The five men on the opposite side of the desk had tacitly chosen
Falconer for their spokesman. He said: "But we've all got something
to say about it, Brendan. You're in charge, but nothing gives you the
power to be an autocrat."
"No?"
"Nothing. The Expedition Charter, in fact, refers to a Board of
Officers--"
"The Expedition Charter was written four hundred years ago, a thousand
light-years away. The men who drew it up are dust. The men who signed
it are dust."
"You're in the direct line of descent from the first Captain."
"Then you're recognizing me as a hereditary monarch, Falconer. I don't
see the basis of your complaint."
Falconer--lean as a whip from the waist down, naked, thick-torsoed,
covered with crisp, heavy fur--set his clawed feet a little apart and
thrust out his heavy under-jaw, clearing his sharp canine tusks away
from his flat lips. He lifted his enormous forearms out from his sides
and curved his fingers. "Don't pare cheese with us, Brendan. The rest
of the dome might be willing to let it go, as long as things're so near
completion. But not us. We won't stand for it." The men with him were
suddenly a tense pack, waiting, ready.
Brendan stood up, a member of Falconer's generation, no more evolved
than any of them. But he was taller than Falconer or any other man in
the room. He was bigger, his cruelly-shaped jaw broader, his tusks
sharper, his forearm muscles out of all proportion to the length of the
bone, like clubs. His eyes burned out from under his shaggy brows,
lambent with the captive glow of the lighting coil, set far back under
the protection of heavy bone. The slitted nostrils of his flat nose
were suddenly flared wide.
"You don't dare," he rumbled. His feet scraped on the floor. "I'll
disembowel the first man to reach me." He lashed out and sent the
massive bronze desk lurching aside, clearing the way between himself
and Falconer's party. And he waited, while the other men sent sidelong
glances at Falconer and Falconer's eyes slowly fell. Then Brendan
grunted. "This is why I'm in charge. Charters and successions don't
mean a thing after four hundred years. Not if a good man goes against
them. You'll keep on taking my orders."
"What kind of paranoiac's world do you live in?" Falconer said
bitterly. "Imposing your will on all of us. Doing everything your way
and no other. We're not saying your methods are absolutely going to
wreck the project, but--"
"What?"
"We've all got a stake in this. We've all got children in the nursery,
the same way you do."
"I don't favor my son over any of the others. Get that idea out of your
head."
"How do we know? Do we have anything to do with the nursery? Are we
allowed inside?"
"I'm this generation's bio-technician and pedagogical specialist.
That's the Captain's particular job. That's the way it's been since
the crash--by the same tradition you were quoting--and that's the way
it has to be. This is a delicate business. One amateur meddling in it
can destroy everything we're doing and everything that was done in the
past. And we'll never have another chance."
"All right. But where's the harm in looking in on them? What's your
point in not letting us at the cameras?"
"They're being overhauled. We're going to need to have them in perfect
working order tomorrow, when we open the nursery gates to the outside.
That's when it'll be important to look in on the children and make sure
everything's all right."
"And meanwhile only you can get into the nursery and see them."
"That's my job."
"Now, listen, Brendan, we all went through the nursery, too. And your
father had the same job you do. We weren't sealed off from everybody
but him. We saw other people. You know that just as well as we do."
Brendan snorted. "There's no parallel. We weren't the end product. We
were just one more link in the chain, and we had to be taught all about
the dome, because the hundred-odd of us were going to constitute its
next population. We had to be taught about the air control system, the
food distribution, the power plant--and the things it takes to keep
this place functioning as well as it can. We had to each learn our job
from the specialist who had it before us.
"But the next generation isn't going to need that. That's obvious. This
is what we've all been working for. To free them. Ten generations ago,
the first of us set out to free them.
"And that's what I'm going to do, Falconer. That's my job, and nobody
here could do it, but me, in my way."
"They're our children too!"
"All right, then, be proud of them. Tomorrow they go outside, and
there'll be men out on the face of this world at last. Your flesh,
your blood, and they'll take this world away from the storms and
the animals. That's what we've spent all this time for. That's what
generations of us have huddled in here for, hanging on for this day.
