Ellis Weiner

Atlas Slugged AGAIN

^{The “Secret Sequel” to the Towering Masterpiece}

^{A Parody}

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

1. The Work

A subject of speculation and rumor for decades, Atlas Slugged AGAIN (ASA) is the so-called “secret sequel” to the monumental Atlas Slugged (AS), by Annyn (rhymes with “hannyn”) Rant.

ASA has acquired an almost Grail-like status among the devotees of Rant’s work, the phrase “Where is Atlas Slugged AGAIN?” having become metonymic shorthand for an expression of futility or eternally-deferred salvation. The following exchange, recently encountered on a Rantian web site, is typical:

HRORK22: When will society ever be free of the parasides that steal our Freedom and pallute everything for us producers?

DOMINIQUEFRANK1: LOL. Where is Atlas Slugged AGAIN?

It is to such readers that news of the publication of this work will be particularly welcome. But why “secret sequel”? For two reasons: “Sequel,” because AS re-visits the characters and situations first explored in Atlas Slugged, published in 1957 by Fandom House. But “secret,” not only because Fandom declined to publish Atlas Slugged AGAIN, but because word of its very existence has been suppressed and denied from the moment its editor first perused the manuscript—a decision supported (albeit reluctantly) by the book’s author.

How the manuscript—the only one extant, as far as I know—came into my possession is worth a brief recounting.

In fact, it was delivered to my door by the mailman, in an ordinary manila envelope addressed to me. Inside I found what appeared to be an indisputably authentic document: a sheaf of pages, not printed with a computer’s uniformity and precision, but hand-typed on a manual typewriter, bound by two crossed rubber-bands, the title page of which bore the publisher’s official stamp noting the date of receipt (November 24, 1968). Attached by paper clip was a computer-printed letter reading:

Mr. Ellis Weiner: I saw your review of Atlas Slugged on Amazon and decided that you should be the one to take custody of this, which has been in my possession since 1968. At the time, I worked as an editorial assistant to Annyn Rant’s editor at Fandom House. My boss had been the original editor of Atlas Slugged. When a messenger delivered this sequel, my boss (who had not been expecting any such thing) said, “Hot dog!,” told me to hold all calls, and shut himself in his office.

When he emerged two hours later, his face was white as a sheet. He handed me the manuscript and said, “Burn this. And let us speak no more of it.” I laughed and said something like, “Well, I don’t know about ‘burn.’ But I’ll dispose of it.” I took the ms. but curiosity got the best of me. I hid it in a drawer until I could smuggle it home that evening.

The days that followed were full of crisis. My boss contacted both Ms. Rant and her agent and told them that publishing ASA would be “career suicide—for all of us.” His principal objection—supported by Fandom House’s legal counsel—was that one character in particular was so clearly modeled on an actual, living person, that that individual would have “a damn good” case to bring suit against the publisher, the author, “and any poor bastards in the immediate vicinity.” The upshot of such a suit would, he felt certain, not only result in substantial monetary damages, but in a complete recall and pulping of all extant copies of the book. Not only would Fandom House suffer, but so would Rant’s reputation, and probably Rant’s personal life as well.

Ms. Rant—who as you know was a highly intelligent and determined woman—at first insisted the work be published. But after several days, she, too, began to think the better of it. In the end, she agreed with my boss, and sent a formal letter withdrawing the ms.

When I read it at home I was saddened to think about its suppression, as it seemed to me to be a perfect sequel to Atlas Slugged. As for the “new” character, I was not at the time as familiar as I came to be, with the man on whom he was (so clearly) based. At the time I simply took it on faith that my boss and our lawyers knew what they were talking about. And so I held onto the manuscript but never mentioned it to anyone. In fact, I actually forgot about its existence until recently when, packing for a move to a retirement in Arizona, I came across it again.

I do not know if Ms. Rant kept her carbon, and if so, who has it now. So this may be the only copy left.

I leave it to you—a proven fan of her work—to decide whether to destroy it, turn it over to her estate, or arrange for its publication yourself. I apologize if this places an unfair burden on you, but as I said, your review of Atlas Slugged on Amazon was so positive and insightful, I decided this poor orphaned work could have no better guardian. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

So touching was this letter, and so intriguing an opportunity did it present, that I couldn’t find it in my heart to inform the writer of it that in fact I had never reviewed Atlas Slugged on Amazon. But a brief glance at that web site confirmed that “Ellis Weiner” had given the book five stars, and had reviewed it thus:

THIS BOOK IS GREAT!! IT IS MY FAVORITE BOOK. THE PHILSOSOPHY (sic) IN THIS BOOK WAS VERY INTERESTING. IT SHOWS THAT BECAUSE THE UNIVERSE EXISTS YOU SHOULD USE YOUR MIND AND BE INTELLIGENT AND NOT LISTEN TO STUPID PEOPLE! NO ONE SHOULD DO ANYTHING FOR ANYONE ELSE UNLESS THEY GET SOMETHING IN RETURN BECAUSE THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES SENSE.

After several hours of Googling and other detective work I discovered that the Ellis Weiner who had written this review was a ten-year old boy from Sherman Oaks, California. (It was merely one more strange facet of this tale, that there should be anywhere on earth another person named “Ellis Weiner.”) As I had, for decades, been published as an author and co-author of various books, as well as a writer for many magazines and a national blog, I could hardly blame the person who had sent me Atlas Slugged AGAIN for assuming that its Amazon review had been written by me, and not a fourth grader fond of his Caps Lock key.

So I decided to return the manuscript (after reading it) to the person who had sent it. But I discovered that the envelope had no return address, and the signature at the end of the letter was indecipherable. I made a token effort to research who, in 1968, had been Annyn Rant’s editor, and who had been his assistant, but both inquiries yielded nothing.

I could, of course, have delivered the manuscript to the Annyn Rant Society, or to a university, or to Fandom House. But, frankly, I didn’t want to. I was one of the few people I knew who had actually read the entirety of Atlas Slugged, and I found the possibility of being associated with its legendary sequel to be too tantalizing to relinquish.

So I arranged to have Atlas Slugged AGAIN published. The present text is a complete rendition of the manuscript as I received it. Apart from the routine correction of typos, nothing has been edited, excised, or added.

Before proceeding, however, it might be helpful to place the characters and events covered in ASA in context.

2. The precursor: Atlas Slugged

Atlas Slugged was Annyn Rant’s second major novel. (Her first, The Figurehead, dealt with the theme of personal genius, set in the cut-throat world of tall ship design.) At the center of AS are five principal protagonists:

1. Dragnie Tagbord◦– Beautiful, brilliant, stylish, bold, fit, flirty, ‘n’ fabulous. She inherited Tagbord Rail from her grandfather, Old Man Pop Gramps “Professor” Zayde Poppa Tagbord, who built the transcontinental railroad empire single-handedly, with his bare hands, in the snow.

2. John Glatt◦– Handsome, brilliant, enigmatic, a genius engineer who becomes disgusted with society and goes into hiding, thus acquiring the stature of a messianic leader.

3. Hunk Rawbone◦– Handsome, brilliant, founder and sole owner and operator of Rawbone Metal. Rawbone invents Rawbonium, a miracle metal that “will save the entire U.S. economy.” Turn-ons: watching “heats” and “pours” of steel. Turn-offs: mean people, nice people, poor people, rich people, and his wife.

4. Sanfrancisco Nabisco Alcoa D’Lightful D’Lovely Desoto◦– Handsome, brilliant, a childhood chum of Dragnie while the two were growing up in different hemispheres. Heir to the Desoto Talc Mines in Chile, “World Capital of The Powder of Babies.” Spends all his time pursuing empty hedonism as a feckless playboy, which is the worst kind.

5. Regnad Daghammarskjold◦– Handsome, beautiful, attractive, brilliant, drop-dead gorgeous, tall and tan and young and lovely, a (naturally) blond Swedish pirate.

The plot of Atlas Slugged is lengthy and convoluted, but can be summarized thus: The U.S.—which is not exactly the U.S., as its government seems to have no Executive, Legislative, or Judicial branches—is run by “Mr. Thomas,” who has no first name. He is surrounded by a coterie of spineless bureaucrats, self-seeking careerists, hypocritical moralists, and contemptible weaklings. These men share a secret knowledge: that, all over the country, persons of achievement (businessmen, entrepreneurs, tycoons, moguls, big shots, etc.) are “disappearing.” One day they simply stop coming to work and utterly vanish, sending the national economy into a tailspin.

Meanwhile, every other country in the world (except, by the end, Goa) has succumbed to the urge to collectivize, and declared itself a “People’s State of the People.”

Throughout it all, Dragnie and Hunk Rawbone struggle to run their businesses, Desoto displays a seemingly callous indifference to the talc industry, Daghammarskjold rampages all over the bounding main… and everyone wonders aloud, “Who is John Glatt?”

Eventually it is revealed that Glatt has been constructing, in a secret valley in Wyoming, a hideaway for tycoons. Dubbed “Glatt’s Gorge,” it is there that the “disappearing” moguls have gone—a Meritocratic Retirement Community™ where rich men pursue their hobbies, artists-in-residence live for free and explore their vision, and the cares and vexations of the outside world (society, history, politics, poverty, children, race, disease, natural calamity, competition for resources, crime, corruption, pollution, hunger, terrorism, religious conflict, etc.) are forbidden by law.

Glatt’s Gorge is a combination Shangri-La, Brigadoon, and Camelot, and all—from the gold coins the community mints as its private currency to the custom-made cigarettes stamped with the Glatt’s Gorge symbol of the dollar sign and the exclamation mark—sustained in its concealment from the rest of the world by a sort of “lens” that projects a disguising image over its valley, to hide it from prying eyes. (Like another 1950’s novelist-philosopher, L. Ron Hubbard, Annyn Rant was unafraid to make use of the crowd-pleasing genre conventions of science fiction.)

Glatt’s scheme is to demonstrate to society what happens when its productive members, who philosophically object to labor unions and collective bargaining, decided to “go on strike,” to withhold their abilities and talents until the “leeches,” “moochers,” and “parasites” that comprise most of American society (and essentially all of humanity) show sufficient appreciation for the strikers. As the climax nears, the national economy deteriorates; Mr. Thomas and the fawning courtiers around him become increasingly desperate; and drastic measures are employed to persuade John Glatt to rescue the nation and demonstrate, to all mankind, the benefits of having a reclusive engineer control an entire nation’s economy.

It is a vast, winner-take-all epic set against an immense, brawling tapestry about a wild, untamed continent as passionate and sweeping as turbulent America herself. But it is more than that. It is also a love story, one in which both Hunk Rawbone and John Glatt love, and therefore desire, and therefore despise, Dragnie. She, in turn, loves and despises them.

The entire saga reaches its thrilling climax in a speech given by John Glatt. Commandeering a radio broadcast, Glatt (who has cannily concealed his true intent by behaving for most of the book like a monosyllabic, sulky child) expounds on his theory of existence, life, human nature, morality, creation, productivity, art, economics, virtue, ethics and the self. A masterpiece of high indignation and elevated rhetoric, Glatt’s oration is a forthright attack on those who preach that “Man has no mind.” He openly mocks those who would assert that “the Mind is impotent.” He explicitly refutes those who believe that “the individual self is worthless.”

The address is famous—or notorious—for its length. It has been estimated that, if read verbatim on an actual radio broadcast, Glatt’s Speech would take three hours to deliver and, since almost all people who listen to radio do so while driving, would so thrill, inspire, terrify, bore, outrage, or baffle listeners as to result in two hundred and forty-five traffic accidents and at least thirty-seven fatalities during a non-rush-hour time period.

The novel ends in a thriller-like flurry of imprisonment, torture, rescue, escape, and triumph. That it was, from its original publication in 1957 up until today, a best seller, should surprise no one. Half again as long as Ulysses and second in influence only to the Bible, Atlas Slugged is a titanic, sprawling epic set in a politically-imaginary America surrounded by a world that never existed, replete with science fiction devices and impossible technology, and all in the service of a 643,000-word treatise on “reality.” Small wonder tens of thousands of readers have, for more than fifty years, clamored for a sequel.

And yet it was not to be. Once written, Atlas Slugged AGAIN was blocked from publication, not only by its publisher, but by its author. As alluded to by my mysterious correspondent, the sequel’s character of “Nathan A. Banden” was thought by many (including Fandom House’s legal counsel) to be too clearly and obviously modeled on a real-life figure—a man with whom Annyn Rant engaged in an extramarital affair in the early 1960s, begun when she was age 50 and he (her protégé, acolyte, and business partner) was 25.

Conducted with the knowledge and consent of their respective spouses, the relationship ended four years later amid accusations of betrayal and disloyalty, and scenes of shouting, slapping, and banishment. Rant, who had dedicated AS both to her husband and to her young lover, removed the latter’s name from subsequent editions and repudiated much of his work with her.

Thus, rescued from oblivion, Atlas Slugged AGAIN arrives with a dual identity: as a perhaps too-rash reply to a faithless lover from a woman scorned, and as the inspiring sequel to one of the most inspirational, if controversial, novels of all time.

Ellis Weiner

PART I

That That Is, Is;

That That Is Not, Is Not;

That That Is Is Not That That Is Not.

Is Not That It?

It Is.

^{Chapter 1}

Where Eagles Dare to Gather

“Who is John Glatt?”

Dragnie Tagbord chuckled as the arms of the students before her shot with arrow-like directness and clean mechanical precision toward the ceiling. Among this group of third-graders, such a response—the lifting of hands and their display to the gaze of their instructor, each other, and to the distinguished woman visiting their school—was a proud and public announcement of knowledge. I know, proclaimed each raised hand. I know, with pure awareness in the consciousness of my mind, the answer to the question I have just been asked.

Their teacher, Miss Pigg, was a short, squat woman in a shapeless, baggy garment the color of desiccated oatmeal. Although constantly informed by politicians and television personalities of her value to society, in her outward, personal appearance she looked shabby and morose, as if harboring in some unconscious recess of her intelligence the shameful awareness of the fact that, like all those whose livelihoods involved servicing the needs of children, she produced nothing. She pointed. “Yes, Johnny Timmons? Do you know?”

“I?” The boy, a ten-year-old unafraid to proclaim his love of truth, suppressed a smile tinged with amused mockery. “Yes, I know it. John Glatt is the smartest, bravest, most rational man in society,” he replied. “It was he who, ten years ago, recruited our nation’s true producers—the entrepreneurs and businessmen whose vision, courage, and energy wrests value from the mute, raw earth—and led them into a strategic retreat from the forces of theft, cowardice, and corruption that prevailed over men in that desperate time. It is to him… um…”

Dragnie whispered, “It is to him we owe—“

“It is to him we owe the Age of Production, which we enjoy—“

The rest of the class joined in. “—TO THIS VERY DAY!”

A laugh escaped from Dragnie’s lips. Exercising her free will, she re-captured it and restricted it to solitary confinement. She had chosen to spend this John Glatt Day touring one of the ten thousand kindergarten-through-Grade Twelve institutions, all of them independently owned and operated and all of them called The Glatt School, that had replaced the hidebound and notoriously inefficient public educational system. It would not do, she thought, to display levity in this, or any, environment.

Wordlessly, Dragnie turned and left the classroom. There was no need to thank the pupils. There was no need to thank their teacher. There was no need to wish them well. Her exit was itself a kind of lesson. Do not ask for praise, it said. Do not ask for acknowledgment or good wishes or pampering. Do not ask for “please” or “thank you” or “you’re welcome” or “Gezundheit” or any of the other tokens of mental enslavement with which men have for centuries sought to limit the sacred freedom of the individual ten-year-old and draft him like a chump into the unconscious mob that men call “society.” We have no time for nurturing. Our enemies are massing. We need you to be strong—not only when you become adults, but today. We need strong third-graders, and second-graders, and first-graders. We need strong kindergarteners and nursery-schoolers and pre-schoolers and Mom-and-Me toddlers and babies and infants. We desperately need strong neonates, fetuses, and zygotes. For that matter, we need strong housepets. We need strong dogs and cats. We need strong hamsters. We need strong gerbils.

Dragnie’s heels clicked with rhythmic percussiveness and her smart gray suit fell perfectly and shifted gently as she strode down the corridor. Two tiers of lockers lined the walls of the hallway, each locker with its own reinforced padlock built to withstand a blast equivalent to twenty pounds of TNT, to ensure the sacred privacy and protection every peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, every Yum-Time juice box, every Super-Fun-Pak of Fat-Free Mockolate Chip cookies, from looters of the world.

A distinctive sound caught Dragnie’s ear as she neared the main entrance lobby. It was the sound of a human voice, emanating from the school’s auditorium. She felt herself drawn involuntarily toward it, as if something in her unconscious were responding to something of which she was not conscious. Her slim legs and trim suit cast a gliding shadow across the lobby’s travertine floor in the slanting afternoon sun. Opening the heavy, ornate oak door of the auditorium, she entered.

The theater was dark, its house lights turned off and therefore providing no illumination by which things might be seen. Chilly white fluorescent lights beamed down from over the stage, however, and by their efficient glow Dragnie could perceive, with her sense of vision, the presence of two persons. One was seated in the front row. She was an adult, obviously a teacher or administrator, whose slouching posture and indifferent air revealed her as someone for whom existence was a thing to be taken for granted. “Not so fast, Nathan,” the woman called, smugly pleased with her authority and the sanction it provided for dispensing criticism of the work of others. “Start over.”

The target of her command was the young man onstage. He was an older student, probably a senior. Standing erect at a lectern, he wore the trademark dark slacks and sage-green shirt and tricolor necktie embossed with dollar signs of the Upper School boys. He received the woman’s advice with an unruffled ease, as if already accustomed to being subjected to the glib, careless directions of the second-guessers and public-speaking-correctors and high-school-student-bossers-around of the world.

“Parents, teachers, Principal Sloughninny, fellow students,” he proclaimed. “We have come tonight to celebrate John Glatt, and I? Who am I, you ask? I am the senior who has been selected to represent the student body. I am the senior who has written this speech which I myself am giving to you now. I am the senior who is alive as himself and is the me that you see before you at this very moment.”

Dragnie found herself stumbling into a seat as though in a daze as if in a hypnotic trance. Her eyes never left his tall, erect, noble, commanding, confident figure even as her ears never left his astute, devastating words.

“You have said, ‘How can an eighteen-year-old give a speech that will do justice to John Glatt?’ I am doing so for you now. You have said, ‘No school child is competent to offer adequate praise to the smartest, bravest, most rational man in society.’ I am proving you wrong as I speak. You have said, ‘The mind of a high school student is impotent and without value.’ I am refuting that assertion in ways you have hitherto found unimaginable.”

His voice was rich and well-modulated. His articulation was exact and flawless. Dragnie’s conscious mind possessed the fullest awareness of the fact that he had composed this speech for an audience of students, teachers, and parents, to be presented that evening at the school’s John Glatt Day celebration. Nonetheless she felt, with a sudden shudder and a flush of pleasure, that he had written it expressly for, and was now delivering it solely to, her, to be detected and processed by the auditory system functioning flawlessly within the living mind of her personal and inviolate head.

“Yes, we will praise John Glatt tonight. But I will do more than that. I will honor John Glatt by asserting my values. I will honor John Glatt, not by kowtowing to the bumming-out expectations you would lay on me, not by kneeling on bended knee to the bad trip of pious slogans that the so-called ‘adults’ deem okay for a ceremony of this kind. I will honor John Glatt by asking questions you would rather not be asked, which you fear being asked—but which must be asked, if in this school, and in every school, men are to be truly free.”

“Wait a minute, Nathan—“ the teacher began.

“Let him finish!” Dragnie cried.

The teacher turned with a start and peered back toward the rear of the auditorium, seeking to determine the source of the outburst. “Miss Tagbord?”

“Yes,” Dragnie replied with icy veracity.

“Sorry. Continue, Nathan.”

The boy peered deeply into the gloom of the unlit seats. He seemed then to catch Dragnie’s eye and, with a small mocking smile of amusement and contempt, returned to his text. “It is I, then, who will now ask you, Principal Sloughninny, and you, Vice-Principal Flabb, the question which all seniors now ask—or should be asking, if their faculties of reason have not been so damaged by the nowhere nature of this institution and their self-respect not sundered by what’s going down in this school’s freaked-out scene. The question is this: Why must the Senior Prom, the theme for which this year is ‘Some Enchanted Evening,’ be held in the gymnasium of this school, and why can it not be held, as everyone wants it to be, in the La Superba Room of Chez Elegance Caterers? The cost of renting the facility can be recouped by the sale of tickets, at a suggested rate of five dollars stag, eight dollars drag. True, admission to the Prom in the gym is free. But no student utilizing his mind, no student exercising his reason, will balk at the patent justness of this nominal fee in exchange for a much cooler set-up.

“Furthermore, regarding the matter of chaperones, we who tremble on the brink of adulthood, we who’ll by term’s end be eligible to serve in the nation’s armed forces, we who for two years now have possessed the legal right to drive a motorized vehicle and have had experience doing so—we insist: we will have no chaperones. We reject their authority. We ask: By what right do they presume to monitor and inhibit our celebration of existence, our rejoicing in the impending milestone of graduation, our frankly erotic fooling around?”

The speech lasted an hour and twenty minutes, during which the young man, calmly and with exquisitely controlled passion, announced his defiance of hall monitors, presented unanswerably his critique of “the legislative sham that is our so-called ‘Student Council,’” and delivered a ringing challenge to the policy of requiring cheerleaders to wear tights both at practices and at interscholastic athletic competitions. By the time he ended with the traditional tracing, toward the audience, of the dollar sign and the exclamation mark, Dragnie had slowly risen to her feet and, her chin held high in open admiration, begun a quiet but pointed round of applause.

The young man descended the three steps from the stage to the auditorium floor and joined her in the aisle. He was taller than she, gaunt and lean and erect in a body that hinted at hidden reserves of productive energy and rationally-managed ardor. His face belied his youth, and seemed to harbor a wisdom and experience beyond his years. His gaze at her was direct and uncowed. “I’m glad you approve, Miss Tagbord.”

They were interrupted by the appearance of another young man. He was dressed in an identical manner to that of the young man who had given the speech, as if the two of them, though distinct individuals, attended the same school—which, as a matter of objective fact, was in fact the fact. “Nice speech, Nathan,” said the other young man.

“Thank you, Eddie,” said the speech maker. “Oh, Miss Tagbord? Allow me to introduce Eddie G. Willikers. He’s on the stage crew here.”

“Gosh,” Eddie Willikers said. “Are you Dragnie Tagbord?”

“I am,” Dragnie replied.

“Not so fast, Eddie!” Nathan said with a hint of mockery. “I saw her first!”

“Yes, you did,” Eddie replied. “Well, nice to have met you, Miss Tagbord. See you later around the school, Nathan.” He walked away in a manner consistent with his own personal choice.

“Your name is Nathan, young man?” she asked.

“Yes, it is,” he replied. “Nathan A. Banden. Will you be attending the commemoration tonight, Miss Tagbord?”

“No,” Dragnie said, electing not to insult his intelligence with an apology, a condescending smile, or any other expression of regret. “I have other plans.”

“That is regrettable.”

“To you, perhaps.”

“Yes… to me. Isn’t that the only one who matters?”

“To you, perhaps.”

“Yes, to me. But don’t I matter to you, too, Miss Tagbord? If only a little?”

“No.”

“Quite right. And yet…”

“Good-bye, Nathan. My compliments on an excellent speech.”

The boy hesitated. Then he said, “Thank you, Miss Tagbord.”

Almost against her will, Dragnie found herself saying, “You’re welcome.”

Looking at each other, they exchanged glances on an equal, voluntary basis. “Am I?” he asked.

“Yes, you’re,” she said. “You’re welcome.” And as she made her way up the slanted floor toward the lobby, she knew, as deeply and as confidently as she had known anything in her life, that it was true.

^{Chapter 2}

Be a Do-er, Not a Viewer

The apartment occupied the penthouse of the Johnsonwood Building, the most indomitably proud and heroic skyscraper in New York, considered in the consensus of top experts to be the greatest building in the world and, therefore, in the universe. From its four immense windows Dragnie and her husband could, and with unfailing regularity, did, look out in all directions at once, in steely indifference and unchallengeable certainty.

Her husband was John Glatt.

That they were not legally married, had never been engaged, had never formally been lavoliered, or ever gone steady, was of no importance. He was her husband because no one else was or possibly could be. And Glatt’s understanding was identical to hers. Openly he professed in the privacy of his mind that she, to him, was his wife no less than he, to her, was her husband, and equally so was he her husband to him, just as she was wife to him to him no less than to her. Consumed with hatred for her by his love for her, he never spoke of it, nor of anything else.

Yet Glatt demonstrated every day his approval of Dragnie: with every cold glance with which he acknowledged her existence each morning, every slit-eyed smirk with which disdained her over cocktails in the evening, every hand-written card he proffered on the anniversary of their first meeting (“I despise you more than ever, dearest.”), and even that one time, when they had engaged in sexual intercourse, when he demonstrated his admiration and respect by brutally degrading her into a humiliated submission as he sneered his contempt and she laughed out loud in silent mockery.

They were husband and wife because they considered themselves to be so in their minds.

They now sat across from one another at the beautiful mahogany table in their elegantly-appointed dining room as the sun slowly set, as it had done for billions of years all over the universe. Pierre, their footman, had just served the night’s meal, a repast of gourmet food possessing the highest deliciousness, impeccably complimented by an excellent wine that John Glatt had decanted, opened, chosen, unpacked, shipped, aged, bottled, fermented, stomped, picked, and planted himself with cool, swift precision.

Glatt’s eyes skimmed the evening newspaper, affording him the opportunity to see the words printed on it and transferring the information they conveyed to his mind. Then his lean, sardonic face lifted from the page. He surveyed the platters of steaming, perfectly-prepared meat, healthful garden vegetables, and taste-tempting side dishes arrayed before him. In a single silent act he shifted his gaze from them to Dragnie until their eyeballs silently beheld one another’s. “You who claim to serve no one,” he said. “You for whom the very idea of granting a favor is a metaphysical chimera, an imaginary creature possessing no reality; you whose sole allegiance is, not to some comforting but fictional construct called ‘society’ but, simply and utterly, to existence; you for whom life itself is rational and self-interested or it is nothing; you who, without shame or boasting, call ‘self-reliance’ what the mass of men call ‘selfishness;’ you who ask nothing of any man for which you will not, at once and without cavil, give some other thing of equal value; you, who know in the deepest recesses of your consciousness that to perform the slightest kindness to others, without the promise of reciprocity in a manner that is meaningful to you on your own terms, is to collude in the enslavement of both them and yourself; you, who ask nothing of the world apart from its consent to leave you to freely pursue your desires in a manner consistent with your own values and morality—will you, not so much in violation of these principles as from an unthreatened position of strength afforded by them, pass the brisket?”

