Collected Short Fiction, page 491
A diamondback, lazily sunning on the black granite steps of Squaredeal Hall, greeted us with a warning whir. Lord whipped out his automatic, with a nervous expertness, and shot it through the head.
The crash of his shot shattered that hot silence. It thundered back, appallingly magnified by those sheer granite cliffs. The dwarfish Squaredealer and his guards crowded apprehensively together, and we all listened uneasily. But the echoes faded unanswered; the dead city was not aroused.
Doyle led us up the steps, past the dead diamondback. Voiceless with awe, we went on between the immense square columns beyond. Here was the shrine of the Directorate. Tyler had surrounded his birthplace with a colonnade of purple granite, more majestic than Karnak.
Memory stirred again. After that review and jamboree, as a personal gift from Tyler, each scout had received a picture post card of the shrine. The little weatherbeaten farmhouse was shown beneath the towering columns, surrounded with an old-fashioned garden of zinnias and gladiola. The stone springhouse had been restored. The old apple tree, which the Director used to climb, was pink with blooms in the picture.
But the old tree was dead, now, and the house had fallen in. The mighty purple columns rose out of a green sea of weeds and sprouts and brambles. Wild morning-glories had buried the old springhouse. Something moved in the brush, and we heard the vicious warning hum of another diamondback.
Beside the useless elevator, we climbed a narrow stair. Tyler’s own door, between two empty guard boxes, was left unlocked. We walked into the abandoned splendor of the Director’s own apartment—and found no trace of violence.
On the high wall behind his desk and the office chair that had served him for a throne, a faded tapestry still hung, intact and undefiled, embroidered in gold with the three linked squares of the Machine.
The massive door of a huge fireproof safe swung carelessly open. Its compartments were stuffed with documents marked restricted or confidential or secret. Letters, reports, beribboned executive decrees—the state papers of the Directorate, left heedlessly behind.
Lord, with a shrill excited shout, discovered a pile of heavy cloth bags that had been buried under the dusty documents in the bottom of the safe. Feverishly, he ripped one of them open, spilling out bright golden double-eagles.
“Millions—left behind!” Wideawake, for once, his eyes glittered yellow as the metal; and his thin nasal voice was hushed with awe. “It must have been a terrible panic, to make them leave the gold.”
But Cameron pointed to several empty compartments, and a blackened metal wastebasket, on the end of the desk, which was nearly full of gray ashes.
“No, it wasn’t panic, Mr. Lord,” he said respectfully. “Tyler had plenty of time to burn the papers he wanted to destroy. Then, I should imagine, he just walked out.”
The little Squaredealer peered up at him, bewildered and visibly afraid.
“But why? Tyler wouldn’t give up the whole Directorate.”
The faded luxury of the great rooms gave us no answer, The paneled walls showed no marks of bullets. The dusty rugs showed no stains that could be blood. The Director’s great bed, under its coverlet of dust, still was neatly made.
Doyle came back to Cameron, muttering the question that haunted us:
“Where could they have gone?”
Cameron rubbed his lean jaw with a brown forefinger.
“Let’s try the country,” he said thoughtfully.
Doyle stared at him, blankly.
“Why?”
“People used to live in cities for certain reasons,” Cameron said. “Just as they used to work for great corporations, or enlisted in the Atomic Service, or joined the Squaredeal Machine. Perhaps those reasons changed.”
Lord blinked at him, sleepily.
“You had better watch your tongue,” he warned sharply. “I believe you read too much, in Mr. Hudd’s library. I’ll be compelled to report your dangerous views, to the SBI.”
But we went back to the lifecraft once more. Doyle landed it again, outside Americania, where a disused highway made a narrow slash through woods and thickets. We climbed down between the stabilizers once more, and Cameron pointed suddenly.
Planted in the middle of the old road, behind us, was a signpost. It carried a yellow-lettered warning:
DANGER!
Metropolitan Area
V.
Gathered in a puzzled little circle, we examined that sign.
“Well?” Doyle looked at Cameron.
