Her eyes went wide. “I did? I shouldn’t have said that.” But she evidently
took him at his word.
Larry said encouragingly, “Well, we might as well go on. Who else is a
member of this Movement besides your father?”
She shifted in her chair uncomfortably. “I don’t know any of their names.”
Steve looked down at the school pass in his hands. He said to Larry, “I’d
better make a phone call.”
He left.
-------------------------------------
Larry said, “Don’t worry about him, Zusanette. Now then, this _movement_.
That’s kind of a funny name, isn’t it? What does it mean?”
She was evidently glad that the less than handsome Steve Hackett had left
the room. Her words flowed more freely. “Well, Daddy says that they call
it the Movement rather than a revolution....”
An ice cube manifested itself in the stomach of Lawrence Woolford.
“... Because people get conditioned, like, to words. Like revolution.
Everybody is against the word because they all think of killing and
everything, and, Daddy says, there doesn’t have to be any shooting or
killing or anything like that at all. It just means a fundamental change
in society. And, Daddy says, take the word propaganda. Everybody’s got to
thinking that it automatically means lies, but it doesn’t at all. It just
means, like, the arguments you use to convince people that what you stand
for is right and it might be lies or it might not. And, Daddy says, take
the word socialism. So many people have the wrong idea of what it means
that the socialists ought to scrap the word and start using something else
to mean what they stand for.”
Larry said gently, “Your father is a socialist?”
“Oh, no.”
He nodded in understanding. “Oh, a Communist, eh?”
Susan Self was indignant. “Daddy thinks the Communists are strictly awful,
really weird.”
Steve Hackett came back into the office. He said to Larry, “I sent a
couple of the boys out to pick him up.”
Susan was on her feet, a hand to mouth. “You mean my father! You’re going
to arrest him!”
Larry said soothingly, “Sit down, Zusanette. There’s a lot of things about
this that I’m sure your father can explain.” He said to Steve, “She tells
me that the money belonged to a movement. A revolutionary movement which
doesn’t use the term revolutionary because people react unfavorably to
that word. It’s not Commie.”
Susan said indignantly, “It’s American, not anything foreign!”
Steve growled, “Let’s get back to the money. What’s this movement doing
with a lot of counterfeit bills and where did you find them?”
She evidently figured she’d gone too far now to take a stand. “It’s not
Daddy’s fault,” she said. “He took me to headquarters twice.”
“Where’s headquarters?” Larry said trying to keep his voice soothing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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