“Yes, John, I will,” Dragnie said. “But I will do so, not out of some received and, thus, limiting sense of obligation as imposed upon me by centuries of unconscious habit transmitted by a corrupt, anti-life, mind-fearing culture, but because I freely choose to do so. I will in full awareness of the fact that, as affirmed by laws of physics established over centuries in response to the sacred human desire to acquire knowledge, the brisket will not pass itself. I will, not because I think you incapable of either rising from your chair and transporting yourself to a position from which you would be able to obtain the brisket yourself, or of extending your arm across the table to take hold of the platter from your current position, but, paradoxically, because you can do these things. You, who’re the apotheosis of heroic humanity, the completely free man, ask nothing from me and, for that reason, deserve to have the brisket passed to you by me. While the mass of men demand something for nothing, you offer everything: your energy, your attention, your consciousness, your mind, your existence. You are the only man on Earth to whom I would pass the brisket willingly and in full awareness of the meaning of that act.”

Taking hold of its elegant china platter, she passed him the brisket. Glatt used a pair of beautiful sterling silver tongs, a gift from a wealthy individual with excellent taste, to transfer several slices of the rich, delectable meat to his plate. He cut through the braised animal flesh and impaled it on the tines of a fork—efficiently, pitilessly. He tasted it, and a dark scowl formed on his face. He rang for the footman, who hurried in from the kitchen. “Pierre,” Glatt said contemptuously, “the brisket has gone cold.”

The footman took the platter and hurried off to the kitchen. Dispassionately eying a basket of dinner rolls, Glatt picked one up in his bare hands and began to eat it. “Oh, Dragnie, Dragnie,” he said. “How was your day?”

“Mine?” Dragnie exclaimed. It was not like Glatt to express an interest in her day; indeed, it was not like him to express an interest in any other person. His independence, his self-sufficiency, his supreme individuality were the character traits for which she most admired and despised him—and for which, she knew, she would willingly kill him and be his slave.

She became suddenly aware, with a deep certainty, that the pressures on Glatt, his responsibilities—not to others, for he had none, but to himself—were taking a toll, as they would on any man. Glatt not only functioned both as C.E.O. of Glatt Industries as well as its Top Breakthrough Inventor, but as Head Advisor of Governmental Bureaucracy Affairs for Economic Ideas for the federal government. The international situation had been deteriorating for some time; no wonder, Dragnie now thought, Glatt looked vexed. “My day was rather interesting,” she said. “In fact, I met a most extraordinary young man at the Glatt School—“

The butler silently entered the room, stopped before Glatt, and said, “Excuse me, sir, but three gentlemen are down in the lobby and insist on meeting with you.”

Glatt chuckled and made a gesture of impatience and mockery and contempt. “Who are they, Farnsworth?”

“Mr. Rawbone, Mr. De Soto, and Mr. Daghammarskjold.”

Glatt and Dragnie exchanged a look, a look of significance and meaning and shared visual contact.

“Send them up,” Glatt said.

Moments later, having ascended the 287 floors of the Johnsonwood Building in a streamlined supersonic elevator of Glatt’s invention, the trio where ushered into the apartment.

“Hello, John,” said Hunk Rawbone. “Hello, Dragnie.”

Dragnie chuckled and Glatt chuckled. That Rawbone had once been Dragnie’s lover was known to all present. Tall, handsome, with the muscular build of an athlete and the brilliant mind of a genius, Hunk Rawbone had founded Rawbone Metals and single-handedly invented the miracle metal Rawbonium. Stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum, cheaper than sand, one-hundred-percent gluten-free and packed with important vitamins and minerals, it had revolutionized the railroad industry, the aviation industry, and every other metal-using industry. There had been a time, ten years before, when its manufacture, distribution, and sale had been strictly regulated by the second-raters and me-too-ers and so’s-yer-old-man-ers of the national government, when the entire metals industry had been hobbled and bound and gagged by men like Francis Pissypants, the Bureaucrat-in-Chief, and J.B. Mucklicker, director of the National Board of Caution.

That, however, had been before John Glatt had convinced various businessmen to hide out in Wyoming, and brought the entire world to its knees. Now Hunk Rawbone was both President of Rawbone Industries and Head Business Person of the Department of Business.

“Hello, Hunk,” Dragnie said. She turned to their second visitor. “How are you, San?”

Sanfrancisco Nabisco Alcoa D’Lightful D’Lovely De Soto chuckled in a mischievous South American way, a way outwardly suggestive of lighthearted frivolity and consistent with his former but faked-up image as a feckless, womanizing and girlizing playboy but now openly proclaiming his absolute fidelity to a code of values that held that the mind was the supreme expression of man’s intellect. “I?” De Soto chuckled.

Like Dragnie, Sanfrancisco was a self-made man who had inherited an industrial empire. Handsome, brilliant, dashing, and with a certain dangerous but appealing Latino flair, he had become director, upon his father’s death, of the fabled De Soto Talc Mines. El Mino De Soto de Talco Incorporado was now the source of eighty-six percent of the world’s baby powder, which was daily administered to more than seventy-one percent of the world’s babies in both Natural and Springtime Fresh scents. “I am well, Dragnie,” he said with an amused twinkle.

“Well, I am fine, too, in case anyone cares!” joked Regnad Daghammarskjold.

“And what if we don’t?” chuckled De Soto.

“Well, then, you can go to hell!” rejoined the boisterous Swedish-American Swede to the chuckles of everyone else except the servants.

Dragnie pursed her lips in amusement as her eyes glittered with appreciation for his rascally personality. Handsome, blond, and attractively beautiful in a way that appealed to men as well as women, Regnad Daghammarskjold was a pirate. He spent most of his time aboard his ship, the Fjord Fusion, with his rollicking but deadly serious and often lethal band of beautiful blond fellow pirates, plundering merchant ships from other countries and pillaging the state-owned vessels for loot, swag, and booty. When not haunting the shipping lanes of the bounding main and asserting the supremacy of private theft and entrepreneurial swashbuckling over state-run maritime mediocrities, Regnad lived in a modest two-bedroom co-op in Murray Hill with his wife, Grace Adams, the beautiful movie star.

“Would any of you like a drink?” Dragnie asked.

“I would like a beer,” Regnad Daghammarskjold said. “Do you have any?”

“I don’t know,” Dragnie replied.

“You might,” the pirate said. “Look around. Check your premises, Dragnie.”

“Let me tell you something about beer,” Sanfrancisco De Soto said, his eyes blazing. Thirty-five minutes later, when he had concluded his discourse on the history, morality, and metaphysics of beer, Dragnie signaled for Pierre to bring three bottles. She handed them around. Each of the visitors gave her a ten-dollar bill. There was no need for anyone to thank anyone for anything. “I won’t insult you by offering you food,” Glatt said. “You are all perfectly capable of obtaining your own sustenance.”

“I know it,” Regnad said.

The group settled in the living room and Hunk Rawbone opened the discussion. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, John,” he said. “But Goa has fallen.”

“I didn’t know it,” Glatt said. “Goa be damned!”

“That’s the last one,” Sanfrancisco added. “Now every nation on earth has become a People’s State of the People.”

“Every nation—save one,” Dragnie murmured. “The United States.”

“Shall I tell you what the product safety boys are saying?” Rawbone asked out loud. “They’re saying that the People’s States’re complaining that our manufactured goods’re dangerous. They’re talking about an embargo.”

“Then we must meet with Mr. Jenkins,” Dragnie said. “We should also alert the boys in the Pentagon, our nation’s most brilliant scientist boys, and our leading achiever-boys in industry, research, and engineering.”

“This is serious, isn’t it, John?” Regnad said with unflinching directness.

“Yes,” Glatt replied.”

The three visitors had gone, and Dragnie and Glatt were preparing for bed, when Glatt mentioned their earlier topic of conversation. Standing in their elegant bedroom, clad in the simplest of pajamas whose clean design, quiet sense of style, and always-tasteful pizzazz made a striking statement of individuality wherever he went, he said, “You were telling me about an extraordinary young man you met today.”

Dragnie suppressed a smile of amusement. “It’s of no importance,” she said, and only afterwards, while falling asleep, did she ask herself if that were really true.

^{Chapter 3}

The Veracity of Truth

Dragnie stood up from her austere, stoical desk, as if announcing to the world with a single decisive gesture that she had completed the work she had sat at it in order to accomplish. She allowed herself a brief chuckle of amusement at her achievement, followed by a contemptuous chuckle of mockery at the amused contemptuousness with which she regarded her own chuckling mockery, which was so amusing.

Tagbord Rail’s Southwest Division was expanding to her satisfaction. The augmented schedule of the Chimichanga Line in Arizona, linking to the Tamale-Caliente Line in New Mexico, would take some of the pressure off the trunk lines of the Enchiladas Suizas Line in Texas. The entire region was doing well. The economy of the Southwest had shown steady growth in the past ten years, as if that area’s system of production and trade among men had been a human being, eating right and staying fit and as a consequence becoming larger.

In fact, the economy of the entire U.S. had undergone a similar expansion over the same period, although not before what came to be called The Great Takeover. Until then, the government, controlled by Mr. Thomas and a small cadre of corrupt and physically-unattractive bureaucrats, had sought to maximize its power and safeguard its incompetence and mediocrity with laws mandating “fairness.”

No one was allowed to produce anything new. No one was allowed to use anything old. No one was allowed to accept a new job or quit their current job. No one was allowed to be a genius. No one was allowed to have fun or have nice things or go anywhere or do anything or go out or see their friends or anything.

John Glatt’s response to this state of affairs was to persuade society’s achievers to withdraw from humanity and hide in a valley in Wyoming. As many as twenty important tycoons abandoned their companies. Some even destroyed their factories, refineries, and warehouses with dynamite and fire, miraculously without injury or loss of life to anyone of importance. What had transpired then was what always happens when a corporation’s founder retires or dies: the companies went out of business. All that remained of the country’s economy ground to a halt.

Then Glatt hijacked the radio waves and made a three-hour speech about his view of the world, and the government—as governments invariably do, after being denounced in long, philosophical lectures—surrendered. The boys in Washington pleaded with Glatt to restore order. Mr. Thomas, convening a formal committee including such cowardly lapdogs and obsequious pontificating high-ups as Jason Bellybutton, the supposed economist; Dr. Cyrus Pussyface, the prevaricating expert; Professor Jones, the world-renowned person; and Secretary of Union Greed Mumph Slimetrail, importuned Glatt to take the reins of the economy and rescue it from disaster. Glatt refused. The government attempted to coerce him into cooperating but that, too, failed. Finally, it abdicated, and Glatt led his courageous, principled team of businessmen and classical music composers and actresses out of Glatt’s Gorge and back into the world.

Their first actions were swift and decisive. They fired Mr. Thomas and replaced him with the impotent puppet Mr. Jenkins. They then nullified every undemocratically-imposed edict and authoritarian-enforced regulation of the past twenty years, and supplanted them with rules supporting individual achievement. They repealed the Everybody Be Nice Act and replaced it with the Leave Business Alone Directive. They cancelled the Nobody Gets to Have More Than Anybody Else Act and instituted the Finders Keepers Losers Weepers Ruling. They reversed the If You Don’t Have Enough to Share With The Rest of the Class Then You Can Leave Those Cupcakes With Me And Collect Them At The End of The Day edict and, in its place, promulgated the This Is My Fudgesickle Go Get Your Own Law.

The results were immediate and profound. Everywhere, in every industry, millionaires went back to work. Useless regulators and corrupt bureaucrats committed mass suicide, publicly begged for forgiveness, or found themselves simply shot on sight. Labor unions, openly acknowledging the superior wisdom and unfailing justice of the marketplace, voluntarily disbanded after first publishing, in newspapers throughout the land, full-page advertisements apologizing to management for any inconvenience they had caused for the past one hundred years. Reality, as properly defined, resumed.

But now, Dragnie mused to her own private self as she began to walk toward her office door, a new enemy of freedom loomed: the consolidation of the People’s States of the People, whose cancerous collectivist malignancy had now spread to every nation on earth—save one.

“Miss Tagbord? A delivery for you.”

Miss Smith, her loyal and obedient secretary, stood in the doorway, an expression of open admiration obscured, on the face of her head, by an immense bouquet of vivid, luxuriant magenta orchids in a handsome cut-glass vase created by one of the city’s top vase designers. Dragnie suppressed a small smile at the inadvertent double meaning of the secretary’s announcement. The notion that she would ever take part in “a delivery,” and from the sacred and inviolable sanctity of her body’s individuality, bring forth another human being whose helplessness and weakness would subject her—at least according to society’s superstitious tribal standards—to years of unremunerated toil and slavish subservience, was literally inconceivable to the mentality of her mind.

A standard business card sat in a small clip amid the heavy, flesh-like blooms. She plucked it out and, as Miss Smith placed the vase on her desk in an attractive orientation, Dragnie read the meticulously hand-written message:

“Dear Miss Tagbord:

Kindly permit me to express the gratitude of which I felt on the occasion yesterday of your extremely neat visit to our School. It was an affirmation of my love of my own self and the life that it lives to see you in the audience as I rehearsed my speech. And yet I do not express here the typically obsequious homage of a nobody to a celebrity. My theory is that celebrity feeds off of fame, which is its bread and butter and meat and potatoes and mother’s milk and just dessert. And what is fame, but the afterglow of men’s discussion of an individual providing value for the admiration of the mob? A visitor can be no more distinguished than the place to which he visits. Therefore I will not speak of being honored by your presence. The mass of lesser men seek elevation of their self-respect in the proximity of their selves to the heightened significance of the lauded one. But to the individual of true mind such turn-ons are irrelevant, because they find their value in the accomplishment of their own achievement. Do you dismiss my assertion as being merely that of a student? Then you do so at your peril. A society indifferent to its students, and to their ability to determine without obstruction the site of their senior prom, is a society that is doomed. It is a society ruled by cowards for the benefit of weaklings, squares, and numb-nuts. That is no society in which I deem it worth living my one life, which is all one can live, and be alive. I hope you like the flowers.

“Yours truly,

Nathan A. Banden.”

Dragnie threw her head back in a gesture of defiance. Informing Miss Smith that she would return to the office tomorrow, she left.

On the train to Washington Dragnie read the card five more times. Something in the boy’s words touched her deeply. She found herself compelled by his unflinching willingness to address even the most trivial of topics in terms of heightened philosophical discourse. The tone of the card bespoke a sensibility almost frighteningly in sympathetic harmony with her own. She wondered if his parents were aware of the boy’s potential for greatness.

The porter, a dignified man named Ben Dover, wearing the official dark blue Tagbord Rail uniform, stopped on his way up the aisle and bent in professional deference. He had been serving the needs of passengers of the Executive Car since the earliest days, when Old Man Pop Gramps “Professor” Zayde Poppa “The Guv’nor” Tagbord had created the line, and had watched Dragnie grow from infancy. He was now ninety-seven years old, blind in one eye and functionally deaf, and yet he still worked, willingly and with the highest competence, for such was his dedication to his job and its ability to protect and safeguard his individuality from the effects of undeserved cost-of-living wage increases, unnecessary health care, and employer-funded pensions that enslaved workers on other, still-vaguely-unionized rail lines.

He now demonstrated his undiminished ability to transport, with one hand under a tray, a martini from the galley car without spilling a drop. “Is something wrong, Miss Dragnie?” he inquired in his wise and aged manner. “You look to be the subject of vexations.”

Dragnie forced a reassuring smile. “It’s nothing, Uncle Ben,” she murmured. “I’m just worried, I suppose—worried about the future of the entire world.”

The old man chuckled. “Well, I don’t know nothing about that,” he said. “All’s I know is, we’re out of chicken salad.”

Dragnie smiled. The courageous train rushed on to its once-dignified but now shamefaced destination.

The conference took place at the White Home, in a secret room unknown about by men not informed of its existence. As Dragnie entered she saw that John Glatt had already arrived, as had Sanfrancisco De Soto, Hunk Rawbone, and Regnad Daghammarskjold. The four men sat along one side of a table set with pitchers of water and glasses, both of the highest transparency, and legal pads and pens. Opposite them sat three representatives of the nominal government in whispered colloquy with its loathsome head, Mr. Jenkins. A sweat-soaked, fat man with repulsive male breasts, he gave a weak, contemptible smile as she moved toward her seat. “Ah. Miss Tagbord. Splendid. We’re all here.” He glanced at the hate-worthy bureaucrats flanking him and then gestured to Glatt and his companions. “So let’s get started.” The repellent chief executive composed the features of his ugly face into a stern and grim arrangement. “The word from the People’s States of the People is what we’d been fearing,” he said in a voice soaked in terror and self-pity. He shifted, his chair emitting squeals of protest as if in violent objection to being sat on by such an inferior individual. “They’re imposing a comprehensive embargo on all products made in the U.S. That’s not good. That’s not good at all!”

“But, why?” Dragnie said, her voice low.

“They say our products are too dangerous,” Mr. Jenkins replied.

“But, why?” Dragnie asked, her voice low.

“Our toys are covered with lead-based paint. Our cars explode when the odometer reaches three hundred. Our broccoli, kale, and Romaine lettuce harbor dangerous impurities such as salmonella, E.-coli, and other pathogens. Our kitchen appliances burst into flame the first time you plug them in. Our telephones generate X-rays that cause brain cancer.” Mr. Jenkins gulped convulsively and wiped sweat from his forehead with a disgusting handkerchief. “The common man doesn’t want brain cancer. The common man doesn’t want brain cancer at all, I tell you!”

“The market will decide that,” Hunk Rawbone murmured coolly. A thousand words screamed in his mind but he did not permit himself to give them voice. Instead, he mentally recommended that they shut up. “We manufacture our products as cheaply as possible in order to maximize profit. Perhaps that’s something they don’t understand any more in the People’s States of the People of France or England or Germany or Spain or Portugal or Greece or China or Australia.”

“Or Goa,” added Regnad Daghammarskjold, deliberately speaking with his voice.

“Look, Hunk,” Mr. Jenkins whined in the manner of a child seeking to escape blame for everything all the time. “I know that, and you know that. But the boys in the People’s States of the People don’t see it that way. They have objections to their kids being poisoned and their mix-masters blowing up. And now, with this embargo, we have no place to sell our exports.”

“We’ll sell them domestically,” Dragnie said, her voice low.

“To whom, Miss Tagbord?”

The question came from the man seated languidly to the right of Mr. Jenkins. He was Phillip Sissyberger, the Minister of Equality, a thin, meticulous aesthete in a custom-made, purple silk suit and a florid green bow tie. He sported a pencil-thin moustache and affected the airy, condescending manner of an individual for whom the supreme achievement of life was to be a big know-it-all. “The vast majority of our population can’t afford much more than food, clothing, and shelter. True, we boast an upper class the income of which may comfortably rival that of any aristocracy anywhere in the world—if there still are any aristocracies left, in our benighted age. But those people—one might call them ‘the achievers’ or ‘the successes’ or ‘the good people’—comprise less than one tenth of one percent of our populace, and in any case they scarcely have need of the cheap consumer goods our factories produce. They purchase their appliances and automobiles from the prestigious manufacturers in the People’s States of the People of England, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. No, my friends. We may all applaud the free-market revolution led by you four gentlemen and Miss Tagbord ten years ago. You may congratulate yourselves on the complete removal of all government regulation and oversight of industry. You may likewise take pride in the realization of your primary goal, which is and always has been the elimination and, indeed, de-legitimization of the very idea, of taxation, and for the complete subjugation of the public sphere to the interests of private enterprise. In this you have succeeded admirably. The popularity of Grand Canyon Fun Park, the lines at the District of ColumbiaLand ticket booths that surround this nation’s capital, the conversion of the Great Lakes into water hazards for the world’s largest miniature golf course—all of these attest to your achievement. But the equality characterizing our nation now consists in a near-universal state of lower-class subsistence. The American people can no more afford to buy their own products than they can afford to catch the flu or purchase loin lamb chops to feed a family of four.”

“The American people, sir, have one thing denied to the richest person in any other country on Earth.” Sanfrancisco De Soto leaned forward, his boyish charm apparent in his twinkly-eyed playfulness and faintly mocking smile. “It is something far more precious than German eggbeaters or English sports cars. Or, I might add, lamb chops. Perhaps you have heard of it. It is called ‘freedom.’ And it is with this freedom that each person is free—for that is why it is called ‘freedom’—to succeed or fail according to their own abilities. Each person is free to start his own steel mill, unburdened by government meddling. Each person is free to create a railroad and to do his damndest in competition against Miss Tagbord here. Each person is free to inherit a talc mine that has been in his family for generations, and to run it as he sees fit.”

“Yes, yes, freedom is wonderful,” Mr. Jenkins said hastily. “But we all have a country to run. I’m merely head of the Federal government. You five are calling the shots. What are we to do?”

Everyone, as everyone always did, turned toward John Glatt.

Once again Dragnie found herself marveling at the face and the appearance of the man whom she had, in essence, married. It was a face so comfortable with itself that it seemed to fall asleep on itself, yet simultaneously a face so hardened by a life not merely lived, but consciously experienced, that it betrayed no sign of having aged or, in the end, existed. His mouth was pure, a mouth that, if it could speak, would announce to the world what a mouth should and must be, for all men, throughout time. His eyes, existing as a matched pair as if they were diamond cufflinks or precious earrings fashioned by one of the top jewelry designers in the world, conveyed a dual nature. They were at once both proud and shy, sensitively concerned and cruelly indifferent, alert to danger and blankly oblivious of the actual meaning of the words “danger” or “alert” or “to.” His hair was as wise as his eyebrows were intelligent, while his ears had the hard, sculpted purity and radiant tensile strength of a bridge that spanned chasms, announcing to all who saw it that no challenge was beyond the ability of man’s mind to meet, solve, and then forget about utterly and forever.

“John?” she said, unaware that she was speaking, unaware that she was breathing, unaware of anything and everything of which men can be aware. “Do you have an idea?”

“Yes,” Glatt said.

“What is it, John?” asked Hunk Rawbone, silently vibrating with a desire to obtain an answer to his query.

“Good.”

“It’s a good idea, John?” inquired Regnad Daghammarskjold, falling silent after he had finished speaking.

“Yes.”

“Care to let us in on it, old pal?” Sanfrancisco said.

“No.”

“We’ll just have to take your word for it?” Mr. Jenkins cried. “Is that what you’re saying, Glatt? Is that what you would have us believe? Is that what you’re communicating to us? Is that the idea?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s fine for you,” Mr. Jenkins cried. “But when word gets out that none of our overseas customers’re going to be buying our products, there’ll be mass panic. Everyone’ll be afraid of losing their jobs. What if they look to the government for help? That’s not what I signed up for. That’s not what I signed up for at all! But I’m the nominal Head Person of the United States of America and I’ll have to say something.” He pressed a button on the intercom in front of him. “Miss Davis? Call the press boys. Tell them in a week I’ll be making a speech about the international economic situation to the general public boys. Then call the speech writer boys and have them come up with something. Then call my wife and have her tell the in-law boys that I’ll have to work over the weekend and won’t be able to attend the drama festival, and to convey my regrets to the Boys From Syracuse boys, the Three Sisters boys, and the Guys ‘n’ Dolls boys.” Mr. Jenkins turned to the others. “You people had better think of something,” he cried. “It doesn’t remove any skin off of my nose if this country’s population all becomes unemployed. I’ve got a job. But that job is to tell everybody else that nothing’s wrong when everybody knows that everything’s wrong.”

The person to Mr. Jenkins’s right, a puling and whiny person of no substance, cried, “This is a terrible crisis and I’m afraid!”

“Yes!” yelled Mr. Jenkins. “We’re all frightened of what might happen to us!”

“Are you afraid, John?” Dragnie asked.

“No,” John Glatt said.

^{Chapter 4}

The Selves of Men

“You still despise me, don’t you, John?”

Dragnie and Glatt were back in their home, in the proud penthouse of the dignified but good-natured Johnsonwood Building. It was night, and all daylight had disappeared, as if the sun had gotten tired and gone to bed. Glatt sat pitilessly at his desk, his attention focused with unswerving intensity upon the notebook in which he had been writing since their return on the train earlier that afternoon. Now, as then, his implacable posture announced his absolute immersion in his task. Now, as then, his confident, strong, clean hand responded to his will, grasping the pen and moving it in specific, controlled, clean gestures to inscribe letters on the clean, college-ruled, white paper, the letters in their turn forming words, from which, when reading it back, his consciousness would derive meaning.

Glatt did not look up when responding to Dragnie’s question. His eyes squinted slightly with amused contempt. “Yes,” he said.

“And you know that I despise you?”

“Yes.”

A faint smile played about Dragnie’s mouth. She left Glatt’s office and went to the bedroom. There was no need for either of them to say goodnight. There was no need for either of them to exchange physical gestures of affection. There was no need for either of them to engage in sexual activity with the other, nor had they done so in ten years. Sex, Dragnie knew, was the body’s way of externalizing the ego in all of its desires, fears, fantasies, and requirements. Most people needed to have sex multiple times in order to assuage the needs of a self that had been irreparably damaged by the cowardly, life-hating mediocrities that controlled society—the looters, who simply stole what others had created or achieved; the leeches, who sucked wealth and reputation from those who had their true claim; the moochers, who sought for free what others had paid for in thought and labor; the koochie-koo-ers, who begged for care and support in exchange for their winning cuteness; the hootchie-kootchers, who demanded acclaim and reward simply because they could dance in a provocative manner. But Dragnie and Glatt were immune to this need, because, as supremely rational beings, their selves—and this they knew with the absolute certainty of purest certitude—were perfect. It had therefore only been necessary for them to engage in sex once. That had taken place ten years earlier in a mutually-brutalizing act of seduction, rape, triumphalism, surrender, gloating, name-calling, bullying, shaming, taunting, objectivizing, sneering-and-leering, self-glorification, and self-loathing. Their “marriage,” their partnership, their union, had been undistracted and undiminished by sex, or conversation, ever since.

Dragnie turned out the light as, in his study, Glatt continued to work on his achievement.

* * *

“Prepare for landing.”

Regnad Daghammarskjold’s voice echoed throughout the spaceship as, below, the mottled and dusty surface of their destination drew nearer. “Co-ordinate the rockets. Get ready to turn off the engines.”

All around him, the crew flawlessly operated switches and, with cool efficiency, checked important readings preparatory to the craft’s touchdown.

“I hope this baby works properly!” Sanfrancisco De Soto chuckled in roguish humor.

“It will,” Dragnie murmured. She spoke, not out of hope, but conviction. The ship had been designed over the course of three days by John Glatt, its materials supplied by Hunk Rawbone’s mills, and fabricated under her personal supervision in Tagbord Rail’s most experienced factory. Now, under the command of the breathtakingly attractive Swedish pirate, its maiden voyage was on the verge of a successful completion.

