Collected Fiction, page 687
“Do you know a priest named Dio?” I asked.
“I do.” Coriole sounded grim. “Why?”
THEN I told him my little story about the procession through the streets. He looked thoughtful at the end of it but he shrugged.
“Well, I hope Falvi can handle him. Dio’s unpredictable. We’ve tried to sound him out for joining us but what he wants is a sure thing. He never takes chances unless he’s Sure they’ll pay off. And he isn’t quite sure about us.
“Still, I think he has an idea we might just possibly get somewhere, someday. Dio’s for Dio first and the winning side next. I suppose he’ll keep his mouth shut but it was clever of you to sidetrack him like that. You’re just the man we need, cousin. I’m glad you’re going to join us.”
“Am I? You seem to have it all worked out. Just what plans have you got for me, Coriole?”
“That depends on whether you join us willingly or not.” He gave me a very chilly glance. Then I saw an unexpected grin flicker across his face and the Coriole I had first met showed, through for an instant—Coriole in his civilian guise, so to speak.
“As the lamb said to the curran,” he added, “How’s that for High?”
“Very funny,” I told him unsympathetically. “Suppose I don’t join you?”
“Then I’ll turn you over to Falvi,” my cousin said, reverting to his military guise with no perceptible effort. “I’m supposing you do join. Then we’ll take you to the mountains and give you a course in politics and strategy. You’re much too valuable to lose, my dear cousin. For instance—”
Someone rapped sharply on the door. Coriole and I looked at each other. Neither of us moved. The knocking came again, very loud in this small room. Coriole switched off the screen. Then he got up cautiously and crossed toward the door. On the way his bare foot came down on a broken eggshell and he swore in a whisper, hopped a time or two and limped the rest of the way.
“Who is it?” he demanded.
“It’s me—Falvi,” an excited whisper declared through the panels. “Let me in. They’re after me!”
I could see Coriole’s grimace. That was Falvi, all right. Let him in so he could lead the police right to the vital spot! Coriole, standing on one foot and. brushing at the injured sole, spoke softly.
“What’s the matter?”
“I think I’ve killed Dio!”
Coriole sighed and unlocked the door, opening it just a crack. I saw Falvi’s thin nose thrust eagerly through.
“Let me in, Coriole!”
“Now wait a minute,” Coriole said in a patient voice. “I’m busy here. What makes you think you’ve killed Dio? Did you shoot him?”
“No, I hit him over the head. I tell you they’re after me! Let me—”
“What did you hit him with?”
“My sandal. Coriole, will you let me—”
“Then I doubt if he’s dead, you fool. You aren’t that powerful. Calm down a minute, will you? Who’s after you?”
“Well, the guards, I think.” Falvi’s excitement was beginning to subside. “You think? Did you see them?”
“Well, no, but—”
“You’re as safe there as you’d be here,” Coriole told him unsympathetically. “Wait—I’ll be with you in a second.”
He shut and locked the door and turned back to me. Then his eye fell on the dismantled screen and he limped forward and began to work rapidly with the copper wiring he had just readjusted.
“I’ve got to calm him down,” he said. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes by yourself to think things over. How about it?”
“Have I got anything to say?”
“No.” My cousin gave me his ready grin. “Not a word. You sit tight and don’t make any fuss. When I. get back we’ll start in planning. I’ll lock you in so you won’t be bothered.”
He finished the rewiring, snapped the panel into place and straightened, wrapping himself afresh in the orange towel. “Don’t try to get out,” he warned. “Remember, Falvi’s right outside.”
“Have it your own way,” I said, watching him unlock the door. A drift of the fragrant fog seeped in through the opening as he looked cautiously out. He spoke to me casually over his freckled shoulder.
“Clia’s our real key,” he said. “You sit here and think of some way you could talk her into joining our side. We’ll have to work fast, you know. Angels from Paradise can get to be a drug on the market if they hang around too long. The Hierarch’s planning to send her back to New York any day now.” He slipped out into the swirling fog.
“See you later,” he said and shut the door. I heard the lock click.
CHAPTER X
Game’s End
I HEARD my brain click, too.
So Lorna was going back to New York any day now. Well, well, I thought, in a rather dazed fashion, staring at the blank screen. And I’d had my trouble for nothing, had I? Obviously, that was what the scene with Lorna at the machine had meant. I thought back, trying to remember exactly what had been said. Lorna was objecting and the priests were coaxing her. Why?
I could understand her aversion toward the machine, once she recognized it. That transition between worlds was a very disagreeable experience. For some reason it seemed necessary to persuade her to go willingly. Probably they were planning a big public ceremony when the angel returned to Paradise. It would spoil the show if she didn’t seem to want to go back.
But she teas going back. Well, then, what was I sitting here waiting for? All I had to do was get to the Hierarch and persuade him to send me with her, and everything would be fine again. Or was it that easy?
I scratched my ear and tried to think. There was something wrong here. If this were the familiar melodrama I was reliving, I’d have dived head first into the excitement my cousin was offering. It seemed to promise unlimited chances to swing swords, gallop on fiery steeds and lead lost causes at the top of my voice. But I felt strongly that I was never cut out to be a hero.
