Collected Short Fiction, page 447
Apprehension seized him. In spite of her scheming ambition—or even because of it—he loved Selene. He knew that the Preacher’s followers hated her savagely, as the very symbol of all that was denied them. She might be abducted, perhaps even murdered.
He hurried back to the telephore in the bomb-shattered Moon Room, and called her suite on the floor below. The dark Eurasian major-domo said she had not come in. But the red-haired operator told him:
“Your genius, there’s a recorded message from Miss Captain du Mars. It was left two hours ago, to be delivered whenever you called for her. Will you receive it?”
Kellon nodded, suddenly voiceless.
Selene’s face came into the crystal block. The fire diamonds burned in her platinum hair. Their changing blaze went blue as her clear eyes, and redder than her lips. Her voice came, cool and hard and perfect.
“Harvey, I am leaving you tonight. We shall not meet again. This is to thank you for all you have given me, and to tell you why I have gone. It isn’t because you are getting old, or because I think you are slipping—believe me, I wouldn’t go because of that. But I’m in love with Admiral Hurd. By the time you hear this, we shall be in space together. I’m sorry, Harvey.”
Kellon sat for a long time at the telephore desk. He felt numb and cold. In a hoarse voice, he told the operator to run it over. Selene smiled again, and wiped away the same solitary jewel-bright tear, and spoke the same gem-hard words.
She lied. Kellon stared blankly at the mural the bomb had shattered—his own life was darkened and broken, like the luxion panel. He clenched his fists in a sick and useless fury. Of course she lied!
Maybe she did love Hurd. The traitor had looks and youth. That would be no wonder. But it wasn’t love that made her go with him. He knew Selene too well to accept that. She had gone with Hurd because she expected him to be the next master of the world.
“Run it again,” he told the operator. “Without the sound.” And he greeted the silent image with a tired, bitter grin. “Good hunting, Selene,” he whispered. “After all, we’ve had our day. Good hunting—but you and your dashing admiral had better watch the Preacher!”
The lone tear fell, and she vanished once more.
And presently Kellon told the operator to try the Outstation again. Selene wasn’t everything. Tonight the world was at stake. His life, and hers. The Union, and Sunport. The game was being played, far out in the silent cold of space. Between an old man’s loyalty and a young one’s ruthless ambition. Between the old world he had conquered and one unknown. He could only wait for the issue. There was nothing else to do.
But the Outstation didn’t answer.
“Nothing, your genius,” the operator said. “There has been nothing from space since General Nordhorn was cut off.”
Wearily restless, Kellon rose from the desk. The dead men had been taken away. But he thought that the faint, sickening smell of death still hung in the room. He felt cold, and his big body was hunched with tension. And he felt desperately alone.
Then he thought of Melkart.
The old philosopher-historian was one man who ought to know what was happening to Sunport. Often in the past his somewhat Machiavellian advice had been useful. Almost before Kellon knew it, his restless feet were taking him through the Saturn Room.
That immense hall was his library. Books walled it, four galleries high. Vaults beneath held microfilm copies of all known literature. Kellon left his guards outside the historian’s office.
Charles Melkart occupied a tiny alcove. The white-glowing walls were bare, but one huge window gave a spectacular view of the shining, night-cloaked city. A huge, ancient, wooden desk took up nearly half the room. It was piled untidily with books and stacks of manuscript.
As if unaware of any trouble outside, Melkart sat behind the desk, writing swiftly with an old-fashioned pen. He was a small, stooped man. He wore a wrinkled lounging robe. A red wool skullcap covered his baldness. He blinked as Kellon entered and took off his spectacles. In his wizened, yellow face, his eyes looked strikingly young and alive.
“Sit down, Wolfe.” Melkart never fawned. “I was expecting you.”
Wolfe! That had been Kellon’s party name. He remembered secret meetings, down in the drainage levels, where the cold walls sweated and the air was alive with the throb of pumps. That was in the old, dangerous days, before they gave up the fight for the forbidden ideals of democracy.
