My whetted ears heard him let out a breath. “When?”

  “Not certain. A move of that kind needs study and planning beforehand. A couple, three weeks? My word is that we’d better compress our own timetable.”

  “Indeed. Indeed.” Wagner bayoneted me with his stare. “If you are correct.”

  “You mean if I’m telling the truth,” I said on his behalf.

  “You understand, Colonel Dowling, you’ll have to be quizzed and examined. And we’ll meet an ironic obstacle in your conditioning against involuntary betrayal of secrets.”

  “Eventually you’d better go ahead and trust me…after all these years.”

  “I think that will be decided on the top level.”

  They took me to a well-equipped room somewhere and put me through the works. They were no more unkind than necessary, but extremely thorough. Never mind details of those ten or fifteen hours. The thoroughness was not quite sufficient. My immunity and my story held up. The physical checks showed nothing suspicious. Mannix had said, “I expect an inhibition too deep for consciousness will prevent the idea from occurring to them.” I’d agreed. The reality was what had overrun me.

  Afterward I was given a meal and—since I’d freely admitted being full of stim—some hours under a sleep inducer. It didn’t prevent dreams which I still shiver to recall. But when I was allowed to wake. I felt rested and ready for action.

  Whether I’d get any was an interesting question. Mannix’s hope was that I’d be taken to see persons high in the outfit, from whom I might obtain information on plans and membership. But maybe I’d be sent straight home. My yarn declared that, after the bout of talks was over, I’d requested a few days’ leave, hinting to my superiors that I had a girlfriend out of town.

  My guards, two young men now grown affable, couldn’t guess what the outcome would be. We started a poker game but eventually found ourselves talking. These were full-time undergrounders. I asked what made them abandon their original identities. The first said, “Oh, I got caught strewing pamphlets and had to run. What brought me into the Society to start with was…well, one damn thing after another, like when I was a miner and they boosted our quota too high for us to maintain safety structures and a cave-in killed a buddy of mine.”

  The second, more bookish, said thoughtfully, “I believe in God.”

  I raised my brows. “Really? Well, you’re not forbidden to go to church. You might not get a good job, positively never a clearance, but—”

  “That’s not the point. I’ve heard a lot of preachers in a lot of different places. They’re all windup toys of the state. The Social Gospel, you know—no, I guess you don’t.”

  Wagner arrived soon afterward. His surface calm was like dacron crackling in a wind. “Word’s come, Dowling,” he announced. “They want to interview you, ask your opinions, your impressions, you having been our sole man on the spot.”

  I rose. “They?”

  “The main leadership. Sotomayor himself, and his chief administrators. Here.” Wagner handed me a wallet. “Your new ID card, travel permit, ration tab, the works, including a couple of family snapshots. Learn it. We leave in an hour.”

  I scarcely heard the latter part. Alfredo Sotomayor! The half-legendary president of the whole Society!

  I’d wondered plenty about him. Little was known. His face was a fixture on post office walls, wanted for a variety of capital crimes, armed and dangerous. The text barely hinted at his political significance. Evidently the government didn’t wish to arouse curiosity. The story told me, while I was in the long process of joining, was that he’d been a firebrand in his youth, an icily brilliant organizer in middle life, and in his old age was a scholar and philosopher, at work on a proposal for establishing a “free country,” whatever that meant. Interested, I’d asked for some of his writings. They were denied me. Possession was dangerous. Why risk a useful man unnecessarily?

  I was to meet rebellious Lucifer, whom I would be serving yet had not the political police laid hand on me and mine.

  Not that those fingers had closed on Bonnie or the kids. They would if I didn’t undo my own rebelliousness. Camp La Pasionara…What was Sotomayor to me?

  How could I believe a spig bandit had any real interest in America, except to plunder her? I had not been shown those writings.

  “You feel well, Jim?” asked the man who believed in God. “You look kind of pale.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I mumbled. “Better sit down, though, and learn my new name.”

