posed to stay where they had been put, no matter what in the real world might be going on.
Those 3 were what psychologists call other-directed.¨
I took them over to my house and ordered them to keep the wood fire in the fireplace going, and to feed Margaret and Mildred when they got hungry. There were plenty of canned goods. I didnt have to worry about the perishables in the refrigerator, since the air in the kitchen was already so cold. The stove itself ran on bottled propane, and there was a months supply of that science fiction miracle.
Imagine that: bottled energy!
Margaret and Mildred, thank goodness, felt neutral about the Wardens zombies, the same way they felt about me. They didnt like them, but they didnt dislike them, either. So everything was falling into place. They would still have a life-support system, even if I went away for several days or got wounded or killed.
I didnt expect to get wounded or killed, except by accident. All the combatants in Scipio would regard me as unthreatening, the Whites because of my color-coding and the Blacks because they knew and liked me.
The issues were clear. They were Black and White.
All the Yellow people had run away.
I had hoped to get away from the house while Margaret and Mildred were fast asleep. But as I passed my boat on my way to the ice, an upstairs window flew open. There my poor old wife was, a scrawny, addled
hag. She sensed that something important was happening, I think. Otherwise she wouldnt have exposed herself to the cold and daylight. Her voice, moreover, which had been rasping and bawdy for years, was liquid and sweet, just as it had been on our Honeymoon. And she called me by name. That was another thing she hadnt done for a long, long time. This was disorienting.
GeneX¨ she said.
So I stopped. Yes, Margaret,¨ I said.
Where are you going, Gene?¨ she said.
Im going for a walk, Margaret, to get some fresh air,¨ I said.
Youre going to see some woman, arent you?¨ she said.
No, Margaret. Word of Honor Im not,¨ I said.
Thats all right. I understand,¨ she said.
It was so pathetic! I was so overwhelmed by the pathos, by the beautiful voice I hadnt heard for so long, by the young Margaret inside the witch! I cried out in all sincerity, Oh, Margaret, I love you, I love you!¨
Those were the last words she would ever hear me say, for I would never come back.
She made no reply. She shut the window and pulled down the opaque black roller blind.
I have not seen her since.
After that side of the lake was recaptured by the 82nd Airborne, she and her mother were put in a steel box on the back of one of the prison vans and delivered to the insane asylum in Batavia. They will be fine as long as they have each other. They might be fine even if they didnt have each other. Who knows, until somebody or something performs that particular experiment?
I have not been on that side of the lake since that morning, and may never go there again, as close as it is. So I will probably never find out what became of my old footlocker, the coffin containing the soldier I used to be, and my very rare copy of Black Garterbelt.
I crossed the lake that morning, as it happens, never to return, to deliver a particular message to the escaped convicts, with the idea of saving lives and property. I knew that the students were on vacation. That left nothing but social nobodies, in which category I surely include the college faculty, members of the Servant Class.
To me this low-grade social mix was ominous. In Vietnam, and then in later show-biz attacks on Tripoli and Panama City and so on, it had been perfectly ordinary for our Air Force to blow communities of nobodies, no matter whose side they were on, to Kingdom Come.
It seemed likely to me, should the Government decide to bomb Scipio, that it would be sensible to bomb the prison, too.
And everything would be taken care of, and no argument.
Next problem?
How many Americans knew or cared anyway where or what the Mohiga Valley was, or Laos or Cambodia or Tripoli? Thanks to our great educational system and TV, half of them couldnt even find their own country on a map of the world.
Three-quarters of them couldnt put the cap back on a bottle of whiskey without crossing the threads.
As I expected, I was treated by Scipios conquerors as a harmless old fool with wisdom. The criminals called me The Preacher¨ or The Professor,¨ just as they had on the other side.
I saw that many. of them had tied ribbons around their upper arms as a sort of uniform. So when I came across a man who wasnt wearing a ribbon, I asked him jokingly, Wheres your uniform, Soldier?¨
Preacher,¨ he said, referring to his skin, I was born in a uniform.¨
Alton Darwin had set himself up in Tex Johnsons office in Samoza Hall as President of a new nation. He had been drinking. I do not mean to present any of these escapees as rational or capable of redemption. They did not care if they lived or died. Alton Darwin was glad to see me. Then again, he was glad about everything.
I had to advise him, nonetheless, that he could expect to be bombed unless he and the rest of them got out of town right away. I said their best chance to survive was to go back to the prison and fly white flags everywhere. If they did that right away, they might claim that they had nothing to do with all the killings here. The number of people the escapees killed in Scipio, incidentally, was 5 less than the number I myself had killed single-handedly in the war in Vietnam.
So the Battle of Scipio was nothing but a tempest in a teapot,¨ an expression the Atheists Bible tells us is proverbial.
I told Alton Darwin that if he and his people didnt want to be bombed and didnt want to return to the prison, they should take whatever food they could find and disperse to the north or west. I told him one thing
he already knew, that the floor of the National Forest to the south and east was so dark and lifeless that anyone going in there would probably starve to death or go mad before he found his way back out of there. I told him another thing he already knew, that there would soon be all these white people to the west and north, having the times of their lives hunting escaped convicts instead of deer.
My second point, in fact, was something the convicts had taught me. They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didnt have what they had, who didnt look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a Free Fire Zone.¨ You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.
Alton Darwin heard me out. And then he told me that he thought I was right, that the prison probably would be bombed. But he guaranteed that Scipio would not be bombed, and that it would not be attacked on the ground, either, that the Government would have to keep its distance and respect the demands he meant to put to it.
What makes you think that?¨ I said.
We have captured a TV celebrity,¨ he said. They wont let anything happen to him. Too many people will be watching.¨
Who?¨ I said.
And he said, Jason Wilder.¨
That was the first I heard that they had taken hostage not only Wilder but the whole Board of Trustees of Tarkington College. I now realize, too, that Alton Darwin would not have known that Wilder was a TV celebrity if old tapes of Wilders talk show hadnt been run again and again at the prison across the lake. Poor people of any race on the outside never would have watched his show for long, since its basic message was that it was poor people who were making the lives of the rest of us so frightening.
36
tar Wars,¨ said Alton Darwin.
He was alluding to Ronald Reagans dream of having scientists build an invisible dome over this country, with electronics and lasers and so on, which no enemy plane or projectile could ever penetrate. Darwin believed that the social standing of his hostages was an invisible dome over Scipio.