The Space Swimmers, page 12
Tomi looked at the balding man. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that’s what I was going to tell you. They don’t know. You see they’re real old, but they’re young. I mean they’ve lived a long time but to them they’re young. One of them told me he remembers when there wasn’t any ice at our South Pole. But they aren’t like us. When they’re born they’re just barely alive—like clams. Then, gradually they grow up until they’re like animals, then finally they get so they think like people. But they live almost forever and it takes a long time. My friends couldn’t understand me being born with brains to start with.”
“You mean—?” Leif broke off, turning to Maytig. “That makes sense, come to think of it. There’s nothing to kill them out here in space. They could live forever as Tomi says. They could start life as merely clouds of living gas and individually evolve into thinking creatures. But that’s tremendous!” Leif said, turning back to Tomi. “If the young ones you know have developed this far—how much farther the older ones must have developed. Think what they can teach us! Tomi, next time you’ve got to get to talk to one of the older Swimmers.”
“But that’s what I told you back in the tank!” said the boy.
Leif and the rest stared at him.
“Told me?” said Leif. “What?”
“The old ones won’t talk,” said Tomi. “Remember how I told you the old one I met the first time in the tank wouldn’t talk to me? My friends—the young ones—say it isn’t just me, or us. The old ones won’t even talk to them.”
Leif and Maytig looked at each other. “Maybe,” suggested Maytig, “the older Swimmers can’t talk.”
“Oh, they can talk,” said Tomi. “They can tell you to leave them alone. And they know things all right—like how the passing over works. My friends say they know almost everything. And you can feel it’s true—somehow—when you get close to an old one. But they won’t tell any of it.”
He looked around at the ring of adult faces.
“It’s like—like something they believe in,” said Tomi. “That’s why they let the Space Academy kill them when the Academy used to capture them the way you said, Dad. The old ones know but they’ll never tell. They’d rather die first!” He looked directly at Johnny. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Dad, but that’s the way they are.”
14
It was just before dawn, fourteen hours later, that the spaceship came down over a cloud-covered North Atlantic and sank itself forty fathoms below the waves until the attachment of air-filled pods balanced it in the water beside the Headquarters Home of the North Atlantic Area of the sea-People. Leaving the ship for the Home, Johnny found a smallboat waiting to take him ashore, and also most of the Sea Captains, already gathered in expectation of a showdown with the Land. Most of the fighting men of the third generation in the North Atlantic Area were either approaching or within fifty miles of the Savannah Stand shoreline now. They had begun to gather the moment Pat had called the sea to warn them he was calling back Johnny at Ebberly’s request.
In that fifty-mile radius area now, the Sea Captains told Johnny, were better than twenty thousand armed men ready to move if Johnny gave the word. Other forces were gathering in the other sea areas. Or, the total sea population could retreat to ocean deeps within two hours, in case the ultimate action to start destruction of the continents by initiating deep-sea geologic disturbances was ordered.
Johnny shook his head.
“I’ve still got hopes of pulling out a solution—for us and the Land, both.” He saw Leif listening and staring at him as he said this, and he looked back, evenly and deliberately. The land-born scientist dropped his eyes. “If anything happens to me, you’re on your own. But talk with the Land. Give them one more chance before you fire off your nuclear charges and wake up the Ring of Fire.”
He swung his eyes around the half-circle of third-generation faces.
“You’ll do that?” he said. “I can count on you to talk first?”
They nodded. He turned and went to his waiting smallboat.
There was no one on the landing stairs above the ducted flyer stand. And the flyers themselves sat in their ranks, lifeless and unmoving.
Johnny left the smallboat, which turned back into the sea, and stepped onto the first concrete level of the steps. He ran lightly up them and stepped in through the irises of the entrance doors into the Terminal.
It was empty.
Lights glowed, signs glittered and moved above restaurant and bar areas. But in all that vast, towering-walled enclosure, no figure moved. But one.
