Occasion ... for Disaster
evidently know a lot about what he was dealing with."
* * * * *
At this point, Malone ran into another roadblock. There had been a
fight of some kind up ahead, and a lot of cars with what looked like
shell-holes in them were piled on one side of the road. The State
Police were working under the confused direction of an Army major to
straighten things out, while a bulldozer pushed the cars off the road
onto the grass bordering it. The major stopped what he was doing and
came to meet Malone as the car stopped.
"Get off the road," the major said surlily.
Malone looked up at him. "I've got some identification here," he said.
"Mind if I get it out?"
The major reached for a gun and held it. "Go ahead," he said. "Don't
try anything funny. It's been hell up and down this road, mister."
Malone flipped out his wallet and showed the identification.
"FBI?" the Major said. "What're you doing out here?"
"Special assignment," Malone said. "Oh ... by the way ... you might
send some men back a ways. There are four dead mean in military
uniforms lying on the road near a couple of sawhorses."
The major stared. "Dead?" he said at last. "Dead how?"
"I shot them," Malone said.
"You--" The major's finger tightened on the trigger of his gun.
"Now wait a minute," Malone said. "I said they were in military
uniforms. I didn't say they were soldiers."
"But--"
"Three enlisted men carrying M-1 rifles?" Malone said. "When the M-1's
out of date? And a captain with his bars on sideways? No, major.
Those were renegades. Looters of some kind; they wanted to kill me and
get the car and any valuables I happened to have."
The major, very slowly, relaxed his grip on the gun and his arm fell
to his side. "You did the smart thing, Mr. Malone," he said.
"And I've got to go on doing it," Malone said. "I'm in a hurry."
He noticed a newspaper fluttering at the side of the road, not too
near the cars. Somehow it made everything seem even more lonely and
strange. The headlines fluttered into sight:
MARTIAL LAW EDICT
"MUST BE OBEYED," SAYS GOVERNOR
But Riots Are Feared In Outlying Towns
MAN AND WIFE CONFESS KILLING OF RELATIVES ABOARD PRIVATE
PLANE:
Force Kin To Drop Off
There was a photo of a woman there, too, and Malone could read just a
little of the caption:
"Obeying the edict of martial law laid down by the President, Miss
Helen A.--"
He wondered vaguely if her last name were Handbasket.
The major was looking at him. "O.K., then," he said.
"I can go on?" Malone said.
The major looked stern. "Drive on," he said.
Malone got the car going; the roadblock was lifted for him and he went
on by.
After a moment, he said: "Pardon the interruption. I trust that all
the devoted listeners to Uncle Kenneth's Happy Hour are still tuned
in."
_Go ahead,_ said Lou's voice.
"All right, let's take a look at what you've been doing. You've caused
people to change their minds about what they've been intending to do.
You can cause all sorts of hell to break loose that way. You have a
lot of people you want to get rid of, so you play on their neuroses
and concoct errors for them to fight. You rig things so that they
quit, or get fired, or lose elections, or get arrested, or just
generally get put out of circulation. Some of the less stable ones
just up and did away with themselves.
"Sometimes, it's individuals who have to go. Sometimes, it's whole
groups or maybe even whole nations. And sometimes it's in between, and
you manage to foul up organizational moves with misplaced papers,
mis-sent messages, errors, changed minds, and everything else you can
think of.
"You know," he went on, "at first I couldn't see any pattern in what
was going on--though I remember telling myself that there was a kind
of justice in the way this thing was just as hard on gangsters as it
was on businessmen and Congressmen.
"The Congressman from Gahoochie County, Arkansas, gets himself in a
jam over fraudulent election returns on the same day that the
accountant for the Truckers Union sends Mike Sands' books to the
Attorney General. Simple justice, I call it.
"And, you know, seen from that viewpoint, this whole caper might come
out looking pretty good. If most of the characters you've taken care
of are just the boys who needed taking care of, I'd say more power to
you--except for one thing. It's all right to get rid of all the fools,
idiots, maniacs, blockheads, morons, psychopaths, paranoids,
timidity-ridden, fear-worshipers, fanatics, thieves, and the rest of
the general, all-round, no-good characters; I'm all for it. But not
this way. Oh, no.
"You've pressed the panic button, that's what you've done.
"You've done more damage in two weeks than all those fumblebrains have
been able to do in several myriads of lifetimes. You've loused up the
economy of this nation and every other civilized nation. You've caused
riots in which innocent people have died; you've caused thousands more
to lose their businesses and their savings. And only God Himself knows
how many more are going to die of starvation and murder before this
thing is over.
"And you can't tell me that _all_ of those people deserve to die."
He slowed down as he came to a small town, and for the first time in
many miles he focused on the road ahead with his full mind. The town,
he saw, looked like a shambles. There were four cars tastefully
arranged on the lawn of what appeared to be the local library. Across
the street, a large drugstore was in flames, and surprised people were
hurrying to put it out. There didn't seem to be any State Police or
Army men around, but they'd passed through; Malone saw a forgotten
overseas cap lying on the road ahead.
