End of the Dream Read online

  “So it was Luna, not human character, was it, that saved the sum of things?” He erased me with a small-eye stare and began explaining how wonderful people would be under all sorts of bad conditions, blackout and so on. I shriveled.

  That was when, in mid-flight, Miles’s voice rolled over the twenty kids. It was a deep bass in childhood and merely grew a little deeper and more resonant when Miles reached adolescence. His peroration was one word: “Shit!”

  It was not a permissible classroom expletive, where manners were required.

  Corddy sucked in a breath. Miles then stood—he was enormous for twelve and would become a giant in the following few years. His blond hair fell over his brow, which, even then, was lined. His blue-gray eyes had a burn that meant “disaster en route.” His hands were fists. He started bellowing in a sort of restricted fashion, and Corddy couldn’t shriek loud enough to stop or even to drown it.

  What Miles said was elaborate, lucid, terrible and true. The adults who were then going around boasting of how well they and everybody acted that November night were “horses’ asses.” To assume that one incident on the moonlit night would characterize behavior on a dirty night was insane. To imagine it would reveal anything about conduct involving a nuclear weapon was mindless. Close to nuts. He, Miles, for one, was not going to spend one more minute in this class listening every day to an alleged teacher doing what he considered an act of pedagogy when it was, in fact, mental buggery.

  It went on till teachers and pupils rushed in from other rooms to see what caused the clamor, thunder over squeals.

  Later that day Miles asked me to his home.

  I had never even seen anything like it even in movies or on TV.

  Or anybody like Nora.

  Or like all the other Smythes.

  And that same afternoon, as Manhattan hazed up for night and got its trillion lights on, I wandered around Miles’s room looking at his trophies and stuff while Miles sat watching me but, plainly, thinking hard about something, so hard I was afraid he had regretted having me over.

  Then, suddenly, he smacked his thigh hard enough to break mine, nearly, and began to talk.

  “God damn! You know what? It’s not only blackouts! It’s just about everything! People think of nature and the planet and science and themselves just the kook way old Corddy thinks! Somebody has got to start straightening them out. I mean, we’re crazy. Our water’s filthy, air’s hard to suck in, we’re covering terra firma with poison and paving over or scraping off the soil. Our whole species—is flying on a bum gauge. Some guy should start a reorientation course and, damn it, Will, I’m that guy! And you’re going to help me.”

  Just like that.

  I was asked for supper—dinner—and there was a butler.

  Looking from this vast journey’s time span to that, for me, nervous yet glorious day, I realize how subtly I was informed and how deeply changed into somebody else.

  Jason Smythe, the psychiatrist, would become a father figure for me. Nora would be my wife. Miles a greater friend than most men ever know. The doctor’s second wife, Pat, and her then absent daughter by a first husband, Zillah, would teach me many things, and some I didn’t want to learn. I’d be a guest here often in the days ahead. I was on my way to summers and winter vacations at Faraway, where the guides would turn Miles and me into “first-class north-woodsmen” by a long and often painful schooling up where there still was real wilderness.

  That night at dinner Miles was voluble about his decision to lead the world in a fight for survival. Oddly, I felt, the doctor apparently accepted that career decision as fact and with approval. What I deemed a whim the doctor saw as a culmination. He often had insights of that clarity and from as little evident cause.

  So that is how and when I came to know Miles and the way my life was altered. He became a great man, some said, the greatest of his age, the “last of the Florentines,” an admirer wrote, and it fits well enough. But Miles Standish Smythe was a human being and it would be an error to suggest he was not just a superior person, which he was, but perfect, which he was not.

  Far from it, in certain obscure ways—and visibly, even spectacularly, flawed in a few others. He was deficient in ego in an odd way. He had a volcanic temper seldom out of control, but when Miles lost that temper he was dangerous, even deadly. His “sex morals”—his phrase, again—were unconventional, but that certainly was owing to his father’s psychological theories and to the conflicts they caused in Miles—and Nora too. He was a prodigious worker, prodigious in whatever he did, but he sometimes worked to a point where his effort was wasted owing to sheer exhaustion. In such a state, he could be absurdly petty.

