Love Ain't Nothing Part 19

He paused.

Roblee made to interrupt, "But to let them haul him out of there and lynch him, that's ..."

"Don't you understand, man?" Peregrin turned on Roblee with fury. "Don't you hear what I'm telling you? That man up there isn't merely a poor sonofab.i.t.c.h who got loaded and pawed a white girl. He's a cold-blooded miserable animal, and if anyone deserved to die, it's him. But that has nothing to do with it. I'm talking to you about the need for that man to die. I'm telling you, Roblee, and all of you, that if you don't take their minds off the Negro community as a whole, you're going to set back the cause of equality in this country fifty years. And if you think I'm making this up you'd better realize that it's already happened once before, just this way."

They stared at him.

"Yes, dammit, it happened once before. And though we didn't have anything to do with the way it turned out--and thank G.o.d it turned out as it did--we would have told them to do it just the way they did."

They stared, and suddenly, one of them knew.

"Emmett Till," he breathed, softly.

Peregrin turned on the speaker. "That's right. They didn't even know for sure what the circ.u.mstances had been, but the trouble was starting up--not even as bad as here--and they hauled Till out and killed him. And it stopped the trouble like that!" he snapped his fingers.

"But lynching ..." Roblee said, horrified.

"Don't you understand? Are you stupid or something, like they say we are? Monkeys? Can't you see that Daniel White dead can be more valuable than a hundred Daniel Whites alive? Don't you see the horror that Northerners will feel, the repercussions internationally, the demands for justice, the swift advance of the program ... can't you see that Daniel White can serve the greater good? The good of all his people?

"What he never was in life, that miserable b.a.s.t.a.r.d up there can be in death!"

Roblee shrank away from Peregrin. The taller man had not spoken with fanaticism, had only delivered with desperate and impa.s.sioned tones what he knew to be true. They had heard him, and now each of them, where there was no room for anyone else's opinions, was thinking about it. It meant murder ... or rather, the toleration of murder. What they were deliberating, was the necessity of lynching. Therewas no doubt that the trouble could be much worse in the town, that more homes would be burned and more people hurt, perhaps killed. But was it enough to know that to sacrifice up a man to the mob madness, to the lynch rope? Was it enough to know that you might be saving hundreds of lives in the long run by sacrificing one life hardly worth saving to begin with?

It might have been easier, had Daniel White been a man with some qualities of decency. But he wasn't. He was just what the White Press had called him, a beast. That made it the more difficult; for had he been easier to identify with, they could have said no. But this way ...

There were murmurs from around the room, and the murmurs were, "I ... don't ... know ... I just don't know ..."

It meant more than just saving the skins of the people in Littletown--though men had been sacrificed to save less lives--it meant saving generations of children to come, from sitting in the backs of movie houses, of allowing them to grow up without the necessity of knowing squalor and prejudice and the words "s.h.i.+ne," "n.i.g.g.e.r," "Jim Crow."

It meant a lot of things, that thin thread of life that was Daniel White. That thin thread that might be stretched around Daniel White's neck.

It meant a lot.

It was a double-edged sword that slicing one way would tame the wrath of the mob beast, and slicing the other would make a path for more understandingly by use of shame and example.

But could they do it ...?

Were this a motion picture, and not a story of some truth, the camera might play about the darkened room, candlelit and oppressive. It might play about the gaunt, hardening faces of the men, and mirror their decisions. If this were a motion picture. And the emphasis on memorable closeups. But it is not a motion picture, and when they threw uptheir hands saying they could not decide, Peregrin had to say, "Let's go talk to someone who knows this mob."

So they agreed, because the decision was not one that men could make about another man.

When they opened the door of the house on the edge of Littletown, and stepped out, they did not see the ma.s.s of moving dark shadows. The first warning they had was the heat-laden voice snarling, "You goin' tuh save that n.i.g.g.e.r rape b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Savannah man? Like h.e.l.l you are!"

Then they jumped.

