The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “Why aren’t you voting for New York?” Arlene asked me nervously. “Come on, you’re not gonna vote for San Francisco, are you?”

  “I categorically refuse to take part in this farce,” I told her.

  “San Francisco?” Ted said with a smug grin.

  A forest of hands. Maybe thirty.

  “See?” Ted crowed. “A big majority wants to go and almost everyone is willing to go along with the vote. So what are we crapping around for, Harvey?”

  The moment of truth: Ted had set it up beautifully for old Harv who could now say yes and still have everyone convinced that he had been pushed every step of the way.

  But I had underestimated Harvey again. He still had one more finesse up his dirty white sleeve: “That’s not a meaningful vote, Ted. It may be a clear indication of how such a vote would go, but it’s a forced choice. It’s not a truly committed vote. And I refuse to accept anything less than a genuine community consensus.”

  “Aw—”

  Harvey held up his hand like the Living Buddha. “Tell you what, Ted,” he soothed, “let’s break up the formal meeting now and chew it over. I’ll call another meeting next week and then we’ll be ready for a final vote. It’ll give everyone a chance to really consider the reality of the situation, now that we know more or less how the vote will go. This isn’t an election, after all, but an attempt to reach a real community decision. It’d take several weeks to plan the move once we decide to go, so we can surely wait one more week for a final decision. So let’s just break this up and talk it over.”

  And so saying, Harvey stepped down off the dais and the meeting almost immediately broke up into dozens of hot little bull-sessions. Man, that had been the Master’s Touch! Give ‘em a week to stew in it, knowing what the decision was going to be! Changed the question from “Do I vote for San Francisco?” to “Do I cut the Foundation out of my life?” As a group, as a community as Harvey would put it, it was all over but the shouting. And as far as I was concerned, I had had it with the Foundation. If I couldn’t talk Arlene and Ted and Doris back into their senses (and Arlene, at least, seemed no problem), they, and the rest of the Cuckoo-clock, could go take a flying leap into San Francisco Bay.

  So I grabbed Arlene’s hand as we got up off the floor, held Ted by the shoulder, and said: “You can’t be serious, man!” Thus achieving what I wanted: Ted, Doris and Arlene formed into my own little bullshit group around me.

  “Why not?” said Ted. “What’s to keep me in New York? I can set up a bike repair shop in San Francisco with no sweat, Doris can get some kind of job there, and I can get a big pad to paint in one hell of a lot cheaper than I can here.”

  “But who do you know in San Francisco?”

  Ted spread his arms as if to hug the whole universe to him. “All these people here!” he said. “That’s what’s so great about the Foundation—when we all move together, we’ll all know plenty of people in San Francisco. Like one big family!”

  “Yes,” Doris said rather mechanically, perhaps trying to convince herself, “it’s not as if we were moving three thousand miles from home all by ourselves...”

  “Et tu, Doris?”

  She shrugged. “New York, San Francisco, what’s the difference? If Ted wants to got to San Francisco, why not? I’ll miss you, though, Tom....”

  Ted draped his arm around my shoulder, “I’ll miss you too, man,” he said. “Shit, it’s ridiculous! Why the fuck don’t you come along? It’d be great for you!”

  It seemed hopeless—unless something happened out of left field, Ted and Doris would go. Any why not? As Doris said, New York, San Francisco, what’s the difference. Of course, the real difference was that it’s the Foundation that counts. If not for that, I could see how a move across the country could be a groovy thing—but not if you took your worst hang-up along. And certainly not if following your insanity was your reason for going!

  “You know, maybe you’ve got something there,” Arlene said. “I’ve been against going all along, but I’m not sure why—”

  “You know why! Because you’re afraid!” Ted said.

  “I know that... but afraid of what...?”

  “Shit,” said Ted, “you’re afraid of what everyone’s afraid of—being alone, all by yourself, in a place you don’t know, and where nobody knows you. Look, do you really think New York is the best place in the world to live, Arlene?”

  “Well... not really, I suppose...”

