Messerschmidt was tall and bony as a wolfhound. His long face was
pale, and his ears were large and prominent. Of his features, the ears
were the first to attract a casual glance. Then attention shifted to
his mouth, hooked in a permanent sardonic grimace under his blade of
a nose. Then his eyes caught, and held. They were dark and set close
together, under shaggy black eyebrows. There was something in them that
made Kimmensen's hackles rise.
He tried to analyze it as Messerschmidt bowed slightly from the hips,
his hands down at the sides of his dark clothes.
"Mr. President, I'm honored."
"Messerschmidt." Kimmensen acknowledged, out of courtesy. The man
turned slightly and bowed to Bendix. "Mr. Secretary."
And now Kimmensen caught it. Toward him, Messerschmidt had been a bit
restrained. But his bow to Jem was a shade too deep, and his voice as
he delivered Jem's title was too smooth.
It was mockery. Deep, ineradicable, and unveiled, it lurked in the
backs of Messerschmidt's eyes. Mockery--and the most colossal ego
Kimmensen had ever encountered.
_Good God!_ Kimmensen thought, _I believed we'd killed all your kind!_
"Father, I invited--" Susanne had begun, her face animated for once.
Now she looked from Jem to Kimmensen and her face fell and set into a
mask. "Never mind," she said flatly. She looked at Kimmensen again, and
turned to Messerschmidt. "I'm sorry, Anse. You'll excuse me. I have to
see to the dinner."
"Of course, Susanne," Messerschmidt said. "I hope to see you again."
Susanne nodded--a quick, sharp jerk of her head--and went quickly into
the kitchen. Messerschmidt, Jem, and Kimmensen faced each other.
"An awkward situation," Messerschmidt said quietly.
"You made it," Kimmensen answered.
Messerschmidt shrugged. "I'll take the blame. I think we'd best say
good night."
"Good night."
"Good night, Mr. President ... Mr. Secretary."
Messerschmidt bowed to each of them and stepped out of the living room,
carefully closing the panel behind him. He walked through the pool of
light from the living room and disappeared into the darkness on the
other side of the patio. In a minute, Kimmensen heard his plane beat
its way into the air, and then he sat down again, clutching his glass.
He saw that Bendix was white-lipped and shaking.
"So now I've met him," Kimmensen said, conscious of the strain in his
voice.
"That man can't be allowed to stay alive!" Bendix burst out. "If all
the things I hate were ever personified, they're in him."
"Yes," Kimmensen said, nodding slowly. "You're right--he's dangerous."
But Kimmensen was less ready to let his emotions carry him away. The
days of political killings were over--finished forever. "But I think we
can trust the society to pull his teeth."
Kimmensen hunched forward in thought. "We'll talk about it tomorrow, at
work. Our personal feelings are unimportant, compared to the steps we
have to take as League officers."
That closed the matter for tonight, as he'd hoped it would. He still
hoped that somehow tonight's purpose could be salvaged.
* * * * *
In that, he was disappointed. It was an awkward, forced meal, with the
three of them silent and pretending nothing had happened, denying the
existence of another human being. They were three people attempting
to live in a sharply restricted private universe, their conversation
limited to comments on the food. At the end of the evening, all their
nerves were screaming. Susanne's face was pinched and drawn together,
her temples white. When Kimmensen blotted his lips, he found fresh
blood on the napkin.
Jem stood up awkwardly. "Well ... thank you very much for inviting me,
Joe." He looked toward Susanne and hesitated. "It was a delicious meal,
Sue. Thank you."
"You're welcome."
"Well ... I'd better be getting home...."
Kimmensen nodded, terribly disappointed. He'd planned to let Susanne
fly Jem home.
"Take the plane, Jem," he said finally. "You can pick me up in the
morning."
"All right. Thank you.... Good night, Sue."
"Good night."
"Joe."
"Good night, Jem." He wanted to somehow restore Bendix's spirits.
"We'll have a long talk about that other business in the morning," he
reminded him.
"Yes, sir." It did seem to raise his chin a little.
* * * * *
After Jem had left, Kimmensen turned slowly toward Susanne. She sat
quietly, her eyes on her empty coffee cup.
_Waiting_, Kimmensen thought.
She knew, of course, that she'd hurt him badly again. She expected his
anger. Well, how could he help but be angry? Hadn't any of the things
he'd told her ever made any impression on her?
"Susanne."
She raised her head and he saw the stubborn, angry set to her mouth.
"Father, please don't lecture me again." Every word was low, tight, and
controlled.
Kimmensen clenched his hands. He'd never been able to understand this
kind of defiance. Where did she get that terribly misplaced hardness
in her fiber? What made her so unwilling to listen when someone older
and wiser tried to teach her?
