“What is it?” I said. “You tell us then if you’re so much in control of this.”
“No,” he said sullenly, “I don’t have to if I don’t want to. And I don’t want to.”
“All right,” I said. The interview had become wearying to me no less than to the rest of them. All that one can attempt to do is to meet the superficial requirements of the statutes and then go beyond them a little bit; there are limits to what can be done, however, with the unresponsive or the insane. “We are going to terminate this with a warning.”
“Warning against what?”
“Against continuation of the pattern of conduct which has brought you here.”
He stood. “I’ll fix you,” he said. “I’ll deal with your pattern of conduct. I’ll show you a few changes around here. You cannot continue to do this to people. Sooner or later you have to face the truth; that you are the descendants of the murderers of the past. Your time is transitory. I will change everything.”
“Is that your final statement?”
“You mean you have nothing to say? You can listen to this and say nothing?”
“I don’t know what you would have us say,” I said and drew encouragement from the nods I sensed around me. Certainly I received full support from the board for the actions taken; this much is clear. If there is any responsibility it is shared. It does not devolve fully upon me. “You refuse to admit complicity, you show no sense of guilt, you do not even seem to acknowledge the reasons for your being here. All of this will become part of the report.”
“You are fools and understand nothing. You do not even realize why you are here or whose work you are doing.”
“Unless you have anything further to say I am going to terminate this interview at the present time.”
“Fools,” he said, “I’ll get the convertor and just destroy you all. Children of murder. You’ll be wiped out of the time scheme.”
He was raving. “Use of the convertor is forbidden to unauthorized personnel. You are unauthorized personnel. You will no longer make these threats.”
“Fools.”
“Suitable entries will be made on the record,” I said, “now leave.”
“Leave?”
“Exactly,” I said and gestured toward the wingapparat behind him. “Through there.”
“You really are mad. I knew it a long time ago but you keep on proving it over and over again. All of you are crazy.”
“Go,” I said to him and he turned, began to make his labored way up the ramps and into the distance, I found my interest beginning to flick away even before he had left, my mind scuttling ahead toward the next case, the next candidate for review. It is impossible to get too involved with any of these situations, otherwise feeling is totally dissipated, absolutely destroyed and one winds up completely ineffective. Certainly a greenshifter who has fallen out of cycle, who is brought before board for a mild admonition, who makes wild threats about stealing a converter and altering the past in order to make a different present . . . certainly such an individual cannot be handled in any other fashion but expeditiously. That is how he was dealt with. Expeditiously. I see no reason for complaint about our behavior.
We went on to Case S103 and then Y1014; we went through Z12 and even the clamorous and difficult B1411 that day and in all of those situations as this our decisions were fair and quick, correct and biting and I do not know why this one has been selected as a special instance; I cannot understand the course of your inquiry. What was done was done and would happen again, unless of course it would not happen again and this is the thrust of your inquiry by which I mean that a mistake has been made but if a mistake has been made I have not made it. I am perfectly innocent in anything to do with this affair and would repeat my actions again and have done absolutely nothing to incur any of your blame and am not guilty at all and did not take his threats to get the convertor seriously how could anyone believe that he would get a convertor? Everyone might have gotten hold of a convertor and the case was of the Temporal Authority and would not be released under any circumstances to a greenshifter with problems like his why it is absolutely impossible to think that he might have gotten hold of a convertor and the case was handled perfectly, why he was not even admonished and I resent having to fill this out and I have nothing more to say I did everything perfectly properly in every detail and am not to blame and any one of you would have done the same thing if you were me and if there is anyone to blame the rest of the board should be questioned since I was obviously the only one among them with intelligence and alertness and am extremely resentful and will refuse to cooperate any further anddidnotmakeonesinglemistakethroughallofthis and all of the mistakes were those of the others and . . .
PART FOUR
CHAPTER I
DREAMT AS IF IN CUNNING AND POWER: Lee Harvey Osborn (1934–1963) has a dream and in that dream he has killed the President of the United States of America. The course of history has been changed enormously: seventy-seven years later the consequences of his action are still being examined, still being enacted in the common lives of six billion citizens of the Greater and Lesser Earths but in the dream Osborn has no time to consider such large matters; he is in desperate flight. He has not wanted to kill the President or then again he has, it is difficult to disentangle his motives; it is even possible that he hasnot killed the President but has merely come to this flight through an excess of desire . . . but be that as it may as he flees through the alleys and motion picture theaters, the bars and buses of this large American metropolis of the predynastic epoch his thoughts are cluttered with images of the gallows and electricity, slow evisceration and constant pain. He has not wanted it to happen in this way. If he had to do it all over again it would be different.
