by James Gunn
“All right, Willie,” said a high-pitched voice from the darkness in front. “You can wait in the back. You, Gavin, stand where you are.”
Gavin stopped. To his right he could see now the red, blue, and yellow stained-glass windows that miraculously had escaped the riots of eighty-five. Then, slowly, three figures emerged from the darkness like corpses floating to the top of a lake. They were seated on a little platform in front of him, so that, even seated, they were taller than he was. The one on the left was fat and youthful; his round face, framed with golden curls and hanging with chins, was rosy and innocent. He wore a voluminous white robe, as if to conceal his bulk, but it overflowed the chair in which he sat, and the flesh of his arms overflowed the padded wooden arms of the chair. He was like a Roman boy emperor who had put aside for the moment his golden laurels.
The one on the right was big and black and strong. His hair was short and curly. He wore shorts and a ragged shirt through which his muscles bulged like fertility images carved from ebony.
Between the two was a girl. She seemed little more than a child. As she sat in her big chair her feet dangled six inches from the floor. Brown hair was cut short and ragged around a childish face. Shirt and slacks fit like doll clothes on a boyish body.
They were unreal, and Gavin did not believe in them.
“You've been busy, Gavin,” the fat boy said. His was the high-pitched voice that had spoken to Willie.
“Yeah,” the black said. “Busy.”
The girl said nothing. Her dark eyes looked roundly at Gavin like shoe buttons in a doll's head.
Gavin nodded. His knees trembled, and he hated them for displaying weakness.
“We wish to compliment you on the skill and professionalism with which you handled the abduction of the Professor.”
“Good job,” said the black.
“Thanks,” Gavin said. He felt as if he was answering talking statues.
“But...” The fat boy broke off. “Did you have to come here in such deplorable condition? Really, Gavin, you stink.” He waved one fat hand in front of his nose like an aristocrat offended by the slums his actions have created.
“I wanted to change,” Gavin said, and instantly wished he had not spoken. The words sounded defensive, and he felt weaker because of it.
“You freaks are all alike,” the black said.
The fat boy shook his head at the back of the room until his curls wobbled. “Willie, you're so impatient.”
But Gavin knew that they liked him muddy and damp in front of them, just as they liked looking down at him, and he tried to even things up by imagining them in other circumstances—in a sauna, for instance, or a shower room. Then he decided he would think of them as the three monkeys who saw no evil, heard no evil, and spoke no evil. Only, the last two monkeys were out of order. The girl had not yet spoken.
“But,” the fat boy went on, “the operation last night was deplorable.” He rocked back and forth in his huge chair metronomically.
“It wasn't my operation,” Gavin said.
“How can you say that? You were there.”
“Against my will.”
“A leader like you?” the fat boy scoffed. “How could anyone make you go on a raid if you didn't wish to go?” He had an oily voice that seemed to go on and on, insinuating and subtle.
“Gregory intimidated Jenny. I went along to protect her.” Gavin had a feeling that they knew all this, that all these questions were a net being slowly tightened around him. His legs shook again, and he locked his knees to avoid seeming in terror of these chimerical creatures.
“Jenny's your girl?” the black asked.
Gavin nodded, suddenly swept by grief.
“She was, Muhammad,” the fat boy said.
What did they know about Jenny? Gavin thought in his misery.
“We know everything that happened,” the fat boy said, as if in answer. “But we want to hear it from you. Whose operation was it?”
An odor like incense began to force itself upon Gavin's senses. He would have smelled it before, he thought incredulously, but his nose had been stuffed with his own effluvium. “I thought it was Gregory's,” he said, “but now I'm beginning to think otherwise.”
“You think it was ours,” the black said.
“Of course he thinks it was ours,” the fat boy said, rocking, “and of course it was. Gregory wasn't smart enough to plan a raid as ambitious as that.”
“It was dumb enough to be Gregory's,” Gavin said.
