"I"ve been so bad, so selfish." Kitty wrenched her head away and whispered into the pillow. "And I"ve been punished. Only you"ve been punished, too."
"n.o.body"s been punished, darling. You mustn"t think that. It"s an accident, that"s all."
"It"s not an accident. It"s a judgment ..."
"Kitty ..." Archer rocked her in his tight arms, not wanting to hear any of this.
"A judgment because I"ve been a useless wife. These last months, when they"ve been torturing you so-I didn"t help. I made it worse. I joined them. I tortured you too. I was frivolous and I was mean and I only thought about myself. All those things I said about you and Vic and Nancy. How could I say them? How can you bear to live with me any more?"
She took her arms away from Archer"s shoulders and let them fall limp behind her head. Archer lowered her gently onto the pillow and stood up. He turned away and wiped his eyes. Kitty had never seen him cry before and he felt embarra.s.sed, as though he had exposed a shameful secret about himself that he had cunningly hidden for twenty years.
"What"s happened to me?" Kitty whispered, staring up at the ceiling. "How did I get so bad? I used to be so proud of myself, I used to think I was so strong, I used to think I was a protection for you, that I paid my way, that we had a real marriage, you and I ..."
Archer put his handkerchief away. He stopped crying suddenly. His nose felt as though he had a cold. "We do have a real marriage," he said. He sat down in the chair beside the bed and rested his hand under Kitty"s head, low-down, feeling the damp hair and the warm, firm skin on the back of her neck. "You mustn"t ever think anything else."
"And the way I fought you," Kitty went on, disregarding his attempt to comfort her. "When you were in the worst trouble of your life. When you had to act the way you did, because that"s the sort of man you are and that"s why I love you. And I yelled at you like the worst kind of money-loving, comfort-loving b.i.t.c.h ..."
"Kitty ..." Archer pleaded. "Not tonight. Wait ..."
"And I was so wrong about Jane," Kitty went on inexorably. "I was so offhand and modern and superior. I was too lazy to see what was happening, I was too busy making myself comfortable, I didn"t want to bother ... I let her slide away. I let her hurt herself and get beaten and shamed ..."
"You"re being too harsh with yourself," Archer said, believing that what he was saying was half-true. "It"s only because you"re exhausted and you"ve been through so much tonight."
"No good as a mother," Kitty whispered. "No good as a wife. All the time I was up there in that room, waiting, I kept thinking of what I said a month ago ... I said, "I hope he comes out in seven months, I"m getting so tired of carrying him around." Do you remember?"
"You never said anything like that," Archer said, although he remembered when she had said it and remembered the slight superst.i.tious twinge of fear he had felt when he"d heard it.
"Oh, yes, I did," Kitty said. Her voice turned into a flat sing-song. "I said it and you remember it, because I remember the look in your eye when I did. Well, I got my wish. Better than my wish. I was tired, I said. I was annoyed at the inconvenience. Oh, G.o.d, what sort of woman am I?"
"Look," Archer said, "we"re going to forget everything you said and everything I said and all the mistakes we"ve made and all the chances we"ve m.u.f.fed. And we"re going to start over again ..."
"I"m not going to forget anything," Kitty said. "And neither are you. Why don"t you leave me? I"m no good for you, n.o.body"ll blame you if you just put on your hat and coat and go right now."
"Kitty, darling," Archer said desperately, "I"m going to call Miss Kennedy and tell her to give you some dope and let you sleep for awhile."
"You can"t call Miss Kennedy," Kitty said in the toneless singsong. "She"s gone off duty. She"s going to church. Clement ..." Kitty"s face was distorted with grief. "Clement, she said she was going to pray for our son."
He put his arms around her again, letting her weep, kissing her cheek. She cried for a long time before she grew quiet and then she was very sleepy and she said in a small, but clear and surprisingly calm voice, "I"m all right now, darling. Why don"t you go out and get some air and a drink and something to eat?"
Then she fell asleep.
Archer stood up. He felt broken and unsteady and it was hard for him to believe that he had ever slept in his whole life. Kitty"s mouth was open, and she was snoring softly, the sound hoa.r.s.e and domestic in the strange, cold room. As he watched his wife sleep, he wondered how much of what she had said was true, how much of what had happened to them was really a judgment. But on whom, he thought, who has been judged?
