Click of heels and a salute that once greeted the Caesars, and later the
pseudo-Aryan of the 20th Century, and, but yesterday, he who was now
known as _the last of the dictators_. "Farewell, Number One!"
"Farewell," he answered emotionlessly.
* * * * *
Mr. Smith, a black dot on the dazzling white sand, watched the lifeboat
disappear up into the blue, finally into the haze of the upper
atmosphere of Venus. That eternal haze that would always be there to
mock his failure and his bitter solitude.
The slow days snarled by, and the sun shone dimly, and the _marigees_
screamed in the early dawn and all day and at sunset, and sometimes
there were the six-legged _baroons_, monkey-like in the trees, that
gibbered at him. And the rains came and went away again.
At nights there were drums in the distance. Not the martial roll of
marching, nor yet a threatening note of savage hate. Just drums, many
miles away, throbbing rhythm for native dances or exorcising, perhaps,
the forest-night demons. He assumed these Venusians had their
superstitions, all other races had. There was no threat, for him, in
that throbbing that was like the beating of the jungle's heart.
Mr. Smith knew that, for although his choice of destinations had been a
hasty choice, yet there had been time for him to read the available
reports. The natives were harmless and friendly. A Terran missionary had
lived among them some time ago--before the outbreak of the war. They
were a simple, weak race. They seldom went far from their villages; the
space-radar operator who had once occupied the shack reported that he
had never seen one of them.
So, there would be no difficulty in avoiding the natives, nor danger if
he did encounter them.
Nothing to worry about, except the bitterness.
Not the bitterness of regret, but of defeat. Defeat at the hands of the
defeated. The damned Martians who came back after he had driven them
halfway across their damned arid planet. The Jupiter Satellite
Confederation landing endlessly on the home planet, sending their vast
armadas of spacecraft daily and nightly to turn his mighty cities into
dust. In spite of everything; in spite of his score of ultra-vicious
secret weapons and the last desperate efforts of his weakened armies,
most of whose men were under twenty or over forty.
The treachery even in his own army, among his own generals and admirals.
The turn of Luna, that had been the end.
His people would rise again. But not, now after Armageddon, in his
lifetime. Not under him, nor another like him. The last of the
dictators.
Hated by a solar system, and hating it.
It would have been intolerable, save that he was alone. He had foreseen
that--the need for solitude. Alone, he was still Number One. The
presence of others would have forced recognition of his miserably
changed status. Alone, his pride was undamaged. His ego was intact.
* * * * *
The long days, and the _marigees'_ screams, the slithering swish of the
surf, the ghost-quiet movements of the _baroons_ in the trees and the
raucousness of their shrill voices. Drums.
Those sounds, and those alone. But perhaps silence would have been
worse.
For the times of silence were louder. Times he would pace the beach at
night and overhead would be the roar of jets and rockets, the ships that
had roared over New Albuquerque, his capitol, in those last days before
he had fled. The crump of bombs and the screams and the blood, and the
flat voices of his folding generals.
Those were the days when the waves of hatred from the conquered peoples
beat upon his country as the waves of a stormy sea beat upon crumbling
cliffs. Leagues back of the battered lines, you could _feel_ that hate
and vengeance as a tangible thing, a thing that thickened the air, that
made breathing difficult and talking futile.
And the spacecraft, the jets, the rockets, the damnable rockets, more
every day and every night, and ten coming for every one shot down.
Rocket ships raining hell from the sky, havoc and chaos and the end of
hope.
And then he knew that he had been hearing another sound, hearing it
often and long at a time. It was a voice that shouted invective and
ranted hatred and glorified the steel might of his planet and the
destiny of a man and a people.
It was his own voice, and it beat back the waves from the white shore,
it stopped their wet encroachment upon this, his domain. It screamed
back at the _baroons_ and they were silent. And at times he laughed, and
the _marigees_ laughed. Sometimes, the queerly shaped Venusian trees
talked too, but their voices were quieter. The trees were submissive,
they were good subjects.
Sometimes, fantastic thoughts went through his head. The race of trees,
the pure race of trees that never interbred, that stood firm always.
Someday the trees--
But that was just a dream, a fancy. More real were the _marigees_ and
the _kifs_. They were the ones who persecuted him. There was the
_marigee_ who would shriek "_All is lost!_" He had shot at it a hundred
times with his needle gun, but always it flew away unharmed. Sometimes
it did not even fly away.
