Collected Short Fiction, page 353
A TALL man in the splendid garb of a hotel doorman escaped the sprawling babbling mob about the wrecked lunch stand. He came stumbling up the street, carrying his prize. This proved to be a coconut. He tried it with his teeth, and then stopped and battered it against the curb.
“He will do,” said Pat Wayland. “He is intelligent and strong.”
Captain Drumm raised a shining little pistol. Cartwright snatched at his elbow.
“What’s this?”
Drumm displayed the small weapon. “Paralysis,” he said. “It shoots a tiny steel needle, tipped with a chemical of Pat’s. Effective up to forty yards. It temporarily paralyzes the motor nerves, without destroying consciousness or have any permanent effect. One shot lasts from five minutes to half an hour.”
“Oh!” Cartwright looked suddenly at Pat Wayland. “Down in the vault, when you put me to sleep, was that—” The girl nodded as Drumm fired the tiny gun. It made a sharp little ping, and the victim dropped over his coconut. They wheeled the portable ideophore to him, propped up his limp head, and fitted a light helmet over it.
Pat started the humming converter, adjusted dials.
“The paralysis of the motor nerves,” she commented, “prevents the usual spasmodic reflexes.” She moved a lever. “Thirty seconds—that’s all. You may remove the helmet.”
They stood watching. In a few minutes the man stood up, and deftly straightened his uniform. His face bore a friendly and intelligent smile.
“I thank you, Four,” he said simply, “for selecting me to be a leader of the Utopians. I will obey your Law, and labor to build Utopia, so that the men to come may save Earth from the Holocaust. Now I must help my comrades to find food and shelter.”
Leaving them, he picked up the coconut that had baffled him before, and broke it on the sidewalk, and gave the fragments to a weeping woman who had not yet learned to stand.
Ping, ping, ping, ping!
With four swift shots, Drumm’s paralysis gun toppled four men in a group. Pushing the wheeled cabinet, carrying the four helmets, the others moved toward them with the ideophore.
CHAPTER X
The Renegade
IN A THOUSAND cities and hamlets, on every inhabited continent, the same procedure was repeated. The Pioneer settled amid the clumsy, speechless victims of the tau-ray. Captain Drumm, with the paralysis gun, dropped half a dozen or half a hundred men and women. From the magic of the ideophore they rose again, to be the leaders of the Utopians.
Washington and Yokohama; Paris, Texas, and Paris, France; Berlin and Toledo, Ohio; Moskva and Montevideo; Honolulu and Singapore; Nome and Petropavlovsk and Kansas City—and ten thousand more.
The weeks and then the months went by. For the Earth was large. Even though they worked day and night, snatching odd bits of sleep one by one, it took a long time to cover all the planet. And they found unpleasant things.
They found hunger, and blood, and death.
In Tokio, the tau-ray must have left no memory of the art of quenching fire—not even of the danger of flame. Only black ruin was left when the Pioneer came. Four helpless millions perished in that unopposed conflagration of flimsy tinder-houses. Nor was Tokio the only city that burned.
In the crowded areas of Europe and Asia, the food at hand was soon exhausted. The speechless rabble, oblivious of the intricate machine of commerce that once had fed them, poured out of the cities in a ravening horde. They stripped the countryside of everything edible. Starving men became hunters of men.
Once, staring at a broad military road in Germany, that was scattered with white, tooth-marked bones, Jay Cartwright felt a cold overwhelming sickness at all the agony and death the tau-ray had brought. Leaning against one of the Pioneer’s small round ports, he shuddered.
“To kill one man was murder,” he said faintly, “and you died for it. To rob one man was a crime, and you paid for it with years of your life. We have murdered perhaps half the population of the Earth. We have robbed the rest—even of all memory of what they have lost.”
His voice rose, raggedly.
“Then what are we? Thieves? Murderers? No! There is no word in the language that fits the thing that we have done.”
The steady iron hand of Captain Drumm fell upon his shoulder.
“It’s a terrible thing, I know,” Drumm said. “But life has always been terrible. The old must give way to the new. A thousand must perish, so that one may have life. So it has always been, since the first hungry cell devoured another.