At first they used the lead pipes and the hammers, but after the first flurry they spent their fury and went on to fists and boots. Peregrin caught a blow in the face that spun him around, sent him cras.h.i.+ng into the wall of the house. Off in the darkness he could hear Roblee screaming and the wet, regular syncopation of someone kicking at b.l.o.o.d.y flesh.

Later, much later, when all the lights had stopped whirling, and all the strange new could had become merely reds and greens and blues, they dragged themselves to their feet.

Roblee's face looked like something sold across a meat counter. He daubed at the ruined expanse of skin and said very defiantly. "It's that White's fault. All this. All this, it's his fault. We don't hafta take it for him."

Peregrin said nothing. It hurt too much merely to breathe. His rib cage had been crushed. He lay against the house, listening, hearing what they had to say.

The others joined in, between sobs and rasps of breath. "Let them lynch him. Let them do it."

They knew who to see ... they knew the men with the ropes ... the men who would start to hit them when they appeared, but who would listen when they said they had come to give up Daniel White. They knew who to see.

They told Peregrin: "We'll be back. You rest there. We'll do it." And they moved off into the night, to make their vengeance.

Peregrin lay up against the building, and he began to cry. His voice was soft and deep as he said to the sky, "Oh G.o.d, they're doing it, but they're doing it for the wrong reasons. They're hating, and that isn't right. They'll give him up, and that's what we need, Lord, but why do they have to do it this way?"

Then after a while, when he had fainted several times, and had the visions of the men storming the jail, and striking the guards and dragging the snarling, defiant Daniel White from his cell, his thought became clearer.

It was worth it. It had to be worth it. What they did, what they allowed, it had to be worth something in the final a.n.a.lysis. For the greater good, he had said. It had to be that. Because if it wasn't, surely there could be no h.e.l.l deep enough to receive him.

If it was worth it, the end had to be in sight.

And had this been a motion picture, with a happy ending desirable--instead of a grubby little story out of central Georgia--then the man called Peregrin would have considered the inscription they must carve on the statue of the martyr, Daniel White.

--Evanston, Illinois, 1961

BLIND BIRD, BLIND BIRD, GO AWAY FROM ME!.

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever G.o.ds may be For my unconquerable soul.

William Ernest Henley, Invictus

There is a sound in that darkness. A soft, mewling sound, far out in the black, a small creature in pain, crying; vapors of night and distance obscure it, but that sound is terrible; a child afraid of the dark; yes, that sound no other sound can approach for pain and terror. The child, lost in the forest of the night, blind, hands out before his face, afraid to move, afraid to remain still, trapped, trembling, help me, help me! But if you go toward that pitiful pleading, somehow the voice seems deeper, older, more strangled by a darkness from within than the darkness without.

There. Up there, look up that flight of bas.e.m.e.nt stairs, barely dimly seen by the crack of light s.h.i.+ning under the door. A child crouched against the wooden panels, scratching feebly at the locked door, looking back over his shoulder, down into the bas.e.m.e.nt. Another sound, tinny rasping counterpoint to the child's pathetic sobbing; a scuttling, furry sound, little claws against concrete, fearful gray creatures with snake-tails twitching, wire-thin whiskers moving spastically, bullet bodies moving quickstart and stop in the bas.e.m.e.nt, coming to feed. With each new wave of movement from below, the child plunging deeper into hysteria, the voice rising shrilly, pleading with the mother beyond the locked door...

"Mommy, pl-please Mommy, let me in, let me in, Mommy, b-be guh-good, beee gooood, Mommmee!" Chittering shriek from below in the absolute darkness, the child flinging himself against the unyielding door, "Mommmmmmee!"

But the door remains closed, the child flattened against it, a painting on wood, terror contorting the small features into a gargoyle's insane face, and the blind darkness filling his mind till it bubbles froths churns like molten lava, searing the inside of his skull, running over and destroying all reason, coherence; pathetic infant, condemned to horror in the darkness; capital punishment, living death, entombment in fear; crime now lost in the mist of childhood, forgotten, tiny sin whose punishment razor-slashes the delicate lining of memory. This child will sleep with the lights on for many years.