  From the age of twelve on, he followed the purpose he announced at the time. His father had been right about that. His studies were chosen, in the main, to that end. His adult friends were often picked because they could augment the biological, ecological, scientific or technological memory bank his big skull housed. He grew up to be taller and bigger than his huge father and he was probably among the strongest men living. That giant size and that awesome power he took for granted as one accepts blue eyes or long arms.

  Many people thought of him as fanatical or obsessive. But the line between obsession and devotion, or dedication, is not easy to draw and perhaps not susceptible of drawing. To me, neither term fitted, for a fanatic is emotionally unstable, and obsessiveness is related to a narrow concern. His tragic flaw, in the view of those who know and knew him best, was that habit of self-deprecation, a way of acting that seemed to mean he felt, somewhere, somehow, so inadequate or guilty that, despite the tremendous good he did, his “sins”—his word—could never be atoned for.

  We all tried to help him be rid of that. And he did learn how his self-deprecation hurt his public “image,” so he quit showing it to the world; he was objective enough to understand his image was germane to and had an effect on his life aim. But he did not exorcise his demon. With his family or intimate friends he and that compulsion often took charge. Self-belittlement sat ill on him even for that group, of course, and Miles’s displays gave rise to many private analyses.

  Miles’s behavior, some said, was owing to an unconscious or else inadmissible superstition: that, in effect, he derogated himself so his achievements could go on without “punishment.” That idea is absurd. So is the notion he played introvert to oppose his father’s blazing extroversion.

  And my own theory about my friend’s strange habit of downgrading himself may be wrong. But there was evidence to sustain my kind of idea, in psychology, before the final times. That evidence showed human “personality” to be, in a major part, not acquired in life but genetic, innate, inherited.

  Among Miles’s forebears were some pretty withdrawn people, hermits, nearly, not anti-social but loners. One of them was the founder of the Smythe fortune in pre-Revolutionary times, Elias Smythe, who supposedly named the lake and river at Faraway, where, legend says, he was not only a trapper but found gold. No one else ever found gold in the region, though many tried. And the fact that old Elias Smythe had trapped in the general area in the 1700s perhaps influenced its purchase by the family, much later.

  In our teens Miles and I used to go prospecting for gold at Faraway, if we could sneak away from our training schedules. We never found any, but we learned a lot about geology and geophysics. Miles didn’t need gold, anyhow. I could have used a few buckets, as my education and other expenses came from “loans” the Smythe family advanced, which ultimately, to their chagrin, I paid back, with interest. For I began to make money at Princeton, and by the time I finished my graduate work I was quite well off. It’s not as hard as those who make it try to make others believe. I was a pretty cute market speculator and I began to buy a few things that were cheap at the time and yet certain in my mind to become valuable. I gambled, of course. But the whole thing was not my main interest so I didn’t sweat out my risks. Owing the Smythes so much, together with a passion to be financially independent, drove me,
if you could call my operations driven.

  But it was Miles whom I wished to sketch here. He is still, at our age of seventy, almost the colossus and powerhouse he was as a younger man. Like many super-size males, he is graceful—has to be, perhaps, as clumsiness would be disastrous. He’s handsome as hell though he does have one incongruous feature, a relatively small nose, flattened slightly and uptilted somewhat. His brow, eyes and jaw would be ideal as models for a Da Vinci sculpture of God or Solomon or, perhaps, Samson. Pat, Dr. Smythe’s gorgeous wife, once said, “When he enters a room people ought to be frightened, but nobody is.”

