Collected Short Fiction, page 354
But he tripped over one of the fallen renegades. Stumbling back to his feet, he saw the fantastic figure of Silver Skull toppling beside him. And Captain Drumm rose, grinning and unharmed, behind the bulwark of the horse.
“Well, Jay,” he said cheerfully, “we’ve got Silver Skull!”
He turned to steady the paralysis gun on a bent elbow and drop the last of the renegades fleeing down the alley. The red-haired girl was on her knees, weeping, beside the fallen chieftain. Cartwright walked to her side, looked down at the tanned features beneath the batted aluminum helmet.
A cold hand clutched his heart.
“What’s the matter, Jay?” Captain Drumm came anxiously toward him. “You look as if you had seen a ghost.”
“I have.” He pointed at the man on the ground. “Silver Skull is Lyman Galt!”
CHAPTER XI
The First Generation
MARTIN WORTH helped Pat Wayland down from the ship. They came to where the red-haired Utopian girl was weeping over the stiff form of the paralyzed chief. Pat started back from her first glimpse of him, and her face went white. All the V’s of little Worth’s face were sharpened by his sardonic smile.
“We came to get Silver Skull,” he said softly, “so that the Utopians can hang him.” He laughed faintly. “Now we’ve got him.”
Pat Wayland was clutching at her white throat.
“But—it’s Lyman!” Her voice was husky. “We couldn’t take Lyman back to be hanged.”
Little Martin Worth was staring at the fallen man, and all the sardonic mockery was gone from his face.
“If I ever had a friend,” he whispered, “it was Lyman.”
Stern little furrows etched the bronzed face of Captain Drumm as he snapped a fresh clip of tiny cartridges into the paralysis gun.
“He was my friend, too,” he said softly. “But—does that make any difference?”
Slowly, Cartwright shook his yellow head.
“It makes no difference,” he said. “Because Silver Skull isn’t Lyman Galt. Lyman Galt was a sum of memories, experiences. And all those were blotted out, by the tau-ray. Silver Skull is a new individual, in the same body. He is a renegade. He has broken Galt’s own Law. That Law says he must be hanged.”
Drumm’s red head nodded slightly.
“That’s true,” he said.
But Pat Wayland made a sharp little cry of protest.
“But we can’t—”
“We must,” said Martin Worth. Lyman gave his life to the Plan, and it meant more than life to him. Now I think that Silver Skull is the greatest single danger to the Plan. I don’t think that there is any doubt about what Lyman himself would want us to do.”
Cartwright was staring at the man on the ground. The tangled black beard and the aluminum kettle and the gaudy silks seemed to melt away, and he saw all the fatigue and the pain and the desperate hope that the tauray had swept from the face of Lyman Galt.
“Mart’s right,” he said. “Galt’s real life was the Utopia that he planned—the hope that that Utopia will be able to escape the Holocaust. This renegade is a threat to Utopia, to the very survival of men through the nebula. I don’t think we have any choice.”
His yellow head made a sharp little jerk. He looked away from the stiff fantastic figure on the ground, down to the weed-tangled street.
“We—we’ll vote.”
Ignoring the catch in his voice, he fumbled in his pocket for a handful of beans. He held them out in his left hand, and cupped his right. They had used this method of decision before.
“A black one is a vote for the death of Silver Skull,” he said huskily. “Three votes carry.”
He looked aside as one by one the others came forward, selected a bean from his left hand and dropped it into his right. Over his own vote, he paused half a minute. Despite himself, he looked back at Silver Skull. And the barbaric trappings seemed to fade again, so that he saw only the tired gravely gentle man he had known.
After all, there could be one white bean.
THEY all gathered around him, and he opened his hand. Pat Wayland made a little breathless cry. Drum caught his breath. Worth smiled sardonicaly. For there were four white beans.
“Four!” whispered Pat. “Then he lives!”
But Cartwright and Drumm and Worth were looking soberly at one another. Cartwright shook his head.
