The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [185]
After Dalleson had gone, Cummings slumped in his chair and sat without moving, thinking for a long time.
There was still that thing with Hearn. The particular set of desires that had culminated in his order to pick up the cigarette had not been appeased, not really. And before him still was the question of getting some Navy support.
Abruptly, Cummings was depressed again.
That night Hearn was on duty for a few hours in the G-3 tent. The side flaps were unrolled, the double entrance was raised, and the corners were covered over to make a blackout tent. And as always, it was painfully humid inside. Hearn and the clerk on duty with him sat drowsing in their chairs, their shirts opened, their eyes turned away from the glare of the Coleman lanterns, the perspiration coursing down their faces. It was a convenient time to think, for with the exception of the hourly telephone reports from the front there was no work to do, and the bare tables, the empty desks, and the draped map-boards surrounded them, induced the proper mood of somnolence and absorption. Sporadically, like a muted burst of thunder, they could hear the harassing fire of the artillery sounding in the night.
Hearn stretched, looked at his watch. "What time do you get relieved, Stacey?" he asked.
"Two A.M., Lieutenant."
Hearn was on until three. He sighed, stretched his arms, and slumped down in his chair. There was a magazine in his lap, but he had scanned through it, and a little bored, he tossed it onto a table. After a moment or two, he took a letter from his breast pocket, and read it again slowly. It was from a college friend.
Here in Washington you can see all the patterns. The reactionaries are frightened. Despite what they want to believe they know this has become a people's war, and the currents of world revolution are in the air. It's a people's movement and they're bringing all the old tools of repression to try to stop it. After the war there's going to be a witchhunt, but it'll fail and the basic will of the people toward communal freedom will be expressed. You've no idea how frightened the reactionaries are. It's the last-ditch fight for them.
And there was more in the same tenor. Hearn finished the letter and shrugged. Bailey had always been an optimist. A sound Marxian optimist.
Only that was all bullshit. There would be the witch-hunt after the war all right, but it would hardly be a frightened witch-hunt. What was it Cummings had said? America's energy had become kinetic and it would not be reversed. Cummings wasn't frightened, not in that sense. The terrifying thing in listening to him was his calm and unshakable certainty. The Right was ready for a struggle, but without anxiety this time, with no absorbed and stricken ear listening to the inevitable footstep of history. This time they were the optimists, this time they were on the offensive. There was the thing Cummings had never said, but it was implied tacitly in all his arguments. History was in the grasp of the Right, and after the war their political campaigns would be intense. One big push, one big offensive, and history was theirs for this century, perhaps the next one. The League of Omnipotent Men.
It wasn't that simple, of course, nothing ever was, but still there were powerful men in America, on the march and aroused, some of them perhaps even conscious in their particular dream. And the tools were all ready to hand, the men like his father, the ones who would function in instinctive accord, not knowing, not even caring where the road led them. It could be narrowed probably to a dozen, two dozen men, not even in communication with each other, not even all on the same level of awareness.
But it was much more than that. You could kill the dozen men, and there would be another dozen to replace them, and another and another. Out of all the vast pressures and crosscurrents of history was evolving the archetype of twentieth-century man. The particular man who would direct it, make certain that "the natural role. . . was anxiety." The techniques had outraced the psyche. "The majority of men must be subservient to the machine and it's not a business they instinctively enjoy." And in the marginal area, the gap, were the peculiar tensions that birthed the dream.