“Oh, go to hell!” Gary reached out angrily and shut off the radio.
The suave voice was lying with every other sweet sentence it uttered, lying or spreading propaganda of the most transparent sort. He had seen the army working that line of endeavor too well in Italy to be taken in by it, had seen the effects of smooth talk on newly conquered, vastly bewildered Germans. It seemed all right at the time, seemed the thing to do to a defeated enemy. They had to be re-educated, given refresher courses in democracy, and what better way to do it than feed them propaganda pills sugar-coated with news? And now the United States was receiving the same treatment from the same hands — the twenty-two United States west of the all-important river. Those twenty-two states were under martial law, no question of it. The radio announcer had unconsciously confirmed it by his honeyed words, his phrasing of the news; in a situation such as the present one the army passed on what was broadcast, what was printed.
He was still alive, still walking around in the contaminated zone, therefore declared the army he was an enemy agent. What could be the reason for spreading that? To cover up their inability to accept him back, to hide their fear of him and others like him? Or was it the foundation for something else to come, the preparatory steps of reconstruction such as the schoolteacher had hinted? Was he branded an enemy agent for the sake of convenience — when the mopping-up process came?
In the year and a half since awakening in that dirty hotel room he had not met one person who might be such an agent, who might actually have entered the country for war-making purposes. He had seen only countless hundreds of ordinary people fighting to stay alive — to prolong their lives until the day the government came to their rescue. Of course the chimneys didn't smoke, not any more, not during the daylight hours unless you wanted strangers. He had cautioned Hoffman's wife of that folly and she now did her cooking under cover of darkness. And of course there were no more dog tracks on the snow — dogs had vanished long before cannibalism came into the picture. But there were people in and about many of the houses; it might be that they no longer rushed out to stare at an airplane overhead, but they were there even though the photographer chose to ignore them. There were thousands of them still alive in the contaminated zone — waiting for what? Waiting to be “reconstructed"? Was that the real reason in telling the western states they no longer existed?
Rotation of troops — that was a sweet one! Troops were rotated by the trainload only when several thousand of them were in the line, and why should several thousand be needed when only a handful of “enemy agents” ran free across the river? Did good tax-paying citizens with tight belts swallow that? Had they all lost the ability to think for themselves?
That dumb lout Harry had been an enemy agent, so they quickly knocked him off. Harry would have lacked the humor to appreciate the joke, Harry would have demanded a better reward for the effort of crawling the cable. But crawl it he did, neglecting to give the password, and they cut him down before he could leave the water. Then maybe a high-flying fish fell over that trip wire and set off the flare, while afterwards someone in a radiation suit came down to the shore and kicked the fish back into the water. But of course the army could get away with that sort of thing — the ten-mile strip of No Man's Land took care of leaks. There were no civilians within ten miles of the river line.
There had been but one thing in the news broadcast that caught his imagination and held it — those brave, unknown survivors who still held the Pentagon cellars.
That was worth looking into — next spring when he could travel again.
He had guessed that the intact cables under the bridge meant that east-west communications remained open, and this was proof of it. The incoming signals may or may not be weak — you couldn't take that lying announcer's word for it — but signals were received. In view of the implied declaration of war on survivors such as himself, there would be little point in mentioning still other survivors in Washington — eventually they would have to be accounted for as other than “enemy agents.” Top brass, therefore, had some reason for their still being “alive,” some reason for talking about them. Gary decided that the cellar holdouts definitely needed investigation. Next spring.
He reached up listlessly and turned the radio on again. There was no mounting thrill this time as the dial glowed, nothing but an undefined dullness within him, no impatience in waiting for the instrument to speak.