It was then that Dale realized that the breathing was not a result of coincidence or of people’s closeness during their lives. It was a messenger of death; they breathed together because they were going to draw their last breath together. He said nothing about this thought to anyone else, but whenever he got distracted from things, he tended to speculate on this. It was better than dwelling on the fact that he. a man to whom family had been very important, was now completely without family; that the only people with whom he was completely himself, completely at ease, were gone, and there was no more ease for him in the world. Much better to wonder whether his knowledge might be used to save lives. After all. he often thought, reasoning in a circular pattern that never seemed to end, if I notice this again, I should be able to alert someone, to warn someone, to save their lives. Yet if I were going to save their lives, would they then breathe in unison? If my parents had been warned and changed flights, he, thought, they wouldn’t have died and therefore wouldn’t have breathed together. So I wouldn’t have been able to warn them, and so they wouldn’t have changed flights, and so they would have died, and so they would have breathed in unison, and so I would have noticed and warned them . . .

  More than anything that had ever passed through his mind before, this thought engaged him. and he was not easily distracted from it. It began to hurt his work; he slowed down, made mistakes, because he concentrated only on breathing, listening constantly to the secretaries and other executives in his company, waiting for the fatal moment when they would breathe in unison.

  He was eating alone at a restaurant when he heard it again. The sighs of breath came all together, from every table near him. It took him a few moments to be sure; then he leaped from the table and walked briskly outside. He did not stop to pay. for the breathing was still in unison at every table right to the door of the restaurant.

  The maître d’, predictably, was annoyed at his leaving without paying and called out to him. Dale did not answer. “Wait! You didn’t pay!” cried the man, following Dale out into the street.

  Dale did not know how far he had to go for safety from whatever danger faced everyone in the restaurant; he ended up having no choice in the matter. The maître d’ stopped him on the sidewalk, only a few doors down from the restaurant, and tried to pull him back toward the place, Dale resisting all the way.

  “You can’t leave without paying. What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I can’t go back,” Dale shouted. “I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you right here.” And he fumbled in his wallet for the money as a huge explosion knocked him and the maître d’ to the ground. Flames erupted from the restaurant, and people screamed as the building began crumbling from the force of the explosion. It was impossible that anyone inside the building could still be alive.

  The maître d’, his eyes wide with horror, stood up as Dale did and looked at him with dawning understanding. “You knew!” he said. “You knew!”

  Dale was acquitted at the trial—phone calls from a radical group and the purchase of large quantities of explosives in several states led to the indictment and conviction of someone else. But at the trial enough was said to convince Dale and several psychiatrists that something was seriously wrong with him. He was voluntarily committed to an institution, where Dr. Howard Rumming spent hours in conversation with Dale, trying to understand his madness, his fixation on breathing as a sign of coming death.

  “I’m sane in every other way, aren’t I, Doctor?” Dale asked, again and again. And repeatedly the doctor answered, “What is sanity? Who has it? How can I know?”

  Often Dale was tempted to ask him what the hell he was doing trying to help the mentally deranged when he did not know what sanity was, what condition he was trying to bring the insane to achieve. But he never did.

  Instead he found that the mental hospital was not an unpleasant place to be. It was a private institution, and a lot of money had gone into it; most of the people there were voluntary commitments, which meant that conditions had to remain excellent. It was one of the things that made Dale grateful for his father’s wealth. In the hospital he was safe; the only contact with the outside world was the television. Gradually he met people and became attached to them in the hospital, began to relax, to lose his obsession with breathing, to stop listening quite so intently for the sound of inhalation and exhalation, the way that different people’s breathing rhythms fit together. Gradually he began to be his old, distractable self.

  “I’m nearly cured, Doctor,” Dale announced one day in the middle of a game of backgammon.

  The doctor sighed. “I know it, Dale. I have to admit it—I’m disappointed. Not in your cure, you understand. It’s just that you’ve been a breath of fresh air, you should pardon the expression.” They both laughed a little. “I get so tired of middle-aged women with fashionable nervous breakdowns or mid-life crises.”

  Dale was gammoned—the dice were all against him. But he took it well, knowing that next time he was quite likely to win handily—he usually did. Then he and Dr. Rumming got up from their table and walked toward the front of the recreation room, where the television program had been interrupted by a special news bulletin. The people around the television looked disturbed; news was never allowed on the hospital television, and only a bulletin like this could creep in. Dr. Rumming walked over to the set, intending to turn it off, but the words coming over the air were so alarming that he could not tear himself away from satellites fully capable of destroying every major city in the United States. The President was furnished with a list of fifty-four cities targeted by the orbiting missiles. One of these, said the communique. will be destroyed immediately to show that the threat is serious and will be carried out. Civil Defense authorities have been notified, and citizens of the fifty-four cities will be on standby for immediate evacuation.” There followed the normal parade of special reports and deep background, but it was patently clear that the reporters were all afraid.

  Dale’s mind could not stay on the program, however, because he was distracted by something far more compelling. Every person in the room was breathing in perfect unison, including Dale. He tried to break out of the rhythm and couldn’t.