“Remember, our goal is the survival of the race. Mankind was following a road that led straight to doom. We are setting him upon a different path. It may be harder, in the beginning. Many must fall by the way. But, in the end, it must lead to life—to a life more splendid than was ever glimpsed before the Oblivion.”
Cartwright was staring at the bones.
“But so many,” he said, “have died.”
“PERHAPS they have died,” Drumm said. “But the most of them were never alive. They were not ends. They were only means. They were not individuals. They were cogs in a machine—that was already breaking down.”
Cartwright turned away from the port, and shook his yellow head.
“Still there’s a lot that I don’t see,” he said. “Why must we drive men out of their cities? Why must they lie under the rain and the frost? When they need tools, why must they let good implements rust? When millions are roving on foot, why must the railroads be abandoned?”
“Because there must be a clean break with the past,” Drumm told him.
“Men had too many machines. In offices and subways and factories, their lives were geared to the machines. Men made machines of themselves. They had no time to live.
“There will be machines in Utopia, of course. Ultimately, there will probably be more and mightier machines than the Old World ever dreamed of. But they will be the servants of men, and not the masters.” Again, doubtfully, Cartwright shook his head.
A YEAR had gone, since the day of Oblivion, when the Pioneer dropped toward a new village upon a low hill in what had been New Jersey. It had been, a year ago, only a cluster of leaf-thatched huts. But a kiln was now smoking beside it, and a new circular building, of brick and stone, was rising in its broad central square. Fields, below, were green with a late corn and turnips and beans.
As Cartwright dropped the little geoflexor toward the dusty street, he looked across toward the lonely towers of the abandoned metropolis, thirty miles eastward. Bitterly, he laughed.
“And we made men give up that—for this!”
“But,” asked Captain Drumm, as they emerged, “do they seem to mind?”
Three children were shouting and laughing as they drove a herd of spotted cows out to pasture on the hillside. An anvil rang cheerfully in a smithy. Saws and hammers made a pleasant sound from the building. Song rose from a man plowing with two horses in the field below.
A little group of men came, with a manner of friendly respect, to greet the Four. Their leader—who still wore the tattered splendor of a hotel doorman’s uniform—eagerly told of the progress that the town had made.
“The harvest will give us food for all, and we are hauling wood for the winter. That is our new community building. It will house a laboratory and a school. Next year, we plan to open a pottery, a mill, and a small chemical works.”
“Splendid,” said Captain Drumm. “Good,” said Cartwright. “And if you have need of more fuel and iron, remember that all railroad tracks lying outside of cities are exempt from the Law.” His eyes surveyed the busy village again, as he asked, “Are your people happy?”
The leader smiled, and nodded. “We are happy,” he assured them. “Why should anyone be otherwise, in Utopia? We have made a place for everyone. Each has his own tasks to do, and his sure rewards. There were hard times at first, but now there is food and shelter for all. But there is one thing—”
THE voice of the leader grew troubled. He paused, and made a little unhappy gesture eastward. The towers of the old city were lost in the misty distance. But Cartwright saw a blackened patch on another little hill. And he saw three bodies swinging from a rude gibbet, nearer.
“What’s that?” Cartwright demanded. “Has the Law been broken?”
“The Law has been broken,” the leader told him grimly. “Those three hanging are renegades. They were captured in a fight, after their band had taken and burned the village on that hill. We hanged them, as the Law requires. But the most of the band escaped.”
Cartwright stared soberly at the distant gibbet. Renegades. All over Earth there were renegades. They were men who had escaped the ideophore, and defied the leadership of those the ideophore had taught.
Savages. Some bands were yet speechless, though the most of them had learned a few words from the Utopians who had tried in vain to lead them. A few individuals among them must have had some dim memory of the Old Times, for they displayed a surprising aptitude for learning to use the forbidden machines and weapons, in the forbidden cities they haunted.
“The band dwells in the old city, where the Law forbids us to follow them,” the leader was saying. “But they have a daring chief, who is called Silver Skull. He often leads them out in raids across our peaceful lands.