As Johnny walked rapidly into the area of the main floor, a tall, lean shape rode to the bottom of the ramp from the mezzanine area of the air-shuttle buses, and strode toward him. Even at this distance, Johnny saw it was Pat. He walked rapidly toward Pat, and they met perhaps fifty yards in front of the foot of the ramp.
“I’ve got a private ship waiting for you on the air-shuttle area,” said Pat. “Come on. The Civil Group’s arresting anyone who moves in the Chicago Complex area. You’d never get through there by subway to Ebberly’s Estates North.”
He turned about and began to head back toward the ramp. Johnny went with him. Their long legs made short work of the distance to the ramp and up it. Sitting in among the air-shuttle bus area was the stubby, powerful shape of a small private rocket ship. Pat jerked open the door and gestured Johnny in, then slid in behind Johnny to take the other seat facing the controls.
A second later the door closed, the rocket jerked skyward, driving for altitude beyond the air traffic controlled area.
“So the Groups are ready to fight each other, at last?” said Johnny.
“At last—yes,” said Pat. His thin face was set in harsh lines and looked older than Johnny could remember seeing it look before. “Most of the rank and file of the Civil Group think the Barons— except Stuve—are trying to dissolve it so that they can take over management of the world.”
He leveled the ship off, finally. Below them the land was featureless and the horizon line was faintly curved. Above, the sky was black with the stars faintly showing, though it was broad daylight. Ahead, Johnny could see the sprawl of the Great Lakes.
“How’d it start?” asked Johnny.
Pat began to turn the ship back toward the surface of the planet again.
“Last night—early last night,” he said. “Men wearing Transportation Marks and livery kidnaped Gino Morandi”—he glanced sideways at Johnny—“the Civil Group Baron. Maybe you remember—?”
“I remember,” said Johnny. “Go on. Have they found him, yet?”
“They found his body this morning. But an hour after the kidnapping was announced on the News Services, yesterday, Stuve went on the air to announce that he had been approached to join a conspiracy, but turned it down. He claimed Ebberly and the five other largest Barons had conspired to kill Morandi and dissolve the Civil Group.”
“Which would dissolve civil law, ashore?”
“That’s right,” Pat nodded. They were descending at a sharp angle into the atmosphere now; and a corner of the screen viewing the area between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior below them showed a corner of one stubby wing glowing cherry-red with the air friction. “With no civil law, the people in the large Groups would have the protection of their own outfits. But most of the world would be unorganized, defenseless, and without anyone to turn to for policing and justice.”
They were coining down and a moment later they landed at the private rocket pad of Ebberly’s Transportation Estates North. Pat led Johnny past the armed men guarding the pad onto a walkway that carried them back to that same lakeside pavilion Johnny had now entered twice before.
Inside the pavilion, Pat led him to the same room, half office, half lounge, where he had had those two previous interviews with Ebberly. As before, Ebberly was there now but this time there were others with him.
“You heard,” Ebberly was saying to these others as Pat and Johnny came in. Ebberly stood with his back to the entrance and the two sea-born as they came through it. He stood with legs spread apart, shoulders squared, staring down at five other Barons seated in a rough semicircle behind the desk Ebberly himself was in the habit of occupying. He did not look particularly disturbed or unhappy. Beside him Johnny recognized Quayle Walser, the thin sixty year old who headed the Communications Group, on the left. Next to him were thick-bodied, middle-aged Pao Jacoski of Fabrication, then fat, old Wally Kutch of Supply, Michael Under of Clerical, and then Ed Poira of Distribution, a man almost as tough-looking as Kai Ebberly himself. “—The latest word,” Ebberly went on, “is that Stuve’s calling for a plebescite. For a world-wide government. The very thing our Groups have fought to get away from for a hundred years. You know who the head of that Government would be—Barth Stuve.”
Ebberly paused, put his hands together behind his back, and cracked the knuckles of his first and second fingers on his left hand, deliberately, one after the other. The sound and action in the face of the silence of the other Barons brought a feeling of savage and contemptuous power into the taut air of the room.
