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  After that, in her car and driving at last, Clare’s snifflings had continued to punctuate her incessant verbal catharsis. How she loved dear Daddy, and poor Mom, and what would happen to Mom and herself and Uncle Herman and the rest of them? They had been at the hospital the entire day, since it had happened early this morning. Everyone was still there, and they were waiting for Steve. Mom was there, and Uncle Herman—who was Mom’s brother—and Dad’s best friend, Ed Period Johnson, and the Reverend Tom Carey, all there, everybody waiting for Steve.

  Waiting for him, Randall thought, the success in the family, the success from New York who always performed miracles with his checkbook or through his connections. He wanted to ask Clare whether anyone was waiting for the One who meant the most to Dad, the One whom Dad had given everything to, depended upon, invested in against Judgment Day, the Creator, the Jehovah, Our Father in Heaven. This Randall wanted to ask, but he had refrained.

  “I guess I’ve told you everything I can,” Clare had said. Then, eyes on the rain-slicked highway ahead, knuckles white on the steering wheel, she had imparted what he already knew. “It won’t be long. We’re almost there.” With that, she had sunk into silence.

  Leaving his sister to consort with her private guilt-demons, Steve Randall slumped back in the seat and closed his eyes, welcoming this interlude to be alone.

  He could still feel, inside himself, the lump of agitation that he had carried along the entire day, but now he could better analyze it, and what was curious was that the smallest part of this unhappiness came from grief over his father. He tried to rationalize his unfilial reaction, and decided that grief was the most intense of the emotions and therefore the shortest-lived. The very intensity of grief made it so self-destructive that one’s survival instinct rose up to draw a sheet over grief and hide it from mind and heart. He had drawn the sheet, and he was no longer thinking of his father. He was thinking right now of himself—realizing how heretical his sister, Clare, would find this, if she could know—and he was thinking of all his own recent dyings.

  He could not number the day he had lost interest in his prosperous and booming public relations business, but it had happened at some time in the last year or two. This loss of interest had begun to occur about the time, just before or just after, he and his wife, Barbara, had faced their final showdown and break, and she had taken their daughter, Judy, and gone to San Francisco, where she had friends.

  He tried to pinpoint when that had come to pass. Judy had barely turned thirteen then. She was fifteen now. So it had been two years ago. Barbara had spoken grimly of divorce, but had not acted upon it, and so it had remained merely a separation. Randall had not minded this suspended state, since he could not accept the finality of a divorce. Not because he feared losing his wife. Their relationship had gone stale. He cared for Barbara only as he cared for his own ego. He had not wanted a divorce because it would have meant admitting a failure. More important, the finality of it might have severed Judy from him completely. And Judy, although he had never seen much of her or given her much of his time, was a person, a person and an idea, an extension of himself that he valued and cherished.

  His career and business, upon which he had lavished so much energy and devotion, had finally become monotonous and boring, as boring as his marriage had been. Each day seemed simply a Xerox of the day before. You entered your lavishly decorated reception room, where the young receptionist, sexy and overdressed, was forever drinking coffee with two other girls and discussing jewelry. You saw your bright young promotion men, carrying their briefcases the same way, draping their trench coats over their arms the same way, going in to work, burrowing toward their plush holes like groundhogs. You conferred with them in their expensive modern offices, their desks always filled with a superabundance of pictures of their wives and children, so that you knew that they cheated.

  There was no more excitement in capturing new clients, new accounts. In the job, you had handled everyone and everything—the rising black singer, the latest rock group, the crazy British actress, the miracle detergent, the fastest sports car, the emerging African nation that wanted tourist trade. There was no more thrill in promoting renowned personalities or promising products. There was no more creative challenge, and no more money motive. Whatever you did, you’d done before. Whatever you earned made you richer, but not rich enough.

  It was far, far from the hopeless middle-class prison, Randall knew, but this sentence to life seemed almost as empty and inhuman. Each day ended for him as it had begun, with self-hate, and hatred for his treadmill existence. Inevitably, his private, wifeless, Judyless, distaste-for-the-rat-race life not only went on, but intensified. There were more women to possess without love, more booze, more uppers and downers, more insomnia, and more lunches, bars, nightclubs, openings, each one populated by the same traveling circus composed of the same faces of men and the same bodies of women.

  Recently, he had begun to escape more and more frequently into an old daydream, a goal once sought but from which he had been detoured. He wanted a refuge, some place with green trees and only water to drink and no shop to repair your watch, a place where The New York Times came two weeks late and you had to hike into the village to find a phone or a girl you could sleep with and with whom you wanted to have breakfast in the morning. He wanted to write not exaggerated or half-phony handouts, but scholarly and truthful history books on a manual typewriter, and never think of money again, and find out why it was important to stay on this earth.

  Yet, somehow he could not find the bridge to that dream. He told himself that he could not change his life because he did not have keeping-money. So, he tried to make do. For weeks he would busy himself, compulsively, with good health. No drinking, no pills, no tobacco, no late hours. Lots of handball.

