"We keep bad things from being said here. We have freedom of speech. Some things just shouldn't be said."
"No doubt," said Smith.
"We do have freedom of speech. I disagree all the time. Some of us think America is the most evil nation in history. But then there's the opposite view. Others think it's the second most evil. They think Nazi Germany was the most evil. What do you think?"
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"I think many good people died, young lady, so you would have the freedom and comfort to be so absurdly stupid," said Smith who did not usually bother with retorts like that.
The first thing Smith noticed about Revvers College was the vast green lawns and magnificent trees. The second thing he noticed was the vast number of expensive cars. The third thing he noticed were the obscene scrawlings in day-glo paint, calling for an end to manicured lawns and expensive cars.
Dr. Mildred Pensoitte was a handsome woman in her mid-thirties. She spoke in clear tones, making grammatical statements.
There was the earth, she told her enraptured audience. And the earth was good. Everything about it was good. The air was good, or had been once. The grass was pure, or had been once. And the rain was good. Or had been, once.
"And then something happened. Then people who did not care whether anything of the earth, other than their bank accounts, survived, began poisoning it all. We broke our basic contract with nature. And what is that contract, that simple obvious contract? That we are a part of it. A part of nature.
"What right do we have to assume that, just because we can make lawns, we have a right to kill the grass's natural growth? What right do we have to poison the air for all living things? What right do we have to carve the coal from the earth's tender skin and then burn it into poisoned fumes? What right does man-centered man have to murder anything he wishes to help his bank account?"' .
But Dr. Pensoitte did not hate all men. Only a few men-those who ran America. Not included in Dr. Pensoitte's hates were men who burned people. After all, hadn't the Nazis tried to destroy America? And the Khmer
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Rouge, which slaughtered tens of thousands of their own kind-didn't they have a right to mass murder because an American secretary of state once tried to bomb the murderers and didn't confess it all to American reporters before the bombers took off?
At the end, one student stood up and asked, "If America is such a rotten place, why is everyone trying to get in? And if those socialist countries are so good, why is everyone trying to get out?"
There were a few boos. Some of the students said that they wished they had known the other student was going to ask that question so that they could walk out and not listen to it.
But Dr. Pensoitte's cool beauty rode above the anger. She wove a tale of poor, one-crop countries, struggling against imperialistic America. She turned lands that had always had famines into lands that now, somehow, only had famines because of America. Anything the Third World did was a natural right because Americans owned more than one shirt.
Therefore any disasters of socialism were not the fault of socialism but of capitalism. Smith had heard similar reasoning by Nazis against Jews, by Khomeini against Satan, and from fringe preachers about radio stations that wouldn't let them broadcast nonsense without paying for it first.
It was the old devil theory very prominent in the Dark Ages and now with major liberal columnists. It was the new alchemy, the new attempt to make gold from lead, the one piece of thing that would explain everything.
Being young, Smith realized, most of Dr. Pensoitte's audience had not have enough time on earth to realize the nonsense of such simplicity.
She was still talking.
"It is not surprising that a country which would make
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enough atomic weapons to destroy the world seven times over would not leave the grass alone. Would someone here tell me how it improves earth to level the grass?"
There were condescending chuckles.
"We not only level grass with hand-pushed rotating blades. We have machines that can do it and poison the air at the same time. We burn electricity from nuclear reactors to do it. And what for? Has the world ever been made one jot better for grass growing in one direction rather than another?"
More chuckles.
"Grass itself is not the problem, of course," Dr. Pensoitte said. "It's the symbol. The person who feels compelled to reduce the earth's growth for the convenience of his feet is precisely the sort of person who has caused all the misery in the world."
Applause.
"We didn't have atomic bombs and acid rain in the Ice Age and we didn't have something else. We didn't have lawns. We didn't have exploitation by madmen. We didn't have the sort of secretary of the interior who daily rapes your mother, the earth."
"Mother raper," screamed one student. He had read that the secretary of the interior was going to allow copper mining right in the center of the mingus worm population of South Dakota, perhaps one of the finest mingus worm concentrations in the world. He had been outraged that man would take it upon himself to decide arbitrarily that 14,000 jobs were more important than one of the finest sub-earth cultures in the western hemisphere.
The mingus worm would attach itself to itself and feed on its own excrement for months at a time, forming perhaps one of the finer ecological units on the earth, destroying nothing, using nothing, polluting nothing.
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Into the concentration of innocent worms, the secretary of the interior had ordered the killing blades of tractors, gouging the skin of the world for profit. The young man had tried to throw himself in front of a tractor, tried to explain to the tractor operator -exactly what he was doing to the earth and then was arrested by the police lackies of the state who so crudely accused him of thinking-the young man remembered the words even as he screamed out support for Dr. Mildred Pensoitte"a shit-eating worm is more important than a man's job."
"Mother raper. Mother raper," screamed the young man, and the students joined in as the secretary's name was mentioned. The chant had a beat. The chant had a fury. The chant had the confidence of the righteous, sure of the power of their numbers, sure of the inevitability of their triumph, sure of the simple genius of their leader.
Harold VV. Smith had heard the chant before. Only the words were different. The words then were "Seig Heil."
He was sure of it now. He had come to the right place to look for killers.
Dr. Pensoitte held up something between two fingers. Her voice was soft and innocent. Hitler too knew how to raise and lower the level of his voice, even though the newsreel films only showed him yelling. Hitler had his Jews; Dr. Pensoitte had the American government as embodied in the secretary of the interior.
"And so we use as our symbol the seed of the lowly blade of grass. It was here before capitalism under the hands of white men and it will be here, God willing, when they no longer abuse the earth . . . when they learn quite simply the obvious fact that we are not consumers of the earth, but part of the earth."
There was a hush among the students, and then one started to clap. It unleashed the flow of dammed-up adoration.
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Harold W. Smith clapped too. He clapped very hard. He was working.
"She's beautiful, isn't she?" said a girl next to Smith.
"Yes," he said.
Mildred Pensoitte was smiling, cool, content. She had dark brown eyes and high cheekbones and a neck that enhanced the pearls around it.
"Yes. Very beautiful," Smith said.
Dr. Pensoitte was, of course, mobbed after her speech, so Smith couldn't get to her there.
And he realized it would not be easy to get to her at all. The problem with getting to her was that she and her organization, at this time, had no needs. Earth Goodness was oversubscribed with money and had no shortage of volunteers.
Yet without penetrating the organization, he might never find the killer group that had been in Virginia.