by C. L. Moore
He lowered his great bulk to a chair and looked curiously at Hale. Sam said, "First—the Sheffield gang's after me. I can't afford to fight it out right now. Got something really big on the fire. Can you call 'em off?"
"Might manage it," the Slider said. It was a guarantee. The old poison-master was still a top danger in the underworld of the Keeps.
"Thanks." Sam turned in his chair to face the Slider. "Now, the important thing. I need a quick job of sound-track faking."
"That's easy," the Slider assured him, and sniffled.
"And the faces to match."
"That's harder. Whose faces?"
"Zachariah Harker, for one. Any other Harkers or Waltons you've got on file, but Zachariah first."
The Slider stared hard at him, forgetting for the moment even to sniffle. "Harkers?" he demanded. And then chuckled unexpectedly. "Well, guess I can swing it, but it'll cost you. How soon you want the job done?"
Sam told him.
-
Faking a sound-track was an immemorially old gag, almost as old as sound-tracks themselves. It takes only nominal skill to snip out and rearrange already spoken words into new sequences. But only recently had a technique been developed for illicit extensions of the idea. It took a very deft operator, and a highly skilled one, to break down speech-sounds into their basic sibilants and gutturals and build up again a whole new pattern of speech. It was not usually possible to transpose from one language to another because of the different phonetic requirements, but any recorded speech of reasonable length could usually be mined for a large enough number of basic sounds to construct almost any other recorded speech out of its building blocks.
From this it was, of course, only a step to incorporating the speaker visually into the changed speech. The lips that shaped each sound could be stopped in mid-syllable and the pictures transposed with the sounds.
The result was jerky to the ear and eye. There was always a certain amount of reducing and enlarging and adjustment to make the faces from various speeches into a single speech. Some experiments had even been made to produce a missing full-face view, for verisimilitude, by projecting onto a three-dimensional form the two-dimensional images of profile or three-quarter views to blend into the desired face, and photographing that anew. Afterward a high degree of skill was necessary to blend the result into convincing smoothness.
The Slider had access to a technician who knew the job forward and backward. And there were plenty of Harker and Walton records on file. But at best it was a dangerous thing to tamper with and Sam knew it. He had no choice.
It took five hours to talk Robin Hale into the hoax. Sam had to convince him of his own danger first; there were Family agents by now ringing in the building where they hid, so that wasn't too hard. Then he had to convince him of Sam's own trustworthiness, which Sam finally managed by rehearsing his arguments with the straps of a pressure gauge recording his blood-reactions for conscious lies. That took some semantic hedging, for Sam had much to conceal and had to talk around it.
"You and I are as good as dead," he told Hale, with the recording needles holding steady, for this was true enough. "Sure, this trick is dangerous. It's practically suicide. But if I've got to die anyhow, I'd as soon do it taking chances. And it's our only chance, unless you can think of something better. Can you?"
The Immortal couldn't.
-
And so on the evening telecast advance word went out that Robin Hale would make an important announcement about the colony. All through the Keeps, visors were tuned in on the telecast, waiting. What they were really waiting for was a moment when the Harkers and Waltons involved in the faked reel were together and out of the way.
The private lives of the Immortals were never very private, and the Slider had a network of interlocking connections that functioned very efficiently. Hale's influence kept the telecast schedule open and waiting, and presently word came that the Immortals involved were all accounted for.
Then on the great public screens and on countless private ones the driving color-ads gave place to Robin Hale's face. He was dressed for landside, and he spoke his lines with a reluctance and a haste to get it over that gave the words an air of unexpected conviction.
He said he had hoped to tell them in detail of the magnificent idea which his good friend Sam Reed had produced to make full-scale colonizing possible without delay. But trouble landside had just broken out and he had been called up to offer his experience as an old Free Companion to the men who were facing a new and deadly menace up above them all, on the jungle shore. Then he offered them a stiff, quick salute and left the screen.
Zachariah Harker's face replaced Hale's. It would have taken a better than expert eye to detect the faint qualities of unevenness which might betray the fact that this was a synthesis of rearranged sound-waves and light-waves. Technically, even Zachariah, watching the screen from wherever he was just now, could not deny he had spoken the words, for every sound he heard and every motion of his own lips was genuine.
The synthetic speech was a triumph in semantics. It was typical of Sam that he should use this boldly suicidal venture not only to clear himself and Hale, if he could, but also to further his plans for the colony. So Harker was made to name Sam—brought forward with modest reluctance to stand beside the Immortal as the speech went on—as the public-spirited, adventurous philanthropist who was going to make the colonizing crusade possible.
Sam Reed, man of the people, short-lived but far-seeing, would lead his fellows to success behind Robin Hale in the great crusade. Landside lay the future of the race. Even the Harkers, Zachariah said, had finally been convinced of that by the persuasions of Sam and Hale. A great adventure lay ahead. Volunteers would be accepted for examination very soon. Ad astra per aspera!