Johnny walked forward, followed by Pat, and at the sound of footsteps Ebberly turned around.
“Here you are,” he said, as they stopped in front of him. His eyes met Johnny’s squarely.
“Yes,” said Johnny. Ebberly’s face, he saw, was calm and the tones of his voice were reasonable.
“Well, Joya,” said Ebberly, evenly, “you were right and I was wrong. Would you like me to apologize—eat crow? I’ll be glad to. Because we need you now.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Ed Poira, his hard, thick-fleshed face unfriendly.
“You’re a fool, Ed,” said Ebberly, without raising his voice or taking his gaze off Johnny. “You always were. When Stuve suggested outlawing these people, you were the first one to go along with it.”
“You went along, too,” growled Poira.
“And I was a fool, too,” said Ebberly. He turned to Johnny. “Well, Joya, how about it? If Stuve gets control of the world, there’s an end to progress. There’s an end to any hope of a future way to the stars. And that’s what I want. So I’m willing to pay any price to keep Stuve from getting control. And so, too, should you people in the sea be willing to pay any price. Because if he gets control he’s not going to let any group of people exist that aren’t under his control. And that means the end of your sea-culture, too.”
He stopped. Johnny said nothing.
“You want me to do all the talking?” said Ebberly. “All right. Barth Stuve is holed up in his Rocky Mountain hunting lodge. It’s on top of a mountain above Yellowstone Park. The only way to stop him is to go in and get him—only we can’t, because the place is a fortress. It’s got space-and-atmosphere defenses against anything from missiles to kamikaze pilots; and the mountainside is too rugged to get heavy weapons up close enough to do any good. Besides, all our retainers put together aren’t enough to take the place by frontal assault up the slopes. We can’t get at Barth—but you can.”
He stopped to look at Johnny significantly.
“Go on,” said Johnny.
“There’s a deep lake inside his walls on the mountain top,” said Ebberly. “And a river that comes out of the side of the mountain a distance lower down. The river is fed by the lake, through a series of caves inside the mountain. There’s a way in up that river. It’d be half underwater work and half cave-climbing, and no men we’ve got could do it—but you people could. And a force of your men could come up right inside Barth’s defenses.”
Johnny nodded slowly.
“I thought something like that,” he said. “But why do you think I’d spend the lives of my people just to haul your chestnuts out of the fire?”
“We’ll give you anything you ask for if you do,” said Ebberly. “My word on it.”
“Keep your word for someone who believes in it,” said Johnny. He looked at all the Barons grimly. “All right—here’s our price for getting Barth for you. An admission that the original outlawing of the sea-People was unjust. And a guarantee that the seas will belong to us, as national territory—not only the under-seas, but the surface of them, and the atmosphere over them.”
Ebberly stared back at him for a second without expression.
“All right,” he said, then, calmly. “I agree. Get going.”
“Not just yet,” said Johnny. “First, I want all of you here to issue a joint statement to the news services, right now, announcing the revocation of the decree of outlawry, and the guarantee that the seas will be ours.” He looked past Ebberly at the other Barons. “Do that—and I’ll save your necks. Otherwise, I won’t.”
“Never mind them,” said Ebberly harshly. “They’ll do it. I promise. We’ll make the announcement right now.” He turned to the other Barons.
Johnny himself turned to Pat.
“Pat,” he said. “Get a message to the Sea Captains and have them send—” He broke off, turning to Ebberly. “How many men has Stuve got on that mountain top?”
“Maybe a hundred—it’s not that big,” said Ebberly.
“Get fifty men—ex-Cadets by preference,” said Johnny, turning back to Pat. “Maybe you better go get them yourself, come to think of it.”
“No,” said Pat, looking steadily back at him. “I’ll message. When you go after Barth Stuve, I’m going with you.”
