Momentarily the lights were fixed on Lime; he squinted into them and nodded into the cameras. The President gave him the benediction of a paternal sad smile before he turned back into the cameras and the lights swiveled away from Lime, and that was that for his part of it except that he had to remain in his seat for the duration of the President’s talk.

It was so easy to give the people heroes nowadays, he thought. You strapped a man into a seat and shot him to the moon, and made him a hero. You put him on a horse in front of a camera, or you hired a dozen keen wits to write his speeches. Heroism was a packaged mass-market commodity, the ultimate cynicism.

People needed their myths, their heroes, and there was no room left for the real thing so you had to contrive fakes for them. It simply wasn’t possible for a new Lindbergh to emerge: technology had gone beyond the individual. Those who persisted in facing individual challenges—the ones who rowed singlehanded across the Atlantic, the ones who climbed mountains—were relegated to the status of harmless fools because what they did was fundamentally meaningless, technology had demeaned it: you could always fly the Atlantic in three hours, you could reach the mountaintop by helicopter in a painless swoop.

The President was talking tough now, carrying a big stick. The perpetrators were in hand, they would be tried, the trial would be a firm example for the world and for those who sought to impose anarchic violence upon the freely elected governments of the world. Justice and law would be served. Our equanimity was not to be taken for equivocation; our tranquillity should not be mistaken for submission, our coolness for passivity. America’s patience had been sorely tried, it was at its limit.

“Let our enemies, within and without, take warning.”

The President concluded his address and left the room without opening the floor to any questions. Lime gave the reporters the slip and made his way back to the Executive Office Building. The streets were quiet; the drizzle continued, very cold, and beyond the curtailed pools of street lamplight the shadows were oppressively opaque. Street scene from a Sydney Greenstreet picture, he observed, and went into the building.

TUESDAY,

JANUARY 4

5:15 A.M. EST Mario was grinning. “Man we have gone and filled the New York Times from the headlines right through to the classified section.”

The newspaper rattled like small-arms fire when Mario turned the pages. “We really trashed them. Listen here: ‘At midnight the toll stood at 143 dead, of whom 15 were U. S. Senators and 51 were Congressmen, and at least 70 journalists. Approximately 500 victims have been admitted to hospitals and emergency clinics, but nearly 300 of these sustained superficial injuries and have been released. At latest count 217 men and women and four children are hospitalized. Twenty-six remain on the critical list.’” Mario took a long breath and let it out with a nod of satisfaction. “Now talk about off the pigs!”

“Keep it down.” Sturka was in the corner of the motel room with the radio turned down low. He sat within reach of the telephone, waiting for it to ring. Alvin wearily listened and watched; Alvin felt wrung out, pain throbbed between his ears, his stomach bubbled sour.

Sturka looked like a television gangster, stripped down to his shirtsleeves with a shoulder holster strapped tight around his chest. Cesar Renaldo was asleep in his clothes on the couch and Peggy lay across the bed smoking a Marlboro and drinking coffee out of the motel bathroom’s plastic cup.

Big trucks snored by; the occasional semi-rig gnashed in and out of the truck-stop café in front of the motel. Peggy looked at Sturka. “Don’t you get tired?”

“When I get tired I hear Mao saying a revolution is not a tea party.”

Alvin slid back in the chair and went limp, eyes drifting half shut. Cesar on the couch was eyeing Peggy with a slow carnal stare. He kept his eyes on her too long: it made Peggy roll her head around, look at him, get up and go into the john. Its door slammed; Cesar smiled lazily. Cesar had moved in with Peggy two weeks ago but they had ended it quickly at Sturka’s command. The privatism of establishing couples inhibited total collectivization. It was counterrevolutionary. It was an oppressive relationship, it led right back into everything they were struggling against: the capitalist orientation toward bourgeois individuality. The pig philosophy of separating one person from the next, encouraging the individual to assert himself at the expense of his brother.

You had to fight all that. You were the oppressed black colony. You learned the frustrating impotence of nonviolent resistance, sit-ins, demonstrations: self-defeating Custerism—bourgeois games encouraged by the Establishment, kids playing at revolution. Deliberately putting yourself in jail was immature and counterproductive. It did not help end the white-skin privilege of capitalism.

The Third World struggled against imperialism and the time to smash racist tyranny was now, while the momentum was there. Put the pigs up against the wall, increase the cost of empire, open new fronts behind enemy lines to smash the state, goad the pigs into reprisals which would awaken the masses to the fat fascism of the demagogues. People had minds like concrete—mixed, framed and set—and if you meant them to listen you had to blow things up.

The phone.

Sturka picked up. “Yes?”

Alvin fixed his insomniac eyes on Sturka hunching forward. “Where are you, a phone booth? Give me the number.” Sturka scribbled on the flyleaf of the Gideon Bible and ripped it out. “I’ll go to a phone and call you back.”

Sturka cradled the telephone and reached for his jacket. “Everyone stay inside.” He opened the door and went. It was probably Raoul Riva.

Peggy was lighting a cigarette from the burning stub of the old one; she stood just inside the bathroom door, stood there for a stretching interval and finally crossed to the front window. Parted the drapes and looked out. “I don’t know.”

Alvin said, “What?”

Peggy sat down on the floor and tipped her head back against the sill. “It was an uncool getaway.”

Cesar rolled his head around. “So?”

“They got six of our people. We’d have to be stupid if we thought they’d all keep quiet. I bet they’ve given us away by now.”

Cesar said again, “So?”

“So why are we sitting here? Waiting for the pigs to rip us off?”

“Gentle down.” Cesar lay back. “Ain’t nothing to fret about.”

Peggy gave a sour bark of laughter.

Mario said, “Hey,” whipping toward the radio.

The announcer: “… arrested less than an hour ago by police who had been staked out to watch the Harlem tenement. Identified as Darleen Warner, the woman is alleged by the FBI to be a member of the conspiracy to bomb the Capitol. This arrest brings to seven the number of bomb-plot conspirators apprehended so far …”

“Oh that’s sensational.” Peggy closed her eyes.

“Get off it,” Cesar said. “You want to push that stuff out.”

Alvin gave them both bleak stares. He didn’t want a push-out session, he was too tired. They had spent days in self-criticism sessions, Sturka and Cesar leading the harsh group therapy inducing them to exorcise their bourgeois conventionalisms and their individualized fears. They had lived taut, studied intensely, learned to accept discipline; now Peggy was backsliding and it was a bad time for it.

Shut up, he thought.

Perhaps the edge of the thought struck them all because Peggy closed her mouth to a pout and did not speak. The radio droned faintly and trucks went snarling by, Mario brooded over the Times, Peggy chain-smoked, Cesar dozed.

Sturka returned so silently it chilled Alvin. He was inside closing the door before Alvin knew he was there.