He took his hat and coat off the rack carefully and went silently out of the room, closing the door gently on the soft, defeated, snoring noise within. As he walked down the dark corridor, surrounded by the convalescing, the delivered, the doubtful, the dying, he remembered that Kitty hadn"t asked him whether he had seen their son, whether he was dead or alive.
The night was cold and Archer put up the collar of his coat as he walked down the empty street toward the river. A drink would have been good, but he didn"t want to see people, he didn"t want to hear saloon laughter or jukebox music.
The river slid past blackly, looking wintry and dangerous, and there were only occasional cars rushing home in a quick flare of headlights along the highway. Downstream, bulking out of the night, punctuated by weak, irregular patterns of light, were the islands on which were the hospitals and the prisons. Upriver were the swinging, mathematically s.p.a.ced lights of the great bridge, unsubstantial in the darkness. There was no moon, but the stars were bright and frosty in the cold darkness of the sky.
The biting air was insistent against Archer"s face, waking him up, but making him feel a little lightheaded, as he stared out over the water and smelled the brackish tidal salt of the river.
I should go to sleep, he thought. Tomorrow"s another day. Not correct. It was past midnight. Today"s another day. He turned around and looked at the hospital behind him. It was almost completely dark. Only here and there a light shone, people refusing to die in the dark, nurses having coffee, doctors probing pain with experienced fingers, saying, This will wait till morning. And in a room high up on top of the building, Mrs. Grogan, without teeth, watching the two incubators, waiting placidly, because it was her job and that"s how she earned her ten dollars a day and bought her tea and her chop and her cotton stockings, waiting placidly, as she. had done how many times before in her cheerful, kind-hearted way, for a small, inadequate, hurried heart to stop beating. All sorts of strange jobs in the world and all sorts of ordinary people to fill them. Airs. Grogan, keeping an eye on the oxygen gauge, comfortably sucking her toothless gums, on the death watch for infants. Thinking what, under her thin gray hair? You"re well out of it, lad, and don"t let anyone tell you different. Listen to an old lady who"s been through it all. There"s nothing to it, lad, only disappointment and leavetakings, and people telling you one thing and meaning another, and fight, fight, fight all the long days of your life. You"re not missing much, lad, and that"s a fact. And from what I read in the papers, we"re all to be blown up any day now, in one thorough explosion, and left to rot in the rubble with our bones turning to water and our blood thinning to acid and giving off signals like a radio station and the signals always saying the same thing, good-bye, good-bye. And here you are dying comfortably in a nice warm box, and not old enough to regret any of it, and there"ll be many on that day who"ll envy you tonight.
Archer turned his back on the hospital. Down the river, on the Queens side, among the factory-stacks, an enormous sign wrote a message across the sky in electric red letters. PEPSI-COLA. Look past the borders of the city at death-time, look for comfort and omens, and see the cryptic, shining words of the oracle, steadfast in mists and storms, saying PEPSI-COLA.
Archer stared out across the river, conscious of the cold and the silence and emptiness of the streets around him, and it made him remember that other night, such a short time ago, when he and Vic had walked side by side along Madison Avenue after the program was over and they were both feeling good, and the night was promising, and the evening"s first drink was waiting for them in the warm bar.
Where had that feeling gone? What had happened to that promise? That night he had chuckled at Pokorny because he was so comically over-serious, and how comic was Pokorny tonight? And he had kissed Alice Weller and congratulated her and a.s.sured her she would work again, and on what grounds could he congratulate her now? And he had criticized Barbante for using too much perfume and had joked about his pa.s.sion for women, and where was the joke now and was he expected to laugh at it tonight? He had been annoyed with Atlas because Atlas was independent and scornful and only Atlas had really survived. And Atlas had survived because he was suspicious and despairing from the beginning and had built a defense for himself out of a protective combination of shrewdness and loathing. Perhaps there were lessons to be learned from Atlas, but who could learn them?
And Vic ... Fifteen years. The lanky student with the black eye and the bruised nose and the pretty girl in the summery cla.s.sroom. The ferocious boy on the football field, playing with that curious mixture of violence and disinterest, disdainful of the praise or friendship of his fellows, coldly unmoved by the pleas of the coach or the dislike of his cla.s.smates, making his own rules as he went along, arrogantly, confidently, not taking anybody else"s advice or, at least when he was young, serving anyone else"s system of values. The gay, inventive, useful, inevitably successful man. You"re not satisfied just to adore, Kitty said. You have to be like your hero. You ape him, the way he talks, the way he walks, the way he wears his hat. I don"t have my own husband any more. I have a carbon copy of another man, and I"m disgusted with it. And now, here"s your final, great chance. The final identification. You can suffer for his sins. How could I expect you to pa.s.s up an opportunity like that?
