Different Seasons(48)

“Don’t say that,” she admonished absently. Then: “Do you think Mr. Denker would like to come over and have dinner with us some night?”

“Maybe,” Todd said vaguely. “Listen, I gotta put an egg in my shoe and beat it.”

“Okay. Supper at six-thirty. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

“Your father’s got to work late so it’ll just be me and thee again, okay?”

“Crazy, baby.”

She watched him go with a fond smile, hoping there was nothing in Tom Jones he shouldn’t be reading; he was only thirteen. She didn’t suppose there was. He was growing up in a society where magazines like Penthouse were available to anyone with a dollar and a quarter, or to any kid who could reach up to the top shelf of the magazine rack and grab a quick peek before the clerk could shout for him to put that up and get lost. In a society that seemed to believe most of all in the creed of hump thy neighbor, she didn’t think there could be much in a book two hundred years old to screw up Todd’s head—although she supposed the old man might get off on it a little. And as Richard liked to say, for a kid the whole world’s a laboratory. You have to let them poke around in it. And if the kid in question has a healthy home life and loving parents, he’ll be all the stronger for having knocked around a few strange corners.

And there went the healthiest kid she knew, pedaling up the street on his Schwinn. We did okay by the lad, she thought, turning to make her sandwich. Damned if we didn’t do okay.

4

October, 1974.

Dussander had lost weight. They sat in the kitchen, the shopworn copy of Tom Jones between them on the oilcloth-covered table (Todd, who tried never to miss a trick, had purchased the Cliff’s Notes on the book with part of his allowance and had carefully read the entire summary against the possibility that his mother or father might ask him questions about the plot). Todd was eating a Ring Ding he had bought at the market. He had bought one for Dussander, but Dussander hadn’t touched it. He only looked at it morosely from time to time as he drank his bourbon. Todd hated to see anything as tasty as Ring Dings go to waste. If he didn’t eat it pretty quick, Todd was going to ask him if he could have it.

“So how did the stuff get to Patin?” he asked Dussander.

“In railroad cars,” Dussander said. “In railroad cars labelled MEDICAL SUPPLIES. It came in long crates that looked like coffins. Fitting, I suppose. The inmates off-loaded the crates and stacked them in the infirmary. Later, our own men stacked them in the storage sheds. They did it at night. The storage sheds were behind the showers.”

“Was it always Zyklon-B?”

“No, from time to time we would be sent something else. Experimental gases. The High Command was always interested in improving efficiency. Once they sent us a gas code-named PEGASUS. A nerve-gas. Thank God they never sent it again. It—” Dussander saw Todd lean forward, saw those eyes sharpen, and he suddenly stopped and gestured casually with his gas station premium glass. “It didn’t work very well,” he said. “It was... quite boring.”

But Todd was not fooled, not in the least. “What did it do?”

“It killed them—what did you think it did, made them walk on water? It killed them, that’s all.”

“Tell me.”

“No,” Dussander said, now unable to hide the horror he felt. He hadn’t thought of PEGASUS in ... how long? Ten years? Twenty? “I won’t tell you! I refuse!”

“Tell me,” Todd repeated, licking chocolate icing from his fingers. “Tell me or you know what.”

Yes, Dussander thought. I know what. Indeed I do, you putrid little monster.

“It made them dance,” he said reluctantly.

“Dance?”

“Like the Zyklon-B, it came in through the shower-heads. And they... they began to leap about. Some were screaming. Most of them were laughing. They began to vomit, and to ... to defecate helplessly.”

“Wow,” Todd said. “Shit themselves, huh?” He pointed at the Ring Ding on Dussander’s plate. He had finished his own.

“You going to eat that?”

Dussander didn’t reply. His eyes were hazed with memory. His face was far away and cold, like the dark side of a planet which does not rotate. Inside his mind he felt the queerest combination of revulsion and—could it be?—nostalgia?

“They began to twitch all over and to make high, strange sounds in their throats. My men... they called PEGASUS the Yodeling Gas. At last they all collapsed and just lay there on the floor in their own filth, they lay there, yes, they lay there on the concrete, screaming and yodeling, with bloody noses. But I lied, boy. The gas didn’t kill them, either because it wasn’t strong enough or because we couldn’t bring ourselves to wait long enough. I suppose it was that. Men and women like that could not have lived long. Finally I sent in five men with rifles to end their agonies. It would have looked bad on my record if it had shown up, I’ve no doubt of that—it would have looked like a waste of cartridges at a time when the Fuehrer had declared every cartridge a national resource. But those five men I trusted. There were times, boy, when I thought I would never forget the sound they made. The yodeling sound. The laughing.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Todd said. He finished Dussander’s Ring Ding in two bites. Waste not, want not, Todd’s mother said on the rare occasions when Todd complained about left-overs. “That was a good story, Mr. Dussander. You always tell them good. Once I get you going.”