The Reign of Brainwash: Dystopia Box Set - Эдгар Аллан По

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leaders, feeble and outmoded men who are afraid to plump for either Fascism or Communism; who dare not—or who are too power hungry—to cast off outmoded techniques, like the Germans, Americans, Italians, Turks, and other really courageous peoples, and place the sane and scientific control of the all-powerful Totalitarian State in the hands of Men of Resolution!

      In October, John Pollikop, arrested on suspicion of having just possibly helped a refugee to escape, arrived in the Trianon camp, and the first words between him and his friend Karl Pascal were no inquiries about health, but a derisive interchange, as though they were continuing a conversation broken only half an hour before:

      "Well, you old Bolshevik, I told you so! If you Communists had joined with me and Norman Thomas to back Frank Roosevelt, we wouldn't be here now!"

      "Rats! Why, it's Thomas and Roosevelt that started Fascism! I ask you! Now shut up, John, and listen: What was the New Deal but pure Fascism? Whadthey do to the worker? Look here! No, wait now, listen—"

      Doremus felt at home again, and comforted—though he did also feel that Foolish probably had more constructive economic wisdom than John Pollikop, Karl Pascal, Herbert Hoover, Buzz Windrip, Lee Sarason, and himself put together; or if not, Foolish had the sense to conceal his lack of wisdom by pretending that he could not speak English.

      Shad Ledue, back in his hotel suite, reflected that he was getting a dirty deal. He had been responsible for sending more traitors to concentration camps than any other county commissioner in the province, yet he had not been promoted.

      It was late; he was just back from a dinner given by Francis Tasbrough in honor of Provincial Commissioner Swan and a board consisting of Judge Philip Jessup, Director of Education Owen J. Peaseley, and Brigadier Kippersly, who were investigating the ability of Vermont to pay more taxes.

      Shad felt discontented. All those damned snobs trying to show off! Talking at dinner about this bum show in New York—this first Corpo revue, Callin' Stalin, written by Lee Sarason and Hector Macgoblin. How those nuts had put on the agony about "Corpo art," and "drama freed from Jewish suggestiveness" and "the pure line of Anglo-Saxon sculpture" and even, by God, about "Corporate physics"! Simply trying to show off! And they had paid no attention to Shad when he had told his funny story about the stuck-up preacher in Fort Beulah, one Falck, who had been so jealous because the M.M.'s drilled on Sunday morning instead of going to his gospel shop that he had tried to get his grandson to make up lies about the M.M.'s, and whom Shad had amusingly arrested right in his own church! Not paid one bit of attention to him, even though he had carefully read all through the Chief's Zero Hour so he could quote it, and though he had been careful to be refined in his table manners and to stick out his little finger when he drank from a glass.

      He was lonely.

      The fellows he had once best known, in pool room and barber shop, seemed frightened of him, now, and the dirty snobs like Tasbrough still ignored him.

      He was lonely for Sissy Jessup.

      Since her dad had been sent to Trianon, Shad didn't seem able to get her to come around to his rooms, even though he was the County Commissioner and she was nothing now but the busted daughter of a criminal.

      And he was crazy about her. Why, he'd be almost willing to marry her, if he couldn't get her any other way! But when he had hinted as much—or almost as much—she had just laughed at him, the dirty little snob!

      He had thought, when he was a hired man, that there was a lot more fun in being rich and famous. He didn't feel one bit different than he had then! Funny!

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      Dr. Lionel Adams, B.A. of Yale, Ph.D. of Chicago, Negro, had been a journalist, American consul in Africa and, at the time of Berzelius Windrip's election, professor of anthropology in Howard University. As with all his colleagues, his professorship was taken over by a most worthy and needy white man, whose training in anthropology had been as photographer on one expedition to Yucatan. In the dissension between the Booker Washington school of Negroes who counseled patience in the new subjection of the Negroes to slavery, and the radicals who demanded that they join the Communists and struggle for the economic freedom of all, white or black, Professor Adams took the mild, Fabian former position.

      He went over the country preaching to his people that they must be "realistic," and make what future they could; not in some Utopian fantasy but on the inescapable basis of the ban against them.

      Near Burlington, Vermont, there is a small colony of Negroes, truck farmers, gardeners, houseworkers, mostly descended from slaves who, before the Civil War, escaped to Canada by the "Underground Railway" conducted by such zealots as Truman Webb's grandfather, but who sufficiently loved the land of their forcible adoption to return to America after the war. From the colony had gone to the great cities young colored people who (before the Corpo emancipation) had been nurses, doctors, merchants, officials.

      This colony Professor Adams addressed, bidding the young colored rebels to seek improvement within their own souls rather than in mere social superiority.

      As he was in person unknown to this Burlington colony, Captain Oscar Ledue, nicknamed "Shad," was summoned to censor the lecture. He sat hulked down in a chair at the back of the hall. Aside from addresses by M.M. officers, and moral inspiration by his teachers in grammar school, it was the first lecture he had ever heard in his life, and he didn't think much of it. He was irritated that this stuck-up nigger didn't spiel like the characters of Octavus Roy Cohen, one of Shad's favorite authors, but had the nerve to try to sling English just as good as Shad himself. It was more irritating that the loud-mouthed pup should look so much like a bronze statue, and finally, it was simply more than a guy could stand that the big bum should be wearing a Tuxedo!

      So when Adams, as he called himself, claimed that there were good poets and teachers and even doctors and engineers among the niggers, which was plainly an effort to incite folks to rebellion against the government, Shad signaled his squad and arrested Adams in the midst of his lecture, addressing him, "You God-damn dirty, ignorant, stinking nigger! I'm going to shut your big mouth for you, for keeps!"

      Dr. Adams was taken to the Trianon concentration camp. Ensign Stoyt thought it would be a good joke on those fresh beggars (almost Communists, you might say) Jessup and Pascal to lodge the nigger right in the same cell with them. But they actually seemed to like Adams; talked to him as though he were white and educated! So Stoyt placed him in a solitary cell, where he could think over his crime in having bitten the hand that had fed him.

      The greatest single shock that ever came to the Trianon camp was in November, 1938, when there appeared among them, as the newest prisoner, Shad Ledue.

      It was he who was responsible for nearly half of them being there.

      The prisoners whispered that he had been arrested on charges by Francis Tasbrough; officially, for having grafted on shopkeepers; unofficially, for having failed to share enough of the graft with Tasbrough. But such cloudy causes were less discussed than the question of how they would murder Shad now they had him safe.

      All Minute Men who were under discipline, except only such Reds as Julian Falck, were privileged prisoners in the concentration camps; they were safeguarded against the common, i.e., criminal, i.e., political inmates; and most of them, once reformed, were returned to the M.M. ranks, with a greatly improved knowledge of how to flog malcontents. Shad was housed by himself in a single cell like a not-too-bad hall-bedroom, and every evening he was permitted to spend two hours in the officers' mess room. The scum could not get at him, because his exercise hour was at a time different from theirs.

      Doremus begged the plotters against Shad to restrain themselves.

      "Good Lord, Doremus, do you mean that after the sure-enough battles we've gone through you're still a bourgeois pacifist—that you still believe in the sanctity of a lump of hog meat like Ledue?" demanded Karl Pascal.

      "Well, yes, I do—a little. I know that

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