Fifteen years. Ending in an overheated banquet room in a fancy hotel with a cleverly dressed, beautiful, neurotic girl making this year"s confession of sin and turning this year"s version of state"s evidence. Ending in the embrace under the lamppost, and the tears, and Nancy"s voice saying, Forget him. Write him off. Wipe us all out. Please.
Very early, Hutt had warned him. n.o.body can stand investigation. n.o.body, Hutt had said. If you think you can you must have led your life in deep freeze for the last twenty years. Well, he hadn"t listened, and the investigation had taken place, and it had turned out that Hutt had been right. His life hadn"t been led in deep freeze, and bit by bit it had been shattered. He was defamed and jobless. His wife had lost his son, who might be dying at this moment in the dark building behind him. She had also lost her own respect for herself, because she had proved jealous and ordinary at the climactic moment of their time together and both she and Archer knew that however good their life together might be from now on, it would be a patched life and not whole and complete as it had been before. As for Vic ... Investigation had proved him a liar and a betrayer of trust, and there went another fifteen years.
If he had done what he wanted to do that day in Hurt"s office, Archer thought, if he had resigned immediately, none of this would have happened. He"d be out of work, but he was out of work now, and he would still have a complete wife, a friend. His wife would still have been frail and undependable, his friend untrue-but he wouldn"t know about it. He was forty-five-the necessary illusions might very possibly have stood up the twenty or twenty-five years more that he had to live. Perhaps he had known all this subconsciously and the immediate, almost instinctive gesture of resignation had been a reflex, not so much of courage and loyalty as a panicky and disguised attempt at self-preservation. Perhaps he had known, deep-down, that he was surrounded by people who were, not what they seemed, that he was committed to loyalties and concepts that could not bear investigation, that the structure of the world he had built for himself had depended equivocally on his own naivete and that when that naivete was destroyed by fact, the structure on which he rested would be shattered along with it.
Perhaps, Hutt had said, perhaps we have to resign ourselves to an unhappy fact. Perhaps we live in a time in which there are no correct solutions to any problem. Perhaps every act we make must turn out to be wrong. You couldn"t afford to believe this-but could you afford not to believe it?
And Barbante had taken it another step. You can die on your feet, or you can die on your knees, Barbante had said, drunk and desolate in Hutt"s office. Surprisingly, thinking of it now, Archer felt that there was more hope in Barbante"s formulation. At least it included the notion of moral choice and hidden in it there was a conception of dignity and the possibility of right though tragic action that was missing from Hutt"s program. The only trouble was that it was an action that had to be performed in the dark, in a twisting, deceptive, obscure medium, with the horizon, in momentary glimpses, always at a different and surprising angle. There is an activity in which I can profitably engage myself in the next twenty years, Archer thought with a queer sense of triumph at having reached this far. I can devote myself to discovering at every moment just how vertical I am. I can commit myself to the single task of keeping my knees from touching the ground.
He felt cold now. The wind was stronger and bit at his face and his hands were stiff in his pockets. He turned and walked away from the river toward the hospital. He looked up at the top floor and wondered numbly and without emotion if his son was still alive. He thought of the warm, moist room and the shapeless old lady between the plastic boxes, and the struggling, desperate, overreached heart. Curiously, he put his hand under his coat and through his shirt to the skin of his chest. His hand was cold on the skin, but under it his own heart beat steadily and prosaically. If only there were some way, he thought, to give a fraction of this strength, a share of this reliable, unthinking movement, to the crumpled small form on the top floor. If only there were some way to subtract a day of his own heart"s beating, a month, and add it to his son"s. If Graves would work on something like that, he thought grimly, instead of resigning so gracefully to the mysterious intentions of G.o.d...
Archer took his hand out from under his coat and walked slowly up the hospital steps. Most of the lights had been put out in the downstairs hall and at first Archer didn"t see the man who was slumped in a chair in a corner. But then the man stood up and started toward Archer and came under a light and Archer saw that it was Vic.
Archer stopped, waiting. Vic came over slowly, shambling, walking in a way that Archer hadn"t seen before. He had a queer, diagonal small grin on his mouth and it looked as though it had been set there a long time.
"Hi," Vic said, stopping a few feet away.
"h.e.l.lo, Vic," Archer said. He didn"t offer to shake hands.