“With the other nearby villages of Utopia, we keep watchmen upon the hills toward the river. When we have warning of a raid, we arm ourselves as best we can, and fight to save our homes. But Silver Skull is very cunning. He took our neighbor village in the night, by surprise.”
Cartwright turned to his companions, with a troubled frown.
“I was afraid something of the sort would happen,” Captain Drumm said soberly. “I knew the job was pretty big, for us. Really, we needed a thousand Pioneers and a thousand ideophores, to sow the seed of Utopia, before these weeds of a new barbarism had fouled the soil.
“There’s danger, now, that these renegades will contaminate all Utopia, with their defiance of the Law. Certainly, we can’t expect the Utopians to make much progress toward their big job of saving the Earth, with a lot of savages preying on them.”
“Well.” Cartwright jerked his yellow head, grimly. “We’ll give the Utopians some better weapons, so they can defend themselves.”
“Lyman foresaw the possibility of something like this,” Pat Way land told them. “He provided for it, in the Plan. We have a special ideophore reel, that will teach the Utopians how to make swords and guns, with a suggestion that they build electrified fences around the ruins of the old cities.”
“Good,” Cartwright said decisively. “We’ll initiate some of our Utopians into the mysteries of weapons—hoping they never get started using them on one another.”
“The Law,” Pat told him, “takes care of that.”
The portable ideophore was set up, beside the silver egg of the Pioneer, when a ragged blood-stained man came staggering up the hill. He stumbled gasping to the leader of the village, who was still somewhat dazed from fifteen seconds of ideophore instruction on the defense of Utopia.
“SILVER SKULL!” he panted. “It was Silver Skull—he came in the dark. I know it was Silver Skull. His head was white in the moonlight. He stabbed me.”
“Where is he?” demanded the tall leader.
“He has gone back with his men into the forbidden city, now. He carried Red-hair away, and left my friend Slim lying dead in the burning camp.”
“Where was this?” asked Cartwright. “And what happened?”
The panting man stared at him with dull bewildered eyes. He was hugging one arm, and the sleeve was sodden with blood.
“At our camp,” he said, “we were burning lime with ties from the railroad. We were far from the forbidden cities, and we thought there was no danger. Last night, after the kiln was fired, we slept.
“We were fools. For it was Silver Skull who woke us. He killed Slim, and took Red-hair, who was going to be Slim’s wife.” He was sobbing, gripping the red arm. “Slim was my friend.”
“Come.” The leader beckoned to him. “We’ll care for your wound. Soon our fear of Silver Skull will be ended. For the Four have taught me to make weapons, and fences that the renegades cannot cross.”
“But still,” whispered the wounded man, “my friend Slim is dead. And Silver Skull has taken his girl.”
Jay Cartwright turned impatiently. “I think we had better do something about this fellow Silver Skull right now,” he said, “without waiting for guns to be manufactured. Or he may be turning out with guns of his own, out of some police armory.”
Drumm’s blue eyes were shining eagerly.
“I was just about to suggest it, Jay.” He turned to the tall leader. “Get your men together, and show us the trail of the Silver Skull. We’ll bring him back to hang for his defiance of the Law.”
The leader gave quiet orders. Soon a hundred men were gathered, a dozen of them mounted. They were armed only with their simple tools, axes, hoes, pitch-forks, saws, and sledges. The Pioneer floated above them, north to the burned camp where the murdered lime-burner lay dead, then east toward the abandoned cities along the Hudson.
The men, Cartwright noticed, kept to the open roads and the fields, avoiding the ever more frequent buildings. At last, at the weed-grown outskirts of what had been Union City, they stopped. When the Pioneer was landed beside them, they refused to go any farther.
“It is the Law,” their leader said. “We cannot enter the old cities.”
“We’ll make a special exception,” Cartwright told him, “until Silver Skull is caught.”
But it was not that simple. He had not realized the lasting power of the ideophore’s suggestions. The Law was the Law, it had to be obeyed. Not one man was willing to break it, even at the command of the Four themselves.
The leader was respectful but firm. The Four were the mysteriously gifted ruler-scientists of Utopia. It was the Law that in most matters they should be obeyed. But the Law said absolutely that the old cities must not be entered.