“You think it was dumb?” asked the fat boy. “What did you think was dumb?”
Gavin ignored the subtle menace in the fat boy's voice and plunged ahead. “Everything. The lack of preparation, realistic objectives, briefings, methods...”
“And yet,” the fat boy mused, “it might have worked.”
“And covered the campus with radiation.”
“If the townies had not been tipped off.”
“How do you know they were tipped off?” Gavin asked. He did not want to take them seriously, but sometimes a statement broke through his feeling of fantasy. Incense! Like gods!
“It was a trap.”
“How do you know that? Perhaps it was only poorly done. As far as I know, I was the only one present who escaped alive.”
“That is suspicious, isn't it?” the fat boy said smoothly.
“Shit!”
“But someone had to, didn't they?” the fat boy asked. “I mean, Gregory was dumb, but he wasn't clumsy. It would hardly be Gregory, now, would it? Or one of those in the squad with him. Why not the one who got away?”
“Maybe you were mad enough to tip off the townies,” the black said. His muscles moved like ripples in a stream of tar.
The girl sat as motionless as a portrait by Gainsborough.
They were trying to make themselves real by irritating him, Gavin thought, but they couldn't succeed. They were too improbable. “I'm going to sit down,” Gavin said defiantly, his jaw tight to keep his voice from shaking. He felt the raised left edge of the bench next to him and edged himself over until he could sink into the seat.
“Of course,” the fat boy said. “We want you to be comfortable.” That was a lie. They didn't want him to be comfortable at all.
“Even if I knew how to inform the townies,” Gavin said, “which I don't, I didn't know the raid was for the power plant until we got there. Gregory kept saying it was the police barracks.”
“We can't prove that now,” the fat boy said, shifting from one grotesque ham to the other. “Nobody's left but you.”
“Anyway,” Gavin said, taking up another position, “anyone could have squealed. Someone told me about it that afternoon.”
“Who?” the black said, leaning forward, rippling.
“Why should I get him in trouble?”
“He means the Monkey,” the fat boy said. He looked at Gavin with clear, innocent eyes. “But that means that you knew all along.”
“Who's going to believe an asskisser like Phil?” Gavin said. “And if he knew, who didn't know? But I suppose all this means that you sent Phil to tell me what was going to happen.”
“Of course,” the fat boy said. “There's no use trying to deceive you, Gavin. You're too bright for that. We won't admit it outside this little sanctuary, but nothing happens on this campus that we don't know about, and nothing important happens that we don't authorize.”
He rocked. The black rippled. The girl watched.
“Like the Professor?” Gavin asked.
“Well,” the fat boy said, “we didn't learn about that until afterward. As we told you, it was a nice, tight operation. What I want you to understand, however, is that we needed a fall guy for the raid if it didn't come off, and, Gavin, you're it.”
“You think I'd risk not only my life but Jenny's?”
“You were angry,” the fat boy said.
“You were out of your head,” the black said.
“You weren't thinking straight, and you thought you could r
id yourself of Gregory and get away. As you did,” the fat boy said.
“Without Jenny?” Gavin's desperation broke through. “Where is Jenny?”
“We thought you'd tell us,” the fat boy said.
For the first time Gavin thought he was telling the truth. “After the townies started shooting, I couldn't find her. She was gone.”
“She isn't on campus,” the fat boy said.
He rocked. The black rippled. The girl stared.
Revelation came to Gavin. “You tipped off the townies!”
“Of course,” the fat boy said. “Rather, the Monkey—the boy you call Phil—tipped them off at our instructions.”
“But why did you give them your own man, your own raid party?”
The fat boy shrugged. “Well, we couldn't have the campus showered with radioactivity, could we? You pointed that out yourself. Even cutting off the electricity would have been a bore.”
“Then why order the raid at all?” Gavin complained. The words were going around in front of him like a spiral galaxy.