Listen. The voice is deeper, down more in the throat, softer, more controlled by time, and the face alters, melts, s.h.i.+fts, runs like hot wax, that face framed by darkness ... and comes to focus in time, another face.

MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, US51403352, thirty-one years old, face pressed tightly against the rough plank door of a two-storey residence in the center of Bain-de-Bretagne, midway between Rennes and Nantes on the spearhead salient of General George S. Patton's 3rd Army. MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, US Infantry, July 1944, hurled forward from his own past to press his face against the splintery dun-colored wood of a door in a waystop town midway between somewhere and nowhere. MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, "Arnie" to his friends, formerly of Willoughby, Iowa, now wis.h.i.+ng he were taffy that could slip between the slats of the unyielding barrier to his safety, a middling-warm day in July, in the midwest of lovely France.

Softly: "Let me in, let me in, let me in ..." as a rattle of machine-gun fire preceded, by an instant, the bite of masonry across the back of his neck. The Kraut gunner in the bell-tower was still chipping for an angle at him, but a ricochet might accomplish his mission for him.

Across the narrow cobblestoned street Arnie Winslow heard a tinkle of breaking window gla.s.s, and the muzzle of an M-1 rifle poked out, firing down the pa.s.sage at the German troops s.p.a.ced out in alleys, doorways, upstairs windows, rooftops. The rest of the patrol was in that building, cut off from escape on three sides by thick stone walls, and on the fourth by a town full of Elite Corps killers intent on keeping Winslow's patrol from getting back. With the intelligence that Bain-de-Bretagne was not--as the quisling had reported--empty of the enemy, evacuated in panic two days before. Twelve men were in that warehouse. Twelve of the fifteen who had come out on the patrol. Winslow made thirteen. Fourteen and fifteen lay sprawled in the weak, failing light of a French sundown. He could just see the inward-turned feet of Pfc. Coopersmith around the edge of the doorway, felled without murmur by a burst from a Schmizer burp-gun, loosed from a courtyard down the street. 2nd Lt. Thomas G. Benbow, formerly intercollegiate high-diving champion from the University of Utah, sprawled idiotically half-across a milk cart parked near the side of the warehouse. Idiotically, for the same covey of shots that had taken out Pfc. Coopersmith had done corrective surgery on Benbow's infectious grin, widening it from ear to ear, from nose to chin, in a b.l.o.o.d.y mash, leaving him with a Pagliacci resemblance to a circus clown. From where he was flattened against the door, Arnie could not see the bone-shattered cavern that opened the rear of Benbow's skull to the fresh air.

When they had cautiously slipped into the town, moved in two lines of skirmishers down the streets, it had seemed precisely as the little Vichy traitor had reported it: empty of all save the infirm and aged, left behind by not only the Germans, but by the collaborationist French who had fled from some inexplicable fear of the retribution Yanks were supposed to inflict on them. It had seemed a shoo-in. And then they had entered the pa.s.sage between buildings; the first burst had dropped Pfc. Coopersmith and hurled Benbow like a Raggedy Andy doll against the warehouse, dumping him bloodily on the milk cart ... and the patrol had dived--almost as one man--through the half-open door of the warehouse.

All but Winslow. MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, US51403352, whose reflexes had hurled him in the opposite direction; brought him up short against the locked door of a house facing across the narrow street to the warehouse where his buddies now sporadically returned fire on the hordes of n.a.z.i troops fly-specked through the town. They were ambushed. Trapped. Boxed in. But they were at least safe behind stone, while Arnie Winslow trembled flat against a locked door, murmuring softly to be let in, out of the light and out of the death.

"Arnie! You out there, Arnie!"