Suddenly Kellon wondered if Melkart and Ruth had really been in love. He dismissed the thought. That hadn’t mattered, for many years. The New Commonwealth was a forgotten dream. Melkart had left his idealism, with his health, in the carnotite mines of Mars. And the parole had settled whatever debt there might have been.
But Melkart. had given him a great deal—besides Roy’s mother. The lean, brilliant New Zealander had taught him the science of politics. His degrees had been forged at the party headquarters, to make him a more useful agent. When the Corporation shattered the underground organization, Kellon had managed to escape with most of the party funds.
Kellon had attempted to repay him with some high position in the Union. But the sardonic exradical declined to accept anything more than the needs of his simple life, and use of the vast library in the Saturn Room.
“You have made the solar system into a laboratory for the test of my politicotechnic theories,” he said, with his thin, yellow grin. “Now all I want is time to finish writing ‘Destiny.’ ”
Now, when he came into the scholar’s narrow room, Kellon was too perturbed to take the single chair beside the cluttered desk. He walked to the great window. The rioters made a gray, uneasy sea below, flecked with the scarlet of fires. A distant explosion jarred the air; a machine gun rattled; the drone of voices lifted angrily.
Melkart picked up his pen to make some hurried note.
Pale and tense, nails biting into his palms, Kellon turned back from the window. In a hoarse, desperate voice he asked the lean old man at the desk:
“Charles—do you know what is happening to Sunport?”
The red fez nodded.
“I’ve known for thirty years,” Melkart grinned, with owlish assurance. “Old Giovanni Vico had a glimmer of it, with his ‘law of cycles,’ back in the seventeen hundreds. Spengler and Toynbee glimpsed it. Sprague, later, saw farther. But it remained for me to reduce the laws of the rise and fall of human cultures to the exact science that I call destiny.” His yellow, clawlike hand gestured quickly at a huge manuscript. “Here, in my last volume—”
“Listen!” Kellon’s fist banged the desk in interruption. “I’ve no time for books. The gray class is rioting. The Fleet has mutinied. The Outstation is under attack—if it falls, we’ll be bombarded from space. Already assassins have attacked me once tonight.”
He made a harsh, mirthless laugh.
“Books! Can you sit here writing a book, when the Preacher’s fanatics are burning libraries in the park? They are murdering every engineer they can lay hands on. Who will be left to read your precious book?”
Melkart’s fleshless, yellow visage grinned.
“Nobody, I’m afraid,” he said slowly. “It is tragic that cultures must reach the point of breakdown before they can breed men able to understand them. But lack of understanding does not change the truth. Every fact you mention is inevitable. Because now Sunport is dead—a petrifact.”
“Petrifact—you’re insane!” Kellon slammed the desk again. “This is no time for your pessimistic theories. I want to know something to do.” His voice sank, pleading. “You have helped me before. There must be—something.”
Melkart closed a big book, and Kellon saw that the yellow fingers trembled.
“You and I are finished, Wolfe.” His voice was slow and regretful. “Because the soul of Sunport is dead. You see, a city or a nation or a culture is something more than the sum of the individuals that make it up. Sunport was born, back in 1978, when the first rocket blasted off Toltec Mesa. It was created to conquer space. It did, and that supreme victory made it the greatest megalopolis the world has seen.”
“That’s history,” Kellon muttered impatiently. “What’s the matter today?”
“Space is conquered,” Melkart told him, “and that great idea is dead. Because life doesn’t stand still. Disused functions are lost. After the victory was won, Sunport failed to discover a new purpose to keep her alive. Therefore, she died. It makes no difference that ninety million new barbarians live on in these dead towers.”
Kellon had moved to speak, but Melkart added sardonically:
“That’s as true of you, Wolfe, as it is of the city. You aren’t a tenth the man you were thirty years ago, when you set out to smash what was left of the Corporation. You might have been a match for Eli Catlaw—then.”
Kellon smoothed a frown of displeasure from his face.
