Part 12 (1/2)

”You were going to say 'the afternoon they killed G.o.d?'” Alice asked him. ”You're right, it was. They killed G.o.d in the kitchen that afternoon. That's how I know he's dead. Afterwards they would have killed me too, eventually, except--”

Again she broke off, this time to say, ”Pop, do you suppose I can have been thinking about myself as the Daughter of G.o.d all these years? That that's why everything seems so intense?”

”I don't know,” Pop said. ”The religious boys say we're all children of G.o.d. I don't put much stock in it--or else G.o.d sure has some lousy children. Go on with your story.”

”Well, they would have killed me too, except the leader took a fancy to me and got the idea of training me up for a Weregirl or She-wolf Deb or whatever they called it.”

”That was my first experience of ideas as weapons. He got an idea about me and I used it to kill him. I had to wait three months for my opportunity. I got him so lazy he let me shave him. He bled to death the same way as Dad.”

”Hum,” Pop commented after a bit, ”that was a chiller, all right. I got to remember to tell it to Bill--it was somebody killing his mother that got _him_ started. Alice, you had about as good a justification for your first murder as any I remember hearing.”

”Yet,” Alice said after another pause, with just a trace of the old sarcasm creeping back into her voice, ”I don't suppose you think I was right to do it?”

”Right? Wrong? Who knows?” Pop said almost bl.u.s.teringly. ”Sure you were justified in a whole pack of ways. Anybody'd sympathize with you. A man often has fine justification for the first murder he commits. But as you must know, it's not that the first murder's always so bad in itself as that it's apt to start you on a killing spree. Your sense of values gets s.h.i.+fted a tiny bit and never s.h.i.+fts back. But you know all that and who am I to tell you anything, anyway? I've killed men because I didn't like the way they spit. And may very well do it again if I don't keep watching myself and my mind ventilated.”

”Well, Pop,” Alice said, ”I didn't always have such dandy justification for my killings. Last one was a moony old physicist--he fixed me the Geiger counter I carry. A silly old geek--I don't know how he survived so long. Maybe an exile or a runaway. You know, I often attach myself to the elderly do-gooder type like my father was. Or like you, Pop.”

Pop nodded. ”It's good to know yourself,” he said.

There was a third pause and then, although I hadn't exactly been intending to, I said, ”Alice had justification for her first murder, personal justification that an ape would understand. I had no personal justification at all for mine, yet I killed about a million people at a modest estimate. You see, I was the boss of the crew that took care of the hydrogen missile ticketed for Moscow, and when the ticket was finally taken up I was the one to punch it. My finger on the firing b.u.t.ton, I mean.”

I went on, ”Yeah, Pop, I was one of the b.u.t.ton-pushers. There were really quite a few of us, of course--that's why I get such a laugh out of stories about being or rubbing out the _one_ guy who pushed all the b.u.t.tons.”

”That so?” Pop said with only mild-sounding interest. ”In that case you ought to know--”

We didn't get to hear right then who I ought to know because I had a fit of coughing and we realized the cigarette smoke was getting just too thick. Pop fixed the door so it was open a crack and after a while the atmosphere got reasonably okay though we had to put up with a low lonely whistling sound.

”Yeah,” I continued, ”I was the boss of the missile crew and I wore a very handsome uniform with impressive insignia--not the bully old stripes I got on my chest now--and I was very young and handsome myself.

We were all very young in that line of service, though a few of the men under me were a little older. Young and dedicated. I remember feeling a very deep and grim--and _clean_--responsibility. But I wonder sometimes just how deep it went or how clean it really was.

”I had an uncle flew in the war they fought to lick fascism, bombardier on a Flying Fortress or something, and once when he got drunk he told me how some days it didn't bother him at all to drop the eggs on Germany; the buildings and people down there seemed just like toys that a kid sets up to kick over, and the whole business about as naive fun as poking an anthill.

”_I_ didn't even have to fly over at seven miles what I was going to be aiming at. Only I remember sometimes getting out a map and looking at a certain large dot on it and smiling a little and softly saying, 'Pow!'--and then giving a little conventional shudder and folding up the map quick.

”Naturally we told ourselves we'd never have to do it, fire the thing, I mean, we joked about how after twenty years or so we'd all be given jobs as museum attendants of this same bomb, deactivated at last. But naturally it didn't work out that way. There came the day when our side of the world got hit and the orders started cascading down from Defense Coordinator Bigelow--”

”Bigelow?” Pop interrupted. ”Not Joe Bigelow?”

”Joseph A., I believe,” I told him, a little annoyed.

”Why he's my boy then, the one I was telling you about--the skinny runt had this horn-handle! Can you beat that?” Pop sounded startlingly happy.

”Him and you'll have a lot to talk about when you get together.”

I wasn't so sure of that myself, in fact my first reaction was that the opposite would be true. To be honest I was for the first moment more than a little annoyed at Pop interrupting my story of my Big Grief--for it was that to me, make no mistake. Here my story had finally been teased out of me, against all expectation, after decades of repression and in spite of dozens of a.s.sorted psychological blocks--and here was Pop interrupting it for the sake of a lot of trivial organizational gossip about Joes and Bills and Georges we'd never heard of and what they'd say or think!