Cadmus leaned against the coruscating wall. A thrill of returning
memory flooded him.
Freedom! That was the key word. Zaleel had said that if the Machine
were destroyed the word would be on millions of lips.
Ironic that Consar should have spoken the word unwittingly and set
Cadmus' mental fountain of memory free. Behind closed eyes, in a brief
flash of recollection, Cadmus' memory, his destiny, his potentiality,
returned.
He knew why he was called Cadmus.
* * * * *
His father, the first Cadmus of the newer myth. The greatest hero of
the System. For years, since the Machine had been placed in power, his
father had worked toward its destruction. A shadow, a mystery in the
starways. He had gotten scientists and had constructed secret arsenals.
He had constructed small matter transmatters and installed a secret
transmat underground between the three worlds and the asteroids.
In the asteroid belt had been thousands of free men who hadn't had the
disciplinary bands installed in their skulls because they had been
born there in the belt, away from all legislative control, of mucker
parents. Men and women and children who were inaccessible in the
thousands of uncharted little worlds between Terra and Mars.
Led by his father, they had attacked through the transmats and had
marched on the council tower and the Machine. But they had been
defeated, slain and taken into slavery. Only a few escaped. Only three.
Two children, Cadmus and Zaleel. And Johlan. They returned to the
asteroids to plan the second revolt.
But they had marched on the Machine, knowing it was surrounded by half
a mile of deadly radioactivity. And now Cadmus knew how his father had
expected to overthrow the Machine in spite of this barrier. His father
had planned the direct assault on the Machine--alone. His father had
trusted no one. He had lain the groundwork, had accomplished the whole
preparation himself. He had been intending to launch the direct attack
on the Machine by releasing the armed men.
... _slew a dragon and sowed its teeth. From these sprang armed men_ ...
Young as he had been then, Cadmus still remembered starkly. His father
had given him the information and directions. No one else knew. Johlan
had suspected. That was why he had blanked out Cadmus' mind until his
own terrible plan had been achieved.
Cadmus could hear his father's words now, plainly, after the many
years. As his father lay dying in a hidden cavern after having failed
to reach the other great cave on the side of the valley facing the
Machine.
"I've worked it for almost a century, son--the armed men--transported
them one by one from Terra by transmat ... an underground filled with
armed men ... ready to march into the Machine ... ready to blast its
accursed heart ... the lever is under the roots of the komble-plant at
the mouth of the cavern ... when the doors are opened...."
His father had given him the directions, how to reach that secret
cavern where the armed men waited. Then he had died. The three
survivors had been waiting for Cadmus, and they escaped, returned to
the asteroids via transmat. Johlan, the leading scientist, had raised
and educated Zaleel and Cadmus.
Cadmus was running across the room. He heard Consar's laughter fading
behind him as he ran into the hall. But the pattern was clear in
Cadmus' mind.
V
Cadmus dodged into a doorway as Guards came down the hall pursuing
three Martians. Behind him he caught a glimpse of a huge pleasure pool
in a lethean garden. Vacant now, its hedonistic lovers caught up in a
grisly destiny.
The two Guards were chasing three Martians who hadn't digested the idea
of suicide, evidently. As the Guards raised vibro-guns, Cadmus hurled
himself through the doorway. His leap carried one of the Guards to the
floor. One desperate blow knocked that Guard senseless. Cadmus raised
the Guard's vibro-gun and brought the other man to the floor in a
paralyzed sprawl.
The Machine's voice still thundered from the Tower as Cadmus ran from
the palace, into the street toward the valley's mouth. The city was
almost deserted now, except for a few Guards and policejets circling,
hunting out deserters from the suicidal march.
Cadmus ran frantically, straining, along the street, keeping next the
shadowed wall. But no Guards bothered him now. To them he was another
suicidal lemming who had gotten the call belatedly.
His breath came harshly, burning fire. His muscles groaned as he forced
himself up the steep rocky slope leading up and along the valley's rim.
His father's directions were vivid in his mind now as he staggered
along the wind-whipped trail. Higher and higher until the mid-afternoon
winds were a thousand icy lances driving through his sweating body.
He finally dropped in a gasping heap at the base of the flowering
komble-plant. To his right was the high flat wall of granite. Huge
doors were behind the red clay and dust, waiting to open. A high wide
door.
His hands clawed at the red clay. His fingers bled as the hard cracked
stuff came away in reluctant layers. His fingers grated on metal.
Frantically he tore at the clay binding the small lever.
Below him in the vast valley, the carnage continued. The radioactive
field was piled with uncountable bodies. Only deep within the
radioactive field did the gamma rays have the intensity to kill
quickly. But much further out, thousands were dying as the
radioactivity spread through the bodies of comrades. Masses behind kept
moving, surging, pressing forward, hurling walls of humanity into the
deadly field.