It was Truck. The push-faced Polack from Hoboken who had soldiered as corporal beside Winslow, all the way in from the spiked beach at Normandy. The voice was Truck, but the tone was Fear. Rabbit-warren Fear. Truck was inside the warehouse, and his shouts brought a cascade of hard-fire from a dozen concealed Kraut positions. Winslow could not afford to answer. The machine-gunner in the bell-tower of the church at the end of the pa.s.sage knew where he was, but it was doubtful any of the others had him pegged. Otherwise he would have by now joined Coopersmith and Benbow. He remained silent.

He had to get inside that house. It was only a matter of time till the bell-tower a.s.sa.s.sin dusted that doorway effectively enough to pick him off. But the door was locked. He could not step back to blast the bolt through the door, for that would put him in plain sight from the street. He b.u.mped his weight heavily against the door twice, three times. It bowed, but did not give.

There was only one way. If there were more ways, they weren't registering, and he had been in the doorway for almost two minutes now. He had to take the chance.

He hop-jumped half a dozen paces out into the street, a timorous creature, and then hurled himself like a battering ram back into the doorway and against the slabbed door. The machine-gunner was a moment too slow. By the time he had tracked the big .30 caliber J-34 to the new target, Arnie was on his return trip. The bigbeast rattle of spraying shots overrode the thwack! of Arnie's shoulder hitting the door, and puffs of dirt, chips of cobblestone exploded harmlessly as he slammed full against the bolted door. The door gave and splintered inward off its bolt as a fresh shower of shots ripped into the edge of the building, chasing him, seeking him, but not locating him.

Then, as the big air-cooled machine gun went berserk, firing hysterically at the empty doorway, he fell inside; with a fluid, almost instinctive movement, he slammed the door closed again, and fumbled for the bolt. It was half-torn from its screws, but it held, rattling into place as he palmed it home. Then he turned-- Into darkness.

That suddenly, that abruptly. The electricity of what had filled the past few moments had held light within his eyes, but now that he was momentarily safe, tension and fear and preoccupation were used up and the mind--magician master of misdirection--came fully to bear on what was inside that house. What was inside that house: Darkness.

Nothingness.

Black chilled pressing-in heavy midnight blindness, a coalsack filled with dust; nothingness weighing down on his eyes, filming them with ink-shadows, flitting dimnesses ...

Slowly his legs collapsed under him. Standing in quicksand, he began to sink with exaggerated slowness to the dirty floorboards of the anonymous hovel. A puppet whose usefulness has pa.s.sed, his unseen manipulator snipped his strings and he fluttered into a heap, bundled in dark shrouds of fear, and a vagrant vision he had had for many years (and never remembered upon awakening) crawled back to him: Thick winds, like ropes of sand, tore at him, the sound like tortured metal shrieking as it was rent. Arms flung up to the nightmare sky, whipped into cloud-and-dark froth, he stood on a barren plain. He was a scarecrow, or something very much like a scarecrow; an imbecile relation to a scarecrow. In the middleground of an empty plain, beaten by sound and hurricane winds, he was crucified on a shaft of night, under a gibbering sky. And as he stood unmoving, from out of that sky--riding a trough of shouting black wind--the blind bird plummeted toward him. It was an ink bird, a domino bird, a soot bird; blind and small and very frightened out in its storm; but he could not help it, could not bring it peace or security or comfort, and he had nothing to say to that blind bird, save to tell it to go away, to fly back up into the darkness. Blind bird, blind bird, go away from me! But it was a s.h.i.+vering, frightened little bird, and over his head it circled, all through that night, until at last he admitted he was afraid, too.

The vision came with extraordinary clarity, for the first time in his life while he was awake, and he suddenly realized how many nights he had trembled in his bed, s.h.i.+vering with that pathetic, circling blind bird. And the question came to him unbidden, there in the pitch-darkness of that house, Why do I remember it now?

Why, indeed? Again, an answer leapt unbidden.