  “Of course not! You’re not that unconscious. Dig, don’t you see? It’s your sickness fighting for its survival. Your ego-fears telling you that going means change. And it’s right! Like Harvey once said to me, if you want to know what to do, take a good look at what you fear the most....”

  Arlene was silent for a long moment. Then she turned to me and said: “You said something like that to me once, too. Maybe you were right. I know damn well I’ve got no rational reason for staying in New York—”

  Goddamn, Ted was starting to get to her! “Bullshit!” I said.

  “What do you mean bullshit? You told me to go into my fears yourself!”

  “I mean bullshit, you’ve got no rational reason for staying in New York. What about college? What about me?”

  “Ah, shit, there are colleges in San Francisco,” Ted said. “And there’s no fucking reason why Tom can’t go with you if you mean that much to each other. Hell, if you really mean anything to Tom, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t go. Yeah,... It’s a good test of your thing with each other. If you were really meant to be together... well, if Tom won’t go with you to San Francisco, how can you—”

  “Hey, mind your own fucking business!”

  “He’s right,” Arlene said flatly.

  “What do you mean, he’s right?” I said. “By that same stupid logic, you should stay in New York to prove that I mean something to you!”

  “But there is one big difference,” Ted said before Arlene could get her mouth open. “The Foundation is going to San Francisco. We all know it is. So if you don’t go, Arlene, you’re gonna be left here all alone. No more groups, no more Harvey, no nothing. That’s what you’d be giving up to stay with Tom. But what will Tom have to give up to go with you? Just a crummy old job....”

  “You’re supposed to be my friend?” I snapped.

  “But I am being your friend,” Ted said with humorless sincerity. “I’m being your friend and I’m being Arlene’s friend too. Because the two of you belong together—in San Francisco with the Foundation!”

  “Ah shit!”

  “Look, I think we ought to talk this over, Tom,” Arlene said, her eyes cold, her mouth grim and determined. “Alone.”

  “Yeah, well the smell is getting pretty thick in here,” I said. “Okay, we’ll go eat our hearts out over dinner.”

  As we turned to go, Ted caught my arm, stared at me with warm, concerned blue eyes. “No hard feelings?” he said quietly.

  “No hard feelings! What the fuck’s the matter with you, Ted?”

  “I’m just trying to help you—”

  “With friends like you, who needs enemies?”

  “God-damn, Tom, you need to wake up! Your mind is only halfconscious! I feel sorry for you, is all...”

  “Yeah, well the feeling is mutual!”

  I dragged Arlene through the crowded room where the San Francisco agitprop machinery was whirring along in high gear. “You and I are gonna have a long nasty talk, baby,” I promised her.

  19 - Which Side Are You On?

  I had decided to pass on Sing Wu’s which, though a much better restaurant than the little joint down the street, was big and light and a little flashy, with a bar and crowds, and hardly a place to talk. The little Chinese restaurant three blocks further down Second was small, dim, obscure, undistinguished, and the kind of place you remember by location, not by name. The small, low-ceilinged, badly-lit dining room was half a flight from street level and gave you the feeling of a cool, quiet cave. The only other customers, seated as we were
at little two-place tables along the walls, were a cop in uniform, two old ladies eating together, a guy that looked like a truck driver, and a scuzzy old duck about one step up from a Bowery bum. The bigger tables in the center of the dining room looked like they had last seen service in 1939.

  Arlene and I hadn’t said much to each other on the cab ride down—in fact we both seemed to be purposely confining the talk to where we were going to eat—and we still hadn’t broken down the wall of small talk and long silences between us as I ordered dinner and the waiter plunked down a pot of tea on the table. I let her pour cups of tea for us—a very Bronx-chick thing to do—and sipped mine straight—a very hip thing to do—while she dumped a huge spoonful of sugar into hers and began stirring and stirring and stirring, staring down into the dark brown whirlpool.

  “Don’t you see what Ted was really doing?” I finally said from deep right field. “He wants me to go along. He figures that if you go, I’ll go.”

