"Sorry," said the pilot, "but you're hovering over a residential area.
That's not allowed. What's your number, pilot?"
"I have no number," said the voice, "and I have no license. Stand off
or take the consequences!"
"It's him--the psycho," hissed Petersen to Handel. "Call HQ on your set
while I keep him busy."
"Right," snapped the engineer, tuning in the traffic center.
The pilot turned to his set, his brow wrinkled. How do you handle a
psycho? Humor him. "What was that you said?" asked Petersen, smooth as
silk.
"Stand off, you fool, or take the consequences! I'll give you five
seconds to get away."
"Wait," said Petersen. "Why don't you--" Then he gasped, as his plans
crumbled. The psycho's ship had winged over with terrible speed and was
heading for his ship nose-on. "Stop!" he shrilled into the mike, his
hand on the throttle. Then he sent his own plane into a loop that made
his bones bend, and streaked for altitude, with the demon plane and its
demon pilot on his tail. "I warned you," ground out of the speaker.
"You'll do well to tell the world that there's one man alive who's
not afraid to kill or be killed to achieve his ends. Spread the word,
friend!" And, when Petersen looked around, the plane was a vanishing
speck in the north, as he watched it reach the blending point and
vanish in the sky.
Handel, gibbering in a corner of the traffic ship where the last loop
had flung him, cried, "What happened to it?"
"I don't know," said the pilot soberly. "Did you get HQ?"
"Yes, but the loop smashed my set. What do we do now?"
"Fly back, but fast," said Petersen, giving his ship the gun.
"Pete," said Handel.
"Yeah?"
"What do we do with a thing like that? I mean how do you finally get
rid of them?"
"I don't know," said the pilot slowly. "Lock them up once you catch
them, I suppose."
"Catch _that_? He tried to ram us! As he said--he's not afraid to kill
or be killed." The engineer shuddered. "Do you think," he asked, "we'll
have to kill him?"
Petersen frowned. "I hope not," he said, his eyes ahead of him as he
prepared to land. "But if there's no other way--what else can we do?"
"How long since they killed a man--purposely, I mean?" The ship was
rolling to a stop.
"I dunno. Maybe a hundred years; maybe more. And who that was, I don't
know either."
The two left the plane and headed for the manager's office, their
faces wry. Petersen was thinking of blood. He was hoping that if they
had to kill the psycho they'd do it some dry, quiet way. And Handel,
nursing a bruised lip, was hoping exactly the same thing. Mankind,
after many years of mutual hatreds had at last reached unanimity, and
an idealistic one at that.
The stolen plane crashed to a halt through the brush and bracken of the
abandoned clearing. Markett looked about her.
"Do you know where we are?" asked Stevens.
"I think so," said the girl slowly. "It must be a park district that's
being allowed to lie fallow. Probably it won't be touched by anyone for
a few years. Or wouldn't have been."
Stevens stared at her. "You mean--?" he asked.
"I mean that in a matter of hours the world will be down on you. Sheer
force of numbers will make you yield to them. Oh, Clark, can't you see
that you're _wrong_?" Her eyes suddenly widened with dread as she saw
his hands work convulsively.
"Get out," he ordered, and she obeyed, thinking wildly of a dash to
safety. Safety among the trees? Without a man to help her for perhaps
hundreds of miles! Meekly she stood, waiting for what might happen. She
could not believe that her life was to end at the hands of a madman.
She found it hard, indeed, to believe that Stevens was mad. Confused,
rather, by the overdose of the Regulator to which he had been subjected.
"Brave woman," he said. "I see you do not fear my madness. _That_ is
well. You are to be my mate--no, my wife."
"Wife?" she replied calmly. "But marriages are no longer customary.
And, even when they do happen, it is only through consent of the bride."
"All this," he said slowly, "must be changed. There is no life in this
world, no struggle." He thought further. "Men must fight--if not each
other, as I did in England, then something bigger. We must fight now
to bring life to this silly paradise we're in. Even if it means the
spilling of blood."
She, the nurse, shuddered at the thought of blood. For radio-knife
surgery had made incisions a dry affair, without confusion or
infection. Accidents were few; many lived their entire lives without
seeing their own blood. "Can you do it alone?" she asked.
"I can start alone," he decided. "I shall find my warriors in the
mad-houses and the clinics. Many of the inmates of these institutions
are no more mad than I; they've merely been put away because they saw
clearly, as I do."
"But they'll find us. They'll find you!" she cried in sudden anguish.
"They'll find you! Kill you!" Suddenly sobs choked her.
"They will forget me after awhile. They will think I was a fool and
drove my plane into the ground or a hillside. So I shall wait. And
then, when it is clear, and they have grown weary of looking, or
expecting an attack from me, I'll go out after my men and women.
We'll place them where best suited; some in transportation; some
in utilities, and some in communication. And some with the Psycho
Regulators. Then we strike, strike _there_, and the world is free
again!"
Markett grew white as she realized that this dream of power could be
more than a dream. She looked up into his face, quiet now. What had
happened to him? Would he become more and more obsessed, more violent?
Perhaps if she could persuade him to wait--to stay there quietly with
her while he worked out plans--the influence of the Regulator would
begin to wear off.
