“Yes, one of those, Bigelow.
He and Lovecraft and Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce and all the tales of terror and fantasy and horror and, for that matter, tales of the future were burned.
Heartlessly.
They passed a law.
Oh, it started very small.
In 1950 and ’60 it was a grain of sand.
They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religions prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”
“I see.”
“Afraid of the word «politics» (which eventually became a synonym for Communism among the more reactionary elements, so I hear, and it was worth your life to use the word!), and with a screw tightened here, a bolt fastened there, a push, a pull, a yank, art and literature were soon like a great twine of taffy strung about, being twisted in braids and tied in knots and thrown in all directions, until there was no more resiliency and no more savor to it.
Then the film cameras chopped short and the theaters turned dark. and the print presses trickled down from a great Niagara of reading matter to a mere innocuous dripping of «pure» material.
Oh, the word «escape» was radical, too, I tell you!”
“Was it?”
“It was!
Every man, they said, must face reality.
Must face the Here and Now!
Everything that was not so must go.
All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air.
So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 1975; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin and Mother Goose — oh, what a wailing! — and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More!
And they spread the ashes of the Phantom Rickshaw with the rubble of the Land of Oz; they filleted the bones of Glinda the Good and Ozma and shattered Polychrome in a spectroscope and served Jack Pumpkinhead with meringue at the Biologists’ Ball!
The Beanstalk died in a bramble of red tape!
Sleeping Beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.
And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry
«Curiouser and curiouser,» and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to smash it and every Red King and Oyster away!”
He clenched his fists.
Lord, how immediate it was!
His face was red and he was gasping for breath.
As for Mr. Bigelow, he was astounded at this long explosion.
He blinked and at last said,
“Sorry.
Don’t know what you’re talking about.
Just names to me.
From what I hear, the Burning was a good thing.”
“Get out!” screamed Stendahl.
“You’ve done your job, now let me alone, you idiot!”
Mr. Bigelow summoned his carpenters and went away.
Mr. Stendahl stood alone before his House.
“Listen here,” he said to the unseen rockets.
“I came to Mars to get away from you Clean-Minded people, but you’re flocking in thicker every day, like flies to offal.
So I’m going to show you.
I’m going to teach you a fine lesson for what you did to Mr. Poe on Earth.
As of this day, beware.
The House of Usher is open for business!”
He pushed a fist at the sky.
The rocket landed.
A man stepped out jauntily.
He glanced at the House, and his gray eyes were displeased and vexed.
He strode across the moat to confront the small man there.
“Your name Stendahl?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Garrett, Investigator of Moral Climates.”