The youngster's eyes showed sudden pain. But he said, "I mean it,
Captain."
There was a slow movement out from that side of the room, men inching
away, crowding against their neighbors.
Rack was still looking past Monk's shoulder, into De Grasse's face. He
said:
"All right."
He turned, still wearing the same frozen expression, and walked down
the side of the room, toward the exit. Monk threw a glance of pure
incredulity over his shoulder, glanced back at De Grasse, and then
followed. Spider scrambled after.
De Grasse relaxed slowly, as if by conscious effort. He put away his
gun, hesitated a moment, and walked slowly out after the others. His
wide shoulders were slumped.
Then there was the scraping of chairs and boot-soles and a rising
bee-hive hum as the audience stood up and began to move out. Harkway
made no effort to call them back.
Cudyk, moving toward the exit with the rest, had much to think about.
He had seen not only De Grasse's will, but Rack's, part against the
knife of human sympathy. And that was a thing he had never expected to
see.
* * * * *
"Times like this," said Ferguson, narrowing his grey snake's eyes in a
smile, "I almost believe in God."
Father Exarkos smiled courteously and said nothing. He and Cudyk had
been sitting in the back room of Chong Yin's since a half-hour after
the meeting. Seu had been with them earlier, but had left. A little
after twelve, Ferguson had strolled in and joined them.
"I mean it," said Ferguson, laughing a little. "There was Harkway,
sticking his neck out, and there was little De Grasse standing in the
way. And Rack backed down." He shook his head, still smiling. "Rack
backed down. Now how would you explain that, gentlemen?"
It was necessary to put up with the gambler, who wielded more power
in the Quarter than anyone else, even Seu; but sometimes Cudyk found
himself dropping his usual attitude of detached interest in favor of
speculations about the specific variety of horrible fate which Ferguson
would most probably meet.
He was particularly irritating tonight, because Cudyk was forced
to agree with him. Cudyk had still not solved the riddle of Rack's
failure to finish what he had started.
It was conceivable that De Grasse should have acted as he did for
reasons of sentiment; but to apply the same motive to Rack was simply
not possible. The man had emotions, certainly, but they were all
channeled into one direction: the destiny of the human race and of
Lawrence Rack. De Grasse was at an age when the strongest emotions
were volatile, when conversions were made, when a man could plan an
assassination one day and enter a monastery the next. But Rack was
fixed and aimed, like a cannon.
Ferguson was saying, "He must be going soft. Going soft--old Rack.
Unless it's the hand of God. What's your opinion, Father?"
The priest said blandly, "Mr. Ferguson, since I have come to live upon
this planet, my opinions have changed about many things. I no longer
believe that either God, or man, is quite so simple as I once thought.
We were too small in our thoughts, before--our understanding of
temporal things was bounded by the frontiers of Earth, and of eternal
things by the little sky we could see from our windows.
"Before, I think I would have tried to answer your question. I would
have said that I think Captain Rack was moved by--a sudden access of
human feeling--or I would have said that I think Captain Rack was
touched by the finger of God. Perhaps I would have hesitated to say
that, because even then I did not believe that God interferes with the
small sins of men like Captain Rack. Or the small sins of anybody, for
that matter."
Ferguson grinned. "Well, Father, that's the best excuse for an answer
I ever heard, anyway." He dragged on his cigar, narrowing his eyes and
pursing his lips, as if the cigar were a tube through which his brains
were being sucked. "In other words," he said, "you don't think the big
blowup back home was a judgment on us for our sins. You think it was a
good thing, only more people should have got out the way we did. That
right?"
"Oh, no," said Father Exarkos. "I believe that the Famines and the
Collapse were a judgment of God. I have heard many theories about
the causes of the Collapse, but I have not heard one which does not
come back, in the end, to a condemnation of man's folly, cruelty, and
blindness."
