Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

Stubb drank and handed the flask to Barnes, who offered it to the witch, then drank too when she refused.

“Let me put it like this,” the man in the duffel coat said. “The Indians used to be Americans—that’s what an American was. Then the trappers were Americans, the Americans of their day. Then the farmers, with their buggies and plow horses and white clapboard houses. Even today when you look at a picture of Uncle Sam, you’re seeing what those farmers were like dressed up to go to the county fair. Only farmers aren’t real Americans any more. Neither are Indians. Poor bastards of Indians aren’t even foreigners, and we like foreigners more than Americans, because foreigners are the Americans of the future. The trappers are gone, and pretty soon you’ll be gone too.”

He felt in his pocket for the flask, then seemed to remember he had thrown it to Stubb.

“You aren’t Americans either.” His voice grew angry and a little deeper. “There isn’t one of you, not a God-damned one, that owns a designer sheet. Or a set of matched towels. You don’t wear anybody’s jeans, and you don’t jog. You’re shit. You’re just shit.”

“I would sooner die!” The witch’s vehemence startled all three men. “I would sooner die than wear your blue jeans and be seen!”

“You’re not American,” the man in the duffel coat repeated. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“And have I ever claimed to be? Or wished to be? I am a Gypsy and a princess. And a dupe, because you have made me one. But I will speak for the Indians too, because they were nomads when they were shaped by their own thoughts and not by yours, and we are nomads now, who will remain so though you slay us.” She gasped for breath; it was almost a sob.

“You have overcome us, but you have not conquered us. To conquer us you must beat us fairly, and you have not beaten us fairly, and so you have struck us to the earth, but you have not won. To conquer us, you must have dignity too, and for that reason you have not conquered us. A man may flee from a wasp and be stung by the wasp, but he has not been conquered by the wasp; it remains an insect, and he is still a man. You deck yourselves like fools and chatter and hop like apes, and your princes marry whores. That is why even those you have crushed to dust will not call you master, and none will ever call you master until you meet a nation more foolish than yourselves.”

Grinning at the man in the duffel coat, Stubb applauded. Barnes took it up.

For a few seconds the man in the duffel coat was silent, shifting the muzzle of the Thompson from Stubb to Barnes and back. Then he said, “All right, I was trying to explain. I thought maybe it might do some good. We’ve been told to send you to the top, so that’s where you’re going.”

Stubb said, “This sounds more interesting than the philosophical stuff—I never really liked that. You’re flying us to Washington?”

The man in the duffel coat shook his head. “I said to the top. To the people who really run things, run the whole world. They want to see all four of you, I’ll be damned if I know why. You’ll leave as soon as the other one gets here.” He chuckled. “You don’t know it, but you’re lucky. In a few more years, you wouldn’t just take a plane—you’d have to go above the stratosphere, into outer space. It’s the truth.”

“The High Country,” Stubb said.

“That’s right, the High Country. It started just after Pearl Harbor, when everybody was afraid the Nazis might come up Chesapeake Bay. The government was exposed as hell, but it would have harmed morale to move it to some place like Kansas City, although Senator Truman and some others were for it. So they decided to put the key men on a plane and shuttle them around.”

Barnes asked, “You mean President Roosevelt? My dad used to talk about him.”

The man in the duffel coat shook his head. “The President’s not one of the key people. Never has been. Basically a front man. These were the decision makers. High Country’ s the code name for the plane, you see. A lot of it was wood. Saved stratetic metals for bombers and fighters. Even back then they were working on it, making it bigger in flight. Harry Hopkins, I think it was, made some joke about spruce growing at ten thousand feet. You get it?”

Stubb nodded. “Sure. Am I supposed to laugh?”

“In those days, they had to land and take off again every eight hours or so. But while they were in the air, nothing could get them unless Goering figured out a way to get his high-altitude fighters over here. So one of the things they worked on was ways to keep the plane up longer. Maybe you heard of Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose? The big seaplane? That was an idea that didn’t work out. Now they never have to land at all, and pretty soon they’ll be too high for—”

A younger man opened the door and peered into the room. “We need you out here, General.”

The man in the duffel coat glanced at him. “Trouble?”

“Not serious, sir.” The younger man shrugged. “But maybe you can think of something.”

“You people stay where you are,” the man in the duffel coat told them. “I don’t want to lose you, and if you leave this room, one of the sentries will probably shoot you.” He shut the door behind him, and they heard the snick of the lock.

Barnes was the first to speak. “Well, what did you think of that?”

Stubb stroked the bruise on the side of his head. “What do you think?” he said. “I’m tired of being smart. I think I ought to listen to somebody else’s ideas for a while.”

Barnes hesitated. “In the first place, Mr. Free came off that plane. ‘The High Country’—that’s what he said, right?”

“Or he wanted us to think that’s where he came from. Or they want us to think that’s where he came from. But, yeah, maybe he did. Is there any of that Scotch left?”

“This?” Barnes held up the flask, which was decorated with interlacing triangles. “About one good shot, I think.”

“You want it, Madame S.?”

The witch shook her head.

“Then I’ll take it.” Stubb wiped the top of the flask with the palm of his hand. “Let me ask you both a question, and I’m not doing it just to keep myself entertained—though God knows I’ve been on that trip often enough. This time I really want to know. Why us?”

Neither answered.

Stubb upended the flask, swallowed, and shook himself. “Smooth. But now suppose this general was giving us the straight goods. What makes us so damn important that these guys who fly around up there all the time want to see us? Or suppose he was lying—that makes it worse. Why’d he want us to think that plane was where Free came from?”

The witch said, “I have a better question. Better because you know the answer. Before you heard the young man say general, you employed an honorific. You knew him for an officer, or at least suspected. How?”

“Nothing spectacular, Madame S. He had on plain-toed brown shoes with a spit shine, and that girl I told you about said her father was a general. Maybe he’s not her father, but she probably thinks of him as a father or an uncle—she said his name was Samuel, so that would be Uncle Sam—and when most people have to make up a lie in a hurry, they use whatever they’ve got their minds on at the time.”

Barnes asked, “You didn’t believe him?”

Stubb shrugged and drank the last sip from the flask, then paused staring at its decorated silver sides. “It seemed like he was the boss. Would they pick a guy to run things who’d get shaky and start fighting a bottle? Hell, maybe they would, you never know. Maybe he’s bankrolling them, and they had to. But if he was really a smart guy, the kind you’d expect to find in charge, and he wanted to lay a number on us, that might be a pretty good way to do it. He knows we’re going to ask why’s he telling us all this? So he gives us an answer—because he’s smashed.”