“We needed it right now,” the fat boy said. “Revolutionary activity had been pretty light recently, and the masses have been restive. We needed something highly visible, but we needed martyrs more than we needed victories. Revolution feeds on martyrs and soon grows surfeited with success.”
Gavin could feel the world fragmenting around him like a Steuben glass vase tapped with a ballpeen hammer. “How did you get Gregory to go along with it?”
“We told him only what he wanted to hear—that it was dangerous, even foolhardy.” The fat boy rocked complacently. “That sort of thing never bothered Gregory. He had a touching faith in his own invulnerability. And then we promised him any girl he wanted. He had a foolish lust for this one girl. It doesn't make sense, really...”
“My Jenny?”
“Your Jenny then, Gregory's Jenny later. The difference is infinitesimal. What does it matter?”
The pieces of the world began to fall, in slow motion, like glass snowflakes, leaving only black nonexistence where they had been. “People matter!”
“Of course people matter!” The fat boy was exasperated. “Individuals don't matter. People matter. And we must do what is good for people, for people and the revolution. We can't let ourselves get enmeshed in personalities.”
Some Radiclibs, said the Professor, are able only to love people abstractly because they hate people individually, and they are perfectly willing, therefore, to sacrifice what they hate for what they love.
“But why would you want to get rid of Gregory?” He had to force himself back to reality, even though reality kept receding before him, buzzing in his ears, unfocusing his eyes. These three incredible creatures sitting in front of him had set them up like pieces on the chessboard of their world, each with its own move. “You move!” they told Gregory, and he plunged into danger. “You move!” they told Jenny, and she meekly followed. “You move!” they told Gavin, and he threw himself between the other two. Now they justified their cruel game with the name of revolution. They were the menace. They were the Moirae—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. He had to destroy them. He had to deliver mankind from their fatal grasp. But he could not move. He was too weak. He felt himself becoming unreal.
“He was getting to be a bit of a problem,” the fat boy said, serene again. “Always going off on his own, reckless, arrogant, hard to control...”
“He didn't give a shit about revolution,” the black said.
“That too,” the fat boy said. “He even made Willie nervous, and not much makes Willie nervous. Gregory was dispensable. The others were dispensable. Actually, Gregory makes a better martyr than a raid leader. And, of course, we wanted you out of the way, too.”
“Why me?”
“Elections are coming up soon. Ordinarily this would be no problem, but times are a bit unsettled. Students were talking about you for president.”
“That didn't interest me.”
“You say that now,” the fat boy said, “but StudEx has its appeal, particularly for a sincere revolutionary who sees how the revolution can be operated more effectively: StudEx wields great power.”
Power, the Professor said. The basic question is power.
“We could have avoided that unpleasantness,” the fat boy continued. “There was no question of that. But sincere rivals, we have found, are better removed than left to gather support and nurture dissent.”
“You would have cheated in the election?”
The fat boy was shocked. “Nothing as crude as that. We would simply have got out the vote—our vote—and there isn't enough student interest in campus politics to overcome our well-organized minority.”
The world continued to fall in tinkling splinters. “Why not let the will of the students prevail?” Gavin's voice sounded distant to him, as if it belonged to someone else.
“Students got no will,” the black said.
“Right, Muhammad,” the fat boy said. “Students don't know what they think until we tell them. We are the revolution. No one else is qualified to replace us. No one is capable of wielding power as effectively or as dispassionately.”
“And my unfortunate survival upset your plans,” someone said. “Sorry.”
The fat boy raised a fat hand; his whole arm wobbled. “No need. We had considered that possibility. Clearly you are a resourceful person. If you escaped, then we had a clear choice: to dispose of you permanently or to persuade you to join us on our terms. Now it's your choice.”
“Between what?”
“We're offering you the position of raid leader.”
“Gregory's position?”
The fat boy spread his hands, palms up, and rocked in his chair. The muscles on the black moved. The girl sat quite still.
“Why would you offer me something like that?” someone asked.
