He turned away from the window. “We can’t go to Bexford and call the state police. If our own government is behind Salsbury, if our own leaders want to enslave us, we’ll never win. It’s hopeless. But if it isn’t behind him, if it doesn’t know what he’s achieved, then we don’t dare let it know. Because the moment the military finds out-it’ll appropriate Salsbury’s discoveries; and there are some factions of the military that wouldn’t be opposed to using subliminal programming against us.”
Looking around at the books about Nazism, totalitarianism, and mob psychology, thinking ruefully of what he’d learned about some men’s lust for power, Sam said, “You’re right. Besides, I’ve been thinking about the problems with the long-distance phone service.”
Paul knew what he meant. “Salsbury’s taken over the telephone exchange.”
“And if he’s done that,” Sam said, “he’s taken other precautions too. He’s probably blockaded the roads and every other route out of town. We couldn’t go to Bexford and tell the state police even if we still wanted to.”
“We’re trapped,” Jenny said quietly.
“For the time being,” Paul said, “that really doesn’t matter. We’ve already decided there’s no place to run anyway. But if he’s not working for the government, if he’s backed by a corporation or a single wealthy man, maybe we’ve got a chance to stop him here in Black River.”
“Stop him . . .” Sam stared thoughtfully at the floor. “Do you realize what you’re saying? We’d have to get our hands on him, interrogate him-and then kill him. Death is the only thing that will stop a man like that. We’d also have to find out from him who he’s associated with-and kill anyone else who might understand how the drug was made and how the subliminal program was constructed.” He looked up from the floor. “That could mean two murders, three, four, or a dozen.”
“None of us is a killer,” Jenny said.
“Every man’s a potential killer,” Paul said. “When it comes to matters of survival, any man is capable of anything. And this is sure as hell a matter of survival.”
“I killed men in the war,” Sam said.
“So did I,” Paul said. “A different war than yours. But the same act.”
“That was different,” Jenny said.
“Was it?”
“That was war,” she said.
“This is war too,” Paul said.
She stared at Paul’s hands, as if imagining them with a knife or a gun or clamped around a man’s throat.
Sensing her thoughts, he raised his hands and studied them for a moment. On occasion, washing his hands before dinner or after treating a sick animal, he would flash back to the war, back to Southeast Asia. He would hear the guns and see the blood again in his memory. In these almost psychic moments, he was both amazed and dismayed that the same hands were accustomed to mundane and horrible acts, that they could heal or injure, make love or kill, and look no different after the task was done. Codified morality, he thought, was indeed a blessing but also a curse of civilization. A blessing because it permitted men to live in harmony most of the time. A curse because- when the Jaws of nature and especially of human nature made it necessary for a man to wound or kill another man in order to save himself and his family-it spawned remorse and guilt even if the violence was unwanted and unavoidable.
Besides, he reminded himself, these are the 1970s. This is the age of science and technology when a man often is required to act with the implacable and unemotional savagery of the machine. For better or worse, in these times gentility is becoming less and less a sign of the civilized man and is, in fact, very nearly an obsolescent quality. You see gentility, most often, in those who are least likely to survive wave after wave of future shock.
Lowering his hands he said, “In the classic paranoid vein, it’s us against them. Except that this isn’t a delusion or an illusion; it’s real.”
Jenny seemed to accept the need for murder as quickly as he had accepted the fact that he might be called upon to commit it. By this point in her life, she had experienced, as had all but the most gentle people, at least the flickering of a homicidal urge in a moment of despair or great frustration. She hadn’t accepted it as the solution to whatever problem had inspired it. But she was not incapable of conceiving of a situation in which homicide was the most reasonable response to a threat. In spite of the overprotected, sheltered upbringing of which she’d spoken last Monday, she could adapt to even the most unpleasant truths. Perhaps, Paul thought, the ordeal with her first husband had made her stronger, tougher, and more resilient than she realized.