What more do you want?"
"Some of the kids are going to die," one of the other men growled. "No
matter how well they're equipped to handle things outside, no matter
how much has been done to get them ready. We don't expect miracles from
you, Brendan. But we want to make sure you've done the best possible.
We can't just twiddle our thumbs."
"You want work to do? There's plenty. Shut up and listen to what's
going on outside."
* * * * *
The gnawing filled their heads. Brendan grinned coldly. And the
chipping sound, which had slowed a little, began a rapid pace again.
"They just changed shifts," Brendan said. "One of them got tired and a
fresh one took over."
"They'll never get through to us in the time they've got left,"
Falconer said.
"No?" Brendan turned on him in rage. "How do you know? Maybe they've
stopped using flint. Maybe they've got hold of something like diamonds.
What about the ones that just use their teeth? Maybe they're breeding
for tusks that concrete won't wear down. Think we've got a patent on
that idea? Think because we do it in a semi-automatic nursery, blind
evolution can't do it out in that wet hell outside?"
Lusic--the oldest one of them there, with sparse fur and lighter jaws,
with a round skull that lacked both a sagittal crest and a bone shelf
over the eyes--spoke for the first time.
"None of those things seem likely," he said in a voice muffled by the
air filter his generation had to wear in this generation's ecology.
"They are possibilities, of course, but only that. These are not
purposeful intelligences like ourselves. These are only immensely
powerful animals--brilliant, for animals, in a world lacking a higher
race to cow them--but they do not lay plans. No, Brendan, I don't think
your attempt to distract us has much logic in it. The children will
be out, and will have destroyed them, before there can be any real
danger to the dome's integrity. I can understand your desire to keep us
busy, because we are all tense as our efforts approach a climax. But
I do think your policy is wrong. I think we should long ago have been
permitted a share in supervising the nursery. I think your attempt to
retain dictatorial powers is an unhealthy sign. I think you're afraid
of no longer being the most powerful human being in our society.
Whether you know it or not, I think that's what behind your attitude.
And I think something ought to be done about it, even now."
"_Distract!_" Brendan's roar made them all retreat. He marched slowly
toward Lusic, and the other man began to back away. "When I need
advice from a sophist like you, that'll be the time when we all need
distraction!" He stopped when Lusic was pressed against the wall, and
he pointed at the wall.
"There is nothing in this world that loves us. There is nothing in this
world that can even tolerate us. Generations of us have lived in this
stone trap because not one of us--not even I--could live in the ecology
of this planet. It was never made for men. Men could not have evolved
on it. It would have killed them when they crawled from the sea, killed
them when they tried to breathe its atmosphere, killed them when they
tried to walk on its surface, and when they tried to take a share of
food away from the animals that _could_ evolve here. We are a blot and
an abomination upon it. We are weak, loathesome grubs on its iron face.
And the animals know us for what we are. They may even guess what we
have spent generations in becoming, but it doesn't matter whether they
do or not--they hate us, and they won't stop trying to kill us.
"When the expedition crashed here, they were met by storms and
savagery. They had guns and their kind of air regenerators and a steel
hull for shelter, and still almost all of them died. But if they had
been met by what crowds around this dome today, they would never have
lived at all, or begun this place.
"You're right, Lusic--there are only animals out there. Animals that
hate us so much, some of them have learned to hold stones in their paws
and use them for tools. They hate us so much they chip, chip, chip away
at the dome all day, and gnaw at it, and howl in the night for us to
come out, because they hate us so.
"We only _hope_ they won't break through. We can only hope the children
will drive them away in time. We don't know. But you'd rather be
comfortable in your hope. You'd rather come in here and quibble at my
methods. But I'm not your kind. Because if I don't know, I don't hope.
I act. And because I act, and you don't, and because I'm in charge,
you'll do what I tell you."
He went back to his desk and shoved it back to its place. "That's
all. I've heard your complaint, and rejected it. Get back to work
re-inforcing the dome walls. I want that done."
They looked at him, and at each other. He could see the indecision
on their faces. He ignored it, and after a moment they decided for
retreat. They could have killed him, acting together, and they could
have acted together against any other man in the dome. But not against
him. They began going out.