Less than a month before, the offensive had struck south from Normandy, leaving the flesh and the metal piled high in the fields, on the beaches, in the sea. He had been trotting along behind a deuce-and-a-half stacked high with cartridge cases, using the truck for cover across a two-mile open stretch currently in favor with the German mortar batteries. He had slung his M-1 over his shoulder and was folded down in upon himself, lighting the roach of his last cigarette, when the truck rolled its right front wheel across the exact center of an ant.i.tank mine. He had been a few paces farther behind (having ceased to dogtrot, trying to get the b.u.t.t lit) and only that had saved him. All he knew was that the truck rose up in majestic fury, like a featherweight prop, sprouted blossoms of metal and flame, and exploded like a thousand fire-lilies. The concussion rather rudely hoisted him by the a.s.s and shot-put him three hundred feet across the field and into a drainage ditch, without his once complaining. He was unconscious before he hit turf. He came to rest upside-down, legs twisted under his body (but, miraculously, unbroken), his back lofted in an aesthetic arch by his pack and the rifle which had whirled along with him. When the medics found him, he was sleeping as peacefully as any cla.s.sic example of shock and shrapnel and whiplash and concussion and blast-burn could sleep. He was trundled back to the evacuation hospital and when the slight burns and flesh wounds had been treated, they had waited patiently for him to come out of the coma, hoping APCs would do the job and he could be trundled back into the line, because there was still much trouble out front. Every man was needed.

Arnie came out of it nicely, and sat up one morning as though refreshed from an extended snooze. Stretching his arms over his head and grunting with pleasure, he had heard the doctor ask, "Well, how do you feel?" and had gotten off the cla.s.sic line, "What time is it?" The doctor had said, "About ten thirty," and Arnie had said, "Blackout?" and the doctor had looked heavenward, because it was ten thirty in the morning, not the evening, and Arnie's eyes were wide open.

They had bandaged his eyes, and he had lain there for close to a week, trapped in stifling darkness, and the soreness had pa.s.sed, but the pools of thought had bubbled.

Memory within a memory: Stealing dimes from his mother's purse. His father had gone to work, and she lay in bed, catching an extra hour before starting the housework. Silent Willoughby, Iowa morning. He knew at just what level of weariness her mind floated, and like a soldier in a movie he had stealthily opened the bedroom door just enough to slip through, had gone to his stomach on the rug, and pull-crawled himself across the room. Her big brown handbag stood on the dressing table bench, and smoothly he had lifted it down, dragged it noiselessly across the floor to the foot of the bed. (If she wakes up and looks out of the bedclothes, I'll be hidden by the foot of the bed and quiet; she'll go back to sleep.) Seven years old. Already accomplished. He had stolen forty cents in dimes. (She never inspects her change, never knows how much she has.) Always "she," seldom by name, why?

He had replaced the purse and turned to start the crawl back to the door, downstairs, outside to his bike, to Woolworth's for things worth forty cents he didn't really need. He had turned.

His mother was staring at him.

Breath clogged like the vacuum cleaner when it's full. Dust in his mouth, a haze through his brain, unbelievable fear. Her face was a mixture of fury and pity, sorrow and revenge.

Before he could move, she was out of the bed, the heels of her feet bed-red and h.o.r.n.y, hitting the floor, and her soft hand sliced air and caught him across the cheek. "Why do you do it!" she moaned. He had hurt her, he knew it. That made it all the worse. He didn't know why! And she wasn't really asking. Then dragged by the collar to Daddy's clothes closet, poised on the lip of the mothball-smelling cavern, and the pit of his stomach turned to ice. "No, please, Mommy. nonono--"

Whipped inside, garbage hidden from view, door slammed and you'll stay in there till I find out what your father wants me to do with you I can't control you I don't know what to do with you, door slammed. Lock clicked as the skeleton key--maintained in that never-needed-to-be-locked door for just this purpose--turned turned quickly turned.

Back in there. Darkness. Oppressive, stuffed like a wad of cotton inside the toe of a sock. Ceiling invisible up there, pressing down, ready to flatten him. His little fist went into his mouth, cries floated to the surface of his mind but were never loosed; he was busy listening to someone else in the closet moaning piteously, whelp-cries for help, to be let out. He knew it was himself, but he could not feel himself making the muscular contractions needed for the sounds.