  It’s just my fear. Dale thought. Just the broadcast, making me think that I hear the breathing.

  A Denver newsman came on the air then, overriding the network broadcast. “Denver, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the targeted cities. The city has asked us to inform you that orderly evacuation is to begin immediately. Obey all traffic laws and drive east from the city if you live in the following neighborhoods . . .”

  Then the newsman stopped and, breathing heavily, listened to something coming through his earphone.

  The newsman was breathing in perfect unison with all the people in the room.

  “Dale,” Dr. Rumming said.

  Dale only breathed, feeling death poised above him in the sky.

  “Dale, can you hear the breathing?”

  Dale heard the breathing.

  The newsman spoke again. “Denver is definitely the target. The missiles have already been launched. Please leave immediately. Do not stop for any reason. It is estimated that we have less than—less than three minutes. My God,” he said, and got up from his chair, breathing heavily, running out of the range of the camera. No one turned any equipment off in the station—the tube kept on showing the local news set. the empty chairs, the tables, the weather map.

  “We can’t get out in time,” Dr. Rumming said to the inmates in the room. “We’re near the center of Denver. Our only hope is to lie on the floor. Try to get under tables and chairs as much as possible.” The inmates, terrified, complied with the voice of authority.

  “So much for my cure,” Dale said, his voice trembling. Rumming managed a half-smile. They lay together in the middle of the floor, leaving the furniture for everyone else because they knew that the furniture would do no good at all.

  “You definitely don’t belong here.” Rumming told him. “I never met a saner man in all my life.”

  Dale was distracted, however. Instead of his impending death he thought of Colly and Brian in their coffin. He imagined the earth being swept away in a huge wind, and the coffin being ashed immediately in the white explosion from the sky. The barrier is coming down at last. Dale thought, and I will be with them as completely as it is possible to be. He thought of Brian learning to walk, crying when he fell; he remembered Colly saying, “Don’t pick him up every time he cries, or he’ll just learn that crying gets results.” And so for three days Dale had listened to Brian cry and cry and never lifted a hand to help the boy. Brian learned to walk quite well, and quickly But now, suddenly, Dale felt again that irresistible impulse to pick Brian up, to put his son’s pathetically red and weeping face on his shoulder, to say, “That’s all right. Daddy’s holding you.”

  “That’s all right, Daddy’s holding you.” Dale said aloud, softly. Then there was a flash of white so bright that it could be seen as easily through the walls as through the window for there were no walls, and all the breath was drawn out of their bodies at once, their voices robbed from them so suddenly that they all involuntarily shouted and then, forever, were silent. Their shout was taken up in a violent wind that swept the sound, wrung from every throat in perfect unison, upward into the clouds forming over what had once been Denver.

  And in the last moment, as the shout was drawn from his lungs and the heat took his eyes out of his face. Dale realized that despite all his foreknowledge, the only life he had ever saved was that of a maître d’hôtel. whose life, to Dale, didn’t mean a thing.

  But We Try Not to Act Like It

  Any organism, including government, will grow until such time as it is successfully resisted or there is nothing left to feed on.

  There was no line. Hiram Cloward commented on it to the pointy-faced man behind the counter. “There’s no line.”

  “This is the complaint department. We pride ourselves on having few complaints.” The pointy-faced man had a prim little smile that irritated Hiram. “What’s the matter with your television?”

  “It shows nothing but soaps, that’s what’s the matter. And asinine gothics.”

  “Well—that’s programming, sir, not mechanical at all.”

  “It’s mechanical. I can’t turn the damn set off.”

  “What’s your name and social security number?”

  “Hiram Cloward. 528-80-693883-7.”

  “Address?”

  “ARF-487-U7b.”

  “That’s singles, sir. Of course you can’t turn off your set.”

  “You mean because I’m not married I can’t turn off my television?”

  “According to congressionally authorized scientific studies carried out over a three-year period from 1989 to 1991, it is imperative that persons living alone have the constant companionship of their television sets.”

  “I like solitude. I also like silence.”

  “But the Congress passed a law, sir, and we can’t disobey the law—”

  “Can’t I talk to somebody intelligent?”

  The pointy-faced man flared a moment, his eyes burning. But he instantly regained his composure, and said in measured tones, “as a matter of fact, as soon as any complainant becomes offensive or hostile, we immediately refer them to section A-6.”

  “What’s that, the hit squad?”

  “It’s behind that door.”

  And Hiram followed the pointing finger to the glass door at the far end of the waiting room. Inside was an office, which was filled with comfortable, homey knick-knacks, several chairs, a desk, and a man so offensively nordic that even Hitler would have resented him. “Hello,” the Aryan said, warmly.

  “Hi.”

  “Please, sit down.” Hiram sat, the courtesy and warmth making him feel even more resentful—did they think they could fool him into believing he was not being grossly imposed upon?

  “So you don’t like something about your programming,” said the Aryan.

  “Your programming, you mean. It sure as hell isn’t mine. I don’t know why Bell Television thinks it has the right to impose its idea of fun and entertainment on me twenty-four hours a day, but I’m fed up with it. It was bad enough when there was some variety, but for the last two months I’ve been getting nothing but soaps and gothics.”

