“For morning? The page is in.”
“Yeah. If it comes out right, it’ll be for morning. I’m kind of rusty, Bea. But I’ll take a crack at it and maybe I’ll run it. Ready?”
She nodded.
He began to walk in front of his desk and to dictate:
“Ten years ago and more, this nation hurled upon its Jap foe a new weapon, a weapon cunningly contrived from the secrets of the sun. Since that day the world has lived in terror.
“Every year, every month, every hour, terror has grown. It is terror compounded of every fear. Fear of War. Fear of Defeat. Fear of Slavery. These fears are great, but they are common to humanity. Man in his sorrow has sustained them hitherto. But there are other fears in the composition of man’s present terror. These are fears that his cities may be reduced to rubble, his civilization destroyed, humanity itself wiped out; in sum, fear that man’s world will end. And this last fear has been augmented through the long, hideous years by hints from the laboratories that, indeed, the death of life is possible—and even the incineration of the planet may soon be achievable, by scientific design or by careless accident.
“Fears of mortal aggression and human crimes are tolerable, however dreadsome. But men have never borne with sanity a fear that their world will end. To all who accept as likely that special idea, reason becomes inaccessible; their minds collapse; madness invades their sensibilities. What they then do no longer bears reasonably upon their peril, however apt they deem their crazed courses. They are then puppets of their terror. And it is as such puppets that we Americans have acted for ten years, and more.”
Coley paused. Bea looked up and nodded appreciatively at his rhetoric. But when he did not immediately continue, she said, “I think, if you asked the first hundred people on the street if they were terrified, they’d laugh.”
“That’s a fact,” he answered. “Good suggestion.” He went on:
“Man has always reacted with universal panic to notions of the world’s end. Time and again in the Dark Ages, some planetary conjunction, the appearance of a comet, or an eclipse led to general convulsion. Business stopped. Mobs Bed the cities. Cathedrals were thronged.