Collected Short Fiction, page 489
Earth, seemingly close beside them, was a huge ball of misty wonder. The twilight zone made a long crimson slash, between the day-side and the night. Dull greens and browns and blues were all patched with the dazzling white of storms.
All the hope and longing of twenty years burst over me, when I saw the Earth, in a sudden flood of choking emotion. My wet eyes blurred that splendid view. I sat grappling in vain with the monstrous and shocking mystery of spreading forests, jungle-buried cities, and unintelligible radio clicks and squeals, until Lord’s high nasal voice recalled me to the lifecraft.
“Civilians, huh?” Sitting pygmylike between his two husky guards, Lord turned condescendingly to Cameron. “But Mr. Hudd insisted you must come, so let’s have your expert opinion.”
He stressed the adjective too strongly, but Cameron answered quietly: “I rather expect we’ll find the ultimate result of what the old economists used to call the division of labor.”
At the time, I failed to see the real significance of the interchange that followed, though it proved the key to much that happened later. I was merely annoyed at Cameron, and somewhat alarmed, because his talk plainly angered Lord.
“Explain!” Lord rapped, imperiously.
“If you like—though I’m afraid the historical principle runs counter to Squaredeal ideology.” Cameron was a little too grave. “Because I don’t believe the Directorate was created by Tyler’s unique statesmanship, or even by the emergent dictatorship of the little man. It was. I think, just one of the end-products of the division of labor.”
Lord blinked his heavy-lidded eyes, apparently uncertain whether this was double-talk or high treason. I kicked Cameron’s foot, in a vain effort to suggest the wisdom of discretion.
“Explain yourself,” Lord commanded sharply.
“Nothing to it,” Cameron said easily. “The division of labor was hailed as something, wonderful—before its unpleasant final consequences came to light. One man made arrows, another hunted, and they both had more to eat. That was very fine, back in the Stone Age.”
Cameron stretched out his legs, cheerful and relaxed.
“But it went a little farther, in the modern world. Division of labor divided mankind, and set special interests against the common good. It made specialists in mining coal, in scientific research, and even in political power, Mr. Lord. The specialists formed pressure groups, and fought to advance their own class interests—with weapons incidentally created by that same division of labor.
“When specialists tight, the winners are apt to lie the experts in war,” he continued brightly. “Thus government becomes a function of military technology, which of course derives from the basic industrial technology. The prevailing form of government, there fore—dictatorship or democracy—depends on the current status of the division of labor. That interesting relation of technology and politics was pointed out by the old philosopher, Silas McKinley.”
lord’s sleepy eyes glitered suspiciously.
“He’s forbidden! Where do you keep such pernicious literature?”
Cameron grinned, quizzically. “Once I had permission to do some research in Mr. Hudd’s very excellent library.”
“And you’re apt to suffer for the dangerous ideas you acquired there,” Lord commented acidly. “Now what’s this nonsense, about technology and government?”
“Political power reflects military power,” Cameron cheerfully explained. “When war is fought with cheap, simple weapons, easy for the amateur to use, then the military importance of the ordinary, citizen is reflected in his political freedom. Democracy in America was established by the flintlock, and maintained by Colt’s revolver.
“But democracy is always threatened by any increase in specialization, especially military specialization. When weapons are expensive and complicated, requiring a class of military experts, then the ordinary man can’t defend his rights—and he therefore has no rights.
“Democracy was murdered, on a desert in New Mexico, in 1945. Already, for a hundred years, the increasing division of labor had been forcing it into a slow decline. The same specialization that created the bomber and the tank had already reduced the free citizen to a pathetic little man, at the mercy of the corporation manager, the union leader, and the bureaucrat.
“The atom bomb was the finish, to freedom. Because it was the final limit, to specialization. The most complicated and costly weapon, ever, its production and use required a fantastically complex division of labor. Politics had to follow the trend of technology, and totalitarian control destroyed the individual.”
Sitting half upright in the long reclining chair, Cameron gave the little Squaredealer his wry, sardonic grin.
