Read The Oasis for Free Online Page A

been there) butsiding with the realists on several important issues, the exclusion, for instance, of communists from the membership, an issue which had temporarily created a new alignment of forces, the Latinist, the radio writer, the clergyman, and the ex-agrarian backing up the realists, to everyone’s surprise, while the two magazine editors, who had their own brand of realism, the horse-sense, let’s-look-at-the-facts-boys, indigenous American side.
    “Cross your bridges when you come to them,” handsome editor Haines had advised. “Don’t commit yourself unless you have to. Let’s see how we feel when a Commie wants in.” This argument and, above all, Jim Haines’s seasoned and sagacious manner of unfolding it convinced the colony of the practical wisdom of following his prescription. The purists believed they had won, and the middle-of-the-roaders were content that the colony should keep its principles at least until the moment when it became necessary to apply them, a moment that seemed remote, since any communists who were not in the hands of the authorities were, according to common knowledge, infiltrating the subterranean armament factories, drilling subversively in the training-camps, or enrolled in America Last, an anti-war organization so reactionary that it had not yet been certified as disloyal.
    Utopia was too small a movement—it comprised only fifty persons—to serve the communist interest by obstructing the national war drive. It had hopes ofextending its influence by inspiring other persons to form oases of their own in the contemporary desert, but the flag of secession it raised was no Fort Sumter. It had been investigated by the Attorney General as a possible communist front group (one of its enemies having denounced it as “objectively” giving aid to communism), but the case against it had been dropped, since the worst that could be said against it was that most of its membership had been guilty of “premature” anti-Stalinism. Pacifism had not yet been made a crime, providing that the pacifist was above the age to bear arms or suffered from some physical disability. The Administration was doing its best to preserve some vestiges of civil liberties (it was badly in need of war aims), and it could point to its toleration of Utopia with patriotic complacency. Moreover, the Home Defense Authority had been urging decentralization as an anti-air raid measure; it was not against the law for a group of people to move together to the country; the Utopians could not even be said to be violating a zoning ordinance. The men and women of the colony had registered with their draft boards as agricultural workers; the children were too young to qualify for the service; there was not a doctor or a scientist among the colonists; all of them, in fact, were quite “unnecessary” people, even Will Taub, who had offered himself to the State Department as an expert on communist strategy, only to endure the scrutiny of a pair of plainclothes detectives, to have his wires tapped and his tax-returns opened to question, and tobe told in the end that his arsenal of ideas was rusty, since he had lost contact with the Party at the time of the Spanish Civil War.
    Up to the last minute, the colonists found it impossible to believe that society was going to let them depart with so little molestation, as if to say, “Go in peace.” The realists suspected a trap, and the more intransigent members asked themselves what Monteverdi, the Founder, would have said if he could have seen that cavalcade of cars, well stocked with whisky, cans, and contraceptives, winding up the mountain of Nowhere with their papers in perfect order—doubtless, he would have smiled, but they could hardly smile for him, and the evocation of his fate cast, for those who had loved him, a shadow on the Utopian hillside, comparable to the shadow of Calvary upon the militant Church. Reviewing their actions, however, in the light of the ideas of the