Danton shouted, "Keith! Don't do it. Don't tell them anything. You
don't realize what they are!"
"It doesn't matter," Keith said, "what they are. I've been on the wrong
side. Maybe I was always an Oligarch, and it's probably the same with
you, only you're just too stupid to admit it. You think I want to go
back to Earth, even if we had a chance to do it, which we'll never
have? I hate Earth, and maybe I always have hated it--the way the New
Order remade it! It's sane! Everyone an angel, filled to the hair roots
with the milk of human kindness. We found it no place for us. Weisser
says he'll take me in. I know where I belong!"
* * * * *
Rhone stood up in the car, looking into Danton's face. "It's true then.
The three of you are from Earth. I thought they were planning a culture
down there that couldn't possibly be aggressive. How could they have
sent you?"
Danton's eyes went from face to face, round the immediate area of the
vast chamber. Keith was grinning thinly, watching him narrowly. This
was it, and there seemed nothing to do but to go down fighting in the
classic vein. A futile gesture, but what else?
He said, "It was done in secret. Only we three and one other knew
about the flight." Tell the truth. It might keep them from invading
Earth for a while. If they thought Earth had an army they would strike
before Earth grew any stronger. The truth might keep them quiescent
for a while longer. "The new social system there, it has no conception
of warfare or violence. You wouldn't understand it. And they wouldn't
understand you, not now."
"You used our ship to get here," she said. "That would indicate that
you have no ships of your own there?"
Danton nodded. Keith laughed, a thin high laughter. He moved toward
Rhone. He dropped to one knee and raised his hands to her. "They have
no armaments, no ships. Psychologically they have no power to resist.
Weisser said I could become one of you."
Danton pushed Rhone from the car. He shoved the control lever and the
car whirled violently, slammed into the foremost Oligarch guard, sent
him spinning across the metal floor. The car swerved again, struck down
the other guard. Danton jumped free, ripped the weapon from the man's
waist. The guard was groaning and his hands were sliding about vaguely
over the floor.
The hand-gun was familiar. It was similar to the flash-guns used by the
guards on Earth a century before; there would have been no need to have
altered that weapon.
Keith ran at him, kicked out, and Danton fired. Keith went to his knees
and looked at Danton dully and then fell forward. He rolled over and
lay there, grinning blankly at nothing at all.
Deliberately, without feeling anything, Danton burned the life out of
the two Oligarchs who had lain stunned where they fell. As he spun
back, the woman stood stiffly almost up against him. He had expected
her to attempt to run away.
She said softly, "I know what it is now. It's because you're human.
It's human to grow older. It's human to die. Maybe we have the wrong
idea, or maybe we've approached it wrong, I don't know. It doesn't
matter now. I--"
He pressed the flash-gun toward her. She didn't seem to notice the
gun. She continued to look at his face, into his eyes, searching, for
something he couldn't tell what, and he didn't care.
"Did you know you have gray eyes," she whispered, "and that they
deepen, get darker and darker?"
"No."
"No. No one ever told you."
Mara had told him. He barely remembered that time when she had told him.
She put her slightly opened mouth against his lips and pulled him
closer.
He pulled the trigger. Her body quivered as though from the kiss, and
then he stepped away and she fell at his feet. He wasn't thinking now.
There was no time for that. He lifted her, carried her toward one of
the refrigerated banks. Her skin had turned a mottled ugly color and
her eyes were open and rigid. Quite suddenly her eyes moved up into her
head, and ugly groups of purple little veins appeared underneath the
skin.
He put her on the frosty floor of the huge bank. Around her, like some
hideous garnishing, were eyes that looked at her accusingly. He dragged
the two Oligarch guards and Keith's corpse into another bank, slammed
the heavy door. Van Ness groaned and Danton lifted him into the car.
"I can't see," Van Ness whispered. "I can't see. I'm dying."
"Hang on," Danton said. "Only fifty Oligarchs, understand, Van? Forty
seven now. Maybe less if those seven I shot down in the pit didn't all
recover. Maybe we can get some more of them, Van!"
"I'm dying," Van Ness whispered. "I can't see."
* * * * *
Danton tooled the car. As he approached doors in the long tubular
halls, the doors opened automatically, closed again behind. There were
turns, drops, risings, more doors, other halls.
He stopped the car. Lost, alone, somewhere. Only fifty of them--no,
forty-seven now at most. They wouldn't have too large a structure here.
Somewhere there would have to be a central power source. If he could
find such a power unit, strike at the heart--
He shook Van Ness. He felt for the heart. It was still beating. Van
Ness moaned, "I'm dying. If I could see--"
"Do you know what I'm saying, Van? Can you hear me?"
"Yes ... sure I can hear you."
