She shook her head. “I don’t think I would care for it,” she said gently, but with clear finality. He dropped the subject.
He was surprised when it became dark. “I suppose we should hurry on to the lodge,” he said.
“The lodge is closed.” That was true, he remembered. The Park was closed; they were not supposed to be there. He started to ask her if she had a skycar there, or had she come up through the tunnel, but checked himself. Either way, she would be leaving him. He did not want that; he himself was not pressed for time—his forty-eight hours would not be up until the morrow. “I saw some cabins as I came this way,” he suggested.
They found them, nestling half hidden in a hollow. They were unfurnished and quite evidently out of service, but strong and weather tight. He rummaged around in the cupboards and found a little glow-heater with more than enough charge showing on its dial for their needs. Water there was, but no food. It did not matter.
There were not even cushion beds available, but the floor was warm and clean. She lay down, seemed to nestle out a bed in the floor as an animal might, said, “Good night,” and closed her eyes. He believed that she went to sleep at once.
He expected to find it hard to get to sleep, but he fell asleep before he had time to worry about it.
When he awoke it was with a sense of well-being such as he had not enjoyed in many days—months. He did not attempt to analyze it at once, but simply savored it, wallowed in it, stretching luxuriously while his soul fitted itself, catlike, back into its leasehold.
Then he caught sight of her face, across the cabin floor, and knew why he felt cheerful. She was still asleep, her head cradled on the curve of her arm. Bright sun flooded in through the window and illuminated her face. It was, he decided, not necessarily a beautiful face, although he could find no fault with it. Its charm lay more in a childlike quality, a look of fresh wonder, as if she greeted each new experience as truly new and wholly delightful—so different, he thought, from the jaundiced melancholy he had suffered from.
Had suffered from. For he realized that her enthusiasm was infectious, that he had caught it, and that he owed his present warm elation to her presence.
He decided not to wake her. He had much to think of, anyhow, before he was ready to talk with another. He saw now that his troubles of yesterday had been sheer funk. McFee was a careful commander; if McFee saw fit to leave him off the firing line, he should not complain or question. The Whole was greater than the parts. McFee’s decision was probably inspired by Felix, anyhow—from the best of intentions.
Good old Felix! Misguided, but a good sort anyhow. He would have to see if he couldn’t intercede for Hamilton, in the reconstruction. They could not afford to hold grudges—the New Order had no place for small personal emotions. Logic and science.
There would be much to be done and he could still be useful. The next phase started today—rounding up control naturals, giving them their choice of two humane alternatives. Questioning public officials of every sort and determining whether or not they were temperamentally suited to continue to serve under the New Order. Oh, there was much to be done—he wondered why he had felt yesterday that there was no place for him.
Had he been as skilled in psychologies as he was in mathematics he might possibly have recognized his own pattern for what it was—religious enthusiasm, the desire to be a part of a greater whole and to surrender one’s own little worries to the keeping of an over-being. He had been told, no doubt, in his early instruction, that revolutionary political movements and crusading religions were the same type-form process, differing only in verbal tags and creeds, but he had never experienced either one before. In consequence, he failed to recognize what had happened to him. Religious frenzy? What nonsense—he believed himself to be an extremely hard-headed agnostic.
She opened her eyes, saw him and smiled, without moving. “Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” he agreed. “I neglected to ask your name yesterday.”
“My name is Marion,” she answered. “What is yours?”
“I am Monroe-Alpha Clifford.”
“‘Monroe-Alpha,’” she mused. “That’s a good line, Clifford. I suppose you—” She got no further with her remark; her expression was suddenly surprised; she made two gasping quick intakes of breath, buried her face in her hands, and sneezed convulsively.
Monroe-Alpha sat up abruptly, at once alert and no longer happy. She? Impossible!
But he faced the first test of his new-found resolution firmly. It was going to be damned unpleasant, he realized, but he had to do it. The Whole is greater than the parts.
He even derived unadmitted melancholy satisfaction from the realization that he could do his duty, no matter how painful. “You sneezed,” he said accusingly.
“It was nothing,” she said hastily. “Dust—dust and the sunshine.”
“Your voice is thick. Your nose is stopped up. Tell me the truth. You’re a ‘natural’—aren’t you?”
“You don’t understand,” she protested. “I’m a—oh, dear!” She sneezed twice in rapid succession, then left her head bowed.
Monroe-Alpha bit his lip. “I hate this as much as you do,” he said, “but I’m bound to assume that you are a control natural until you prove the contrary.”
“Why?”
“I tried to explain to you yesterday. I’ve got to take you in to the Provisional Committee—what I was talking about is already an established fact.”
She did not answer him. She just looked. It made him still more uncomfortable. “Come now,” he said. “No need to be tragic about it. You won’t have to enter the stasis. A simple, painless operation that leaves you unchanged—no disturbance of your endocrine balance at all. Besides, there may be no need for it. Let me see your tattoo.”
Still she did not answer. He drew his gun and levelled it at her. “Don’t trifle with me. I mean it.” He lowered his sights and pinged the floor just in front of her. She flinched back from the burnt wood and the little puff of smoke. “If you force me, I’ll burn you. I’m not joking. Let me see your tattoo.”