"Well," said Ferguson, "excuse me, Father, but if you believe that
way, what are you doing here? Back there--" he jerked his head, as if
Earth were some little distance behind his right shoulder--"people
are living like animals. Chicago, where I come from, is just a stone
jungle, with a few beast-like scavengers prowling around in it. If the
dirt and disease don't get you, some bandit will split your head open,
or you'll run into a wolf or some other hungry animal. If none of those
things happen, you can expect to live to the ripe old age of forty, and
then you'll be glad to die."
He had stopped smiling. Ferguson, Cudyk realized, was describing
his own personal hell. He went on, "Now, if you want to call that a
judgment, I won't argue with you. But if that's what you believe, why
aren't you back there taking it with the rest of them?"
He really wanted to know, Cudyk thought. He had begun by trying to bait
the priest, but now he was serious. It was odd to think of Ferguson
having trouble with his conscience, but Cudyk was not really surprised.
The most moralistic men he had ever known had been gangsters of
Ferguson's type; whereas the few really good men he had known, Father
Exarkos among them, had seemed as blithely unaware of their consciences
as of their healthy livers.
The priest said, soberly, "Mr. Ferguson, I believe that we also are
being punished. Perhaps we more than others. The Mexican peon, the
Indian fellah, the peasant of China or Greece, lives very much as his
father did before him; he scarcely has reason to know that judgment has
fallen upon Earth. But I think that no inhabitant of the Quarter can
forget it for so much as an hour."
Ferguson stared at him, then grunted and squashed out his cigar. He
stood up. "I'll be getting along home," he said. "Good night." He
walked out.
Cudyk and Exarkos sat for a while longer, talking quietly, and then
left together. The streets were empty. Behind them and to their left as
they walked to the corner, the ghostly blue of the Niori beehives shone
above the dark human buildings.
The priest lived in a small second-floor apartment near the corner of
Brasil and Athenai, alone since his wife had died ten years before.
Cudyk had only to go straight across Ceskoslovensko, but he walked
down toward Brasil with his friend.
Near the corner, Cudyk saw a dark form sprawled in a doorway. "One of
your congregation, Astereos?" he asked.
"It is probable," said the priest resignedly. "Steve Chrisudis has been
drinking heavily again this past week; also the two Moulios brothers."
He stepped over and turned the man's face up to the light.
The face was bloody and broken, the eyes sightless. It was Harkway. He
had been dead long enough to grow cold.
* * * * *
One question of Harkway's kept coming back to Cudyk. "Would you live in
a universe drenched with blood?"
Rack would, of course; for others there was a tragic dilemma. For them,
the race had come to the end of a road that had its beginning in
prehistory. Every step of progress on that way had been accomplished
by bloodshed, and yet the goal had always been a world at peace. It
had been possible to live with the paradox when the road still seemed
endless: before the first Earth starships discovered that humanity was
not alone in the universe.
Human beings were like a fragile crystalline structure, enduring until
the first touch of air; or like a cyst that withers when it is cut
open. The winds of the universe blew around them now, and there was no
way to escape from their own nature.
The way forward was the way back; the way back was the way forward.
There was no peace except the peace of surrender and death. There was
no victory except the victory of chaos.
As the priest had remarked, there were many theories about the
Collapse. It was said that the economy of Earth had been wrecked by
interstellar imports; it was said that the rusts and blights that had
devastated Earth's fields were of alien origin; it was said that the
disbanding of the Space Navy, after the Altair Incident, had broken
Earth's spirit. It was said that the emigrations, both before and after
the Famines, had bled away too much of the trained manpower that was
Earth's life-blood.
The clear fact was that the human race was finished: dying like
Neanderthal faced by Cro-Magnon; dying like the hairy Ainu among the
Japanese. It was true that hundreds of millions of people lived on
Earth much as they had done before, tilling their fields, digging
stones from the ground, laboring over the handicrafts which sustained
the men of the Quarter in their exile.
Humanity had passed through such dark ages before.
But now there was no way to go except downward.
