each woman was vulnerable to the sincerity of the song,
the vibrant emotion of it. While his voice and hammer
were in harness Neq the Glockenspiel was potent even in
the face of their unified distrust.
I'd hammer out love
between all my brothers
all over this land!
He finished that song, and sang another, and then an-
other. It was as though he were marching out of the
haunted forest again, and in a way he was, for there was
nothing but song to do the job that had to be done. Vara
began harmonizing with him, the way Neqa'tad done
long ago, and slowly the others formed into a circle about
him, compelled to echo the words.
He sang. The very room wavered and flowed, shaping
itself into an ugly badlands mountainside girt by tangled
metal palisades, irregular stone battlements, a tunnel
under the awful mountain, a vast cavern filled with ashes.
Helicon formed, and Helicon's promise infused the group.
From death came life—the mountain of death that meant
life for the finest elements in man. The dream became
tangible, thrilling, eternal; a force that no living man
could deny.
At last he stopped. They were his, now, he knew. His
dream had met their caution and prevailed, however il-
logically. Helicon would live again.
Then he saw the vine-box. Jimi had covered it, so that
the flowers had opened in their darkness, and the nar-
cotic had seeped into the room while Neq was singing.
Tyi must have seen it happen, and let it be, for Tyi was
gone.
Fifty strong, they unloaded at devastated Helicon. The
mountain appeared much the same from the outside—a
looming, forbidding mound of refuse.
"We shall not need to kill in Helicon's defense," Neq
said. "We will accept those who climb to the snow line. If
they are unsuitable, we will send them far away. No one
who comes to us must be allowed to return to the nomad
world."
The others nodded. They all knew the mischief such
returns had made in the past. Had Helicon truly kept to
itself, instead of dabbling in nomad politics, the original
society of the crazy demesnes would have survived un-
broken. It had been a lesson—one that Neq himself had
learned most harshly of all.
The nomads were the real future of mankind. The
crazies were only caretakers, preserving what they could
of the civilization the nomads would one day draw upon.
Helicon was the supplier for the crazies. But Helicon and
the crazies could not make the civilization themselves, for
that would be identical to the system of the past.
The past that had made the Blast. The most colossal
failure in man's history.
Yet by the same token the nomads had to be prevented
from assuming command of Helicon, either to destroy it
or to absorb its technology directly. There must not be a
forced choice between barbarism and the Blast. The care-
taker order had to be maintained for centuries, perhaps
millennia, until the nomads, in their own time, outgrew it.
Then the new order would truly prevail, shed of the liabili-
ties of the old.
That, at least, was Dr. Jones' theory. Neq only knew
that they had a job to do. Perhaps the others understood
it better than he did, for even the scattered children in
the group were subdued.
"To many of you, the interior will be strange," Neq
said. "Think of it as a larger crazy building, gutted at the
moment but about to be restored by our effort. Each
person will have his area of responsibility. Dick the Sur-
geon will be in charge of group health, as he was before;
he will check the perimeters with the radiation counter—
the crazy click-box—and set the limits of safety by post-
ing wamers. Only with his permission—and mine—will
anyone go beyond these. The mountain is a badlands; the
kill-spirits still lurk.
"Jim the Gun will be in charge of mechanical opera-
tions; restoring electric power, making the machinery func-
tional. Most of us will work under his direction for as long
as it takes. A year, perhaps. Without the machinery
Helicon can not live; it will bring in air and water and
keep the temperature even and make our night and day.
Some of you are—were—crazies; you know more about
electricity than Jim does. He's in charge because he's a
leader and you are not. Had there been leadership among
the crazies, Helicon might never have fallen, and would
certainly have been rebuilt before this."
They nodded somberly. Leaders existed among the
nomads, but the crazies didn't operate the same way. In
time the new Helicon would amalgamate its disparate ele-
ments and rear its own leaders and technicians and be a
complete society in itself. Right now everything had to be
makeshift.