“Stabilize the gyroscopes,” Regnad ordered. “Adjust the controls and line up the necessary components properly.”

Finally the craft touched down on the surface. “Confirm that everything is pressurized,” the pirate said. “Turn off the motors and turn on the lights. Assure that the cabin pressure is correct for human habitation.”

“How much time do we have?” Sanfrancisco asked.

Dragnie glanced at her watch, an expensive timepiece she proudly wore in unashamed pride. Beautifully enhanced with precious jewels and waterproof to thirty atmospheres, it was built with the utmost precision and expressed her own personal style. “Fifteen minutes.”

“Ready, John?”

John Glatt unbuckled his seat belt in a single clean, decisive, confident motion. It was a motion that had the cleanliness and the decisiveness and the confidence of a certainty that, unlike the certainty of other men who, however much they had felt a similar certainty about other things, had been proven wrong, was right. “Yes.”

On Earth, in the country of the United States, in a state called Nebraska, a family sat in its living room, preparing to watch an address delivered by the Head Person of the United States government. They had been told to anticipate this event for a week, and had obediently gathered before their television to hear their leader’s words of wisdom. “Be sure to watch Mr. Jenkins!” the television ads had cried. “Mr. Jenkins will have something important to say!” read the billboards on signs and buses. “Listen to Mr. Jenkins because he is smart!” ran the ads on the radio. This family, whose members had been instructed from birth to believe whatever certain authorities told them, whether the authorities were the church, the government, or the education system, consisted of a father, who was a contemptible weakling, his wife, who was hatefully stupid, and their two children, each more repulsively “idealistic” than the other.

“Mr. Jenkins cares about us,” the mother said reassuringly. “He will be able to help us.”

“Mr. Jenkins is not one of those heartless, selfish capitalists,” the father said, believing himself to have expressed an opinion of wisdom. “He is able to empathize with the ordinary man.”

“I love Mr. Jenkins!” cried the daughter in a voice indistinguishable from that with which she squealed her adoration of the latest pop star.

“Mr. Jenkins is my favorite person. When I grow up, I want the government to give me everything,” announced the son, believing himself to be a mature and thoughtful human being.

Suddenly a voice announced Mr. Jenkins, and a face appeared on the television, and the family fell silent and paid attention to it. “Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow Americans, boys and girls, and people all over the world,” said Mr. Jenkins. “I come before you tonight with a grave announcement.” He spoke in the dull monotone of a man who did not love life. There were pouches below his eyes, as if reality had hung there twin bags of ethical compromise, while the lines of his face formed the latitude and longitude demarcations of a map of moral corruption that no cosmetologist’s pancake makeup could conceal. “The People’s States of the People of all the states and nations and people of the world have determined that they can no longer engage in trade with the United States of America. They say our products are too dangerous. They say that when we removed all regulatory oversight from the private sector, ended corporate taxation, outlawed unions, and eliminated the minimum wage, our work force degenerated into a pool of depressed and angry wage-slaves for whom quality no longer mattered. And so…” He paused to lick his thin, terrified lips. “And so they are issuing a blanket embargo on… on…” Suddenly Mr. Jenkins lurched up from his seat and toward the camera, as though desperately seeking the attention and sympathy of a skeptical onlooker. “This isn’t my fault!” he cried, sweating visibly. “You can’t blame this on me! I can’t help it! I just do what I’m told by John Glatt and that wife of his, and that Frisco fellow and that, that pirate! You’ve got to believe me—“

And then the picture went black. The channel seemed to have ceased transmission.

“Attention, the ears of men. This is John Glatt speaking.”

Before the family a new face had appeared, a face only vaguely familiar to the adults and almost entirely unknown to the children, and yet a face which each of them—man, wife, son, daughter—sensed belonged to a man that could be trusted. It was a face not only at perfect peace with itself, but at perfect peace with life and with man and with existence. “You are now receiving me on every channel on every television and on every station on every radio on Earth,” Glatt said in a tone of supreme confidence. “It is useless to try to change the station or the channel. We are controlling transmission. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. How is it that we are able to dominate the airwaves in this fashion, you ask? We are able to do so for one reason: I am speaking to you from the Moon.

“I have come here, in a craft of my own design and constructed at my own expense, to issue a reply to the people of the People’s States of the People. I address them as follows: You have, with the fall of Goa, consolidated your grip on all the nations on earth—except ours. You have elected to embargo all of our private sector products, claiming that it is our governmental responsibility that some of them are dangerous, unwholesome, or lethal. We have sought, in good faith, to avoid that responsibility. We have made the logically irrefutable case that, for every shipment of arsenic-tainted minty-fresh toothpaste or dioxin-laced lo-fat yogurt or spontaneously-combusting strawberry-scented bowling balls or carcinogenic E-Z-Fit sweat pants we sell, there is another shipment of the same product that poses no danger to its users. But, rather than allow the market to sort out the dangerous commodities from the safe ones—rather than allowing some consumers to die or sustain injuries so that others may enjoy the safe versions of those products—you now choose to impose a global ban, denying your citizens access to these products and unfairly victimizing both us and them, but mainly us, in the process.

“We have protested, we have argued, and we have petitioned, but all to no avail. You continue to reject our products—and, in so doing, our very society. You continue to reject our values. You continue to live differently than we do—and, thus, to contradict us. It is for this reason that we hate you. We have arrived at our values, and our society, through the use of mind. We are the men of mind, and the women of mind, and the kids of mind. That is how we know we are right. To your attacks and criticisms we have ample reply. You say that your economies are growing and ours is stagnant. We say: economies are like hair, and too much growth can result in unmanageability and a fly-away society. You say your unemployment rates are at an all-time low while ours are skyrocketing. We say: when everyone is employed, there is an insufficient labor pool for the starting of new businesses; then innovation dies and everything gets old and depressing. You say that your governments are able to assure a modern, efficient infrastructure and a pleasant array of public amenities such as highways, parks and libraries, via the taxation of the individuals and corporations who make use of them. We say: taxes are the people who make so little that they need not pay them anyway, while the others, the successful, should not be taxed, so they will have an incentive to make more money, whereas if they were taxed, and therefore had less money, they would have no incentive to make more. You say that you have created a decent safety net to assure every one of your citizens a minimally civilized existence from infancy through old age, while we have abandoned our poor and infirm and aged to lives of degradation and poverty. We say that safety nets are for amateur tightrope walkers, while the tightrope walkers that men truly admire, and pay good money to watch, are the professionals, who work without a net. You say your defense budgets are sensible and targeted to actual enemies, while ours is larger than the rest of the world’s put together and targeted at enemies that no longer exist. We say, the bigger one’s defense budget, the stronger one feels. You say that your literacy rates are higher than ours. We say: a nation filled with people reading is a nation filled with people not doing other worthwhile activities, such as writing a stirring symphony, painting a breathtaking new masterpiece, or delivering an unforgettable cinematic performance of astounding depth and sensitivity. You say your life expectancy is higher than ours. We say: No one can accurately guess how long they will live, so why try to? You say that your percentage of population per capita in prison is lower than ours. We say, a high rate of imprisonment attests to both a society’s ample temptations to criminal behavior, and to the existence of an efficient and effective criminal justice system. You say your infant mortality rate is lower than ours. We say that our supply of babies is so large and excellent that we can afford to have more of them die. You say your average costs of medical procedures and prescription drugs are lower than ours. We say, men place the highest value on what costs them the most, and that when health comes with a high price tag men cherish their lives all the more. You say your rates of medical bankruptcies are zero while ours are astronomical. We say, if life is not worth going bankrupt to prolong, then one shouldn’t be alive in the first place. You say you have lower rates of venereal disease, teenage pregnancies, and abortions per capita than we do. We say, the more syphilis and gonorrhea and unwanted pregnancies a nation has, the sexier its population has proven itself to be. You say that polls indicate that your populations are consistently happier and less frightened of the future than ours are. We say that happiness without fear is like rice pudding without cinnamon, that fear makes you conscious, and that consciousness is what differentiates man from the non-conscious entities of the universe, such as rice pudding.

“All of these characteristics—the American mortality rate, American life expectancy, American bankruptcies, American venereal disease statistics, American defense budget, American absence of a safety net, and so on—are components of one essential fact that has defined America from its very birth: American exceptionalism. America is the only country in history that not only believes itself to be exceptional among all the nations of all time, but that really is exceptional among all the nations of all time. America is the only nation in history founded on the American idea—the idea of universal liberty and self-government for all white men owning property. It is this American exceptionalism that has made the United States the envy of the world, the exemplar of hope, and the dream destination of the poor, the oppressed, and the dispossessed, until only fairly recently.

“But you have treated us badly. So it is this very American Exceptionalism that we now propose to deny you.

“You have always looked to the United States as an example of a free society? Henceforth and until further notice we will restrict our own freedoms to deny you their example. You have always desired to immigrate to our shores in search of religious liberty and material prosperity? We hereby announce our intention to encourage religious intolerance and impoverish our population. You have long considered America a beacon of freedom and a force for good? Effective immediately we will deny freedom to ourselves and become a force for bad—for indifference, if not outright evil, in the world.

“In a word, we are going on strike. Do not look for our participation in the world of international affairs, because we are withdrawing our involvement in the doings of men. Do not anticipate the export of our Hollywood productions of films and television shows that promote the values of liberty, opportunity, and justice, because we shall now make them for and distribute them solely among ourselves, and they shall be about servitude, hopelessness, and things like that. Do not expect foreign aid for your populations or the arrival of Peace Corps volunteers to help with your latest efforts to build a school or inoculate your village against polio, because you have done us ill and hurt our feelings. If you change your mind, we will be where we have always been, in the northern hemisphere, between Mexico and Canada. If you decide to behave differently, and can provide convincing evidence to that effect, we will be only too happy to review it. Until then, however, we wish not to be contacted, and we’d appreciate it if you would take our name off any international communications, telexes, mail postings, diplomatic cables, and broadcasts. Thank you, and good night.”

^{Chapter 5}

On the Being of Existence

A muffled roar could be heard as Regnad switched off the rocket engines once the ship was safely back on its launch pad on Earth. He looked around, an expression of baffled amusement flitting over his unutterably lovely Swedish piratical features, while attending with cool precision and clean, flawless skill every task required of him.

“What’s that noise?” he asked Sanfrancisco, who had spent the entire flight back lounging in the co-pilot’s chair, outwardly reading a motorcycle magazine while, at the edge of his mind and part-way in toward the interior of it, marshalling his intelligence to address a vexing problem concerning the dispersal coefficients of aerosolized powder. “I thought I told you to turn off the ventilation system.”

“I did,” Sanfrancisco replied with flippant unconcern. “I guess John’s design for the exhaust fan was flawed.”

From her seat beside a window, Dragnie looked out onto the area around the launch pad, her expression of purest calm unaltered by the stunned amazement, or anything else, that she felt. “That’s not the sound of the exhaust fan,” she murmured, then tilted her chin toward the vista outside the glass. “It’s them.”

In a single uninterrupted motion, Hunk Rawbone transported his body to the main hatch and worked its mechanism. The moment it swung open a deafening roar flooded into the control room. “John?” he said. “Look.”

John Glatt, responding instinctively to the mention of his own name, joined Rawbone at the hatch. The rest of the crew gathered behind them. Outside a tumultuous crowd had gathered. As one, when they saw the hatch open and the ship’s crew step out, the multitude cheered. They cheered as crowds have cheered for millennia the return of conquering armies, the arrival of admired kings, the celebration of praised heroes waving from convertible automobiles as they are paraded down Main Street. Many of them held aloft signs they had created by their own hand, signs which read “WE LOV YOU JON GLAT” and “DOWN WITH MR JENKINS!” and “JHON GLATT IS OUR LEADER.” Making their way through the throng, Dragnie and the others were applauded, their backs were slapped, they were waved at and hugged and kissed. Mothers held babies aloft to burn into their infantile awareness the significance of the occasion. An old woman in a threadbare shawl had tears in her eyes. A man who looked like a factory worker held out the colloquial American gesture of a thumb’s up. Another man, who looked like a white collar worker, made the a-okay sign with his thumb and index finger. A man who looked like he might be a farmer chewed on a piece of straw and, his weathered face firmly affixed to his graying head, nodded wisely. A woman who looked like a mother of two clasped her hands in gratitude. An elderly couple, who looked like they had one son who was a dermatologist in Sarasota, Florida, married to an Italian girl and with a boy toddler who was allergic to pistachio nuts, and a daughter named Corinne doing graduate studies in anthropology at UCLA while working part-time waiting tables in an exclusive restaurant, smiled.

Suddenly Dragnie saw a familiar face. It was the face of a young man who, when her eye caught his, looked away, as though to deny the contact, and then returned the look, as if announcing his mastery of an instinctual shyness and his ability to use his will to overcome fear and advance his interests. With an expression of amused contempt he threaded his way through the crowd until he was standing beside her and smiling with contemptuous amusement.

“Hello, Miss Tagbord,” Nathan A. Banden said.

Something in his insolent attitude made Dragnie recoil. And yet a part of her responded in a different manner.

“Hello, Nathan,” she said. “We’ve just returned from the Moon.”

“I know it.”

“John made a speech.”

“I know it.”

“By the way, thank you for the flowers. You were quite eloquent in your note.”

The young man chuckled mockingly. “I?” he said. “Eloquent? Quite? Was? I merely wrote words—words that needed to be read by you, silently, to yourself, in order to receive my meaning.”

“Not everyone would see it that way.”

“I know it. But not everyone is me.”

“I know it. Only you are you.”

“Are you certain of that, Miss… Dragnie?”

They stood there, saying nothing wordlessly and looking at each other, like the last man and woman on earth, surrounded only by several thousand other men and women. Dragnie felt something stir deep within herself. His face was youthful, unlined by a lifetime’s struggle to discover his values. His cool blue eyes seemed to look directly at her. He was taller than she, and so in conversation with him she acquired that characteristic that is among the most feminine qualities it is possible for a woman to display: that of being short. But her femininity transcended mere physical diminutiveness, attaining its apotheosis in a tableau attesting to her subjugation to him. After her long, half-million-mile trip, she was unkempt, whereas he had obviously showered and shaved that morning, to the extent that he needed to shave at all. She was thus hygienically his inferior as well. It was a thought that gave her pleasure. She was on the verge of saying something. She did not know what it was. She did not know why she was about to say it. She did not know why she did not know these things. She only knew that she was about to say something, when Sanfrancisco appeared beside her, grasping her arm and drawing her away, saying, “Dragnie, John needs you.”

She allowed herself to be guided to where John Glatt stood, watching the journalists ask fawning questions of Hunk Rawbone. The reporters, supposedly of a professional class concerned with discovering and communicating the truth, had long ago ceased to pursue such matters. Their only concern now was the unearthing of scandal and the publication of innuendo, gossip, and triviality. All of them hated their profession and, therefore, hated its allied professions as well. They hated their editors. They despised their art directors. They loathed their circulation staffs, advertising departments, and press operators. The crowd surrounding the journalists, conscious of the moral bankruptcy of their profession, hated them.

“Hunk seems to be holding his own with the jackals of the press,” Sanfrancisco said.

Glatt’s reply hinted at a vast reservoir of emotions held in check by his will. “Yes.”

“John,” Dragnie said. She spoke with her eyes on the crowd. It was not necessary to look at her husband, as she had just addressed him by name. “I’ve been thinking. Once our strike against the rest of the world begins, I’d like to travel around the country on a fact-finding mission, to monitor how it progresses.”

“All right.”

“Of course, I’ll need an assistant to help me take notes and compile my findings. I think that boy I told you about, at the Glatt School, who made the speech—I think he’d make a fine assistant.”

“Very well.”

“Of course I’ll have to consult with his parents, but that shouldn’t be a problem—“

The rest of her words were drowned out as the crowd began several rhythmic chants at once. “LET’S MURDER ALL THE OTHER COUNTRIES,” went one, while another announced, “HURRAY FOR US BECAUSE WE’RE THE BEST!” Across the tarmac, Dragnie saw Nathan A. Banden watching her. A sleek limousine slowly crept through the crowd and stopped. Its door opened. Dragnie climbed in and was followed by the others. As the car pulled out, the mob cheered and waved.

* * *

“You wish to take Nathan with you on a trip around the country, Miss Tagbord? How odd a request.”

The person speaking, Nathan A. Banden’s mother, was one of those individuals who believe that a woman’s most exalted purpose in life is to adorn a husband and give birth to his children. She consequently regarded Dragnie with a combination of personal suspicion and moral disapproval.

“Yes,” Dragnie replied. “For about a month.”

Mrs. Banden was a slim, tightly-coiffed woman with a showily blasé attitude, the kind of person for whom appearance was reality and reality was an illusion. She regarded Dragnie from a complacent divan, on which she lounged in a lazy caftan crafted of haughty material. “But do please be seated, Miss Tagbord,” she said, indicating an antique wing chair of unquestionable confidence. The Banden home, a large Tudor-style dwelling in a suburb of New York City, occupied several acres whose gardens and landscaping were designed to celebrate man’s dominance over Nature and over his fellow man. “Don’t you agree that the idea is somewhat unusual?”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Well, I must say, I do. Of course, Nathan is about to graduate high school, and will have to find something to do before starting college in the fall. Does one say ‘graduate high school’ or ‘graduate from high school’? No, don’t bother trying to answer. I wouldn’t expect you to know matters of proper grammar and syntax. You work on a railroad, after all. I wonder, Miss Tagbord, do you work ‘all the livelong day’? Or is that merely a misconception propagated by the familiar folk tune?”

“I work during the day and often at night.”

“Yes, I believe you do. For what else is a woman without children to do? In any case, you are a grown woman, Miss Tagbord. Indeed, if one is to credit the news reports, you are married—to none other than John Glatt, the man who, we’re led to believe, single-handedly saved the economy and our country ten years ago. Do you deny it?”

“I do not deny it, although we are not married.”

“Nathan is, of course, a teenager, and teenage boys are notoriously immature. Although of course all men are. All men are at bottom children, don’t you think so?”

“I do not.”

“You must not know very many men, then. I assure you, I do know many men. Mind you, I’m not saying I’ve had sexual relations with all of them, although you are of course free to infer such a thing and, in fact, I’m not saying I haven’t. You will find it interesting, perhaps, to learn that my husband and I happen to be married to each other. And yet I will tell you that he, like the other men I know, is an overgrown boy. Well, then, in that sense, I suppose there’s no harm in allowing Nathan to accompany you on your journey.”

Dragnie nodded her head slightly, in acknowledgment of the woman’s consent and in full awareness that such a gesture meant “yes” to men. “I would like him to move in with me and Mr. Glatt in preparation for our trip, if you don’t mind,” she said.

Mrs. Banden laughed gaily with a sort of carefree cynicism, as though implicitly confessing the depravity of her values. “Oh, you’ll have to ask Nathan if he is willing. As for me, Miss Tagbord, it can hardly come as a shock to you to hear that I don’t mind a whit. Nathan’s absence will afford me increased opportunities to pursue my customary activities, such as shopping, attending luncheons and cocktail parties, participating in high-stakes auctions for cultural artifacts deemed important and valuable by noted experts, and arranging charity events featuring famous entertainers and attended by individuals whose great wealth has been obtained, not via the messy and arduous invention of a new process, material, or device, or, as indeed you yourself do, by attending to the affairs of an industry, but by intelligently manipulating the financial instruments that all corporations and individuals require to pursue their business in our modern economic system. I speak, of course, of investment bankers, currency speculators, financial planners and advisers, and the other experts in the vital field of finance. That is my social set, Miss Tagbord, and although it may seem somewhat pallid and bloodless to a woman whose daily labor concerns the movement of massive and filthy railroad cars and their cargo, I assure you it is as essential a service to society as that provided by you or, indeed, your renowned boyfriend. In that sense, I suppose it would be interesting to Nathan to spend some time with you, to observe how other people live—people who care about such things as railroad ties, and lengths of track, and roundhouses and switches and the sundry other equipment that plays so important a role in your life as a childless executive.”

“Thank you.”

“You will find Nathan in his room.”

Following his mother’s instructions, Dragnie discovered Nathan upstairs, reclining on his bed, reading. His room was the embodiment of order and precision, and Dragnie was unable to resist the thought that this clean tidiness, this exact and meticulous arrangement of his personal effects, was merely the outward manifestation of the clarity of his mind.

He did not look up from his book. “Hello, Miss Tagbord. Did you enjoy meeting Mother?”

Dragnie felt provoked by his rude insolence. A grown man would have had no business lounging in bed when an adult woman entered the room; far less did an eighteen-year-old teen. She felt compelled to correct him, yet she found herself speaking in defense of a person whom she found detestable, and a part of her consciousness wondered how this callow youth had the power to unsettle her. “Your mother is a remarkable woman,” she said.

“She? Remarkable?” he laughed bitterly. “Has she fooled you, too, then?”

She was suddenly aware of not knowing what he meant, and succumbed to an inner urge to question him accordingly. “What do you mean?” she asked.

He turned a page with casual ruthlessness. “Nothing. Only that she is a self-centered, hypocritical, loathsome harpy and I detest her with every fiber of my being.”

She found herself surprised at his precocious eloquence—surprised and, in some distant point of her awareness at the center of her being, strangely aroused. He spoke urgently, as though words mattered. He spoke concisely, as though opinions mattered. He spoke offhandedly, as though nothing mattered.

“Then you may be interested in why I’ve come here,” Dragnie said. She explained her purpose: the proposed inspection tour of the country to determine the effects of the Strike against the People’s States of the People, her need of an assistant, and her suggestion that he might find the position interesting. Banden listened impassively, his expression unreadable save for the mockery visible in his blue eyes and the contempt implicit in his hair.

Finally he smiled coolly. “It sounds rather tedious. When would we start?”

To her astonishment she reacted to his skepticism with something verging on panic. It suddenly seemed very important that he be persuaded to agree to her proposition. “In a month. But I would like you to move in with me and Mr. Glatt as soon as possible, to prepare for it.”

All trace of amusement vanished from his face. “I accept, Miss Tagbord.”

She smiled lightly and hoped her reaction did not make visible the flood of relief she felt within her emotions. “Please. Call me Dragnie.”

* * *

They began that afternoon. Nathan quickly packed several bags, bade his mother good-bye, and told her to explain everything to his father, who was out of town attending an important meeting with some of the nation’s top meeting-attenders. A moment later they were in Dragnie’s limousine, cruising toward the city. They did not speak. Nathan gazed out the window and affected an attitude of nonchalance, as though the entire event were of no consequence. Dragnie busied herself with documents pertaining to Tagbord Rail but, from time to time, cast glances his way, partly in casual curiosity about her young charge and his comfort during the trip, but partly for some more obscure reason. It was as though in order to see him she was compelled to look at him. She wondered what that meant and, whenever she did so, she quickly dismissed the matter from her mind after first asking herself, with ruthless introspection, what she was doing and why she was asking, and why.

By the time they reached the city, and the Johnsonwood Building, and Nathan had unpacked and settled in, it was early evening. New York stretched out across the vista visible from the dining room’s great windows like a model train diorama of a city, with distant lights twinkling in remote windows and cars creeping along serpentine expressways with astonishing realism. Glatt was late; Dragnie and Nathan were chatting over dinner when he arrived. Dragnie introduced him to the young man.

“It’s an honor, sir,” Nathan said.

“Hello,” Glatt said. He ate quickly, with the quiet ferocity and intense focus of a jungle animal, as if still responsive to instincts born ten million years earlier, when competition for food was fierce, and an individual’s chances of survival depended on making the most of an ability to take advantage of eating as many orders of eggplant rollatini as possible.

“I’m very excited about what Dragnie’s told me about our project.”

“Good.”

“Making the American way of life seem undesirable is the only way to show the world how desirable it is and how much it would miss us if we weren’t here.”

“Exactly.” Glatt, finished, placed his utensils on his plate with a deliberate gesture, as if obedient to an impulse requiring him to signal to the world: I have completed the eating of my meal. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

Glatt left the dining room. Dragnie felt Banden’s eyes on her as she watched him leave. “It must be difficult for you,” the young man said. “To have a husband to whom you are not married, and who is so busy.”

Dragnie’s head jerked back in surprise. The accuracy of his statement came as both a gift and an intrusion. She did not know whether to praise his powers of observation or slap him for his presumptuousness, or perhaps both, or perhaps half of one and half of the other, a response she considered weak and conciliatory and which she despised in herself even as she adored that part of her that found the other part so despicable. “Difficult? Why?”

The young man shrugged. “A wife likes to spend time with her husband.” He laughed bitterly. “Or so I assume. It’s not as though I’ve learned that from my parents’ example. They seem to detest one another.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? It’s not your fault. And I assume each of them finds… other people to take up the slack.” Banden sat back and leveled his gaze at hers. “As, indeed, you might.”

“Why, you—“ she began. But then her words seem to catch in her throat, and she found it difficult to breathe, and her mouth hung half-open as she stood up and sent her chair falling to the floor behind her. Then Banden, too, stood up, assigning to his chair a similar fate, and a moment later he was there, beside her, looking down into her eyes from his masculinely superior height. She groped for something to say, some pretext to decline or forbid what she knew was about to happen, what she wanted to happen, what she knew he knew was about to happen, but none appeared in the consciousness of her mind’s awareness. And then he had with violence and a proprietary sense of ownership pressed his mouth to hers, and she, raised to the exalted height of femininity both by her shortness and by virtue of having been transformed into an object for his casual use, could do nothing other than respond in like manner. They fell to the floor, tearing off their own and each other’s clothes until, to her surprise, he, then and there, without further preamble, instituted the ultimate act of possession, destroying in a moment every category that had differentiated them, including age, personal interests, yearly income, gender, and medical history, until a moment later he succumbed to a soaring triumph that left her gasping with amazement. Then they rested, lying on the rug half-under the dining table and half-surrounded by chairs, trusting in the discretion of the footman who had served their dinner not to interrupt them. Suddenly, after what seemed at most ten minutes, she was shocked to witness him rousing himself and taking her again, as they re-enacted that earlier drama, and she noted with interest and a faint, dawning hope that, while his ardor was undiminished from its first expression, his endurance was improved, and Dragnie felt herself approaching that state of inexpressible pleasure which derived from the assuaging of the ultimate greed but which, as again he sought and obtained the supreme release, she was once more doomed to fail to attain.

She stood up, entirely naked, and took his hand and drew him to his feet. He, too, was entirely naked. “Come with me,” she said.

He let her lead him down the hall to a lighted room where John Glatt sat a desk, poring over documents and jotting notes. Glatt looked up. His face, gaunt and sharp-planed in the light of the desk lamp, betrayed no emotion other than a contemptuously amused contempt.

