"Yes. I think so. I have felt better in my life."
"Do you want to get up? Did you jump or fall?"
Cudyk leaned forward, trying the strength of his thighs to raise him,
and Seu put a hand under his arm to help. "I jumped," Cudyk said. "What
happened, afterward?"
"The mob came down, me in the middle, and I couldn't stop to see if you
were all right. They took Rack with them. He was unconscious then; he
may have been dead."
"And?"
"They tore him apart," said Seu.
They moved toward the exit from the kitchen, Seu holding Cudyk's arm
firmly.
"I don't know if you felt this," the mayor said stiffly, "but the way
it seemed to me was that Rack suddenly represented all of it--not only
the bombings, but the Quarter, the Galaxy, Earth--everything we hated.
It was a feeling of release, a kind of ecstasy. Watch out for the sill."
"Scapegoat," Cudyk said, indistinctly.
"Yes.... Zydh Oran saw it, you know. He was there when the mob came
out. He saw it all. This finishes the Quarter, Laszlo. After this there
won't be any more reprieves."
Cudyk glanced down at Seu's plump fingers. There was a thin film of
blood on the skin, and a dark line of it around each finger-nail.
* * * * *
Cudyk stood at the top of the gentle rise opposite the Washington
Avenue bridge, and looked down at the Quarter. It was just after
sunset, and the ranked street-lights cast a lonesome gleam. The streets
were empty. There was no one left in the Quarter except one man in the
powerhouse. When the time was up, he would pull the switches on the
master board and come out; then the Quarter would be dead.
The Niori edict had come on the Wednesday morning after Rack's death.
They had been given four days to pack their belongings, arrange for
assignment of cargo space, and wind up their several affairs. Cudyk's
stock was small and his personal belongings few; he had been ready two
days ago.
The evening breeze, freshening, pressed Cudyk's trousers against his
calves and stirred the hair at the back of his head. Looking into the
east, he saw a few pallid stars in the sky.
Several hundred people had already been collected by the air-cars which
served the spaceport. Cudyk, Seu, Exarkos and a few others, by unspoken
assent, had taken places at the rear of the crowd, to be the last to go.
He glanced at Seu. The little man was standing with his hands in his
pockets, shoulders slumped, staring dully at the Quarter. He looked up
after a moment, smiled unhappily, and shrugged.
"It's absurd to feel homesick for it, isn't it?" he said. "It was a
ghetto; we had no roots there. It was cramped, and it stank, and we
fought among ourselves more viciously than we ever fought on Earth. But
twenty years ..."
"We could pretend that we had roots, at least," Cudyk answered. "We
don't belong anywhere. Perhaps we'll be happier, in the long run, once
we face that and accept it."
"I doubt it."
"So do I."
To Cudyk's right, Father Exarkos was sitting on his suitcase, hands
relaxed on his thighs. Cudyk said, "If I were a believer, Astereos,
I think it would do me a great deal of good to confess to you and be
absolved."
The priest's dry, friendly voice said, "Why, have you sinned so
terribly, Laszlo?"
"I killed a man," said Cudyk, "but that's not what I mean. I jumped
over a stairway railing and stopped Rack. If it hadn't been for me, he
might have got away. There would have been nothing wrong with that. He
couldn't have done any more harm, one man by himself. The Guards would
have captured him sooner or later, anyhow. And if he had gotten away,
we wouldn't have given the Niori the one more straw they needed. In
that sense, it is my fault that we were expelled."
"No, Laszlo," said Seu.
Exarkos said, "You have nothing for which to reproach yourself, on
that score. You were only the instrument of history, my friend, and a
minor instrument at that. And, speaking for myself, not for the Church,
Rack deserved to die."
Cudyk thought, at least it was quite suitably ironic. Cudyk, the man
of inaction, hurls himself through the air to kill a murderer. And the
citizens of the Quarter are deported, not because one of their race
murdered a billion billion Galactics, but because that same killer was
killed by them.
That was one thin mark on the credit side. There was one more: the
tension was gone, for some of them at least. Now the worst thing that
could happen had happened; the Damocletian thread had snapped. The
problems which had caused the tension no longer existed.
Earth was two months away. Cudyk expected nothing and hoped for
nothing. But the Niori had agreed to set each passenger down wherever
on the globe he chose to go; each man, at least, could choose his own
hell. The crews of the captured battleships, and the captured staff of
the base on New Earth, were also being sent back. The weapon that had
been used on them had done no permanent damage; they would simply have
to be retrained, to learn all over again, as if they were reborn.
Seu was going to North America, where he hoped survival for a fat
cosmopolite would be a little less difficult than in Europe or Asia.
Moskowitz had been born in New York, and was going back there. Exarkos
was going to Istanbul first, for orders; he had no idea where he might
be sent after that. Cudyk had not yet made up his mind. He thought that
perhaps he would go with the priest; if he should change his mind after
landing it would be no great loss; one wilderness, as Exarkos had once
said, was as good as another.
It will all be anticlimax, he thought, and perhaps that is the
definition of Hell: unending anticlimax.
He wondered how it would feel to be Earthbound again. The repatriation
ship was to be the last Galactic vessel which would ever call at Earth.
And there would be a constant guard. The Niori had learned, belatedly
but well. If humanity ever climbed high enough again to reach the
stars with its bloody fingers, the citizens of the galaxy would be
ready.
Cudyk looked at his watch. The man in the powerhouse must be a
sentimentalist; he was waiting until the last possible moment.
He heard the soft hum of the air-car behind him, turned and saw it
settling lightly to the clipped lawn. The remaining passengers were
moving toward it. Exarkos stood up and lifted his suitcase. Cudyk
turned back for one last look at the Quarter. It was full dark now,
and all he could see of it was the blocky, ambiguous outline of its
darkness against the glowing buildings beyond, and the cross-hatched
pattern of yellow street lights.
The lights went out.