What fear in the Pit, in the darkness. Sounds of sightlessness, of terror at being closed in, unable to see. Indescribable. One memory melded to a thousand others, of bas.e.m.e.nts (primarily! the most terrible of all!), of the trunk of the Plymouth once, of eyes open yet unseeing ... memories ... of other closets, of tiny hotel rooms where he slept better because the great neon OTE flashed on OTE and off OTE at regular intervals, metronomically, soothing him ... memories ... of beds with women in them, sometimes laughing, sometimes surly, sometimes uneasy, because he made love in the light, not in the faceless darkness they had come to trust, when their bodies and their egos were stripped naked for pleasure.

All of these memories, swirling: a paperweight globe of a pristine town that never existed. ankle-deep in snow, turned upside-down. shaken: thoughts swirling, memories like snow, cold, chilling, swirling.

Back from a memory within a memory, to merely a memory: As Arnie had lain in that bed, the floodgates of his fears had been pried open. After years of having troweled the mud of forgetfulness over the scars, after years of subconsciously sinking the traumas in the silt of other experiences, maturity, pleasures, more pertinent fears ... now freed, they thundered forth, and locked inside the bandages, he knew terror once more. He was blind!

The darkness that was deeper than darkness engulfed him, swallowed him whole, destroyed his senses and his reason, left him trembling and moaning like the child who had begged to be let out of the closet, who had pleaded to be taken out of that bas.e.m.e.nt where the rats chittered below him.

And then one day, after a week in the evacuation hospital, the blindness had pa.s.sed. That simply. They had removed the bandages when he had said he felt a p.r.i.c.kling, and without any refocusing or salty tears, his eyesight had come back. It had been some sort of minor miracle. The doctor, less p.r.o.ne to muddy semantics, felt it was more temporary shock and psychosomatic than miraculous. But either way, he was pleased: with Arnie repple-deppled back into the line, it left the bed open for some new pile of human hamburger.

Arnie had been returned to his company and, so minor were the visible reminders of his wounds, within a few days he had almost totally forgotten the madness he had known while lying helpless without his eyes. Almost forgotten. Not quite, but almost.

Then the a.s.sault had consumed his attentions, and the simple business of remaining alive became vastly more menacing than any bolts of darkness from the past. The a.s.sault, the capture of the collaborationist, the order to dust out the town, the ambush, a burst of hacking fire from a Schmizer ...

Another burst of hacking fire from the Schmizer down the street hauled him back to this moment in which he sat on his knees, legs collapsed under him like the segments of a carpenter's folding ruler, on the floor of the little French maison de ville. Back to this instant of absolute sightlessness, utter darkness, no-sight so much like the memories he had just flashed through.

And fear was reborn.

Consuming fear. Paralyzing fear. Stomach-numbing fear that left him crouched on the floor a ma.s.s of putty and milk. Whimpering. Soft tissue-paper whorls of sound from his chest. They came regularly, incapable of being captured in true fidelity by any human mechanism. They were the vocalizations of petrifying terror.

A floorboard creaked.

His whimpering halted, momentarily. A floorboard had creaked, but he had been stone-immobile. He listened, the blood pounding in his ears. A slight rasp, as of shoe sole against bare floor. It came from over his head.

He was not alone in the house.

(And why should he have thought he was? Every other building in this town seemed to be stinking with n.a.z.i troops; why should he think this one was a sanctuary for lost Iowans?) He could not move. The paralysis he felt at being trapped in the dark. It left him unable to function. He was shaking. s.h.i.+vering. And the sound came again from above him. One man ... two ... a patrol ... a barracks-full ... he wanted to run ...

The footsteps came again, gently. He sat in the middle of the room, looking up, the weight of the M-1 unfelt in his hands, and he could not protect himself. If there had been a sliver of light, a gleam, anything, he might have been able to pull himself together ... but there was nothing. If there were windows in that room, they were boarded or bricked up. If there had been a smoldering sun dying on the horizon, it might have cast rays through the slats of the door, but (how long had he been there, remembering?) the sun had vanished and taken with it the day. Now it was night. Outside. Inside. Within his mind. He was alone with that other, Up there, in the dark.