For one thing, the hero never pauses to consider what’s in it for him before he plunges into combat to overthrow the government. And how did I know the majority of the Malescans wanted their government overthrown? I had only Coriole’s word for it.
Assuming that everything he’d said, was perfectly accurate, even then I knew I was lacking in the stuff of heroes. It’s true that when he was telling me Uncle Jim’s story he seemed to be speaking to a quality in my mind that responded. I knew then what real heroes are like—and I knew I wasn’t one of them.
It takes conviction, for one thing. Maybe it takes a man who’s a misfit in ordinary life and I wasn’t a misfit. I was an up and coming young actor with a future in show business. I had everything in the world to go back to if I could take Lorna with me and clear myself.
I thought of that pickpocket on the street. The average hero would have bounded to his defense without waiting to get the facts straight. Before I meddled with Malescan affairs it seemed to me I had better find out exactly what I was doing.
I told myself flatly, “Eddie, let’s not get romantic about this. Uncle Jim’s case was entirely different. For one thing he was a born adventurer. For another he had a wife and son in Malesco to fight for. No,” I went on, “not me. It’s not my battle.”
Then I poured myself a cup of the cold stuff that had once been hot tea. It had dregs in it. I sat there looking at the patterns they made in the cup, stirring them around, trying to keep them from settling and trying to keep my own future from taking permanent shape just yet.
The door clicked. Coriole stuck his head in, wreathed in floating fog. He looked worried.
“I’ve got to go and check up on this Dio business,” he said. “Maybe the fool did kill him. You’ll be all right for half an hour.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.
“Think so?” I asked.
“Oh yes. I’ve got a man watching this door. I really have as a matter of fact. I know it sounds like a bluff but it isn’t.”
“Just what do you think I can do for you as long as you keep a rope around my neck, Coriole?” I demanded.
“Oh, I have lots of plans,” he assured me cheerfully. “You’re going to help me get rid of the Hierarch.”
“Sure, pure,” I said. “That ought to be easy.”
“As a matter of fact,” he repeated, “it won’t be too hard the way I’ve got it figured. Our boys couldn’t do it but you’re from Paradise. You could get to him. We’ve got his successor all picked out too—one of us. A lot of the priests are with us, you know. Once the Hierarch’s out of the way we’d have a good chance if we worked fast. Oh, you’ll help us all right.”
“I think you’re crazy,” I said. “No.”
“Of course you will. Cheer up, it won’t be as hard as you think. The people are with us. You just sit tight here and watch the pretty pictures. I’ll be back for you in half an hour. Remember, there’s a man with a gun outside, so do as you’re told.” The word he used for “gun” was a Malescan word naturally and it didn’t mean revolver. But the intent was obvious.
“Goodbye,” I said, and turned my back to him. He chuckled and the door clicked. I sat there and stared at the blank screen.
AFTER awhile I got up and squatted in front of the panel, feeling around under it the way Coriole had done. There were smooth pegs underneath, fastening it to the wall. One of them was loose. I worked at it and in a minute it fell off into my hand.
I could get the tips of my fingers under the panel and I gave it a tentative pull. It came soundlessly away from the wall and I had to grab to keep it from falling. I laid it on the table as Coriole had done and squatted there, peering into the thing’s innards, wondering just why I was doing this.
“Maybe there’s something to be said for the priesthood,” I thought. “I’d sort of like to hear their side before I take any permanent steps either way. There’s never been an argument yet where all the right was on one side. It seems to me I’ve been brought up on the theory that when a people has an oppressive government it’s the government they really want after all.”
“By and large, they keep it because they want it.” I thought that over and added, “The majority anyhow.” Then I said to myself, “Cut out the hedging, Burton, and see what you can make of this gadget.”
Actually, it wasn’t so hard, even without the secret knowledge Falvi had imparted to his boss conspirator. But being familiar with the “miracle” of electricity, I handled the Malescan version of a television set with due caution.
I’m no expert but I’ve had to pick up the rudiments of hook-ups at one-night stands backstage in the days when I was working with semi-amateur groups. And I know a little about video, Earth version. Malescan-style video might be different but I soon realized it wasn’t too different to understand.
Pretty soon I discovered that Coriole hadn’t known what he was doing. Obviously he’d gone through his routine by rote, without knowing the reasons. Television occupies a channel 6,000 kilocycles wide against radio’s 10 kilocycles and there’s just so much space on the normal band. Back in New York—Paradise, that was—I knew we were getting around this by shifting video to a higher band in the spectrum, and doing it with adapters.
This set had such an adapter. It was what Coriole had rewired and I went through the same motions more cautiously, automatically changing the frequencies on which the set would receive. I went farther than Coriole. His method had missed a whole band of upper frequencies.
It seemed almost too easy but when I thought about it I saw it wasn’t, given the Malescan mentality. Malesco was a religious society—Earth’s is a mechanistic society. Malescans were conditioned to skip a link in process because they didn’t know it was an important link. They believed in the priesthood as we believe in machines.