"How is it?" Vic asked.
"Kitty"s OK," Archer said, wondering what OK meant. "The kid is still alive. Or he was still alive the last time I asked."
Vic nodded soberly. "I hope ..." he began. Then he stopped, self-consciously. He looked very tired and he kept his coat collar turned up, as though he was cold, even in the warm hallway. "Give my love to Kitty," he said.
"I will."
"I don"t suppose she"d want to see me."
"I don"t suppose she would," Archer said.
Vic nodded again. "I wanted to tell you something," he said. "Something that"s probably been puzzling you." He waited, but Archer didn"t speak. "About that pet.i.tion," Vic said. "The one you were supposed to have signed."
Archer tried to remember. He knew there was something about a pet.i.tion that had seemed important at one time, but it was so long ago, and so many things had happened since then, and whatever it was, it no longer was even important enough to remember.
"The one Frances Motherwell spoke about at the meeting," Vic explained patiently.
"Oh, yes," Archer said.
"You never signed that," said Vic.
"I know."
"I did," Vic said. "I forged your name."
"OK," Archer said disinterestedly. He wanted to get upstairs and ask about the child.
"We needed a certain number," Vic said, "and it was beginning to get awfully hard to dig up names."
"OK."
"If you want," Vic said, "if you think it will help, I"ll announce it. I"ll send a note to the papers saying it was me all along."
"Forget it," Archer said. He felt uncomfortable and he realized that what he was uncomfortable about was seeing Vic standing there so strangely contrite and beaten. It wasn"t like Vic and he didn"t want to see it.
"Nancy told me she gave you the gory details about me," Vic said. "You know the worst."
"Yes."
"In case you"re interested," Vic said, still with that queer, slit grin, "I"m not ashamed of any of it."
"OK," Archer said. "You"re not ashamed."
"I"m only sorry about one thing."
"What"s that?"
"I behaved like a fool about Frances Motherwell."
"I imagine you did."
"Not the way you think." Vic chuckled softly. "Not politically. s.e.xually. Learned a lesson. s.e.x is politics, too. Just like economics, art, war. I underestimated the role of the bedroom in the advance of the Revolution. The lady took a liking to me. Four years ago. Always be careful when one of those girls with eyes that pop just a little out of their head begin to yearn over you. First I pretended I was too modest to understand what she was hinting. Then she stopped hinting. Did you know there"s a whole new breed of woman loose in America, who drink four Martinis and go up to a man at a party and say, "I"m going to make a pa.s.s at you"?" Herres shook his head ruefully. "Result of advanced higher education for girls; the progressive feminization of the male s.e.x brought about by luxurious living; the alarming increase in h.o.m.os.e.xuality among artists and college graduates ... I don"t know. I behaved in an urbane manner," Herres said, laughing a little. "Or as urbane as I could be in a situation like that. I explained I had a pathologic addiction to monogamy. I pretended that I was flattered and that perhaps some other time, if I ever got into trouble with my wife ... I tried to turn the talk to n.o.bler topics like the drama and the organization of sharecroppers in Tennessee and she"d just laugh, that wild, curdled laugh of hers, and tell me she"d get me in due time. I got to hate the sight of her, but I had to pretend I thought she was fine, and of course in the Party I couldn"t let feelings like that influence me. Then recently she took to writing me the most obscene and specific invitations and calling me up in the middle of night, dead drunk, crying and using words over the phone that you"d be embarra.s.sed to hear in a Ma.r.s.eilles wh.o.r.e-house. Finally, I made the big blunder. I gave it to her. I told her what I thought of her. Big mistake to do with any woman. But with someone like Motherwell, whom you have to depend on-fatal." He shrugged. "I told her I didn"t like promiscuous women." He grinned. "That isn"t even absolutely true. There"re some promiscuous women I like very much. Salt of the earth. Merry, useful citizens, easing the burden of being alive in an intolerable civilization. But I didn"t like her. I told her to climb up out of the gutter. I told her she ought to go to an a.n.a.lyst. I told her she ought to get married and have five kids. I told her she disgusted me. For the first time in many years, I indulged myself in an emotional att.i.tude. And I"m paying for it. The wages of virtue," Vic said, smiling queerly, "is death. Beware of the puritan within. I made the virgin"s error-I overestimated the value of chast.i.ty and the lady got up in meeting and paid me off in another coin. If I"d been a little more realistic I"d"ve visited that little chocolate-colored apartment a couple of afternoons a month and put a blindfold on and screwed like a patriot for the International. And Frances Motherwell would still be a silent, satisfied worker for the Cause. Oh, I forget," Vic said, his eyes amused though his voice was sober. "You don"t like me to use language like that."
