“Juke box curse!” somebody blurted.
Hopkins said evenly, “We’ve begun to receive reports of it. Go on, Mr. Wonder.”
“However, it won’t cover physical things Tubber’s done, like sealing up the slots in parking meters, and setting a nightclub on fire with lightning because the proprietor was throwing shows involving teen-age kids stripping. It wouldn’t even cover breaking a set of guitar strings at a distance.”
Jim Westbrook, seated off to one side, and noticed now by Ed Wonder for the first time, said, “Perhaps the fellow owning the guitar only thought the strings were broken, under Tubber’s hypnosis.” But the big consulting engineer didn’t sound as though he believed it himself.
Ed said, “We simply don’t know. Perhaps there’s something in nature that when there’s a need for a certain type of person the race produces him. Possibly nature figures there’s a need for a man with Tubber’s powers right now. There was a need for a Newton when he came along. Can we explain him? There was a rash of super-geniuses in such cities as Florence at the time of the Renaissance. Can anybody explain the fantastic abilities of Leonardo and Michelangelo? Devil knows, the times called for them. The race had to be pulled out of the Dark Ages.”
Dwight Hopkins sighed and ran a gaunt hand over his mouth and chin. “Very well,” he said. “However, Mr. Yardborough, see that Doctor Jeffers’ line of investigation is continued. Crash priority. We leave no possibilities unexplored. The national emergency is growing geometrically.
“And now,” Hopkins continued, “we come to another, very uncomfortable aspect. General Crew, please.”
The general lumbered to his feet, and even before opening his mouth his face dyed mahogany. He took up a newspaper from Hopkins’ desk and shook it.
“Who is the traitor who leaked this whole story to AP-Reuters!”
Ed Wonder snatched his own paper from his jacket pocket, ripped it open to the front page. It glared 72 point type:
TV-MOVIE-RADIO COLLAPSE LAID TO RELIGIOUS LEADER
He didn’t have to read it. He knew it would all be there.
“I thought nobody’d believe you,” he snapped at the reporter.
Buzz grinned at him, took his stogie from his mouth and pointed at Ed’s chest with it. “That’s where my stroke of genius came in. This was my story, from the beginning, and I just had to see it in print. You left me in charge, yesterday. So I sent a couple of the boys up to Kingsburg and had them haul Old Ulcers right out of the city room and down here. I showed him around. Showed him all the staff we’ve got working on Project Tubber. Finally it got through to him. Whether or not he believes it himself, the biggest story of the century cracked right in his own town. I had the piece already written up. He just took it with him.”
“And AP-Reuters picked it up from the Times-Tribune, you kook!” Ed snarled at him. “You know what you’ve done?”
“I know what he’s done,” Hopkins said, the evenness of his voice for once tried. “He’s made a laughing stock of the administration. I thought it was made clear that this phase of our investigation was to be kept under wraps until more definite data was available.”
Ed Wonder was on his feet, his face working. “He’s done more than that! He’s signed the death warrant of Tubber and his daughter!”
Buzz scowled at him, defensively. “Don’t be silly, chum. I didn’t mention where they were. They’re safely tucked away in the little Elysium hamlet of theirs. Sure, a lot of people might be sore at them. A good chance of teaching old Zeke a lesson. He’ll find out what a heel practically everybody in the world figures he is.”
Ed snarled, “He isn’t in Elysium. He’s in Oneonta, with that pint-sized revival tent of his, spreading the message. Come on, Buzz! You started this. Let’s go. They’ll lynch him.”
Buzz threw his stogie on the floor. “Good grief,” he muttered, heading for the door.
The general was standing too. “Wait a minute! Perhaps this is for the best.”
Ed Wonder flung a contemptuous glare at him. “Like that other brainstorm of yours. Getting a sniper to shoot him from a distance. Just consider two of the ramifications, soldier. One, suppose Tubber starts flinging hexes at a mob out to lynch him. Do you have any idea what they might consist of? Or, number two, suppose the crowd does get to him and finishes him off. Do you think his hexes end with his death? How do we know?”
Buzz was through the door and on his way to the outer offices. Ed started after him.