But in the dream there is no returning; what he has done is irrevocable. Even as he mumbles and twitches on his miserable pallet in an Army barracks dreaming not only of this but of the novel that he will someday write . . . even as he retreats against the edges of the dream, it coalesces, becomes sharper and now in the abscesses of a motion picture theater he thinks he sees a nest of patrolmen in the outer lobby, prowling in, cutting open the darkness with lights like knives looking for him. There are very few people in this theater; there cannot be more than twenty altogether what with it being a Friday afternoon and the President’s visit having brought the whole city to curbside or its television sets, that part of the city which does not work that is to say. Lee Harvey Osborn is also unemployed; sometimes he is quite bitter about this and at other times he is not knowing that his is a much greater destiny than ordinary employment in an obscure office or factory but what controls him now more than anything else is fear, the fear that the patrolmen will find him.
He does not know exactly why he is so frightened. In the dream he has killed the President of the United States of America and that is certainly reason for him to be sought but he is also outside of the dream in a simultaneity of conviction and here he knows that he has no more to do with the police, then, than anyone else within these walls. But the dream is peculiar and gelatinous, it drapes around him like a garment which he both is and is not wearing and he decides, finally, that the fear must take precedence, it is the fear with which he must deal since it is possible, at least possible that he is the man they are seeking . . . and slowly, slowly he arcs himself out of the seat, stumbles past a fat old man clutching himself so quietly in the darkness and into an aisle. He will try to leave the theater as inconspicuously as possible. He will leave the theater and return to his bedroom and there, silent and alone, he will try to work out these difficulties in his mind.
Lately something has been happening to his mind. He does not seem to be thinking with the same clarity and insight which he used to muster, his thoughts seem jumbled and strange to him (the dream is part of that disturbance) and hypochondriacal to the last moment Osborn believes that he may have a brain tumor, something terrible and inoperable which is eating away at the corners of his cerebrum and will soon tap the gross motor at which time he will be dead. He will not see a doctor because he cannot bear to have these fears confirmed; it would be far better to die, to be eaten away, to perish from the center than to sit in an office across from a man who would lay out for him the fact of his own death. He is almost at the door toward the lobby, his undershirt coming against him in tight, streaked blotches where he has sweated it through when the lights in the theater go on, all of them, hit by some master switch and in the glare he finds himself facing a patrolman; the next thing he knows he is braced up against a wall facing the drawn gun and other police are coming in from the sides. Their faces are angry and yet unyielding; he feels that he has never seen such faces before and as he confronts them, as in that continuing silence they bear down he realizes that he has never been so frightened. He tries to speak but he cannot. “You son of a bitch,” the nearest patrolman says, “you son of a bitch, we’ve got you. We’ve got you now.” He reaches out and slashes Osborn across the face with the back of his hand. His condition is such that he does not even feel the pain, only a greater panic.
“Don’t kill him,” someone says, “don’t hurt him bad, just take him in; we’ve got all the time in the world to deal with him later,” and they close in nodding; feeling their hands on him, the whisk and stutter of their grasp Osborn decides then that he has had enough of the dream, it is a bad dream, one he does not wish to continue and he tries to vault himself out of itbuthecannotdoit ; he cannot escape the parameters of the vision embracing him and so, struggling, he submits but submission is not easy either; they seem no more willing to accept his collapse than they were his struggle. Humiliation is in the transversal of their hands as they put them upon him; humiliation also in the way that their eyes seem suddenly and terribly knowledgeable as they come in closer, putting handcuffs on him, their fingers beating at him. Again and again he tries to will himself out of the dream like a man trying to batter his way through an orgasm that will not occur, that the very motions deaden; again and again he tells himself that this cannot be happening, that all of these events come from within his own skull but as he tries again to heave himself out of that lobby, as he tries repeatedly to either leap or go under the dream so that he is back again in his bed the first outlines of understanding begin to appear to him as if in the dazzle of fluorescence through which they take him to the waiting car. He wanted to do it, that is what he sees; whether or not these events are really happening they partake of what must have been his real desire to become the Killer of the King and he finds this insight so shocking and yet so absolutely correct, such an utter confirmation of what he must have long known about himself that he gasps, inhales, shudders in their grasp and that is the way they put him into the car and so he is taken away from there and toward the police station where in due course he will find the true and final explanation of what he has become.