  He was thirty-eight years old, five feet eleven, with bloodshot brown eyes already a bit baggy, a straight nose set between flushed cheeks, a strong jaw that revealed the first inklings of a double chin, and a husky frame. In his good health period, when he began to feel twenty-eight instead of thirty-eight, and the brown eyes began clearing and the circles smoothing out below them, and the round face was becoming square, the chin gaining definition and becoming noticeable, and the stomach was becoming flat and the biceps almost brawny, when that happened, he would lose the incentive for maintaining his Spartan regime and clean living.

  He played this losing game twice a year. He had not played it in recent months. Also, in trying to regularize his life, he had tried to confine himself to one woman. A sustained relationship. That was how, he remembered, Darlene Nicholson and Kahlil Gibran had been brought into his two-level brownstone Manhattan apartment.

  It was in his work, which occupied the greater part of his time, that it was most difficult to make do anymore. Wanda Smith, his personal secretary, a tall black girl with a modified natural and a size-forty bust, worried about him. Joe Hawkins, his beetle-browed protégé and associate, worried about him. Thad Crawford, his graying, soft-spoken attorney, worried about him. He constantly reassured them that he was not going to crack, and to prove it he did his day’s work every day. But it was dark and joyless, that work.

  Yet, sometimes, so rarely but sometimes, there was a shaft of light. A month ago, through Crawford, Randall had met a brilliant and original young law graduate who was not practicing law but practicing a profession new to a competitive capitalist democracy, a profession, a social science really, called Honesty. This young man, in his late twenties, with fantastic walrus moustache and burning eyes like a John Brown at the Ferry, was Jim McLoughlin. He had established something called The Raker Institute, with offices in New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles. The organization was nonprofit, staffed by young fellow attorneys, by business school graduates and former professors, by rebellious journalists and professional fact-finders and bright errant fugitive sons of America’s affluent industrial community. Quietly busy for several years, Jim McLoughlin’s Raker Institute had been investigating, as its first project among the many that were expected to follow, an unspoken, an unwritten conspiracy by America’s big business, its industries and corporations, against the public at large and the common good.

  “What it amounts to is this,” McLoughlin had told Randall during their first meeting. “For decades, our leaders in private enterprise, virtual monopolists, have suppressed new ideas, inventions, products that would have lowered the cost of living for the consumer. These new inventions, ideas, died stillborn, or were suffocated by big business, because if they had ever reached the public, they would have destroyed the huge profits made by private enterprise. We’ve done an incredible detective job these many months. Did you know that someone once invented a pill that could produce high-quality gasoline for automobiles?”

  Randall said he had heard rumors of such things as long as he could remember, but had always assumed such discoveries were pure fancies, more sensational wish than fact.

  Jim McLoughlin had gone on intently. “It’s always been the job of big business to make you think such findings are, as you say, pure fancies. But you can take my word for it, such wonders have existed and still exist. A perfect illustration is the gasoline pill. An unknown genius of a chemist came up with a formula for a synthetic gasoline, and compressed the chemical additives to the size of a small tablet. You merely had to fill your gas tank with ordinary water, drop the pill in your tank, and you had eighteen or twenty gallons of pollution-free gas at a cost of maybe two cents. Do you think the mammoth oil companies would let that get out on the market? Not on your life—not on their life—it would have meant the end of the trillion-dollar petroleum industry. That’s only one case. What about the so-called perpetual match? Was there really a single match that could give you fifteen thousand lig
hts? You bet there was, and you bet it was suppressed quickly by big business. Then we found more, much more.”

  Randall had been definitely intrigued. “What else?” he had demanded.

  “We learned of a textile—yes, I mean cloth—that never wears out,” said McLoughlin. “We learned of a razor blade, one blade that can last a lifetime, and never even needs sharpening. There have been several examples of a rubber tire that could go two hundred and fifty thousand miles without wearing out. There has been a special light bulb that could burn for ten years without being replaced. Do you realize what these products could mean to the struggling low-income family? But big business won’t allow it. Through the years, inventors have been bought out, blackmailed, destroyed—in two cases they simply disappeared, and we suspect they were murdered. Yes, Mr. Randall, we have it well documented, and we’re exposing the whole filthy suppression in a white paper—a black paper, if you prefer—to be called, ‘The Plot Against You.’”

  Randall had repeated the title, savoring it. “Great,” he had murmured.

  “The minute our white paper is released,” McLoughlin had gone on, “big business will use every conceivable means to keep our expose from being seen by the public. Failing that, they’ll try to discredit it. That is why I’ve come to you. I want you to handle The Raker Institute and its first white paper. I want you to communicate our discoveries to the public—through interested congressmen, television and radio newsmen, the press, printed pamphlets, sponsored lectures. I want you to overcome every effort to gag us or defame us. I want you to drum our story across the land until it’s as well known as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ We won’t be clients who will make you rich. But hopefully, after you see what we’re doing, we will make you feel you are part of a meaningful people’s lobby, which will exist for the first time in American history. I hope you will do it.”