“We have lost a raid leader,” the fat boy said. “We need a new one. You are clearly qualified. You will have won a position of honor and privilege; we will have exchanged a hothead for a cool one, a confused mind for a clear one, a bad leader for a good one. The perquisites of the office are these: any girl you want, an automatic A in any course you wish to take, a virtually unlimited expense account, and free access to whatever drug supplies you need, so long as it doesn't interfere with your duties.”
The light from the westering sun colored the rough stone wall behind the fantastic trio with motley like an effulgence of their power.
“And what must I do?” someone asked.
The fat boy shrugged. His shoulders rippled under the white robe. “Anything we say.”
“It sounds,” someone said, “like a sentence which you can execute anytime you wish. Is this what you do with all your rivals?”
“The alternative is more certain and less pleasant,” the fat boy said.
“No.” The word echoed.
“You're crazy, man,” the black said.
“I'm not interested in power.”
The fat boy frowned. “What else is there?”
“What else, man?” the black said.
The fat boy rocked. The black rippled. The girl watched, round-eyed and still.
“Knowledge. Truth.” Someone else was in the room, answering for Gavin.
“Knowledge of what?” the fat boy asked. “The truth about what?”
The other person shrugged. “Everything.”
“What about the revolution?”
“First you must know,” the other person said. “Then you make the revolution.”
“No, no,” the fat boy said. “First you make the revolution. Then you find out what for.”
“I never did think that made sense,” the other person said. Where was he?
“Besides,” the fat boy said, “what is there to know? Five percent of the people own ninety-five percent of the wealth in this country. We know that. ‘The history of all existing society is the history of class struggle.’ We know that. The revolution creates a classless society; in the pro
cess, the proletariat become the ruling class, until the state withers away. We know that; Marx told us.”
“What he means,” the black said, “is power to the people. The poor is gonna get rich, and the rich is gonna get shot. That's the revolution.”
“Kill the oppressors,” the fat boy said, “and liberate the oppressed. We will bring freedom and justice to the world if we have to destroy the world in the process.”
The sunlight streaming, filtered and changed, through the stained-glass windows fell like clown's paint upon the terrible three. The fat boy was still. The black was tense. The girl's round eyes narrowed.
Someone giggled. “Eenie, meenie, and miney,” someone said. “Words. Words.” Gavin knew now who was talking: it was the Professor. A wave of dizziness rocked his head, and the scene wavered in front of him.
“It's all a game,” he heard the Professor saying. “You're playing a deadly little game with people's lives, and you're making it seem real by dressing it up in ancient words and creeds. It's no different from the games you played as children, except this time it's for keeps. It's no different from the chickens establishing a pecking order, except that chickens don't kill. And the funny part about all this is that you believe it; you think it matters, and the only ones it matters to are those who get used. The funny part is that you don't know it's a game.”
Gavin laughed. He was happy with the laugh. The sound was not too hysterical. It would have been a completely satisfying laugh if the room had not been shimmering and buzzing and the three student leaders had not loomed up and receded like a zoom lens gone mad. In the midst of his laughter, Gavin realized that they saw themselves not as see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil, not as the Fates, not as eenie, meenie, and miney, but as a Roman triumvirate or a Soviet troika,and he laughed harder, laughed until the room blurred with tears and the world ached, and he laughed even harder when he thought he heard the fat boy call, “Willie,” but all buzzy and distorted and strung out, like “Will-ell-eray!” and the little girl in the middle, whose feet did not touch the floor, who had not made a sound, seemed to say, “There are better ways than making martyrs. As we should know. Leave him.”
When the laughter died, shivers shook him. He wrapped his arms around his chest to hold himself still, and half-rose to find his way back out into sunshine and sanity, but his thigh muscles jellied and his traitorous knees surrendered to the weakness of his body, and he sank back, the room spinning until he had to close his eyes. He could still feel it spinning, but he didn't have to watch it.
