None But Lucifer

Chapter XXIV

HALE TOLD himself it was no time for intellectual hesitation. Act, man, act! Defeat Lucifer! Double-cross him as he tricked you! Revolt against the philosophy of Hell, disprove it, make man happy! But act!

Johnson loved paradoxes. That was one of the more horrifying aspects of Hell: ruthless confidence in the dictatorships, which were hopelessly poor and exhausted; nervous timidity in the democracies, which were drowning in wealth. Unreasoning hope where there should be none. Those with nothing convincing themselves that they were miserable.

Fear lay beneath all this. Remove fear — no, that would be a merely negative cure. Instill confidence! Hale knew he could do it. Just to be sure, he watched Banner closely. With complete assurance, the advertising man had enlarged his business, and employed enough additional men to worry his Businessmen's Club members.

"I don't know what's come over him," Sam Furman, a shrewd chain-store clothier, had complained to Hale. "A payroll like this'll bankrupt him."

"Really? The country can stand plenty of expansion."

"Maybe," said Furman. "But I'll let the other guy experiment. I'm feeling my way."

"Just feeding, clothing, and housing everybody in this country would keep us busy. This is the richest nation in the world."

Furman nodded his somber head. "It all sounds good, but —"

"There aren't any buts," Hale snapped. "You have confidence. You've refused to face the facts, that's all."

The Businessmen's Club was astonished and cynically morbid when Furman bought a new factory, doubled the number of his employees, and opened stores in small towns. That was until Hale instilled confidence into them.

But after all, Hale thought, what did that amount to? A few indomitable businessmen bucking the inertia of the whole country; proof of his power; a goad to further effort. But he searched his mind furiously for means of casting the spell over the whole hemisphere.

One thing pleased him: he didn't have to use Johnson's sly, underhanded methods. His own were direct and humane. But was Hale a reformer? Not in the ordinary sense of the word. To prove he was capable of happiness, he had to prove he could make others happy, too. That meant reversing Hell's philosophy, and that, in turn, meant defeating Lucifer. The logic was inexorable.

But how? Key figures? He had thought so. But he couldn't reach all the large industrialists, bankers, labor leaders. And lack of confidence among the masses would sabotage and eventually stop any improvement resulting from an infusion of confidence into those on the tops of the pyramids. He had to make all his subjects feel equally confident. How? From his private office strings led to every section of the hemisphere. But he felt more helpless than ever, knowing that he had the cure but not the knowledge of how to use it.

He refused to allow the sound of Gloria's knitting needles to annoy him. But her incomprehension did bother him. Bother him? It drove him frantic. She yawned constantly, bored with everything she made no effort to understand, and irritated him by asking — at the most inconvenient times — to be amused. A life-and-death struggle against the first principles of Hell — and she knitted, placid, featherbrained!

HE FORCED himself to drop that line of thought. It wasn't her fault, and she stayed with him loyally, almost without complaining. What more could he expect? Stick to the subject, Hale. How to spread confidence over the hemisphere — it should be easy — a mere psychological inversion for several hundred million people.

"Go ahead and do it," Johnson's professionally friendly voice said. The fat, commonplace face swam into his mind. The lunchtime chatter of the garment workers, in the street below, merged into Johnson's taunting words. "Well, William? I see you are still hesitating. Why? After all, you are merely trying to contradict the basic philosophy of Hell, and upset all my plans. That should not be hard, should it?"

"Damn you!" said Hale aloud. "I know how it can be done!"

"Then why don't you do it? Shall I tell you why? You don't know how!"

"Oh, yes I do!" Hale shouted.

"Billie-willie!" A hand touched his arm. He jerked away, and yelled out the open window: "You have confidence! The winds will bring it to you. You can accomplish anything! You have the strength!"

"Billie-willie! What is it? You're not ... going crazy, are you?"

He drew his hand across his eyes. "I started to crack, I suppose," he confessed. "I'm all right now. I won't let it get me." He wondered whether he was getting hallucinations. That wouldn't do: it would be playing into Johnson's hands.

"Let's take the day off, huh?" he said with forced cheerfulness.

"Oh, Billie-willie!" She caught his lapels and pulled his face down. "We can go to Mabel's tea! She wrote me and asked why we've been out of circulation for so long. Everybody'll be there!"

What the hell, he thought, what difference did it make where he went? The problem would be with him all the time. How to reach everybody in his hemisphere with the spell — rich and poor; humble and mighty; in cities, villages, and farms: asleep or awake; men, women, and children.

Actually, there was no longer any problem.