Progress Goes “Betune”
Rain drove into our faces as we went toward the center of the dark plaza. Other figures moved around us, though none came near. We halted at the foot of an iron statue of somebody on a horse.
A pale young man of extraordinary thinness came up and began to talk rapidly, gesturing with both hands, sniffing every now and then, as if he had a cold in his head. I couldn’t understand a word he said.
The rumble of other voices began to compete with the patter of rain. The fat, white-whiskered face of the banker who had been at the meeting appeared suddenly out of the darkness and went back into it just as suddenly, as if he didn’t want to be recognized. Men I hadn’t seen before gathered around us, saluting Grantham with a sheepish sort of respect. A little man in a too big cape ran up and began to tell us something in a cracked, jerky voice. A thin, stooped man with glasses freckled by raindrops translated the little man’s story into English for us:
“He says the artillery has betrayed us, and guns are being mounted in the government buildings to sweep the plaza at daybreak.” There was an odd sort of hopefulness in his voice, and he added: “In that event, we can, naturally, do nothing.”
“We can die,” Lionel Grantham said gently.
There wasn’t the least bit of sense to that crack. Nobody was here to die. They were all here because it was so unlikely that anybody would have to die, except perhaps a few of Einarson’s soldiers. That’s the sensible view of the boy’s speech. But it’s God’s own truth that even I—a middle-aged