When still she made no move, he got up, went to her, grabbed her roughly by the arm, dragging her to her feet. “Let’s see your tattoo.”
She hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders. “All right…but you’ll be sorry.” She lifted her left arm. As he lowered his head to read the figures tattooed near the arm pit she brought her hand down sharply near the wrist joint of his right hand. At the same instant her right fist made a painful surprise in the pit of his stomach.
He dropped his gun.
He dived after the gun before it had clattered to a stop and was up after her. But she was already gone. The cabin door stood open, framing a picture of sugar pines and redwoods, but no human figure. A bluejay cursed and made a flicker of blue; nothing else moved.
Monroe-Alpha leaped to the door and looked both ways, covering the same arc with his weapon, but the Giant Forest had swallowed her. She was somewhere close at hand, of course; her flight had disturbed the jay. But where? Behind which of fifty trees? Had there been snow on the ground he would have known, but the snow had vanished, except for bedraggled hollows, and the pine needles carpet of an evergreen forest left no tracks perceptible to his untrained eye—nor was it cluttered with undergrowth to impede and disclose her flight.
He cast around uncertainly like a puzzled hound. He caught a movement from the corner of his eye, turned, saw a flash of white, and fired instantly.
He had hit—that was sure. His target had fallen behind a baby pine which blocked his view, thrashed once, and was quiet. He went toward the little tree with reluctant steps, intending to finish her off mercifully, if, by chance, his first bolt had merely mutilated her.
It was not she, but a mule deer fawn. His charge had burnt away half the rump and penetrated far up into the vitals. The movement he had seen and heard could have been no more than dying reflex. Its eyes were wide open, deer soft, and seemed to him to be filled
with gentle reproach. He turned away at once, feeling a little sick. It was the first non-human animal he had ever killed.
He spent only a few minutes more searching for her. His sense of duty he quieted by telling himself that she stood no chance of getting away here in a mountain forest anyhow, infected, as he knew her to be, with a respiratory ailment. She would have to give up and turn herself in.
Monroe-Alpha did not return to the cabin. He had left nothing there, and he assumed that the little glow-heater which had kept them warm through the night was equipped with automatic cut-off. If not, no matter—it did not occur to him to weigh his personal convenience against the waste involved. He went at once to the parking lot underground where he found his runabout, climbed in, and started its impeller. There was an immediate automatic response from the Park’s traffic signal system, evidenced by glowing letters on the runabout’s annunciator: NO CRUISING OVER GIANT FOREST—ANGEL THREE THOUSAND AND SCRAMBLE. He obeyed without realizing it; his mind was not on the conning of the little car.
His mind was not on anything in particular. The lethargy, the bitter melancholy, which had enervated him before the beginning of the Readjustment, descended on him with renewed force. For what good? To what purpose was this blind senseless struggle to stay alive, to breed, to fight? He drove the little capsule as fast as its impeller would shove it straight for the face of Mount Whitney, with an unreasoned half-conscious intention of making an ending there and then.
But the runabout was not built to crash. With the increase in speed the co-pilot extended the range of its feelers; the klystrons informed the tracker; solenoids chattered briefly and the car angled over the peak.
CHAPTER NINE
“When we die, do we die all over?”
AS HE turned his back on the lifting runabout into which he had shanghaied Monroe-Alpha, Hamilton dismissed his friend from his mind—much to do and damned little time. Hurry!
He was surprised and not pleased to find that the door giving down into the building from the roof responded at once to the code used by the Clinic staff—a combination Mordan had given him. Nor were there guards beyond that door. Why, the place might as well be wide open!
He burst into Mordan’s office with the fact on his mind. “This place is as unprotected as a church,” he snapped. “What’s the idea?” He looked around. In addition to Mordan the room contained Bainbridge Martha, his chief of technical staff, and Longcourt Phyllis. His surprise at her presence was reinforced by annoyance at seeing she was armed.
“Good evening, Felix,” Mordan answered mildly. “Why should it be protected?”
“Good grief! Aren’t you going to resist attack?”
“But,” Mordan pointed out, “there is no reason to expect attack. This is not a strategic point. No doubt they plan to take the Clinic over later but the fighting will be elsewhere.”
“That’s what you think. I know better.”
“Yes?”
“I was assigned to come here to kill you. A section follows me to seize the Clinic.”
Mordan made no comment. He sat still, face impassive. Hamilton started to speak; Mordan checked him with a raised hand and said, “There are only three other men in the building beside ourselves. None of them are gunmen. How much time have we?”
“Ten minutes—or less.”
“I’ll inform the central peace station. They may be able to divert a few reserve monitors. Martha, send the staff home.” He turned to the telephone.
The lighting flickered sharply, was replaced at once by a lesser illumination. The emergency lighting had cut in. No one needed to be told that Power Central was out. Mordan continued to the phone—it was dead.