“John,” Dragnie said. “Nathan and I are going to have a sexual relationship. I know you will have no objection to such an arrangement. He can be no competition, let alone a threat, to you as my lover, or as my friend, or as the husband to whom I am not married. You know my feelings for you are inviolate and cannot be usurped by a youth twenty-five years my junior. Indeed, it is this very disparity in our ages that makes such a liaison desirable for each of us and recommends its indulgence and consent on your part. Nathan shall benefit from the experience and wisdom I am able to impart to him as a (so-called) ‘older woman,’ and also conceivably enjoy a frisson of Oedipal conquest and satisfaction in engaging in the sexual act with a woman symbolically old enough to be his mother. (Although I mention this strictly for the sake of completeness and without any real endorsement of the concept, since neither you nor I, as fully rational beings, ascribe any reality to the notion of the unconscious, and reject out of hand its ability to affect conscious human cognition, perception, thought, action, volition, feeling, or belief.) I, for my part, will enjoy not only the vigor and enthusiasm he brings to the physical act of love by virtue of his youth, but will greatly appreciate the access it will afford me to his viewpoints, opinions, and values, offering a first-hand encounter with what ‘the kids’ are ‘into’ these days. Moreover, let me point out that this is not betrayal but its opposite—the betrayal would consist in keeping our affair a secret, in treating you, not like the rational adult you are, but like an authority figure to be feared and, therefore, deceived. It goes without saying that this setup will have no effect on the sexual relations between you and me. Don’t you agree, dearest?”

Glatt shifted his gaze over each of them. “All right,” he said.

^{Chapter 6}

The Strike

The train, dubbed by the press boys “The Tagbord Special,” raced through the evening twilight past lonely farms and smug towns and stoic road crossings like a living thing intent on attaining the destination that would fulfill its highest purpose. Its passenger manifest contained only two names: Miss Dragnie Tagbord, and Mr. Nathan A. Banden.

Its destination this night was Chicago, where Dragnie was scheduled the next day to attend a meeting of the openly racist National Association for the Abolition of Colored People in the morning and, that evening, a rally for the Student Violent Coordinating Committee. Each organization was barely two weeks old. Each was the consequence of a new ruling passed summarily into law by John Glatt’s Strike Committee. “To deny the world the America of its dreams,” he had proclaimed, “We will pull off a switch-back and un-do America.” The first new law, known as the Pro-Be Nasty to People You Don’t Like Act, made it a crime to prevent, inhibit, or protest expressions of disapproval or enmity about any racial or religious group or organization. “The very word ‘tolerance’ is patronizing and insulting,’ announced Communique No. 2 as issued by the Strike Committee. “If Americans cannot be free to hate whomever they want, then they cannot be free in anything.” The result was an immediate proliferation of openly racist and religiously bigoted op-ed columns, hate groups, publications, tracts, speeches, pageants, parades, Off-Broadway musicals, and half-time shows. This drew the predictable criticisms from individuals and groups for whom “brotherly love” was the highest form of man’s achievement—the same groups, many noted, whose sympathies lay more with the empty abstraction of “humanity” than with the actual American people. “With this ruling encouraging bigotry and hate, America has betrayed her proud heritage and taken a large step back toward the Dark Ages,” announced the Prime Minister of the People’s State of the People of Great Britain, a short, sweaty man with perennially unkempt fingernails. It was noticed, however, that applications for immigration to the U.S. from Muslim, Latin American, African, and Asian countries dropped by 68%.

Dragnie was seated in the office car, putting the finishing touches on her speech, when Banden entered. “We’re pulling into Centerville to take on water,” he said. “Care to stretch your legs?”

She smiled with a hint of a smile. She did not mention the familiarity he had acquired with her legs. She did not feel it necessary to remind him that they would be sharing her executive car that night, as they had every night since the journey began. “Yes,” she said.

They walked across the platform, her practiced eye noting with satisfaction its state of decay and disrepair. Her reaction was the same to the ill-lit, trash-strewn terminal. Outside its doors, the main street of Centerville gave similar evidence of neglect and lack of upkeep. Pot holes in the street, vandalized signs, garbage festering in alleys and clogging sewer drains all offered proof that, in the ten years since the elimination of state and local taxes, what some intellectuals attempted to glorify as “the public sphere” had, in accordance with John Glatt’s Fifteen Year Plan, been allowed to rot into a nutrient-rich mulch to be used to fertilize the private sector. Private property, embodiments of the highest achievement of civilization, flourished: store fronts, office buildings, and private residences all looked new, and all displayed the logo of a corporation called Centervillecorp.

“You… you’re Dragnie Tagbord, aren’t you?”

The question, which carried with it an undertone of surprised pleasure, had come from a bum loitering nearby. His greasy coat was shabby and threadbare; he had not shaved in weeks. The weathered, soiled state of his face made his age unreadable. He could have been twenty-five or three times that. Banden gently grasped Dragnie’s arm as though to guide her away from what he perceived as possible danger, but she met the bum’s gaze and said, “Yes.”

“Well, ma’am, I just want to thank you.”

Dragnie chuckled with a chuckle. “Thank me? For what?”

The bum gestured broadly, indicating the entire main street. “For this. I was against it, at first. You see, Miss Tagbord, I used to be a professor of political science. Oh, my name is of no importance. What matters is that I used to feel that society had an obligation to attend to the public, social aspect of man’s nature. I used to think that that’s what society was, a way to reconcile private desires and needs with public needs and amenities. And so when John Glatt and his colleagues took over the country ten years ago, I feared the worst. I thought their radical form of individualism would do nothing more than serve a narrow constituency of private interests at the expense of the vast majority of the American people, that a philosophy lionizing ‘producers’ was merely a self-serving bit of cant to advance the interests of the wealthy. But over ten years of such policies I’ve realized my error. As every public institution, from the Federal government down to the local street-cleaning crew, was denied funding or eliminated altogether, I realized how fragile and weak a creature government is. Government can be hobbled or eviscerated by the actions of any ignorant mob. All that’s required is for the stupid, the frightened, the resentful, the credulous, and the desperate to vote in candidates whose interest in working in government consists in wanting to cripple it. Government is therefore like a servant, who must do what his master tells him, and if his master is a fool, so much the worse for him. Whereas corporations are like heroes! Or, really, super-heroes, such as those adolescents read about in lurid comic book periodicals. The powers and resources of super-heroes dwarf those of mere men. Why, then, would a society wish to be ruled by individuals elected by idiots, when it could be guided by experts and demi-gods? Granted, we have filthy streets. The state university I worked for has gone out of business. Our local privatized fire department has just raised its rates again. A flu shot costs an average week’s wages. Criminal gangs of disaffected youth, led by unscrupulous professional crime lords, rule the night. But in exchange for that, we have our individual freedoms guarded by a Superman, who grows more powerful and invincible each day. As you can see, Centervillecorp has taken over every business in town, including nail salons and the ice cream shop. Imagine its power, its scale, its scope! And now, with the new anti-anti-trust laws being promulgated by your husband, it will be capable of even more! Business will at long last be free of the lingering restrictions and inhibitions still left over from the old we-know-best, eat-your-peas, play-fair-or-go-to-your-room nanny state. Successful companies will at last be free to acquire less successful companies, with the large subsuming the small until each industry will be free to be dominated by one or two hyper-efficient behemoths. The resulting layoffs will not only tarnish the image of the U.S. in the eyes of the rest of the world, but will also free millions of American citizens, who were previously employed by pre-existing companies, to start their own corporations—to compete with the giants, to be swallowed up by them, and so make them even mightier and more magnificent. So thanks, Miss Tagbord, both to you and to your visionary, heroic husband.”

“We’re not married.”

“Boyfriend, then.”

“You’re welcome,” Dragnie said.

“One question, fellow,” Banden said. “What do you live on?”

The bum shrugged. “Bottle deposits, petty crime, and restaurant refuse.”

“That’s terrible!” Banden cried.

“I get by,” the bum said.

Later, lying together in Dragnie’s executive car on a full-sized bed made expressly for rail travel by a top bed maker, Banden grew reflective. “When I said ‘that’s terrible’ to that man, I was serious.”

“I know it,” Dragnie replied.

“How, in this day and age, can there still be such a thing as bottle deposits?”

Dragnie smiled in amused amusement. She turned toward him, the dim light playing fleetingly over his strong, youthful body and her admittedly twenty-five-years older but no less toned, attractive torso. “We’re working on it,” she murmured, and reached for him, and he reached for her, and after several forays into the realm of highest desire, in which her body was able to communicate to her her own deepest values even while his exertions vouchsafed promises of physical consciousness that were not kept, they voluntarily submitted themselves to a self-extinguishing of consciousness and the thorough obliteration of their awareness and love of existence, and slept.

The appearances in Chicago went well, as Dragnie gathered data on the public’s widespread endorsement of the Strike. The next morning the Tagbord Special set off north, to Milwaukee, and from there northwest, toward Minneapolis. En route, gazing from the clear bubble dome of the observation car, Dragnie and Banden beheld a tableau of American freedom, as motorists stranded for lack of money for gas, and farmers on stubble-strewn fields following behind plows drawn by patient, aged horses, and shopkeepers undisturbed by deliveries of goods or by customers to demand them, all glanced up as the train hurtled by, and raised their hands in triumphant celebration of their shared national resolve. This, Dragnie thought, is proof of what men are capable of.

It took three days, traveling northwest, to reach Spokane, Washington. En route the Special made sporadic stops in small villages and hamlets, where occasionally a welcoming committee met it at the station, and men in their one decent suit offered handfuls of cash if only they could board the silver train and ride it to any destination that wasn’t the present town, and shy little girls in party dresses were pushed forward by their noble, clear-eyed mothers to hand to Dragnie a plate of cookies or a jar of lemonade, along with a note asking for one thing or another—a job; money; or simply that Dragnie adopt the child and raise her as her own daughter. In each instance the gift was received gratefully and its receipt logged by Nathan A. Banden, except for the offered children, which were politely declined. When Banden asked the assembled well-wishers how they felt about the Strike, no one, other than rotters or bums, replied with anything but praise. “Well, sir, I don’t rightly know much about inter-whatchamacallit politics,” mused a former grain dealer, squinting into the distance and divulging meaning from his consciousness. “But the way I figure it, anything that gets the rest of the world to buy our yams, that’s what I’m for.”

On the third week of their tour, word came via telegraph that John Glatt and the Strike Committee had succeeded in establishing its most visionary law to date: the privatization of everything once managed by the Federal government. The armed forces had years before been replaced by private security contractors, but the new law, dubbed The Mind Your Own Business Act, continued in that rational, efficient tradition. Environmental protection, highway maintenance, air traffic control, the minting of currency: all sloughed off their old, diseased governmental skin and were born anew under private, for-profit exploitation. “Let the word go forth,” John Glatt announced. “From this day forward, the United States is a gated community. Visitors must announce themselves at the guard station, and trespassers will be prosecuted.”

The consequences of these new policies were quickly forthcoming. In a small town in Italy, a cobbler whose lifelong dream had been to emigrate to the U.S. decided to remain in his home town and pursue his cobbling there. In a large city in Algeria, a family of four who had saved for years to emigrate to the U.S. concluded that, with no more public amenities, services, entitlement payouts, emergency room medical care, or food stamps available in America, they’d be better off moving to Spain. An Indonesian grocer, disheartened at the news that America was no longer a place where the weak, the mediocre, the lazy, or the incompetent might thrive on the wealth extracted from the industrious and the successful, killed himself.

But a young man in Senegal, either in ignorance of the new laws or in defiance of them, went forward with his plan to move to America. When word of his arrival at JFK reached the citizens of Queens, N.Y., they covertly formed a “Citizens’ Strike Support Committee” and, by cover of night, burned down the airport. All that remained on the smoking site was a note reading, “We’re taking back this land and returning it to its original state.” Within a week of this event, ports, airports, and cross-border highway checkpoints all over the continental U.S. were ravaged by fire, explosives, or the concerted efforts of massed demonstrators. The instigators of these actions became folk heroes overnight. One broadcast on a shortwave radio frequency, “If they don’t get the message when we deny them the America of their dreams, they’ll get it when we deny them a way to enter our shores.” When airport or maritime unions protested these acts, John Glatt and the Strike Committee issued Communique No. 12, which outlawed collective bargaining in all corporations employing more than three persons. This, Dragnie thought, was the apotheosis of the highest American values: The rejection of collective action as being repugnant to the American ideal of self-sufficiency, and the defense of each corporation’s right to deal honestly and straightforwardly with each employee on an individual basis. This, she concluded as the Tagbord Special pulled into Sacramento, was the very essence and enactment of moral significance.

^{Chapter 7}

The Scum of the Earth of the World

The meeting took place in a squalid, filthy room in the basement of the White Home in the nation’s capital. Formerly used as an office for the social secretary of the Head Person of the Government of the U.S., it had fallen into neglect over the past ten years as that office, once highly admired by men, was seen to be an empty shell devoid of meaning and significance, and important people from industry, agriculture, the arts, and the sciences no longer wished to be seen associating with its occupant. The nauseatingly mint green institutional paint was peeling from its unhappy walls. Several bulbs were missing from its harsh overhead array of disingenuous fluorescent lights, presenting the appearance of a series of dark gray bruises amid the glare. There were no windows. A scent of mold, dead things, and moral exhaustion permeated the air.

Present at the meeting were Mr. Jenkins, the Head Person of the U.S., and his usual coterie of experts and advisers: Philip Sissyburger, the effeminate and complacent Minister of Equality; Dr. Francis Tinklepants, the Chief Diplomat to Foreign Places, who was incapable of offering a direct answer to any question put to him; Professor Davis, the Secretary of Wisdom, who insisted that his conception of reality was superior to all others; and T.T. Mucklicker, who was an authority on what was known as Public Relations. They had assumed their seats along one side of the conference table and now watched as, under conditions of the highest security, four other men arrived: M. Jacques Beaucoup, of The People’s State Of The People Of France; Sir Lord Derek Blimey, of The People’s State Of The People Of Great Britain; Dr. Ivan Lubyanka, of The People’s State Of The People Of Russia; and Signore Giuseppe Tortellini, of The People’s State Of The People Of Italy.

The conference, which was to be held under conditions of absolute secrecy, began with an exchange of banalities, preliminary small-talk, and a shared sardonic admission that the clandestine nature of the event gave ample proof that its participants were moral weaklings and deserved the contempt of good, clean, rational men everywhere. Then the agenda was called. Mr. Jenkins began. “Everyone has been briefed, so you know our major concern. It’s this damn Strike. I don’t like it, I tell you! I don’t like it at all!”

“If I may, Monsieur Jenkins,” said M. Beaucoup. “It is liked by none of us. Having deceptively and self-servingly foisted collectivization upon our people, we are now discovering that, without a fantasy of one day escaping to a free America full of tolerance and opportunity, they have begun to believe that they should overthrow the People’s State and institute actual Capitalism! Sacre bleu, as we French say!”

“Quite so,” said Sir Lord Blimey. “It’s the same with us Brits in Britain. As career government workers, we found it in our narrow interest to expand the public sector as much as possible, resulting in a People’s State of the People which, as some wags have commented in their witty and ironic British manner, should more properly be called the People’s State of the Bureaucrats. We are happy to endure their sarcasm, and consider it a small price to pay for our large salaries, guaranteed job security, lavish expense accounts, and handsome pensions. In addition, we enjoy the kind of prestige among our fellow human beings that would be unknown to us were we to somehow find employment commensurate with our abilities in the private sector. But now that the U.S. has removed itself from the imagination of our people, there is widespread discontent and talk of re-instituting private enterprise! It is appalling, simply appalling.”

“Is John Glatt,” sneered Ivan Lubyanka. “He is crafty adversary. And wife. Also Mr. Hunk Rawbone and the Chilean talc merchant, De Soto. And Swedish pirate. Why you do not lock them up and throw away key?”

“Don’t blame me!” Mr. Jenkins cried. “I’m just the Head Person! I can’t help it! I have to do what I’m told. Moreover, I’m a weakling! I can’t assert even my own modest powers! I lack the inner strength that comes from consciously having integrity!”

“Be peaceful, my friend,” said Signor Tortellini. “We all want the same thing, in truth.”

“And what is that, gentlemen?” All conversation ceased as Professor Davis slowly removed the pipe from his mouth, puffed on it, filled it, and surveyed the men at whom he was looking. He was a repulsive fat slob with a shiny suit and a stain on his tie, the pattern of which was no longer in fashion. “Shall I tell you what it is that we all want? It is stability, security, and respect.”

“In our societies, do you mean?” asked M. Bonjour. “But of course.”

“Don’t cause me to laugh. I mean in our jobs. We want to protect our careers. Mr. Jenkins here, and the rest of us, are mere figureheads. The actual decisions in the U.S. have, for the last ten years, been made by John Glatt and those around him. This is so, not only because the people demanded it, but because we ourselves demanded it. We had no choice but to beg Glatt to rescue us with his community of businessmen, and to accede to his demands. We eliminated taxes. We amended what was left of our Constitution to protect production and trade. We removed all restrictions on manufacturing and scuttled all product safety requirements and food and drug purity laws. We did it in the name of freedom.”

“One is aware of this,” Signore Tortellini said coolly. “What now?”

“What now? I will tell you, my friend. This Strike has shown the American people that they can feel proud and alive, that they can love existence, just as much when government provides no social services, as when it provides many. They are discovering that such things as poverty, anxiety, fear, starvation, misery, and despair, endured in the context of physical squalor and societal turmoil, are nothing compared to the exhilaration experienced in the presence of true freedom. It is only a matter of time, then, until they conclude—with, no doubt, Glatt’s assistance—that they need no government at all.”

The room was silent, as if the individuals in it did not permit themselves to speak or possessed no will to do so.

“But see here, Professor old chap,” Sir Lord Blimey objected. “Surely one needs a government for national defense.”

“One does not, sir,” Professor Davis said, lighting his pipe and filling it and puffing on it wisely. “One needs only an army—or, as in our case, private security contractors.” The Professor rapped the ash from his pipe into an ash tray with a decisive series of taps. “No, gentlemen, the truth is this: all of us, if we are to retain our jobs, must stop John Glatt.”

“Is question how,” Ivan Lubyanka muttered.

“Just so,” said Dr. Francis Tinklepants. “But we’ve come up with a plan. At least—“ he added in his haste to avoid saying something definite, “I think it’s a plan, and I think we’ve come up with it. As an articulate spokesman who is essentially a coward, I could be wrong.”

“All right, Frank, all right,” Mr. Jenkins said, clearly uncomfortable with this meeting, and with existence. “Here’s the idea. You boys—“ He gestured toward the heads of the People’s States. “—declare war on us.”

There was an explosion of befuddlement, outrage, and indignation. M. Bonjour called the idea “extreme.” Sir Lord Blimey asked, “What will that accomplish, exactly?” Signore Tortellini dismissed the idea with “Bah. Ridiculo,” and a rude, typically Italian gesture. Ivan Lubyanka looked cautiously intrigued.

“Okay, settle down,” T.T. Mucklicker yelled. “Now just hold on to your horses. Think about it. You declare war on us. We announce a wartime footing and maybe introduce a bit of martial law. Then we proclaim Glatt and his pals as the cause of all this, and we take them into custody for questioning. We let them out in maybe a hundred years or maybe never. We bring back the laws that once made America synonymous with edible broccoli, you end the embargo, and everybody goes back to work. Especially us.”

There was a minute’s silence as all in the room contemplated the idea. Finally Ivan Lubyanka said, “Could work.”

“But on what basis will we declare war?” Sir Lord Blimey asked. “We’re already applying an embargo. If anything, it’s you who should declare war on us.”

“We thought of that,” Mr. Jenkins bleated. “But in order to rally the whole nation behind us, we need the country to feel like it’s being unfairly victimized. It works better if you attack us than if we attack you.”

“You realize, gentlemen,” Sr. Tortellini said. “That when you are talking about the rest of us, you are referring to the entire world—every nation on earth except your own. If there really were a state of war between you and all of us, we probably could defeat you.”

“Slim to none chance,” T.T. Mucklicker said. “You forget, Giuseppe—your people love us. They’re rising up against you because they miss us.”

“Look, everyone,” Mr. Jenkins yelled. “There isn’t going to be any real war. Nobody is going to mobilize their army or kill anyone. It’s all just to give us a pretext for seizing John Glatt and his friends. Agreed?”

Seven heads nodded silently as everyone said, “Agreed.”

^{Chapter 8}

Anti-Maim

The Tagbord Special hurtled through the night, traversing farmland and undeveloped rural tracts, past cozy encampments of families clustered around blazing campfires, the men rising to their feet at the approach of the roaring train to lift an arm in hearty greeting, the women’s faces illuminated by the ruddy orange light of the fire and smiling softly as their children gazed in wide-eyed wonder and sucked on fresh carrots pulled from the living earth not five minutes earlier. Occasionally Dragnie would hear a muffled thud from the rear of the executive car, as an ambitious vagabond would attempt to clamber aboard the car’s entry steps but, finding his way blocked by her security men, would leap or be helped off a moment later. Over the four weeks they had been conducting this tour, Dragnie and Banden had become used to the sight of three or four stowaways who, having clung to the rear of the last car for hundreds of miles, ducking low to avoid detection and enduring weather ranging from northwest downpour to southwest desert heat, leaped off at the next station when the train stopped to take on water. They would then scramble away over the weed-choked sidings or through the dilapidated terminal building and into the town, in their endless quest for economic opportunity and the realization of their deepest values.

She thought about what one such man had said to her in her own office car as the train barreled across the verdant, moist bottomland between Pensacola and Tallahassee on its gleaming rails of light, strong, vitamin-enriched Rawbonium. “You’re Glatt’s wife, aren’t ya,” he said, combining insolence and respect. He was young, in his twenties, with a week’s worth of beard and wearing dungarees and a blousy shirt, and looked like a handsome movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten. She could tell he found her physically attractive but was even more attracted to and intimidated by her mind. “You tell your husband something from me,” he said with virile directness. “You tell him that we ain’t got nothing. No job, no food, no home, nothing. When a man can’t sell his crops, and he can’t sell his manufactured goods, and he can’t sell what the smart boys call durable goods, well then he ain’t got no business. But we do got one thing, ma’am. We got our freedom. We’re free to look for work until we find it. And then we’re free to not find it. And then we’re free to slap our wives around if they give us any sass, and we’re free to say things about the black man and the Chinaman and the Jew and the faggot if we want to, because that’s what freedom means. And that’s what’s important. God bless you and your husband, ma’am.” Dragnie had just enough time to thank him before her security men escorted him off the train as it raced on into the night.

The Special pulled into Charleston, South Carolina, at ten o’clock that evening. Nathan A. Banden had announced his intention of strolling the city’s streets in an effort to find sources of entertainment and amusement, but Dragnie had uncharacteristically declined his invitation. She did not feel well. Dinner that evening had left her nauseated, its aroma, normally enticing and pleasurable, a torment. She was also unusually fatigued and wished only to lie down and not smell anything. But she was unable to specify the source of her discomfort, as if a symptom of a disease were a saboteur of the factory of her body, and had infiltrated its defenses to inflict damage covertly, without possessing the honor and decency to do so to her face.

She remained in the office car as Banden left for his nighttime meandering. It was while coordinating a rolling order to purchase stock with a purchase order for rolling stock that a thought occurred to her awareness unbidden, as if a messenger had arrived unannounced from another country and forced entry into her home and shouted something at her in a language she realized that she understood. The idea roiled her consciousness. It was as monstrous in its implications as it was distressing in its meaning.

Then, suddenly, her concentration was interrupted by a knock on the executive car door. “Miss Tagbord?” a youthful voice queried.

Dragnie looked up. Young Billy Stevens, the coach boy, stood there holding a sheet of paper. “Yes, Billy?” she said.

He approached nervously. He looked distraught, as if something bad had happened and it was his task to bring it to the attention of Dragnie’s awareness. “This, uh, came in on the wire just now. Gosh, Miss Tagbord. What does it mean?” He handed her the teletyped message.

As Dragnie read, something within her seemed to collapse. They’ve gone and done it, the fools, some inner voice within her screamed. “It’s bad news, Billy,” she murmured. She read it again to make sure she understood its content and its meaning. It said:

“A Public Communication From the People’s States of the People of the World:

We, who don’t care about the individual; we, who believe that the group is superior to the one; we, who believe that all men should live for society rather than vice-versa; we, who despise existence whether or not it actually exists; we, who feel bad when many men are embarrassed or made envious by the success of one man; we, who resent excellence; we, who insist that man has no mind because he has no brain, and cannot think because he cannot know anything; we, who find inherent value in mediocrity precisely because we are ourselves men of mediocrity; we, who proudly equate desire with greed, ability with pull, talent with luck, and genius with being a big show-off, do hereby ordain and establish this Declaration of War against the United States of America. We do this because we hate you, so help us God.”

There was a noise outside. Nathan A. Banden burst in. “Dragnie!” he cried. “Darling! Have you heard?”

Dragnie held up the teletype and wordlessly nodded her head to signify “yes” to his intellect. “This just arrived. It was sent by John.” She handed him the sheet and he forced himself to read it without once removing his gaze from the paper. Finally he lowered it and stared at her. “What do we do now?”

“Billy,” she said to the wide-eyed boy. “Tell Conductor Mills that we’re leaving for New York. Tonight. Now.”

“You bet, Miss Tagbord!” the boy cried, and dashed out.

Banden rushed up to her and took her in his arms. “This has been wonderful,” he breathed. “Hasn’t it?”

She smiled. It was the smile of a woman in complete awareness of her capacity to communicate ideas to another human being, of a woman for whom agreement with her lover was neither an obligation nor a gift, but a mutuality of perception, of assessment, of values, freely dispensed and presented without expectation of reward, of a woman for whom being a woman was a condition of her gender and for whom smiling was an expression of her emotions. “Yes,” she said, and in the flurry of packing and preparation for return that followed, she made a mental note to conduct a vital telephone call the moment they arrived.

* * *

“Dragnie? Are you listening?”

The question was asked by Sanfrancisco De Soto, but upon its asking Hunk Rawbone chuckled as Regnad Daghammarskjold shook his handsome blonde head and chuckled. John Glatt, sitting near a blackboard at the head of the table around which this meeting was being held, glanced quickly at his girlfriend and invisibly, inaudibly chuckled.

Dragnie smiled and said, “I’m listening, San.”

“Because you have this faraway look in your eye,” De Soto explained. “Ever since you got back two days ago from that national tour with our friend Nathan here, you haven’t been yourself.”

Dragnie traded a wry look with Banden, who hovered off to the side, taking notes. He did not permit himself to blush in unspoken acknowledgment of their passionate weeks together. “I’m just tired, I guess,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping well lately.”

“Can we resume?” Rawbone said, and, as all faces again turned toward him, he continued. “So far the declaration of war seems more rhetorical than actual. Our private military and security contractors report no mobilization in any of the People’s States of the People anywhere in the world.”

“They could be doing it clandestinely,” the pirate said.