"Listen to me. We're in the Oligarch's fortress. I don't know how big
it is. But it seems to be one unified structure. There has to be a
central power source here. You were an engineering expert. Where would
it be? Van, listen. There are only a handful of Oligarchs here now. We
stand a slim chance...."
"But I can't see--"
"I can see."
"Yes--a central power source. I remember the words to an old song,
Captain. You know, soldiering used to be a great sport. There was one
about a chocolate soldier with a uniform so pretty...."
"_Van Ness!_"
"Yes."
"Where would they build that central power room? Up? Down?"
"Down."
He started the car moving. Oddly curving and angling corridors bending
with geometrical precision. He saw an elevator door and he pressed
the button; the door opened and he drove the car into it. Down, fast,
sickeningly fast.
"Bottom ... clear down," Van Ness mumbled. "Start from there. I can't
see--"
Danton kept the elevator dropping and then it stopped. He hadn't
stopped it.
He stepped to the side as the door slid open. He hit the entering
Oligarch, hit him with a short hard blow in the solar plexus and when
the man gasped and bent forward, Danton brought his knee up. Bone and
cartilage crunched. The man slewed to one side, and Danton hit him
again and the man smashed into the wall and slid down toward the floor.
"I can't see," Van Ness said. "But what I hear has a sweet sound."
Danton dragged the Oligarch up, held him against the wall. The man
sagged and lifted his hands to protect his face. His lips were torn,
his nose bleeding. He stared dazedly at Danton, his eyes filled with
terror, shock.
"Wha--" he started to say something. Danton pushed his flash-gun into
the man's middle. And the Oligarch screamed. Danton's voice chopped
into the scream.
"I'm going to kill you," Danton said. "Unless you tell me what I want
to know. Tell me where the power rooms are, the central power units."
The man shook his head, no.
Danton moved the gun around, pressed the stud. Burning flesh, and
the Oligarch jerked away and fell twitching on the floor, his left
leg charred from the knee down. He sat and stared at the leg, and he
started whimpering. He reached down with his fingers, then drew them
back again.
"Tell me," Danton said. "Or what's left of you, even the body parts
from your banks won't put back together again."
The Oligarch murmured, and he had changed his mind.
* * * * *
The Oligarch led them into the gigantic room, then collapsed. Danton
killed him where he lay. Danton recognized some of the equipment,
though he was no nucleonics or electronics expert as Van Ness had been.
"Listen to this, Van. Listen to me!"
"Yes...."
Danton told what he saw. He was Van Ness' eyes. The generators,
huge oscilloscopes, vacuumtube voltimeters, electronic power-supply
panels, rolls and skeins of hook-up wire, shielding of every color,
size and shape, panel plates, huge racks of glowing tubes, elaborate
transceivers, long solid surfaces of gleaming bakelite, color-indexed
files of resistors and capacitances....
Van Ness told Danton what to do. Van Ness took a long time to say
a few words, and after that he didn't seem to be able to say
anything else. He didn't move either. Danton released the force of
the flash-gun, left the gun in the position Van Ness had indicated,
its beam burning deep into the heart of the complicated soul of the
Oligarch fortress.
He would have taken Van Ness with him, but Van Ness wasn't interested
anymore. He was dead. Danton left him. He would remember Van Ness alive
as long as he was capable of remembering anything. Van Ness as clay he
had already forgotten.
He ran toward the elevator. As it whirred upward, he felt the
reverberation, the trembling, the beginnings of a low deadly murmuring.
The elevator continued to rise smoothly, carrying Danton and the car,
but Danton felt a giddy swaying like that of an earthquake.
A social system strictly of the top-down variety. But in the final
analysis, the top wasn't the mind of Rhone or of Weisser. It was
something above both of them, above the Oligarchs. Machines. And above
the machines, generators and switches and volts and tubes.
The electronic interdependence was going insane within the fortress,
like the intricate cellular structure of a mind within a skull.
In a hall somewhere in a catacomb of metal, Danton sat in the car,
wondering which way to go, wondering if it would make any difference
now, feeling the fortress above, below, all around him, breaking apart.
What about the Oligarch spaceships? Perhaps they were someplace else,
away from here, and they would survive the destruction of the fortress.
And maybe one or two or three Oligarchs would also survive. Even one
ship, one Oligarch, returning to Earth, would be one too many.
He was looking at the far door as it slid open and a car sped through,
skimming along the polished metal floor frantically, desperately.
The occupant of the car, a woman, took no notice of Danton. Her face
was damp and pale with fear as her car sped past. Her machines were
forsaking her. Her efficiency, her gadgets and the tremendous power
that had existed for so long at her fingertips, were disintegrating,
and she appeared to be disintegrating with them.
She would be intent only on escape, of course, not realizing that
without her machines, she was doomed. But she might find a temporary
escape from the death around her, the metal walls of the gigantic
coffin.