  Randall had found himself coming alive as he considered the project. Do it? And how he would do it! He was ready to work out details, start meetings, as soon as Jim McLoughlin and his crusaders were ready. McLoughlin had said that they would be ready soon, certainly before the end of the year. With a veteran study team he would be off, for some months, looking into a highly secret prototype of a nonpolluting, low-priced steam-engine automobile that had been suppressed for two decades by the internal-combustion people in Detroit. In addition to that, he would be checking with his field men who were evaluating future projects that involved other powerful legal racketeers, abusers of the American dream, and included among them were the insurance companies, the telephone monopolies, the packinghouse combines, the loan associations.

  “Don’t expect to hear from me or my staff for a while,” young McLoughlin had said. “Our whereabouts will be confidential. We have to work undercover. I learned that early on. Otherwise, the big business lobbies, and their puppets in various branches of government, they’d have their goons tailing us, anticipating and thwarting us. I used to believe such police-state activity impossible in a government of the people, by the people, for the people. I thought talk of such harassment was sheer juvenile paranoia, melodramatic nonsense. Not so. When profit is made synonymous with patriotism, any means seem justified to preserve that profit. In the name of the public, the public be damned. So to protect the public, to expose lies and frauds, we have to operate like guerrillas. At least, for the present. Once we can come out into the open, through you, honest practices and the people will prevail, and we’ll have support and safety in numbers. I’ll keep in touch with you, Mr. Randall. Or I’ll try to. But anyway, be prepared for us to go ahead—with your help —in six or seven months, like in November or December, and that’s definite.”

  “Okay,” Randall had agreed, feeling genuine excitement, “in six or seven months come back to me. I’ll be ready and waiting, and away we go.”

  “We’ll be depending upon you, Mr. Randall,” McLoughlin had said at the door.

  The waiting period for The Raker Institute account had hardly begun when a far greater prospect of change had come to Randall out of the blue. Cosmos Enterprises, the international multibillion-dollar conglomerate presided over by Ogden Towery III, burst into Randall’s life. Like a colossal magnet, Cosmos Enterprises was combing the United States and the world, attracting and collecting relatively small, successful businesses to enhance its diversification program. Searching for footholds in the area of communications, Towery’s team had settled on Randall Associates as a promising public relations firm. Preliminary talks on the lawyer level were conducted. Progress was made swiftly. All that had remained, before papers were drawn, was a meeting between Towery and Randall.

  It was this very morning, early, that Towery had appeared at Randall Associates in person, inspected the premises with his aides, and finally, closeted himself with Randall, alone, one to one, in Randall’s office, with its eighteenth-century Hepplewhite furniture.

  The remote Towery, a legend in financial circles, had the rangy look of a prosperous rancher. He was an Oklahoman, who kept his modified Stetson hat in his lap as he settled in the deep-tufted leather chair and who spoke crisply like a man who was used to being listened to.

  Randall had listened, because he saw his visitor as freedom’s angel. By the grace of this billionaire, Randall could possess, in short years, his long-held fantasy, that haven, that happiness, with green trees and no telephone and a manual typewriter and security for the remainder of his lifetime.

  It was near the end of Towery’s monologue that the only bad—the only truly horrendous—moment came.

  Towery had been reminding Randall that although Cosmos Enterprises would own Randall’s firm, Randall would be in complete charge of his company under a five-year management contract. With expiration of the contract, he would have the right to exercise an option to stay on or leave with enough extra cash and stock to make him wealthy and independent.

  “This will still be your business as long as you’re with us, Mr. Randall,” Towery was saying. “So you will continue to run it as you have in the past. It would make no sense for us to interfere with a successful operation. My policy, in whatever I take over, is always hands off.”

  That moment, Randall ceased listening. A suspicion had come to him. He decided to test freedom’s angel. “I appreciate your attitude, Mr. Towery,” he said. “What I understand you to be saying is that my office can make its own decisions about which accounts it will take on, the clients it will handle, without any screening by Cosmos.”

  “Absolutely. We’ve seen your contracts, your list of clients. If we didn’t approve, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Well, not every client is in the files you’ve seen, Mr. Towery. There are some new ones who haven’t been formalized yet. I just want to be sure that you’re going to let us go on handling whomever we wish.”

  “Of course. Why not?” said Towery. Then his tanned brow wrinkled slowly. “Why should you even imagine we’d be concerned?”

  “Sometimes we take on a client, an account, that might be regarded as controversial. And I wondered—”

  “Like what?” Towery quickly interrupted. “What kind of account?”

  “About two weeks ago, I made a verbal agreement with Jim McLoughlin to handle the first report of The Raker Institute.”

  Towery sat up, ramrod-straight. He was very tall, even when sitting. His face seemed suddenly cast in bronze, hard and bronze.

  One split-cowhide boot pushed the ottoman aside. “Jim McLoughlin?” he said, as if mouthing an obscenity.

  “And his—and The Raker Institute.”

  Towery stood up. “That bunch of Commie anarchists,” he said harshly. “That McLoughlin. He’s getting his from Moscow, you know that. Or maybe you didn’t know.”