The pressing circle began to melt back. The extended hands disappeared, as if into a numbed, intolerable darkness.
“Don’t stand there,” the other cop said to Joe in his thick cop’s voice. “Get moving. Get those coins out of here or I’ll write you out a citation after which you won’t have one goddam coin left.”
Joe walked on.
“What do you think you are?” the other cop said to him, as the cruiser followed after him, holding its position directly above his head. “Some sort of privately endowed philanthropic organization?”
Saying nothing, Joe continued on.
“You’re required by law to answer me,” the cop said.
Reaching into his asbestos cloth sack, Joe got out a quarter. He handed it up toward the nearer of the two cops. And, at the same time, saw with amazement that only a few quarters remained.
My coins, he realized, are gone! So there is only one door open to me—the mail tube and what it has brought in the last two days. Whether I like it or not—by what I’ve done just now it’s been decided.
“Why did you hand me this coin?” the cop asked.
“As a tip,” Joe said. And, at the same time, felt his head burst as the laser beam, on stun, hit him directly between his eyes.
At the police station the swank young police official, blondhaired, blue-eyed, slim, in his swank clean uniform, said, “We’re not going to book you, Mr. Fernwright, although technically you’re guilty of a crime against the people.”
“The state,” Joe said; he sat hunched over, rubbing his forehead, trying to make the pain stop. “Not the people,” he managed to say. He shut his eyes and the pain flooded over him, radiating out from the spot where the beam had touched him.
“What you’re saying,” the young police official said, “constitutes in itself a felony and we could book you on that, too. We could even turn you over to the Political Control Bureau as an enemy of the working class, engaged in a conspiracy to advocate agitation against the people and the servants of the people, such as ourselves. But your record heretofore—“ He studied Joe with professional intensity. “A sane man doesn’t start handing coins out to total strangers.” The police official examined a document which had come unreeling itself out of a slot of his desk. “Obviously you acted without deliberation.”
“Yes,” Joe said. “Without deliberation.” He felt nothing in the way of emotions; he experienced only bodily discomfort, acute and still growing. It had preempted any feeling, any mental activity.
“However, we’re going to impound your remaining coins. For the present at least. And you’ll be on probation for a year, during which time you will report here, once a week, and give us an account, a full account, of your activities.”
“Without a trial?” Joe said.
“Do you want to be tried?” the police official eyed him keenly.
“No,” Joe said. He went on rubbing his head. The QCA material apparently hasn’t been fed to their computers yet, he decided. But eventually it’ll all be combined. They’ll put it all together, my tipping the cop, my finding notes in the water closet of my toilet. I’m a nut, he said to himself. I’ve gone mad from inactivity; the last seven months have destroyed me. And now, when I made my move, when I took my coins to Mr. Job–_I couldn’t do it_.
“Wait a minute,” another cop said. “Here’s something on him from QCA. It just rolled down the circuit from their computer bank central.”
Turning, Joe ran toward the door of the police station. Toward the mass of people outside. As if to bury himself among them; to cease to be a finite part.
Two cops appeared ahead of him and they lunged toward him as he ran; they came closer unnaturally rapidly, as if on video tape speeded up. And then, suddenly, they were under water; they, like slender silver fish, gaped at him and rhythmically maneuvered themselves among—good god! coral and seaweed. And yet he himself felt nothing, no water; but here was a tank of water, instead of the police station, all the furniture like sunken wrecks, half-buried in sand. And the police twisted and streaked by him, lovely in their glittering gliding movements. But they could not touch him, because he, although standing in the center, was not in the tank. And he heard no sound. Their mouths moved, but only silence reached him.
Bobbing and undulating, a squid swept past him; it was, he thought, like the soul of the sea. The squid all at once ejected clouds of darkness, as if meant to efface everything. He saw no police officers, now; the darkness propagated itself until it filled up the panorama and then it became more intense, as if it were not opaque enough before. But I can breathe, Joe said. “Hey,” he said aloud—and heard his own voice. I’m just not in the water, he realized, like they are. I can identify myself; I’m split off, a separate entity. But why?
What if I try to move? he wondered. He took one step, another, and then clunk; he rebounded off a wall-like surface. Another way, he said; he turned and took a step to his right. Clunk. In panic he thought, I’m in a box like a coffin! Did they kill me? he asked himself. When I tried to run for the door. He reached his arms out, into the darkness, groping . . . and something was placed in his right hand. Small, square. With two disklike knobs.
A transistor radio.
He turned it on.
“Hi there, folks!” a happy, tinny voice sounded in the darkness. “This is Cavorting Cary Karns here with six phones sitting in front of me and twenty switchboard circuits going, so that I can hear you all, all of you good people who want to discuss something, anything. The number is 394-950-911111, so call in, folks, about anything at all, whatever’s on your mind, good, bad, indifferent, interesting, or dull—just call Cavorting Cary Karns at 394-950-911111 and the whole radio audience out there will hear you and what you have to say, your opinion, a fact that you know that you think everyone else should know—“ From the speaker of the transistor radio came the sound of a phone ringing. “Hello—we’ve got a caller already!” Cavorting Cary Karns declared. “Yes sir. Yes ma’am, I mean.”
“Mr. Karns,” a shrill female voice said, “there ought to be a stop sign placed at the intersection of Fulton Avenue and Clover, where all the little schoolchildren, and I see them every day—“
Something hard, some dense object, bumped Joe’s left hand. He took hold of it. A phone.
Sitting down, he placed the phone and the transistor radio in front of him and then he got out his cigarette lighter and zipped the butane flame on. It illuminated a meager circle, but within the circle he could make out the phone and the transistor radio. A Zenith transistor radio, he noted. Evidently a good one, from the size of it.
“Okay, folks out there,” Cavorting Cary Karns merrily prattled. “The number is 394-950-911111; that’s where you’ll reach me and through me the whole world of—“
Joe dialed. At last he had painstakingly dialed the whole number. He held the receiver to his ear, listened to a busy signal for a moment, and then heard, from both the receiver and the radio, the voice of Cavorting Cary Karns. “Yes sir, or is it ma’am?” Karns asked.
“Where am I?” Joe said into the phone.
“Hey there!” Karns said. “We’ve got somebody out there, some poor soul, who’s lost. Your name is, sir?”
“Joseph Fernwright,” Joe said.
“Well, Mr. Fernwright, it’s a downright pleasure to talk to you. Your question is, Where are you? Does anybody know where Mr. Joseph Fernwright of Cleveland—you are in Cleveland, aren’t you, Mr. Fernwright?–does anybody out there know where he is, at this moment? I think this is a valid question on Mr. Fernwright’s part; I’d like to hold the lines open for anyone who can call in and give us some idea, at least a general idea, of the vicinity in which Mr. Fernwright is currently. So you other people, who don’t know where Mr. Fernwright is, could you not call in until we’ve located Mr. Fernwright? Mr. Fernwright, it shouldn’t be long; we’ve got a ten million audience and a fifty-thousand-watt transmitter going and—wait! A call.” Tinny sound of a phone ringing. “Yes sir or ma’am. Sir. Your name, sir?”
A male voice, from the radio and from Joe’s phone, said, “My name is Dwight L. Glimmung of 301 Pleasant Hill Road, and I know where Mr. Fernwright is. He’s in my basement. Slightly to the right and a little behind my furnace. He’s in a wooden packing crate that came with an air-conditioning unit that I ordered from People’s Sears, last year.”