Van Ness was gone. And Keith--convinced that soldiering was an end in
itself, rather than a means to an end--had found the inevitable end for
a soldier.
Danton wondered about that. He knew one thing--that the test was yet to
come for him. He was not sure yet that Keith had not been right....
He followed the woman through a door into a chamber. It was a nice
room, Danton thought. A great deal of pleasure had drifted through
this room, and in it, time had probably never meant anything. Perfumed
incense. Music, drifting, still rising from somewhere, pneumatic
couches--but underneath something was cracking open, veins and arteries
of power choking, blocked off; but the power had to go somewhere;
short-circuit, the madness of a great machine-mind.
The woman had opened a panel, and beyond her, Danton could see the
Martian afternoon. He had never seen a Martian afternoon before. It was
beautiful, he thought, though he was hardly in a position to study or
appreciate it properly. Then he saw what she was doing--the woman was
escaping out the panel. There must be some way she was planning to get
safely to the ground outside. It seemed to be a long way down.
But she wasn't worried about that.
She jumped. She looked back at Danton, her face pale and twisted, then
she jumped. Danton ran, looked out. He looked out just in time to see
her body hit. It was too far down for anyone to go that way. Her body
bounced a little.
* * * * *
Insane, Danton thought. They had each become such component parts of
the bigger machine that very likely they were all going crazy now,
right along with the machine. And the machine wasn't going to last much
longer either, insane or otherwise. It was beginning to quiver, to
shake and shudder, and its metal skin was beginning to groan and twist.
Its metal joints were grinding together, its skein nerves wrenching and
singing.
Danton looked around hurriedly. He saw the wires again, everything
suspended by wires, shiny and strong. He gave a heavy table
slab--legless, of course, a suspended disc of metal--he gave it a
tremendous shove and it began to swing to and fro; it made a heavy
pendulum, swinging wider and wider, and it began to crash into other
suspended things, into chairs and into weird sculpture, crashing
through structural images and distorted faces of metal. It made a sound
like off-key bells bonging and clanging.
Wires finally snapped with a whine and Danton felt the hot sharpness
as a strand cut across his arm, sinking in like the slash of a knife.
He pushed the table slab to the wall, against the window. He managed
to get several strands of the wire tied together by complicated knot
designs. He yanked down an ornamental drape that seemed to have a
swirling life of its own, made sheaths for his hands from finely-woven
metallic-cloth, and looped the wire three times around the metal
sheathing.
He slid down toward the ground. It was further down than it had seemed
from above. The wind was high and cold and strong. He began to sway
dangerously and the wind threatened to tear him from the wire.
He glanced upward. The structure of the Oligarchs was huge, a shining
silver metal thing of coldness rising up out of bare rocks. It was
built on the side of a cliff, very high, and very far below was a
valley. Perhaps it was the valley in which he had landed ... no, that
must have been far away from here. He saw no lake. But, of course, the
valley itself stretched windingly away further than he could see.
He ran out of wire. He managed to lift his weight with one arm enough
to unwrap the wire coils from the other. That gave him another three
feet. He dropped. Pain came from a wrenched ankle and the shock of the
weight on his bones. But he hit running and he kept on running.
For somehow, though he had killed her, she was alive.
Just before dropping he had seen her, running away from the Oligarch
tower. Running along a steel walkway. A fine-mesh railing separated the
walkway from a sheer drop of at least a thousand feet. It was Rhone.
She was running fast, too. Very fast.
He ran hard. He didn't feel the pain in his ankle. He couldn't afford
to feel anything now except urgency. The cold thin air burned.
She stopped and he stopped too, flattening against the hard
rust-colored rock. She was pushing a lever or something; whatever it
was it got results. A silver nose projected outward from the cliff,
slanting slightly upward; it blossomed out as though someone were
blowing a silver bubble from stone. Out and out. It stopped.
It was a spaceship, all right. Danton figured that the power shut-off
had prevented her from reaching the ship from a subterranean route.
Evidently rigged for such an emergency, the wall of the cliff could
also summon the ship out into the open, prepare it for blasting off
from a cradle cut down into the cliff like a giant cannon barrel.
When the outer door in the side of the ship opened, Rhone ran for it.
Danton was right behind her. She heard him just as she went through and
into the air-lock. She turned, her mouth opened, and then he struck her
with his shoulder, carried her on through the inner air-lock door and
into the tubular corridor leading forward into the control room.
He dragged her forward with him as the doors closed behind him. The
controls were the same in principle as those of the ship he had brought
from Earth. Once set, they were automatic. He strapped Rhone in the
shock-seat at the side. He strapped himself into the chair before the
control panel....
* * * * *
Seers, Secretary of Social Security, was a fat man with a serious round
slate-gray face. He looked at Danton thoughtfully, waited. Outside the
office of Sociology Section in New World Square, the sky was a soft and
promising blue.