Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) (17 page)

I thought of the people who had been
trapped under the bomb.
 
How many had
died?—half a million
;
twice that?
 

I felt a hand on my shoulder.
 
I turned.
 
Cheryl Fineberg stood beside me, holding out her sweater.
 

“You looked so cold out here Jerry.
 
Don’t you want to put this on?”

I grinned and pushed my arms into the
sleeves.
 
Cheryl was a nice little thing
to have around.
 
It was the first time I
saw her simply as a girl.
 

Unfortunately Cheryl’s sweater was too
small.
 
It pulled painfully against the
abrasive burns on my back.
 
I took it off
again.
 

“Maybe I ought to start getting used to
a few discomforts,” I apologized.
 

“We all should, I guess.”
 
She folded the sweater carefully.
 
“I’ll put this aside.
 
Your mother might really have to have it
if—well, later on…”

Yes, later on:
 
if we were still refugees in the mountains
when winter came.
 
So that possibility
had occurred to Cheryl, too.
 
She wasn’t
the kind of girl who tried to avoid an unpleasant fact by pretending it wasn’t
there.
 

“The morning is so beautiful,
Jerry.
 
It’s hard to believe the
nightmare last night was real.”
 

“We were lucky.
 
If we had gone on to the desert as we were
supposed to—”

As I glanced in Cheryl’s direction I
saw, far up the road, a man walking toward us.
 
I stood up, slipping my finger through the rifle guard.
 
The sun
rose
over
the ridge and in the slanting shaft of light on the highway I recognized Willie
Clapper.
 
He raised his hands high.
 

“Don’t shoot!” he cried.
 
“I’m a friend.
 
I’m not armed.”
 
His voice was ragged with fear.
 

I motioned for him to join us.
 
He ran forward eagerly.
 
“My cabin was burned.
 
I have no food.
 
If you could spare me a little something to
eat—” His wheedling trailed off hopefully.
 

“We met last night, Dr. Clapper,” I said,
“on the road.
 
Perhaps you remember—”

“I was scared.
 
I couldn’t think straight.”
 

“You deliberately started a second fire
and tried to kill us.”
 

“I thought you were—
Well
,
the Reds would send subversives out to get me; I’ve fought the good fight so
long.”
 

From Willie Clapper’s point of view,
that nonsense was probably logical.
 
“All
right,” I agreed.
 
“You can eat with
us.”
 

Thatcher made no attempt to hide his
anger when he saw Clapper; if the decision had been up to Pat, Clapper would
have starved.
 

I thought Mom would be pleased to find
herself so close to her idol.
 
Instead,
she was cold and aloof, remembering that Clapper had nearly run her down the
night before.
 

I had made our fire at the back of the
clearing.
 
Sheltered by the rocks, we
could not be seen from the road, nor were we able to see more than a
twenty-foot segment of the highway.
 
The
Soviet paratrooper stumbled on us totally unprepared.
 
We heard the indrawn breath from the mouth of
the clearing.

For a second no one moved.
 
We sat staring dumbly at the enemy; he stared
back at us.
 
His uniform was torn and
smeared.
 
His face seemed unusually red,
as if he had stayed too long in the summer sun.
 
He was carrying a submachine gun; he raised it slowly.
 

Willie Clapper sprang up.
 
“Not me!” he yelped.
 
“You know who I am.
 
These others—”

Thatcher slammed his elbow into
Clapper’s stomach, and the politician dropped, groaning.
 
Simultaneously Mom screamed and snatched my
rifle, firing blindly.
 

The Soviet soldier toppled toward
us.
 
His gun clattered from his
fingers.
 
Cheryl caught it and bent over
the man.
 
“He’s still alive,” she said.
 
“Your shot went wild, Mrs. Bonhill, I think
he was hurt in the fire.”
 

Cheryl looked at the submachine
gun.
 
She ran her fingers over the firing
stud.
 
“This may be the man who killed my
father; he may be the man who dropped the bomb on the desert.”
 

IX
.
 
The
City—Friday
morning, 2:30 A.M.
 
Dr. Stewart Roswell

TWENTY-FOUR of us stood rigid against
the cloister arches while General Anton Zergoff walked toward George
Knight.
 
Raw, heavy-muscled, animal
power, a Goliath armed with whip and revolver and the absolute authority of
the military conqueror—facing a slight, unimposing, beaten man, armed only with
the intangible strength of conviction.
 

“The Quaker Pacifist,” Zergoff
purred.
 
“The coward
afraid to fight.”
 

He lashed the back of his hand against
Knight’s jaw.
 
The Quaker reeled, blood
trickling from the freshly opened wounds in his lip.
 
The General bent close to the smaller man’s
face.
 

“This is the idiot who betrayed
Alexander Gordov.
 
In a people’s
democracy, Comrade Knight, we are realists.
 
I consider it my responsibility to educate you in the fundamental
psychology of human nature.”
 
Zergoff
swung his hand again; Knight staggered and I saw his eyes glaze with pain.
 