The steel magnate frowned, an expression of skepticism rather than of sadness, in this case. “Marshalling troops? Moving men and materiel? Mobilizing navies and air forces? Those are things you can’t do in secret, Regnad.”

“Maybe it’s all a feint,” Sanfrancisco De Soto said. “Maybe they have a super weapon we don’t know about, and they’re just waiting to unleash it on us.”

A rap was heard on the door, and an aide from an outer office leaned into the conference room. “Miss Tagbord? You have a call on line two. They say it’s somewhat urgent.”

Dragnie excused herself and left the conference room as five sets of male eyes followed her exit. Finding an empty office, she entered and shut the door. Then she sat, pressed the blinking button on the telephone, picked up the receiver, and said, “This is Dragnie Tagbord” because it was, as she knew, her name. She listened carefully to the voice that spoke to her. It was a male voice, calm and confident, secure in its owner’s awareness of his ability to perform his job with competence and skill. Finally, after asking a question and receiving an answer, she said, “Thank you, Doctor,” hung up, and returned to the conference room.

The conversation ebbed as she entered. “Who was that?” Sanfrancisco asked. “One of the military-industrial complex boys?”

She smiled. “My office. A question about tunnel maintenance.” Dragnie resumed her seat, then turned to look over her shoulder a Nathan A. Banden, who returned her glance with one of his own. She tore a piece of scrap paper off a steno pad and scribbled a brief note on it, then folded it in half and handed it to the young man. He glanced at it, and it was only through the exertion of an iron discipline and self-control unknown to his less impressive peers that he was able to resist leaping up and shouting, although whether for joy or in dismay even he did not know.

“I’m pregnant,” it said.

PART II

I Am He as You Are Me

^{Chapter 1}

A Horse Is a Horse,

of Course, of Course

“Is it… is it true?”

They were in Dragnie’s office in the apartment. Rawbone, De Soto, and Daghammarskjold had left. John Glatt was in his own office, drafting a response to the declaration of war. Nathan A. Banden stood before her desk as Dragnie sat back limply in her chair, physically but not morally or philosophically exhausted. “Yes,” she said.

Banden’s eyes grew wide, his manner animated. “Really?” He kept his voice pitched at an urgent whisper, somehow sensing that Dragnie had not yet informed Glatt and that, for the moment, she preferred he not know. “Does John know?”

“No.”

“Wow.” He nodded, not looking at her. It gave the appearance of a young man nodding to himself, as if he were two persons at once, both the nodder and the noddee, a paradox for which, had he been asked, he would have been unable to offer an explanation. “I’m going to be a father! The father of your child!”

“No.”

He laughed as he chuckled. “I know. It’s sheer madness. I can’t believe it either. But this is perfect! Look, I didn’t want to go to college anyway. The idea of spending four years at some ideologically-corrupt institution, where the pampered children of the middle class are lectured to by cosseted intellectuals one moment —so-called scholars, who spend half their time mocking and disdaining the elements of society who actually create the wealth that goes into their tenured paychecks, and the other half soliciting alumni donations from those selfsame industrialists and entrepreneurs in order to keep the university solvent so that they may continue to deride men of business—and then massing in the quads to protest the policies of the very institution that affords them the luxury of living the so-called life of the mind, while abler and stronger men are actually out in the real world, creating and producing things from which all men benefit, is disgusting! This way, I’ll stay at home with the baby, you’ll go to work, John’ll go to work, and we’ll be one big happy family!”

“Will we?”

“Why… why sure we will. Oh, I know—you don’t look forward to nine months of incapacitation and then being laid up a couple weeks after delivering. You’ll have to curtail your work schedule and possibly delegate some responsibility to your underlings. But you have good people working for you. They can pick up the slack.”

“Really?”

“Sure! And the first eight months or so you’ll be able to work anyway. I mean, I think. What do women do, who get pregnant when they have jobs?”

“They quit their jobs.”

“But you don’t have to do that. Oh, to be sure, that’s what ordinary women do. But you’re no ordinary woman, Dragnie.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re extraordinary! That’s why I’m so excited. Just think of it: Dragnie Tagbord is going to be the mother of my child!”

“No. I’m not.”

The youth looked baffled, as though he had been slapped during a moment when he had not been expecting such a thing. “What do you mean? I thought you were pregnant.”

“I am pregnant.”

“Then what do you mean, you’re not going be the mother of my child?” He pondered this matter in confusion and puzzlement for a moment. Then, suddenly, it was as though a light went on in the room that was his mind. His eyes went wide. “You mean… I’m not the father?” He forced a bitter laugh. “Of course. I’ve been such a fool. I just naturally assumed… But then, you do have a live-in boyfriend, as I of all people should be eminently aware.”

“No, the baby is yours.”

He face once again lit up with dawning joy. “But, then, what’s the problem? I want you to have my baby! And by the way, I’m not just any common Joe who’s fantasizing about the great Dragnie Tagbord giving birth to his spawn. I’ve had plenty of women after me to sire their offspring. Women my own age and, if you must know, older, including some of my mother’s friends. Are you shocked? I didn’t think so. To be an adult in the world of men is to become familiar with such matters. In any case, it is of no consequence. The important thing is, you are pregnant, and we’re going to be parents. Now: do you want a girl or a boy? I have my own reasons for either, but I think—and this may surprise you—I think I want… a girl!”

He fell silent and stood there beaming, as though having just presented Dragnie with a precious gift the value of which he knew she appreciated and for which he assumed she would be grateful. Several seconds passed in which both of them, wordlessly, said nothing, as if his extended monologue and its excited tone had burned up the air in the room and they must wait until it was replenished. Dragnie looked away and fretted. She did not permit herself to cry although she felt the urge to do so. She did not permit herself to shake her head and say, “Oh, Nathan, you fool,” although somewhere, at the far edge of her mind, she knew that his name was Nathan, and that he was a fool. Finally she drew herself up in her chair and permitted herself to address him directly.

“I do not wish to give birth—to your child or to any child. I do not wish to be a mother,” she said.

He looked stunned and perplexed. “But… darling! You don’t know what you’re saying! Every woman does. Motherhood represents the apotheosis of womanhood.”

“According to whom?”

“Why, according to a wide range of authorities. Not just the spiritual experts who promote the ideas and values of what middle-brow organs of news and opinion call ‘the world’s great religions’ (ideas and values of which I suspect you are as skeptical and dismissive as I), but according to eminent female writers of both fiction and non-fiction and to the received wisdom of society at large!”

“That is their opinion. It is not mine.”

He spread his hands, at a loss. “But… then… what do you intend to do?”

“I intend to terminate the pregnancy.”

His mouth fell open in shock. “But… you can’t.”

“I can.”

“But I don’t want you to.”

“It is not your decision to make.”

“But I’m the father.”

“That is less significant than the fact that I am the mother.”

“But… what if I forbid it?”

“You have no authority to forbid it.”

“But by what right can you do such a thing?”

“By what right can you prevent it?”

“But that’s our little son or daughter in there! It’s a person, damn it!”

“No. It is not. It is not a person. It is less than a lizard. It has no volitional consciousness. It has no awareness. It lacks the one thing that elevates man above the rest of the living world, the one sacred characteristic that differentiates man from every other entity in existence: a mind. Without a mind, it cannot possess a code to guide its actions, and without such a code, it is not human. Ask a fetus what is its code of existence and you will get a nullity for an answer. Question it as regards to it values, and you will obtain an evasive silence. Inquire of it how it is able to survive in the absence of these things, and you will hear nothing—but you will discern that it manages to remain alive, not by the conscious pursuit of its values, but by the passive, unthinking, and unreflective absorption of nutrients from another human being.

“You have heard men condemn slavery. Yet even the slave produces something of value, and is given something of value in return—food, clothing, shelter, and the harmonicas with which he creates his distinctive music. What is objectionable about slavery is not the fact that the slave must work—for all men must work—but, rather, that his freedom is curtailed by means of force. What is shameful about slavery is not that the slave is prevented from receiving or sharing in the profits derived from his labor—for no man may receive or share in the profits of any man’s labor unless he owns the company for whom others labor—but, rather, that he is unable to quit his job if he so chooses. End slavery, forbid that application of force, and the slave is able to exercise his freedom, pursue his values, and live a human life by laboring for the owners of companies under conditions he is free to quit whenever he so chooses.

“How much worse is the enslavement of the mother by the fetus! For what force is applied by the fetus to the mother, to ensure and coerce her support of the parasite that literally feeds off her? The worst kind of force there is: the force of public opinion. Women who become pregnant must carry the baby to term and give birth to it, or they are condemned and shunned by so-called polite society. Worse, the fetus does no meaningful work. It creates nothing. It transforms nothing. It grows, manufactures, refines, harvests, or assists in, nothing. It creates no immortal works of art that inspire countless thousands over the centuries. And then, not content merely to enslave the adult female woman human individual-type person whom it holds in this unspeakable bondage, it provides its slave with neither food, nor clothing, nor shelter, nor harmonicas. Indeed, it insists the mother provide it with food, create its ‘clothing,’ and provide her body as its actual shelter. In so doing it robs the mother of nutrients, deforms her body, stimulates in her all manner of distasteful reactions and excretions, distorts her appetite, subjects her to exhaustion, transforms her into a quasi-public plaything whose belly may be groped and caressed by strangers on demand, and in the end dooms her to a prolonged exposure to excruciating pain and possibly mortal danger, prior to its termination of her enslavement—after which commences a new kind of enslavement, as the infant uses its absolute helplessness to control her every action, emotion, and thought, and to require increasing amounts of the mother’s income in order to survive.

“Acceding to this kind of physical, emotional, and moral subjugation may be appealing to men for whom society’s approval and the sentimental contemplation of cultural stereotypes is appealing. But I am not one of those. And so I will terminate this pregnancy and retain my human freedom.”

Nathan A. Banden took this all in with an outwardly stoic calm. Finally he said, “Then where will you have this procedure done? May I accompany you to it, at least?”

“No,” she said. “You may not.”

“Oh, Dragnie, Dragnie, Dr—“

“You may not because there is only one physician I trust with this kind of procedure, and he practices in a place where you may not go.”

Banden did not chuckle. He did not chuckle because he laughed. It was the laugh of an anxious man uncertain of what another human being had said to him but fearing its content would reveal itself to be objectionable. “Where does he work? In a prison?”

“In Glatt’s Gorge.”

The young man, unafraid to reveal the limitations of his education and disclose his inability to understand what had just been said to him, replied, “Huh?”

“You’ve never heard of Glatt’s Gorge?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it. But I thought it was a… you know, a mythical place. Like the Garden of Eden or Shangri La.”

Dragnie permitted herself a slight smile. Then she withdrew the permission and the smile vanished. “It is quite real. I have been there. And that is where Doc Hastings still resides. I would not trust anyone else with this matter.”

“But why can’t I go with you?”

“Because,” Dragnie said in a tone of wistful nostalgia. “No one except a very privileged few is allowed there. It was the perfect society. There you would find wealthy people, and the people who love them or work for them, creating a self-sufficient community of gentlemen farmers, hobbyist craftsmen, amateur civil engineers, and artists-in-residence. There you would find a world-renowned philosopher running a chicken-and-waffle diner while expatiating on ‘truth,’ or a brilliant composer writing an opera about Marcus Aurelius for a full orchestra and a cast of thirty, to be performed by three people playing ukeleles. There you would discover a society in which everything, from obtaining electrical power to asking someone what time it is, was mediated by money, which was minted right there in the Gorge by an internationally-acknowledged metaphysician whose hobby was the minting of money. It was a place where a lecture on the irreducible value of currency and of its unregulated use in the valuation and conduct of all human affairs could be attended for a token fee of twenty-five cents. It was an entirely self-sufficient place because it was a place entirely underwritten by private wealth. In short, it was Paradise.”

“You keep saying ‘was.’ What is it now?”

“Exactly the way it was ten years ago.”

“It sounds wonderful, darling,” Banden sighed. “But can’t you vouch for me and get me in?”

She shook her head regretfully, because it was her head, and it was full of regret. “It’s just not possible.”

The change in Banden was sudden and volcanic. Whatever effort he had made at a sympathetic hearing of Dragnie’s explanations and a courteous response to them were now invalid. Anger rose within him like a fever; his normally pale white skin grew pink with agitation and ire. “Oh really?” he cried. “Then what you’re telling me is, you refuse to have my baby, and you refuse to even allow me to be present at its termination. And why? Because I’m not a millionaire?”

“No,” Dragnie said rationally. “It’s because—“

“Never mind,” he cried. “I can see now what I’ve meant to you this past month—not a boyfriend, not even a lover, but a plaything, to amuse you for the few weeks you’d be away from home and your world-famous, other, long-term, ‘steady,’ boyfriend.”

“Nathan, don’t be silly—“

“And now I’m ‘silly.’ Very well.” He made a visible effort to regain his composure, drawing himself up to his full height and extending himself out to his complete width. “I thought we had something special, Dragnie. I see now I was wrong. I won’t trouble you with my presence any further. If you change your mind, and wish me to accompany you to your tycoon’s paradise, I shall be at home, living with my parents.”

He turned and strode from the room.

^{Chapter 2}

A Chair is Not a House

Dragnie checked her co-ordinates and glanced out the window of the small plane that responded to her will as with unerring precision she flew it through the air of the atmosphere. A faint smile played about her lips. Visible below her was precisely the forbidding series of mountain crags she expected to see, identical to those she had seen ten years previous when, in pursuit of another plane, she had unknowingly penetrated the optical illusion shielding this valley from the eyes of the world and had crash-landed in Glatt’s Gorge. With a clean turn of the rudder and a firm, clean adjustment of the flaps, she began her descent toward the small airstrip that she knew, in her mind, would reveal itself as she began her skillful, controlled, clean descent.

A car was waiting for her when she got out of the plane. It was an old Humpmaster, one of the costliest models of its year, now scrupulously maintained in accordance with the modern-day object and purpose of Glatt’s Gorge. Standing beside it, grinning happily, was a young man. “Miss Tagbord? It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m ‘Dirk Biceps.’” He smiled. “Not really, of course. My real name is Claude Bawlz. But as far as you’re concerned I’m Dirk Biceps. The pet food magnate.”

Dragnie extended her hand and grasped his in a firm, clean handshake of hands. “The pleasure is mine, ‘Dirk.’”

“They’re waiting for you in town. Shall we go?”

He put Dragnie’s suitcase in the car’s trunk and they set off down the unpaved mountain road. Dragnie gazed at the foothills to either side, and at the undisturbed meadow over which the road ran, and decided that none of this had changed in ten years, exactly as she knew it would and, more importantly, wouldn’t.

“How long have you been here, ‘Dirk’?” she asked the driver in order to obtain information.

“About six months,” he said with casual accuracy. “Mr. Glatt came and visited me in my office in February, and by mid-April I had shut down the factory, dissolved the corporation, dynamited the warehouse, murdered my wife and children, cancelled my subscriptions to Dog Food Age and Modern Gerbil, and ended up here.”

She knew he was talking about the actual history of the real Dirk Biceps, and responded in kind. “Was it a good decision?”

He took his eyes off the road for one moment and directed them to look at Dragnie’s, which they did with the certitude of human visual organs obeying their owner. “The best you’ll ever make,” he said.

It was exactly what she expected him to say and hearing it filled her with triumph. This was a place founded on an idea; and, as ideas never change provided they are shielded from the world, Glatt’s Gorge had not changed, and never would.

She saw familiar landmarks that she remembered from her week’s stay a decade earlier, when the real Dirk Biceps, the real John Glatt, and all the other tycoons, entrepreneurs, and industrialists, plus a philosopher and a composer and a beautiful movie star, had removed themselves from the outside world and repaired here, to mount their strike against society. Nestled in a knoll against the hillside was Douglas Sinew’s Fabric, Trim, and Notions-o-Rama, its sign, with Sinew’s trademark emblem of a smiling abacus, testimony to Sinew’s previous profession as an actuary. He had, during his time at Glatt’s Gorge, discovered an entirely new method of being an actuary, one that sped up actuarial calculations tenfold, provided three times the predictive accuracy, and at a cost of mere pennies a day. Like everyone else at the Gorge, however, he refused to take it into the outside world, either to exploit it commercially or to present it to his fellow professionals.

Across the field stood Kent Wallbricker’s distillery, the source of what was considered by experts to be the best pine cone liqueur in five counties, an achievement made all the more impressive considering Wallbricker’s job back in the corrupt world, where he had been a professional tap dancer and performed on television network variety shows for the entertainment of cowards, weaklings, and other members of the cannibal class. During his time at the Gorge he had invented a revolutionary new method of tap dancing, one that enabled him to tap five times as fast, with double the time accuracy and one-tenth the fatigue. He, too, refused to share it with the world. Kent Wallbricker’s “dynamic tap technique” died with him two years earlier.

“’Mr. Fasnacht’ is waiting for you at the hotel,” Dragnie’s driver said.

She nodded, her attention fixed on the town as they pulled in, past the civic sculpture of a solid gold dollar sign and exclamation point that greeted visitors. The road here was unpaved, too, but nonetheless lined with shops and services: a bakery, a hardware store (“We Hand-Forge Our Own Nails” read the sign in the window), a post office, an ice cream parlor, a bowling alley, a slaughterhouse, an automobile dealership, a grocery store, a fire station, a bridal shop, a Major League baseball stadium, a museum of contemporary art, a maximum-security prison, a hospital for the criminally insane, and a dinner theater. Everywhere she looked, Dragnie saw men and women walking with unyielding purpose, confident in the use of their own legs and feet. Their feet seemed not to touch the ground as they moved busily about on the errands of the lives they lived during their existence. Then Dragnie noticed that, in fact, their feet didn’t touch the ground. These, she thought, must be the anti-gravity shoes John told her he had devised for residents of the Gorge, one of the inventions, along with the refracting lens that concealed the valley, the motor that converted atmospheric static electricity into kinetic energy, the reverse-osmotic pump that transformed ordinary poison ivy into 60/40 cotton-poly sport shirts, the amplification mirror that harnessed starlight to boil water, and the other brilliant achievements that made living in Glatt’s Gorge different from living in a poorly-equipped summer camp.

Her eye was arrested by a small cluster of men and women following a single individual, who commanded their attention by holding up a furled umbrella. The group had just emerged from Hercules Fleet’s Pizza ‘n’ Calzone. The sign in the window depicted a stylized view of Moses descending Mt. Sinai, holding the twin tablets traditionally inscribed with the Ten Commandments but here displaying, on the one, an image of a pizza, and on the other, a calzone—graphic acknowledgment and commemoration of Fleet’s achievements in the outer world, where he had been a top Conservative rabbi. While at Glatt’s Gorge he had invented a revolutionary new way to be a Conservative rabbi, a way that resulted in his being twice as conservative and three times as rabbinical at half the cost. But he had refused share the secret with the rest of the world, and declined even to discuss it while turning out the best pizza in the valley.

“If you don’t mind, ‘Dirk,’ I’d like to tag along with that tour for a bit and see what things are like here now,” Dragnie said.

Her driver nodded. “Just check in at the Inn when you’re ready,” he said, and drove off.

Dragnie hurried along and fell in step with the tour group. Over the next hour they visited a number of exhibits, at each of which, she noticed, every care had been taken to maintain the original appearance and function of the facility, while the actors portraying the various figures who had, ten years earlier, “gone Glatt,” were scrupulous in their costumes, accents, and values.

They stopped by the Post Office, where the young actor portraying Flint Bigbone, the former natural gas magnate, demonstrated stamp-cancellation techniques on fragile parcels, while lecturing them on the evils of subsidized medical care. Next came the Bakery, run by a talented blonde playing former Globe-Tech C.E.O. Donna-May Uppercut, who showed everyone how to hand-twist their own pretzels. And they visited the hardware store, where a vaguely familiar character actor embodying Gil “Dad” Popp handed out period paint chips while regaling them with the story of how, the day before his arrival at Glatt’s Gorge, he had personally detonated 1,225 pounds of high explosives to demolish his entire magnesium processing plant.

By then it was snack time. Dragnie took her leave of the group, consulted the site map with its dollar-sign compass rose, and found her way to the Glatt’s Gorge Inn and Conference Center.

Inside, the lobby was bustling, as corporate parties or select private individuals checked in, checked out, or met for the evening’s activities. Dragnie’s driver said, “I’ll get your key. Don’t bother looking for an elevator. There isn’t one.” He pointed to a row of three arches standing off to the side of the main desk. “Just walk through one of those. It will read the key and instantly teleport you to your door. It’s something Mr. Glatt invented while ironing a shirt one day. We’re hoping to develop its use to transport the barrels of oil Flint Buttslammer figured out how to refine from spider webs. The idea… but look at me, telling you all this, when you probably know more than I do…”

“No. Go on.”

“Well, the idea is to transport the oil right from the webs in the caves to the refinery started by Clunk Fistpuncher, when he came here after abandoning his career as the foremost legal ethicist in the world. Oh, good, here’s ‘Mr. Fasnacht.’” He indicated a man in work pants and a rough-weaved shirt who, smiling with purest politeness, approached.

“Miss Tagbord. A pleasure. We’ve been looking forward to your arrival.”

She shook the proffered hand. “Thank you, Mister—?”

“Make it ‘Mister Fasnacht.’” He chuckled. “It will hardly surprise you learn that I’m not actually Faustus Fasnacht. My real name is Mike Hunt. But here at the Gorge we do our best to maintain the atmosphere and the values of what the original founders brought when they first created this retreat ten years ago. All the buildings, all the roads, all the shops and factories, even the landscaping, have been meticulously preserved from the original period. The Glatt’s Gorge Foundation employs a number of us to staff the conference center, and we do our part to contribute to the illusion that each visitor, whether on officially-sponsored corporate retreat or on a personal sabbatical at our Committee’s exclusive invitation, feel that he—or she!—is taking part in something very like the original strike that Mr. Glatt called before the Great Takeover, and that Mr. Fasnacht bankrolled with his property here in the mountains.” He chuckled. “Why, if you’re with us long enough, you’ll likely run into the chap playing John Glatt himself. That should be an interesting experience for you.”

“Yes,” Dragnie said in a mocking tone of facetiousness. “And is the real Doc Hastings around? Or only his stand-in?”

“Oh, the actual McCoy, I assure you. He’s expecting you tomorrow morning at ten a.m. And by the way—“ He indicated Dragnie’s wrist watch. “You’ll have to adjust your watch and any travel clocks you may have brought. We have our own time zone here in the Gorge, which differs from the Standard Time of the outside world by forty-two minutes and twelve seconds. We prefer not to be chronologically co-ordinated with the moochers, the leeches, the looters, the kootchie-koo-ers, the hoochy-coochers, and the hot-cha-cha-ers, if you know what I mean.”

“I do.” Dragnie spoke with unflinching honesty. Because she did know what he meant.

* * *

“My, my. Dragnie Tagbord. It’s been awhile.”

“Yes. It has.”

Dragnie was seated in Doc Hastings’ office, a small, wood-paneled room beyond which was an examination room that fronted a larger surgical suite. Hastings reclined in his chair behind his desk. He wore a white lab coat because he was a doctor. He was tall, lean, and tanned. His white hair floated in wisps above his flaring white eyebrows and strong hooked nose. “You’re sure you’re with child?”

“I’m sure.”

“But why come to me? Don’t they have doctors in New York City?”

“You’re the only one I trust.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised. You hear I cured cancer?”

“No.”

“Well. Not all of it. Leukemia. Figured it out last year—” He pointed to the room beyond. “—right in there. Not gonna give it to them, though, I can tell you that. Damn thieving bastards.”

“I know it.”

“M.S., too. Multiple whatachamcallit. Sclerosis. Had an idea, followed it through, bingo. Think I’ll let anyone in on it? Don’t make me laugh. Mooching swine.”

“Yes.”

“Plus, get a load of this…” He yanked open the long horizontal drawer of the desk and rummaged around in it. He produced an object resembling a blood-pressure monitor, although attached to the flexible cuff was, not a squeezable rubber bulb, but a device resembling a transistor radio. “Know what this does?”

“No.”

“Cures arthritis, gout, shingles, and acne with cosmic rays. Transforms stray gamma into what I call ‘revivification energy.’ Wrap it on your ankle or around your face, tune ‘er in, set the timer, listen for the ding, and you’re done. Guess where it’s going. Right back in here, is where.” He returned the device to the drawer and slammed it shut. “So. When do you want to do this?”

“How about right now?”

“Right now it is. Follow me.”

They went into the surgical suite at the rear of the building, where Doc Hastings had Dragnie replace her clothes with a hospital gown and lie on a gynecological exam chair with stirrups. He had opened a cabinet containing chemicals and syringes, when he turned and asked, “You want to be out cold for this, or awake on a local?”

“Awake, if that’s all right.”

“Good. A woman should see what men do to her.” He prepared an injection, then disappeared into an anteroom, from which Dragnie heard the sounds of water running and Hastings scrubbing up. He returned a moment later in a wrinkled, faded surgical gown and face mask. ”Let’s get this done. There’ve never been any children at Glatt’s Gorge and we’re not about to start having any now. Damn freeloaders.”

He injected her with the anesthetic and, while waiting for it to take effect, shared his views on existence. Finally, a few minutes later, seated between her splayed legs and his hands obscured beneath the covering sheet, he asked, “Feel that?”

“No.”

“Good.”

She lay back, facing the ceiling. He made small sounds of concentration until a question occurred to her, and she said, “Doc Hastings, why did you stay here? When nearly everyone else went back into the world with John?”

He paused in his activities and emerged from under the sheet over her legs. He scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you, Dragnie.” Returning back under the sheet, he continued answering in a firm, clear voice. “I stayed here because I could no longer live in a world in which practically no one believed that the mind existed. I stayed because I couldn’t bear to return to a world in which rational people are penalized, brutalized, and tortured, while lunatics and crazy people thrived. Of course, as it is today, so it has ever been. Throughout history, wild-eyed madmen have succeeded in attaining positions of authority and power, while men dedicated to rationality and reason have been consigned to condemnation, ignominy and worse. The men of the mind—scientists, inventors, and industrialists—have always been condemned by society, while shrieking psychopaths who play with their own feces have been elevated to positions of authority and prestige. Everywhere, in every corporate board room, university, newspaper office, publishing house, scientific laboratory, industrial facility, television network, and government bureau, you hear men say that there is no such thing as thought, that reason is an illusion, and that only magic, mysticism, and madness are the appropriate tools for running the world. Is it any wonder, Dragnie, that every company in the Fortuitous 500 is headed by a certified schizophrenic? Is it any wonder that every university in the nation is ruled by a committee of gibbering maniacs in strait jackets? Everywhere, the men who actually make the world function—entrepreneurs, tycoons, industrialists, businessmen—are victimized, subjected to an endless onslaught of torture and abuse. They are forced to live in segregated communities surrounded only by people of their own kind. They are forced to vacation in remote areas, on distant islands under the glare of a tropical sun, or sliding down snow-covered mountain tops, which are costly to reach. They are forced to eat in restaurants unfrequented by and unfamiliar to the common man. They are compelled to pay five, ten, a hundred, a thousand times what ordinary men pay for such basic necessities as wristwatches, automobiles, and three-piece suits. They are required to spend millions of dollars to influence a political system merely in order to manipulate it into giving them what they want. They must endure the hardship, not only of devising ways to make money, that their immediate needs may be met, but of devising ways that their money may make money, inflicting a double burden upon them, about which they scarcely utter a word of complaint. I stayed here because, once I had come to Glatt’s Gorge, once I had gone on strike against that world, once I had withdrawn myself from the world in which the rational men are constantly victimized and the raving, delusional masses live lives of undeserved leisure and luxury, I discovered I could not go back to it.”

