The Naked and the Dead (49 page)

            "We've become destiny, eh?" Hearn said.

            "Precisely. The currents that have been released are not going to subside. You shy away from it, but it's equivalent to turning your back on the world. I tell you I've made a study of this. For the past century the entire historical process has been working toward greater and greater consolidation of power. Physical power for this century, an extension of our universe, and a political power, a political organization to make it possible. Your men of power in America, I can tell you, are becoming conscious of their real aims for the first time in our history. Watch. After the war our foreign policy is going to be far more naked, far less hypocritical than it has ever been. We're no longer going to cover our eyes with our left hand while our right is extending an imperialist paw."

            Hearn shrugged. "You think it's going to come about as easily as that? Without resistance?"

            "With much less resistance than you think. In college the one axiom you seem to have carried away is that everyone is sick, everyone is corrupt. And it's reasonably true. Only the innocent are healthy, and the innocent man is a vanishing breed. I tell you nearly all of humanity is dead, merely waiting to be disinterred."

            "And the special few?"

            "Just what do you think man's deepest urge is?"

            Hearn grinned, his eyes probing Cummings. "A good piece of ass probably."

            The answer grated, made Cummings's flesh tingle. He had been absorbed in the argument, temporarily indifferent to Hearn, concerned only with unfolding his thesis, and the obscenity stirred little swirls of apprehension in him. His anger returned again.

            For the moment, however, he ignored Hearn. "I doubt it." Hearn shrugged once more, his silence unpleasantly eloquent. There was something unapproachable and unattainable about Hearn which had always piqued him, always irritated him subtly. The empty pit where there should be a man. And at the moment he desired, with an urgency that clamped his jaws together, to arouse some emotion in Hearn. Women would have wanted to excite some love from him, but for himself -- to see Hearn afraid, filled with shame if only for an instant.

            Cummings went on talking, his voice quiet and expressionless. "The average man always sees himself in relation to other men as either inferior or superior. Women play no part in it. They're an index, a yardstick among other gauges, by which to measure superiority."

            "Did you arrive at that all by yourself, sir? It's an impressive analysis."

            Hearn's sarcasm riled him again. "I'm quite aware, Robert, that you've worked out the ABC's of something like that, but you don't carry it any further. You stop there, go back to your starting point, and take off again. The truth of it is that from man's very inception there has been one great vision, blurred first by the exigencies and cruelties of nature, and then, as nature began to be conquered, by the second great cloak -- economic fear and economic striving. That particular vision has been muddied and diverted, but we're coming to a time when our techniques will enable us to achieve it." He exhaled his smoke slowly. "There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God."

            "Man's deepest urge is omnipotence?"

            "Yes. It's not religion, that's obvious, it's not love, it's not spirituality, those are all sops along the way, benefits we devise for ourselves when the limitations of our existence turn us away from the other dream. To achieve God. When we come kicking into the world, we
are
God, the universe is the limit of our senses. And when we get older, when we discover that the universe is not us, it's the deepest trauma of our existence."

            Hearn fingered his collar. "I'd say
your
deepest urge is omnipotence, that's all."

            "And yours too, whether you'll admit it or not."

            Hearn's sharp voice softened a little with irony. "What moral precepts am I supposed to draw from all this?"

            Cummings's tension altered. There had been a deep satisfaction in expounding this, a pleasure apart from all the other concerns of this discussion with Hearn. "I've been trying to impress you, Robert, that the only morality of the future is a power morality, and a man who cannot find his adjustment to it is doomed. There's one thing about power. It can flow only from the top down. When there are little surges of resistance at the middle levels, it merely calls for more power to be directed downward, to burn it out."

            Hearn was looking at his hands. "We're not in the future yet."

            "You can consider the Army, Robert, as a preview of the future."

            Hearn looked at his watch. "It's time to go to chow." Outside the tent the earth was almost white in the glare of the overhead sun.

            "You'll go to chow when I release you."

            "Yes, sir." Hearn scraped his foot slowly against the floor, stared at him quietly, a little doubtfully.

            "You threw that cigarette on my floor today, didn't you?"

            Hearn smiled. "I figured that was going to be the point of all this talk."

            "It was simple enough for you, wasn't it? You resented some of my actions, and you indulged a childish tantrum. But it's the kind of thing I don't care to permit." The General held his half-smoked cigarette in his hand, and waved it slightly as he spoke. "If I were to throw this down on the floor, would you pick it up?"

            "I think I'd tell you to go to hell."

            "I wonder. I've indulged you too long. You really can't believe I'm serious, can you? Supposed you understood that if you didn't pick it up, I would court-martial you, and you might have five years in a prison stockade."

            "I wonder if you have the power for that?"

            "I do. It would cause me a lot of difficulty, your court-martial would be reviewed, and after the war there might be a
bit
of a stink, it might even hurt me personally, but I would be upheld. I would have to be upheld. Even if you won eventually, you would be in prison for a year or two at least while it was all being decided."

            "Don't you think that's a bit steep?"

            "It's tremendously steep, it has to be. There was the old myth of divine intervention. You blasphemed, and a lightning bolt struck you. That was a little steep too. If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power. With this in mind, how do you think you would react?"

            Hearn was kneading his thighs again. "I resent this. It's an unfair proposition. You're settling a difference between us by. . ."

            "You remember when I gave that lecture about the man with the gun?"

            "Yes."

            "It's not an accident that I have this power. Nor is it that you're in a situation like this. If you'd been more aware, you wouldn't have thrown down that cigarette. Indeed, you wouldn't have if I were a blustering profane General of the conventional variety. You don't quite believe I'm serious, that's all."