“One moment,” Dwight Hopkins called, his famed poise shot to hell. “I can phone the local police in Oneonta.”
“No good,” Ed called back over his shoulder. “Tubber and Nefertiti know me, but some heavy-handed cops might just intensify the fireworks.”
In the anteroom, Johnson and Stevens hustled to their feet.
Ed ripped out at them, “Phone down to the garage. Have the fastest police car available ready for us, by the time we get there. Hurry, you flatfooted clowns!”
He charged down the corridor in the direction of the elevators.
Buzz had summoned one by the time he arrived. They hurried into it, banged the descent button, and their legs all but folded under them at the plunge.
The car was waiting. Ed flashed his identity and they bustled into the front seat. “How do you work this thing?” Buzz demanded. “I’ve never had an automatic.”
Ed Wonder had used Helen’s General Ford Cyclones from time to time. He rapped, “Here,” and dialed the number to take them across the George Washington Bridge. Meanwhile he snatched up the road map and located the coordinates for Oneonta. The upstate New York town wasn’t a much greater distance than Kingsburg, but situated further west. They’d have to go to Binghamton, as the closest route.
They agonized along the way. It would be nearly noon before they arrived. They had no way of knowing where Tubber had set up his tent. They had no way of knowing how soon he would begin his lecture. If it were anything like Saugerties, it wouldn’t be just one meeting scheduled, but several throughout the day. He’d possibly start quite early.
Ed Wonder didn’t expect him to get through the first talk. Once the audience found out who he was, that would be it. He cursed silently, inwardly. Perhaps they had already found out. Possibly the Oneonta Star had already run a notice. The Star was undoubtedly a subscriber to AP-Reuters; if some bright reporter connected the two stories and revealed that the controversial prophet was in town, it would mean the end already.
They could have saved themselves the anxiety over the time that would be taken locating Tubber’s tent. From afar, the roar of the mob could be heard. Throwing on the manual operation, Ed Wonder hit the lower part of town without diminution of speed.
“Hey, take it easy, chum,” Buzz De Kemp blurted.
“A siren,” Ed spit out at him. “There must be some button or something. Find it! This car should have a siren.”
Buzz fumbled. The siren’s whine ululated, wave over wave. They shrilled through the small Catskill city, traffic pulling away, right and left, such traffic as there was. Ed Wonder suspected that the greater part of the town was in on the show.
They could spot the action now. There was fire. As they pulled closer, they could see that it was obviously the tent.
All over again, it was the lynch scene of the movie projectionist in Kingsburg. It was basically the same, though ten times over in size. Far beyond the point where it could have been controlled by the police.
The mob numbered thousands, roaring, shouting, shrilling, screaming. But here on the outskirts they were principally milling around, the crowd hampered by its very size, unable to see what was going on in the center. Ineffective in the developments.
From their height in the hovercar, Ed Wonder and Buzz De Kemp could make out the activity. In the dead center, Ezekiel Joshua Tubber and his daughter were being buffeted this way and that, framed in the light of the burning tent behind them. There was no sign of other followers of the rejected prophet. Even in the excitement
of the moment, Ed had a quick thought go through his mind. The desertion of Jesus, even by Peter, at the time of the betrayal to the Romans. Where were the followers, no matter how small a handful? Where were the pilgrims on the path to Elysium?
He slugged the lift lever, bringing them up to ten feet, shot toward the center of the shouting, club brandishing, fist brandishing mob. The smell of hate was everywhere. The fearful smell of hate and death, found seldom other than in mobs and in combat. The yells had become one, one blast of roaring rage.
Buzz yelled, “It’s impossible. Let’s get out of here. It’s too late. They’ll get us too!” The reporter’s eyes were popping fear.
Ed banged toward the center of the melee.
He yelled at Buzz, “Take the wheel, it’s on manual. Bring it down right above them!”
He squirmed over the seat into the back. He’d spotted something there earlier. Even as Buzz De Kemp grabbed at the wheel, steadying them, Ed tore the submachinegun from its rack.
“Hey!” the reporter yelled at him, still goggle-eyed.