If the exiles in their ghettoes, on a hundred planets of the galaxy,
were the lopped-off head of the race, then the ferment of theories,
plans, and policies that swirled through them stood for the last fitful
fantasies in the brain of a guillotined man.
And on Earth, the prelates, the robber barons, the petty princes were
ganglia: performing their mechanical functions in a counterfeit of
intelligence, slowing, degenerating imperceptibly until the last spark
should go out.
Cudyk fingered the manuscript which lay on the desk before him. It was
the last thing he had written, and it would never be finished. He had
hunted it up, this morning, out of nostalgia, or perhaps through some
obscure working of that impulse that made him look out at the stars
each night.
There were twenty pages, the first chapter of a book that was to have
been his major work. It ended with the words:
"The only avenue of escape for humanity is...."
He had stopped there, because he had realized suddenly that he had been
deliberately deceiving himself; that there was no avenue. The scheme he
had meant to propose and develop in the rest of the book had one thing
in common with those he had demolished in the first pages. It would not
work.
Cudyk thought of those phantom chapters now, and was grateful that he
had not written them. He had meant to propose that the exiles should
band together on some unpeopled planet, and rear a new generation which
would be given all the knowledge of the old, save for two categories:
military science and astronomy. They would never be told, never guess
that the bright lights of their sky were suns, that the suns had
planets and the planets people. They would grow up free of that numbing
pressure; they would have a fresh start.
It had been the grossest self-deception. You cannot put the human mind
in chains. Every culture had tried it, and every culture had failed....
He pulled open a drawer of his desk and put the manuscript into it. A
folded note dropped to the floor as he did so. Cudyk picked it up and
read again:
_You are requested to attend a meeting which will be held at 8
Washington Avenue at 10 hours today. Matters of public policy will be
discussed._
It was not signed; no signature was needed, nor any threatened
alternative to complying with the "request". Cudyk glanced at his
wristwatch, made on Oladi by spidery, many-limbed creatures to whom
an ordinary watch movement was a gross mechanism. The dial showed the
Galactic Standard numerals which corresponded to ten o'clock.
Cudyk stood up wearily and walked out past the carved screen. He said
to Nick, "I'll be back in an hour or so."
Eight Washington Avenue was The Little Bear, half a block from the
corner where he had first met Harkway, a block and a half from the
spot where Harkway's corpse had been left in a doorway. Two more
associations, Cudyk thought. After twenty-five years, there were so
many that he could not move a foot in the Quarter, glance at a window
or a wall, without encountering one of them. And this was another thing
to remember about a ghetto: you were crowded not only in space but in
time. The living were the most transient inhabitants of the Quarter.
* * * * *
Cudyk stepped through the open door of The Little Bear, saw the tables
empty and the floor bare. The bartender, Piljurovich, jerked his thumb
toward the stairs. "You're late," he said in Russian. "Better hurry."
Cudyk climbed the stairs to the huge second-floor dining hall, where
the Russians and Poles held their periodic revels. The room was packed
tight with a silent mass of men. At the far end, Rack sat on a chair
placed on a table. He stopped in mid-sentence, stared coldly at Cudyk,
and then went on.
"--or against me. From now on, there won't be any more neutrals. I want
you to understand this clearly. For one thing, your lives may depend on
it."
He paused, glancing around the room. "By now you all know that James
Harkway was executed last night. His crime was treason against the
human race. There are some of you here who have been, or will be,
guilty of the same crime. To them I have nothing more to say. To the
others, those who have considered themselves neutral, I say this:
First, New Earth needs all of you and has earned your allegiance.
Second, those of you who remain on an enemy planet in spite of this
warning will not live to regret it if that planet is selected for
attack.
"You have two months to make up your minds and to close your affairs.
At the end of that time, a New Earth transport will call here to take
off those who decide to go. It will be the last New Earth ship, and I
warn you that you had better not count on Galactic transportation after
that date."