Prologue to an Analogue, Leigh Richmond [the reading strategies book .txt] 📗

toward Mary, but stage center, chanting—their cry.

"Witches of the world, unite to make it clean, clean, clean, Witch clean,—NOW!"

At the corner of the screen, the child-body in the wheel chair shuddered suddenly. Mary took a deep breath, went white and then red. With a forceful gesture she threw off the shawl and looked at her legs. Her hand reached down to touch them.

On the stage itself, one witch stopped dancing to watch. The others noticed, stopped. The jingle died, half through....

And Mary stood up, looking at her legs. She took a step towards the camera, and another. Her blue eyes lifted to the camera, widening.

In the absolute quiet, as everyone on stage stood frozen, Mary walked towards the camera, her eyes like saucers looking into it. Her voice, barely above a whisper, spoke.

"I'm ... I'm walking," said Mary.

The papers called it the cruelest hoax of all.

They carried the story side by side with the withdrawal of the Witch program from the network, both by network and by International Witch Corporation order.

The carried the statement of FCC officials that an investigation would be made.

They carried the statement by Randolph that he would sue BDD&O.

They carried the statement by Oswald that he would sue Witch Products.

But mostly they carried the story of a little girl, who had been whisked from sight and couldn't be located. Who had probably been given an operation to make it possible for her to walk, but had been forced to pay for the operation by taking part in a cruel hoax of unbelievable magnitude.

Bill Howard stayed with the network, on the same time, sponsorless. He'd been cleared of any implication in the hoax by all parties concerned, and his reputation had always been good. He was asked to stay in town and be available to appear as a witness, but the network gambled that he was clear, and kept him on. He was one of the biggest draws in newscasting, his personality that made the news seem to belong to the people, to be a continuing story of their lives, was unique. The network decided the gamble of keeping him on was warranted.

By the next night the Formosa crisis had broken into the news, and it was the news.

The details were horrible, and they were uncovered aplenty. Finally ungagged, those who had been holding off gave the story the works.

The effects of the pest plane, of the pest bombs, were the most vicious that could be developed in the laboratories of bacterial war—and they put to shame the naturally-occurring epidemics that have scourged mankind throughout his history.

And the effects were spreading with the speed of a prairie fire before a high wind.

The entire area was quarantined, and daily the quarantine was extended. No plane could land and take off again. No ship could enter and leave. An airlift of supplies dropped by parachute was being organized.

Bacteriologists and doctors jetted to the area were dying with the rest, caught in disease for which there was no answer.

The propaganda attempts to make it seem as though cures were near were flatly not believed. Suez was remembered, but was remembered as a hoax—and the country had had its complete fill of hoaxes.

Randolph had a number of what he referred to—and reported—as "crank calls," asking Witch to try its might. He arranged for every call that reached him to be traced immediately. He remained in seclusion.

Oswald had a few of the "crank calls" and reported them as such.

Bill Howard had a number of calls, and didn't report them.

Bill Howard worried, and added two and two, and sweated, and reported the details of Formosa each night. The details giantized in gruesomeness until their very content was too much for the airways, and he had to censor them as he gave them out.

Bill Howard sweated in the cold January weather, and each day he ferreted further, seeking out the realities behind the censorship that lay heavy now even over the wires. By phone, by gossip, by hearsay and by know-how he got the stories behind the story—the real horrors that he couldn't broadcast.

Sometimes he rebelled at the censors and himself as one of them, but he knew better than to rebel. It's facing us all, he thought. We each have the right to know.

This is the way the world ends, he thought. With a whimper that comes after the agony, when agony is too great.

And he kept remembering a little girl walking towards a camera with big eyes.

If I were a physicist, he told himself, if I were a physicist instead of a newshawk, I could get a computer to tell me the probability ratio of whether I hold an answer.

That probability ratio is probable ten billion to one, he told himself.

That probability ratio is zero.

Witches are for burning, he told himself.

He told himself a lot of things, and he sweated through the cold January weather.

It had been two weeks since the world heard the first details of Formosa, and the details were so grim now that you couldn't use them at all. Just a blanket story.