“Please, Charles,” he begged. “I know I’m getting old, but the Union is mine. Maybe I got it by arbitrary methods, but it is a trust. I’ve got to save it from the Preacher and his rabble, because the Union has created everything we call civilization.”
“True.” Melkart’s red-capped skull nodded gravely. “The engineers were a creative minority—a hundred years ago. A small group of experts conquered space—and thereby created more wealth than mankind had ever owned before.
“Inevitably, the creative power of the engineers resulted in political dominance. Unfortunately, however, they have ceased to create. Now their spendthrift children merely loot the wealth their fathers earned, and play their silly game of hereditary degrees. And Sunport is as much a petrifact as the pyramids of old Egypt.”
Kellon leaned over the untidy desk.
“Sunport is mine.” His rugged face was pale under the rouge, and his low voice trembled. “I paid for it, with brains and toil and years. I worked and schemed and bribed and robbed and lied and killed. I lived in dread of assassination. I fought like a jungle animal for the city.” He gulped a rasping breath. “I won’t give it up.”
“You said that,” Melkart smiled his wry, yellow smile, “but you help establish my proposition. Because you completely fail to share the magnificent aspiration that created Sunport. Out of these restless millions of new nomads, you merely had superior cunning and audacity and luck.
“But men want to merge themselves in things greater than their individual lives. Destiny is the word I use, for those supernal living forces that exalt and give purpose to the lives of myriads.
“Sunport has fulfilled her destiny, and thereby lost it. But the Preacher has offered these new barbarians another destiny—a fresh, common purpose—that is on their own savage plane. That means that our world has ended, Wolfe.”
Kellon stared at him silently.
“You’re lost, Melkart,” he said at last. “You will still be sitting here, when the Preacher’s fanatics come along to burn your book and cut your throat. I think that is the best criticism of your philosophy”—he swung aggressively toward the door—“but I’m not done.”
Kellon went back to the bomb-torn Moon Room. Perhaps Melkart was right. Perhaps Sunport was doomed. But he wasn’t ready to die. He sat down anxiously at the telephore desk, and told the operator to call the Outstation once more.
“I’ll try, your genius.” The girl was pale and jittery. “But I’ve been trying. They don’t answer.” Her voice was near hysteria. “The whole telephore system is breaking down. They have been smashing equipment and murdering operators.”
“Get the Outstation!”
His voice was harsh with strain. He sat watching the busy girl. Unrest held him tense, but there was nothing he could do. The minutes dragged. There was no reply from space, until a terrible screaming came out of the sky.
The tower shuddered. A monstrous, bellowing vibration drowned all thought. The floor pitched. Concussion jarred Kellon’s bones. The high luxion murals flickered and went dim. The plastic mosaic of a moon city turned black and came crashing down. The air was filled with choking dust.
The bombardment had begun.
No need to get the Outstation now. That first terrible projectile from space was enough to tell him that Hurd and the Preacher were victorious. The Outstation had been taken or destroyed.
Sunport was defenseless. True, there were huge batteries on the militechnic reservation, beside the spaceport. But, hampered by Earth’s gravitation and the atmosphere, they were almost useless against attack from space—even if the plotters had failed to put them out of commission already.
Kellon shivered to something colder than personal fear. For he knew that Melkart was right. This was the end of Sunport. The Union was finished. The engineering class was doomed. Ahead he could see only ruin and chaos, ignorance and savage cruelty, darkness and despair.
“Get me Marquard!” he shouted at the frightened operator.
Now the Goon Department was the last feeble defense of civilization. But Sunport must be blacked out. The people must be warned to leave the city or take refuge on the lower levels. And he wanted to know where that first projectile had struck.
The Goon chief’s head came into the crystal block. But it was sagging wearily back. Marquard’s apprehensive frown was at last relaxed. There was a little dark hole at his temple. The operator made a tiny, stifled scream, and the peaceful face vanished.
“He’s dead!” She listened, and began a tightvoiced explanation. “The office says he shot himself, when he learned—”
The second projectile cut her off.
