_The Niori permitted refugees from Earth to
live in their cramped little ghetto conditionally:
that they do so peacefully. But there will always
be patriotic fanatics, like Harkway and Rack,
who must disturb the peace...._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The sun had set half an hour before. Now, from the window of Laszlo
Cudyk's garret, he could see how the alien city shone frost-blue
against the black sky; the tall hive-shapes that no man would have
built, glowing with their own light.
Nearer, the slender drunken shafts of lamp posts marched toward him
down the street, each with its prosaic yellow globe. Between them and
all around, the darkness had gathered; darkness in angular shapes, the
geometry of squalor.
Cudyk liked this view, for at night the blackness of the Earth Quarter
seemed to merge with the black sky, as if one were a minor extension of
the other--a fist of space held down to the surface of the planet. He
could feel, then, that he was not alone, not isolated and forgotten;
that some connection still existed across all the light-years of the
galaxy between him and what he had lost.
And, again, the view depressed him; for at night the City seemed to
press in upon the Quarter like the walls of a prison. The Quarter:
sixteen square blocks, about the size of those of an Earth city, two
thousand three hundred human beings of three races, four religions,
eighteen nationalities; the only remnant of the human race nearer than
Capella.
Cudyk felt the night breeze freshening. He glanced upward once at the
frosty blaze of stars, then pulled his head back inside the window. He
closed the shutters, turning to the lamp-lit table with its hopeless
clutter of books, pipes and dusty miscellany.
Cudyk was a man of middle height, heavy in the shoulders and chest,
blunt-featured, with a shock of greying black hair. He was fifty-five
years old; he remembered Earth.
A drunk stumbled by in the street below, cursing monotonously to
himself, paused to spit explosively into the gutter, and faded into the
night.
Cudyk heard him without attention. He stood with his back to the
window, looking at nothing, his square fingers fumbling automatically
for pipe and tobacco. Why do I torture myself with that look out the
window every night? he asked himself. It's a juvenile sentimentalism.
But he knew he would go on doing it.
Other noises drifted up to his window, faint with distance. They grew
louder. Cudyk cocked his head suddenly, turned and threw open the
shutters again. That had been a scream.
He could see nothing down the street; the trouble must be farther over,
he thought, on Kwang-Chow-fu or Washington. The noise swelled as he
listened: the unintelligible wailing of a mob.
Footsteps clicked hurriedly up the stairs. Cudyk went to the door, made
sure it was latched, and waited. There was a light tapping on the door.
"Who is it?" he said.
"Lee Far."
He unlatched the door and opened it. The little Chinese blinked at him,
his upper lip drawn up over incisors like a rodent's. "Mr. Seu say
please, you come." Without waiting for an answer, he turned and rapped
his way down into darkness.
Cudyk picked up a jacket from a wall hook, and paused for a moment to
glance at the locked drawer in which he kept an ancient .32 automatic
and two full clips. He shook his head impatiently and went out.
Lee was waiting for him downstairs. When he saw Cudyk open the outer
door, he set off down the street at a dog-trot.
Cudyk caught up with him at the corner of Athenai and Brasil. They
turned right for two blocks to Washington, then left again. A block
away, at Rossiya and Washington, there was a small crowd of men
struggling in the middle of the street. They didn't seem to be very
active; as Cudyk and Lee approached, they saw that only a few were
still fighting, and those without a great deal of spirit. The rest were
moving aimlessly, some wiping their eyes, others bent almost double in
paroxysms of sneezing. A few were motionless on the pavement.
Three slender Chinese were moving through the crowd. Each had a white
surgeon's mask tied over his nose and mouth, and carried a plastic bag
full of some dark substance, from which he took handfuls and flung them
with a motion like a sower's. Cudyk could see now that the air around
them was heavy with floating particles. As he watched, the last two
fighters in the crowd each took a halfhearted swing at the other and
then, coughing and sneezing, moved away in separate directions.