“The building cannot be held by two guns,” he observed, as if thinking aloud. “Nor is it necessary. But there is just one point necessary to protect—the plasm bank. Our friends are not completely stupid, but it is still bad strategy. They forget that a trapped animal will gnaw off a leg. Come, Felix. We must attempt it.”
The significance of the attack on the Clinic raced through Hamilton’s mind. The plasm bank. The one here in the Capital’s clinic was repository of the plasm of genius for the past two centuries. If the rebels captured it, even if they did not win, they would have a unique and irreplaceable hostage. At the worst they could exchange it for their lives.
“What do you mean, ‘two guns’?” demanded Longcourt Phyllis. “What about this?” She slapped her belt.
“I daren’t risk you.” Mordan answered. “You know why.”
Their eyes locked for a moment. She answered with two words. “Fleming Marjorie.”
“Hmm… I see your point. Very well.”
“What is she doing here, anyhow?” demanded Hamilton. “And who is Fleming Marjorie?”
“She came here to talk with me—about you. Fleming Marjorie is another fifth cousin of yours. Quite a good chart. Come!” He started away briskly.
Hamilton hurried after him, thinking furiously. The significance of Mordan’s last remarks broke on him with a slightly delayed action. When he understood he was considerably annoyed, but there was no time to talk about it. He avoided looking at Phyllis.
Bainbridge Martha joined them as they were leaving the room. “One of the girls is passing the word,” she informed Mordan.
“Good,” he answered without pausing.
The plasm bank stood by itself in the middle of a large room, a room three stories high and broad in proportion. The bank itself was arranged in library-like tiers. A platform divided it halfway up, from which technicians could reach the cells in the upper level.
Mordan went directly to the flight of stairs in the center of the mass and climbed to the platform. “Phyllis and I will cover the two front doors,” he directed. “Felix, you will cover the rear door.”
“What about me?” asked his chief of staff.
“You, Martha? You’re not a gunman.”
“There’s another gun,” she declared pointing at Hamilton’s belt. Hamilton glanced down, puzzled. She was right. He had stuffed the gun he had taken from Monroe-Alpha under his belt. He handed it to her.
“Do you know how to use it?” asked Mordan.
“It will burn where I point it, won’t it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all I want to know.”
“Very well. Phyllis, you and Martha cover the back door. Felix and I will take a front door apiece.”
The balcony platform was surrounded by a railing waist high and not quite one solid piece, for it was pierced here and there with small openings—part of an ornamental design. The plan was quite simple—crouch behind the railing, spy out the doors through the openings and use them as loopholes through which to fire.
They waited.
Hamilton got out a cigaret, stuck it in his mouth and inhaled it into burning, without taking his eyes off the lefthand door. He offered the case to Mordan, who pushed it away.
“Claude, there’s one thing I can’t figure out…”
“So?”
“Why in the world didn’t the government bust this up before it had gone so far? I gather that I wasn’t the only stoolie in the set-up. Why didn’t you smear it?”
“I am not the government,” Mordan answered carefully, “nor am I on the Board of Policy. I might venture an opinion.”
“Let’s have it.”
“The only certain way to get all of the conspirators was to wait until they showed themselves. Nor will it be necessary to try them—an unsatisfactory process at best. This way they will be exterminated to the last man.”
Hamilton thought about it. “It does not seem to me that the policy makers are justified in risking the whole state by delaying.”
“Policy makers take a long view of things. Biologically it is better to make sure that the purge is clean. But the issue was never in doubt, Felix.”
“How can you be sure? We’re in a sweet spot now, as a result of waiting.”
“You and I are in jeopardy, to be sure. But
the society will live. It may take a little time for the monitors to recruit enough militia to subdue them in any key points they may have seized, but the outcome is certain.”
“Damnation,” complained Hamilton. “It shouldn’t be necessary to wait to stir up volunteers among the citizens. The police force should be large enough.”
“No,” said Mordan. “No, I don’t think so. The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom. That’s a personal evaluation, of course.”
“But suppose they don’t? Suppose these rats win? It’s the Policy Board’s fault.”
Mordan shrugged. “If the rebellion is successful, notwithstanding an armed citizenry, then it has justified itself—biologically. By the way, be a little slow in shooting, if the first man comes through your door.”
“Why?”
“Your weapon is noisy. If he is alone, we’ll gain a short delay.”
They waited. Hamilton was beginning to think that his timepiece had stopped, until he realized that his first cigaret was still burning. He glanced quickly back to his door, and said, “Psst!” to Mordan, and shifted his watching to the other door.
The man entered cautiously, weapon high. Mordan led him with his gunsight until he was well inside and had stepped out of direct line of sight of the door. Then he let him have it, neatly, in the head. Felix glanced at him, and noticed that it was a man he had had a drink with earlier in the evening.
The next two came in a pair. Mordan motioned for him not to shoot. He was not able to wait so long this time; they saw the body as soon as they were in the doorway. Hamilton noted with admiration that he was unable to tell which one had been shot first. They seemed to drop simultaneously.
“You need not honor my fire the next time,” Mordan remarked. “The element of surprise will be lacking.” Over his shoulder he called, “First blood, ladies. Anything doing there?”