Captain Drumm abruptly shrugged the gold-and-crimson splendor of his shoulders, and turned away from the frightened hundred.
“LET ‘em wait,” he said. “And we’ll go after Silver Skull by ourselves.”
“We had better not try it,” Cartwright said reluctantly. “The Pioneer isn’t armed. We’ve no weapons but the paralysis guns. And if they’re hidden in some building, we could hardly find them from the air.”
“I’ll ride a horse,” Drumm said, “and follow the trail. You can scout for me with the Pioneer. The paralysis gun will take care of Mr. Silver Skull, until the Utopians are ready to hang him.”
He borrowed a harness-scarred gelding that once had carried a New York traffic officer, and which had quickly re-learned what it had forgotten—for animals too had been subject to the action of the tau-ray. With two bright little guns belted over the crimson coat, he swung briskly into the saddle, and rode into the deserted streets of the forbidden city.
The hooves rang musically on the pavement, echoing against a strange depressing silence. The buildings already looked gray and neglected. Tufts of grass had pushed through cracks in the sidewalks. Broken windows leered. A naked white skeleton, here on the pavement, there on a doorstep, told its own mute story of the Oblivion.
Cartwright guided the Pioneer a hundred feet above. Alertly, at the ports, Pat Wayland and Mart Worth watched for any sign of the renegades.
“The trail is leading toward the Lincoln Tunnel,” Worth commented. “Probably our Big Chief Silver Skull has got his headquarters somewhere in the old subways under Manhattan. We’ll never find him, there.”
“But there might be an ambush.” The wide blue eyes of Pat Wayland rested on Drumm’s erect, red-clad figure. “You shouldn’t have let him ride in here, Jay,” she protested. “It’s splendid of him—the sort of dashing thing he loves. But he might be killed.”
“I know,” Cartwright said soberly. “But I think we had better get this Silver Skull—I’ve got a hunch that he’s the Plan’s greatest enemy.”
He looked suddenly away from the strained anxiety on her lovely face. Suddenly he was wistfully envious of the courage and dash of Captain Drumm. Probably none of the three would ever win Pat’s favor. But, if any did, it would be Drumm. Well, Cartwright insisted to himself, Drumm deserved her. There was never a braver man.
“Oh—there!”
Pat cried out the warning, pointing. Cartwright saw the little swarm of ragged grimy men. With a slinking, feral quickness, they darted out of weed-tangled alleys and broken windows. They rushed upon the lone horseman.
“Jay—” Pat was trembling, voiceless. “Can’t you do something?”
But already Cartwright was dropping the Pioneer into the street, to warn Drumm and possibly to disconcert his attackers. But the screaming renegades, leaping to surround the horseman, paid the ship no heed.
They were a fantastic lot, gaudy with silks and jewels from looted shops. Their weapons, Cartwright thought, must have come from some museum. For they carried swords and pikes and spears and medieval battle-axes.
“Look!” gasped Pat Wayland. “Silver Skull!”
HER quivering hand pointed to a dark gigantic man, who clutched the wrist of a frightened red-haired girl. All in green silk and fur, he was as splendid as Captain Drumm. On his head, hammered into a crude helmet, he wore an aluminum kettle—whence, Cartwright thought, his name. His weapon was a long iron-tipped African assagai.
Mouthing weird, incomprehensible cries, the renegades converged upon Captain Drumm. The frightened horse reared and snorted. But Drumm held his seat, without apparent effort, and a bright paralysis gun moved swiftly in his hand.
Ping, ping, ping!
The foremost renegades began to stiffen and drop.
Dragging the girl, Silver Skull rushed forward. Thrust with all his weight, the assagai ripped into the belly of the rearing horse. It fell screaming backward, and Drumm went out of sight.
“Oh!” whispered Pat. “He’s—under—”
Her white hand caught at her throat. Desperately, Cartwright flung open the valves. He Was cold, trembling—he wished that he had Drumm’s easy courage. But with Drumm pinned under the horse, it was up to him. He snatched a little paralysis gun out of its rack, and leaped out of the Pioneer.
