Mack Reynolds - After Utopia

He stared at her.

“And now,” she said, and the mocking quality was back in her voice again, “I assume that you are not particularly interested in my accompanying you to your bed tonight. Not in view of the fact that you have experienced more than six orgasms… in your mind.”

“No, I suppose not,” he said. “Good night, Betty. This sort of thing isn’t going to happen to me again.”

“We’ll see,” she said. “You’ve already let us know that so far what you’ve seen of this society you rather like.”

“I’ll talk about it with the three of you tomorrow,” he said. “Good night, again.”

He made his way to his room, but instead of undressing he stretched out on his bed, fully clothed and stared up at the ceiling.

So, it was for this that he had devoted his life to the movement. It was for this he had fought in half a dozen wars, revolutions, and revolts. It was for this that he had been wounded more times than he could remember. It was for this that he had spent years in prisons and concentration camps.

And all his friends who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him. All those who had died in the struggle. Jim Farthington and Bud Whiteley, in the Spanish Civil War; Ferry Washington, who had been lynched in Mississippi; Buck Dillard, Dave Woolman, Fred Thompson, all dead fighting Hitlerism in the Second World War; Ilya Rostov and Michael Manovich, caught by the Soviets and last heard of in a Siberian labor camp; Luca Memmi and Lippo Signorelli, dead with the partisans, fighting Mussolini in Northern Italy. Yes, and many more, and above all, Dan Whiteley, who evidently had been shot after Tracy had gone into hibernation, or whatever you wanted to call it. Shot by the Maoists in Communist China when he was trying to get the movement going there.

All of them dead, and many more. But they were the dead. Hundreds and thousands of others in the organization Tracy had belonged to had been caught and imprisoned for varying terms, some of them for life.

Yes, all of the martyrs. The men and women who had given all there was to give, fighting for a cause, a better world, a Utopia.

Well, here it is, Tracy Cogswell. Here is the Utopia you all fought for.

His mind went back again over the list of those who had been close to him and had gone down in the fight, and as before, he ended the list with his best friend.

The last time he and Dan Whiteley had worked together to any extent had been in Budapest in 1956 when the revolution was on there. Otherwise, he hadn’t even seen Dan except for those times in the Tangier medina.

Tracy was even more tired than he had realized. He fell off into sleep, still clothed, still thinking about Dan Whiteley.

And the dream that came to him was almost as vivid as the one he had gone through in the gardens of Hasan Ben Sabbah… but hardly as enjoyable.

Tracy Cogswell and Dan Whiteley had both been in Vienna when the anticommunist Hungarian revolution of 1956 began.

Tracy was already permanently attached to the organization in Tangier, and Whiteley had been working with the Solidarity branch of the movement in England; but both had been sent to Austria in an attempt to strengthen the organization there. The Austrians, they found, were on the easy going side when it came to drastic changes in the politico-economic system. Their idea of carrying on a conspiracy was to sit around in one of the little taverns on the outskirts of town, drinking heurigen wein whilst eating wurst , listening to a zither player somewhere in the background, and talking endlessly about the finer technicalities, such as where Marx and Engels had gone wrong.

Before meeting in Vienna, the two hadn’t seen each other for some time. Dan Whiteley had less than enjoyed a rather remarkable stint in the Second World War. He had been in England when it started and immediately signed up, anti-Hitlerite that he was. His years in Spain didn’t do him any good with the British military authorities and they didn’t even make him a noncom. He had been captured at Dunkirk and, instead of being sent to a military concentration camp, he had been sent to East Prussia and assigned to work on a farm along with one other allied prisoner. The three young sons who had formerly helped with the farm chores had been called up by the German army, leaving only their elderly parents. The two old folk weren’t particularly hard to get along with, but Whiteley had no intention of sitting the war out in such wise. He and his companion escaped and, rather than trying to get all the way through Germany to France or England, headed north in the direction of Poland. They thought they might be able to make it across the Baltic to Sweden. Happily, his companion was of Slavic background and could speak the language, so when they were captured by the Polish partisans they made out all right, and Dan spent two years with them, before his companion was killed and he was recaptured. The Gestapo decided Dan was an American who had been parachute dropped to stir up the Poles, and they worked him over a bit for a confession and to get him to reveal any other American agents in the country. He was saved from being shot by the advancing Red Army, which took the prison in which he was held.

Yes, it had been quite a war. Dan’s biggest regret was that it was the Russians who had liberated him. By this time, he hated their guts.

Tracy was sitting in their favorite meeting place, the Gosserkeller, a beer hall located at Elisabethstrasse 3, near the Opera, having a stein of the superlative Schwechater dunkles beer. He was at a small table off to the side. One of the advantages of the oversized beer hall was that it was so noisy and packed that you could carry on any kind of a conversation whatsoever and nobody would hear you.

Whiteley came in, excitement in his less than handsome face. He took the chair across from his companion.

He said, excitedly, “Been following the news?”

Tracy snorted and said, “You mean from Poland? Now that they’ve brought that old Party hack Gomulka into power, things will simmer down. There won’t be any basic changes in spite of all this gobbledygook about his standing up to Krushchev.”

Dan reached across the table and picked up Tracy’s stein and took a heavy gulp of the dark beer. He said, “I mean from Budapest.”

“What’s happened now?” Tracy said cynically. “I understand that they’re bringing Imre Nagy back into power, kicking Mayyas Rakosi out. But so what? Nagy’s just another Communist party hack.”

Dan Whiteley was jubilant. He said, “You should have heard the radio this morning. Hellsapoppin in Budapest. All over the country, for that matter. Tracy, this is it. All Hungary is up. The students, the teachers, the intellectuals, and the workers are forming worker’s councils to take over production. Even the army has come over. Pal Maleter is heading the army. They’ve all come in. Hell, even the church. Cardinal Mindszenty is backing the revolt, getting into the act… they have to. Tracy, this is it. The people are taking over! I’ll spread. If Hungary goes, Czechoslovakia will be next, then Poland, East Germany. It’ll go both East and West. Spain, Portugal, Rumania, Yugoslovia to begin with. Eventually, the world. The people are taking over!”

Tracy said, “For Christ’s sake. Let’s go back to the hotel. I want to hear the latest developments.”

They were staying in a small pension on Schellin Gasse, two blocks over from the Schubert Ring in an older part of the town. For economy reasons, they shared a room and took all of their meals at the pension rate. They walked, to save the cab fare, but they walked fast. It was only five or six blocks.

Even as they strode, Tracy said, “What’s the AVO in Hungary doing about all this?”