Lusic was the last through the door. As he reached to pull it shut, he
said, "We may kill you if we can get enough help."
Brendan looked at his watch and said quietly: "Lusic--it's the
twenty-fifth day of Kislev, on Chaim Weber's calendar. Stop off at his
place and tell him it's sunset, will you?"
He waited until Lusic finally nodded, and then ignored him again until
the man was gone.
* * * * *
When his office door was locked, he went to the television screen
buried in the wall behind him, switched it on, and looked out at the
world outside.
Rain--rain at a temperature of 1° Centigrade--blurred the camera
lenses, sluicing over them, blown up through the protective baffles,
giving him not much more than glutinous light and shadow to see. But
Brendan knew what was out there, as surely as a caged wolf knows
the face of his keeper. Near the top of the screen was a lichenous
gray-green mass, looming through the bleakness, that he knew for a line
of beaten, slumped mountains. Between the mountains and the dome was a
plain, running with water, sodden with the runoff from the spineless
hills, and in the water, the animals. They were the color of rocks at
the bottom of an ocean--great, mud-plastered masses, wallowing toward
each other in combat or in passion, rolling, lurching, their features
gross, heavy, licking out a sudden paw with unbelievable speed, as
though giant hippopotami, swollen beyond all seeming ability to move,
still somehow had managed to endow themselves with the reflexes of
cats. They crowded the plain, a carpet of obscenity, and for all
they fed on each other, and mated, and sometimes slept with their
unblinking eyes open and swiveling, they all faced toward the dome
and never stopped throwing themselves against its flanks, there to
hang scrabbling at the curve of the concrete, or doing more purposeful
things.
Brendan looked out at them with his chest rising in deep swells. "I'd
like to get out among you," he growled. "You'd kill me, but I'd like
to get out among you." He took a long breath.
He triggered one of the dome's old batteries, and watched the shells
howl into the heaving plain. Red fire flared, and the earth trembled,
erupting. Wherever the shells struck, the animals were hurled aside ...
to lie stunned, to shake themselves with the shock of the explosions,
and to stagger to their feet again.
"You wait," Brendan hissed, stopping the useless fire. "You wait 'til
my Donel gets at you. You wait."
He shut the screen off, and crossed his office toward a door set into
the bulkhead at his right. Behind it were the nursery controls, and,
beyond those, behind yet another door which he did not touch, was the
quarter-portion of the dome that housed the children, sealed off, more
massively walled than any other part, and, in the center of its share
of the dome surface, pierced by the only full-sized gateway to the
world. It was an autonomous shelter-within-a-shelter, and even its
interior walls were fantastically thick in case the dome itself were
broken.
The controls covered one wall of their cubicle. He ignored the shrouded
camera screens and the locked switch that would activate the gate. He
passed on to the monitoring instruments, and read off the temperature
and pressure, the percentages of the atmospheric components, and all
the other things that had to be maintained at levels lethal to him
so that the children could be comfortable. He put the old headphones
awkwardly to his ears and listened to the sounds he heard in the
nursery.
He opened one of the traps in the dome wall, and almost instantly there
was an animal in it. He closed the outer end of the trap, opened the
access into the nursery, and let the animal in. Then, for a few more
moments, he listened to the children as they killed and ate it.
* * * * *
Later, as he made his way down the corridor, going home for the night,
he passed Chaim Weber's doorway. He stopped and listened, and coming
through the foot-thick steel and the concrete wall, he heard the
Channukah prayer:
"_Baruch Ata Adonai, Eloheynu Melech Haolam, shehichiyanu vikiyimanu,
vihigianu lazman hazeh_...."
"Blessed be The Lord," Brendan repeated softly to himself, "Our God,
Lord of the Universe. Who has given us life, and is our strength, and
has brought us this day."
He stopped and whispered, "this day," again, and went on.
* * * * *
His wife was waiting for him, just inside the door, and he grunted a
greeting to her while he carefully worked the bolts. She said nothing
until he had turned around again, and he looked at her inquiringly.
"Sally?"
"You did it again," she said.