boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

504 Anthony Boucher
shot. Two blocks away, he deliberately stalled the car in the middle of an intersection.
In the confusion of the resulting pile-up he managed to slip away unnoticed.
The car had to be abandoned anyway. Where could he get gas for it with no
ration coupons? The important thing was to get away with his skin.
For he had realized in an instant that one of Kruger’s first questions would be,
“Where’s your draft card, Mac?” And whatever steps he had to take to solve the
magnificent confusion which his godhead had created, he could take none of them
in Federal prison as a draft evader.
Molly stared at the tramp who had forced his way into the Sentinel office. “Well,”
she growled, “what do you want?”
“Molly, don’t you know me?”
“Boss!”
The huskies on either side of him reluctantly relaxed their grips. “You can go,
boys,” she said. They went, in frowning dumbness.
MacVeagh spoke rapidly. “I can’t tell it all to you now, Molly. It’s too long. You
won’t believe it, but I’ve had the Feds on my tail. That’s why this choice costume,
mostly filth. The rods were the only safe route to Grover. And you thought I should
take a vacation—”
“But why—”
“Listen, Molly. I’ve made a world of truth, all right. But that truth holds good
only where the Sentinel dominates. There’s an imaginary outside to go with it, an
outside that sends me dispatches based on my own statements, that maintains banking
relations with our banks, that feeds peacetime programs to our radios, and so on,
but it’s a false outside, a world of If. The true outside is what it would be without
me: a world at war.”
For a moment Molly gasped speechlessly. Then she said, “Mr. Johansen!”
“What about him?”
“You sent him to the Office of Peacetime Reconstruction. That’s in your world
of If. What’s become of him?”
“I never thought of that one. But there are problems enough. It isn’t fair to the
people here to make them live in an unreal world, even if it’s better than the real one.
Man isn’t man all by himself. Man is in and of his time and the rest of mankind. If
he’s false to his time, he’s false to himself. Grover’s going to rejoin the world.”
“But how, boss? Are you going to have to start the war all over?”
“I never stopped it except in our pretty dream world. But I’m going to do more
than that. I’m going to reveal the whole fake—to call it all a fake in print.”
“Boss!” Molly gasped. “You … you realize this is suicide? Nobody’ll ever read the
Sentinel again. And suicide,” she added with grim personal humor, “isn’t anything
I’d recommend.”
“I don’t count beside Grover. I don’t count beside men. ‘For God,’ ” he quoted
wryly, “ ‘so loved the world—’ ”
“This is it,” said John MacVeagh much later.
That edition of the Sentinel had been prepared by a staff of three. The large,
fine new staff of the large, fine new Sentinel had frankly decided that its proprietor