  A fake Security car, windows blanked, could bring me to an expendable hidey-hole like this, off in a lonely section of hills. The method was too showy for a meeting which included brains, heart, and maybe spinal cord of Decatur. Wagner and I would use public transportation.

  We walked to the nearest depot, a few kilometers off. I’d have enjoyed the sunlight, woods, peace asparkle with bird song, if Bonnie had been my companion (and I whole, I whole). As was, neither of us spoke. At the newsstand I bought a magazine and read about official plans for my future while the train was an hour late. It lost another hour, for some unexplained reason, en route. About par for the course. Several times the coach rattled to the sonic booms of military jets. Again, nothing unusual, especially in time of crisis. The People’s Republic keeps abundant warcraft.

  Our destination was Oakland. We arrived at 2000, when the factories were letting out, and joined the pedestrian swarm. I don’t like city dwellers. They smell sour and look grubby. Well, that’s not their fault; if soap and hot water are in short supply, people crowded together will not be clean. But their grayness goes deeper than their skins—except in ethnic districts, of course, which hold more life but which you’d better visit in armed groups.

  Wagner and I found a restaurant and made the conversation of two petty production managers on a business trip. I flatter myself that I gave a good performance. Concentrating on it took my mind off the food and service.

  Afterward we saw a movie, an insipidity about boy on vacation volunteer meets girl on collective. When it and the political reel had been endured, meeting time was upon us. We hadn’t been stopped to show our papers, and surely any plain-clothes man running a random surveillance had lost interest in us. A street car groaned us to a surprisingly swank part of town, and the house to which we walked was a big old mansion in big old grounds full of the night breath of roses.

  “Isn’t this too conspicuous?” I wondered.

  “Ever tried being inconspicuous in a tenement?” Wagner responded. “The poor may hate the civil police, but the prospect of reward money makes them eyes and ears for the P. P.”

  He hesitated. “Since you could check it out later anyway,” he said, “I may as well tell you we’re at the home of Lorenzo Berg, commissioner of electric power for northern California. He’s been one of us since his national service days.”

  I barely maintained my steady pace. This fact alone would buy me back my life.

  A prominent man is a watched man. Berg’s task in the Society had been to build, over the years, the image of a competent bureaucrat, who had no further ambitions and therefore was no potential menace to anybody, but who amused himself by throwing little parties where skewball intellectuals would gather to discuss the theory of chess or the origin of Australopithecus. Most of these affairs were genuine. For the few that weren’t, he had the craft to nullify the bugs in his house and later play tapes for them which had been supplied him. Of course, a mobile tapper could have registered what was actually said—he dared not screen the place—but the P.P. had more to do than make anything but spot checks on a harmless eccentric.

  Thus Berg could provide a scene for occasional important Society meetings. He could temporarily shelter fugitives. He could maintain for this area that vastly underrated tool, a reference library; who’d look past the covers of his many books and microreels? Doubtless his services went further, but never into foolish flamboyancies.

  I don’t recall him except as a blur. He played his role that well, even that night among those men. Or was he his role? You needn’t be a burning-eyed visionary to live by a cause.

  A couple like that were on hand. They must have been able in their fields. But one spoke of his specialty, massive sabotage, too lovingly for me. My missiles were counterforce weapons, not botulin mists released among women and children. Another, who was a black, dwelt on Russian racism. I’m sure his citations were accurate, of how the composition of the Politburo has never since the beginning reflected the nationalities in the Soviet Union. Yet what had that to do with us and why did his eyes dwell so broodingly on the whites in the room?

