He plodded down the road, skirting potholes, the loose gravel sliding underneath his feet. Ahead of him, several men were walking down the road, but he made no attempt to catch up with them, for now that he was here, he found himself surprisingly abashed. Maybe he shouldn’t have come, but, at the time, the idea had seemed simple and flawless. God knows, he needed a ear and here was a way to get one. Not for a moment had it occurred to him that others would come up with the same idea. He could not know, of course, but he suspected that the others in the town had come on the self-same errand. There was one consolation, however: There should be plenty of ears to go around. The story he had heard on TV said that at the time the visitors on the island had been found, they had made more than a hundred cars. It was reasonable to suppose that since the report, they had kept on making them, so there would be more than the hundred now. Maybe a couple of hundred. Maybe more than that. There were a lot of people in town, but surely with more than two hundred cars sitting there and waiting, there’d be plenty to go around. The big problem would be to find how to cross the river, but he’d deal with that when the time came.
He came to the outskirts of the village and continued trudging toward the business district, which fronted on the river. Perhaps there, he could find someone who would tell him what to do. By this time, some sort of procedure might have been worked out for picking up a car.
A knot of people stood on the sidewalk in front of a bar and he drifted over to them. Three highway patrol cars were standing across the street, but there was no sign of the troopers who had been in them. A line of men were standing on the far side of the railroad track that arrowed between the town and river. All their backs were turned toward the town, as if they were watching something on the river.
The South Dakota man plunked apologetically at the sleeve of a man standing on the sidewalk. “Has there been an accident?” he asked, motioning at the patrol ears.
“There ain’t been no accident,” said the man. “One earlier in the day, but not within the last few hours.”
“Well, what are the troopers doing here?”
“You must have just pulled in,” said the man.
“That’s right. Drove all the way from South Dakota. Rapid City—well, not really Rapid City, but a little town just east of Rapid City. Made it all in one run; only stopped for gas.”
“Sounds like you were in a hurry.”
“Well, you see, I wanted to get here before all the cars were gone.”
“There ain’t none of them gone,” said the man. “They’re all over on the island.”
“So I’m still in time.”
“Still in time for what?”
“Still in time to pick up a ear.”
“You ain’t going to pick up no car. There ain’t no one going to pick up a car. State troopers, they got the river sealed off. Some word has it they may be sending in the guard. They’re out in boats patrolling on the river so no traffic can come up or down the stream.”
“But why? The TV said. .
“We all know what the TV said. And the papers, too. Free cars for everyone. But you can’t get across the river to the island.”
“That the island over there?”
“Somewhere over there. I don’t know just where. There are a lot of islands over there.”
“But what happened? Why did the troopers. .
“Bunch of damn fools piled into a boat. More of them than the boat would carry, but they kept on piling in. The boat swamped out in midstream. Most of the damn fools drowned.”
“But someone could set up some kind of system, some safe way to get across and . .
“Sure, they could,” said the other man, “but no matter what you did, it wouldn’t work. No one here has got a lick of sense. Everyone has got his heart set on one of the cars. The police are right. They can’t let no one near the river. If they did, more people would get killed.”
“But don’t you want a car?”
“Sure, I want a car. But there’s no chance to get one now. Maybe, later on .
“But I have to have a car right now,” said the man from South Dakota. “I just got to have one. I don’t think that heap of mine will last to get me home.”
He ran across the street and up the embankment to the railroad track. He reached the line of men who stood on the far edge of the track, pushing his way through them, shoving them aside. One foot hit the downslope of the embankment. Skidding on sliding gravel, he lost his balance. He fell and rolled down the slope, stopping just short of the water’s edge. Lying there, he saw a huge man in uniform towering over him.
The trooper asked, almost gently, “Where do you think you’re going, son?”
“I got to have a car,” said the man from South Dakota.
The officer shook his head.
“I can swim,” said the South Dakotan. “I can swim it easy. Let me have a chance. Let me take a chance.”
The officer reached down a hand, jerked him to his feet.
“Now, you listen to me,” he said. “I’m giving you a break. Get your tail up over that track. If I so much as catch sight of you again, I’ll toss you in the cage.”
The South Dakotan hastily clambered up the embankment. The crowd jeered kindly at him.
54. MINNEAPOLIS
“How sure can we be of Norton?” Lathrop asked. “He’s not one of our staff.”
“I’d stake my reputation on him,” said Garrison. “Frank and I go a long ways back. We went to school together, have been in touch ever since. He’s a dedicated newspaperman. Just because he chose to hide away up at Lone Pine doesn’t make him any less a newspaperman. We act as if we were specialists here—some of us write the news, others edit it, still others make up the pages, and there are a few who write editorials. Each one to his own task. Frank does the whole damn thing. He starts each week with nothing and he pulls the news and advertising together, he edits what he writes, he makes up the paper. If there is need for an editorial any particular week, he writes the editorial and not only that . .
“No need to go on, Johnny,” Lathrop told him. “I just wanted to know how you felt about it.”
“If Frank tells me he saw evidence the visitors are making houses,” said Garrison, “then I’ll believe they’re making houses. His story hangs together, he had a lot of detail.”
“It seems incredible to me,” said Lathrop, “that we have this one exclusive. That makes two in a row. We had the cars and now we have the houses.”
“There’s something I want to talk with you about,” said Garrison. “I think we should let the White House in on it before we go to press. I’ve talked to the press secretary there. He seems a decent man. I can get through to him.”
“You mean you want to tip them off,” said Lathrop, somewhat horrified. “Tell them about the houses. ‘Why, Johnny? Just why in hell . .
“My thinking may be wrong,” said Garrison, “but it seems to me the administration is absorbing a lot of punishment and . .
“It’s good for them,” said Lathrop. “The bastards have it coming. Not on this visitor matter—they’ve done fairly well on it. But they’ve been willfully wrong and pig-headed on most other things. A good dose of humility won’t do them any harm. I can’t seem to summon up much sympathy.”
Garrison was silent for a moment, considering, trying to put his thoughts together.
“It’s not the administration so much,” he finally said, “as it is the nation. The White House is being stiff-necked about it; they’re determined to ride the crisis out. Maybe they can do it. Maybe they had a chance of doing it before the houses came up. But the houses will wreck them. The cars are bad enough, the houses
“Yes, I can see that,” said Lathrop. “The implication is there. Houses as well as cars. First the automotive business, now the housing industry. The dollar will be worthless. Our credit will be gone. But still we have to run the story. Even if we wanted to, and we don’t, it’s something that can’t be covered up.”
“There’s no question about publishing,” said Garrison. “We have to do that. The question is: Do we give our own government a chance to react to it before we let them have it straight between the eyes? Maybe, if they knew, they would have the time to shift their stance, stand on more solid ground to deal with it when it broke.”