“I thought—” he muttered jerkily—“I guess we all thought—I think we’ll have to vote again.”
Pat Wayland’s tense fingers gripped his arm.
“You mean you are going to take him back to be hanged—after we have all voted to set him free?”
He nodded. Worth did. And Drumm.
“Don’t you see, Pat?” he said huskily. “If we leave him, the risk to the Plan is too great.”
The girl’s blue eyes searched their tense faces. Suddenly she lifted her platinum head.
“We don’t have to hang him,” she cried. “There’s a better way. We can use the ideophore on him.”
Cartwright shook his head, doubtfully.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If we had found him right after the Oblivion, the ideophore would have made him a leader of Utopia. But now his hardships and his struggle to survive have given him an independent aggressive personality. I’m afraid the ideophore wouldn’t change that. I’: can still teach him facts. But I don’t think it will make a good Utopian out of him. You know, we have found a rising curve of failures, ever since the first few weeks. Now, if we could use the tauray on him again—”
“The tau-ray works just once,” Pat Wayland said. “An immunity is developed to the virus.” Her face was pale and taut. “But let’s try the ideophore.” Her blue eyes went appealingly from face to face. “I believe it will work. Let’s vote again.”
“If you think it will work—”
They balloted again, and again there were four white beans.
“It is the ideophore,” said Cartwright, slowly. “And I hope it makes a different man of Silver Skull. I hope it gives us back . . . Lyman Galt.” The Utopian girl watched them, tearfully, as they brought the portable ideophore and fitted one of its helmets to the renegade’s head, in place of the aluminum kettle. When the thing was done, Cartwright offered to take her back to the town.
Kneeling over the prostrate man, she shook her head.
“I shall stay with Silver Skull,” she told him. “He made me break the Law. He made me touch the forbidden things, and enter the forbidden places. Now I am an outcast, and I shall stay with him.”
She clung to his brown hand.
“He is not like any man I knew in the town. He speaks little. He knows nothing of science and Utopia and the Law of the Four and the Holocaust to come. But he has a strength, a fire. I shall stay with him.”
Pat Wayland moved suddenly forward, and touched the girl’s red head.
She slipped a thin jeweled watch from her arm, and put it on the girl’s slender wrist. Tears gleamed in her eyes.
“Take this,” she whispered. “He gave it to me, many years ago. But he doesn’t remember.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. “The Four are very good.”
“WHEN Silver Skull wakes,” Cartwright warned her, “tell him to cease molesting the Utopians. Tell him that we are giving them new weapons that can destroy him. Tell him to heed the Law that we have taught him as he slept. Tell him that if we must come again, we shall kill him.”
The girl’s tearful face burst into a smile.
“Then you haven’t harmed him. You are going to let him live?” Cartwright nodded. “Then the Four are very kind.”
“Perhaps,” murmured Cartwright, “too kind.”
They carried the ideophore back aboard the geoflexor. Looking back from the drumming Pioneer, as it lifted with them, they saw Silver Skull stir and rise. He made the girl fit the aluminum helmet back upon his head. Then, pushing her behind him, he caught up the bloody assagai and shook it angrily at the departing ship.
“Still,” Pat Wayland insisted, “I believe the ideophore will change him.”
“We’ll come back before we leave the Earth,” Cartwright said, “and see.”
For another year, they toured the communities of Utopia. It was impossible, Pat Wayland at last agreed, for the ideophore to make any more renegades into good Utopians. All the towns that had suffered from the unregenerate bands were supplied with instructions for defense.
Many thousands received ideophore training in science and technology and the various arts. And hundreds of the most promising scientists received a special reel devoted to astronomy and all that was known of the advancing nebula.
“The whole object of the Plan,” Cartwright said, “is to enable men to advance far enough to save the Earth from the Holocaust. We must never let the Utopians forget their great task.”