If I didn't love her, he thought, this wouldn't matter to me. But in
spite of everything, I do love her. So I go on, every day, trying to
make her see.
"I can't understand you," he said. "What makes you act this way? Where
did it come from? You're nothing like your mother,"--though, just
perhaps, even if the thought twisted his heart, she was--"and you're
nothing like me."
"I am," she said in a low voice, looking down again. "I'm exactly like
you."
When she spoke nonsense like that, it annoyed him more than anything
else could have. And where anger could be kept in check, annoyance
could not.
"Listen to me," he said.
"Don't lecture me again."
"Susanne! You will keep quiet and listen. Do you realize what you're
doing, flirting with a man like Messerschmidt? Do you realize--has
anything I've told you ever made an impression on you?--do you realize
that except for an accident in time, that man could be one of the
butchers who killed your mother?"
"Father, I've heard you say these things before. We've all heard you
say them."
Now he'd begun, it was no longer any use not to go on. "Do you realize
they oppressed and murdered and shipped to labor camps all the people
I loved, all the people who were worthwhile in the world, until we
rose up and wiped them out?" His hands folded down whitely on the arms
of his chair. "Where are your grandparents buried? Do you know? Do I?
Where is my brother? Where are my sisters?"
"I don't know. I never knew them."
"Listen--I was born in a world too terrible for you to believe. I
was born to cower. I was born to die in a filthy cell under a police
station. Do you know what a police station is, eh? Have I described one
often enough? Your mother was born to work from dawn to night, hauling
stones to repair the roads the army tanks had ruined. And if she made a
mistake--if she raised her head, if she talked about the wrong things,
if she thought the wrong thoughts--then she was born to go to a labor
camp and strip tree bark for the army's medicines while she stood up to
her waist in freezing water.
"I was born in a world where half a billion human beings lived for a
generation in worship--in _worship_--of a _man_. I was born in a world
where that one twisted man could tell a lie and send gigantic armies
charging into death, screaming that lie. I was born to huddle, to be a
cipher in a crowd, to be spied on, to be regulated, to be hammered to
meet the standard so the standard lie would fit me. I was born to be
nothing."
Slowly, Kimmensen's fingers uncurled. "But now I have freedom. Stepan
Dubrovic managed to find freedom for all of us. I remember how the word
spread--how it whispered all over the world, almost in one night, it
seemed. Take a wire--twist it, so. Take a vacuum tube--the army has
radios, there are stores the civil servants use, there are old radios,
hidden--make the weapon ... and you are free. And we rose up, each man
like an angel with a sword of fire.
"But if we thought Paradise would come overnight, we were wrong. The
armies did not dissolve of themselves. The Systems did not break down.
"You take a child from the age of five; you teach it to love the
State, to revere the Leader; you inform it that it is the wave of the
future, much cleverer than the decadent past but not quite intelligent
enough to rule itself. You teach it that there must be specialists
in government--Experts in Economy, Directors of Internal Resources,
Ministers of Labor Utilization. What can you do with a child like
that, by the time it is sixteen? By the time it is marching down the
road with a pack on its back, with the Leader's song on its lips? With
the song written so its phrases correspond to the ideal breathing
cycle for the average superman marching into the Future at one hundred
centimeters to the pace?"
"Stop it, Father."
"You burn him down. How else can you change him? You burn him down
where he marches, you burn his Leaders, you burn the System, you root
out--_everything_!"
Kimmensen sighed. "And then you begin to be free." He looked urgently
at Susanne. "Now do you understand what Messerschmidt is? If you can't
trust my advice, can you at least understand that much? Has what I've
always told you finally made some impression?"
Susanne pushed her chair back. "No. I understood it the first time and
I saw how important it was. I still understood it the tenth time. But
now I've heard it a thousand times. I don't care what the world was
like--I don't care what you went through. I never saw it. You. You sit
in your office and write the same letters day after day, and you play
with your weapon, and you preach your social theory as though it was
a religion and you were its high priest--special, dedicated, above
us all, above the flesh. You tell me how to live my life. You try to
arrange it to fit your ideas. You even try to cram Jem Bendix down my
throat.
"But I won't have you treating me that way. When Anse talks to me, it's
about him and me, not about people I never met. I have things I want.
I want Anse. I'm telling you and you can tell Bendix. And if you don't
stop trying to order me around, I'll move out. That's all."
Clutching his chair, not quite able to believe what he'd heard, knowing
that in a moment pain and anger would crush him down, Kimmensen
listened to her quick footsteps going away into her room.