He spoke of danger. He went into details, each word carefully chosen and charted to make the listeners discontented. He hinted at the stagnation of the Keeps, of growing racial debility, new vulnerabilities to disease. And most important—man had stopped growing. His destiny was no longer to be found in the Keeps. The great civilizations of Earth must not reach a dead end under the seas of this fertile planet. Ad astra!
Zachariah's face left the screen. Sam stepped forward to clinch the matter, nervous and deeply worried under his calm. Now that he had actually done this, he quivered with belated qualms. What would the Harkers do when they discovered how fantastically they had been tricked? How outrageously their innermost convictions had been reversed and repudiated before all the Keeps, apparently in their own words! They must be moving already; the Families were geared to rapid action when the need arose. But what they would do Sam couldn't guess.
He spoke with quiet confidence into the screen. He outlined his ideas for offering the people themselves the opportunity to join in the crusade, financially if not personally. In deft words he referred to the hardships and dangers of landside; he wanted to discourage all but the hardiest from offering as personal volunteers. And to aid in that, as well as to provide a smash finale to his scheme, he made his great announcement.
Something which until today had been a plaything for the wealthy would now be offered to all who owned shares in the magnificent venture before mankind. Each participant could watch the uses to which his money was put, share almost at first hand in the thrills and perils of landside living.
Look!
On the screen flashed a dizzying view of jungle that swooped up toward the beholder with breathtaking swiftness. A ring of velvet-black mud studded the flowery quilt of treetops. The ring swung up toward the view and you could see an iridescent serpent slithering across the blackness. The mud erupted and a mud-wolf's jaws closed upon the snake. Blood and mud spattered wildly. Churning and screaming, the combatants sank from sight and the velvety pool quivered into stillness again except for the rings that ran out around it from time to time as bubbles of crimson struggled up and burst on the surface with dull plops which every listener in the Keeps could hear.
S
am thanked his audience. He asked their patience for a few days longer, until the first examination trials could be set up. He observed with arrogant humility that he hoped to earn their trust and faith by his service toward themselves and the Free Companion, who had left all such matters in his hands while Hale himself struggled up there on landside in the jungles he knew so well. We would all, Sam finished, soon be watching such struggles, with men instead of monsters enlisting our sympathy in their brave attempts to conquer Venus as our forebears once conquered Old Earth ...
-
The Families did nothing.
It worried Sam more than any direct action could possibly have done. For there was nothing here he could fight. Profoundly he distrusted that silence. All telecast attempts to interview any of the Immortals on this tremendous subject which was uppermost, overnight, in every mind, came to nothing. They would smile and nod and refuse to comment—yet.
But the plans went on at breakneck rate. And after all, Sam told himself, what could the Harkers do? To deny the public this delightful new toy might be disastrous. You can't give candy to a baby and then snatch it away untasted without rousing yells of protest. The people of the Keeps were much more formidable than babies, and they were used to collapsing into paternalistic hands. Remove the support, and you might expect trouble.
Sam knew he had won a gambit, not the game. But he had too much to do just now to let the future worry him. All this was to be a swindle, of course. He had never intended anything else.
Paradoxically, Sam trusted the judgment of the Harkers. They thought this attempt would fail. Sam was sure they were right. Of course the Logician believed that colonizing would succeed, and the Logician normally should be right. How can a machine err? But the machine had erred, very badly, in its analysis of Sam himself, so it isn't strange that he disbelieved all its conclusions now.
The only way to make the scheme succeed as Sam intended it to succeed was to insure its failure. Sam was out this time for really big money. The public clamored to buy, and Sam sold and sold.
He sold three hundred per cent of the stock.
After that he had to fail. If he put the money into landside development there'd be nothing left over for the promoter, and anyhow, how could he pay off on three hundred per cent?
But on paper it looked beautiful. New sources of supply and demand, a booming culture rising from the underseas, shaking off the water from gigantic shoulders, striding onto the shore. And then interplanetary and interstellar travel for the next goal. Ad astra was a glorious dream, and Sam worked it for all it was worth.
-
Two months went by.
Rosathe, like all the other fruits of success, dropped delightfully into his arms. Sam closed all three of his apartments and with Rosathe found a new place, full of undreamed of luxuries, its windows opening out over the hydroponic garden that flourished as lavishly, though not so dangerously, as the jungles overhead. From these windows he could see the lights of the whole Keep spread out below, where every man danced to his piping. It was dreamlike, full of paranoid splendors, megalomaniac grandeur—and all of it true.
Sam didn't realize it yet, though looking back he would surely have seen, but he was spinning faster and faster down a vortex of events which by now were out of his control. Events would have blurred as they whirled by, if he had been given time enough to look back at them when the moment of reckoning came. But he was not given time ...
-
Rosathe was sitting on a low hassock at his feet, her harp on her arm, singing very sweetly to him, when the moment finally came.
Her violet-blue skirts lay about her in a circle on the floor, her cloudy head was bent above the high horns of the lyre and her voice was very soft.
"Oh, slowly, slowly got she up, and slowly she came nigh ... him ..." How delightfully, the sweet voice soared on the last word! That dip and rise in the old ballads tried every voice but an instrument as true as the lovely instrument in Rosathe's throat. "But all she said"—Rosathe reported in that liquid voice—and was stopped by the musical buzzing of the televisor.