She nodded. “But there’s still one thing I don’t understand, Doc,” she said. “Why has the rest of the world turned against us?”

“Why has every country on earth become a People’s State of the People, you ask? Why has the entire world welcomed collectivization, with its centralized health care and its safety nets and its trade unions and its social protections, you inquire? Why has every human being on earth—including, now, apparently, the ones in Goa—given up on our dream, the American dream, the dream of one day having a job that will sustain us in our hope that we may, one other day, somehow, become rich, you query? But the answer is simple, Dragnie. They have turned on us because of who we are. The people of the world would rather live stable middle-class lives than dare to do what you did, and inherit a railroad empire from their father. They hate us for our success. They hate us for our excellence. They hate us for our freedom. We, the greatest country that ever existed—it was inevitable that one day the rest of humanity would, in contemplation of our superiority, deform, deprive, and destroy itself out of sheer resentment, jealousy, and spite. Nations have always obliterated themselves when confronted with another nation whom they wished to make feel bad. Let two men run a foot race. Let one of them win, while the other loses. Now observe the behavior of that second man. What does he do? He drinks a fifth of bourbon and then leaps into the reservoir. You see, Dragnie, most men would rather stab themselves in the chest with a bread knife, than admit, to another man, ‘you run faster than I.’ In this way the weak have always victimized the strong by harming themselves and then saying, ‘you did this to me.’ It is, quite simply, a fact of history, and has been ever since we overcame our second-rate, inferior status in the world and rose to the pre-eminence we enjoy today.”

“But they’re not destroying themselves. They’ve declared war on us.”

“The suicidal act of a desperate social order. Oh, they’ll have their little war with us. And we’ll destroy them. And afterwards they’ll cry, ‘It’s not fair,’ and they’ll kill themselves. No, Dragnie… I mean, yes, Dragnie, the world is now in the hands of those whose central idea is that the mind does not exist, and they will annihilate themselves in order to coerce us into pitying them.”

“I understand,” Dragnie was about to say, when a sudden noise, as of gunfire or an explosion, sounded sharply from outside.

Doc Hastings jerked up from beneath the sheet over her legs, his arms and hands still under it. “What the hell was that?” he snarled.

The door flew open and Sanfrancisco De Soto burst in. “Dragnie! It’s John!”

Unaware of what she was doing, not permitting herself to ask of herself permission to consider the medical consequences of her actions, Dragnie sat upright and tore the sheet away. As she leaped off the chair Doc Hastings cried, “Whoa, don’t—” but it was too late. Dragnie followed Sanfrancisco out through the office.

^{Chapter 3}

The Person Who Did the Thing with the Thing

Once outside Dragnie saw the cause of the tumult. On the rough dirt road, Hunk Rawbone and Regnad Daghammarskjold stood crouching behind a parked car. Beyond them, in the middle of the road, was John Glatt. Another man stood behind Glatt and was holding him prisoner with a gun to his back and an arm rigidly locked around Glatt’s neck.

Dragnie followed Sanfrancisco in joining the other two just as she felt a sudden flow of warmth down one of her legs. She did not permit herself to engage it with the attention of her concentration. She knelt beside Rawbone. “Is anyone hurt?” He shook his head. “Hunk, what are you doing here?”

“They tried to arrest John, but he got away,” Rawbone answered with icy accuracy. “We came here to re-group and devise a strategy for dealing with it.”

“Who?” she cried. “Who tried to arrest him? And by what right? By what right, Hunk?”

“Mr. Jenkins and his stooges. For violating the Don’t Do Anything That Will Upset Other Countries So Much That They Declare War on Us Act—which they passed in secret last night.”

Behind her she heard Doc Hastings shouting from his office doorway. “Dragnie! Get back here! Or my attorney will have my head on a plate!”

Ignoring it, she indicated the man holding Glatt and asked Rawbone, “How’d he get into the Gorge?”

“He followed us through the concealment in a small plane and parachuted in.”

“Who’s he?”

Rawbone sneered. “Some rotter.”

“What’s he want?”

Rawbone’s eyes flared with unspoken intensity as he burned his gaze into Dragnie’s with a look that said, silently, without words, You know what he wants. It was a look that said, You know what he wants because we have discussed this a thousand times. It was a look that, having said the previous things, went on to say, You know what he wants because we have discussed this a thousand times in words that have rung with the pitiless reverberation of truth as we have enunciated it in half-hour speeches to civic groups and Junior Achievement awards ceremonies, as we have declared in thunderous tones to waiters in elegant restaurants in response to their inquiry about whether we wanted to hear tonight’s specials, as we have lectured at ribbon-cuttings, at baseball games, in elevators, on the beach, in museums, in theater lobbies, at chess tournaments and, that one time, to those three little girls dressed as a ballerina, a witch, and a princess who came to my home trick-or-treating. “What they all want. Something for nothing.”

Dragnie stood up. Dimly, on the edge of her awareness, she was conscious of an increased flow of warmth and, now, some kind of sticky, thick liquid moving down her leg, and of an unnaturally robust ventilation afforded by her clothes. Rawbone reached out to stop her but she clawed his hands off and skirted the car. She took a step with halting difficulty toward Glatt and the man holding him.

“You,” she called. “Rotter. What do you want?”

“Dragnie!” she heard Sanfrancisco shout. “Get back inside! You’re bleeding!”

“Nobody move!” the rotter screamed. He nodded hysterically toward Dragnie. “I know who you are. You think you’re so high and mighty, Miss Dragnie Tagbord! Well why not! You were born rich. It’s easy for you to make these laws. It’s easy for you to call this Strike. But what about the rest of us? I haven’t worked in a year! My wife is sick, my kids need clothes… we don’t have enough food, we’re living in a refrigerator box under a bridge… I’m at the end of my rope, I tell you!” He held the gun up to Glatt’s head. “You’ve got to give us things we haven’t earned!”

Dimly, on the edge of her consciousness where knowledge of a secondary or auxiliary nature resided, such as that of state capitals, the rules of cricket, and the lyrics to the latter verses of “America the Beautiful,” Dragnie was aware that she was shuffling awkwardly forward, and that she was sheathed in a flimsy, ill-fitting garment. “Wait,” she said. “Let him go. Your life is not John Glatt’s fault or responsibility.”

“That is merely a piece of self-serving, pseudo-philosophical cant from a person determined to retain a life of privilege and comfort!” the rotter cried. “I hate all of you! This world you have created is inhuman, cruel, and barbarous!”

She realized that Regnad, Sanfrancisco, and Rawbone had left the protection of the car and gathered on either side of her. She said to the rotter, “What is your name?”

“Seymour Butts.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Butts.”

The rotter seemed to start in surprise. “You’re what?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry you don’t adequately understand the system we live in. We don’t mean to harm you personally. We’re trying to create a society that affords everyone in it the maximum amount freedom consistent with property rights. But freedom only has meaning depending on its context. To a dog, for example, freedom in the context of a dog park means, ‘the ability to go off the leash and run around.’ In a school, freedom might mean ‘the ability for the senior class to determine where it will hold its Senior Prom.’ In capitalist society, freedom means ‘the unobstructed opportunity to make money.’ That is what John, here, and all of us, are trying to achieve: the creation of a society in which everyone is free to make money, which at the same time allows us to preserve, expand, and consolidate the wealth we already have by preserving and expanding the power that we already have. It’s not that we want you to be poor. We want you to be as rich as you can be, provided that does not conflict with our ability to be as rich as we can be based on remaining as rich as we always have been.”

Butts loosened his grip on Glatt’s neck but kept the gun pointed at his head. “I… I never thought of it that way,” he admitted. “Thus put, it’s a perfectly defensible modus vivendi.”

Dragnie felt a desire to sleep. She ignored it and continued, “That’s why we called this Strike. The rest of the world is hampering our ability to make money—which, because we’re capitalists, is the only freedom we care about. And, because we control your world, it’s the only freedom you care about, too. That’s why you’re here. Because you can’t make any money, without which you and your family will starve and die.”

“That is true,” Butts said.

“But we have done our part. You want to make money. You have the freedom to do so. If you have not done so, it can only be your own fault.”

“Such reasoning is indisputable.”

“Therefore it follows that it is not us that you hate,” Dragnie said, feeling herself reeling in place. “It is yourself.”

“That is indubitably so,” Butts replied. “I’m a weak, second-rate mediocrity who can’t succeed in an economy based on competition and merit, as are my wife and children. I see now that it was wrong of me to blame John Glatt, or indeed anybody, for difficulties of which I am the sole cause. To demand that the wealthy, who have obtained their wealth strictly via their own efforts or the efforts of others, to contribute to a minimally decent standard of living for all members of the society the existence of which has made that wealth possible, is to subvert the very idea of capitalism, which holds that a man has a right to exist only insofar as he can sell something to another man.” He lowered the gun and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Glatt. I’ll go now.” Taking two steps back, he raised the gun again, this time to his own head, and pulled the trigger.

Glatt did not permit himself to flinch in shock, nor did Rawbone, Sanfrancisco, or Regnad Daghammarskjold permit themselves to react. Dragnie, however, witnessed none of these events, for she lost consciousness and collapsed onto the dirt road.

* * *

Dragnie awoke in a hospital-type bed in a small room. Before her she beheld an array of faces displaying responses ranging from pitiless unsentimentality to calm dispassion. Glatt, Rawbone, Sanfrancisco De Soto, and Regnad Daghammarskjold ringed her bed, sitting on small folding chairs, while Doc Hastings stood gravely by her side. “How do you feel?” Hastings asked.

She replied with a defiant smile. “All right,” she said, her voice low. “Weak.”

“You should. You lost a lot of blood out there, young lady.”

“What happened?”

“You jumped up from the chair and a piece of equipment nicked an artery. Didn’t you feel yourself bleeding all over your leg?”

“Go easy on her, Doc,” Sanfrancisco said. “She saved John’s life.”

“So I heard. By the way, Dragnie, the procedure was a success.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Dragnie said. She turned to the others. “What happened to Mr. Butts?”

“Nothing,” Regnad said, his stunning Swedish beauty more beautiful and stunningly Swedish than ever before. “Killed himself.”

“Oh,” Dragnie said. “Too bad.”

“Too bad?” Doc Hastings said gruffly. “He got what he deserved. Damn moocher. Meanwhile, I’ll tell you what’s too bad. The fact that you lost about two pints of blood and are in no condition to get up out of that bed, let alone fly back to New York.”

Dragnie was about to protest when a knock was heard at the doorway. Standing there was “Faustus Fasnacht,” holding a sheet of paper. “Excuse me, folks. Sorry to intrude, but Mr. Glatt just received a telex from New York and it’s marked ‘urgent.’” He entered and handed the sheet to Glatt, and only then did his eye fall on Dragnie. “Miss Tagbord! My goodness, you’re white as a sheet! What happened?”

She smiled weakly. “I had an accident and lost some blood.”

“Will you be needing a transfusion? What’s your blood type?”

“O-positive.”

“So is mine!” The young man turned to Doc Hastings. “Doc, I’d like to volunteer to be a donor for your patient here.”

“Not so fast, son,” Doc Hastings said. “I’m O-positive, too.”

“So am I,” Hunk Rawbone said with icy objectivity.

“As am I!” Sanfransico De Soto cried happily.

“I am O-positive, too,” Regnad Daghammarskjold remarked.

“I, too, am O-positive,” John Glatt said, his eyes displaying a glint of mocking contempt.

The young man playing Faustus Fasnacht laughed. “But this is amazing! Miss Tagbord, you have an unlimited supply of donor blood. When shall we do this, Doc?”

To the young man’s surprise, but to the surprise of no one else, Doc Hastings did not answer. Instead, he looked soberly at each individual in the room, ending on Dragnie, whose expression in reply mirrored the gravity of his own. Finally Dragnie said to the young man, “There will be no transfusion.”

“What? Why not? I thought you said you lost a lot of blood.”

“I did.”

“And isn’t the customary practice in such cases to replace the lost blood with donated blood of a compatible type?”

“It is.”

“Then—“

“It is for some. Not for me,” Dragnie said.

“Or me,” Glatt said.

“Or any of us,” Rawbone murmured.

“But… why not?” the young man stammered.

“Because,” Dragnie said, “I would no sooner ask a man to give me his blood than I would ask him to give me his bond portfolio. Because the only thing more parasitic than living off another man’s earnings is living off his body. Because I ask no man to deprive himself of that which guarantees and safeguards his existence, nor would I agree to give that man that which guarantees mine. Because my blood is mine, the product of my body, and therefore no man may have a claim on it, just as I may not assert a claim on his. Because I do not live for anyone but myself, and I ask no man to live for anyone but himself. And because, when my body has replenished its blood supply—as it undoubtedly will—I shall go forth with neither debt nor gratitude, entirely free and self-sufficient, owing nothing, neither moocher nor leech.”

Doc Hastings thumbed toward the door and said to the young man, “Okay, Junior, you got your answer. Now go.” As the young man left, Hastings made a gesture toward the others. “Now suppose we all stop gabbin’ and let Miss Tagbord here get some rest.”

“How long will I need, Doc?” Dragnie asked.

Hastings made a face of estimation. “Four days. Five tops.”

Dragnie looked at Glatt. “Tell my office, John, will you? And get word to Nathan.”

Glatt, implacable in his ironclad reserve, nodded. Sanfrancisco pointed to the document in his hand. “What’s it say, John?”

“It’s from my office,” Glatt said. “It says the government has put out an all-points bulletin calling for my detention and arrest.” He looked at the others. “Your names are here, too. If we’re going to go back, we have to do it in secret.”

^{Chapter 4}

The Naughty and the Nice

The party, a “Being-In” held by the children of the middle class, who imagined that injustices that had characterized society since the ancient Greeks somehow could be eradicated by college students smoking and ingesting illegal substances in the name of “peace,” took place in a filthy loft in the derelict, grimy section of Manhattan which was normally the preserve of drug addicts, homosexuals, and petty criminals. Daubs of brightly-colored, glowing paint applied to dirty factory walls and crude signs affixed to lamp posts pointed the way to a decrepit building on an ill-lit side street from which the sound of loud, primitive music, of the kind that sinks the spirit of men in the debased urges of adolescent emotionality rather than glorifying it in a purest expression of abstract exaltation, could be heard. It would take more than ten years from the Great Takeover for the neighborhoods, and the offspring, of men to be rescued from the corruptions and decay of the previous order.

It was Nathan A. Banden’s first experience of such a neighborhood and, as was typical of the pampered children of the professional class, he credited himself with personal courage and ethical praiseworthiness merely for walking down the street. That there were visible no menaces to his safety was of no consequence, nor was it of any importance to his preening self-regard that the periodic appearance of a police car, sent to monitor the possibilities of civic rowdiness, served as a deterrent to any possible crimes in public.

Banden had, in the heat of their last exchange, told Dragnie he would be moving back in with his parents, but in fact he had not done so yet. He decided to take advantage of her pilgrimage to Glatt’s Gorge and remain in the Glatt penthouse, where he had spent the past two days nursing his self-pity and stoking the flame of his indignation. It was while there that he had received a phone call from her office, informing him that her return would be delayed by at least four days, as would Glatt’s. To Banden this felt like a betrayal. It was bad enough that she had rejected the prospect of carrying his seed and giving birth to his child; now she was extending the trip into a five-day vacation with his chief rival, and in the one place to which his entrance was barred and where she and Glatt had experienced perhaps their finest hour.

Banden trudged up the wide, worn steps of the building toward the increasingly deafening noise. He was unsure of why he was there, of what he was looking for, or if he would know it if he saw it. He knew only that, like romantic swains of ages past trapped in the suffocating misery of rejection, he sought something cathartic, possibly dangerous, and perhaps even deadly. When he had seen a sign near the Glatt apartment advertising this event, he decided to attempt to assuage his feelings of jealousy and diminishment by looking into it.

The loft was immense, poorly-lighted by unshaded, naked bulbs scattered throughout and several neon beer advertisements on the walls. It was teeming with writhing bodies, for whom the word “dance” denoted a state of gyrating, spastic gesticulation indistinguishable from a gran mal seizure. The music, for so the assembled deemed it, featured amplified bass and thunderous drums under shrieking, caterwauling electric guitar strumming, all accompanying indecipherable lyrics shouted by “singers” of no notable training or ability. The crowd consisted primarily of young men and women of college age. Each considered himself to be exploring new avenues of self-expression, and so each wore clothing with an identical intention: to offend their parents. In evidence were flared pantaloons, tunics, Indian sport coats, blousy shirts, black t-shirts and tight jeans, dandified frills, Bluebeard costumes, feather boas, plumed hats, and other calculated tokens of strained whimsicality or affronts to normal standards of attire. Banden, in the pressed slacks and crisp dress shirt of the Glatt School student, instantly felt self-conscious.

Having led a privileged and sheltered life, Banden had no experience with the kinds of people now gyrating before him. One young man doing The Bugaboo in a red and purple striped shirt, was the son of a doctor. He believed that Western medicine was a fraud, and that men could be cured of all diseases through chanting foreign syllables and drinking herbal infusions. The previous week he had contracted an infection and demanded that his father provide him with antibiotics without cost.

A girl in a billowing dress imitative of that of a peasant wife danced the Meat and Potatoes with abandon. She believed that the corruptions of civilization began with the stricture that women must shave their legs and underarms, and for that reason had made it a philosophical priority to display the hairy legs of a savage and to smell like a gymnasium.

Nearby danced a woman for whom the highest expression of personal freedom and individual liberty consisted in the unconfined swinging of her breasts. The week before she had taken part in a demonstration at which women too old, unattractive, or disagreeable to obtain a lover had gathered to remove their brassieres and burn them in a public display of what they considered to be advanced thinking and political protest.

Banden’s eye fell on an older man, just past thirty. He was an assistant professor of sociology at a local university. As befitted his relative maturity, he gazed at the gathering from the periphery and contented himself with smoking a tiny ceramic pipe stuffed with the compressed extract of the poppy. In his classes he instructed his students that the mind was an illusion, the brain was essentially a large kidney, and the collective wisdom of three thousand years was contemptibly out of fashion. He urged those attending to his words to follow precepts uttered by illiterate popular singers, Hindu mystics, or Buddhist worshippers of self-annihilation.

A man in his late twenties dancing The Twang wore a pseudo-military jacket of braids and epaulets. He was a dealer in mind-damaging plants and hallucinogenic chemicals. That one of his customers had, the previous week, been under the delusion that he could fly, and had leaped to his death off the roof of a building, was of no consequence.

Two women in blue jeans and shapeless gray sweat shirts were Lesbians. Their movement scarcely qualified as dancing at all, even by the debased standards of the present event. Instead, they deemed it a measure of their freedom to be able to openly engage in kissing and stroking on the dance floor.

A boy wearing a shabby tuxedo and top hat, with his face painted yellow and red, spun like a Dervish, displaying no sense of rhythm or form. He had no aptitude for study and lacked the discipline to derive any benefit from a university experience, and yet felt entitled to a full scholarship to one of the most prestigious colleges in the nation.

One couple, each in black from head to toe, clutched each other and rocked as though in the grip of an attack of deliriums tremens. She was an associate professor of English. He was “a poet.” Both believed that the problems of society were due to the necessity of each individual to earn a living, and both called upon the workers of the world to overthrow the creators of wealth and to distribute their riches among “the people.” That they lived in a townhouse purchased by her father was a fact neither found difficult to ignore.

“Hey, man, your attire is far away.”

The girl who spoke to Banden was pretty, slim, and with the exaggerated eye-makeup of a child exploring the treasures of her mother’s dressing table. She was slightly shorter than he and wore her dark hair long, unstyled, and untied. “I’m Angel Human,” she said.

He started. “Is that really your name?”

She shrugged and emitted a doltish grin. “I don’t know. What does it matter? Names aren’t important as long as you love everybody. Why can’t we just be? La la la, life is so simple.” Someone nearby handed her something from his fingertips to hers. She put it in her mouth and inhaled, then held it out to Nathan. “Want to smoke a Mary Jean cigarette?”

Banden took it with the fascination, dread, and morbid curiosity he would have felt had it been a loaded gun. He knew what this contraband substance was, but it had never occurred to him that the opportunity actually to sample it would ever present itself in the circles in which he moved. Internally committing himself to whatever dangers lay before him, he put the cigarette to his lips and drew in sharply. The smoke plunging into his chest caused his throat to clench and loosed a spasm of coughing, at which Angel Human laughed merrily.

“Your first time, huh? Far away. Not so much this time. Here.”

As she held the cigarette up to his lips and he took a puff, he became transfixed by her eyes. They were large, brown, and guileless—so different from his former lover’s ice-blue eyes, with their sparks of intelligence, their glint of calculation, their burning awareness of existence as the ground of all phenomena. It would be nice, Nathan felt, to be absorbed by these eyes, to receive from their untroubled placidity a sanction for the cessation of striving, of pushing, of achieving, and instead merely to exist in the here and now, like an animal or a rock. He took another puff as she smiled softly at him.

“Hey,” she said. “Wanna dance?”

He was about to protest that he didn’t know how, when she summarily began shifting and gyrating in place, more or less in rhythm with the throbbing wail of the popular music blaring from loudspeakers across the room. She pulled on the cigarette and held it up for him. He drew on it again. She then passed it to someone nearby and, with a luxuriant toss of her head, exhaled the smoke directly at him as her hair rippled on either side of her smooth, child-like face. “You’re cute,” she said.

“So are you,” he said.

“Hey, let’s engage in heavy petting.”

He hesitated. “I’m not sure I should.”

“Oh, man, don’t make me trip over a bum,” she said, rolling her large, liquid eyes with exasperation. “Hang up on society and call up freedom long-distance! Don’t let the square world drag you down. Because what if they threw a war and nobody caught it? Did you know that the Earth is like ninety percent water? It’s our home and it’s water, okay? The Earth is our home and we live here, man, covered in water. It’s like a big aquarium and we’re all fish. Fish don’t make bombs. Fish don’t declare war on other people just because they’re different. They live for today because tomorrow is just today that hasn’t come yet. That’s why this is the dawning of the age of aquariums. Everybody should do what fish do—stay in the school, get in the swim, and enjoy Nature.”

It was a nonsensical fit of verbal hysteria, an ignorant mélange of colloquial expressions, simplistic metaphors, and crude piscine symbolism, but Banden listened to it in a state of transfixed fascination. It articulated a view of the world, a set of values, a code, which he never knew existed. Compared to this, Dragnie’s comments about mind, will, and rationality seemed simply too difficult to confront and too demanding to live up to. The simplicity of Angel’s expression, the fluidity and grace with which she carried herself, the guileless directness of her manner of interaction, and of course her physical attractiveness, proved convincing evidence to Banden of the correctness of her views, however nonsensical they were in reality.

“You’re right,” he said dazedly.

“Come on.”

It took ten minutes by cab to reach her apartment, a small studio in an old apartment building in a quaint residential part of the city, where poets and painters of previous eras had lived, but which was now occupied by the children of the privileged while they attended university, where they spent the days protesting its curricula and policies and the nights engaging in lurid escapades involving mentally-disorienting drugs and sexual activities devoid of metaphysical dimensions.

As she unlocked her front door he thought, Do you see this, Dragnie? Here is a place to which you cannot gain admission. It is the place of today’s stylish and hip-most young people, who have something to say to society and want the whole world to jibe on their now message. His voice tremulous with hope, he said, “Is what we’re going to do a thing?”

She smiled. “Definitely,” she said. “It’s a thing and we’re going to hang it out.”

“It sounds like it will have many grooves.”

“It already does,” she said, and pulled him into the apartment.

^{Chapter 5}

When You Are Hot You Are Hot.

When You Are Not You Are Not.

On the morning of the third day of her convalescence, Dragnie was sitting up in bed in Doc Hastings’s clinic, reading with ruthless literacy the freight manifests and other railroad documents sent to Glatt’s Gorge by her assistants in New York, when John Glatt appeared in the doorway. As always, his face bore no outward sign of his inner state of being, apart from a slight narrowing of the eyes signaling an absolute love of existence and a barely-perceptible wiggling of the ears manifesting a withering contempt for reality.

“Hello, John,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

“I’ve just been speaking to Fritz,” Glatt said.

“Our loyal chauffeur? On the telephone?”

“Yes. Nathan has been compelling Fritz to drive him to various social engagements the past several evenings.”

“Oh, is that all?” Dragnie said, chuckling.

“No,” Glatt said, not chuckling. “Nathan has been accompanied in these nightly outings by a young lady—the same young lady, every night—who, Fritz said, is physically attractive in a girlish, lissome way said to be appealing to the masses of men for whom, according to the latest fashionable magazines, such an appearance and manner are widely considered to be pleasing.”

“I see. And she is how old?”

“Approximately eighteen. At the end of each evening Nathan requests that Fritz deposit both of them at the girl’s dwelling, a squalid little apartment in the disreputable section of Greenwich Village frequented by bohemians and non-conformists. And now excuse me. I’ve got work to do in my secret laboratory, dedicating all of my intelligence and energy to the creation of an invention thus far unseen by the eyes of men.”

Glatt left. Dragnie pondered what course of action would best honor her highest code of values and conduct. After a few moments of pitiless concentration and dispassionate analysis, it became clear that the optimal course of action for her would be to return to New York, initiate a discussion with Nathan A. Banden and, at a precise moment the arrival of which she would identify by a combination of innate instinct and objective calculation, shriek emasculating insults at him and, if feasible, repeatedly slap his face as hard as she could. He would, she felt with the confidence of certitude, recoil from this expression of her displeasure. But she did not doubt her ability to pursue him both verbally and physically, whether in the apartment, around the corridors of the world-famous Johnsonwood Building, or up and down the street. She would do so until, having delivered a sufficient quantity of slaps and, if a propitious opportunity presented itself for such actions, punches, he acknowledged her theme and accepted its premise. Its premise was that she accepted full responsibility for how old she was. Its premise was that if he had begun to experience her age as a “bring-off” and a “turn-down” he need only have said something, and she would have prevailed on John Glatt to invent something to make her younger. Its premise was, thus, inescapably, that it was his fault that she was old, that she was compelled, by a reasonable assessment of her self-interest, to slap him and yell her values at him, and that she was now forced to wonder if she—she; Dragnie Tagbord—were not enough for him.