  “You trying to tell me that your friend is using me to trick you into going to San Francisco?” Arlene said belligerently, taking a brief sip of her over-sweetened tea.

  “Yeah... But it’s not like that... it’s not something sinister. Ted’s nothing if not sincere. He digs me, he digs you, he thinks we should be together, he wants all of us to be in San Francisco with the Foundation where he truly believes we’ll all live happily ever after, and he feels that he knows what’s good for us better than we do. I’m not putting Ted down... I feel sorry for him.”

  “Why should you—”

  The waiter shuffled up with the wonton soup and Arlene cooled it. I spooned broth, wontons, greens and reddish-pink slivers of pork out of the tureen and into our bowls. I tasted the soup: flat. I dribbled in a few drops of soy sauce, turning the broth a murky brown. Not exactly great, but better.

  “Why should you have such a superior attitude?” Arlene said, sipping diffidently at her soup.

  I suddenly realized I was hungry. Uptightness can do that to me sometimes. I started gobbling up soup and wontons, gauchely talking with a full mouth.

  “Maybe because I am superior. I see through what’s going on and you and Ted don’t. A week or so ago, you wouldn’t have dreamed of following old guru Harv to San Francisco. Now—”

  “I know what you’re going to say. Harvey maneuvered the whole thing. I’m not that dense, Tom. But what if he has? So what?”

  “So what?”

  “Look,” she said, starting to eat a little heartier, “it all depends on what you think of Harvey and the Foundation. You think Harvey’s a phony and the Foundation is bad. If you’re right, then Harvey maneuvering everyone into going to San Francisco is an evil thing. I’ll grant you that...”

  Looked like the food was starting to make her more reasonable: she was talking more calmly and the lines on her face had relaxed with the motions of chewing. Maybe it was a matter of eating up that old Oriental cool—I was feeling less combative myself.

  “But?” I said. “There is a but...?”

  She nodded, finishing off the last of her soup. “But,” she said, looking up from her bowl, “what if Harvey is a good man and the Foundation a good thing? What if he’s wiser than any of us? What if he knows that a clean break with our pasts and a fresh start in San Francisco and a sense of the Foundation as a community is what we all need? What if he knows we wouldn’t accept it if he told it to us? Well, then the only way to get us to help ourselves is to make us think it’s our spontaneous decision. You see what I mean? If what Harvey’s doing is really a good thing, then how he gets it done doesn’t really matter...”

  “Der Fuehrer knows best, eh? Baby, I have not the words to tell you how slimy and evil that feels to me!”

  “But you’re just going with a feeling...”

  “I trust my instincts,” I said.

  “So why shouldn’t I trust mine? My instincts tell me that Harvey is good and wiser than I am. So—”

  The waiter appeared carrying three big dishes with steel covers on a metal tray. He cleared off the soup tureen and the bowls, set a big platter down in front of each of us, put the three dishes down on the table, and split.

  I spooned a big mound of fried rice onto each of our platters. The other two dishes were lobster Cantonese (pieces of lobster in egg sauce) and Chinese pepper steak (beef with green peppers, onions and water chestnuts)—nothing fancy. I dumped some of the lobster on my plate. Arlene started on the pepper steak.

  “Look,” Arlene said while I struggled with my lobster-fork, “doesn’t it all boil down to what you feel about Harvey and the Foundation? You feel he’s not doing a good thing, so the move to San Francisco is just one more bad thing. I feel he’s good and he knows what he’s doing, so going to San Francisco is probably a good thing for me. Especially since it scares me. Ted was right about that. So were you—I’m full of fears. Maybe if I lick this one big fear, it’ll be a breakthrough for me...”

  The lobster wasn’t bad. “Try some of this,” I said, spooning some of it onto her plate. I took some of the pepper steak. Too greasy.

  “I’ll buy the fighting your fear thing,” I said. “Okay, you gotta make a motion, an existential act, whatever you want to call it. But why buy Harvey’s junk? Why not do something more personal?”

  “Such as?”

