Ballroom of the Skies Read Online Free PDF Page B

there had still been small though influential Negro groups who had joyously welcomed the dominance of a dark-skinned race in world affairs. They had soon found, to their dismay, that the Pak-Indians were supremely conscious of being, in truth, an Aryan race, and brought to any dealings with the Negro that vast legacy of hatred from the years of tension in Fiji, culminating in the interracial wars. Of Pak-India proper, only Ceylon had any percentage mixture of Negro blood, due to the African invasions of ancient years, but Ceylon was to Pak-India much as Puerto Rico had been to the United States prior to Brazilian annexation.
    Indians would treat you with courtesy, even with affability, but in any conversation with them you could detect, running like a symphonic theme through the orchestrationof words, their conviction that you were a citizen of a decadent nation, one that had gone beyond its peak of influence in world affairs, one that was doomed to the inevitable status of a supplicant nation, free in name only.
    We had it, he thought, and we threw it away. We ripped our iron and coal and oil out of the warm earth, used our copper and our forests and the rich topsoil, and hurled it all at our enemies, and conquered them, and were left at last with the empty ravaged land. How could it have been avoided? What could we have done that we did not do? Should we have used that great moment of momentum in 1945, well over thirty years ago, and gone on to take over the planet? Should we have dropped the sword, misered our resources, and succumbed meekly during the increasing pressures of the middle sixties? How did it come about that any step we could take was wrong, that every course open to us was but a different road to a different classification of disaster? England had been dying too—just a few scant years ahead of us in the inexorable schedule, yet we had been unable to learn from her defeats, unable to cut a new channel. It was almost, he thought, as though there was some unanswerable paradox against which every world power must inevitably run and collapse. Some cold and alien influence in the world, breaking the hearts of men.
    Or perhaps it is all merely our own stupidity. Our blindnesses. Our inability to see and comprehend the obvious. Perhaps we are all like Darwin Branson. Able for a time—even for a sustained length of time—to influence our environment for good, yet always failing somehow in that last crucial moment. As Branson had failed when the blindness came over him.
    He wondered what Patrice would say. He dreaded seeing her. Her love was a contradiction. She seemed capable of loving every aspect of him as a human being except his final, innermost motivation.
    Unscathed Philadelphia had its standard joke about itself. When, during the war, many of the executive branches of government had to be evacuated to Philadelphia,and when the city itself was not bombed, the Philadelphians proclaimed that the enemy had been smart enough to realize that by obliterating all the red tape, they would be helping the U. S. instead of hurting it. The air of immunity had carried over into the present time of fear. There was less underground construction here than elsewhere. It was a prim, old-lady city, walking through the mud with its skirts carefully held up, not too daringly, and with a wise and knowing air as though that old lady, in her almost forgotten youth, had raised a bit of forbidden hell.
    Deceleration thrust him forward against the straps, and ten minutes later he was in a wheezing, clattering taxi headed toward Patrice’s unexpectedly modest home near Upper Darby. Patrice’s father had died in ’71 just one week and two days before the passage of the hundred percent inheritance tax bill. His fortune had its beginnings back when the original Gundar Togelson had been pirating oil land from Mellon. Each Togelson since then had increased it until the late sixties when the capital gains tax was revised to take seventy