Two Dooms. Cyril M. Kornbluth

started, and there was a gratified murmur around the auditorium. He was made up as French Letour, one of the Mobsters from the old days—technically a hero, but one who had sailed mighty close to the wind. This promised to be interesting.

      "Peace, ho! Caesar speaks."

      And so to the apron where the soothsayer—public relations consultant—delivered the warning contemptuously ignored by Letour-Caesar, and the spotlight shifted to Cassius and Brutus for their long, foreboding dialogue. Brutus' back was to the audience when it started; he gradually turned—

      "What means this shouting? I do fear the people will choose Caesar for their king!"

      And you saw that Brutus was Falcaro—old Amadeo Falcaro himself, with the beard and hawk nose and eyebrows.

      Well, let's see now. It must be some kind of tortured analogy with the Treaty of Las Vegas when Letour made a strong bid to unite Mob and Syndic and Falcaro had fought against anything but a short-term, strictly military alliance. Charles felt kind of sore about Falcaro not getting the title role, but he had to admit that Tremaine played Falcaro as the gutsy magnifico he had been. When Caesar re-entered, the contrast became clear; Caesar-Letour was a fidgety, fear-ridden man. The rest of the conspirators brought on through Act One turned out to be good fellows all, fresh and hearty; Charles guessed everything was all right and he wished he could grab a nap. But Cassius was saying:

      "Him and his worth and our great need of him—"

      All very loyal, Charles thought, smothering a yawn. A life for the Syndic and all that, but a high-brow version. Polite and dignified, like a pavanne at Roseland. Sometimes—after, say, a near miss on the polo field—he would wonder how polite and dignified the great old days actually had been. Amadeo Falcaro's Third Year Purge must have been an affair of blood and guts. Two thousand shot in three days, the history books said, adding hastily that the purged were unreconstructed, unreconstructable thugs whose usefulness was past, who couldn't realize that the job ahead was construction and organization.

      * * * * *

      And Halloran was touching Charles on the shoulder. "Intermission in a second, sir."

      They marched up the aisle as the curtain fell to applause and the rest of the audience began to rise. Then the impossible happened.

      Halloran had gone first; Charles was behind him, with the four other guards hemming him in. As Halloran reached the door to the lobby at the top of the aisle, he turned to face Charles and performed an inexplicable pantomime. It was quite one second before Charles realized that Halloran was tugging at his gun, stuck in the holster.

      The guard to the left of Charles softly said: "Jesus!" and threw himself at Halloran as the chief guard's gun came loose. There was a .45 caliber roar, muffled. There was another that crashed, unmuffled, a yard from Charles' right ear. The two figures at the head of the aisle collapsed limply and the audience began to shriek. Somebody with a very loud voice roared: "Keep calm! It's all part of the play! Don't get panicky! It's part of the play!"

      The man who was roaring moved up to the aisle door, fell silent, saw and smelled the blood and fainted.

      A woman began to pound the guard on Charles' right with her fists, yelling: "What did you do to my husband? You shot my husband!" She meant the man who had fainted; Charles peeled her off the bodyguard.

      Somehow they got into the lobby, followed by most of the audience. The three bodyguards held them at bay. Charles found he was deaf in his right ear and supposed it was temporary. Least of his worries. Halloran had taken a shot at him. The guard named Weltfisch had intercepted it. The guard named Donnel had shot Halloran down.

      He said to Donnel: "You know Halloran long?"

      Donnel, not taking his eyes from the crowd, said: "Couple of years, sir. He was just a guy in the bodyguard pool."

      "Get me out of here," Orsino said. "To the Syndic Building."

      In the big black car, he could almost forget the horror; he could hope that time would erase it completely. It wasn't like polo. That shot had been aimed.

      The limousine purred to a halt before the titanic bulk of the Syndic Building, was checked and rolled on into the Unrestricted Entrance. An elevator silently lifted the car and passengers past floors devoted to Alcohol Clerical, Alcohol Research, and Testing, Transport, Collections Audit and Control, Cleaning and Dying, Female Recruitment and Retirement, up, up, up, past sections and sub-sections Charles had never entered, Syndic member though he was, to an automatic stop at a floor whose indicator said: enforcement and public relations.

      It was only 9:45 P.M.; F. W. Taylor would be in and working. Charles said: "Wait here, boys," and muttered the code phrase to the door. It sprang open.

      F. W. Taylor was dictating, machine-gun fashion, to a mike. He looked dog-tired. His face turned up with a frown as Charles entered and then the frown became a beam of pleasure.

      "Charles, my boy! Sit down!" He snapped off the machine.

      "Uncle—" Charles began.

      "It was so kind of you to drop in. I thought you'd be at the theater."

      "I was, Uncle, but—"

      "I'm working on a revision for the next edition of Organization, Symbolism and Morale. You'd never guess who inspired it."

      "I'm sure I wouldn't, Uncle. Uncle—"

      "Old Thornberry, President of the Chase National. He had the infernal gall to refuse a line of credit to young McGurn. Bankers! You won't believe it, but people used to beg them to take over their property, tie up their incomes, virtually enslave them. People demanded it. The same way they demanded inexpensive liquor, tobacco and consumer goods, clean women and a chance to win a fortune and our ancestors obliged them. Our ancestors were sneered at in their day, you know. They were called criminals when they distributed goods and services at a price people could afford to pay."

      "Uncle!"

      "Hush, boy, I know what you're going to say. You can't fool the people forever! When they'd had enough hounding and restriction, they rose in their might.

      "The people demanded freedom of choice, Falcaro and the rest rose to lead them in the Syndic and the Mob and they drove the Government into the sea."

      "Uncle Frank—"

      "From which it still occasionally ventures to annoy our coastal cities," F. W. Taylor commented. He warmed to his subject. "You should have seen the old boy blubber. The last of the old-time bankers, and they deserved everything they got. They brought it on themselves. They had what they called laissez-faire, and it worked for awhile until they got to tinkering with it. They demanded things called protective tariffs, tax remissions, subsidies—regulation, regulation, regulation, always of the other fellow. But there were enough bankers on all sides for everybody to be somebody else's other fellow. Coercion snowballed and the Government lost public acceptance. They had a thing called the public debt which I can't begin to explain to you except to say that it was something written on paper and that it raised the cost of everything tremendously. Well, believe me or not, they didn't just throw away the piece of paper or scratch out the writing on it. They let it ride until ordinary people couldn't afford the pleasant things in life."

      "Uncle—"

      * * * * *

      A cautious periscope broke the choppy water off Sea Island, Georgia. At the other end of the periscope were Captain Van Dellen of the North American Navy, lean as a hound, and fat little Commander Grinnel.

      "You might take her in a little closer, Van," said Grinnel mildly.

      "The exercise won't do you any lasting damage," Van Dellen said. Grinnel was very, very, near to a couple of admirals and normally Van Dellen gave him the kid-glove treatment in spite of ranking him. But this was his ship and no cloak and dagger artist from an O.N.I. desk was telling him how to con it.

      Grinnel smiled genially at the little joke. "I could call it a disguise," he said patting his paunch, "but you know me too well."