Flinging the papers aside, she tore off the bedclothes and struggled to her feet. Striding out of the clinic, Dragnie barely heard the astonished Doc Hastings cry, “What th—?”. She did not stop to reply. She had to find her plane, prepare it for flight, and return to New York. She shuffled in staggering steps down the dirt track toward the air strip, her thin hospital booties shredding against the loose stones and sun-baked ruts of the road. Behind her she heard Doc Hastings yell, “Dragnie! God damn it! Not again! Where are you going?”

“Home!” Dragnie shouted, not looking back.

“Where—New York? Bushwa. You’re in no shape to go anywhere, least of all to the airport in order to commandeer that twin-engine dual prop Cessna for an eight-hour solo flight back to Teeterboro! If you take off in that thing you will crash and die. Now get back here.” She did not heed his command. She did not stop and get back there. She did not do anything other than the thing that she did, which was to continue walking.

“Miss Tagbord?”

Out of nowhere, a figure had appeared. It was a young woman who had apparently run over to her from Ed Virility’s Bait ‘n’ Tackle Shoppe across the road, where Ed Virility, the nation’s top forensic ophthalmologist, had pioneered an important breakthrough in using fishing gear to conduct forensic ophthalmology and then refused to share it with the rest of either the forensic ophthalmology world or the fishing gear world. Dragnie walked on, examining the girl with a cursory glance but never breaking stride. The girl looked vaguely familiar. Her haircut, in a style no longer in fashion, reminded Dragnie of some similar style she had either seen or dreamed about years before. Her clothes—trim chino pants, showing off her slim shape to perfection; a loose white blouse accentuating her superb posture; the sensible flat shoes announcing their utter disregard for standard notions of feminine footwear—also looked like something Dragnie had seen in the past.

“Do you have a minute?” the young lady asked. “I’ve been dying to meet you. My name is—well, my real name is Phyllis Upp, but that is of no consequence. Don’t you know who I am?”

Dragnie marched on, fully determined to continue marching on. “Should I?” she said.

The girl smiled. “I’m you. I’m ‘Dragnie Tagbord.’ I play you here at the Gorge.”

Dragnie stopped. She turned and fully exposed herself to the sight of the young lady at whom her eyes were openly staring. It was only then that it struck her, that she was indeed looking at herself—or, rather, at herself as she had been ten years earlier. The young woman’s face resembled the younger Dragnie’s. Her hair, her clothes, her personal sense of individual style and her unique, kicky personality that made her one-in-a-million unique and someone people liked to be near, were identical to Dragnie’s of a decade earlier. “But you’re… perfect,” Dragnie breathed.

The girl smiled. “Yes, that’s how I’m playing you. As the perfect woman. As a fully conscious being who loves existence and maintains complete awareness in everything she does, says, and thinks.”

“Yes,” Dragnie replied. “That is exactly what I am.”

“I know it.”

“No, I know it.”

“Well,” the girl laughed, “I know it in a different way. You see, Miss Tagbord, I’m a work of art, and as such represent a re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments. My depiction of you is an even more accurate depiction of you than is your depiction of you. I’m more you than you are you.”

“But how can you be sure?” Dragnie asked, as always supremely concerned with the truth of her self-knowledge. “How can you be certain that your depiction is accurate? Your metaphysical judgments represent opinions of purest subjectivity.”

“Not if they’re accurate,” the girl said. “Then they’re transformed from being subjective opinions to objective facts.”

“And how can you be sure your subjective opinions are accurate?”

“Because it’s not just me,” the girl smiled. “Everybody I talk to about you says, ‘Yes, that’s how she was—the perfect woman, supremely aware and with a volitional consciousness impervious to the influence of the so-called unconscious.’” The girl shrugged, as though stating something obvious and indisputable. “Their belief in your perfection proves it’s an objective reality. That’s why I’ve created an entire philosophical system based on my experience as an actress here at Glatt’s Gorge. I call it ‘Objectivismism.’ Its principle tenet is what I have just articulated: that one’s subjective opinions are, when also held by other men, elevated to the status of objective fact.”

Chuckling, Dragnie chuckled. “But… but that’s exactly how I’ve always felt, too,” she said. “Ever since I was fourteen. I read a book about demi-god heroes who announced their beliefs to each other as they triumphed over mortal enemies, and I thought, ‘This is how life should be—and would be, if my parents weren’t such moral cowards, and possessed the courage to see things as they really are, in black and white. If only I could be surrounded by people who think as I do, life would be perfect.’”

“Of course,” the actress said. “The more you’re surrounded by people who agree with you, the more you know your ideas are objectively correct.”

“May I ask you something?” Dragnie found herself saying. “I don’t know you but I sense that you can be trusted. Recently a man betrayed me. I am significantly older than he, and his unfaithfulness was with a much younger woman—a teenager, actually. And yet I know him to be a supremely rational, if still somewhat immature, young man. His actions seem to suggest that I am not enough for him. But how, if I am as perfect as you contend, can this be possible?”

The young woman playing “Dragnie Tagbord” chuckled. “That’s easy. It isn’t possible. It’s not that you aren’t enough for him. It’s that he isn’t enough for you. You’re too much for him. He betrayed you because you threaten him.”

Dragnie embraced the young woman and said, “Thank you, Phyllis. As an actress, you possess keen insight into human reality. What you just said sounds perfect. Which means it is perfect.”

^{Chapter 6}

The Conversation of Talking People Saying Things

It took five days for Dragnie to regain sufficient strength and stamina to enable her to return to New York. During her convalescence she had directed Tagbord Rail from afar, communicating via telephone with her subordinates and conveying ideas from her mind into their consciousness via the power of human speech. She had also consulted with Glatt and his colleagues about the Peoples’ States of the People’s declaration of war, and Mr. Jenkins’s issuance of an arrest order for Glatt and the others.

“It makes no sense,” Dragnie had said. “Mr. Jenkins knows he is nothing more than an impotent puppet who serves at your pleasure. Why would he want to antagonize you?”

“The Strike is teaching Americans many things,” Glatt had explained. “It’s showing America that it can survive without jobs, without income, without tolerance, without opportunity, and without most of the rudiments of a modern civilization—which is to say, the very things guaranteed by government. All it takes is a willingness to redefine the word ‘survive.’ Sooner or later it will dawn on Americans that they can survive without government itself, and that a nation run by corporations, who are obedient to the demands and the rules of the market when they are not busy subverting or conspiring against them, is all that men need in order to live a life minimally acceptable to the mass of citizens and maximally desirable for the corporations themselves. Mr. Jenkins, as the Head Person of the government, knows this. He knows his job is in jeopardy. That is why he wants to arrest me and, indeed, all of us.” He had paused, and then added, “That is why we must avoid capture as we continue to press the Strike.”

During her more leisurely hours Dragnie also meditated on her relationship with Nathan A. Banden. Now that the termination of her pregnancy had taken place, what would his response be? Did she still desire him as a lover? Did he her? None of these questions possessed ready answers, but one thing seemed certain: Banden had been deeply hurt by her decision to decline motherhood, and even more betrayed by her refusal to allow him to accompany her to Glatt’s Gorge. He had said he would be moving back to his parents’ house, and she could not but assume that he had done so.

She arrived at the penthouse under cover of night and in the concealment of an unfashionable garment. Accompanied by her chauffeur, Dragnie planned to gather some essential clothes and business materials, and then to rendezvous with Glatt at their secret safe-house. She debarked from the elevator on the top floor of the world-famous, prize-winning Johnsonwood Building, unlocked her front door, and rushed in.

“Hello, Dragnie,” Nathan A. Banden said.

Dragnie did not permit herself to scream the epithet she so desperately wanted to scream. “Hello,” she replied.

“How are you feeling?”

“A little weak still, but—“

He chuckled. “Weak? From your five day tryst with your in-effect husband? You must have had a fine vacation indeed.”

“I?” she chuckled. “Vacation? I was in bed the whole time.”

“I’m sure you were in bed—where, one may assume, you enjoyed the superior amatory talents of your other lover, a man old enough to be my father. But why tell me, Dragnie? It’s certainly none of my business. Not any more.”

“I mean, Nathan, that I sustained a bad cut, lost a lot of blood, and had to stay in bed while I recuperated. I hardly saw John at all. He’s been busy with his advisers, talking about the People’s States.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure he has been. Somebody has to save our way of life, so it might as well be the great and heroic John Glatt.”

“Is something wrong, Nathan?”

“With society? Oh, I think one could say that, yes. Ask yourself this, Dragnie: What if somebody threw a war and nobody caught it?”

“I?” she cried. “Ask myself that? Don’t be preposterous.”

“I? Preposterous?” he chuckled. “Tell me, are you aware of the fact that the Earth is ninety percent water? And what does that make Man?”

“Wet?”

“A fish. Man is a fish, Dragnie. And there is nothing that you, or John Glatt, or the rest of your tightened-up rich friends, can say or do that will make it any different.”

“I see,” Dragnie said. “These are uncharacteristic expressions, Nathan. Do I sense a shift in your values? Has your perception of reality altered in some vital way?”

“It has.”

“Then I can only conclude that you have been sleeping with another woman.”

“I have. Wait here.”

Banden strode out of the living room toward his bedroom in the rear. Several moments later he re-appeared with a young woman. Both of them were naked. Joining hands, they stood before Dragnie.

“Dragnie,” Banden said, “Angel Human and I are going to have a sexual relationship. I trust that will receive your permission and blessing. It of course will have no effect on my relationship with you, so there is no rational reason for you to object to it.”

Dragnie smiled, as a man might smile at an apprentice displaying competence at a task of which the man had been teacher. “Of course I permit it,” she said. “Of course I give it my blessing. It’s nice to meet you, Angel Human.”

“Cool. Hi.”

“In fact, Nathan, why don’t you and Angel Human join us for our dinner party tonight? We’re having a few friends over and the conversation will be sparkling and enlightening, since it will deal exclusively with reality.”

“We’d love to,” Banden said icily. “Wouldn’t we, Angel?”

“Far away from sight.”

“But Dragnie,” Banden added. “This apartment hardly looks like a place scheduled to be the scene of a sparkling dinner party.”

“Oh, we’re not holding it here. We have to temporarily move to a secret location while John works out some problems with the government.”

“A secret location?” Banden’s mouth displayed an amused smile of purest mockery and somewhat-alloyed contempt. “It sounds like they’re after him. Has an arrest warrant been issued for John?”

“Not formally, no,” Dragnie replied coolly. “But he is wanted for questioning.”

Angel’s eyes grew wide with the expression of willed innocence and falsely childlike wonder typical of her generational and cultural cohort. “Really? The Pigs are after your husband? Far away from sight!”

“We’re not married. In any case, the matter is being addressed,” Dragnie said. “But you two may feel free to stay here and I’ll send Fritz to pick you up at six. Casual dress, naturally. Now excuse me, I must pack and run.”

Dragnie strode from the living room toward her own bedroom, noting, as she went, Angel Human’s comment to the young man. “She seems nice,” the girl said.

* * *

“The paradox of the unconscious, my dear, is that we are only aware of it when we are not aware of it, and by then it is too late.”

A cascade of glittering laughter followed this witticism as the preparation and imbibing of cocktail drinks continued. Dragnie was about to wonder where her final two guests were when they arrived: Nathan A. Banden and Angel Human were ushered into the Glatts’s secret location by Fritz, the loyal chauffeur.

The apartment was an elegant, spacious three-bedroom duplex in a nondescript building at an unregistered address, and was concealed from the sight of men by a three-dimensional camouflage projection conveying the deceptive impression of a leather tannery. Banden was at first confused when, expecting a sumptuous yet tasteful example of architectural splendor as the site of the evening’s activity, he and Angel were escorted into what appeared to be a dilapidated industrial structure. But their disorientation upon entering the building was nothing compared to his bedazzlement as he was introduced to the array of accomplished, glamorous guests.

Dragnie rose, put her perfectly mixed martini down onto the handsome table designed by a famous table designer, and conducted the introductions. “May I present Grace Adams, the beautiful movie star, and her husband, Derek Maxwell, the popular British spy. Grace is the extramarital lover of my husband, John Glatt. Now may I introduce noted author Andrea Smith, her lover, Paul Rogers, the brilliant physicist, and her husband, top economist Alan Greenback. Beside them are prima ballerina Marie Francais, who is Alan’s mistress, and her husband, Nils Nillssonsonson, the Norwegian philologist, who is Andrea’s sometime-paramour. Everybody, this is Nathan A. Banden, my extramarital lover, and his little girlfriend, Angel Human.”

 As Banden and Angel shook hands with the other guests and found places for themselves on the elegant, spare sectional Danish seating system created by a famous Danish sofa creator, Dragnie took the keenest pleasure in observing Nathan’s reaction to this dazzling array of achievement, beauty, and intelligence. The chic and flattering clothes on the women, and their expertly-applied makeup; the stylish dress of the men, and the ease with which they discoursed on abstruse matters of political economy, aesthetics, and epistemology; the sophistication of everyone’s cigarettes—did Banden know how privileged he was to be included in this event? The question went unanswered in Dragnie’s mind as Nils Nilssonsonson directed a jovial query to Glatt in his charmingly-Norwegian-accented English.

“So, tell me, John. This Strike of yours, to teach the world a lesson by destroying America. It goes well, yes?”

Glatt’s face, an expressionless array of flat planes and sharp angles, accommodated itself to the sipping of a vodka gimlet prepared with the highest competence by Juan, the Filipino bartender, as he replied, “Yes.”

“You mean it was your idea?” Angel asked in a tone of surprise.

“Yes.”

“But don’t you think it’s sad, that people are so bummed up in their heads about everything?” the girl inquired in a juvenile tone of voice. “I mean, ‘cause, like, when nobody has a job, and everybody is intolerant of everyone’s race and creed and everything, and everyone’s poor and sleeping in the bus station and everything, isn’t that, like, bad?”

“No, Angel,” Dragnie said, her gaze fixed on Nathan A. Banden. “What would be bad is if they slept in the train station.”

A burst of knowing laughter greeted this observation—laughter from everyone in attendance except Angel Human, who did not understand the allusion, and Nathan A. Banden, who looked uncomfortably from Dragnie to Angel and back again.

“Besides, Miss Human, what is ‘bad’ about freedom?” Glatt remained impassive, his expression displaying the confidence borne of the unyielding certitude that, while other men could be wrong about some things, he never could, because he knew he was right. “Is it ‘bad’ that men be free to suffer?”

“Uhm?”

“’Uhm’ indeed, Angel,” Dragnie said. “Nathan, you didn’t tell me that your girlfriend possessed such a keen theoretical mind. I can see what attracts you to her.”

“Now see here, Dragnie—“

“Is it ‘bad’ that each man be liberated from the atavistic shackles of a cowardly social order whose inability to accept reality was for centuries faked out and smushed over by the empty cliché that ‘man is a social animal’?” Glatt asked aloud.

“Ehrm?”

“But see here, John,” Derek Maxwell said. “If man isn’t a social animal, what is he?”

“He is an individual,” Glatt said. “He has always been an individual, even from the time he was a little baby. And everything he has done, from the invention of the English muffin to the creation of the atomic bomb, he has done on his own, without help from anyone.”

Andrea Smith looked mischievous as she said, “Not even… from society?”

“Society is a myth, my dear,” Alan Greenback purred. “Society is what we call it when two individuals stop strangling each other and break for lunch.”

“Oh, come, Alan. Don’t you think you’re being a bit reductive?” Grace Adams, the unforgettable star of movies, said. “Even you must admit that civilization is the result of society going to work each day creating industry and agriculture, and then coming home and enjoying ample leisure and cultural activities.”

“I admit no such thing, Grace,” Greenback twinkled genially. “Ask the philosophy boys and they’ll tell you to ask the anthropology boys, who’ll tell you that civilization’s spent the last two thousand years sitting on its hands and playing pinochle.”

“Is that not a contradiction?” the ballerina with the French name said. “One gentleman, he says one thing. The other gentleman, he says another thing.”

Perplexedly, Angel Human said, “Fahm?”

“Don’t say anything,” Nathan A. Banden told her.

“There is no such thing as contradiction,” Glatt declared with finality. “Reality—real reality—permits no disagreements.”

“I am not seeing it that way,” Nils Nilssonsonson said.

“Then you are wrong,” Glatt replied. “Reality is binary and absolute. That is why opinion is something properly confined to animals and, to a lesser extent, plants. Something either is true, or it is not true. Either something exists, or it does not. If it does not exist, we say, ‘Hey, what happened to it?’ Then we discover that it does exist, and we say, ‘Oh, never mind, here it is.’”

“I don’t do that,” Angel said.

“Oh just shut up,” Banden muttered. “Let them talk.”

“Na-than,” the girl whined. “Be nice.”

“The morality of reason rests on the axiom that existence exists,” Glatt continued. “All of the problems of the world, throughout history, are the result of men seeking to deny this fundamental truth. Their evasions and denials take several forms. Some men say, ‘Existence has never existed, so we may as well enslave mankind.’ Others aver, ‘Existence used to exist, but it went away.’ Still others claim, ‘Existence does not exist yet, but we expect it to exist in about fifteen minutes.’ All of these are gross misconceptions. For either existence exists, or it does not. And we know that existence does exist. We know it exists because we can go outside and point to it. We go outside. I point to something. You say, ‘What is that?’ I say, ‘That is the thing that exists.’ You say, ‘Oh, of course. Thank you.’ I say, ‘You’re welcome.’ And all the while we feel free to ignore the underlying fact that if the thing did not exist we would not be talking about it. This holds true for everything in human history except unicorns. They do not exist but we are compelled to talk about them from time to time. And when we do, we are not conscious. Any man who discusses unicorns is, by definition, asleep. Besides, it is impossible that existence not exist. To the man who says, ‘Existence does not exist’ we say: then what does? That man is invariably at a loss to reply.”

“Bravo, John Glatt,” Paul Rogers, the brilliant physicist, said. “Let me, if you will, extend your thinking. It is man’s capacity for reason that keeps him from being a crazy person. That is why the businessman is the highest form of human being. No lunatic can be a businessman, else the other businessman with whom he attempts to deal will say, ‘You are insane, and I will not deal with you.’”

“I don’t understand this kind of talk,” Angel Human said.

“Just pay attention and keep your mouth shut,” Nathan A. Banden hissed at her.

“Nathan?” Andrea Smith murmured. “Your girlfriend gives some appearance of being stupid. One is tempted to conclude that you are stupid, too.”

“I am not stupid!” Banden cried. “Please, sir, continue.”

Rogers smiled. “Thank you. Now, we are a society run by businessmen, and by corporations, who are identical to businessmen except that they wear buildings instead of suits. This means we are a rational society. And, since no businessman is in the business of causing human suffering, it follows that anyone suffering in society is not a businessman, and therefore is not rational, and thus can be said to be insane.”

Everyone raised their glass in a silent congratulatory toast—everyone, that is, with the exception of Angel Human. The girl suddenly leaped to her feet and addressed the others in a tone of anger common to those unaware of the fact that their code of morality is inferior to those of the superior people to whom she speaks. “How can you people talk this way?” she demanded. “People who’ve lost their jobs… people who’ve lost their homes… people who’re living on the streets and in tents out in fields—they’re not insane! They’re just poor!”

Dragnie smiled with pitiless sympathy. “You haven’t been listening, Angel. We just proved that they are insane. Nathan?” She looked pointedly at Banden and made a gesture of appeal. “I think it would be best if you and Angel left in embarrassment and disgrace, don’t you?”

“I certainly do,” Banden seethed. “I have no patience for people who take pleasure in mocking someone not as brilliant as they are.”

“I’m leaving, too,” Angel Human announced. “I don’t like people who don’t love everybody, and who only believe in providing goods and services for money. I think everyone should feel sorry for everyone else, because otherwise you have a mean society.”

Dragnie walked the two young people to the front door. She smiled coolly at Banden and said, “You must be completely humiliated. Well, good night, and thank you for coming.” After they had exited the building she closed the door.

Out on the sidewalk, Angel Human tried to conceal her dismay with a hollow, forced laugh. “Wow, what terrible people,” she said.

Banden did not answer. Instead, he took a few steps to the corner and peered up at the two street signs identifying the intersection. Nearby was that essential utility without which a civilization cannot function: a public telephone booth. Entering it and placing coins in the slot, he dialed some numbers and, when a voice answered, said, “Hello? Is this the government? My name is Nathan A. Banden and I’m at the intersection of Crenshaw and Third…”

They were still standing there when, several minutes later, three unmarked cars and a van roared up and disgorged ten men in trench coats and carrying side arms. The men rushed into the building. Banden dragged Angel into the concealment of an awning’s shadow as they watched the men lead Dragnie, Glatt, and their guests out, forced them into the van, and drove off into the night.

PART III

Non-Being

and

Somethingness

^{Chapter 1}

Fixed for Great Justice

“What is the matter, honey?”

“Nothing,” Nathan A. Banden said. “Just, for god’s sake, you little fool, shut up.”

The chair, which was of the beanbag variety, was of a bright pink color. It smelled of plastic, and of death. It was symbolic of a world in which Banden had recently come to realize that he no longer loved life.

A week had passed since agents of the government had seized Dragnie, Glatt, and the other guests at the party and, Banden assumed, spirited them off to an undisclosed location. Banden now lay sprawled on the crunchily noisy seating unit, flailing about in its impudent grasp, imprisoned within the untidy and faintly repulsive apartment of Angel Human. The television had just broadcast an announcement informing the American people that, in ten minutes, Mr. Jenkins would introduce Miss Dragnie Tagbord to make a very special announcement to the public. “Mr. Jenkins wants you to watch Miss Dragnie Tagbord’s important address to the People, so please be sure to do so!” the “public service announcement” commanded. Banden, determined to avoid viewing the program, had struggled to extricate himself from the chair, but had failed in his purpose.

“Do you need a hand getting up?” Angel inquired.

“No! Just stop talking,” he sighed. “I’m… fine. Just fine.”

Parting her long, straight hair from either side of her childlike, smooth face, she smiled as though speaking to a disgruntled toddler. “Are you looking forward to hearing your friend on television?”

“My friend be damned!” he cried.

“Na-than,” she chided. “You don’t have to bite my head off with displaced frustration. You’ve been such a big grouchy puss lately.”

“Stop talking baby talk! Speak the way intelligent men speak, in complete sentences tidily arranged in elaborate, extended paragraphs making full use of dependent clauses, perfectly articulated chains of logical, sequentially-arranged phrases, a formal and, arguably, somewhat artificial deployment of commas—and inserted sub-comments set off by em-dashes in the service of providing auxiliary but nonetheless logically valid digressions—and, if it were to prove necessary, accurate employment of the conditional tense, I tell you!”

“You say men but I’m not a man. I’m a human woman, which is the proper way to denominate a female individual in our society today.”

“I can’t live like this, I tell you!”

“If you don’t like the beanbag chair go sit somewhere else, silly.”

“Oh, Angel, Angel—“

“Although everybody else that comes here likes it,” she noted. “And I think people are all the same, and so they should all like the same kinds of chairs. Individual taste and personal proclivity just lead to arguments and fighting and wars and stuff. That’s why genius is bad and mediocrity is preferable. I think that and I think you should, too.”

Banden surrendered to the enveloping grasp of the chair, acutely conscious of the reality that he despised existence.

Less than a mile away, in a television studio located in a moderately important building, Dragnie sat on a small sofa in a so-called green room near a sound stage. Two agents of the government, in identical dark suits, flanked her and observed her every move. Across from her, leaning forward anxiously from a folding metal chair, sat Mr. Jenkins, the Head Person of the Government of the United States.

“I must say, Miss Tagbord, I’m rather impressed with how reasonable you’re being about all this,” he said, his face wreathed in a desperate, obsequious smile. “Especially after your initial resistance to making our little speech.”

“Your threat was quite clear, Mr. Jenkins,” Dragnie said coolly. “You did, after all, threaten to hold John Glatt, Mr. De Soto, and the others—including me—in a military prison for an indefinite period of time, without recourse to counsel, under a series of State of Emergency laws summarily passed by you without any consultation with us as the Board of Directors of the United States, or any other acknowledgment of due process.”

“We are at war, Miss Tagbord. The usual nuances of peacetime legality do not apply.”

“So you claim. In any case, John and I discussed the situation and agreed on what we considered to be a rational response.”

“Yes, well, I always figured Glatt for a sensible fellow.” The career bureaucrat sat back and indulged in a chuckle, chuckling. “Mind you, I’m no fan of this embargo brought about by the People’s States. I’m no fan of it at all! But then you and Glatt call this Strike, and the People’s States declare war—well, I mean to say, nobody benefits from any of it! It’s bad for business all the way around. He sees that, and you see it, and, well, I’m just glad you all are willing to help us calm things down.” He glanced at his watch, an overpriced and vulgar instrument of no great precision, and inaccurate below a depth of two fathoms. “Better get yourself together. You go on in fifteen minutes.” He held out a sheaf of typescript. “Do you, uh, want to see the text again?”

“No, thank you,” Dragnie said. “I’ll read it from the teleprompter.”

“Fine, fine. Suit yourself.” Mr. Jenkins rose and headed for the door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Meanwhile, if you need anything…”

Dragnie nodded. She needed nothing. A single reading of the speech Mr. Jenkins and his speechwriters had composed had been enough to disclose the theme, content, and purpose of this address, both explicitly and, more importantly, implicitly. It called for an end to the Strike. Effective immediately, all actions and policies that had been implemented to subvert the idea of America as an ideal of liberty, equality, and opportunity, in the mind of men, would be cancelled. This would have the effect—and this was patently the reason and purpose behind the speech and the Strike’s cancellation—of reasserting the validity of and the need for government. In return, the forces holding John Glatt and the others prisoner would release them, unharmed. Mr. Jenkins would negotiate a diplomatic truce with the People’s States of the People, the war would be declared over, and, after some token assurances that American manufacturers would take steps to improve the safety of their products, the embargo would be lifted. Life would return to normal—and governments all over the world would be safe, once more, from a threat to their existence.

“Miss Tagbord?” A young man knocked on the green room door and opened it. “Five minutes.”

Dragnie nodded. She was ready.

“Good evening, my fellow American citizens.”

Banden watched Mr. Jenkins glumly from the implacable clutches of the beanbag chair as Angel sat nearby. Unable to cope with reality, she smoked a Mary Jean cigarette and damaged her consciousness in the manner promoted by her generation of lazy hedonists who expected something for nothing.

