To inspire himself, he lit up a marijuana cigarette, excellent Land-O-Smiles brand.
In his room on Hayes Street, Frank Frink lay in bed wondering how to get up. Sun glared past the blind onto the heap of clothes that had fallen to the floor. His glasses, too. Would he step on them? Try to get to bathroom by other route, he thought. Crawl or roll. His head ached but he did not feel sad. Never look back, he decided. Time? The clock on the dresser. Eleven-thirty! Good grief. But still he lay.
I’m fired, he thought.
Yesterday he had done wrong at the factory. Spouted the wrong kind of talk to Mr. Wyndam-Matson, who had a dished-in face with Socrates-type nose, diamond ring, gold fly zipper. In other words, a power. A throne. Frink’s thoughts wandered groggily.
Yes, he thought, and now they’ll blacklist me; my skill is no use—I have no trade. Fifteen years’ experience. Gone.
And now he would have to appear at the Laborers’ Justification Commission for a revision of his work category. Since he had never been able to make out Wyndam-Matson’s relationship to the _pinocs_–the puppet white government at Sacramento—he could not fathom his ex-employer’s power to sway the real authorities, the Japanese. The LJC was pinoc run. He would be facing four or five middle-aged plump white faces, on the order of Wyndam-Matson’s. If he failed to get justification there, he would make his way to one of the Import-Export Trade Missions which operated out of Tokyo, and which had offices throughout California, Oregon, Washington, and the parts of Nevada included in the Pacific States of America. But if he failed successfully to plead there . . .
Plans roamed his mind as he lay in bed gazing up at the ancient light fixture in the ceiling. He could for instance slip across into the Rocky Mountain States. But it was loosely banded to the PSA, and might extradite him. What about the South? His body recoiled. Ugh. Not that. As a white man he would have plenty of place, in fact more than he had here in the PSA. But . . . he did not want that kind of place.
And, worse, the South had a cat’s cradle of ties, economic, ideological, and god knew what, with the Reich. And Frank Frink was a Jew.
His original name was Frank Fink. He had been born on the East Coast, in New York, and in 1941 he had been drafted into the Army of the United States of America, right after the collapse of Russia. After the Japs had taken Hawaii he had been sent to the West Coast. When the war ended, there he was, on the Japanese side of the settlement line. And here he was today, fifteen years later.
In 1947, on Capitulation Day, he had more or less gone berserk. Hating the Japs as he did, he had vowed revenge; he had buried his Service weapons ten feet underground, in a basement, well-wrapped and oiled, for the day he and his buddies arose. However, time was the great healer, a fact he had not taken into account. When he thought of the idea now, the great blood bath, the purging of the pinocs and their masters, he felt as if were reviewing one of those stained yearbooks from his high school days, coming upon an account of his boyhood aspirations. Frank “Goldfish” Fink is going to be a paleontologist and vows to marry Norma Prout. Norma Prout was the class schones Mädchen, and he really had vowed to marry her. That was all so goddam long ago, like listening to Fred Allen or seeing a W. C. Fields movie. Since 1947 he had probably seen or talked to six hundred thousand Japanese, and the desire to do violence to any or all of them had simply never materialized, after the first few months. It just was not relevant any more.
But wait. There was one, a Mr. Oinuro, who had bought control of a great area of rental property in downtown San Francisco, and who for a time had been Frank’s landlord. There was a bad apple, he thought. A shark who had never made repairs, had partitioned rooms smaller and smaller, raised rents . . . Omuro had gouged the poor, especially the nearly destitute jobless ex-servicemen during the depression years of the early ‘fifties. However, it had been one of the Japanese trade missions which had cut off Omuro’s head for his profiteering. And nowadays such a violation of the harsh, rigid, but just Japanese civil law was unheard of. It was a credit to the incorruptibility of the Jap occupation officials, especially those who had come in after the War Cabinet had fallen.
