“We have gasoline! It would make a nice fire, no?”
“I think we’d better go now, Doctor. We’ve done what we were supposed
to do.”
The three men started to walk around the pile to the black car. Daddy left
us and walked up to the first man, looking at him hard all the time.
“What about books? Not all the books are in New York! There are some
here you can burn too! Why not?”
“No, Doctor, please.” The three men tried to walk away from him but they
would have walked right into the woods so they kind of walked sideways to their
car. One of them took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead.
He looked at the sky. The other man licked his lips. The marshall kept trying to look
at Daddy but his eyes kept dropping.
“I have more instruments!” Daddy’s voice was sharper and made them
wince. “Yes, gentlemen. Instruments. Scientific equipment. Would you like to see
that on the pile too? No?”
The marshall and one of the men walked around the far side of the black
car and got in quickly. The other man, the driver, tried to walk around to the door
but Daddy was in front ofhim. He stood in front of Daddy with his head lowered.
Daddy just looked at him. After a long time, the driver raised his head and looked
at Daddy and then he dropped his head again.
“Excuse me, Doctor. Please.”
“Yes, I’ll excuse you. Of course.” He stepped aside and the man twisted
past him and got into the car.
Daddy turned around and looked at him in the window.
The driver leaned out. His face was white.
“Doctor. I ... I’m sorry.”
“Yes. You’re sorry. Of course. Aren’t we all? Goodbye, gentlemen.
Someday you will understand.”^3The next destruction occurred on June 26. The FDA’s records list 251 pieces of lit-
erature burned on that day. A memo by an FDA agent states: “We went into the students’
laboratory and Reich said, There they are, burn them.’ “ The actual burning was carried out
by a workman from the company of S. A. Collins and Sons, the firm that had originally built
the accumulators.
The items burned included copies of the Orgone Energy Bulletin,The Orgone Energy
Accumulator,the International Journal of Sex-economy and Orgone Research,Emotional Plague versus
Orgone Biophysics,Annals of the Orgone Institute,The Oranur Experiment, and Ether, God and Devil.
The FDA agent’s report commented: “During the burning, Dr. Reich found him-
self just about to throw some of the literature on the fire. He stopped short and remarked,
T promised myselfthat I would have nothing to do with the burning of this literature.’”^4
Reich told the agent that his books had been burned in Germany but he never expected it
426 Myron SharafFury On Earth