The Reign of Brainwash: Dystopia Box Set. Эдгар Аллан По

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      When he was with Lorinda, gone was all the pleasant toying and sympathetic talk with which they had relieved boredom. She was fierce now, and vibrant. She drew him close enough to her, but instantly she would be thinking of him only as a comrade in plots to kill off the Corpos. (And it was pretty much a real killing-off that she meant; there wasn't left to view any great amount of her plausible pacifism.)

      She was busy with good and perilous works. Partner Nipper had not been able to keep her in the Tavern kitchen; she had so systematized the work that she had many days and evenings free, and she had started a cooking-class for farm girls and young farm wives who, caught between the provincial and the industrial generations, had learned neither good rural cooking with a wood fire, nor yet how to deal with canned goods and electric grills—and who most certainly had not learned how to combine so as to compel the tight-fisted little locally owned power-and-light companies to furnish electricity at tolerable rates.

      "Heavensake, keep this quiet, but I'm getting acquainted with these country gals—getting ready for the day when we begin to organize against the Corpos. I depend on them, not the well-to-do women that used to want suffrage but that can't endure the thought of revolution," Lorinda whispered to him. "We've got to do something."

      "All right, Lorinda B. Anthony," he sighed.

      And Karl Pascal stuck.

      At Pollikop's garage, when he first saw Doremus after the jailing, he said, "God, I was sorry to hear about their pinching you, Mr. Jessup! But say, aren't you ready to join us Communists now?" (He looked about anxiously as he said it.)

      "I thought there weren't any more Bolos."

      "Oh, we're supposed to be wiped out. But I guess you'll notice a few mysterious strikes starting now and then, even though there can't be any more strikes! Why aren't you joining us? There's where you belong, c-comrade!"

      "Look here, Karl: you've always said the difference between the Socialists and the Communists was that you believed in complete ownership of all means of production, not just utilities; and that you admitted the violent class war and the Socialists didn't. That's poppycock! The real difference is that you Communists serve Russia. It's your Holy Land. Well—Russia has all my prayers, right after the prayers for my family and for the Chief, but what I'm interested in civilizing and protecting against its enemies isn't Russia but America. Is that so banal to say? Well, it wouldn't be banal for a Russian comrade to observe that he was for Russia! And America needs our propaganda more every day. Another thing: I'm a middle-class intellectual. I'd never call myself any such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds coined it, I'll have to accept it. That's my class, and that's what I'm interested in. The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do not think that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and the proletarians are the same. They want bread. We want—well, all right, say it, we want cake! And when you get a proletarian ambitious enough to want cake, too—why, in America, he becomes a middle-class intellectual just as fast as he can—if he can!"

      "Look here, when you think of 3 per cent of the people owning 90 per cent of the wealth—"

      "I don't think of it! It does not follow that because a good many of the intellectuals belong to the 97 per cent of the broke—that plenty of actors and teachers and nurses and musicians don't get any better paid than stage hands or electricians, therefore their interests are the same. It isn't what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your class—whether you prefer bigger funeral services or more books. I'm tired of apologizing for not having a dirty neck!"

      "Honestly, Mr. Jessup, that's damn nonsense, and you know it!"

      "Is it? Well, it's my American covered-wagon damn nonsense, and not the propaganda-aeroplane damn nonsense of Marx and Moscow!"

      "Oh, you'll join us yet."

      "Listen, Comrade Karl, Windrip and Hitler will join Stalin long before the descendants of Dan'l Webster. You see, we don't like murder as a way of argument—that's what really marks the Liberal!"

      About his future Father Perefixe was brief: "I'm going back to Canada where I belong—away to the freedom of the King. Hate to give up, Doremus, but I'm no Thomas à Becket, but just a plain, scared, fat little clark!"

      The surprise among old acquaintances was Medary Cole, the miller.

      A little younger than Francis Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley, less intensely aristocratic than those noblemen, since only one generation separated him from a chin-whiskered Yankee farmer and not two, as with them, he had been their satellite at the Country Club and, as to solid virtue, been president of the Rotary Club. He had always considered Doremus a man who, without such excuse as being a Jew or a Hunky or poor, was yet flippant about the sanctities of Main Street and Wall Street. They were neighbors, as Cole's "Cape Cod cottage" was just below Pleasant Hill, but they had not by habit been droppers-in.

      Now, when Cole came bringing David home, or calling for his daughter Angela, David's new mate, toward supper time of a chilly fall evening, he stopped gratefully for a hot rum punch, and asked Doremus whether he really thought inflation was "such a good thing."

      He burst out, one evening, "Jessup, there isn't another person in this town I'd dare say this to, not even my wife, but I'm getting awful sick of having these Minnie Mouses dictate where I have to buy my gunnysacks and what I can pay my men. I won't pretend I ever cared much for labor unions. But in those days, at least the union members did get some of the swag. Now it goes to support the M.M.'s. We pay them and pay them big to bully us. It don't look so reasonable as it did in 1936. But, golly, don't tell anybody I said that!"

      And Cole went off shaking his head, bewildered—he who had ecstatically voted for Mr. Windrip.

      On a day in late October, suddenly striking in every city and village and back-hill hide-out, the Corpos ended all crime in America forever, so titanic a feat that it was mentioned in the London Times. Seventy thousand selected Minute Men, working in combination with town and state police officers, all under the chiefs of the government secret service, arrested every known or faintly suspected criminal in the country. They were tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot immediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in ten released as innocent . . . and two in ten taken into the M.M.'s as inspectors.

      There were protests that at least six in ten had been innocent, but this was adequately answered by Windrip's courageous statement: "The way to stop crime is to stop it!"

      The next day, Medary Cole crowed at Doremus, "Sometimes I've felt like criticizing certain features of Corpo policy, but did you see what the Chief did to the gangsters and racketeers? Wonderful! I've told you right along what this country's needed is a firm hand like Windrip's. No shilly-shallying about that fellow! He saw that the way to stop crime was to just go out and stop it!"

      Then was revealed the New American Education, which, as Sarason so justly said, was to be ever so much newer than the New Educations of Germany, Italy, Poland, or even Turkey.

      The authorities abruptly closed some scores of the smaller, more independent colleges such as Williams, Bowdoin, Oberlin, Georgetown, Antioch, Carleton, Lewis Institute, Commonwealth, Princeton, Swarthmore, Kenyon, all vastly different one from another but alike in not yet having entirely become machines. Few of the state universities were closed; they were merely to be absorbed by central Corpo universities, one in each of the eight provinces. But the government began with only two. In the Metropolitan District, Windrip University took over the Rockefeller Center and Empire State buildings, with most of Central Park for playground (excluding the general public from it entirely, for the rest was СКАЧАТЬ