“A remarkably strong aluminum alloy.” Thoughtfully, Cameron rubbed his lean brown chin. “An excellent vitreous enamel. Evidently it was made and set up after the city was abandoned—to keep people out.”
He started whistling gayly through his teeth, but Lord scowled him into silence. His blue eyes had lit with a speculative eagerness.
“And so?” prompted Doyle.
“Interesting implications.” Cameron counted on lean brown fingers. “One, there are people. Two, they possess a high grade metal-and-enamel technology. Three, they have sufficient social organization to post public signs. Four, they don’t like cities.”
His eager eyes peered beyond the silver pencil of the lifecraft, down the dark leafy tunnel of the old road. He-softly whistled another lilting bar, and then looked quickly back at Doyle.
“Let’s take off again, captain,” he suggested. “And follow the road, flying low. I think we’ll find the sign-posters.”
“We’ll do that—” Doyle began, but the little Squaredealer interrupted him sharply:
“I’m in charge, and I don’t agree.” Lord’s nasal tone was both insolent and apprehensive. “The jets are too bright and noisy. We’d be seen—maybe killed from ambush. Don’t forget that melted money. No, we’ll leave the craft hidden here, and go on foot.”
Doyle’s red head nodded soberly.
“A wise precaution, probably,” he agreed. “We’ll carry a radiophone, so we can call back.”
And presently we left the bright craft hidden among the trees, and started cautiously down the green tunnel. Interlacing branches usually hid the sky. Vines and ferns made thick walls on either side. Jays scolded at us, and unseen things rustled in the brush. Once we came upon a red deer, which stood quite motionless in a little glade ahead with antlers high until Lord clutched for his automatic, and then bounded noisily away.
We were all, I think, keyed up and uneasy. The gloom of the forest darkened my own thoughts. Imagination turned small rustlings into startling threats. I recalled that the two other landing parties were long overdue, and I began to wish I had a gun.
Cameron walked ahead. His step was light and springy, and his hollowed face had a look of grave expectancy. Once he started whistling again, softly, and Lord stopped him with a snarled, low-voiced command.
We must have gone three miles, before Cameron turned from a curve in the old road, and plunged out of sight in the ferns and tangled vines. We followed him. A few yards brought us into daylight, on the rocky run of a low sandstone cliff.
“The sign-posters,” he said softly.
He pointed. Before us spread a broad, shallow valley of woods and open meadow. The sun glittered from the curve of a stream. But I couldn’t see any people.
“There’s the house, against the other cliff. Reddish walls, and green roof.” I found it, then—a low graceful building that had seemed part of the landscape. “I heard a man singing.”
I listened. It was midafternoon, now, and a soft breeze had begun to disturb the midday hush. Leaves stirred lazily. I heard the sleepy hum of insects, the cool murmur of water running, a mockingbird singing—all wonderful sounds, halffamiliar, that brought my boyhood back.
“Listen,” Cameron urged.
There was a clear yodeling call answered by a woman’s voice.
“Keep down!” Lord’s nasal voice was cautiously hushed. “We’ll slip across, under cover. Study their weapons, and keep out of sight. If we’re discovered—shoot first.”
“Are you sure,” Cameron protested, “that shooting’s necessary?”
Lord’s sleepy-lidded eyes narrowed unpleasantly.
“I’m running this show,” he said, sharply. “I’ll tolerate no meddling from you.”
A fern-grown ravine let us down from the low cliff. We waded the clear stream, and climbed again through the woods beyond. Nearer the dwelling, the land had been cleared. We crossed an orchard of young apple trees, toward the voices of the man and the woman.
Twenty years at space had not made us expert stalkers. Dry leaves rattled, twigs cracked, and pebbles glattered. Lord turned,” more than once, with a hissed injunction of silence. But at last we came on hands and knees to the grassy rim of another ravine, and peered down upon the unsuspecting two.
They were running a machine. The young woman sat in a little cab of bright aluminum, moving levers. A toothed bucket, on a long metal arm, scooped earth and stones from the side of the gorge, and filled a hopper.