Sound. Again. The other was coming for him. One? Two? How many? It had to be only one--he wrenched his mind forcibly from his terror to consider the logistics of the situation--and he was coming downstairs.

The one upstairs had to know he was here. The noise Arnie had made coming through the locked door would have given him all the warning he'd needed. But time had elapsed, and Arnie had made no sound, until he had begun whimpering, and the one (two, nine, nine hundred?) upstairs had waited, trying to ascertain how many had come through that door. Now the waiting was over, it was ended, and the stalking had begun.

The footsteps (yes, now he could tell, it was only one moving; perhaps there were more up there, but only one was moving toward him) reached the head of the stairs, lost to Arnie's right in the darkness. They began moving down, and there was the clank of metal on wood. The weapon striking the banister. Arnie tried to move his fingers, found them cold and unresponsive. He had to get under cover, not just sit there like a child in the middle of a playpen. He was sure meat, a lamb staked out for some hungry beast.

The footsteps descended, and Arnie could not even tell if the man was in sight. It was that dark. Or was most of the darkness behind his eyes, not really in the room? Had he gone blind again? Could the German see everything? He sat there waiting, and the steps came nearer, nearer, stopped.

A snap-bolt was thrown. It made a hard, unyielding sound in the room. Then there was a chuckle.

The burp-gun opened up at waist-level and slugs marched across the room in a straight line. Back and forth. The spray was a thorough one. It bit chunks out of the wooden walls, thundered into the door, sent flakes of wallpaper and debris cascading through the air. The German turned left and right in stately maneuver, cutting the room in half at the height any normal man would be standing. The fusillade seemed to go on indefinitely, and the crimson-flash of the muzzle brought a glare that revealed who was firing. Arnie stared across the room as the bullets snarled over his head. He did not move. He could not move. And as the trooper brought his burp-gun back and forth methodically, the muzzle flash showed Arnie a thickheaded, saturnine man with the top of his skull crammed tightly into a steel helmet, the pot down almost to the thick, unattractive eyebrows. The n.a.z.i was grinning impishly. Chuckling. While the slugs thrummed and screamed overhead harmlessly.

Abruptly, the last slug tore through the wall of the house, and the last casing hit the bottom step on which the n.a.z.i stood, and the room went silent. A sprinkle of plaster-dust made a fine, sifting noise. But it was silent. And dark again.

The rifle shot was a million times louder than anything ever heard in the world before. It had been silent, then the silence had been torn to shreds with a burp-gun's depredations, then silence again. And now the rifle shot.

The n.a.z.i choked once; there was a watery gurgle as if someone had forgotten to turn a faucet off tightly, and with a metallic clatter of equipment and body, he fell forward, caught the edge of the banister and was whirled sidewise, tumbled the one step to the floor, and fell flat on his stomach.

Arnie suddenly realized he could feel the bucking of the M-1 in his hands, moments after the recoil had faded. He had killed the n.a.z.i. Somehow. Without trying. Instinct, perhaps. Maybe it was someone else entirely. A reflex.

"Jeezus," he murmured, gently. The body at the foot of the stairs moved softly. Arnie got to his feet and blindly stumbled toward the sound. His right boot met an obstacle, and he reached down into that pit of shadow to touch the body. His hand encountered the face. His fingertip lay in one of the open eyes. It was dry. The man was dead.

Click! Just that exactly, a switch of thought was turned off in Arnie Winslow's mind, and all his mouth-gagging fear came to asphyxiating proportions; the darkness built into a ma.s.sive wave that swept over him; the wide-eyed s.h.i.+vering he had done as the hundreds of burp-gun slugs thundered just over his head; the death of this stranger; all built into an electrical current that turned off the switch; and the hammer that had been poised in his mind--suddenly struck!