“Tyler thought he had conquered the world,” he concluded. “But really it was just division of labor that created the new technology of atomic war, and so destroyed the whole world’s freedom. It was just the trend of specialization that made the Directorate and flung Tyler to the top of it—no more responsible than a pebble flung up by a wave.” Pressed deep in the cushions. Lord sat peering back with confused suspicion in Iris yellow, heavy-lidded eyes. Fortunately for Cameron, he was now concerned with dangers more immediate than ideological heresy. His nasal voice rasped angrily:
“Well? What happened—according to your theory?”
Cameron answered his sharpness with an easy grin.
“Quite likely, the division of labor broke down at last.”
“Watch your manner, mister.” Lord didn’t like his cool grin. “What could break it down?”
“Rebellion, perhaps.” Cameron was properly respectful. “Fort America had a permanent garrison of nine thousand specialists in death. They were prepared to devastate any part of the Earth—or all of it. Perhaps they were just too thorough.” Uneasily, the little Squaredealer licked his thin lips.
“Then why should, the fort itself be silent?”
“Disease, perhaps—some biological agent out of control.” In Cameron’s blue eyes, I caught a faint glint of malicious amusement. “Or famine—maybe they left the Earth unable to feed them. Or cataclysm.” Lord fought the acceleration pressure, to sit bolt upright. His bleak narrow face was filmed with sweat of effort—and of fear.
“Cataclysm?” He peered into Cameron’s lean, sardonic face. Explain!”
“Twenty years at space has shown us the insensate hostility of the universe.” Now low and solemn, Cameron’s voice deepened my own unease. “Man lives at the mercy of blind chance, surviving only through a peculiar combination of improbable factors. Just suppose we find the Earth stripped of oxygen.” He grinned at Lord, satanically. “As efficiently as the planets of the Dark Star were robbed of uranium?”
Before we reached the Moon, Lord had turned a sallow green with acceleration sickness.
Fort America was hidden beneath a crater in the tawny, riddled desolation of the Mare Nubiurn. We wheeled above the mountain ring, just above the highest crags, searing the dozen miles of barren floor.
“It hasn’t changed!” I whispered to Cameron. “The valves, the roads, the docks—just as they used to be!” I tried to point, through the small quartz port. “There’s where the Great Director stood.”
“But it has changed.” Cameron glanced at me, and the strong glare of the moonscape, striking his haggard face from below, made his habitual sardonic expression seem oddly diabolic. “It’s abandoned, now.”
And I remembered. Great trucks once had rolled over that white web of roads. Colored signal lights had blinked and flickered from the domes over the pits. Tall, tapered ships had stood like rows of silver pillars on the dark, wide fields.
But now the crater was an empty bowl. The lowering sun made all the westward rim a jagged lip of shattered ebony. Sharp fingers of the dark crept across the empty hollow, to clutch the empty domes and seize the empty roads.
Nothing moved, anywhere. No metal flashed, beneath the sun. No signals flickered, now, out of the cold, increasing shadow. Men had been here once, armed with atomic science, bold with conquest. Now they were gone.
Yet the crater wasn’t empty, quite—for it held a riddle. What had silenced man’s greatest citadel? Cold dread sank into me, out of that black, expanding shadow. The brooding mystery of it seemed to numb my senses, like some deadly biotoxin.
We landed at last, well out in the retreating sunlight, on a concrete road near one of the valves. We clambered into space armor—Cameron and I, and Captain Doyle. Laden with assorted equipment, we scrambled one by one through the small air lock, and leaped clumsily down to the Moon.
Victor Lord remained aboard. He was ill. I believe his apprehensive thoughts had fastened too strongly on Cameron’s malicious suggestion of interstellar invasion. I think he expected us to encounter unearthly monsters lurking in the pits and tunnels.
Beside the bright spire of the lifecraft, we set up a portable Geiger-Muller counter, and a neutron detector. The counter started flashing rapidly, and I couldn’t stop an apprehensive gesture toward the valves.