“As you know, we have been in the midst of a national emergency,” Mr. Jenkins continued. He summarized the embargo issued by the People’s States of the People, the Strike as called for by John Glatt, and the subsequent Declaration of War by the People’s States. “I’m sure you agree with me that it all seems so… hostile,” Mr. Jenkins went on. “Everybody is suffering—our people, people all over the world, and the people in governments in every country on Earth. That is why I am pleased, now, to introduce Miss Dragnie Tagbord, who as a member of the Board of Directors of the United States and an original participant in the Great Takeover, is known to you all. She has some words about the war, and the Strike, that I know you will all want to hear. Miss Tagbord…?”

As Banden stared in a miasma of guilt, despair, and impotent self-loathing, the image of Dragnie appeared on the screen. She wore a gray jumpsuit suggestive of some sort of official captivity, and the effects of a week’s detention were evident in her drawn, haggard face. “Thank you, Mr. Jenkins,” she began. “Ladies and gentlemen: As you may know, the text of the speech I am supposed to deliver appears on a small screen just under the lens of the camera that is beaming my image to your television sets. I am to read the speech, while appearing to be looking into the camera, at you, the American people. The speech is one in which I call on all of you to end the Strike that John Glatt initiated in his now-famous Broadcast From the Moon. I am, supposedly, to call on you to restore America’s reputation as a place of economic opportunity, religious tolerance, and racial understanding, and to cease and desist from pursuing our Strike goals of promoting poverty, bigotry, and racist hatred. But I am not going to do that.”

Suddenly alert to an ominous tone of defiance in Dragnie’s voice, Banden sat up with an abrupt jerk, or tried to, but failed, and flopped backwards into the yielding, entrapping sack of pebbles.

“I am not going to do that, because to do that would be to compromise our highest value—that the poor be just as free in theory to become rich as the rich are free in reality to become richer. It would compromise our most cherished principle—that individuals collected into groups known as governments and unions represent mediocrity and are an unmitigated evil, while individuals collected into groups known as corporations represent the pinnacle of civilization. It would compromise our noblest foundational axioms of truth, which hold that existence exists whether it wants to or not, that everything is itself and so everything is everything, and that only tautologies offer the basis for an unchallengeable philosophy, because only tautologies are always true, because they have to be, which means that they are.”

“Nathan, are you okay?” Angel was looking at him in concern. But it was the concern of the silly nitwit for the wellbeing of the superior man, and as such was of no consequence. “You have like this weird expression on your face.”

“Just please,” he replied, eyes fixed firmly on the television screen. “Please, I beg you, do whatever you can to shut up. She’s… she’s wonderful.”

“You whose company manufactured those spontaneously-combusting legal pads, whose products are no longer bought in the other nations of the world; you whose job consisted in packing and shipping fourteen-ounce jars of marinated okra, whose off-gassing vapors have proven toxic to all mammals, including Man; you who have spent your days delivering shipments of potassium-fiber bathing suits which explode upon contact with water: what’ll you do now, you ask? Now that your companies have gone bankrupt and left you without income? We say: so long as you are conscious, you are alive. And we want you to live. We want you to remain conscious.”

In the control room of the television studio, Mr. Jenkins cried to the technicians, “This isn’t the speech she’s supposed to give! Cut her off!”

The engineer, whose life, unlike that of the bureaucrat, was dedicated to the clean, pure pursuit of the utmost exactitude, said, “Not so fast, Mr. Jenkins. I want to hear what she has to say—and I have a hunch other people do, too!”

“It doesn’t matter what she has to say, damn you!” he yelled. “Get her off the air!”

“This is my studio,” the engineer said, gesturing with clean, economical gestures toward the clean, efficient instruments and technology. “And as long as you’re broadcasting from my studio, you’ll play by my rules.”

“And now,” Dragnie said into the camera, “I have an announcement to make. My announcement is that Mr. Jenkins and his bureaucrat thugs have taken me, John Glatt, and several of our colleagues as their prisoner. My announcement is that we are being held in an undisclosed location until you, the American people, end this Strike. But you must not end the Strike. Rather, if John Glatt and Sanfrancisco De Soto and Hunk Rawbone and I are not released within forty-eight hours from now, the consequences around the world will be dire. You, in the meantime, must continue to display openly your natural or learned enmity toward people of other races, creeds, and religions; you must continue to reject what had once been known as the American Dream, and its promise of upward mobility, and persevere in embracing a frightened acceptance of the American Nightmare, with its threat of total financial desolation; and you must continue to transform America from the hope of the world’s peoples to the shame of all of Planet Earth. You must do this until our enemies capitulate, end this cruel embargo, and resume buying our admittedly occasionally hazardous barbecue sauces and radioactive typewriters. You must do this for the reason all true American patriots do whatever their leaders tell them to do: in the name of Freedom. As John Glatt himself once said while asking me to pass him the sour cream—“

But Dragnie was unable to continue. Mr. Jenkins strode out onto the studio and, live and on camera, pulled her out of her chair. “That’s it!” he barked at the lens. “Show’s over.” He forced her off the set, away from the cameras and microphones. “I should have known better than to trust you,” he hissed. “Well, you’ve dug your own grave. You and Glatt have had it. We’re going to bury you in a military detention center and throw away the key.”

“We’ll see about that,” Dragnie said with a mysterious smile.

“What are you doing, Nathan?” Angel said after the special announcement had ended and normal broadcasting had resumed. The girl’s attention, to the extent that it was not focused on trivial fancies and her own childish vanity, was caught by the sight of Nathan A. Banden suddenly squirming and lurching around within the grasp of the bright pink mass of plastic furniture, amorphous as a giant blob of bubble gum, in which he had lain, trapped.

“Leaving,” Banden replied, and, summoning all his energies, competence, and purpose, pushed and hoisted and managed to lift himself up out of the beanbag chair and rise to his feet.

“Where are you going?” the girl inquired.

“Where I belong,” he said, and left the apartment.

^{Chapter 2}

To Have and Then Not to Have Any More

They returned Dragnie to her cell, a windowless cube with only a cot and a toilet, its door heavily barred. After several hours a guard appeared and announced that she had a visitor. The guard escorted her into a meeting room, where she was both astounded and utterly unsurprised to discover, waiting for her, Nathan A. Banden. He looked cowed and worn down, his normally crisp attire of khaki slacks and white dress shirt both wrinkled and unwashed. He looked as though he had not shaved in several days.

“Hello, Dragnie,” he said.

“Hello, Nathan,” she replied. “You’re looking well.”

“I?” Banden laughed bitterly, as if something were funny, not in a sweet way, but a bitter way. “I look ill-kempt and disreputable. You look great, though.”

“Thank you.”

“I… I saw you on TV,” he said. “Do you… do you really think they’ll let you go in forty-eight hours?”

“No.”

“Then… then what will you do?”

“We’ll see.” She gazed at him coolly, evenly, with her eyes. “How did you find me here?”

“My father is a man of some influence,” Banden replied. “In fact, that’s one of the reasons I wished to see you. I… I want to apologize. And to beg you to forgive me. And to take me back. I was a fool to have betrayed you. I indulged in a fit of childish pique when you wouldn’t let me accompany you to Glatt’s Gorge. I felt as though you disdained my youth. And so I convinced myself, despite ample evidence to the contrary both historically and introspectively, that your age made you unattractive to me. I sought revenge for my wounded feelings by giving my attention to a younger woman—and in so doing, I behaved like a rotter. How I regret my impulsive actions! Oh, it is true that she is younger than you, and in that respect can be said to be ‘prettier’ in a girlish, fledgling way. But such immature comeliness can, in the end, only be of interest to the callow youth, the boy-man whose romanticized notions of what is attractive and desirable are as shallow, limited, and transitory as his experience in love’s ways is primitive and half-baked. To the real man, to the true man, to the man of men, no manner of superficial maidenly prettiness can compare to the deep, feminine beauty of a mature woman who has encountered the world and bested it in the pursuit of her highest values. Yes, the body has its imperatives. Yes, the need for sexual activity is fundamental. But these imperatives and needs can be satisfied through the simplest mechanisms of sexual activity, with any passably desirable and compliant female. Beneath the body, however, is the spirit. I refer, of course, to the human spirit, since we, the two of us, spend our existence as human beings. It, too—the human spirit—asserts a repertoire of needs, but its requirements and criteria are orders of magnitude more profound, more demanding, and more important than those of mere adolescent physicality. It is those—as well as the more superficial but no less pleasurable needs—whose satisfaction I found with you, Dragnie. It is those which I must resume. It is those which you must vouchsafe to me again, now and forever more. Will you, dearest? Will you forgive my foolish transgression and allow me to worship and adore you as you deserve to be worshipped and adored—by a young, hyper-potent lover with a brilliant intellectual future ahead of him?”

“No.”

“I— What?”

“No.”

“But… but you have to! I am young and virile, brilliant and energetic, vibrant and handsome and bursting with potential! I am eighteen! You are forty-three!” For a moment he was at a loss for words. Then he added, “This is a good deal for you! Plus, my father can get you out of jail!”

“Nathan,” she said. And she said it quietly, calmly, without rancor or hostility, without resentment or feelings of betrayal or the desire for revenge. “How did the government’s men know where John and I were holding that dinner party?”

He blanched, and a look of terror appeared as an expression on the face of his head. “I… how should I know…”

“You told them, didn’t you?”

“Yes!” he sobbed. “Because you were making fun of us! Not just of her! But of me! Your sophisticated friends, the men and women of achievement with whom you socialize, treated us with mockery and contempt and sneering derision! Why? Why, Dragnie, why?”

“They treated you as you presented yourself to be treated. As a high school student with a silly girlfriend, out of your league and in over your head.”

He started, stunned. And then a look of shrewd calculation replaced the expression of dismay. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Why’re you being so cruel to me? Can it be that you’re… jealous? Ha ha ha ha! The great Dragnie Tagbord, jealous of a silly, unworldly girl—who, by definition, ’s no threat to you. You can’t possibly imagine I find with her the kind of communion of kindred souls I find with you. What, then, ’s there to be jealous of? Mere sex? Does John Glatt behave this way? Is he jealous of me? Of course not. He knows I’m no threat to him. But you, who’re supposedly his female equivalent; you, who’re just as devoted as he is to only the highest codes of standards of ethics of the values of the behavior of principle of the meaning of life in the awareness of the human mind!; you, who’re committed to being so entirely conscious and rational about everything all the time: you’re jealous of a teenage girl named Angel Human! Ha ha ha ha! How amusing. How hypocritical. How… irrational!”

He thought, she could tell, that he had blocked her. He thought he had thwarted her. He thought he had won. But when she replied, it was without defiance, without heat, without self-congratulation. “Jealous? I?” She smiled. “I assure you, I am not jealous.”

“That’s what you say. That’s your mere subjective opinion.”

“No, it’s an objective fact.” From a pocket in her prison jumpsuit Dragnie produced a piece of paper. It was a standard sheet of typescript, folded in quarters, and when unfolded revealed a paragraph of typed text above a series of signatures. “I have here an affidavit attesting to the fact that I am not jealous, either of you or of your little girlfriend. It is not only signed by me, which would be of no significance, but it is also signed by other people. It therefore can be said to establish an objective fact.” She handed the sheet to him and watched as he perused it, as he squinted at the signatures of John Glatt, Hunk Rawbone, Sanfrancisco De Soto, and several others. “It is the first principle of Objectivismism: my friends all agree with me, which means that I’m right,” she said. “That is why it is important to surround yourself with people who believe what you believe. So they can help you create your reality. And that is why I can no longer allow you around me.”

She could see his defiance and confidence ebb, leaving behind the dispirited, defeated shell of a young man suddenly aware of his inability to live up to his own greatness—and to hers. “You win, Dragnie,” he muttered. “You were and are too much for me. I now realize that, even sexually, you are more desirable than Angel. As for intellectually, existentially, and psycho-epistemologically, well, there is no comparison.” He handed her the paper and stood up. “Good-bye, Dragnie. I will never forget you, nor how superior you are to every other woman in the world.”

^{Chapter 3}

It Is Your Thing;

You Do What You Want to Do

For two days, the world held its anxious, worried breath. Neither Dragnie, nor John Glatt, nor any of the other prisoners were released by Mr. Jenkins from captivity. The embargo decreed by the People’s States of the People remained in effect; the Strike called by Glatt also remained in effect. The state of war declared by the People’s States continued, albeit with no clear manifestations or acts of military hostility.

By then, Nathan A. Banden had reconciled himself to having lost Dragnie forever and, as is typical of such men when they can no longer find approval in the eyes of the best of women, he contented himself with the attentions of a lesser woman. Having relinquished all thoughts of college, he spent the day in the apartment of Angel Human, mired in the bright pink beanbag chair, watching the television. It was in this manner, therefore, that he was able to monitor the events of that convulsive day which would come to be known to men as Takeover Two.

Two days after Dragnie’s televised speech, at nine o’clock in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, in a nondescript area of the Bronx, a plain panel van pulled up before an unidentified building. Out of it emerged an armed squadron of strikingly beautiful Swedish pirates. They quickly overwhelmed the guards both outside and inside the facility, and moments later escorted Dragnie Tagbord, Hunk Rawbone, Sanfrancisco De Soto, and John Glatt out of the building and into the truck, and drove off. Astonishingly, this entire event was broadcast live on national television, as cameras and news crews, consisting of self-loathing “on-air reporters” whose sole concern was the dissemination of celebrity gossip, political scandals of the most sordid kind, stories of local crime and corruption, and sentimental “human interest” melodramas, were on hand. Nathan A. Banden therefore, by sheer happenstance, was able to watch, live, the rescue of the woman he had so selfishly, immaturely, and rotterishly betrayed.

A news helicopter was present to follow the escape van as it drove to a hidden airfield, where its passengers (except for the really quite fantastically lovely Swedish pirates) debarked and boarded a small private plane, which took off immediately. A news plane gave chase and broadcast to an astounded world the escapees’ flight to Wyoming. There Glatt’s plane descended through what proved to be an illusory visual projection depicting wild mountain crags, to land on a verdant meadow below. The news crew, unsure of its ability to land safely in pursuit of the story, radioed to the nearest city, where a vertical-takeoff-and-landing news jet was scrambled. This aircraft rendezvoused over Glatt’s Gorge—for such was the location where Glatt’s plane had landed—and successfully touched down at the air strip below. The jet’s news crew was therefore able to broadcast what transpired next.

A squadron of small, sleek, two-man jets taxied out of a heretofore hidden hangar and took off. Their destinations, men would later learn, were the capitals of the world. Each of them was armed with three things: A “ray gun” that emitted a modulated sort of radiation which, when its waves passed through the human brain, had the effect of making the subject feel deeply ashamed of himself; these were protected by a kind of shield made of a metal no man had seen before, which was able, when attacked by ordnance, bombs, or missiles, not only to deflect the incoming round but literally to reverse its course and send it back against the device that had shot it. Finally, each of the small jets was equipped with a series of non-lethal bombs which, when exploded over government buildings, released a cloud of fine-particulate talc-based chemicals that caused the officials in their blast radius, and their academic toadies and corrupted shills in the press, to acquire an immediate and intense dislike of collectivism, and to yearn instead for freedom.

All of this unfolded as Banden, and a billion other people in nations all over the globe, watched. On-air analysts speculated—accurately, it later emerged—that the jets and the “shame ray” were the inventions of John Glatt, the explosive-deflection metal the creation of Hunk Rawbone, the anti-collectivization powder the product of Sanfrancisco Nabisco Alcoa D’Lightful D’Lovely De Soto, and the personnel, both in the jets and co-ordinating their movements from the ground, were under the direction of Regnad Daghammarskjold, the notably handsome Swedish pirate.

The results of this unprecedented action were swift and decisive. As announced that afternoon on television by Dragnie Tagbord, who functioned as the liaison between the Glatt forces and the public, within five hours half the nations of the world reported that their civilian populations were thoroughly embarrassed by everything they had done, beginning with opting for the collectivism of the People’s States of the People and up to and including the recent embargo. Mass demonstrations erupted in national capitals around the globe, at which expressions of shame and abasement alternated with demands for capitalism, individualism, and a free market. Guarantees of a well-maintained public sphere, safeguards of a clean environment, provision of affordable medical care, assurance of a quality elementary and secondary education, and the protection of an old age marked by dignity and respect, were universally denounced as being “socialistic” and “parasitic.” Within twelve hours of the initial jet sorties, a wholesale rejection of collectivism and an avid embrace of corporatism had firmly taken hold in every nation on earth except Goa.

The response of the government of the United States was equally decisive. Mr. Jenkins went on the air, not only to formally resign, but to fire his entire administration. This had the effect of eliminating what few skeletal remnants still existed of the original Executive, Legislative, and Judicial systems. Over the course of two days, all of the Federal government withered away, followed by the various state governments—a transition formalized by an old man named Judge Rapahannock, who took a gift-shop copy of the Constitution and scratched it out.

Nathan A. Banden watched all this on television while dressed in pajamas and a bath robe, leaving his beanbag chair in Angel’s apartment only to attend to bodily functions and insisting she bring him meals. Three days after the initial escape by Glatt and the others, he was still watching the historical events unfold. He had viewed footage from all over the world of rioting mobs of citizens transformed, by the arrival of freedom, into swarms of jubilant consumers. He had watched the interviews with Glatt, Rawbone, De Soto, and Daghammarskjold. He had watched Dragnie conduct three press conferences. He had watched coverage of victory parades in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Dallas, and Seattle. He had watched as high government officials such as Francis Pissypants and T.T. Mucklicker had dodged reporters and muttered “no comment” and generally sought to avoid confrontation with the nation’s, and the world’s, radiant new reality.

It was while he was watching coverage of the parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue that he realized that Angel Human was not in the apartment. Compelled to prepare his own bowl of cereal, he was leaning against the kitchen counter when she burst into the flat. She was exhilarated and breathless.

“Isn’t it neat, Nathan?” she gasped happily.

“Isn’t what neat?”

“Everything! What John Glatt and those guys did! I just came back to get my camera. Somebody saw Dragnie Tagbord up the street and I want to get a picture of her! She’s so fantastic! It’s a shame you weren’t man enough to keep her.” She seized her camera from a coffee table and ran out.

Banden heard a familiar voice emanating from the television.

“Ladies and gentlemen of Earth, it is my pleasure to announce that Goa has capitulated.” It was a voice he had heard over the course of many nights, as a train had roared into the darkness along gleaming, vitamin-rich rails of Rawbonium, its two principle passengers escorting each other into the realm of ecstasy and creating, with that voice and with his, the sounds of attack, conquest, surrender, hatred, fury, triumph, and subjugation. “It is also my pleasure to announce that, as of twelve noon tomorrow, Eastern Standard Time, this nation shall be formally known as the Incorporated States of America.”

Banden put the milk back in the refrigerator and carefully closed its door. He shuffled into the bedroom and emerged with his belt. Hoisting the noisy, plastic beanbag chair, he squeezed its central section until he had reduced its volume by half. He then plunged his face into the resulting bulge above the narrowed part and, with some difficulty, lashed the furniture to his head with the belt. It did not occur to him to change his mind. It did not occur to him to attempt to undo the belt. It did not occur to him to claw his way out of the asphyxiating grip he had contrived for the pink plastic object.

Angel found him two hours later, his skin a necrotic white against the bubble-gum floridity of the clammy, suffocating bag.

^{Chapter 4}

That This Triumph Shall Be a Victory of the Winners

The coronation of John Glatt as King of the Earth took place at a ceremony two weeks after the capitulation of Goa and the final consolidation of Takeover Two. It was held in New York’s most elegant and important concert hall, and beamed to television sets all over the world. In his remarks, Glatt thanked Rawbone, De Soto, Daghammarskjold, and Dragnie, all of whom would serve on the Committee to Control the World for lifelong terms.

Glatt’s speech lasted four hours, and touched on a number of important topics, including the history of mankind, the importance of logic, the vision of Man as a heroic being, and how the free market would, henceforth, solve all of humanity’s problems. As the speech was nearing its conclusion Dragnie, standing in the wings and gazing on in proud delight, spotted a familiar face. It was Edward G. Willikers, the classmate of Nathan A. Banden whom she had met several months—and a lifetime—before, at the Glatt School. She motioned for him to join her.

“Hello, Eddie,” Dragnie said. “Don’t tell me you’re on the stage crew here, too.”

“Hi, Miss Tagbord,” the boy said. “Yeah, I’m just helping out for the summer.”

Dragnie found herself revising her characterization of him, for he no longer resembled a mere boy. “You look different, Eddie,” she said. “How’ve you changed?”

“I’m growing my hair long,” he said. “All the guys are doing it.” He indicated Glatt, out on the stage, still speaking. “Gosh, Mister Glatt is wonderful, isn’t he?”

“He certainly is, Eddie. Also… are you growing a beard?”

“Trying to,” he chuckled. “But all of you guys are great,” the youth continued. “Mr. Rawbone, Mr. De Soto… even that Regnad guy, the strikingly beautiful Swiss pirate.”

“Swedish. The Swiss have no coastline.”

“Oh. Yeah.” The young man shrugged. “I get ‘em mixed up. And you, too, Miss Tagbord. You’re really great. Men are saying that you guys are about the greatest people who ever lived.”

“Thank you, Eddie. But if you’ve been listening to Mr. Glatt’s speech, you know that he says that everyone can be a hero just like him. That means you can, too.”

“I know, but…” The young man hesitated. “Miss Tagbord? There’s a few things I don’t understand.”

“Like what, Eddie?”

“Well, like, what Mr. Glatt said in his speech two hours ago. He said, ‘Our conception of Man is as a heroic being, who lives purely for himself. Who asks no other man to do anything on his behalf, and who will do nothing on behalf of another man.’ Did I get that right?”

Dragnie smiled. “Yes, you quoted it perfectly.”

“But the thing is, Miss Tagbord, you can’t be a hero and live only for yourself. That’s not what a hero does. A hero does things for the sake of others. That’s what makes him a hero, and not just some guy doing stuff for himself, like everybody else.”

“Well, I suppose it depends—“

“And another thing. Mr. Glatt said, ‘We call on Man to live solely in the light of logic, undistracted and unimpeded by fear, shame, anger, hatred, and, yes, even love, obligation, loyalty, altruism, sacrifice, and any of the other subjective atavisms that have for millennia distorted Man’s true purpose.’”

“You have a good memory, Eddie. Yes, you see—“

“The thing is, Miss Tagbord, you can’t really be a hero unless you feel fear. Heroism isn’t when you do something that’s no big deal. It’s when you’re afraid of something that might bring harm to yourself, but you do it anyway.”

“Well, of course you’re capable of feeling fear. What Mr. Glatt means is, we admire most the superior man who has no feeling for others—not because he chooses not to, but because he lacks the capacity for it. He is completely unmoved by others’ pleasure, or pain, or suffering, or happiness, because he lives entirely for himself, above the plane of the mediocre herd.”

“But… well, gee, Miss Tagbord, what’s the difference between that kind of person and a whatchamacallit, that we talked about in social studies?”

“A laissez-faire capitalist?”

“A sociopath.”

Dragnie chuckled. “Be careful using that word, Eddie. Just because a superior man’s complete independence of spirit makes it impossible for him to have feelings for any another man, doesn’t mean he’s a ‘sociopath.’ The sociopath has an urge to defy society, so he kidnaps a young girl, kills her, and chops up her body. The superior man, while perhaps admiring the sociopath’s freedom from societal constraint, knows that such an act is not necessary—however much one might admire the principle of freedom as an absolute that lies behind it.”

Eddie Willikers looked dubious. “I could never be like that.”

“Sure you could! You just have to study these ideas, understand the truth of them, and then apply them to your daily life.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense!”

“It makes nothing but sense,” Dragnie smiled. “Try this, next time you go out into society. Don’t let feelings influence your actions. Just base your actions on logic. You’ll see. It’s easier than you think!”

“But isn’t that… you know… crazy?”

“I hardly think—“

“Everything we do begins and ends with feelings. Fathers go to work because they feel responsible for their families. Mothers take care of their kids because they love them. You know what that’s like, right? You have kids, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, that’s the basis of every human society throughout, like, history. Parents sacrifice their own desires for the sake of their children. That’s what Nature requires, Miss Tagbord. Otherwise, offspring would never—you know—survive. Sure, you use logic to solve problems. And you can say that if you base everything on feelings, you’re like an animal. But if you eliminate feelings completely, and base everything on logic, you’re not heroic. You’re not even human.”

“Eddie, tell me something.” Dragnie fixed the young man with a commanding stare. “Who is John Glatt?”

“Huh?” He pointed out onto the stage. “He is.”

“No, Eddie. True, that man’s name is John Glatt, and he is being crowned the King of the Earth. And these are the values he’s lived by. But we can live by those values, too. We can be just as great as he is. Who is John Glatt? You are. I am. We are all John Glatt.”

Eddie Willikers frowned and scratched his head in puzzlement. “Well, but, gosh, Miss Tagbord, no we’re not.”

“Well, I mean, not literally. But—“

“Not at all. John Glatt invented that electric power motor, and those anti-gravity shoes, and that shame ray, and that concealing projector over Glatt’s Gorge—oh, and those neat teleportation arches. Plus probably other stuff I don’t even know about. He created all these fantastic new devices. That’s got nothing to do with his values. Anyone can have those values, but it doesn’t mean they’re a genius inventor. Same thing with Mister Rawbone. He isn’t rich and powerful because of his values. He invented Rawbonium. That’s not me. I’m not John Glatt. I’m just some kid who graduated high school and is going into college in the fall.”

Dragnie paused. On the edge of the mind of her consciousness she recognized that Glatt was at that moment reading the last several lines of his speech. In a moment the hall would be filled with thunderous applause, and swarming reporters, and dignitaries frantic to have their photos taken with Glatt and the others. Her private moment with this young man would be shattered forever. She simply did not have the time, now, to correct his misapprehensions, to recommend that he surround himself with people who believed in the truth, as she did, as Glatt did, as Rawbone and De Soto and the other members of their circle did. She did not have the time to draw the fine distinction, so crucial to her values, between the perfect man and a sociopathic murderer. She did not have the time, just now, to correct Eddie’s premises. But she sensed, behind his rather appealing looks, an intelligence simmering with potential.

“You know, Eddie,” she said. “These questions you’re asking—they’re excellent questions. I’d love to discuss them more with you. So let me make a suggestion. Now that Mr. Glatt has been named King of the Earth, he and I are going to need a private assistant. I think you would make an excellent candidate to fill that job. Of course it would require putting off college for a few months, and living with us… but would that interest you?”

“Really?” The young man look stunned. “Well, yeah. Of course. But my parents—“

“I’ll talk to your parents.”

Out on the stage, John Glatt said, “…as we inaugurate a new era in human society: the New, Improved Era of the Producer, and the Rest of the Human Race, Who Help Him.” And with that, he raised his hand, and made a gesture outlining the sign of the dollar, and the exclamation mark, articulating its final dot with a pointed finger and an outthrust arm.