"All right," Archer said. "Now I have the full and glorious history of Frances Motherwell, who doesn"t interest me very much any more. Now, how about you and me?"
"What about you and me?"
"The stuff to Roberts," Archer said. "The lie before I went to Philadelphia. The attack on me at the meeting. You helped plan that, too, didn"t you?"
"Yes," Vic said. He looked vaguely around him at the dim hospital lobby, with the low gleam of subdued lights cold off the marble walls. "There was nothing personal in that."
"Oh, G.o.d"," said Archer. "Nothing personal."
"No," Vic said. "There was a certain situation that had to be handled. A particular tactic was called for. In a war, when a commander has to expose certain elements of his troops to being cut off and decimated, or allow some civilians who happen to be on the ground to be hurt, that doesn"t mean that it"s a personal transaction between him and them. It was just bad luck. You were exposed and in the line of fire and you had to get hit. That"s all."
"That"s all," Archer said. "Just as a point of interest-n.o.body told me it was a war."
"Read the papers, brother," Vic said softly. "The communiques are on every page."
"I"m a funny man," Archer said, ignoring Vic. "I believe that whatever two human beings do to each other, and certainly whatever two people who are friends do to each other, is personal."
"You"re a funny man," Vic said gravely. "You said so yourself."
"And if anybody believes in something that prevents him from treating me personally, and that means taking into account the necessity of telling me the truth, the necessity of behaving honorably," Archer said, "I can"t accept him as my friend. I don"t want to see him any more. Ever."
"Honorable," Vic said. "Slippery word. Subject to a variety of interpretations."
"I don"t think so."
"Time changes a word like that," Vic said. "Geography. Law. Ultimate aims. The weather. Everything. It"s like love. You get into bed with an eighteen-year-old girl in Connecticut and it"s love. You do the same thing in California and it"s statutory rape." He grinned. "You start a revolution in America in 1776 and you happen to win, so you"re an honorable fellow. Father, I chopped down the cherry tree, oh, what a bright boy am I. Talk about the same thing in 1950 and hanging"s too good for you. You think I betrayed you, don"t you?"
"Yes," said Archer.
"Another word. Betrayal. Treason. In a more general sense you think I"m a traitor, too, don"t you? Or at least potentially?"
"Yes," Archer said slowly. "I do. Nancy told me that when that man was arrested for giving away atomic secrets to the Russians, you said you"d do the same thing if you had the chance."
"Nancy talks too much," Vic said harshly. "But she wasn"t lying. Why not? Listen-during the war, when a German turned against the n.a.z.is and helped us, you thought he was a n.o.ble fellow, indeed, didn"t you? Remember all the pretty articles that were written about it-the higher call, the duty to humanity above the narrow duty to your country, the necessity for private revolt to save the very people you were revolting against. All that? Well, I fell for it. I"m a big man," he said mockingly, "for the higher duty. I"m busy trying to save America from itself. And if I have to lie a little here and there for it, and if I have to say one thing when I mean another, and not advertise everything that comes into my mind in the New York Times, I don"t mind that at all. The guys who sneaked across the German lines with maps of n.a.z.i artillery positions didn"t announce what they were doing over a public-address system, either. Were they dishonorable because they crossed the lines at night?"
"That was Germany under Hitler," Archer said. "In America it"s a different ..."