I’d be the last man to contend that we don’t miss a few important links in our own thinking, of course. How many people on Earth have a real sense of process? How many can visualize and evaluate the process that goes into the making of a loaf of bread, for example? Or know the use of the iconoscope with its mosaic light cells, the real miracle of video?
I switched the screen on again and as before that businesslike fast light-up occurred, with no rigmarole of Alchemic A’s or background music. I had no idea how to get what I wanted on the thing or even a very clear notion of what it was I wanted.
But I twirled a dial experimentally at random and found myself apparently sailing over a range of mountains studded here and there with shimmers of lights that were probably villages. It was night. I could see the stars in their familiar patterns and, far off at the edge of the sky, a glow that looked like a city. The one I was in? Probably—maybe there was only one city in this world. Was Malesco the city, the country, the world? One or all? I never knew.
I turned the dial again and the picture snapped off like a light and instantly flickered into a focus on a mountain village. I seemed to be looking down the main street of the little town, lighted by overhead incandescents that filtered through the trees lining the street.
It looked like a pleasant small-town street back home except that the parked cars were missing and the adolescents strolling two by two wore strange garments and clustered around a corner building that was not a drug-store but—perhaps—a temple. I couldn’t see clearly but I thought I caught a glimpse through the shadows of the leaves that looked like red and yellow lions and shining salamanders painted on the walls.
I tried the dial again and was at some club-meeting of middle-aged Malescan women who seemed to be reading poetry to each other. I visited a theatre where a version of Medea was being staged and it startled me very much until I realized that Euripides belonged to a period of the past which we and the Malescans held in common.
It wasn’t until much later that Rufus Agricola edged out Claudius and the two worlds split apart. I wondered briefly what had really happened at that point of cleavage. In Caligula’s time there were portents in the sky, weren’t there? It must have released quite a lot of energy, that cosmic schism in space-time.
THERE seemed to be practically nowhere in Malesco—city, state or world—which this video screen couldn’t picture with the right dialing. I sat there, feeling like a spider at the center of an endless web reaching out over a world—by coaxial cable or relay towers or some version of miracle we don’t use ourselves—and spying on every dweller here.
The priests were missing no bets. The wonder was they hadn’t caught Coriole already—unless they hadn’t cared to. Could that be it? Was he not as important as he thought, not as dangerous? Or were the Alchemists wise enough to permit latitude for the blowing off of steam?
For ten minutes or so I swooped and soared over Malesco, my vision riding the air-waves of an alien world, moving in vast curves above the heads of unsuspecting people whom I would never see or know. I tuned in briefly on a vision of New York, and had again that disorienting feeling of being in two places at once, the surge of homesickness as I sat in an alien room on an alien world and looked right down on the familiar streets of my own neighborhood.
It was when I was trying to find in my fumbling way what kind of screen the New York scene was projected on that I ran into my fatal error.
New York without warning went suddenly blank in a blinding dazzle of blue-white light. The brilliance centered in the lower right-hand quarter of the screen and seemed to spread from a minor sun which had come into unexpected being about two feet from my face.
The light was so strong I couldn’t look at it, so curiously compelling that I couldn’t look away. I sat there paralyzed for a moment, feeling jagged lightning-flashes of pain zig-zag through my head, helpless to turn my eyes away.
Then the sun blinked out and I slapped both hands to my eyes and squeezed my forehead to keep it from splitting in two. Bright orange afterimages swam like amoebas inside my lids. When the pain subsided a little I began to be able to hear again and I realized that somebody had been asking me the same question over and over, with increasingly angry intonations.
“What are you doing here?” a man was demanding. “Give me the code-word before I—”
I blinked tearfully at the screen. Through streaming eyes I saw a somewhat unshaven face between the flaps of the priestly headdress, small squinting eyes boring into mine and, chest-high between us, gripped in a hairy fist, a glass cylinder about the size of a pint milk bottle, glowing and fading rather angrily like a large irritated firefly.
I started to say, “Don’t shoot!” and something told me my voice would quaver when I did it, for I was scared and I didn’t even feel called upon to hide it, in that first moment. However impossible it may seem that a man at the other end of a video hookup could shoot and kill me through the relay system, I’d just had convincing proof that he could certainly do me grave harm. Maybe that thing would kill, at that.
I wiped my eyes on a corner of the blue towel and put on as haughty a look as I could manage with the tears still streaming from my stinging lids. I didn’t know what I was going to say but I knew I’d better say it fast. The priest had caught me at something I had no business to meddle with and he’d probably feel perfectly justified in using the fullest power of his milk bottle to punish me unless I spoke first—and fast.
It was time for Allan Quatermain or possibly John Carter to take over. I drew a deep breath and told myself I was a hero. In a hero’s loud decisive bullying voice I said sharply, “Drop that, you fool!”
The priest’s bristly jaw fell slightly. There is this to say about wearing nothing but a towel—manners make the man when his clothes are missing. If I’d been wearing a peasant’s outfit or a clerk’s apron I wouldn’t have got away with this.
But for all the priest knew I might be a visiting High Priest from the other side of the world. Certainly the fact that he’d caught me monkeying with the top-secret video band, known only to the inner circles of the priesthood, would indicate that I might be important.