  The remaining half dozen were entirely businesslike in their various ways, except Sotomayor, who gave me a courteous greeting and then sat quietly and listened. They were ordinary Americans, which is to say a mixed lot, a second black man, a Jew to judge by the nose (it flitted across my mind how our schools keep teaching that the People’s Republic has abolished the prejudices of the imperialist era, which are described in detail), a Japanese-descended woman, the rest of them like me…except, again, Sotomayor, who I think was almost pure Indio. His features were rather long and lean for that, but he had the cheekbones, the enduringly healthy brown skin, dark eyes altogether alive under straight white hair, flared nostrils and sensitive mouth. He dressed elegantly, and sat and stood as erect as a candle.

  I repeated my story, was asked intelligent questions, and carried everything off well. Maybe I was helped by Bonnie having told me a lot about theater and persuading me to take occasional bit parts. The hours ticked by. Finally, around 0100, Sotomayor stirred and said in his soft but youthful voice: “Gentlemen, I think perhaps we have done enough for the present, and it might arouse curiosity if the living room lights shone very late on a midweek night. Please think about this matter as carefully as it deserves. You will be notified as to time and place of our next meeting.”

  All but one being from out of town, they would sleep here. Berg led them off to their cots. Sotomayor said he would guide me. Smiling, as we started up a grand staircase the Socialist Functionalist critics would never allow to be built today, he took my arm and suggested a nightcap.

  He rated not a shakedown but a suite cleared for his use.

  Although a widower, Berg maintained a large household. Four grown sons pleaded the apartment shortage as a reason for living here with their families and so preventing the mansion’s conversion to an ordinary tenement. They and the wives the Society had chosen for them had long since been instructed to stay completely passive, except for keeping their kids from overhearing anything, and to know nothing of Society affairs.

  Given that population under this roof, plus a habit of inviting visiting colleagues to bunk with him, plus always offering overnight accommodations when parties got wet, Berg found that guests of his drew no undue notice.

  All in all, I’d entered quite a nest. And the king hornet was bowing me through his door.

  The room around me was softly lit, well furnished, dominated by books and a picture window. The latter overlooked a sweep of city—lanes of street lamps cut through humpbacked darknesses of buildings—and the Bay and a deeper spark-speckled shadow which was San Francisco. A nearly full moon bridged the waters with frailty. I wondered if men would ever get back yonder. The requirements of defense against the revisionists—

  Why in the name of madness was I thinking about that?

  Sotomayor closed the door and went to a table whereon stood a bottle, a carafe of water, and an ice bucket which must be an heirloom. “Please be seated, Colonel Dowling,” he said. “I have only this to offer you, but it is genuinely from Scotland. You need a drink, I’m sure, tense as you are.”

  “D-does it show that much?” Hearing the idiocy of the question, I hauled myself to full awareness. Tomorrow morning, when the group dispersed, Wagner would conduct me home and I would report to Mannix. My job was to stay alive until then.

  “No surprise.” He busied himself. “In fact, your conduct has been remarkable throughout. I’m grateful for more than your service, tremendous though that may turn out to be. I’m joyful to know we have a man like you. The kind is rare and precious.”

  I sat down and told myself over and over that he was my enemy. “You, uh, you overrate me, sir.”

  “No. I have been in this business too long to cherish illusions. Men are limited creatures at best. This may perhaps make their striving correspondingly more noble, but the limitations remain. When a strong, sharp tool comes to hand, we cherish it.”

  He handed me my drink, took a chair opposite me, and sipped at his own. I could barely meet those eyes, however gentle they seemed. Mine stung. I took a long gulp and blurted the first words that it occurred to me might stave off silence: “Why, being in the Society is such a risk, sir, would anybody join who’s not, well, unusual?”

  “Yes, in certain cases, through force of circumstance. We have taken in criminals—murderers, thieves—when they looked potentially useful.”

  After a moment of stillness, he added slowly: “In fact, revolutionaries, be they Decaturists or members of other outfits or isolated in their private angers—revolutionaries have always had motivations as various as their humanity. Some are idealists; yet let us admit that some of the ideals are nasty, like racism. Some want revenge for harm done them or theirs by officials who may have been sadistic or corrupt but often were merely incompetent or overzealous, in a system which allows the citizen no appeal. Some hope for money or power or fame under a new dispensation. Some are old-fashioned patriots who want us out of the empire. Am I right that you fall in that category. Colonel Dowling?”