With the butt, Ed Wonder knocked the glass out of the right rear window. The siren continued its screaming. The mob’s leaders—a dozen of them, manhandling the bearded prophet, who seemed dazed, and Nefertiti, screaming and scratching to get to her father—stared up. The siren was getting through to them for the first time.
Ed stuck the gun through the window, pointed up. He had never handled a similar weapon before. He pulled the trigger and the roar blasted back through the heavy hovercar, deafening him as he bucked the kick.
For the nonce, at least, it was effective. Below him, men scattered. He emptied the clip into the air.
“Down!” he yelled at Buzz.
“Don’t be crazy! We can’t…”
Ed leaned over the seat and knocked the lift lever up. Even before the limousine had hit earth, he had torn open the car door. He used the riot gun as a club, dashing for the staggering old man.
The sheer audacity of the attack was its success. Still swinging the heavy gun by its blisteringly hot barrel, he pulled and tugged the repudiated reformer toward and into the car’s back seat. He spun and threatened the temporarily flabbergasted crowd with the submachinegun, as though it were still loaded, yelling, “Nefertiti!” He couldn’t see her.
Buzz screamed, “Let’s get out of here!”
“Shut up!” Ed roared.
She came crying and stumbling, her clothes half torn from her, through the ranks of the bewildered lynchers. Less than gently, Ed Wonder pushed her into the back seat, grabbed hold of the ascending vehicle. He felt a hand grab his foot. He kicked back and down. The hand let go and they were off and free.
“They’ll be after us!” Buzz yelled back at him. “A thousand cars will be after us.”
Everything went out of Ed Wonder. It was all he could do to keep from vomiting. He was trembling as with a paroxysm of ague. “No they won’t,” he said, his voice shaking. “They’ll be afraid of the gun. A mob is a mob. Brave enough to take on the killing of an old man and a girl. Not brave enough to face a submachinegun.”
Nefertiti, still blubbering in hysteria, was working over her father. Getting him straight on the seat, at the same time trying to rearrange her own torn clothing.
Tubber made the first sound since the rescue. “They hate me,” he said, dazed. “They hate me. They would have destroyed me.”
Buzz De Kemp had at last shaken off his panic of the height of the excitement. “What’d you expect?” he grumbled. “An egg for your beer?”
They had a little difficulty in getting the torn and battered Tubber pair into the New Woolworth Building, but Ed had recovered by now. He glared down the guards at the entry, grabbed the phone and snapped, “General Crew. This is crash priority. Wonder, speaking.”
Crew came on in seconds.
Ed snapped, “I’ve got Tubber. We’re coming up immediately. Have Dwight Hopkins ready in his office, and the top men on my staff. I want everybody who’s informed on Project Tubber.” He looked at the guards. “And, oh yeah, tell these kooks to let us pass.” He threw the phone to the armed guard, and started toward the elevator.
Buzz was supporting the elderly prophet at one side, Nefertiti from the other.
They went directly to the topmost floor.
Buzz said, “We ought to take them to your apartment. Miss Tubber is in bad enough shape, but the old boy is just short of being in shock.”
“That’s how we want him,” Ed Wonder muttered lowly. “Come on.”
Hopkins was at his desk, the others came hurrying in, one or two at a time.
Ed got the pathetic old man seated on a leather couch, Nefertiti next to him. The others stood, or took seats, staring at the cause of the crisis which was shaking the governments of very affluent nation on earth. At the moment, he didn’t look as though he could have shaken a meeting of a small town Board of Education.
Ed said, “All right. Let me introduce Ezekiel Joshua Tubber, the Speaker of the Word. It’s now up to you gentlemen to convince him that his curses should be lifted.” Ed sat his own self down, abruptly.
For a long moment there was silence.
Dwight Hopkins, his voice tense below the crisp efficiency, said, “Sir, as spokesman for President Everett MacFerson and the government of the United Welfare States of America, I can only plead with you to reverse whatever it is you have done—if, indeed, it was you—to bring the nation to the brink of chaos where it now stands.”
“Chaos,” Tubber muttered, brokenly.