CHAPTER II
THE TURNING POINT: Scop confers with his teammates, the Greens, before they take the field for their climactic battle with the Blues for the challenge rights in the third division. Only a very few of them will return to this room alive he knows but this does not make the warnings he gives them any less imperative. The Games, although they result in death for almost all of them must be dealt with as if the choice for life was in their own hands which in certain senses it may be. And in other senses it may not. “Gather around,” Scop says, motioning them into a tight circle. Carrying their gear they troop toward him, their sullen, bleak faces as clean of feeling as the dead stones in Daley Plaza. Segregated and trained for the Games from their tenth birthday almost all of the Gamesmen are completely lacking intelligence, it has been drilled and tortured out of them but in a very few there seems to be a kind of awareness seen only as an unwillingness to join the tightly-packed circle. It is those, Scop knows, who he must reach; the Games, being evenly matched for size and weaponry are almost completely random for all of their brutality. Results will turn upon marginal factors which in turn depend upon complete motivation. How many of these marginals will eventually be willing to die? Can they be motivated no less than any of the others to the reality of their survival? They seem trivial factors as compared to the overpowering brutality and pain, the utter seeming disorganization of all the movement on the field but as Scop knows these are the factors which will determine outcome; the blood and the death must be taken for granted. Bodies will fall, lives will run away without any reference to his (or their) feelings on the matter.
“You realize,” Scop says, “that there will be no turning back when we get onto the field, that from that moment forward everything we do can move us in only one direction? We must kill them all, the Blues, we must kill them to the last one because otherwise they will kill us.” Is he reaching them? He cannot tell. “Do you want this to be a Blue world?” he says. “Do you really want to feel that in the generations to come the Greens will have perished from this earth? Is that the legacy that you want to leave?”
They look at him without comprehension. He knows that the concepts are too difficult for them, the words too puzzling but he had hoped that a certain mood could be conveyed, a level of feeling to which they would respond. Sometimes it is not so much meaning as rhythm which can energize them. Also they are not as stupid, he believes, as everyone takes them to be and at a certain level they take in everything. They can be reached. He has to believe that anyway; his presence would be utterly futile otherwise. “All right,” he says to them, a sudden chilling sensation that he is a fool choking himself, “let’s go out then. There is nothing else to say.”
They move away from him pounding their gear, moving toward the corridors in a flourish of movement that does not conceal that they are merely responding to verbal cues. There does not seem to be any feeling in them. There does not seem to be any interaction either; what has been said of them is true, they are not social creatures, know nothing of relationships, may not even be conscious of one another as living beings because of the conditioning that has taught them that they are machines and that their one purpose is to destroy those of other colors. Scop alone in the corner now watches them go, realizes that they are utterly outside of his ability to reach them but that this is no insult to him; they are outside of anyone’s ability. They merely perform their dreadful actions and die but none of it has anything to do with human persuasion.
Well, he thinks, well, it might have something to do with the culture itself. It is a barbarous, mechanistic construct in which he lives; the purposes of the machines are at all times greater or at least clearer than the purposes of the populace who lives entrapped within them and it is pointless to look at the Gamesman as anything extraordinary; he is simply, stripped bare, the final and most typical product of his culture. As he walks down the corridor, following them through the close concrete and into the arena it must be that the thought comes to Scop for the first time: the thought that the entire culture is ruinous, barbarous and insane. It is not just the Games. The Games are merely that point at which the culture asserts itself most clearly, at which it is easiest to see exactly what is going on here. But the Games do not matter except as diversion. The trouble is that he, the Gamesmen, everyone . . . they are living in a culture which is completely mad.
Then he must change it, Scop thinks as he walks slowly up the steps, staggering a little at the simplicity or then again it might be the complexity of his insight, then if this is truly the case then it must be changed and it falls upon him to change it. Ultimately responsibility must descend upon the individual who will take it; it cannot be shirked once acknowledged. If the culture is mad and he has seen it clearly then he cannot let it go by; he must do everything within his power to change it.
Wondering how he can possibly change it Scop walks upon the field hearing as if from a great distance the sound of the shifters roaring as the teams take their places to the side and doffing their superficial gear prepare for death.