15
It was five o’clock Mountain Time when Johnny, with Pat and the fifty sea-born fighting men, landed on a snowy slope in the Rockies. Less than a thousand feet above was the rocky crest that held the hunting lodge of Stuve in a cup-shaped depression below the peak. The peak was not so high that pines and spruce were not thick on the slope and in the cup. And the cup had high walls of the natural rock surrounding it on all sides but one. In this one gap was the Terminal for the area.
Johnny led Pat and the fifty sea-born up the wind-packed snow of the slope between the pine trees. The cloudless sky overhead was warm with a freakishly early breath of false spring. A hawk circled overhead. Far across the gulf of open air behind them was the curve of the Gallatin Range, beneath which lay Yellowstone Park.
Back at Transportation Estates North, Johnny had examined air photos of the rocky cup and the lodge within it. The cup was more than a mile in diameter. The inner half of this space was taken up by a blue and deep mountain lake, well-stocked with trout warmly unfrozen beneath the weather shield that protected everything in the cup. There was nothing to hunt under that shield but the trout and some imported, rare albino squirrels with enormously fluffy and decorative tails. These inhabited the pine- and fir-treed shores, which in a nearly natural state ran down in the form of slopes, deep in brown fallen pine needles, to the water’s edge. Except where these trees had been cleared to make room for the lodge.
The spacious lodge itself ran down the slope toward the lake from the entrance. Its final structure was a tower which lifted at last on the very lakeshore, the curve of its outer side bulging out over the water. A tower four-stories high with two balconies projecting from the upper two stories on the land side. There were no windows, and there could be no fixed weapons in the tower. The rest of the lodge was also windowless, its walls armored against missile weapons and magnetically screened against any power that could be carried against it in the form of individually portable sonic or electronic weapons. The one soft spot, Johnny had decided, was the back part of the entrance Terminal, just inside the mountain gap of the entrance to the area. If he and the sea-born could break in there, then they could fight their way down the lodge from the inside.
Now, they reached the spot, guarded by some of the Ebberly’s retainers, where the underground stream broke from the mountainside. One by one, the sea-born men slipped masks up over their faces and took to the water. The current was difficult, but they had come equipped with belt jet units; and with these they slipped into the interior of the mountain along the riverbed like salmon working upstream.
Within the mountain the river proceeded by a series of cave-born falls and rapids. The route was a slow one, but not difficult for anyone but a Lander. Only a little less than an hour later, they cut their way with torches through a too-narrow stone entrance into the lake above, only some twenty feet below the surface and a dozen feet out from the shore.
The shore itself was overhung thickly by brush and tree-tangles. They slipped ashore under this cover and circled through the woods around to the three-story-tall, plaster-white, back wall of the Terminal entrance. Johnny raised his hand in signal for the attack.
The sullen sound of the explosion of the sonic bomb lobbed by the advance party to blow open the Terminal’s three-story-tall, plaster-white, outside gate, jarred on Johnny, when he with Pat and the advance guard of the sea-born were still fifty feet down from it. The sound and the sudden pressure of air reminded him of the raid on New York Complex six years before when he had led the expedition to rescue the ex-Cadets held prisoner by the Land. He broke into a run now, abandoning concealment, scrambling up and forward.
The Terminal entrance was blown clear and open when he reached it. A blast of warm air was blowing out of it. A few metal scraps of wreckage, a few bodies, black against the white snow, and shards of broken gate were all that they saw. Then they were into the Terminal, the ex-Cadets behind Johnny spreading out with sonic rifles in their hands to take advantage of their cover. Their original training at the Academy had been improved by six years of being hunted. They moved like professional soldiers. It was the difference between wolf and dog with them and the hired toughs in livery that made up the force backing them up.
Also they were now all caught up in their third-generation sense of location and the awareness of each others’ position. They moved forward with a sureness no land-born fighters could have felt, and the pale beams of the visual-sighting mechanisms of their rifles began to trace paths through the air between the crowded trees before them.
They were all down on their bellies now and wriggling forward. Pat, in spite of his long time ashore, was keeping up at Johnny’s side.