            "Perhaps I don't."

            Cummings tossed his cigarette at Hearn's feet. "All right, Robert, suppose you pick it up," he said quietly.

            There was a long pause. Under his breastbone, Cummings could feel his heart grinding painfully. "I hope, Robert, that you pick it up. For your sake." Once more he stared into Hearn's eye.

            And slowly Hearn was realizing that he meant it. It was apparent in his expression. A series of emotions, subtle and conflicting, flowed behind the surface of his face. "If you want to play games," he said. For the first time Cummings could remember, his voice was unsteady. After a moment or two, Hearn bent down, picked up the cigarette, and dropped it in an ashtray. Cummings forced himself to face the hatred in Hearn's eyes. He was feeling an immense relief.

            "If you want to, you can go to chow now."

            "General, I'd like a transfer to another division." Hearn was lighting another cigarette, his hands not completely steady.

            "Suppose I don't care to arrange it?" Cummings was calm, almost cheerful. He leaned back in his chair, and tapped his foot slowly. "Frankly, I don't particularly care to have you around as my aide any longer. You aren't ready to appreciate this lesson yet. I think I'm going to send you to the salt mines. Suppose after lunch you report over to Dalleson's section, and work under him for a while."

            "Yes, sir." Hearn's face had become expressionless again. He started toward the exit of the tent, and then paused. "General?"

            "Yes?" Now that it was over, Cummings wished that Hearn would leave. The victory was losing its edge, and minor regrets, delicate little reservations, were cloying him.

            "Short of bringing in every man in the outfit, all six thousand of them, and letting them pick up your cigarettes, how are you going to impress them?"

            This was the thing that had sullied his pleasure. Cummings realized it now. There was still the other problem, the large one. "I'll manage that, Lieutenant. I think you'd better worry about your own concerns."

            After Hearn had gone, Cummings looked at his hands. "When there are little surges of resistance, it merely calls for more power to be directed downward." And that hadn't worked with the line troops. Hearn he had been able to crush, any single man he could manage, but the sum of them was different still, resisted him still. He exhaled his breath, feeling a little weary. There was going to be a way, he would find it. There had been a time when Hearn had resisted him too.

            And his elation, suppressed until now, stimulated him, eased to some extent the sores and frustrations of the past few weeks.

            Hearn returned to his own tent, and missed lunch. For almost an hour he lay face down on his cot, burning with shame and self-disgust and an impossible impotent anger. He was suffering an excruciating humiliation which mocked him in its very intensity. He had known from the moment the General had sent for him that there would be trouble, and he had entered with the confidence that he wouldn't yield.

            And yet he had been afraid of Cummings, indeed, afraid of him from the moment he had come into the tent. Everything in him had demanded that he refuse to pick up the cigarette and he had done it with a sick numbed suspension of his will.

            "The only thing to do is to get by on style." He had said that once, lived by it in the absence of anything else, and it had been a working guide, almost satisfactory until now. The only thing that had been important was to let no one in any ultimate issue ever violate your integrity, and this had been an ultimate issue. Hearn felt as if an immense cyst of suppuration and purulence had burst inside him, and was infecting his blood stream now, washing through all the conduits of his body in a sudden violent flux of change. He would have to react or die, effectively, and for one of the few times in his life he was quite uncertain of his own ability. It was impossible; he would have to do something, and he had no idea what to do. The moment was intolerable, the midday heat fierce and airless inside the tent, but he lay motionless, his large chin jammed into the canvas of his cot, his eyes closed, as if he were contemplating all the processes, all the things he had learned and unlearned in his life, and which were free now, sloshing about inside him with the vehemence and the agony of anything that has been suppressed for too long.

            "I never thought I would crawfish to him."

            That was the shock, that was the thing so awful to realize.

The Time Machine:

ROBERT HEARN

THE ADDLED WOMB

           
A big man with a shock of black hair and a small sharp voice, a heavy immobile face. His brown eyes, imperturbable, stared out coldly above the short blunted and slightly hooked arc of his nose. His wide thin mouth was unexpressive, a top ledge to the solid mass of his chin. He liked very few people and most men sensed it uneasily after talking to him for a few minutes.

            In the center is the city, lashing at one's senses.

            For a thousand, two thousand miles the roads and the earth have led up to it. The mountains have snubbed down to hills, lapsed into plains, rolled on majestically in leisurely convolutions and regroupings. No one ever really comprehends it, the vast table of America, and the pin points, the accretions, the big city and the iron trails leading to it.

            The nexus.

            (All the frenetic schemings, the cigar smoke, the coke smoke, the carbolic and retch of the el, the frightened passion for movement of an ant nest suddenly jarred, the vast hurried grabbing plans of thousands of men whose importance is confined to a street, a café, and there is no other sense than one of the present. History is remembered with a shrug; its superlatives do not match ours.

            The immense ego of city people.

            How do you conceive your own death, your own unimportance in all that man-created immensity, through all the marble vaults and brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the market place? You always believe somehow that the world will end with your death. It is all more intense, more violent, more rutted than life anywhere else.)

            And in the humus around the mushroom stem grow the suburbs.

            Since we added that last wing, we got twenty-two rooms now, Lord knows what the hell we're gonna do with 'em, Bill Hearn shouts. But Ina you can't tell her a goddam thing, she figures she needs it, and we got it.

            Now, Bill, Ina says. (A pretty woman who looks younger, slimmer, than the mother of a twelve-year-old son. No beauty, however. There is the thin aseptic mouth, the slightly bucked teeth, the midwestern woman's denial of juice.)