Sam knew it must be important, or it would never have been put through to him at this hour. Reluctantly he swung his feet to the floor and got up.
Rosathe did not lift her head. She sat quite motionless for an instant, curiously as if she had been frozen by the sound of the buzzer. Then without glancing up she swept the strings with polished fingertips and sang her final line. "Young man, I think you're dyin' ..."
The cloudiness of the visor screen cleared as Sam flipped the switch and a face swam out of it that rocked him back a bit on his heels. It was Kedre Walton's face, and she was very angry. The black ringlets whipped like Medusa-locks as she whirled her head toward the screen. She must have been talking to someone in the background as she waited for Sam to acknowledge the call, for her anger was not wholly for Sam. He could see that. Her words belied it.
"Sam Reed, you're a fool!" she told him flatly and without preamble. The Egyptian calm was gone from her delicate, disdainful face. Even the disdain was gone now. "Did you really think you could get away with all this?"
"I've got away with it," Sam assured her. He was very confident at that point in the progress of his scheme.
"You poor fool, you've never fought an Immortal before. Our plans work slowly. We can afford to be slow! But surely you didn't imagine Zachariah Harker would let you do what you did and live! He—"
A voice from behind her said, "Let me speak for myself, Kedre, my dear," and the smooth, ageless young face of Zachariah looked out at Sam from the screen. The eyes were quietly speculative as they regarded him. "In a way I owe you thanks, Reed," the Immortal's voice said. "You were clever. You had more resources than I expected. You put me on my mettle, and that's an unexpected pleasure. Also, you've made it possible for me to overthrow Hale's whole ambitious project. So I want to thank you for that, too. I like to be fair when I can afford to be."
His eyes were the eyes of a man looking at something so impersonally that Sam felt a sudden chill. Such remoteness in time and space and experience—as if Sam were not there at all. Or as if Harker were looking already on death. Something as impersonal and remote from living as a corpse. As Sam Reed.
And Sam knew a moment's profound shaking of his own convictions—he had a flash of insight in which he thought that perhaps Harker had planned it this way from the start, knowing that Sam would doublecross him with Hale, and knowing that Sam would doublecross Hale, too. Sam was the weak link in Hale's crusade, the one thing that might bring the whole thing crashing if anyone suspected. Until now, Sam had been sure no one did suspect.
But Zachariah Harker knew.
"Good-by, Reed," the smooth voice said. "Kedre, my dear—"
Kedre's face came back into the screen. She was still angry, but the anger had been swallowed up in another emotion as her eyes met Sam's. The long lashes half veiled them, and there were tears on the lashes.
"Good-by, Sam," she said. "Good-by." And the blue glance flickered across his shoulder.
Sam had one moment to turn and see what was coming, but not time enough to stop it. For Rosathe stood at his shoulder, watching the screen, too. And as he turned her pointed fingers which had evoked music from the harp for him this evening pinched together suddenly and evoked oblivion.
He felt the sweet, terrifying odor of dust stinging in his nostrils. He stumbled forward futilely, reaching for her, meaning to break her neck. But she floated away before him, and the whole room floated, and then Rosathe was looking down on him from far above, and there were tears in her eyes, too.
The fragrance of dream-dust blurred everything else. Dream-dust, the narcotic euthanasia dust which was the way of the suicide.
His last vision was the sight of the tear-wet eyes looking down, two women who must have loved him to evoke those tears, and who together had worked out his ruin.
-
He woke. The smell of scented dust died from his nostrils. It was dark
here. He felt a wall at his shoulder, and got up stiffly, bracing himself against it. Light showed blurrily a little way off. The end of an alley, he thought. People were passing now and then through the dimness out there.
The alley hurt his feet. His shoes felt queer and loose. Investigating, Sam found that he was in rags, his bare feet pressing the pavement through broken soles. And the fragrance of dream-dust was still a miasma in the air around him.
Dream-dust—that could put a man to sleep for a long, long while. How long!
He stumbled toward the mouth of the alley. A passer-by glanced at him with curiosity and distaste. He reached out and collared the man.
"The Colony," he said urgently. "Has it—have they opened it yet?"
The man struck his arm away. "What colony?" he asked impatiently.
"The Colony! The Land Colony!"
"Oh, that." The man laughed. "You're a little late." Clearly he thought Sam was drunk. "It's been open a long time now—what's left of it."
"How long?"
"Forty years."
-
Sam hung on the bar of a vending machine in the wall at the alley mouth. He had to hold the bar to keep himself upright, for his knees were strengthless beneath him. He was looking into the dusty mirror and into his own eyes. "Forty years. Forty years!" And the ageless, unchanged face of Sam Harker looked back at him, ruddy-browed, unlined as ever.
"Forty years!" Sam Harker murmured to himself.
-
PART TWO
Sometimes, when a race is slipping slowly into the long, easy twilight toward extinction, a ruthless crook can be a savior—a furious, lying, cheating, totally amoral egomaniac—
-
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides
along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window
panes;
There will be time, there will be
time