It had happened at almost exactly four o'clock that afternoon.
As he did at least once each day, Kimmensen had been checking his
Direct Power side-arm. The weapon lay on the desk blotter in front of
him. The calloused heel of his right palm held it pressed against the
blotter while his forefinger pushed the buttplate aside. He moved the
safety slide, pulling the focus grid out of the way, and depressed the
squeeze triggers with his index and little fingers, holding the weapon
securely in his folded-over palm. Inside the butt, the coil began
taking power from the mysterious _somewhere_ it was aligned on. Old
Dubrovic, with his sheaves of notations and encoded symbology, could
have told him. But Dubrovic had been killed in one spiteful last gasp
of the old regime, for giving the world as much as he had.
The pea-sized tubes flashed into life. Kimmensen released the triggers,
slid the buttplate back, and pushed the safety slide down. The side-arm
was working--as capable of leveling a mountain as of burning a
thread-thin hole in a man.
He put the side-arm back in its holster. Such was the incarnation of
freedom. The side-arm did not need to be machined out of metal, or
handgripped in oil-finished walnut. These were luxuries. It needed only
a few pieces of wire, twisted just so--it was an easy thing to learn--,
a few tubes out of an old radio. And from the moment you had one,
you were a free man. You were an army to defend your rights. And when
everybody had one--when Direct Power accumulators lighted your house,
drove your plane, let you create building materials, food, clothing
out of any cheap, plentiful substance; when you needed no Ministry
of Supply, no Board of Welfare Supervision, no Bureau of Employment
Allocation, no Ministry of the Interior, no National Police--when all
these things were as they were, then the world was free.
He smiled to himself. Not very many people thought of it in those
technical terms, but it made no difference. They knew how it felt. He
remembered talking to an old man, a year after the League was founded.
"Mr. Kimmensen, don't talk no Silas McKinley to me. I ain't never read
a book in my life. I remember young fellers comin' around to court my
daughter. Every once in a while, they'd get to talkin' politics with
me--I gotta admit, my daughter wasn't so much. They'd try and explain
about Fascism and Bureaucracy and stuff like that, and they used to
get pretty worked up, throwin' those big words around. All I knew was,
the government fellers used to come around and take half of my stuff
for taxes. One of 'em finally come around and took my daughter. And I
couldn't do nothin' about it. I used to have to work sixteen hours a
day just to eat.
"O.K., so now you come around and try and use your kind of big words
on me. All I know is, I got me a house, I got me some land, and I got
me a wife and some new daughters. And I got me a gun, and ain't nobody
gonna take any of 'em away from me." The old man grinned and patted the
weapon at his waist. "So, if it's all the same to you, I'll just say
anything you say is O.K. by me long's it adds up to me bein' my own
boss."
That had been a generation ago. But Kimmensen still remembered it as
the best possible proof of the freedom he believed in. He had paid
great prices for it in the past. Now that the old regime was as dead as
most of the men who remembered it, he would still have been instantly
ready to pay them again.
But no one demanded those sacrifices. Twenty-eight years had passed,
as uneventful and unbrokenly routine as the first thirty years of his
life had been desperate and dangerous. Even the last few traces of
administration he represented would soon have withered away, and then
his world would be complete. He reached for the next paper in his IN
basket.
He felt the thready flutter in his chest and stiffened with surprise.
He gripped the edge of his desk, shocked at the way this thing was
suddenly upon him.
A bubble effervesced wildly in the cavity under his ribs, like a liquid
turned hot in a flash.
He stared blindly. Here it was, in his fifty-ninth year. The knock on
the door. He'd never guessed how it would finally come. It hadn't had
to take the form of this terrible bubble. It might as easily have been
a sudden sharp burst behind his eyes or a slower, subtler gnawing at
his vitals. But he'd known it was coming, as every man knows and tries
to forget it is coming.
The searing turbulence mounted into his throat. He opened his mouth,
strangling. Sudden cords knotted around his chest and, even strangling,
he groaned. _Angina pectoris_--pain in the chest--the second-worst pain
a man can feel.
The bubble burst and his jaws snapped shut, his teeth mashing together
in his lower lip. He swayed in his chair and thought:
_That's it. Now I'm an old man._
* * * * *
After a time, he carefully mopped his lips and chin with a handkerchief
and pushed the bloodied piece of cloth into the bottom of his
wastebasket, under the crumpled disposal of his day's work. He kept
his lips compressed until he was sure the cuts had clotted, and decided
that, with care, he could speak and perhaps even eat without their
being noticed.
