Dark Tunnel Read Free Page A

manufactured a grin. “It looks as if you’ll make it, doesn’t it?”
    “If I can pass the physical. The officer who interviewed me was pretty encouraging.”
    “Congratulations.”
    We took the elevator down and went out into the street. The sky was still blue and bright but the memory of the night in Munich hung across it like a shadow. There was a first faint chill of winter in the air, and I felt older.
    On the way back to the parking-lot neither of us said anything. We were good enough friends not to have to talk, and I had nothing to say. Alec seemed to be thinking about something. The lines that slanted down from his blunt nose were deep and harsh, and he didn’t walk as fast as he had before.
    Even after we reached the car and headed out of the city, the silence remained unbroken. He’d have unfinished business to worry about, I thought, and let him worry. He drove smoothly and automatically by instinct, and his brain went on working on something else.
    When we were approaching Dearborn, I got tired of reading billboards to myself and said, “Are passengers allowed to talk to the driver of this bus?”
    “Eh?” He smiled a little sheepishly.
    “What’s eating you? You tell me not to brood and immediately pull a Hamlet yourself.”
    “Sorry. Matter of fact, I want to talk to you about this. Let’s go in there and have a beer.” He nodded his head at a tavern that we were passing.
    “I could do with a beer.”
    He turned down the next side-street and parked, and we got out and walked back to the tavern. It was a long, dim room lit by red neon, with a black bar running the length of it punctuated by red leather stools. The juke box at the back of the room looked like a small French chateau that had swallowed a rainbow. As we entered somebody put in a nickel and it began to cough rhythmically.
    The place was nearly empty and we had one end of the bar to ourselves. We slid onto stools and Alec ordered two beers from a waitress who wore powder like a clay mask.
    When we got our beer, I said, “What’s on your mind?”
    He wasn’t ready to talk. “Look about you,” he said. “The twentieth-century inferno, and we pay to sit in it. Red light like hell-fire. Ear-busting noise, and we pay the juke to lambaste our ears. Bitter beer.”
    “And horrible hags to serve it,” I said. At the other end of the bar the two waitresses were giggling together over the exploits of their grandchildren.
    “Walk down the streets of Detroit and what do you see,” Alec went on. “Grey streets bounded by grey walls. Men caught in the machines. The carnivores creep between the walls on rubber tires. The parrots squawk from the radio in every home. The men run round in the buildings like apes in iron trees. A new kind of jungle.” He drained his glass and ordered more.
    “Baloney,” I said. “Look at the other side of the medal. Hot lunches for children and advanced medical facilities. Cars for everybody—after the war. Education for everybody now. It’s a fairly Utopian jungle to my mind.”
    “I won’t argue. I’m a country bumpkin and Detroit always gets me.” He was born in Detroit. “But education isn’t everything. A car in every garage isn’t everything, nor a helicopter on every roof.”
    “You sound like Thoreau,” I said. “What good is a telegraph line from Maine to Texas, if Maine has nothing to say to Texas?”
    “Exactly.” He was talking now, and he let me have it: “Education isn’t everything. There’s a certain Doctor of Philosophy, for example, that I suspect of doing a pretty barbarous thing.”
    “Dr. Goebbels?”
    “This is serious. You can keep it under your hat.” I nodded.
    “I’m telling you because I may need your help. I’ve got to clean this thing up before I go into the Navy.”
    “I’ll help of course,” I said. “But what do you want me to help do?”
    He answered my question in his own way:
    “I’m not in a position to go to the F.B.I. I’m not certain