Cadmus shoved the lever. The massive doors broke through the years of
clay camouflage behind him. A grinding roar shattered the thin air.
Startled, Cadmus cried out, and leaped away. He was running desperately
out of the field of the armed men who came darting in deadly ferocity
from the silence of their ancient crypt.
Huge, glistening, streamlined metal monsters. They shot from the dark
opening. A line of twenty, they glowed with a deadly field of gamma
radiation and death-spray. And Cadmus kept running away from them. His
heart pounded with a deathly fear and awe as he hurled himself down the
steep trail. He glanced back a few times. That was enough.
Those great metal tanks were deadly to any living thing near them. They
sped from the cavern, headed in a grim straight line directly for the
Machine. Once set as his father had set their automatic robot controls
long ago, nothing could divert them from their objective. Straight down
the slope they plunged in silent, ferocious intent.
Cadmus remembered other things now. Of how his father had installed
secretly a transmat sender in a Terran museum where such curious
mementos as giant robot tanks were no longer of interest to Terrans.
One by one, via transmat, the tanks had been transported to this hidden
cavern on the edge of the valley.
In that last ghastly war, robot tanks and drone planes had been
employed almost entirely in place of human beings. Atomic engines were
built and used to drive these drone planes, tanks, ships. But no living
thing could pilot them, nor come within a quarter of a mile of them,
and survive.
They were robot controlled. Man's final contribution to annihilative
warfare. Equipped with raw, unshielded atomic engines, the tanks were
deadly beyond imagination, with atomic bombs as warheads, and giving
off a sheet of robot death-spray. They were impervious to any kind of
atomic weapons for they were the ultimate in robot-controlled atomic
weapons. Silent, implacable, they rushed down the slope, over rock and
through brush, and finally over mounds of dead and dying. The human
lemmings rushing to their death didn't notice the tanks. They did not
notice anything.
Up and up over mounds of clawing bodies and hills of dead the terrible
robot weapons climbed. Over heaps of human lemmings, red and yellow and
black Terrans, and yellow Martians. And then they struck the smooth
gleaming side of the Machine.
The machine exploded!
The valley was suddenly a seething boiling cloud of chaos. Bits of Gray
God rained for miles over the desert, mountains and ruins of Akal-jor.
Boiling dust clouds rose blackly, flung by a tremendous flash like
a ball of fire the size of the setting sun. Churning debris climbed
thousands of feet in the air, while smoke climbed higher. The dying
day was relighted by a searing light, golden, purple, violet, gray and
blue. Then came the first of a series of air-blasts, to be followed
almost immediately by the sustained and awesome roar.
Cadmus stumbled to his knees. He crawled, managed to regain his feet,
lurched blindly through clouds of choking dust. His clothing hung in
strips. Blood seeped from his ears and nose. Somehow he managed to
deactivate the rest of the transmats. For although the Machine was now
utterly destroyed the great crater that remained was even more deadly
in its neutron and gamma radiation than before.
The last of the matter transmatters stopped working. The rivers of
desperate beings were dammed. On Terra and in the Martian cities,
waiting worshippers were wondering what had happened as their own
transmat senders stopped functioning.
They waited for a long time. They waited until it finally occurred to
them that the transmats might never function again. They wondered,
and kept on waiting. But three quarters of the Terran and Martian
population had been saved from suicide.
* * * * *
Cadmus dragged himself up the sweeping steps of the council tower. It
was dark now. And silent. On three worlds, people waited, not yet aware
of the full significance of what had happened.
Phobos was a hurtling curse in the sky. Deimos was edging up into the
night like an afterthought. Cadmus stumbled. He staggered to the
elevator and inside. He watched the lights blinking as he climbed to
the Tower's top. He went into a hall leading to the large audi-chamber.
A massive bulk lay sprawled in the shadows. Consar III. His flesh
was charred. Even the brilliant jewels that had bedecked him seemed
exhausted of their luster.
Cadmus paused. Consar hadn't wanted to die, not really. He, too, had
come to the Tower. He hadn't given up his position of power and wealth
easily. He had come to the Tower to attempt to assume the direct power
that the Machine had once controlled. Someone had prevented him. Johlan?
He peered through the opening into a large, gloomy chamber. It
contained the transcription and audiocasting facilities of the council
tower. Somewhere, the ten council members, aged children conditioned to
voice the dictates of the Machine, were crouched in blank fear.
A large audiocasting set was humming in the far corner of the room, a
strip of tape running beneath its electronic needle.
Cadmus stopped in the shadows. He had made his way to the Tower fast.