Recalling the rugged, stoic honesty of the Trade Missions, Frink felt reassured. Even Wyndam-Matson would be waved off like a noisy fly. W-M Corporation owner or not. At least, so he hoped. I guess I really have faith in this Co-Prosperity Pacific Alliance stuff, he said to himself. Strange. Looking back to the early days . . . it had seemed such an obvious fake, then. Empty propaganda. But now.
He rose from the bed and unsteadily made his way to the bathroom. While he washed and shaved, he listened to the midday news on the radio.
“Let us not deride this effort,” the radio was saying as he momentarily shut off the hot water.
No, we won’t, Frink thought bitterly. He knew which particular effort the radio had in mind. Yet, there was after all something humorous about it, the picture of stolid, grumpy Germans walking around on Mars, on the red sand where no humans had ever stepped before. Lathering his jowls, Frink began a chanting satire to himself. Gott, Herr Kreisleiter. Ist dies vielleicht der Ort wo man das Konzentrationslager bilden kann? Das Wetter ist so schon. Heiss, aben doch schon . . .
The radio said: “Co-Prosperity Civilization must pause and consider whether in our quest to provide a balanced equity of mutual duties and responsibilities coupled with remunerations . . .” Typical jargon from the ruling hierarchy, Frink noted. “. . . we have not failed to perceive the future arena in which the affairs of man will be acted out, be they Nordic, Japanese, Negroid . . .” On and on it went.
As he dressed, he mulled with pleasure his satire. The weather is schon, so schon. But there is nothing to breathe . . .
However, it was a fact; the Pacific had done nothing toward colonization of the planets. It was involved—bogged down, rather—in South America. While the Germans were busy bustling enormous robot construction systems across space, the Japs were still burning off the jungles in the interior of Brazil, erecting eight-floor clay apartment houses for ex-headhunters. By the time the Japs got their first spaceship off the ground the Germans would have the entire solar system sewed up tight. Back in the quaint old history-book days, the Germans had missed out while the rest of Europe put the final touches on their colonial empires. However, Frink reflected, they were not going to be last this time; they had learned.
And then he thought about Africa, and the Nazi experiment there. And his blood stopped in his veins, hesitated, at last went on.
That huge empty ruin.
The radio said: “. . . we must consider with pride however our emphasis on the fundamental physical needs of peoples of all place, their subspiritual aspirations which must be . . .”
Frink shut the radio off. Then, calmer, he turned it back on.
Christ on the crapper, he thought. Africa. For the ghosts of dead tribes. Wiped out to make a land of—what? Who knew? Maybe even the master architects in Berlin did not know. Bunch of automatons, building and toiling away. Building? Grinding down. Ogres out of a paleontology exhibit, at their task of making a cup from an enemy’s skull, the whole family industriously scooping out the contents—the raw brains—first, to eat. Then useful utensils of men’s leg bones. Thrifty, to think not only of eating the people you did not like, but eating them out of their own skull. The first technicians! Prehistoric man in a sterile white lab coat in some Berlin university lab, experimenting with uses to which other people’s skull, skin, ears, fat could be put to. Ja, Herr Doktor. A new use for the big toe; see, one can adapt the joint for a quick-acting cigarette lighter mechanism. Now, if only Herr Krupp can produce it in quantity . . .
It horrified him, this thought: the ancient gigantic cannibal near-man flourishing now, ruling the world once more. We spent a million years escaping him, Frink thought, and now he’s back. And not merely as the adversary . . . but as the master.
“. . . we can deplore,” the radio, the voice of the little yellow-bellies from Tokyo was saying. God, Frink thought; and we called them monkeys, these civilized bandy-legged shrimps who would no more set up gas ovens than they would melt their wives into sealing wax. “. . . and we have deplored often in the past the dreadful waste of humans in this fanatical striving which sets the broader mass of men wholly outside the legal community.” They, the Japs, were so strong on law. “. . . To quote a Western saint familiar to all: ‘What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?’” The radio paused. Frink, tying his tie, also paused. It was the morning ablution.