"_All is lost!_"
At last he wasted no more needle darts. He stalked it to strangle it
with his bare hands. That was better. On what might have been the
thousandth try, he caught it and killed it, and there was warm blood on
his hands and feathers were flying.
That should have ended it, but it didn't. Now there were a dozen
_marigees_ that screamed that all was lost. Perhaps there had been a
dozen all along. Now he merely shook his fist at them or threw stones.
The _kifs_, the Venusian equivalent of the Terran ant, stole his food.
But that did not matter; there was plenty of food. There had been a
cache of it in the shack, meant to restock a space-cruiser, and never
used. The _kifs_ would not get at it until he opened a can, but then,
unless he ate it all at once, they ate whatever he left. That did not
matter. There were plenty of cans. And always fresh fruit from the
jungle. Always in season, for there were no seasons here, except the
rains.
But the _kifs_ served a purpose for him. They kept him sane, by giving
him something tangible, something inferior, to hate.
Oh, it wasn't hatred, at first. Mere annoyance. He killed them in a
routine sort of way at first. But they kept coming back. Always there
were _kifs_. In his larder, wherever he did it. In his bed. He sat the
legs of the cot in dishes of gasoline, but the _kifs_ still got in.
Perhaps they dropped from the ceiling, although he never caught them
doing it.
They bothered his sleep. He'd feel them running over him, even when he'd
spent an hour picking the bed clean of them by the light of the carbide
lantern. They scurried with tickling little feet and he could not
sleep.
He grew to hate them, and the very misery of his nights made his days
more tolerable by giving them an increasing purpose. A pogrom against
the _kifs_. He sought out their holes by patiently following one bearing
a bit of food, and he poured gasoline into the hole and the earth around
it, taking satisfaction in the thought of the writhings in agony below.
He went about hunting _kifs_, to step on them. To stamp them out. He
must have killed millions of _kifs_.
But always there were as many left. Never did their number seem to
diminish in the slightest. Like the Martians--but unlike the Martians,
they did not fight back.
Theirs was the passive resistance of a vast productivity that bred
_kifs_ ceaselessly, overwhelmingly, billions to replace millions.
Individual _kifs_ could be killed, and he took savage satisfaction in
their killing, but he knew his methods were useless save for the
pleasure and the purpose they gave him. Sometimes the pleasure would
pall in the shadow of its futility, and he would dream of mechanized
means of killing them.
He read carefully what little material there was in his tiny library
about the _kif_. They were astonishingly like the ants of Terra. So much
that there had been speculation about their relationship--that didn't
interest him. How could they be killed, _en masse_? Once a year, for a
brief period, they took on the characteristics of the army ants of
Terra. They came from their holes in endless numbers and swept
everything before them in their devouring march. He wet his lips when he
read that. Perhaps the opportunity would come then to destroy, to
destroy, _and destroy_.
Almost, Mr. Smith forgot people and the solar system and what had been.
Here in this new world, there was only he and the _kifs_. The _baroons_
and the _marigees_ didn't count. They had no order and no system. The
_kifs_--
In the intensity of his hatred there slowly filtered through a grudging
admiration. The _kifs_ were true totalitarians. They practiced what he
had preached to a mightier race, practiced it with a thoroughness beyond
the kind of man to comprehend.
Theirs the complete submergence of the individual to the state, theirs
the complete ruthlessness of the true conqueror, the perfect selfless
bravery of the true soldier.
But they got into his bed, into his clothes, into his food.
They crawled with intolerable tickling feet.
Nights he walked the beach, and that night was one of the noisy nights.
There were high-flying, high-whining jet-craft up there in the moonlight
sky and their shadows dappled the black water of the sea. The planes,
the rockets, the jet-craft, they were what had ravaged his cities, had
turned his railroads into twisted steel, had dropped their H-Bombs on
his most vital factories.
He shook his fist at them and shrieked imprecations at the sky.
And when he had ceased shouting, there were voices on the beach.
Conrad's voice in his ear, as it had sounded that day when Conrad had
walked into the palace, white-faced, and forgotten the salute. "There is
a breakthrough at Denver, Number One! Toronto and Monterey are in
danger. And in the other hemispheres--" His voice cracked. "--the damned
Martians and the traitors from Luna are driving over the Argentine.
Others have landed near New Petrograd. It is a rout. All is lost!"