He had heard that voice from the Tower, and it had changed. He knew
whose voice had replaced the voice of the Machine. Johlan.
Cadmus' eyes adjusted to the gloom. The Venusians preferred gloom.
Then, beside a recorder across the large chamber, Cadmus saw the
greenly iridescent body of the Venusian crouched over a microphone,
recording more tape for the audiocaster.
Cadmus listened to Johlan's voice coming from the loudspeaker atop the
Tower.
"The Great Gray God of stability was only a Machine. It has been
destroyed. The Venusians destroyed it to save the System from disaster
through the Machine's static pattern of unchange. But a tri-planetary
government of organic agency must replace the Machine. There cannot
be a return of old inter-world antagonisms. There must be a united
System. A tri-planetary government will be established here on Mars.
Directives will soon follow from the council tower that once voiced the
machine-dictates of the Gray God. The Ven--"
Cadmus fired. Not at Johlan. The Venusian's recorded message stopped as
the blast from Cadmus' gun melted the audio unit. The thundering voice
from the Tower's summit died. Johlan turned quickly.
"That was enough of that speech," said Cadmus. "So far, you spoke very
well. There'll be a new tri-planetary government, but the Venusians
aren't dictating terms from this Tower. No one world will dictate any
terms from anywhere."
"Wait," interrupted Johlan. "Don't fire, Cadmus. We can rule together."
Cadmus' voice was brittle as steel. "You're worse than Consar, worse
than the Machine. Millions have died today because of you. Because
of old greeds and ambitions you couldn't bury--dreams of Venusian
imperialism."
"The Venusians never got fair representation from the System," cried
Johlan. "They never will. Fishmen! That's what you call us!"
His lidless eyes gleamed as his hand flashed. Cadmus yelled once, then
fell to his knees as a ray of neuron-shattering force from a paralysis
gun swept across his knees. His legs crumbled him to his side. Another
stream soaked into his arm. His neutron gun toppled from nerveless
fingers.
The fingers of his other hand crawled toward it. That arm went dead.
Only his torso was still capable of sensation. Cadmus turned fevered
eyes on Johlan. He waited, his heart pounding. The little Venusian's
scales glinted with triumph as he padded forward on webbed feet.
* * * * *
"You did a fine job, Cadmus," he said, looking down. "No one else but
you could have accomplished it. No one else had the will, the courage,
or the strength and audacity. Nor the human gullibility. That's why I
used you."
Johlan paused. He looked away from the window. A splash of white
moonlight flooded down, rippled over the mosaic floor. It glinted from
Johlan's scales and danced in his lidless eyes. His voice was dreamy
with power. "My question to the Machine was simple. I merely devised
a series of opposed questions, requiring one answer for all of them.
In other words, the Machine was forced to make a compromise. But the
Machine was fixed. It couldn't make a compromise. It had to go insane."
He looked back down at Cadmus. "That was a magnificent idea of your
father's--those ancient tanks from the atom war. He was a great man.
Maybe the greatest Terran who ever lived. But I'm a Venusian. I am
greater, because I used him. And I used you, his son. So Cadmus slew
the dragon and sowed its teeth, and from these sprang armed men!"
Johlan smiled gently. "But the dragon was never really slain, Cadmus. I
was the dragon."
Cadmus heard the door open. He heard her voice, sharp and clear. It
was beautiful, he thought, like music. Though music could never be so
deadly.
"But dragons always die, Johlan."
The Venusian gasped as he turned. He started to die as he faced her.
The death ray glowed on his green-scaled chest for a while, then faded
as the Venusian stumbled across the room, the neutron gun hanging
limply and forgotten in his webbed hand. He finished dying with his
face pressed hard against the window.
Far away, Venus shimmered brightly in the sky.
She knelt beside Cadmus. Her kisses were wet on his face. He could feel
her hands and her lips.
"You'll be all right, Cadmus," she said as her hands caressed his face.
"As long as it didn't get your heart."
Cadmus looked at her hungrily.
"I managed to hide for a while," she said, "when we fled from Consar's
palace. I heard that terrible explosion. Later I heard Johlan's voice
from the Tower and I came here. I didn't know, until I overheard him
talking to you, what had really happened." Her voice broke. "How could
he have been--so fiendish--so--"
"Forget it," he murmured. "Or try to anyway. We did it. The Machine's
gone."
"Yes." A glitter of faith shone in her eyes. "The System's free again.
Free to evolve and grow, and reach greatness or ruin. But at least to
be free."
"Zaleel--Where do we go--from here?"
"We're going again, and that's what really matters," she said. "It's us
now, Cadmus. It'll be just you and me now for a while. Remember?"
Cadmus remembered.