The Pioneer came back at last to that town in New Jersey. Cartwright was amazed at the progress of a single year. Straw-thatched huts had given way to neat tiled cottages and pleasant community buildings. A hundred new industries were busy, and the happy-seeming people had replaced their tattered Old World garments with gay synthetic fabrics.
Geoflexor fliers, similar in design to the Pioneer, although their copper cathode power tubes were not powerful enough for interplanetary flight, already carried commerce between the Utopian towns.
A world-wide Congress of Men had been organized, to coordinate all effort toward the great problem of the coming Holocaust. Plans were already drawn for a super-observatory, to be erected upon a western mountain.
Anxiously, Cartwright inquired about the renegades.
“There were a few more raids,” the leader of the town told him. “But we turned back the last of them with the new machine guns. And now we have finished a charged wire barrier and a wall of towers, surrounding the forbidden city. I think there will be no more trouble.”
“Silver Skull?” asked Cartwright. “Their leader—do you know anything of him?”
The Utopian shook his head.
“Silver Skull has not been seen since the Four pursued him into the city. We believe that he was afraid to defy the Law again. Anyhow, with our new defenses, Utopia is safe.”
THE Pioneer flew westward, to the new metropolis of Star City. The new observatory was to be erected above it. And the Congress of Man was already in session there. The representatives of Utopia greeted the Four with a warm respect.
Forgetting his old diffidence in the urgency of what he had to say, Cartwright spoke before the Congress. He reminded them of the approaching nebula, and the great task of saving Earth and mankind.
“I don’t know how it can be done,” he said. “For it is a bigger thing than men have ever tried to do. The science of the Four enables us to do many things. But it suggests no answer to this great problem.
“We Four, will aid you in every way we can. We shall return from our own place at intervals of thirty years, to see what progress you have made. But we can do little more than observe your efforts, and suggest lines of effort, and keep the new generations reminded of the task.
“For the problem is one that no small group will be able to solve, nor any single generation. Two hundred and twenty-eight years are left, before the Holocaust. Every day of it will probably be needed.
“Now the job is up to you. We’ll come back, in Nineteen Seventy-two, I should say, the year thirty-two of the Oblivion—to see what you have done.”
Applause thundered in the hall. Pat Wayland and Mart Worth and Captain Drumm were called to the platform. The Utopians made confident promises of progress. And then the Four went back aboard the Pioneer. Star City dropped behind. The convexity of western America contracted into the Earth’s misty globe. The rugged Moon grew large against the stars ahead, and the little ship dropped toward the white fortress on the peak of Arzachel.
A photo-cell opened a massive valve in its wall, and Cartwright maneuvered the Pioneer into a compartment buried behind many yards of rock and armor.
“To protect the ship against meteorites,” Captain Drumm explained to Pat. “Here, with no atmospheric barrier, we have to expect a good many of them. In two hundred years, or even thirty, there’s a fair chance that one would smash the Pioneer.”
“What about us?” queried the girl. “Inside?”
“That depends.” It was Worth who answered, grinning sardonically. “A few tons of steel, going thirty or forty miles a second, could give the fortress quite a jolt. If you care for an estimate of the statistical probability—”
“Never mind,” Pat said hastily.
The elevator dropped them nine thousand feet, into the narrow gray-walled corridor before the vaults of sleep. The girl hurried from cell to cell, setting the elaborate clockwork mechanism within the armored doors. At last she came back to the others, nervous and pale.
“They are set for thirty years,” she whispered. “For 1972.”
For a strained little moment they all crowded close together. Cartwright didn’t want to leave the others. There was something terrible about the very thought of going to sleep for thirty years.
SO many things could happen. Suppose a great meteor did strike? Even if it didn’t kill them as they slept, it might cave in the elevator shaft, and leave them buried alive. Suppose the clockwork failed? If some tiny part went wrong, they might never wake again. Even if the clockwork operated perfectly, there still was danger. The effects of the sleep gas had never been tested over a period so long.
