were eating. The contact had not been broken. Surely they were being followed and marked…

They bathed in turn, very gratefully, and turned in. Mr. Sparhawk slept on the floor and laughed when Justin offered him the bed. Justin understood the laughter an hour later while he tossed and turned and angrily commanded his muscles to relax. He had made up his mind at last to spread a blanket on the floor and sleep there himself when he heard a scratching on the door.

The long ordeal was ended.

He opened up. It was the Bee-Jay salesman, of course, and two other men. They all wore coveralls and carried telephone linemen’s gear in broad leather belts.

“Come along,” the salesman said softly. “We have a truck. And guns.”

He assumed they would have guns. “We don’t have to wake up the old man,” he whispered to one of them who was stooping over Mr. Sparhawk.

“He’s coming,” the man said, and shook him.

“Friends of mine, Mr. Sparhawk,” Justin whispered. “We’re taking a short trip.”

“Yeah,” said the salesman. He raised his hand. “No arguments. Explain everything later.”

“I never argue,” Mr. Sparhawk whispered loftily, and they dressed and went quietly down the stairs, the salesman in front of them and the two strangers behind. The truck was an olive-green A.T. & T. cab-over-engine repair job, the kind of truck that can appear anywhere on the continent without a word of comment or stir of interest as long as there is a telephone within fifty miles. Justin was struck by the brilliant simplicity of the idea. When they were settled in the dark body of the truck with the two strangers, he started to say as much. They told him to be quiet. He didn’t like their manner, but set it down to the strain of a risky mission.

Mr. Sparhawk settled down on the floor in the padmasana posture while the truck bumped over a lot of railroad tracks and made a lot of left and right turns and a couple of U turns that could only have been meant to confuse their sense of direction. In half an hour the truck stopped definitely, the hand brake rasped along its ratchets, and the motor stopped.

They hustled Justin and Mr. Sparhawk out of the truck onto a dimly lit loading deck of concrete. Down a concrete corridor where fork hoists and stacks of pallets stood. Past a thousand stacked new milk cans shining dully. Past crates of pitcher pumps and a thousand cream separators. Into a concrete room where a dozen men awaited them. When the door rolled shut behind them, Justin weakly said, “I’m glad to see you.” But he already knew that it was no joyful reunion but a trial.

“Now we can talk,” the Bee-Jay salesman said grimly.

“Yes,” said Justin between his teeth. Then he yelled at them: “Why was Chiunga County deserted?”

Their faces were shocked. The trapped mouse had turned and bit them on the finger.

“Not that you give a damn,” Justin said, “but Chiunga happens to be the key to the whole situation, as you’d know if your organization were conducted sensibly. Why haven’t we had any couriers? Why don’t you answer us on the dry wire? Why were we left to rot?”

“While we’re asking questions, William,” Mr. Sparhawk said mildly, “what on earth are you talking about?”

They ignored him. The Bee-Jay salesman said slowly: “You might as well know my name, Justin. Sam Lowenthal. I used to be a civilian consultant to the psychological-warfare branch. You don’t have to know who all these people are. It’s enough to say that they constitute a court-martial of the United States Army. You’re on trial for treason. We suspect you of being a stool pigeon, Justin. We thought so when we got a dry-wire message that somebody named Justin had important information for a top contact team. We sent in the team—and never heard from it again.