Thomas Sherred: E for Effort

Mike helped me carry in the machine from the car. We came in the door in time to see Kessler throw the transcript as far as he could. He bounced to his feet as the sheets fluttered down.

He was furious. “What’s going on here?” We paid no attention to him, nor to the excited demands of the others until the machine had been plugged into the nearest outlet.

Mike looked at me. “Any ideas?”

I shook my head and told Johnson to shut up for a minute. Mike lifted the lid and hesitated momentarily before he touched the dials. I pushed Johnson into his chair and turned off the Ughts myself. The room went black. Johnson, looking over my shoulder, gasped. I heard Bernstein swear softly, amazed.

I turned to see what Mike had shown them.

It was impressive, all right. He had started just over the roof of the laboratory and continued straight up in the air. Up, up, up, until the city of Los Angeles was a tiny dot on a great ball. On the horizon were the Rockies. Johnson grabbed my arm. He hurt.

“What’s that? What’s that? Stop it!” He was yelling. Mike turned off the machine.

You can guess what happened next. No one believed their eyes, nor Mike’s patient explanation. He had to twice turn on the machine again, once going far back into Kessler’s past. Then the reaction set in.

Marrs smoked one cigarette after another, Bernstein turned a gold pencil over and over in his nervous fingers, Johnson paced like a caged tiger, and burly Kessler stared at the machine, saying nothing at all. Johnson was muttering as he paced. Then he stopped and shook his fist under Mike’s nose.

“Man! Do you know what you’ve got there? Why waste time playing around here? Can’t you see you’ve got the world by the tail on a downhill pull? If I’d ever known this—”

Mike appealed to me. “Ed, talk to this wildman.”

I did. I can’t remember exactly what I said, and it isn’t important. But I did tell him how we’d started, how we’d plotted our course, and what we were going to do. I ended by telling him the idea behind the reel of film I’d run off a minute before.

He recoiled as though I were a snake. “You can’t get away with that! You’d be hung—if you weren’t lynched first!”

“Don’t you think we know that? Don’t you think we’re willing to take that chance?”

He tore his thinning hair. Marrs broke in. “Let me talk to him.” He came over and faced us squarely.

“Is this on the level? You going to make a picture like that and stick your neck out? You’re going to turn that… that thing over to the people of the world?”

I nodded. “Just that.”

“And toss over everything you’ve got?” He was dead serious, and so was I. He turned to the others. “He means it!”

Bernstein said, “Can’t be done!”

Words flew. I tried to convince them that we had followed the only possible path. “What kind of a world do you want to live in? Or don’t you want to live?”

Johnson grunted. “How long do you think we’d live if we ever made a picture like that? You’re crazy! I’m not. I’m not going to put my head in a noose.”

“Why do you think we’ve been so insistent about credit and responsibility for direction and production? You’ll be doing only what we hired you for. Not that we want to twist your arm, but you’ve made a fortune, all of you, working for us. Now, when the going gets heavy, you want to back out!”

Marrs gave in. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’re crazy, maybe I am. I always used to say I’d try anything once. Bernie, you?”

Bernstein was quietly cynical. “You saw what happened in the last war. This might help. I don’t know if it will. I don’t know—but I’d hate to think I didn’t try. Count me in!”

Kessler?

He swiveled his head. “Kid stuff! Who wants to live forever? Who wants to let a chance go by?”

Johnson threw up his hands. “Let’s hope we get a cell together. Let’s all go crazy.” And that was that.

We went to work in a blazing drive of mutual hope and understanding. In four months the lipreaders were through. There’s no point in detailing here their reactions to the dynamite they daily dictated to Sorenson. For their own good we kept them in the dark about our final purpose, and when they were through we sent them across the border into Mexico, to a small ranch Johnson had leased. We were going to need them later.

While the print duplicators worked overtime Marrs worked harder. The press and the radio shouted the announcement that, in every city of the world we could reach, there would be held the simultaneous premieres of our latest picture. It would be the last we needed to make. Many wondered aloud at our choice of the word “needed.” We whetted curiosity by refusing any advance information about the plot, and Johnson so well infused the men with their own now-fervent enthusiasm that not much could be pried out of them but conjecture. The day we picked for release was Sunday. Monday, the storm broke.

I wonder how many prints of that picture are left today. I wonder how many escaped burning or confiscation. Two World Wars we covered, covered from the unflattering angles that, up until then, had been represented by only a few books hidden in the dark corners of libraries. We showed and named the war-makers, the cynical ones who signed and laughed and lied, the blatant patriots who used the flare of headlines and the ugliness of atrocity to hide behind their flag while life turned to death for millions. Our own and foreign traitors were there, the hidden ones with Janus faces. Our lipreaders had done their work well; no guesses these, no deduced conjectures from the broken records of a blasted past, but the exact words that exposed treachery disguised as patriotism.

In foreign lands the performances lasted barely the day. Usually, in retaliation for the imposed censorship, the theaters were wrecked by the raging crowds. (Marrs, incidentally, had spent hundreds of thousands bribing officials to allow the picture to be shown without previous censorship. Many censors, when that came out, were shot without trial.) In the Balkans, revolutions broke out, and various embassies were stormed by mobs. Where the film was banned or destroyed written versions spontaneously appeared on the streets or in coffeehouses. Bootlegged editions were smuggled past customs guards, who looked the other way. One royal family fled to Switzerland.

Here in America it was a racing two weeks before the Federal Government, prodded into action by the raging of press and radio, in an unprecedented move closed all performances “to promote the common welfare, insure domestic tranquillity, and preserve foreign relations.” Murmurs—and one riot—rumbled in the Midwest and spread until it was realized by the powers that be that something had to be done, and done quickly, if every government in the world were not to collapse of its own weight.

We were in Mexico, at the ranch Johnson had rented for the lip-readers. While Johnson paced the floor, jerkily fraying a cigar, we listened to a special broadcast of the attorney general himself:

“…furthermore, this message was today forwarded to the Government of the United States of Mexico. I read: ‘the Government of the United States of America requests the immediate arrest and extradition of the following:

“ ‘Edward Joseph Lefkowicz, known as Lefko.’ ” First on the list. Even a fish wouldn’t get into trouble if he kept his mouth shut.

“’Miguel Jose Zapata Laviada.’” Mike crossed one leg over the other.

“’Edward Lee Johnson.’” He threw his cigar on the floor and sank into a chair.

“’Robert Chester Marrs.’” He lit another cigarette. His face twitched.

“’Benjamin Lionel Bernstein.’” He smiled a twisted smile and closed his eyes.