Neq continued announcing assignments while the others
stared at the mountain. Cooking, explorations, foraging,
supply, cleanup—he had worked this out carefully in
consultation with literate crazy advisers during the truck
journey here, and he wanted each person to know his
place in the scheme as he viewed the interior for the first
time. He put Vara in charge of defense, for the time being:
-he would cultivate the vines, and clear rooms for the
flowers to occupy, and set up an effective system of Lights
and vents so that no one could penetrate Helicon by
stealth without passing through that narcotic atmosphere.
The mountain would never be taken by storm! Sola was
in charge of boarding; she had to assign a private room to
each man, and provide for some recreational facilities.
"What about rooms for the women?" someone asked.
"We have no rooms," Sola said. "We will share with the
men—a different room each night on strict rotation. That
is the way it has to be, since we have only eight women
within the nubile range, and forty men. There is no mar-
riage here, and bracelets are only sentiment. You all knew
that before you enlisted."
Then Vara described the history of Helicon, for the
majority of this group was aware of only portions of it.
She told how the Ancients, who had been like crazies with
nomad passions, had filled the world with people they
could not feed and had built machines whose action they
could not control, and had finally blown themselves up in
desperation. That was the Blast—the holocaust that had
created the contemporary landscape.
Not all the people had died at once. More were killed
by radiation than in the physical blast—actually a massive
series of blasts—and that had taken time. There were
desperation efforts to salvage civilization, most of which
came to nothing. But one group in America assembled an
army of construction equipment and bulldozed a moun-
tain from the refuse of one of the former cities. It was
/> the largest structure ever made by man, and probably the
ugliest—but within its depths, shielded from further fall-
out, was the complex of Helicon: an enclave of preserved
civilization and technology. Only a tiny portion of this
labyrinth was residential. A larger section consisted of
workshops and hydroponics, and one wing contained the
atomic pile that generated virtually unlimited power.
"Dr. Jones assures us that's still functional," Vara said.
"It's completely automatic, designed to operate for cen-
turies. It made the first century, anyway. All we have to
do is reconnect the wiring at our end." '"
The name Helicon had been borrowed from a myth of
the Ancients: it was the mountain home of the muses,
who were the nine daughters of the gods Zeus and
Mnemosyne, and were themselves the goddesses of memory
and art and science. Poetry, history, tragedy, song—it all
reflected the spirit of Helicon as originally conceived. The
virtues of civilization were to have been remembered here.
But Helicon had lacked self-sufficience in one vital re-
spect: personnel. The people who first stocked it had been
the elite of the devastated world: the scientists, the highly
skilled technicians, the ranking professionals. Most were
men, and most were not young. The few women, children
of the elite, could hardly replenish the enclave in a genera-
tion without dangerous inbreeding—and they had sub-
stantial scruples about'trying.
So it was necessary to allow limited immigration from
the outside world. The prospect was appalling to the
founders, for it meant admitting the very barbarians that
Helicon was on guard against, but they had no choice.
Without enough children to educate in the traditions and
technology of civilization. Helicon would slowly die.
They were fortunate, for some elements of civilization
had Survived outside. People who later came to be known
as the "crazies" because their idealistic mode of operation
made no sense to the majority, were quick to appreciate
the potential benefits of collaboration. They provided some
new blood for Helicon, and pointed out that many bar-
barians could be safely recruited if they were made to
understand that there was absolutely no return. Thus Heli-
con became the mountain of death—an honorable demise
for those with courage. And regular, secret trade was
instituted, with Helicon adapting a portion of its enormous
technical resources to the manufacture of tools and ma-
chinery, while the crazies provided wood and surface
produce that was much preferable to the hydroponic food
turned out by less-than-expert chemists.
The crazies' vision turned out to be larger than that of
the founders of Helicon, for the crazies were in touch with
the real world and were necessarily pragmatic about nomad
relations, despite the nomads' opinion. They ordered
weapons from the Helicon machine shops—not modern
ones, but simple nomad implements. Swords and daggers;
clubs and quarterstaffs. They issued these to the nomads
in return for a certain docility: the weapons were to be
used only in formal combat, with noncombatants inviolate,
and no person could be denied personal freedom.
Enforcement was indirect but effective: the crazies cut
off the supply to any regions that failed to conform. Since
the metal weapons were vastly superior to the homemade
ones, the "crazy demesnes" spread rapidly as far as their
supply lines were able to go. Their services expanded to
include medicine and boarding, with hostels being as-
sembled from prefabricated sections produced in Helicon.