The man held a thick, flexible hose, pouring a heavy yellow semiliquid from the machine into a metal form across the little gorge. Presently he stopped to lift and adjust the plates of the form, and then poured again. Between the plates, I saw, a massive yellow dam was growing.
The machine ran quietly. There was only a subdued humming, and the occasional clatter of the bucket when sometimes it scraped a stone. It ate the dark soil, and poured out yellow concrete.
I peered at Cameron, astonished.
He made a pleased little nod.
“A very neat step forward,” he whispered, “in basic technology.”
“Silence!” Lord hissed.
Below us, the man called to the girl, and she moved the machine on its wide caterpillar tracks. I watched them, feeling an increasing glow of pleasure. For twenty years I had thought and dreamed of life on Earth, and here was a glimpse of it—as any lucky man might hope to live it.
The man was a lithe young giant, in shorts, bareheaded and brown. The sweat of his toil, in the hot afternoon, made a film that rippled and gleamed with every movement of his splendid body. Sometimes he paused to get his breath, smiling and calling down to the girl.
“Mushrooms for supper, what?”
“Let’s plant a lilac on the south terrace, shall we?”
“I’ve thought of a name, darling—let’s call him Dane Barstow, Dane Barstow Hawkins!”
That name gave me a puzzled shock. Dane Barstow was my father’s name—but it seemed quite improbable that the expected young Hawkins should be named for an unsuccessful traitor, long dead in the labor camps of the SBI.
But I soon forgot my wonder, watching them. Their absorbed happiness set me to dreaming, wistfully. The girl was sun-browned as the man, slender, yet, and lovely. She ran the machine with a graceful skill, until a time when the man lost his balance as he hauled at the hose, and teetered on the edge of the dam.
She stopped the machine, then, with a sharp cry of alarm. After a moment of frantic clawing at the air, however, the man regained his balance. Seeing him safe, she laughed at him—a rich laugh, deep and musical and glad.
“Darling, if you had seen yourself! But please be careful—you’re much too valuable to make into the dam! If you’re so weak, we’d better stop—I’m hungry, anyhow.”
“Laugh at me, huh?”
Grinning fondly through a mock ferocity, the man hung up the hose and dropped down from the dam. The girl scrambled out of the cab and ran from him, still laughing.
“Darling,” she sobbed, “you looked so silly—”
“Stop ’em!” whispered Lord.
Instantly, the automatics crashed. The girl crumpled down, beside the bright machine. The man ran another step, uttered a loud strange cry, and fell sprawling on top of her.
Doyle made a hoarse outcry of incredulous protest. “What have you done?”
The dwarfish Squaredealer fired twice more, expertly. His bullets thudded into the quivering bodies. The bitter reek of smoke stung my nostrils. Nodding to his bleakfaced gunmen, he rose calmly to his feet.
“Well, they didn’t get away.” His nasal voice had a shocking complacency. “I thought they might have seen us. Now we’ll have to work fast, to learn what we can and get away to space. Doyle, call the craft—have it brought here at once. Cameron, inspect that machine—Mr. Hudd will want a full report on it. We’ll look for their weapons.”
Doyle had the self-discipline of a good officer. He was white-lipped, stunned, but any protest must wait until the proper channels became available. The Squaredealer was his superior. He reached obediently for the little radiophone, which I had been carrying.
Cameron’s discipline was not so fine.
“You fool!” His blue eyes glared at Lord, and his low voice crackled with cold anger. “You murdering fool! You had no excuse for that.”
His brown fists clenched. For one terrified moment, I thought he was going to strike the Squaredealer. Lord must have thought so, too, for he nodded at his two black gunmen and stepped quickly back.
“Please, Jim.” I caught Cameron’s quivering arm. “You’ll only get us shot.”
“Quite right.” Lord retreated again, watchfully. “Any further trouble, and I’ll shoot you with pleasure. In any case, I shall report your insubordination. Now—if you want to go on living—inspect that machine.”