Over the course of some two hundred years the white man of North
America had lost what backwoods skill he once possessed. The little
party snapped twigs and stumbled over stones as they advanced through
the wilderness at the dead of night.
"How long?" asked a neuro-muscular specialist.
"About ten minutes more," said a general practitioner.
"Excuse me," said the specialist, who became violently sick in a bush.
Returning he said, "'M not ordinarily weak like this, but--"
"I understand," said a civil engineer. "It's a pretty revolting notion
at best." He hefted a pick in his hand, and sighed.
"I don't see why--" began the specialist in loud and irritated tones,
only to be cut off by a terrified chorus of "shh!"
"Sorry," he whispered. "I was saying that I don't see why there aren't
special bodies of men for this sort of thing. I mean, why pick men like
us to do work we haven't studied?"
"Haven't had the opportunity," said a pianist. "And there's good
reason why we haven't a body of men as you suggested."
"I can't think of it," whispered the specialist.
"Assume," said the pianist, "that there is a group chosen--by lot, I
suppose--to keep in line all eccentrics like the gentlemen on whom we
are about to call. Then how do we keep this group in line?"
The general practitioner pondered, and, still pondering, fell into a
brook. "Sorry," he gasped, being helped out. "But I have the answer to
your question. How to keep them in line, I mean--if they misbehave you
stop their salaries. Right?"
"No," said the pianist. "Because if they're trained to inflict
suffering as a negative bribe to good conduct how are we to keep
them from utilizing their training as a negative bribe to the end of
exacting tribute?"
A historian unexpectedly spoke up: "In ancient days that technique was
known as the 'shakedown racket'."
"Indeed," said the general practitioner, pondering again. "There must
be some way of insuring good conduct," he brooded. "Why not set up two
rival bodies of men to check on each other?"
"Because," said the specialist, now quite won over, "they would either
join forces--disastrous to the common welfare--or they would struggle
openly for supremacy and the victor would assume that he had the
_right_ to oppress common folk."
"I see," sighed the general practitioner. "How much farther?"
"As I remember it," said a radio engineer, "the message came from
the plane as it lay half wrecked by their dwelling. That makes it
about--there." He pointed, and silhouetted in the starlight they could
see the outlines of a monoplane. "Type ten," said a transportation
engineer, regretfully tightening his grip on an electric drill's
ponderous bit. "Shall we kill him first or get the girl to safety?"
"Kill him first, I say," volunteered the historian. "All in favor?"
There was a soft chorus of assent. "Well, then," said the historian,
"let's get as close as possible before he wakes up."
Stealthily they crept into the clearing and approached the little shack
of boughs and trunks which had been flung together.
"Not bad," whispered a structural operator. "Well chinked,
ventilated--in a primitive way one couldn't wish for anything better."
The neuro-muscular specialist took a heavy pair of operative forceps
from his bandolier, and pushed on the door. It swung open after
offering only a slight resistance. The seven others crowded into the
large room and distributed themselves strategically. The pianist
squinted through the dark and whispered, "There he is. I mean they
are." Lying on a sort of semi-permanent bower were the two outlanders,
side by side.
"I saw," whispered the transportation engineer, "I hadn't thought it
was anything like _that_--"
"He probably threatened her," said the specialist. "That _must_ be it."
He raised his forceps and said uncertainly, louder than he had meant
to, "Well!"
And Clark Stevens awoke. "Now," he muttered, and his eyes opened.
Like a shot from a gun, his lean body snapped into steely action. The
specialist he grasped by the wrist, flung away like a rat.
There was a shrill intake of breath in the room, and the men with
weapons poised were frozen where they stood. Every man there knew
what should be done, what had to be done for the safety of their
civilization, and had spent time studying the use of the weapon he
carried. But they couldn't do it. The genteel conditioning, in which
all thoughts of physical violence had been carefully weeded out from
birth, left them helpless before this man.
Stevens rose before them, and, in the gloom of the hut, his eyes blazed
like twin embers of a burning city. He uttered one inarticulate
roar, and started for them. That galvanized them into action; they
were capable of as swift motion as he, but in another direction. They
dropped their weapons and fled.
Stevens watched the last of them vanish, then felt a hand take his.
"They--they didn't hurt you?"
Silently he drew her through the door and their bare feet felt the loam
of the clearing. The night wind fanned their faces. He turned to her.
"I made them run," he laughed, and she smiled. Markett was used to the
bursts of childlike glee, and she loved her husband. He had insisted
upon some sort of ceremony which apparently was tied up with Roald. And
beside the usual broad grin was a kind of shrewd, calculating glint.
"_They_ can't fight. They've forgotten how. But now they know it."
"Then," she whispered, "we're safe."
"Safe," he repeated broodingly. "From men, yes. But they have their
machines. And machines can be set to kill as well as to build. We must
move on."
Markett turned slowly and looked at the lean-to where they had been
living. She laughed, a little nervously.
"Strange," she said. "At first I didn't like our--home. It was
small--smaller than any of the apartments in the District Dwellings.
And we always had to go outdoors for water--cold water that I couldn't
drink because it hadn't been distilled so that all the salts and taste
had been removed. Must we go, Clark?"