"Different. Different!" Vic said sardonically. "America is immune to everything, including Fascism and the common cough, because G.o.d loves us so much. Let me tell you something about America. We"re the most dangerous people in the world because we"re mediocre. Mediocre, hysterical and vain. We"re worse than the worst religious fanatics. We can"t bear the thought that anybody anywhere else might be more advanced or more intelligent or better organized or be closer to the true faith than we are-and we"re ready to knock down a hundred cities in one night to stifle our own doubts. We"re the ruin-bringers. We lick our chops, waiting for the moment to start the planes off the runways. All over the world when people hear the word America, they spit. We call it freedom and we"ll stuff it down their throats like hot lead if we have to. Our idea of freedom includes two hundred million radioactive corpses. And what do you think it"s going to be like here? There"ll be plenty of the free dead here, too, because the rest of the world will see to that. And the ones that aren"t produced by foreigners"ll be supplied by the domestic trade. Look at the newspapers, listen to the radio-everybody in this country is slavering to get his hands at the throat of his neighbor. Give us two, three years of another war and we"ll blow up here like a firecracker. The whites"ll kill the blacks, the Protestants the Catholics, the Catholics anybody they can lay their hands on, the rich"ll machine-gun the poor, the poor"ll turn Fifth Avenue red with blood, if there"s still a Fifth Avenue left that anybody can find. Everybody in this country hates everybody else. All you have to do is follow one political campaign to mow that. And there"ll be a big sigh of relief when the killing season"s officially introduced ... And if I have to do a little lying to my poor old history professor now and then in an attempt to postpone all this, let the angels punish me in heaven for it. n.o.body who ever accomplished anything ever behaved like a boy scout on Sunday. Look for your scrupulous friends on the losing side of everything. Morality-morality is what the conqueror imposes upon the conquered to make sure they both remain exactly that. Don"t think I"m taken in by the lies," Vic went on stubbornly. "Not the Chamber of Commerce lies or the Hitler lies or Hutt"s lies or Pravda"s lies. I don"t believe we"re all brave, free, friendly patriots here and that everything will always be just dandy as long as we salute the flag and pay our income tax on time. And I don"t believe that Russia"s full of merry, singing peasants and the Kremlin is full of saints and that n.o.body gets killed in the Soviet Union and n.o.body gets tortured and n.o.body gets his face pushed in when he happens to say something unpopular. But I say that it"s coming to a showdown and when that time comes, it"s going to be worse here and I"m betting that the Russians"ll be at least fifty-one percent right. And I"ll bet that when that time comes you"ll have to be on our side."
"You should have been at the meeting Friday night," Archer said. "I made an interesting little lecture on just that subject. I"m going to be on my own side."
Vic made an impatient gesture. "I heard about your speech. It wasn"t a lecture. It was a suicide note. You"re so G.o.d-d.a.m.n anxious to be pure that you"re making it absolutely certain that you"ll be cut down without the slightest effort. Because n.o.body on either side"ll raise a finger to help you. It"s going to take a new invention to service people like you, Clement. A cellophane wall. So that when you go to your martyrdom, the firing parties of both sides can hit you at the same time. You"ve outdated the opaque, non-transparent wall for execution purposes, Clem, and you"ll be remembered for your contribution." He grinned coldly in the shadowy marble hall. "And you"ve done it the old-fashioned way," he went on. "With all the old ingredients. Honor. Loyalty. Literal truth. You"d"ve been a big success in the fifteenth century, but this year, kid, you"re just a joke. You"re hundreds of years behind the times and the worst of it is that you"re proud of it. And the sad part of it is that there"re so many like you. You want all the benefits of the twentieth century, you want to ride in cars and fly in the air and have an easy, modern, up-to-date, latest-model conscience, but you can"t grind a cylinder or put in a rivet or do any of the dirty work that has to be done to keep people from starving or wars from breaking out. You"re great on results but when it comes to the techniques you suddenly discover your mother won"t let you get your pretty clothes dirty playing with the grease and the heavy machinery."
"You"re so proud of yourself," Archer said. "You"re so sure that you"re right."
"Well," Vic said, leaning easily against the wall, his hat tilted down over his eyes, "I am. Why deny it?"
"What if the people you say you"re working for, the people you say you want to keep from starving, to keep from getting killed in wars, what if they don"t want you? What if they reject you, the way you are being rejected? What do you do then?"
Vic shrugged carelessly. "Screw them," he said. "One hundred million slobs. What do they know? They"re stunned from reading their idiotic newspapers and going to their movies and listening to their politicians and preachers. Leave them alone and they wouldn"t know enough to come in out of the rain. You ignore what they tell you and save them despite themselves. Then ten years later they"re creaming your name in ecstasy and they"re ready to tear anyone part who dares to hint you can"t p.i.s.s to windward."
Archer shook his head. "Vic ... Vic," he said softly. "Do you remember back in school, when you quit the football team ..."
Vic grinned. "That idiot Samson."
"Remember I told you you were suffering from the sin of pride and maybe that was the worst sin of all ..."
"You were a little stuffy in those days, Professor," Vic said, smiling. "The cloistered atmosphere. Big improvement noticeable in recent years."
"G.o.d help us," Archer said, "if you ever have your way."
"Don"t worry, pal," Vic said. "We"ll all be dead first."