  I reached into my pocket, dangled my apartment key in front of her face.

  She grimaced, seemed about to say something, hesitated, smiled, grimaced again. “You know,” she finally said, “you could be right. Maybe it would be the same thing. But... I can’t do that...”

  I put away the key. “Because you’re afraid,” I said around a mouthful of rice.

  “Yes...”

  “Well, there you are... It is the same thing. If you can fight one fear, you can fight the other.”

  She swallowed a mouthful of food. “It’s not the same thing,” she said. “If I take that key, then it’s you and me all alone and the Foundation goes to San Francisco... and... and I’m left here with you and my fears... and no support... That’s a much bigger thing than going to San Francisco....”

  “I’m glad you finally realized that.”

  “Don’t you see? If I go to San Francisco, I have the Foundation and Harvey and all the members... a whole community to help me with my hang-ups... I’d be afraid, but I wouldn’t be so alone.”

  “You wouldn’t be alone with me.”

  “But... a real relationship really scares me. You’d be the last person in the world to help me with that fear... I haven’t reached that level of consciousness yet... I think with the Foundation’s help I could, someday... But if I stay behind, I’ll be trapped... I’ll never be able to have a real relationship with you or anyone else.”

  “You’ll never know until you try. You won’t get there by just talking about it for the rest of your life.”

  She played with her pepper steak, stared at her plate while a vein pulsed at the hinge of her jaw. “You’re right,” she said, “But... but I’m right too. I’d like to take that key, but... But if it means giving up the Foundation—”

  Suddenly she cut herself off. She looked at me with a thin smile arced across her face; her eyes shone with a strange kind of berserk fire.

  “Do you think it could be... the real thing between us?” she said.

  “Yes...”

  “I think so too. And I’m willing to prove it. Are you?”

  “Try me.”

  “I will: If the Foundation goes to San Francisco, I’m going with it; I have to. But I’ll prove that you mean as much to me as the Foundation does—I’ll be your... woman on any terms you want.”

  She paused, put down her fork, and stared at me with frightening intensity. “But only in San Francisco,” she said. “That’s what you’ve got to do to prove yourself to me; we’ve got to go to San Francisco together. That’s fair.” And she clamped her jaw into bear-trap resolution.

  “Fair? That’s asinine! Love me, love the Foundation, that’s what you’re say
ing!”

  We stared at each other across the littered table, across the oriental flotsam and jetsam of a meal that was starting to turn to a cold greasy lump of lead in my stomach.

  “In a way, maybe that’s right,” she said. “I need the Foundation; I can’t survive without it. That need’s part of me, so you can’t have me without it... I’m not asking you to need the Foundation...”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Sure you’re not!” I said. “You’re just asking me to drag my ass all the way across the country to be with you—and all because you have to be with Harvey.”

  Her jaw trembled but didn’t relax. “If you don’t think I’m worth leaving New York for...”

  “Oh shit, it’s not that and you know it! You want to run away with me to Paris or Timbuktu or Cleveland, we can leave tomorrow. Anywhere but San Francisco!”

  “If you really mean that, then why not San Francisco?”

  I forced myself to shut up for nearly a minute and recover my cool. What she was really saying was, I’m willing to try making it with you if you’re willing to give me a quid pro quo. All the logic was on her side. But goddamn it, a relationship between a man and a woman can’t be based on horsetrader’s logic!

  “Okay,” I said, about ten decibels lower and minus 25mg of speed less uptight, “I’m trying to understand, really I am. You need the Foundation, you say. And you want me. So I have to go with you and the old Cuckoo-clock to San Francisco. Okay, I dig: you want me, but you need the Foundation and you’ve got to go with the need over want.”

  “You still don’t completely understand—even if I stayed in New York with you and let the Foundation go to San Francisco, it wouldn’t work. Maybe part of me wants to do that. But I can’t. Because I need the Foundation to get me to the point where I can have a real relationship with you.”

  “Bullshit! It’s the Foundation that’s keeping you from really making it with a man.”

  “You believe that. I don’t.”