Suddenly, there were many things for him to decide quickly. He glanced
at the clock on his desk. In an hour, Jem Bendix would be dropping by
from his office down the hall. It'd be time to go home, and tonight Jem
was invited to come to dinner.
Kimmensen shook his head. He wished he'd invited Jem for some other
day. Then he shrugged, thinking: I'm acting as though the world's
changed. It hasn't; I have. Some arrangements will have to change, but
they will change for the quicker.
He nodded to himself. He'd wanted Susanne and Jem to meet more often.
Just as well he'd made the invitation for tonight. Now, more than ever,
that might be the solution to one problem. Susanne was twenty-five now;
she couldn't help but be losing some of her callow ideas. Give her a
husband's firm hand and steadying influence, a baby or two to occupy
her time, and she'd be all right. She'd never be what he'd hoped for in
a daughter, but it was too late for any more efforts toward changing
that. At least she'd be all right.
He looked at his clock again. Fifty-five minutes. Time slipped away
each moment your back was turned.
He hooked his mouth, forgetting the cuts, and winced. He held his
palm pressed against his lips and smiled wryly in his mind. Five
minutes here, five there, and suddenly twenty-eight years were gone.
Twenty-eight years here in this office. He'd never thought it'd
take so long to work himself out of a job, and here he wasn't quite
finished even yet. When he'd accepted the League presidency, he'd
thought he only needed a few years--two or three--before the medical
and educational facilities were established well enough to function
automatically. Well, they had been. Any League member could go to a
hospital or a school and find another League member who'd decided to
become a doctor or a teacher.
That much _had_ been easy. In some areas, people had learned to
expect cooperation from other people, and had stopped expecting some
all-powerful Authority to step in and give orders. But then, medicine
and education had not quite gotten under the thumb of the State in this
part of the world.
The remainder had been hard. He'd expected, in a sort of naive haze,
that everyone could instantly make the transition from the old regime
to the new freedom. If he'd had any doubts at all, he'd dismissed them
with the thought that this was, after all, mountainous country, and
mountaineers were always quick to assert their personal independence.
Well, they were. Except for a lingering taint from what was left of the
old generation, the youngsters would be taking to freedom as naturally
as they drew breath. But it had taken a whole generation. The oldsters
still thought of a Leader when they thought of their president. They
were accustomed to having an Authority think for them, and they
confused the League with a government.
Kimmensen shuffled through the papers on his desk. There they were;
requests for food from areas unused to a world where no one issued
Agricultural Allocations, letters from people styling themselves Mayors
of towns.... The old fictions died hard. Crazy old Dubrovic had given
men everywhere the weapon of freedom, but only time and patience would
give them full understanding of what freedom was.
Well, after all, this area had been drowned for centuries in the blood
of rebellious men. It was the ones who gave in easily who'd had the
leisure to breed children. He imagined things were different in the
Western Hemisphere, where history had not had its tyrannous centuries
to grind away the spirited men. But even here, more and more families
were becoming self-contained units, learning to synthesize food and
turn farms into parks, abandoning the market-place towns that should
have died with the first MGB man found burned in an alley.
It was coming--the day when all men would be as free of their past as
of their fellow men. It seemed, now, that he would never completely see
it. That was too bad. He'd hoped for at least some quiet years at home.
But that choice had been made twenty-eight years ago.
Sometimes a man had to be a prisoner of his own conscience. He could
have stayed home and let someone else do it, but freedom was too
precious to consign to someone he didn't fully trust.
Now he'd have to call a League election as soon as possible. Actually,
the snowball was well on its way downhill, and all that remained for
the next president was the tying up of some loose ends. The business
in the outlying districts--the insistence on mistaking inter-family
disputes for raids from the northwest--would blow over. A society of
armed Freeman families had to go through such a period. Once mutual
respect was established--once the penalty for anti-sociability became
quite clear--then the society would function smoothly.
And as for who would succeed him, there wasn't a better candidate
than Jem Bendix. Jem had always thought the way he did, and Jem was
intelligent. Furthermore, everyone liked Jem--there'd be no trouble
about the election.
So that was settled. He looked at his clock again and saw that he had
a half hour more. He pushed his work out of the way, reached into a
drawer, and took out a few sheets of paper. He frowned with impatience
at himself as his hands fumbled. For a moment, he brooded down at the
seamed stumps where the old regime's police wires had cut through his
thumbs. Then, holding his pen clamped firmly between his middle and
index knuckles, he began writing:
"I, Joseph Ferassi Kimmensen, being of sound mind and mature years, do
make the following Will...."