Crying with pain, the child jumps down from the dais and runs back to her place in the ranks.
Cut back to the Chief. His brow is wrinkled in a frown of displeasure.
«All this progressive education!» he says to Dr. Poole. «No proper discipline. I don’t know what we’re coming to. Why, when I was a boy, our old Practitioner used to tie them over a bench and go to work with a birch rod. ‘That’ll teach you to be a vessel,’ he’d say, and then swish, swish, swish! Belial, how they howled! That’s what I call education. Well, I’ve had enough of this,» he adds. «Quick march!»
As the litter moves out of the shot, the Camera holds on Loola who remains, staring in an agony of fellow feeling at the tear-wet face and heaving shoulders of the little victim in the second row. A hand touches her arm. She starts, turns apprehensively and is relieved to find herself looking into the kindly face of Dr. Poole.
«I entirely agree with you,» he whispers. «It’s wrong, it’s unjust.»
Only after she has thrown a quick look over her shoulder does Loola venture to give him a little smile of gratitude.
«Now we must go,» she says.
They hurry after the others. Following the litter, they retrace their steps through the Coffee Shop, then turn to the right and enter the Cocktail Bar. At one end of the room an enormous pile of human bones reaches almost to the ceiling. Squatting on the floor, in a thick white dust, a score of craftsmen are engaged in fashioning drinking cups out of skulls, knitting needles from ulnas, flutes and recorders from the longer shank bones, ladles, shoe horns and dominoes from pelvises, and spigots out of femurs.
A halt is called, and, while one of the workmen plays «Give me Detumescence» on a shinbone flute, another presents the Chief with a superb necklace of graded vertebrae ranging in size from a baby’s cervicals to the lumbars of a heavyweight boxer.
NARRATOR
«And he set me down in the midst of the valley that was full of bones; and lo, they were very dry.» The dry bones of some of those who died, by thousands, by millions, in the course of those three bright summer days that, for you there, are still in the future. «And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live?» The answer, I replied, is in the negative. For though Baruch might save us (perhaps) from taking our places in such an ossuary as this, he can do nothing to avert that other, slower, nastier death. . . .
Trucking shot of the litter as it is carried up the steps into the main lobby. Here the stink is overpowering, the filth beyond description. Close-up of two rats gnawing at a mutton bone, of the flies on the purulent eyelids of a small girl. The Camera pulls back for a longer shot. Forty or fifty women, half of them with shaven heads, are sitting on the stairs, among the refuse on the floor, on the tattered remnants of ancient beds and sofas. Each of them is nursing a baby, all the babies are ten weeks old, and all those belonging to shaven mothers are deformed. Over close-ups of little faces with hare lips, little trunks with stumps instead of legs and arms, little hands with clusters of supernumerary fingers, little bodies adorned with a double row of nipples, we hear the voice of the Narrator.
NARRATOR
For this other death — not by plague, this time, not by poison, not by fire, not by artificially induced cancer, but by the squalid disintegration of the very substance of the species — this gruesome and infinitely unheroic death-in-birth could as well be the product of atomic industry as of atomic war. For in a world powered by nuclear fission everybody’s grandmother would have been an X-ray technician. And not only everybody’s grandmother — everybody’s grandfather and father and mother as well, everybody’s ancestors back to three and four and five generations of them that hate Me.
From the last of the deformed babies the Camera pulls back to Dr. Poole who is standing, his handkerchief held to his still too sensitive nose, staring with horrified bewilderment at the scene around him.
«All the babies look as if they were exactly the same age,» he says, turning to Loola, who is still beside him.
«Well, what do you expect? Seeing that practically all of them were born between the tenth and the seventeenth of December.»
«But that must mean that. . .» He breaks off, deeply embarrassed. «I think,» he concludes hastily, «that things must be rather different here from what they are in New Zealand. . . .»
In spite of the wine, he remembers his grey-haired mother across the Pacific and, blushing guiltily, coughs and averts his eyes.
«There’s Polly,» cries his companion, and hurries across the room.
Mumbling apologies as he picks his way between the squatting or recumbent mothers, Dr. Poole follows her.