  Thinking of Miles’s nose, it occurs to me that the organ would be ideal for a circus comic, one big enough. His nose may be the physical sign of the imp, the comedian, the clown Miles loves to be. Even now, at seventy, with his history of mighty efforts that failed, as head of what’s left of a nation that thought itself the earth’s most “powerful” and that truly was the most “advanced” in technology, even after the near extermination of the human species and after being witness to the unbearable events that led to it, even in the year 23, or A.D. 2023, the fun in the man erupts, quite often at the bleaker moments.

  Another Smythe forebear with this same instinct for solitude was the great-grandfather who disappeared after a banquet to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. His sons spent a fortune trying to locate him, but in vain. When he died at the age of eighty-six it was discovered that he had gone to live in the wilds of British Columbia, where his “friends” were wolves and bears and bobcats, as he explained: not any of that “mostly evil breed called man.” There he had lived, a happy man, and there he had died. Miles even found that there existed a clan remnant in remotest, mistiest Scotland, some “MacSmiths” or near to that, who were known in their scantily peopled hills as “the sky folk.”

  Extreme shyness, as psychologists know, is usually an acquired pose, real enough but unconscious, cloaking an ego too arrogant to show its bloated condition.

  No such inward distortion fits Miles.

  In my view, and as he tried to explain it to me, obliquely, his self-deprecation and the periods of intense depression that sometimes followed came from a gene; the cause was inherited. He dealt as best he could with something common in children but, in him, innate and not open to maturation or other remedy.

  Miles is bashful.

  2. Black Valentine’s Day

  One man ultimately learned the cause of Black Valentine’s Day besides the agent. He eventually told it to another who passed it on to a few more in the certainty that it would be entered on the record. For a long time, however, events made any such historic notice impossible.

  The man responsible confessed as he was dying. His name was Elliot Brown and he was in St. Anthony’s Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, when he finally told his story. A fattish, bald man now thinned by terminal cancer of the then rare sort that could not be arrested, son of a morose architect whose great expectations had not materialized, one of six children, Brown grew up in the environment of hate, self-pity and world-blame that is common in the home of a disappointed father and, in this case, of an embittered mother too.

  Elliot, who inherited the most meager genetic strains of both parents, was granted a degree in a junior college, night school division, and became what his diploma permitted, an electrical technician. He was also a racist, a member of local chapters of secret organizations dedicated to the extinction of—or, at least, the final resistance against—numberless anti-American traitors which such groups perceived everywhere, Reds, kids, criminals, non-whites, liberals, the lot.

  At the time of his confession Elliot Brown was a skeleton covered by skin, a living thing with sunken, pale gray eyes and lips on which metastases grew like halves of strawberries. After employment by three major power companies he had given up work to live on relief. He would never have divulged his tremendous secret had not his physician been Jewish, a young resident named Stern whom Elliot was unable to have replaced.

  Even so, he would not have talked had he not heard from a well-meaning nurse a fact about Dr. Stern offered as an effort to lessen this detestable but dying man’s prejudice. The story was simple and true: Dr. Stern had watched his mother burn to death in a tenement window when he stood below, helpless, on that Valentine’s Day.

  The date of that anguish sent Elliot’s thoughts whizzing back to his years of labor under hated bosses. For the last ten years of employment he had been a district inspector of the power transmission system of New England, Canada and Erie Power and Light Company, or NECE, one of the biggest. The sophistication of these systems had increased with the growth of the great power grid that finally stretched from New Brunswick to Florida and west into parts of several states adjoining those on the Atlantic coast. Elliot’s duties involved an extensive territory, to cover which required four weeks.

  Just when he first realized that, if he wanted, he could easily and without personal risk cause a massive power failure he never confessed. Some germinal idea may have been latent in him for a long time but it became a thriving fantasy that Elliot amplified as a sort of quid pro quo for his immense grudge against society.

  It must have developed slowly if for no other reason than that its accomplishment involved literally hundreds of steps, and these would have to be designed so they would remain unsuspected before the critical moment and afterward. What matters is that Elliot finally carried out his scheme, with elaborations that took him, in the guise of a fisherman or bird watcher, into areas served by NECE but not in Elliot’s own territory.