Braithgale said, “Three quarters of the population are spending the greater part of their time wandering aimlessly up and down the streets. It will take only a spark, and sparks are already beginning to fly.”
Nefertiti said indignantly, glaring around at them, “My father is ill. We were almost killed. This is no time to badger him.”
Dwight Hopkins looked at Ed Wonder, questioningly. Ed shook his head, infinitesimally. Ezekiel Joshua Tubber was at bay, they would either come to terms with him now or anything might develop when he recovered strength and poise. It was brutal, perhaps, but the situation was brutal.
Ed said, explaining to the others. “Yesterday, Ezekiel Tubber explained part of his beliefs to me. His sect thinks the country is choking on its own fat and at the same time heading for destruction by using up its resources, both natural and human, at a headlong speed. He thinks we ought to plan a simpler, less frenetic society.”
The dazed reformer looked up at him, shook his head in exhaustion. “That’s not exactly the way I would put it… loved one.”
Jim Westbrook, slumped in a heavy chair, hands in pockets, said, dryly, “The trouble is, you’ve started at the wrong end. You’ve been trying to get to the people. Change their way of looking at things. The fact is, friend, the people are slobs, and always have been. There hasn’t been a period in history when, given the chance, the man in the street hasn’t made a slob of himself. Given the license and freedom from reprisal, they’ll wallow in sadism, debauchery, destruction. Look at the Romans and their games. Look at the Germans when they were given the go-ahead by the Nazis to eliminate the inferior races, the non-Aryans. Look at any combat soldiers, of any nationality.”
Tubber shook his shaggy head, bearlike, and the faintest brace of the old spark was there. “You err, loved one,” he protested, brokenly. “Human character is determined by environment rather than heredity. Human faults are imparted by bad training. The vices of the young spring not from nature, who is equally the kind and blameless mother of all her children; they derive from the defects of education.”
It was Westbrook’s turn to shake his head. “Sounds good, but it doesn’t work out that way. You can’t put more into a container than its capacity to hold. Average I.Q. is one hundred. Half the population is below that and you can subject most of them to education for life and it’s not going to take.”
The exhausted prophet was in there pitching. “No, your belief is a common fallacy. True, av
erage I.Q. is one hundred, but actually few of us go more than ten points either above or below that figure. The moron is as seldom found amongst us as is the genius with his I.Q. of 140 or above. The less than one percent who are geniuses are precious gifts to the race and should be sought out and given every opportunity to develop their talents, and cherished. Those who fall below 90 in their I.Q. are our unfortunates and every effort should be made, in all charity, to see that they lead as full lives as possible.”
Dwight Hopkins said smoothly, “I thought your basic complaint was against our affluent society and the Welfare State. But here you develop the usual do-gooder philosophy. All men are equal, so we should sacrifice the products of the successful to those who have lost the race.”
Tubber brought himself up more erect. “Why are we so contemptuous of the so-called do-gooder? Is it so reprehensible to attempt to do good? Man would seem to be his own worst enemy. We all claim to desire peace, but at the same time sneer at the conscientious objector. We claim to desire a better world, and then sneer at those who suggest reform as do-gooders. But that is beside the question you ask. My objection to the welfare state and our present society is not that we have solved the problems of production, but that the machine has slipped beyond our control and runs amuck. I do not begrudge the productive person the product of his efforts. The right to products is exclusive, but the right to means should be common. This is so, not merely because raw materials are provided by the All Mother, by nature, but also because of the heritage of installations and techniques which is the real source of human wealth and because of the collaboration that makes each man’s contribution so much more effective than if he worked in solitude. But this question of rewarding the more intelligent while penalizing he whom the All-Mother saw fit to equip with a lower I.Q. is no longer pertinent. In an economy of scarcity, it is obvious that the greatest contributors to society should reap greater rewards, but in our affluent society why should we begrudge anyone an abundance? We have never begrudged either air nor water to our meanest criminal because there has always been an abundance of both. In the affluent society, the meanest citizen can have a decent home, the best of food, clothing and the other necessities and even luxury. I would be a fool indeed, if I railed against this.”
Earth Unaware Page 19