Polly is sitting on a straw-filled sack near what was once the Cashier’s desk. She is a girl of eighteen or nineteen, small and fragile, her head shaved like that of a criminal prepared for execution. She has a face whose beauty is all in the fine bones and the big luminous eyes. It is with an expression of hurt bewilderment that those eyes now look up into Loola’s face and from Loola’s face move without curiosity, almost without comprehension, to that of the stranger who accompanies her.
«Darling!»
Loola bends down to kiss her friend. NO NO, from Dr. Poole’s viewpoint. Then she sits down beside Polly and puts a comforting arm around her. Polly hides her face against the other’s shoulder and both girls begin to cry. As though infected by their grief, the little monster in Polly’s arms wakes up and utters a thin complaining howl. Polly raises her head from her friend’s shoulder and, her face still wet with tears, looks down at the deformed child, then opens her shirt and pushing aside one of the crimson NO’S, gives it the breast. With an almost frantic hunger the child starts to suck.
«I love him,» Polly sobs. «I don’t want them to kill him.»
«Darling,» is all that Loola can find to say, «darling!»
A loud voice interrupts her.
«Silence there! Silence!»
Other voices take up the refrain.
«Silence!»
«Silence there!»
«Silence, silence!»
In the lobby all talk ceases abruptly and there is a long, expectant hush. Then a horn is blown and another of those strangely babyish, but self-important voices announces: «His Eminence the Arch-Vicar of Belial, Lord of the Earth, Primate of California, Servant of the Proletariat, Bishop of Hollywood.»
Long shot of the hotel’s main staircase. Dressed in a long robe of Anglo-Nubian goatskins and wearing a golden crown set with four tall, sharp horns, the Arch-Vicar is seen majestically descending. An acolyte holds a large goatskin umbrella over his head and he is followed by twenty or thirty ecclesiastical dignitaries, ranging in rank from three-horned Patriarchs to one-horned Presbyters and hornless Postulants. All of them, from the Arch-Vicar downward, are conspicuously beardless, sweaty and fat-rumped and, when any of them speaks, it is always in a fluting contralto.
The Chief rises from his litter and advances to meet the incarnation of spiritual authority.
NARRATOR
Church and State,
Greed and Hate: —
Two baboon-persons
In one Supreme Gorilla.
The Chief inclines his head respectfully. The Arch-Vicar raises his hands to his tiara, touches the two anterior horns, then lays his spiritually charged fingertips on the Chiefs forehead. «May you never be impaled upon His Horns.»
«Amen,» says the Chief; then straightening himself up and changing his tone abruptly from the devout to the briskly businesslike, «Everything OK for tonight?» he asks.
In the voice of a ten-year-old, but with the long-winded and polysyllabic unctuousness of a veteran ecclesiastic, long accustomed to playing the role of a superior being set apart from and above his fellows, the Arch-Vicar replies that all things are in order. Under the personal supervision of the Three-Horned Inquisitor and the Patriarch of Pasadena, a devoted band of Familiars and Postulants has travelled from settlement to settlement, making the yearly census. Every mother of a monster has been marked down. Heads have been shaved and the preliminary whippings administered. By this time all the guilty have been transported to one or other of the three Purification Centres at Riverside, San Diego and Los Angeles. The knives and the consecrated bull’s pizzles have been made ready and, Belial willing, the ceremonies will begin at the appointed hour. Before tomorrow’s sunrise the purification of the land should be complete.
Once more the Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns, then stands for a few seconds in recollected silence. Reopening his eyes, he turns to the ecclesiastics in his train.
«Go, take the shaven ones,» he squeaks, «take these defiled vessels, these living testimonies of Belial’s enmity, and lead them to the place of their shame.»
A dozen Presbyters and Postulants hurry down the stairs and out into the crowd of mothers.
«Hurry, hurry!»
«In Belial’s name.»
Slowly, reluctantly, the crop-headed women rise to their feet. Their little burdens of deformity pressed against bosoms heavy with milk, they move toward the door in a silence more painfully expressive of misery than any outcry.
Medium shot of Polly on her sack of straw. A young Postulant approaches and pulls her roughly to her feet.
«Up!» he shouts in a voice of an angry and malevolent child. «Get up, you spawner of filth!»
And he slaps her across the face. Cringing away from a second blow, Polly almost runs to rejoin her fellow victims near the entrance.
Dissolve to a