  “It took you two months to notice?”

  “I try to ignore the set. I like to read. You can bet that if I had more than my stinking little pension from our loving government, I could pay to have a room where there wasn’t a TV so I could have some peace.”

  “I really can’t help your financial situation. And the law’s the law.”

  “Is that all I’m going to hear from you? The law? I could have heard that from the pointy-faced jerk out there.”

  “Mr. Cloward, looking at your records, I can certainly see that soaps and gothics are not appropriate for you.”

  “They aren’t appropriate,” Hiram said, “for anyone with an IQ over eight.”

  The Aryan nodded. “You feel that people who enjoy soaps and gothics aren’t the intellectual equals of people who don’t.”

  “Damn right. I have a Ph.D. in literature, for heaven’s sake!”

  The Aryan was all sympathy. “Of course you don’t like soaps! I’m sure it’s a mistake. We try not to make mistakes, but we’re only human—except the computers, of course.” It was a joke, but Hiram didn’t laugh. The Aryan kept up the small talk as he looked at the computer terminal that he could see and Hiram could not. “We may be the only television company in town, you know, but—”

  “But you try not to act like it.”

  “Yes. Ha. Well, you must have heard our advertising.”

  “Constantly.”

  “Well, let’s see now. Hiram Cloward, Ph.D. Nebraska 1981. English literature, twentieth century, with a minor in Russian literature. Dissertation on Dostoevski’s influence on English-language novelists. A near-perfect class attendance record, and a reputation for arrogance and competence.”

  “How much do you know about me?”

  “Only the standard consumer research data. But we do have a bit of a problem.”

  Hiram waited, but the Aryan merely punched a button, leaned back, and looked at Hiram. His eyes were kindly and warm and intense. It made Hiram uncomfortable.

  “Mr. Cloward.”

  “Yes?”

  “You are unemployed.”

  “Not willingly.”

  “Few people are willingly unemployed, Mr. Cloward. But you have no job. You also have no family. You also have no friends.”

  “That’s consumer research? What, only people with friends buy Rice Krispies?”

  “As a matter of fact, Rice Krispies are favored by solitary people. We have to know who is more likely to be receptive to advertising, and we direct our programming accordingly.

  Hiram remembered that he ate Rice Krispies for breakfast almost every morning. He vowed on the spot to switch to something else. Quaker Oats, for instance. Surely they were more gregarious.

  “You understand the importance of the Selective Programming Broadcast Act of 1985, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was deemed unfair by the Supreme Court for all programming to be geared to the majority. Minorities were being slighted. And so Bell Television was given the assignment of preparing an individually selected broadcast system so that each individual, in his own home, would have the programming perfect for him.”

  “I know all this.”

  “I must go over it again anyway, Mr. Cloward, because I’m going to have to help you understand why there can be no change in your programming.”

  Hiram stiffened in his chair, his hands flexing. “I knew you bastards wouldn’t change.”

  “Mr. Cloward, we bastards would be delighted to change. But we are very closely regulated by the government to provide the most healthful programming for every American citizen. Now, I will continue my review.”

  “I’ll just go home, if you don’t mind.”

  “Mr. Cloward, we are directed to prepare programming for minorities as small as ten thousand people—but no smaller. Even for minorities of ten thousand the programming is ridiculously expensive—a program seen by so few costs far more per watching-minute to produce than one seen by thirty or forty million. However, you belong to a minority even smaller than ten thousand.”

  “That makes me feel so special.”

  “Furthermore, the Consumer Protection Broadcast Act of 1989 and the regulations of the Consumer Broadcast Agency since then have given us very strict guidelines. Mr. Cloward, we cannot show you any program with overt acts of violence.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you have tendencies toward hostility that are only exacerbated by viewing violence. Similarly, we cannot show you any programs with sex.” Cloward’s face turned red.

  “You have no sex life whatsoever, Mr. Cloward. Do you realize how dangerous that is? You don’t even masturbate. The tension and hostility inside you must be tremendous.”

  Cloward leaped to his feet. There were limits to what a man had to put up with. He headed for the door.

  “Mr. Cloward, I’m sorry.” The Aryan followed him to the door. “I don’t make these things up. Wouldn’t you rather know why these decisions are reached?”

  Hiram stopped at the door, his hand on the knob. The Aryan was right. Better to know why than to hate them for it.

  “How,” Hiram asked. “How do they know what I do and do not do within the walls of my home?”

  “We don’t know, of course, but we’re pretty sure. We’ve studied people for years. We know that people who have certain buying patterns and certain living patterns behave in certain ways. And, unfortunately, you have strong destructive tendencies. Repression and denial are your primary means of adaptation to stress, that and, unfortunately, occasional acting out.”

  “What the hell does all that mean?”

  “It means that you lie to yourself until you can’t anymore, and then you attack somebody.”

  Hiram’s face was packed with hot blood, throbbing. I must look like a tomato, he told himself, and deliberately calmed himself. I don’t care, he thought. They’re wrong anyway. Damn scientific tests.