“Uh…just an accident. Maybe you could let me have clean rags and some iodine.”
Moyland stared at him, his bland face expressionless, then smiled. “You’ve got no troubles we can’t fix. Sit down.” He stepped to a cabinet and took out a bottle of bourbon, poured three fingers in a water glass, and handed it to Benz. “Work on that and I’ll fix you up.
He returned with some torn toweling and a bottle. “Sit here with your back to the window, and open your shirt. Have another drink. You’ll need it before I’m through.”
Benz glanced nervously at the window. “Why don’t you draw the shade?”
“It would attract attention. Honest people leave their shades up these days. Hold still. This is going to hurt.”
Three drinks later Benz was feeling better. Moyland seemed willing to sit and drink with him and to soothe his nerves. “You did well to come in,” Moyland told him. “There’s no sense hiding like a scared rabbit. It’s just butting your head against a stone wall. Stupid.”
Benz nodded. “That’s what I told them.”
“Told who?”
“Hunh? Oh, nobody. Just some guys I was talking to. Tramps.”
Moyland poured him another drink. “As a matter of fact you were in the Underground.”
“Me? Don’t be silly, Zack.”
“Look, Joe, you don’t have to kid me. I’m your friend. Even if you did tell me it wOuldn’t matter. In the first place, I wouldn’t have any proof. In the second place, I’m sympathetic to the Underground-any American is. I just think they’re wrong-headed and foolish. Otherwise I’d join ’em myself.”
“They’re foolish all right! You can say that again.”
“So you were in it?”
“Huh? You’re trying to trap me. I gave my word of honor — ”
“Oh, relax!” Moyland said hastily. “Forget it. I didn’t hear anything; I can’t tell anything. Hear no evil, see no evil-that’s me.” He changed the subject.
The level of the bottle dropped while Moyland explained current events as he saw them. “It’s a shame we had to take such a shellacking to learn our lesson but the fact of the matter is, we were standing in the way of the natural logic of progress. There was a time back in ’45 when we could have pulled the same stunt ourselves, only we weren’t bright enough to do it. World organization, world government. We stood in the way, so we got smeared. It had to come. A smart man can see that.”
Benz was bleary but he did not find this comment easy to take. “Look, Zack-you don’t mean you like what happened to us?”
“Like it? Of course not. But it was necessary. You don’t have to like having a tooth pulled-but it has to be done. Anyhow,” he went on, “it’s not all bad. The big cities were economically unsound anyway. We should have blown them up ourselves. Slum clearance, you might call it.”
Benz banged his empty glass down. “Maybe so-but they made slaves out of us!”
“Take it easy, Joe,” Moyland said, filling his glass, “you’re talking abstractions. The cop on the corner could push you around whenever he wanted to. Is that freedom? Does it matter whether the cop talks with an Irish accent or some other accent? No, chum, there’s a lot of guff talked about freedom. No man is free. There is no such thing as freedom. There are only various privileges. Free speech-we’re talking freely now, aren’t we? After all, you don’t want to get up on a platform and shoot off your face. Free press? When did you ever own a newspaper? Don’t be a chump. Now that you’ve shown sense and come in, you are going to find that things aren’t so very different. A little more orderly and no more fear of war, that’s all. Girls make love just like they used to, the smart guys get along, and the suckers still get the short end of the deal.”
Benz nodded. “You’re right, Zack. I’ve been a fool.”
“I’m glad you see it. Now take those wild men you were with. What freedom have they got? Freedom to starve, freedom to sleep on the cold ground, freedom to be hunted.”