“Why, ma’am,” cried the man. “I am!”
And he was.
He landed and fell rolling in the road.
Neva banged the car into full flight.
Behind, the man picked himself up and yelled, “You must be nuts. You must be crazy. Nuts. Crazy.”
“I’m nuts? I’m crazy? said Neva, and hooted. “Boy!”
“… nuts … crazy …” The voice faded.
Douglas looked back and saw the man shaking his fist, then ripping off his shirt and hurling it to the gravel and jumping big puffs of white-hot dust out of it with his bare feet.
The car exploded, rushed, raced, banged pell-mell ahead, his aunt ferociously glued to the hot wheel, until the little sweating figure of the talking man was lost in sun-drenched marshland and burning air. At last Doug exhaled:
“Neva, I never heard you talk like that before.”
“And never will again, Doug.”
“Was what you said true?”
“Not a word.”
“You lied, I mean, you lied?”
“I lied.” Neva blinked. “Do you think he was lying, too?”
“I don’t know.”
“All I know is sometimes it takes a lie to kill a lie, Doug. This time, anyway. Don’t let it become customary.”
“No, ma’am.” He began to laugh. “Say the thing about mandrake root again. Say the thing about wolfbane in my pocket. Say it about a pistol with a silver bullet, say it.”
She said it. They both began to laugh.
Whooping and shouting, they went away in their tin-bucket-junking car over the gravel ruts and humps, her saying, him listening, eyes squeezed shut, roaring, snickering, raving.
They didn’t stop laughing until they hit the water in their bathing suits and came up all smiles.
The sun stood hot in the middle of the sky and they dog-paddled happily for five minutes before they began to really swim in the menthol-cool waves.
Only at dusk when the sun was suddenly gone and the shadows moved out from the trees did they remember that now they had to go back down that lonely road through all the dark places and past that empty swamp to get to town.
They stood by the car and looked down that long road. Doug swallowed hard.
“Nothing can happen to us going home.”
“Nothing.”
“Jump!”
They hit the seats and Neva kicked the starter like it was a dead dog and they were off.
They drove along under plum-colored trees and among velvet purple hills.
And nothing happened.
They drove along a wide raw gravel road that was turning the color of plums and smelled the warm-cool air that was like lilacs and looked at each other, waiting.
And nothing happened.
Neva began at last to hum under her breath.
The road was empty.
And then it was not empty.
Neva laughed. Douglas squinted and laughed with her.
For there was a small boy, nine years old maybe, dressed in a vanilla-white summer suit, with white shoes and a white tie and his face pink and scrubbed, waiting by the side of the road. He waved.
Neva braked the car.
“Going in to town?” called the boy, cheerily. “Got lost. Folks at a picnic, left without me. Sure glad you came along. It’s spooky out here.”
“Climb in!”
The boy climbed and they were off, the boy in the back seat, and Doug and Neva up front glancing at him, laughing, and then getting quiet.
The small boy kept silent for a long while behind them, sitting straight upright and clean and bright and fresh and new in his white suit.
And they drove along the empty road under a sky that was dark now with a few stars and the wind getting cool.
And at last the boy spoke and said something that Doug didn’t hear but he saw Neva stiffen and her face grow as pale as the ice cream from which the small boy’s suit was cut.
“What?” asked Doug, glancing back.
The small boy stared directly at him, not blinking, and his mouth moved all to itself as if it were separate from his face.
The car’s engine missed fire and died.
They were slowing to a dead stop.
Doug saw Neva kicking and fiddling at the gas and the starter. But most of all he heard the small boy say, in the new and permanent silence:
“Have either of you ever wondered—”
The boy took a breath and finished:
“—if there is such a thing as genetic evil in the world?”
“Sit down, young man,” said the Official.
“Thanks.” The young man sat.
“I’ve been hearing rumors about you,” the Official said pleasantly. “Oh, nothing much. Your nervousness. Your not getting on so well. Several months now I’ve heard about you, and I thought I’d call you in. Thought maybe you’d like your job changed. Like to go overseas, work in some other War Area? Desk job killing you off, like to get right in on the old fight?”
“I don’t think so,” said the young sergeant.
“What do you want?”
The sergeant shrugged and looked at his hands. “To live in peace. To learn that during the night, somehow, the guns of the world had rusted, the bacteria had turned sterile in their bomb casings, the tanks had sunk like prehistoric monsters into roads suddenly made tar pits. That’s what I’d like.”
“That’s what we’d all like, of course,” said the Official. “Now stop all that idealistic chatter and tell me where you’d like to be sent. You have your choice—the Western or the Northern War Zone.” The Official tapped a pink map on his desk.
But the sergeant was talking at his hands, turning them over, looking at the fingers: “What would you officers do, what would we men do, what would the world do if we all woke tomorrow with the guns in flaking ruin?”
The Official saw that he would have to deal carefully with the sergeant. He smiled quietly. “That’s an interesting question. I like to talk about such theories, and my answer is that there’d be mass panic. Each nation would think itself the only unarmed nation in the world, and would blame its enemies for the disaster. There’d be waves of suicide, stocks collapsing, a million tragedies.”
“But after that,” the sergeant said. “After they realized it was true, that every nation was disarmed and there was nothing more to fear, if we were all clean to start over fresh and new, what then?”
“They’d rearm