The Huddlers Part 5

"Farmer?" I suggested.

"Oh," she said, "oh, oh--"

"Or a cheeseburger," I added.

There was a small crowd, now, openly watching. One man said, "Hey, this is better than them jerks inside. Slug him, lady."

Jean started to laugh, and so did I, and then all of us were laughing, the whole crowd.

We didn't go to a hamburger place. We went to a place where we could dance, too, and I had a small gla.s.s of wine, and wondered why we'd outgrown alcohol, on our planet.

It was a night I will never forget. It was a night I learned how much she meant to me. There wasn't ever going to be anybody else for me, after that night.

We were married in Las Trenos at five-thirty the next morning.

And still, I didn't tell her where I was from. When the time came, she could go back with me, but I couldn't risk sharing that secret with her.

I didn't have the right to jeopardize my people by giving her information she might divulge unintentionally.

The world was our playground, and my study hall American first. We drove east, taking our time, while I tried to get the temper of the people. I never overlooked a chance to talk to people; the papers were no subst.i.tute for that. And between the papers and the people, I found that only the hysterics were voluble, only the biased articulate. And yet, it was a country with a liberal and progressive tradition, a country that should have been informed beyond the average.

Knowledge had been made too easy; the glib were in command.

Fear, Jars had said, and it was becoming increasingly clear to me that he was closer to it than Deering. For Deering's viewpoint, I had a working model, I had Jean.

In the canyon city, New York, high in our room at the Empire-Hudson, she said, "You're an awfully nosy guy, Dream Boat."

"I like to talk to people," I said. "Haven't you been getting enough attention?"

"As much as I can handle," she said. "And I'm enjoying every second of it. But it seems to be getting you down."

"You or the people?" I asked, and mussed her hair.

She didn't answer that. "Fred," she said, "do you remember that day at breakfast, long ago? Do you remember asking about Ambrose Bierce and Amelia Earhart?"

"I guess I do."

"Don't be evasive, Fred. You know you do."

I pulled her close. "Is this going to be a questioning period? Is this one of _those_ marriages?"

"Now, Fred--" she said, against my shoulder. "Be serious, please, Fred.

Please be serious--oh, you, Fred--"

We went to England. What's that phrase they have--"muddling through"?

That's what they were doing. Proudly, with a minimum of complaint, with no thought of rebellion, with no rationalizing or projection, living as the submerged tenth lives in America, and seeming to think that--well, things _could_ be worse.

In Italy, it was the kids, the beggars and procurers and thieves and even murderers who were kids. In Spain we found much of the same. In France it was all the heat and no light, charges and counter-charges, lies and counter-lies, confusion and corruption.

In Berlin, it was Russia. The cloud that darkens the world looms darkest in Berlin. The apathy that grips the world is epitomized in Berlin. A people with no sense of guilt and no reason for hope, nor stirring to the promise of a re-armed Germany. A bled and devastated people, shorn of their chief strength, their national pride.

Jean said, "I've seen enough. Haven't you, Fred? How much can you take?"

"One more," I said. "Russia."

"Don't be silly," she said. "How would we get into Russia?"

"_We_ wouldn't. But _I_ would."

"Look, baby, whither though goest, I--"

"Up to here," I said. "Who's the big boss in this family?"

"Now, Fred--"

"Now, Jean--"

"Get away from me. This time, it won't work. If you think that for one second you're going into that no man's land alone--and--"

It took some talking, to convince her, it took some lies. She'd wait, she agreed finally, in Switzerland. In comfort for a change.

It took two diamonds to get to the right man, and it took a formula from there. A formula that is learned in the first year of college chemistry on my planet, a formula for converting an element. A formula this planet couldn't have been more than a decade short of learning, anyway.

The last man I saw in Berlin went along, for which I was grateful, though he didn't know that. I don't speak Russian, but he did.

They were careful, they don't even trust themselves. I told Nilenoff the formula came from America, and there were more, but I needed money. I didn't tell him the fallacy in the formula; it had taken us three years to realize what it was.

My trips were limited, directed, and avoided the seamier side. I saw the modern humming factories, and the mammoth farms. No unemployment, no waste, no "capitalistic blood sucking"--and the lowest standard of living in the industrialized world. A vast, bleak land peopled with stringless puppets, with walking cadavers.

I remembered the faces of the crowds and the strangely mixed people in America, their obvious feelings, emotions and rivalries. There was nothing strange about these people of Russia--they were dead, spiritually dead.

The country that could have been a cultural and industrial center of the world was a robot-land of nine million square miles, getting ready for war, getting ready to take over the dreams of Hitler and make them come true.

I came out with a promise of ten thousand American dollars for every one of the future formulas I had a.s.sured them I could get to. I came out with the knowledge that I'd be a watched man from now on.

In Switzerland, Jean said, "Well--?"

"I'm ready to go home," I told her.

"America, you mean?"

"Where else?"

"I've been alone," she said, "and thinking. I've gone back to Sunset and Pacific Coast Highway and traced it all forward from there. And I don't think America's your home."

Very cool her voice, very tense her face. I smiled at her.