The Union Tower shuddered again, like a giant live thing struck with some deadly harpoon. Concussion flung Kellon out of the seat. He was deafened, and the salt sweet of blood was on his lips.
He climbed back to the desk. But the operator’s prism was blank. The dial lights were out. Frantically he jiggled the call key, but there was no response. The instrument was dead.
His ears ceased to ring. Suddenly he felt that the huge shattered room was queerly still. He shouted anxiously for his guards, but there was no reply. Peering into the dust, he saw that the officer lay motionless under a pile of rubble, in the broken archway. The others had fled.
He was alone.
Alone! That realization was appalling. Now the breakdown was complete. No longer was he boss of the Union. He was merely one among millions of frightened and bewildered human beings. The only order left was the organization of his enemies.
In his dazed aloneness, he was scarcely aware when the third projectile fell. But the light flickered, in all the luxion walls, and went out. He cried out, in the smothering dark. An ultimate purpose was awakened in him—the blind instinct for survival.
A dim glow from without guided him to the terrace. He saw that half the city’s towers were still pulsating with the changing radiance of their luxion facades. The bombardment soon would black them out, he thought bitterly, forever.
Union Square was almost empty. A few stragglers of the gray mob still fled across the darkened ways. Near the base of the Tower, dust and smoke drifted out of an immense dark crater.
So near! Kellon shivered to a cold realization. The Union Tower was the target. The space bombardment was aimed at him! Because, by now, he was almost the last symbol of the Union’s shattered power.
He ran back through the archway, to the roof elevator. Its luxion walls still glowed, and it shot upward when he pressed the controls. He stumbled out into a chill night wind, on the penthouse roof.
“Here!” he shouted, across the glider terrace. “Quick—haul out the Ruth!”
Then he saw that the terrace was deserted. The hangar yawned black and empty. The long crystal bubble of his unitron glider was gone. The crew must have fled with it when the bombardment began.
Kellon stood bewildered in the cold dark. He sobbed, and his fists were clenched impotently. The world had crumbled under him, and there was nothing he could do. Civilization had dissolved.
The fourth projectile came nearer still. An appalling vibration battered him. He dropped flat. The deck quivered, like part of a monster animal dying. The concussion stunned him.
He came to himself in the elevator. Its luxion walls were black. He fumbled in the dark for the controls. But the mechanism was dead. He flung himself into the dark emergency stair, and started running down the steps.
Presently, he supposed, when those guns in distant space had found the Tower’s range exactly, the projectiles would come in salvos, instead of singly.
The black stair was endless, and his descent became a blurred nightmare. Blast followed blast, until he no longer tried to count them. The concussions were shattering blows against his very sanity.
Down and down, through dust and darkness. Once he tripped over something that felt like a body, and fell until a landing stopped him. His muscles jerked with fatigue. Stiff blood dried on his bruised temple.
Somewhere there were levels where the walls still glowed dimly. It was part of the administrative offices of the Union, for he glimpsed floor after floor covered with identical unending rows of glass cubicles and telephore desks and business machines. The mob must have been here, for he saw scattered bodies of Goons and grays. But the living had fled.
Still his numbed brain could function, in a disjointed way. For he realized that his bright dress pajamas would be a sure warrant of death, when he came down to the levels where the Preacher ruled. He stripped a gray-clad body, pulled the coarse garments over his own, and threw away the white toupee.
Sometimes black panic blotted out all awareness. Fatigue became a drug that destroyed memory and sensation. But he kept on his feet. He kept moving. Because he didn’t want to die.
There was another stratum of darkness. Then somewhere he found an elevator that worked. It dropped him into the damp chill of the drainage levels. The concussions were now muffled with hundreds of feet of earth. But still they struck and struck and struck, numbing clubs of death.
Once he came to himself, and found that rubble had almost buried him. An air tube had caved above him. He dragged himself stiffly out of the debris. No bones were broken. He stumbled on. It was a long time before he realized that the bombardment had ceased.