  “Yes,” I said, “you were.”

  Sotomayor’s gaze went into me and beyond me. “One reason I want to know you better,” he said, “is that I think you can be educated to a higher ideal.”

  I discovered, with a sort of happiness, that I was interested enough to take my mind off the fact I was drinking the liquor of a man who believed I was his friend and a man. “To your own purposes, sir?” I asked. “You know, I never have been told what you yourself are after.”

  “On as motley a collection as our members are, the effect of an official doctrine would be disruptive. Nor is any required. The history of Communist movements in the last century gives ample proof. I’ve dug into history, you realize. The franker material is hard to find, after periodic purges of the libraries. But it’s difficult to eliminate a book totally. The printing press is a more powerful weapon than any gun—for us or for our masters.” Sotomayor smiled and sighed. “I ramble. Getting old. Still, I have spent these last years of mine trying to understand what we are doing, in the hope we can do what is right.”

  “And what are your conclusions, sir?”

  “Let us imagine our takeover plan succeeds,” he answered. “We hold the rocket bases. Given those, I assure you there are enough members and sympathizers in the rest of the armed services and in civilian life that, while there will doubtless be some shooting, the government will topple and we will take over the nation.”

  The drink slopped in my hand. Sweat prickled forth on my skin and ran down my ribs.

  Sotomayor nodded. “Yes, we are that far along,” he said. “After many years and many human sacrifices, we are finally prepared. The war has given us the opportunity to use what we built.”

  Surely, I thought wildly, the P.P., military intelligence, high party officials, surely they knew something of the sort was in the wind. You can’t altogether conceal a trend of such magnitude.

  Evidently they did not suspect how far along it was.

  Or…wait…you didn’t need an enormous number of would-be rebels in the officer corps. You really only needed access to the dossiers and psychographs kept on everybody. Then in-depth studies would give you a good notion of how the different key men would react.

  “Let us assume, then, a junta,” Sotomayor was saying. “It cannot, must not be for more than the duration of the emergency. Civilian government must be restored and made firm. But what government? That is the problem I have been working on.”

  “And?” I responded in my daze.

  “Have you ever read the original Constitution of the United States? The one drawn in Philadelphia in 1786?”

  “Why…well, no. What for?”

  “It may be found in scholarly works. A document so widely disseminated cannot be gotten rid of in 30 or 40 years. Though if the present system endures, I do not give the old Constitution another 50.” Sotomayor leaned forward. Beneath his softness, intensity mounted. “What were you taught about it in school?”

  “Oh…well, uh, let me think…Codification of the law for the bourgeoisie of the cities and the slaveowners of the South…Modified as capitalism evolved into imperialism.”

  “Read it sometime.” A thin finger pointed at a shelf.

  “Take it to bed with you. It’s quite brief.”

  After a moment: “Its history is long, though, Colonel Dowling, and complicated, and not always pleasant—especially toward the end, when the original concept had largely been lost sight of. Yet it was the most profoundly revolutionary thing set down on paper since the New Testament.”

  “Huh?”

  He smiled again. “Read it, I say, and compare today’s version, and look up certain thinkers who are mentioned in footnotes if at all—Hobbes, Locke, Hamilton, Burke, and the rest. Then do your own thinking. That won’t be easy. Some of the finest minds which ever existed spent centuries groping toward the idea—that law should be a contract the people make among each other, and that every man has absolute rights, which protect him in making his private destiny and may never be taken from him.”

  His smile had dissolved. I have seldom heard a bleaker tone: “Think how radical that is. Too radical, perhaps. The world found it easier to bring back overlords, compulsory belief, and neolithic god-kings.”