  On a cool April morning Dr. Herman Stern, a dark-eyed and dark-skinned man with a mournful profile and an honest face, looked in on Elliot while he was alone in a treatment room.

  “Well, fellow, how’re you doing?” His smile was intended to diminish the daily whine. But the whine wasn’t tried that day.

  Elliot was hooked up to tubes and needles and half sitting. He did not seem cheerful but he did not look as usual, on the short-term edge of new grievances adduced and readied for immediate listing. He even seemed a little—not roguish, exactly, Stern thought, but something like it which the patient enjoyed and others would surely find malicious or unsavory.

  “I hear,” Elliot said, “your old lady burned alive.”

  “Oh.” The face-on expression was sadder, now, even than the long and drooping profile.

  “That true? The Black Day?”

  The doctor nodded. He didn’t want to think of it, even less to talk of it, but the man was dying and knew it and his offer of communication on any level but that of beefing was novel, even interesting. So, quietly, in a few sentences, he explained how and why he had had to stand helpless while flames poured out of a sixth-story window and incinerated his loved, screaming mother.

  Elliot listened—avidly. He was going to get his back from this yid. When the doctor stopped, he said, “I done her in. Murdered her, me. And maybe like about a hunnert thousand more people like her. Yids, a lot of ’em. Like her. You. Niggers, thousands.”

  Stern made the only sane appraisal. Some wandering bit of cancerous material had been carried to the man’s brain and grown there till the man’s mind had been its victim.

  “You think I’m nuts? It’s God’s truth! I rigged two sections of the NECE grid to blow—and it went off bigger than I had even expected.”

  “You what?” Stern remembered this living residue of a man had been some sort of high-tension line inspector. “Tell me about it.”

  Five minutes later Stern felt that one of them was mad. Ten minutes later he phoned from the room that he must not leave the patient for at least half an hour.

  He was there for an hour.

  He came back for more the next day—bemused, horrified, driven against his will to learn more about this incredible act of one man that had ended so many lives, ruined more and was remembered, nowadays, only as a minor vicissitude of the nation.

  That second day Elliot, with excessive pride, gave the physician a fe
w details of his treachery. As Stern was to reflect in later months, the size of the fiend’s ego, his megalomania, his sense of justice and vindication were psychologically classic—the perfect image of the assassin: weak, mindless paranoids determined to make their mark, however contemptibly.

  It was not until Stern was a general practitioner in the town of Lake Placid, where he had gone with his wife and new baby, like many, to escape any further urban disasters, that he repeated the tale. He did so after he had been made chairman of a local sports and conservation group which Miles addressed one afternoon. Stern, like all the world by then, knew a great deal about Miles Standish Smythe and his Foundation. He liked Miles at once, and told him about Elliot’s deed because, he had long felt, somebody besides himself ought to know, just for the record. And who was better able than Miles Smythe to understand the fantastic revenge on society of a once fat, bold, nondescript, invidious and finally skin-and-bones fiend?

  Even so, Miles was shocked more than the physician had expected. Stern was in turn stunned. He had taken the world’s view of Miles, the image, a Hercules tramping unmoved and resolute through the horrors of the past and present. As he stared at Miles’s broken features, his stiffened hands, disciplined not to clench, and at the changing shape of his shoes which revealed the curling toes, as he saw the light in the man’s eyes switch out, the young doctor regretted his act. Miles had proven to be one who never could become inured. Suffering made him suffer. So his career had a cost in courage the doctor could not bear to contemplate.

  Stern began to apologize for burdening the man.

  Miles halted that and smiled. Then he spoke—his voice like the first sound of thunder.

  “There was some inside discussion of the possibility that the Valentine’s Day thing was due to sabotage. One of the men in my Foundation told me about it. There was some evidence of tinkering at several points where safety equipment hadn’t been damaged, burned up. A group of men could have done it, he said. But the signs weren’t conclusive and the blackout could have been due to systems failure.”