There was nothing the crazies could return in direct pay-
ment for Helicon's full-scale help—but the improvement
in the local level of civilization was such that many more
recruits were available for both the crazies and Helicon.
All three parties to this enterprise profited.
But Helicon remained the key. Only there could high-
quality items be mass-produced.
Then Helicon had been destroyed. And the crazy
demesnes had collapsed.
"And ours was the best system in the world," Vara con-
cluded. "There are other Helicons in other parts of the
world, but they were never as good as ours and they don't
have much effect. Var and I discovered that in the years
we traveled. To the north they have guns and electricity,
but they are not nice people. In Asia they have trucks and
ships and buildings, but they—well, for us, our way is best.
So now we are going to rebuild Helicon ..."
Neq took them inside by way of the passage from the
hostel. "This will be our secret," he said. "Converts will
have to try the mountain. But the crazies can't send trucks
up there, so they will bring supplies for trade to this point.
This hostel is seldom used by nomads in the normal course,
since it is an end station, not a travel station."
The tunnel curved into its darkness. The lift is on hostel
power," Neq explained, reminded again of Neqa and her
explanations to him so long ago. "Once we restore Helicon
power . . . but lanterns will do for now." -»
When they were gathered in the storage room, he opened
the panel to reveal the subway tracks. A wheeled cart was
there; he had brought it up when he finished the long
grisly cleanup job. Only a few of the party could ride it
at a time, and it had to be pushed by hand, but it was still
quicker to ferry them this way than to make them all walk.
The nomad converts in particular were nervous about
thesedepths.
When all were assembled on the platform at the other
end, he guided them up the ramp for the grand tour. The
nomads were awed, the crazies impressed, and the Helicon
survivors subdued. Everything was bare and clean—no
doubt quite a contrast to what the former underworlders
remembered.
At the dining hall he paused, feeling a chill himself. He
remembered the way he had left it, after removing the
bodies and cleaning out the charred furniture. He had
stacked the salvageable items in one corner, and had left
a cache of durable staples in the kitchen area.
One of the tables had been moved. Some of his dried
beans had been used. Someone had been here.
Neq concealed his dismay by continuing the tour. "I
don't know the purpose of all the rooms, and certainly
not the equipment," he said. "We'll be drawing heavily
on the experience of those of you who were here before."
Inwardly he was chagrined. He and the crazies had
searched for every possible surviving member of Helicon.
Compared experiences and his body-count suggested that
very few were unaccounted for. Was the intruder from
outside? Most of the tribesmen were terrified of this region,
and would never enter the mountain even if they could
find their way in.
Of course Tyi and h
is army had forced entry here dur-
ing the conquest of the mountain, so those men could
penetrate Helicon again if they chose. But Neq had sealed
over the invasion apertures as well as he could and none
of them seemed to have been reopened, and no damage
had been done.
Someone had come without fear, looked about, had a
bite to eat, and departed. That person could come again.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
"Yes, she is pregnant," Dick the Surgeon said. "I think
under the circumstances she should be excused from, er,
circulation. Our children will be our most important asset
for some time, for they will be raised in the atmosphere
of civilization...."
It was Neq's decision to make, and it would set a
precedent, but he was aware of his own bias. Intellectually
he knew that the women had to be shared; emotionally he
couldn't share Vara. "It's a matter of health," he said.
"That's your department."
So Vara did not circulate. Actually the system had not
been fully implemented yet; people needed time to settle
in to it. There was some problem about the women's
arrangements, for they required more privacy than the
men's rooms provided, sexual aspects aside. Finally they
were assigned rooms of their own, but were expected to
make their rounds on schedule.
If the social system functioned with hesitation, at least
the reconstruction didn't. The restoration of electric power
was much simpler than anticipated. A few cables replaced,
a few circuit-breakers closed, a few fixtures tinkered
with, a few parts substituted, and there was light and heat
and circulating air and sanitary facilities in-^operation.
Helicon had been beautifully designed; they were not
building or even rebuilding it. They were merely imple-
menting a system that had been temporarily interrupted.