Angrily, Cameron shrugged off my hand. He stood facing Lord, defiant. Slowly—with an eager, dreadful little twist of his thin, pale lips—Lord raised his gun. Cameron gulped, and shrugged hopelessly, and turned silently toward the. bright machine.
Lord and his men searched the bodies. They found no weapons. The gunmen came back with a ring and a watch and a jeweled comb they had taken from the girl.
Cameron attacked the machine, with an intense, trembling savagery of movement—as if it had been a substitute for Lord. After a few moments, however, a sudden consuming interest seemed to swallow his wrath. His lean face was intent, absorbed. His fingers were steady again, very quick and skilful.
Soon he was whistling with his teeth, so softly that Lord seemed not to hear.
I tried to help him, very ineffectually. The machine baffled me utterly. Obviously, it had turned ordinary stone and soil into a very strong quick-setting concrete, which was remarkable enough. There was, however, something more astonishing.
The machine had evidently used a great deal of electrical power. Electric motors drove the tracks and moved the bucket; heavy bus bars ran into the cylinder where soil became cement. Strangely, however, I couldn’t find the source of that power. There was no lead-in cable, no space for batteries, no possible receiver for broadcast power, certainly nothing bulky enough to be any kind of fission engine. Yet there was current—as a painful shock convinced me. So far as I could determine, it just appeared spontaneously in the circuits.
Bewildered—and shaken by that unexpected shock—at last I merely stood back to watch. Working with such an eager-faced absorption that I didn’t dare to question him, Cameron was studying a bit of the wiring which, for no reason that I could see, was formed into a double coil of odd, unhelical turns. Softly, he whistled a gay little air.
Lord had posted his two gunmen on either side of the ravine, with orders to watch for anyone approaching and to shoot at sight. He himself stood warily on the bank of the little gorge, watching Cameron. When Doyle had called the lifecraft, Lord sent him and me to search the house.
“Look for weapons,” he rapped. “Find out all you can, for our report to Hudd. And make it quick.” His nasal voice was shrill with tension. “When the craft comes, we’re getting out of here.”
Doyle tramped in bitter silence until we were out of earshot, and then let flow a savage stream of lowvoiced military profanity.
“That unprintable fool!” he finished. “Those poor farmers could have told us all we want to know, in five minutes—and that bloodthirsty little fool had to butcher them!”
He kicked angrily at a pebble, and then turned suddenly to me with a sympathetic look.
“I’m sorry about your friend Cameron,” he said regretfully. “Lord doesn’t like him, and you know the sort of report he’ll make. I’m afraid Cameron’s done for. He was just too independent.”
VI.
Rory Doyle and I came up to the dwelling. The long, low building seemed all of one piece, a solid part of the hillside. It was apparently made of the same soil-concrete as the dam—differently colored in different rooms, the walls smooth and warm to the touch.
The furnishings gave an effect of sturdy and comfortable simplicity. The whole house seemed to tell of a warm, free, spacious sort of life—and a cold shadow fell across it, when I thought of its builders and owners lying slaughtered in the owners, gully.
Hastily, we explored the inviting living room, the workshop where a great, handsome table stood half-finished in a clutter of plastic dust and shavings, the big kitchen fitted with shining gadgets to manufacture plastic dishes and synthetic staples on the spot, the cold locker stored with a rich abundance of frozen foods.
We found no identifiable weapons. Nor any good reason, that I could see, why men had fled the cities and abandoned the old way of life. Instead, it was only another question that we found.
“They must have been quite self-sufficient.” Peering about the silent rooms, Doyle tried to reconstruct the lives of the murdered couple. “I think they built and furnished this house, with their own hands—everything has the look of good, careful workmanship; they were adding a new room, that isn’t roofed yet. Evidently they grew or manufactured their own food. That little machine in the shed is grinding a hopperful of leaves and sticks into something like cloth, very beautiful and strong. All these gadgets must use a lot of power.”
His puzzled eyes came back to my face.
“But where does the power come from?”
I had to shake my head.