“Dangerous intensity!” My voice rang loud and strange in the spherical helmet. “The residue, maybe, from atomic weapons—though I don’t see any craters.”
But Cameron was shaking his head, which looked queerly magnified inside the thick, laminated bubble of his helmet.
“Just the normal secondary activity, excited by our own ion blast.” His voice came on the microwave phone, dulled and distorted. “I think it’s safe for its to go on.”
Moving clumsily with all our equipment, we left the tiny craft a hundred yards behind, and tried again. There the counter showed only the normal bombardment of the unfiltered solar and cosmic rays.
“Come along!” Doyle’s deep voice roared in my phones. “Have a look—here’s a whole row of wrecks. The mutineers must have caught them sitting. They’re blown all to scrap!” Beside a huge deserted dock of gray pumice-concrete, he had discovered the dismembered remnants of half a dozen vessels. We approached cautiously, and paused again to test for dangerous radiations. There were none—for these skeletons of spacecraft had been stripped by something else than mutiny.
This had been a repair dock. Doyle pointed sheepishly at abandoned cranes, and empty jet pits. The apparent wrecks had merely been cannibalized—their plates and valves and jets ripped out, to repair other vessels.
“No mutiny!” Doyle made a disgusted sound. “Let’s look below.” For the actual fort was far beneath the crater. A vast web of tunnels sheltered hangars, shops, barracks, and magazines. The launching tubes, trained forever on the Earth, were hidden in deep pits. Somewhere in that sublunar labyrinth, we could hope to find our riddle answered.
The nearest entrance shaft was topped with a low dome of concrete, piled with pumice boulders by way of camouflage. The great armored valve was closed, unrusted, quite intact. Doyle spun a bright little wheel, outside.
“I was stationed here, before they picked me for the Task Force,” he said. “A robot-missiles officer—used to know my way around.”
The massive steel wedge failed to move, and Doyle turned to another, larger wheel. It resisted, and I came to help. Stubbornly, it yielded. The great wedge sank slowly.
“Power’s off.” Doyle was breathless with effort. “Manual emergency control!”
We shuffled at last into the huge dark chamber of the lock. Our battery lights cast flickering, fantastic shadows. Doyle studied a row of dials and gauges on the curved steel wall, and punched a series of buttons.
Suddenly I felt a faint vibration. The huge wedge lifted behind us. shutting out the dark and harsh-lit moonscape. The chamber was a steel-jawed trap. I felt a tense unease, and the sudden boom of Doyle’s voice startled me.
“The main power lines are dead. That’s an emergency generator, with a chemical engine—there’s one at each valve, to work the controls and energize the instruments.” He scanned the dials again. “Shows air, inside—twelve pounds. We’ll have to test it.”
He turned another wheel, and air screamed into the chamber. It brought back sound—the clink of our equipment, the clatter of our armored boots, the throb of the emergency engine beneath the metal deck.
We tested it. The counter gave only an occasional click and flash. I broke the glass nipple off a regulation testing tube, and Cameron leaned clumsily beside me to study the reaction of the colored paper indicators.
“O.K.,” he said. “Safe.”
We took off our armor. The air was fresh, but icy cold—we exhaled white mist. Hopefully, Doyle tried the telephone in the box beneath the dials. Dead silence answered him. Shivering perhaps to a sense of something colder than the freezing air—he hung it up and opened the inner valve. The emergency power system didn’t work the elevators. We climbed down a black ladder well, into the silent citadel.
III.
Fort America was dead.
The thrumming of the little emergency engine was muffled, as we climbed on down, and finally lost. We descended into appalling silence. So long as we moved, there was a comfortable rustle and clatter. When we stopped to listen, there was nothing at all.
Everywhere, the power lines were dead; the lights were out. Midnight shadows retreated grudgingly from our little battery lamps, and lay in wait at every turning. Beyond was total dark.
The heating system must have been shut off long ago, for the cold was numbing. Sweat had dampened my wool lined suit, in the heated armor, and now it was icy on my back. The chill of the rungs sank through my thin gloves; my fingers were stiff and aching, long before we reached a horizontal passage.
