The Sword and the Net полностью

His orders came at the end of his fourth week in Welham Park—and within three days he was beginning a journey by road across the continent. He drove his own car, a gift from Mrs. Van Teller in appreciation of his appearance at the Greek Relief entertainment. It was a good American car, neither too large nor too small, and in the back of it were a trunk and suitcase filled with good American clothes. He was, as he drove through the spring-green eastern countryside, a sight and fact to bring pleasure to honest American eyes and warmth to kindly American hearts—a young man who had been born a foreigner but was now on the way to American citizenship; a young man who had proved himself, in a brief moment of glory, to be a true defender of Democracy and who now was prospering through hard American work on high American wages; a young man whose foreign background was romantic and honest and true and who now was rapidly collecting an American history equally unimpeachable; a young man of good looks and brains and brawn, an athlete and a worker, steady but far from priggish, vastly attractive to women yet highly popular with men; a young man, it seemed, with only one fault and that almost a virtue—a violent, all-absorbing hatred of the Nazi-Fascist ideals and way of life.

He arrived in San Francisco six days and some odd hours after leaving Welham Park. He had vastly enjoyed the journey, principally, he thought, because it was a prelude to the adventure of active service but also because of the personal vision it had given him of this vast, incredible country of America. Before, even while he was in New York and Welham Park, the bigness and variety of America had been things which he knew only academically, as figures and graphs of distance and contour and industry—but now he had felt America himself with his own eyes and senses and the body which he had transported from one end of America to the other. He had, in some three and a half thousand miles of driving and one hundred and fifty hours of time, passed through every conceivable kind of country and weather and city. He had driven through sunshine and snowstorm, flood and drought, dusty plains and cloud-tipped mountains, ever-changing forests and never-changing fields of wheat; through fog so thick that he could not see ten feet ahead of him and through sunshine so strong that he could only see through narrowed eyes. He had traversed cities where the pall of smoke hung so thick and low that he could not see the sky, and over hills where there was nothing but sky to see. He had eaten in hotels and tourist camps and farmhouses and by a prospector’s fire and in halts for lorry-drivers. He had slept under one blanket on desert sand and shivered in a bed under five. He had seen and spoken with business men and cowboys, shop-girls and soldiers, miners and farmers and lumbermen and college boys, housewives and salesmen, saleswomen and priests and hobos and waitresses; with two stranded airmen and a small-town policeman—even with one Revivalist whose eyes flared insanely and a circus attendant looking for a mislaid leopard. He had swum in five rivers and one ocean and spent three hours in the stuffy jail of a Midwestern town, charged with driving at forty miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile zone and condemned to await the local judge’s return from a belated luncheon. He had crossed America.

It was mid-afternoon when he arrived in San Francisco. He drove in over the Bay Bridge after stopping in Oakland for two hours at a small hotel where he bathed and changed his clothes and, like the methodical tactician that he was, charted upon a big-scale map of the city his course to the San Francisco offices of R. Altinger and Horwood Incorporated—Production Homes.

They were on June Street, a difficult place to find even for a San Franciscan—and as he drove carefully along the narrow, congested stream of Market Street, and up and down the sudden, steeply looming hills so improbably clothed in pavement and buildings, he had cause to bless the map and his patient study of it.

But June Street was where it should be, and he turned into it, weaving between the street-cars and a lorry. There was no parking-space at either curb, but he found a garage and left his car there and walked back to the Jackson Building. He went straight to the lift and said: “Four, please,” as they did in New York, and was carried swiftly up. Outside the ground-glass doorway marked ‘407’ and ‘Altinger and Horwood Inc.—INQUIRIES,’ he halted for a moment and probed into his breast-pocket and brought out the letter addressed to ‘Mr. Rudolph Altinger—Personal’ and then knocked upon the door and opened it.