Anything might happen.
“Night, darling.”
Captain Drumm spoke cheerfully to Pat, and strode into the vault that bore his name. The girl gave him a white, uncertain smile. Worth turned silently away. With a little awkward gesture, Cartwright walked into his own narrow cell.
He closed the massive door, and sat down on the bunk. The gray walls seemed very close about him. He could almost feel the weight of the thousands of feet of rock above. Suddenly he was breathless, cold with sweat.
He pulled off his clothing, drew on the light robe, and reached at last for the stud on the wall that would start the mechanism. But his hand fell away. He sat, as it were, shuddering on the brink of an abyss of three decades.
Beyond the faint racing tick of the clockwork, there was no other sound. The silence was overwhelming, the burden of a world where motion had ceased. Thirty years meant nothing, here. No more than thirty seconds, or thirty millennia. For the Moon was dead.
Thirty years, he wondered restlessly—what would they mean to the Earth? Would the Utopians carry on, from the beginning they had made? What marvels of science might three decades disclose?
A dread obsessed him. Suppose something turned the Utopians away from their great task? Recklessness of futurity, or despair. Then thirty years would be just one tremendous leap toward the Holocaust, toward the final end.
He wished, suddenly, that he knew what the ideophore had done to Lyman Galt.
The silence clotted about him. He moved, clapped his hands together, made a dry-lipped effort to whistle. But the stillness grew. It came in little waves, that drowned the ticking of the clock. For it was death. It was the enemy of motion and life—
“Aw, nuts!”
Cartwright jerked the words out. With a sudden effort he touched the stud on the wall. The light went out. He heard a hissing. The fragrant pungence of the sleep gas was strong in his nostrils. He had just time to settle into a comfortable position on the bunk.
He slept.
On Earth, a generation passed.
CHAPTER XII
The Gray Chieftain
A DRAUGHT of cold air waked Jay Cartwright. His body felt oddly numb and stiff, but he sat up on the edge of the bunk. He blinked his sticky eyes, and stared bewilderedly about the small gray cell, and at last saw the clock on the door.
It was August 18, 1972. The thirty years were ended.
He stood up, painfully. Opened a sealed water-jar. Rinsed his dry, bitter-tasting mouth. Splashed water over his stiff dry skin. Gulped thirstily.
Movement restored elasticity. Putting on his clothing, he became conscious of a ravening hunger. He felt weak with famine as he pushed to open the massive door.
He was the first in the narrow gray hall. He waited wondering what thirty years had done to Utopia. And what it had done to them. Would they be changed, aged?
There was no mirror in the hall. But Cartwright thought that he had an old man’s stiffness. He looked at his hands—they seemed thinner, yellowed. He fingered the beard on his face.
At last little Worth came out. His black beard grew down to a point, making him appear more satanic than ever. But, to Cartwright’s relief, he was not visibly older.
“Sleep well?” Worth grinned sardonically. “Half a dozen more such naps, and the Earth will be plunging into the nebula—unless our Uptopian friends have found something to do about it.”
He burst suddenly into laughter, at sight of the thick red expanse of Captain Drumm’s beard. Pat Wayland, her blond beauty unchanged, came out of her own vault, and stared at the men.
“Evidently,” she observed, “the hair-roots remain disproportionately active. I hope your razors haven’t rusted.”
The elevator whisked them to the living compartments above. It was the lunar mid-morning. The harsh desert floor of Arzachel remained as ever changeless. Northward, above the dark peaks of the barrier ring, hung the Earth.
“Thirty years!” Pat was whispering, faintly, as they all stared at the mother planet. It was huge and bright against the starry void, mottled with cloud, mysterious. “I can’t wait to see what has happened.
“Perhaps the seed we planted will already have grown beyond our knowledge. Perhaps the Utopians have already found a way of escape.”
“More likely,” Worth said, “they have forgotten about the nebula, and gone to building empires.”