Gruesome expectations haunted me. I looked for frozen corpses, twisted with the agony of some biotoxin, or charred with atomic heat. Queerly, however, we found no mark of violence, nor any evidence of human death.
“They’re just—gone!” Even the deep voice of Captain Doyle held a certain huskiness of dread. “Why—I can’t imagine. Nothing wrong, no sign of any trouble.” He caught his breath, squared his shoulders. “We’ve got to find the answer. Let’s try the commandant’s office.”
He led the way along a black and soundless lateral tunnel, and opened an unlocked door. The series of rooms beyond was deserted—and quite in order. Empty chairs were neatly set behind the empty desks. Dead telephones were neatly racked in their cradles. Pens in their stands were neatly centered on green blotters, with the ink dried up.
Doyle rubbed a dark mark in thin gray dust.
“They’ve been gone a long time.” His voice seemed oddly hushed; yet it was too loud in those silent rooms.
I began to open the drawers of desks and filing cabinets. They were all empty. The bulletin boards had been stripped, the floors swept dean. Even the wastebaskets had been neatly emptied.
A large portrait of Tyler, in the commandant’s office, had slipped askew on the walls. Doyle moved without thinking to set it properly straight. Cameron followed the movement, I noticed, with a curious sardonic expression, but he said nothing.
“The evacuation must have been quite orderly.” Doyle shook his head, his eyes dark with bewilderment. “No sign of haste or panic. Now what could have caused them to go?”
We moved on, in search of the answer.
It wasn’t famine. We walked through an empty mess hall. The long tables were all in line, filmed with fine gray dust. Clean trays and silver lay in geometric order, where the last KP’s had left them, for the last inspection. The warehouse beyond was stacked high with crates and bags and cans of food, frozen now, and still preserved.
Nor was it any biological killer, gone wild. We found hundreds of beds in a hospital tunnel, empty, their dusty sheets still neat and smooth. The pharmacy shelves were loaded with drugs, untouched.
“Power failure?” Cameron suggested. “If the pile had gone dead—”
Rory Doyle found the way, down a black and bottomless ladder well, to the main power pile. The massive concrete safety wall shut us away from all the actual mechanism, but Cameron scanned the long banks of recording instruments and remote controls. He flashed his light on a distant conveyer belt, motionless, loaded with bright aluminum cans.
“Nothing wrong,” he said. “The last operator discharged the pile—dumped the canned uranium out of the lattice, into the processing canyon underneath. There’s plenty of metal left, but it wasn’t charged again.”
On another black and silent passage, a little above, we came to the steel-walled dungeons of the guardhouse and the military prison. The armored doors stood open. The records had been removed. The prisoners were gone.
“Revolt, perhaps,” Doyle suggested. “Perhaps the prisoners escaped, and touched off a mutiny in the garrison—no, that couldn’t have been, or we’d see the marks of fighting. But perhaps it was revolution, on Earth. That explains everything—if the missiles are used up.”
He led us up again, along an endless silent tunnel, and down another dark ladder well. We spun stiff wheels to open, three heavy safety doors, and came at last into one of the magazines.
Doyle gasped, in blank astonishment.
For on row, as far as our lights could reach, long racks were loaded with the robot missiles. They were sleek cylinders of bright metal, gracefully tapered, every part of them beautiful with precise machining. Spaceships, really, they were six feet thick and sixty long, each powered with its own light pile, driven with its own ion-jets, controlled with the fine and costly mechanism of its own robot pilot, each burdened with its own terrible cargo of plutonium or crystalline biotoxins.
Stunned, almost, Doyle walked to the nearest. He examined it expertly, lifting inspection plates, flashing his light on serial numbers. He came slowly back to us, baffled.
“All abandoned!” he muttered. “I can’t believe it. Why, those babies cost three million apiece, even in mass production. They are loaded with the finest precision machines that men ever made. They take off at twenty gravities. Just one of them, in forty minutes, could obliterate any city on Earth. And never a one was fired!”