That night, the map of the world behind his desk, Bill Howard leaned toward his audience.

He told them the human side of the story of Formosa.

He spoke of the people there, the pawns in a game of international suicide, real people, not just statistics.

He described a family, and he made them the family next door. Mother, father, children, watching one another die, not prettily but with all the torture that the laboratories of the world could dream and put together. A family that watched each other go insane, knowing what was happening. A family that watched each other die, writhing and unknowing in insanity.

He took his pointer and he showed the growing perimeter of the quarantine. He traced the location of the center of the disaster.

Then he leaned again toward his audience. "Listen, now," he said, "for the world cannot sustain this torture."

He took a deep breath and he put the full force of his being into his words.

"Witches of the world, unite," he said, "to make it clean, clean, clean, Witch clean—NOW!"

The final word was out before the network censor reached the cut-off switch.

The President and his cabinet put the country on a double alert. Russia had cleaned up Formosa, they knew, and would hit the United States with disease and ultimatums next.

The people of the world took the story with an unexpected calm. Like Hiroshima, it was too unexpected, too big, too unimaginable. There was a hooker somewhere, and they went about their business annoyed, angry, worried, but quiet.

The papers editorialized on the question of who cleaned up Formosa—who had the answers?—and left the subject of what the possession of such a clean-up force could mean to the world, to the statesmen. They turned as quickly as possible to other matters, for nobody was sure what to think, and nobody told them what to think.

Bill Howard was off the air, of course. It didn't bother him. He had a real problem now.

We've bought a little time, he thought. A little time to grow in.

We've bought a little time from the fanatics and their statesmen, from the eggheads and their politicians, from the military and the industrial and the just generally foolhardy.

We, the people of the world, have a little time now that we didn't have yesterday.

How much? He didn't know.

On this one, there'd been time to get together. On this one, there'd been weeks, while the crisis built and the world faced a horrible death. This crisis had been a lengthy one. There'd been time for a man to make up his mind and try a solution.

The next one might be different. There might be a satellite up there waiting, with a button to be pushed. There were an awful lot of buttons waiting to be pushed, he told himself, buttons all over the world, controlling missiles already zeroed in on—well, on the people of the world.

The next one might occur in hours, or even minutes. The next one, the bombs might be in the air before the people even knew the buttons were for pushing.

Bill Howard got out his typewriter.

You've got a problem, you talk to a typewriter, if that's the only thing that will listen.

What's the problem? he asked himself, and he wrote it down. He started at the beginning and he told the story on the typewriter. He told it the way it had been happening.

Now, he thought, you've got to end the story. If you leave it just "to be continued," it'll be continued, all right. Somebody will push a button one day, and that will write 30 at the end for you. Conclusion.

The problem was, in essence, quite simply stated in terms of miracles.

The way things were stewing, it'd be a miracle if the world held together long enough for unity to set in. It'd take a miracle to bring about the necessary self-restraint, which was the only possible substitute for the imposed restraint of war.

The witch power was, quite clearly, a power of the people—of the people who needed that protection, needed those miracles. And it was the power that had worked miracles.

We'll never know who does the job, he told himself. It's better that way. Like table-tipping. You can say "I didn't do it." You can even be sure you didn't do it, if you want to. But the table tips if you get enough people around the table. Ouiji writes, if at least two people have their fingers on it, so that they each can say "I didn't do it."

Who are the witches? Why, they're the people, and they're not for burning. The fanatics and their statesmen, the eggheads and their politicians, the brains and the brain trusts and the world-weary—they're for burning, but not the witches. Which witch is a witch? Doesn't matter.

An hour later, Bill Howard sat down to the typewriter again. He'd stated the general problem—but now he had a specific problem, and, for a man in his line of business, it was a fairly straightforward problem.

He need only plot out the necessary moves so that he could call on that witch power just one more time. Just once. Just long enough to clean out the violent, rooted resistance to the idea that people had powers—and could work miracles!

THE END End of Project Gutenberg's Prologue to an Analogue, by Leigh Richmond