CHAPTER III
THE TRUE AND THE REAL AND THE FINAL MEANING: Still in the dream which has now become familiar, comforting, almost reality itself, certainly too close to all the secret places of him to fight against, still deep in the dream which is the only reality he will ever again know Lee Harvey Osborn now takes himself to have been in the basement of a police station for almost two days, submitting to interrogation with only short interruptions for food or elimination; once a brief nap. They are not trying to torture him they have made clear, only to try to work with him to obtain the true and the real and the final meaning for what he has done. By this he gathers that they want a confession but of course that is the one thing that he cannot give them since he is not sure as to whether or not he shot the President. Everything seems so terribly unclear; his memory of the events of recent weeks is blurred, chirascuro. All that he is clear about recently is the movie theater and what he was doing when they caught him: he was thinking about masturbating, tell the truth and be done. It must be the brain damage. He knows he has a brain tumor. For months it has been eating away into his soft, vulnerable grey tissue, chewing up little parts of his memory and reason until at last, within only a little time he would have had nothing up there at all except the neural sockets that sent instructions to his hands to pull off. This is better. At least he is under custody now. Eventually a doctor will examine him and at that point they will be clear as to what has happened to him and they will not bother him any more. He may even get an operation. He may get the help that he needs.
But for the moment they try to coax out of him a confession. Why did he do it? Where was he when he did it? What did he do with the rifle and for that matter how had he gotten the rifle to begin with? Had he planned this for a long time, mapping out the President’s route or rather was it an impulsive thing decided on the day itself? He gathers that they have been in his apartment but there is nothing that they could find there. He does not even remember what is in his apartment. As far as his wife; that means nothing. He is not even sure that he has a wife. It has been so terribly long since he has thought of her. It has been so terribly long since he has thought of anything. Mostly he is interested in going to the Bijou and beating it off.
They want to know what his plans were for escaping. Did he really think that he would get away with it? Where was he going to go? Did he have assistance from a foreign country? Did he have contacts in some foreign port which would enable him to flee? They are quite polite for all the brutality of the process. He has dealt with a lot of police in a lot of cities through his time and certainly these must be given credit for courtesy; the southern accents, the curiously formal tilt of their faces as they ask the most shockingly intimate questions in the most distant and apologetic fashion is remarkable and would be something worth remembering in other circumstances, if he believed that he had any kind of a future. He would put all of this down in his novel except that he is pretty sure at this point that there is not going to be a novel that he, Lee Harvey Osborn, is for all intents and purposes finished. Maybe not. How has his sex life been? Not too bad, he says, like anyone else’s sex life. Of course with the baby recently and certainly the problems they had had with his not being able to get a job. . . . Maybe he would like to talk some more about that. Except that he would not. There are certain things it turns out and to his surprise which he really cannot talk about. Like his wife. He begins to cry.
But crying is no more helpful to him in this dream than it was ever outside of it. It seems that they are not impressed and that indeed his crying, as a sign of weakness, gives them encouragement to pick up the pace of their questioning, to dig into him in a way that they had not before. The politeness begins to drop out of their voices. They begin to ask their questions in a more strident fashion, facing him now, hurling the questions to him in grunting passion, one syllable at a time and they start to get through to him, the emotional significance of the questioning that is: they are serious here, they are serious,theybelievethathehaskilledthePresident and it is possible that until this moment he has not taken them seriously, has not believed that they could possibly have this on their minds. How could he have killed the President? He loved him, revered him, didn’t everyone? The President was going to occupy a very important role in the novel that he was writing, a whole chapter devoted to his life and works and in praise of the man to say nothing of his beautiful wife; that was what he thought of the President but they do not believe this. They do not seem to take him seriously. No one took him seriously, that was always one of his problems Osborn thinks but this is in a more dangerous fashion because he begins to see that these people want him dead. They really do. They will not be satisfied until he is dead despite the fact that their tempers are still well in check and they maintain the outer edges of their politeness. How could he have believed that essentially these people were on his side and willing to help him, to work with him? What a fool he has been! Of course it is too late now. He keeps on denying however. That is the only thing he has to hold onto, the denials, the fact that he has not done what they have accused him of. He knows that he could not have done it. Everything is a blur right up to the movie theater, the brain tumor, that is it, has wiped out his memory but still he knows himself. He must have faith in what he has been. He could not have done something like that.