“Every man will fight, Comrade Knight—every
man, when it means his own survival.
 
It
shall be my pleasure to smash this bourgeois idealism of yours.
 
And when you are broken, Comrade, you will
work with us or face the firing squad—however the whim happens to strike
me.”
 

George Knight lifted his hand
quietly.
 
In a quiet, almost compassionate
voice, he said, “And now, General, like your misguided friend—
”
 
He
gestured toward
Dragen “—now you will quote Christ’s words and order me to turn the other
cheek.
 
The due of
Caesar.”
 

Zergoff stood for a moment clenching his
fists.
 
Then, slowly, he began to
smile.
 
“No, Comrade, I expect to apply a
somewhat more realistic psychology.”
 

He jerked a revolver from his belt,
emptying it except for one shell.
 
He put
the weapon on the table, motioning the Soviet soldiers back against the
wall.
 
Watching Knight’s face, he
beckoned one of Dragen’s bullyboys, disarmed the
man
and handed him a riding crop.
 
He pushed
Knight close to the table, where he stood two feet from the loaded
revolver.
 

“A lesson, Comrade,”
Zergoff said, “in human nature.
 
You
should find the experiment illuminating.
 
Comrade Bergoll, here, has always been obedient to party
discipline.
 
I am ordering him, under no
condition, to touch the revolver.
 
That
weapon is for you to use; your only way to save yourself, incidentally.
 
Comrade Bergoll will beat you with the crop
until you break down and defend yourself.
 
The gun’s there, by your hand.
 
Who knows?
 
You might even reach
it in time.”
 

General Zergoff moved back with the
Soviet soldiers.
 
He gulped a stiff drink
from the vodka bottle, then he signaled with a gesture, and the beating
began.
 
I felt a sick nausea.
 
Somewhere among the prisoners I heard a man
vomiting; Zergoff bellowed with laughter.
 
“The party develops strong bellies,” he said
;
“if you survive.”
 

And all the while I heard the steady
slash of the crop upon human flesh.
 
Knight neither cried out nor resisted.
 
The silence lengthened; it endured for an eternity.
 

Sudden fury distorted Zergoff’s face and
he ordered the torment to stop.
 

George Knight still stood beside the
revolver, bleeding and almost unconscious.
 
I thought he smiled; it was difficult to identify an expression in the
pulp of his face.
 

“Is it possible, General,” he asked,
“that your psychology of human nature needs revision?”

“You won’t destroy me the way you did
Gordov!”

“General, before your experiment began,
you admitted failure.”
 

“I have not failed!
 
On your knees you will confess—”

“If I believed in violence, when you
left the gun on the table I would have used it against you, General.
 
You knew I wouldn’t.
 
You knew you were safe.”
 

General Zergoff hurled an unopened
bottle at Knight.
 
It struck Knight’s
head, and the Quaker collapsed on the floor.
 
The bottle shattered against the wall.
 
His face white, Zergoff moved toward Knight.
 
With the toe of his boot he turned the Quaker
on his back.
 

“Not dead,” he grunted, with what seemed
to me a tone of satisfaction.
 
He
snapped his fingers at his men.
 
They
propped Knight into a chair and tried to revive him.
 

Zergoff faced us, pacing up and down
while he talked; slowly he regained confidence.
 

“You have seen a demonstration of our
methods of education.
 
The lesson should
be clear to you all.”
 

Was he so accustomed to success, to the
Communist formula of fear that he didn’t know what he was saying?
 
The lesson was there:
 
we had watched the conqueror admit
defeat.
 
Knight had given each of us the
will to resist in our own way, armed with our individual beliefs.
 
Anton Zergoff had missed the point.
 

“We have a use for each of you,” the
General went on.
 
“You can serve us
painlessly or after indoctrination.
 
The
choice is yours.
 

“Los Angeles is our key to victory.
 
Beginning at dawn we shall funnel manpower
into this area—according to the present plan, approximately five thousand men
an hour.
 
We have transformed the war
into an infantry conflict; with all of Europe,
Asia
and Africa to draw from, we hold the overwhelming superiority in
manpower.
 
On both sides the atomic
weapon is finished.
 
Production capacity
has been destroyed.
 
Your air force as
well as ours has been reduced to a negligible factor.
 
True, your navy is still intact.
 
But we have submarines in the Los Angeles
harbor to hold off any direct naval attack.
 

“I am telling you this—the full,
strategic picture—so you will understand that our victory is inevitable.
 
We ask your help in order to bring the day
of peace closer and spare your people the futile sacrifice of a long infantry
war.
 

“We will go on the air at noon, on a
twenty-four hour basis.
 
We expect each
of you to speak for us to your fellow citizens.
 
Nothing really different from what you have already said or written,
nothing different from what you believe yourselves.
 
Can you honestly call that propaganda?
 
Can you still say we are not sincerely humanitarian,
not—
”

An officer came to the door.
 
Zergoff turned toward him.
 
“Well?” he snapped.
 

“He has left the city, Comrade
General.”