With a shock, he realized that he was now in Pennsylvania, close to
where he wanted to go. A signboard told him the town he was looking at
was Milford. It was a mess, and Malone hoped fervently that it was a
mess that could eventually be cleaned up.
The town was a small one, and Malone was glad to get out of it so
quickly.
"That's the kind of thing I mean," he said aloud. Then he paused. "Are
you there, anybody?"
He imagined he heard Luba's voice saying: _Yes, Ken. Yes, I'm here.
Listening to you._
Imagination was fine but, of course, there was no way for them to get
through to him. They were telepathic, but Kenneth J. Malone, he told
himself sadly, was not.
"Hello, out there," he went on. "I hope you've been listening so far,
because there isn't too much more for me to say.
"Just this: you've wrecked my country, and you've wrecked almost all
of the rest of civilization. You've brought my world down around my
ears.
"I have every logical reason to hate your guts. By all the evidence I
have, you are a group of the worst blackguards who ever existed; by
all the evidence, I should be doing everything in my power to
exterminate you.
"But I'm not.
"My prescience tells me that what you've been doing is right and
necessary. I'm damned if I can see it, but there it is. I just hope
you can explain it to me."
XV
Soon, he was in the midst of the countryside. It was, of course,
filled with country. It spread around him in the shape of hills,
birds, trees, flowers, grass, billboards and other distractions to the
passing motorist.
It took Malone better than two hours more to find the place he was
looking for. Long before he found it, he had come to the conclusion
that finding country estates in Pennsylvania was only a shade easier
than finding private homes in the Borough of Brooklyn. In both cases,
he had found himself saddled with the same frantic search down what
seemed likely routes which turned out to lead nowhere. He had found,
in both cases, complete ignorance of the place on the part of local
citizens, and even strong doubts that the place could possibly have
any sort of existence.
The fact that is was growing dark didn't help much, either.
But he found it at last. Rounding a curve in a narrow, blacktop road,
he saw the home behind a grove of trees.
He recognized it instantly.
He had seen it so often that he felt as if he knew it intimately.
It was a big, rambling, Colonial-type mansion, painted a blinding and
beautiful white, with a broad, pillared porch and a great carved front
door. The front windows were curtained in rich purples, and before the
house was a great front garden, and tall old trees. Malone
half-expected Scarlett O'Hara to come tripping out of the house at any
minute shouting: "Rhett! The children's mush is on fire!" or something
equally inappropriate.
Inside it, however, if Malone were right, was not the magnetic
Scarlett. Inside the house were some of the most important members of
the PRS--and one person who was not a member.
But it was impossible to tell from the outside. Nothing moved on the
well-kept grounds, and the windows didn't show so much as the flutter
of a purple curtain. There was no sound. No cars were parked around
the house--nor, Malone realized, thinking of "Gone With the Wind,"
were there any horses or carriages.
The place looked deserted.
Malone thought he knew better, but it took a few minutes for him to
get up enough courage to go up the long driveway. He stared at the
house. It was an old one, he knew, built long before the Civil War and
originally commanding a huge tract of land. Now, all that remained of
the vast acreage was the small portion that surrounded the house.
But the original family still inhabited it, proud of the house and of
their part in its past. Over the years, Malone knew, they had kept it
up scrupulously, and the place had been both restored and modernized
on the inside without harming the classic outlines of the
hundred-and-fifty-year-old structure.
A fence surrounded the estate, but the front gate was swinging open.
Malone saw it and took a deep breath. Now, he told himself, or never.
He drove the Lincoln through the opening slowly, alert for almost
anything.
There was no disturbance. Thirty yards from the front door he pulled
the car to a cautious stop and got out. He started to walk toward the
building. Each step seemed to take whole minutes, and everything he
had thought raced through his mind again. Nothing seemed to move
anywhere, except Malone himself.
Was he right? Were the people he'd been beaming to really here? Or had
he been led astray by them? Had he been manipulated, in spite of his
shield, as easily as they had manipulated so many others?
That was possible. But it wasn't the only possibility.
Suppose, he thought, that he was perfectly right, and that the group
was waiting inside. And suppose, too, that he'd misunderstood their
motives.
Suppose they were just waiting for him to get a little closer.
Malone kept walking. In just a few steps, he could be close enough so
that a bullet aimed at him from the house hadn't a real chance of
missing him.
And it didn't have to be bullets, either. They might have set a trap,
he thought, and were waiting for him to walk into it. Then they would
hold him prisoner while they devised ways to....
To what?
He didn't know. And that was even worse; it called up horrible terrors
from the darkest depths of Malone's mind. He continued to walk
forward.
Finally he reached the steps that led up to the porch, and took them
one at a time.
He stood on the porch. A long second passed.
He took a step toward the high, wide and handsome oaken door. Then he
took another step, and another.
What was waiting for him inside?
He took a deep breath, and pressed the doorbell button.
The door swung open immediately, and Malone involuntarily stepped
back.
The owner of the house smiled at him from the doorway. Malone let out