by Jerry
Five centuries earlier the harnessing of cosmic radiation, in a machine as simple to make as a crystal radio set, had put interstellar flight into the hands of the common man. No longer had the exorbitantly expensive three-stage rockets been necessary. Cosmic power automatically eliminated the government control and financing of space flight. The adolescent boy, once happy with his noisy hot rod, began to build space flivvers to explore the dry deserts of Mars. The family down the street took a Sunday ride beyond the troposphere and vacationed in the asteroids.
Within a generation man learned to key his new-found energy to a speed just short of the speed of light. And humankind overflowed into the universe. Every crackpot who could attract a handful of disciples went to build a new world after his own pattern. By the thousand other groups left to make more stable societies. Sometimes, for a decade or more, communication was maintained with the home world. But the universe was infinite and the colonies were so widely scattered that any continuing form of union was impractical.
Lawson looked upon the period of free-for-all colonization as the high point in man’s creative genius. He was certain that the gradual tightening of controls paralleled a cultural decline, and the prohibition of space flight marked the death of civilization. There was no alternative except to escape from a world that had chosen, in indolence and ignorance, to destroy itself. The only thing he needed to make his escape was one of the government charts of the universe; without it—and without a knowledge of astronomy—no cosmic-powered ship could be piloted to a pinpoint destination in the vast emptiness of space.
Yet Lawson was quite undisturbed by the fact that the charts were sealed within a vault more carefully guarded than the treasury. The gray-uniformed dictatorship, tangled in its endless net of bureaucratic forms, was hopelessly inefficient. A determined man could break into the vaults before the ponderous machinery of government could bestir itself to stop him.
Lawson’s primary concern was to recruit colonists who thought as he did. Carefully he sounded out the men and women he knew. Within six months he found twenty followers—all as young as he was and as idealistic. They met in an abandoned cellar in the industrial district and they liked to consider themselves the first spark of conspiracy against the dead-weight mediocrity of the gray dictatorship.
The number of converts increased steadily, as new members of the conspiracy spread the word to their friends and brought them to the hidden cellar. At the end of a year, when more than a hundred eager citizens for the new world-to-be had been recruited, Lawson met Adam Endicott again. It was in the white-tiled coffee automat, where Lawson went for his fifteen-minute break in the five-hour afternoon shift he worked in the factory. Endicott dropped on the booth seat opposite Lawson, smiling his recognition.
“Still dreaming of escaping from your fellow fools?” Endicott asked.
For a moment Lawson was shocked—and frightened—at having his dream spoken of in a crowded public space. Then he saw who it was, and he countered with another question, “Do you still want to join me?”
Endicott shrugged. “Any time you show me a sky chart—”
“We don’t have that—not yet. But I’ve something almost as good.” Lawson’s voice dropped to a stealthy whisper. “A genuine textbook in astronomy. We stole it from the library archives. Nobody ever caught on. This government’s too lazy to inventory its own books.”
A flame of hope flickered behind the cynical mask of Endicott’s lean, hungry face. “So you really mean it.” He held out his hand. “It won’t work; it can’t work. Escape is impossible. But I’m with you all the way.”
After Endicott joined the conspiracy, his sardonic probing, his incisive cynicism, shifted the emphasis from starry-eyed discussions of the projected escape colony to practical plans for creating it. The recruiting of colonists stopped, and the conspirators hammered out the details of an ideal government. It was largely a government of negatives. They knew precisely what they did not want—the cumbersome bureaucracy which crushed their world—but it was considerably more difficult to visualize the positive legislative forms they would need.
“That we can work out later,” Lawson said confidently. “It will depend partly on the environment of the planet we colonize. The important thing for us to agree upon now is the extent to which we must limit the government. In our world the individual must have maximum freedom. Government must never be allowed to regiment our lives or imprison us again in mediocrity.”
All the colonists spent a great deal of their time studying the stolen text in astronomy. At the space port near the city they located a large, abandoned cruiser that would meet their needs when the time came to escape. At night they worked in small groups refurbishing the interior. They carried supplies, in small quantities, past the gray-uniformed field guard and secreted them aboard the escape ship.
During the second year they managed to steal half a dozen neuro guns from the police. They could never make an open raid on the city arsenal, because that would have given away the conspiracy. For the same reason they could not attack isolated police officers patrolling their beats in the factory aisles or on the city slide-walks. So that the loss of the guns would seem to be the result of a natural accident, the conspirators periodically tied up slide-walk intersections at the peak of the rush hour when the factory shifts were changing. They did this by tampering with the machinery in the bowels of the city—slight damage which the repair crew could take for a normal breakdown. When the police tried to straighten out the temporary confusion caused on the street level, conspirators in the milling mob managed to drive the dull-witted emotions of the nonentities close to panic. They arranged for the gray-uniformed patrol to be caught and trampled in the turmoil. And, in the process, the police lost their weapons.
It was a very slow way to acquire arms, because the mechanical breakdowns could be organized only at rare intervals or the government might have become suspicious. But the conspiracy required relatively few neuro guns. They would be used only once, on the night the chart vault was raided.
When the last of the supplies had been carried aboard the cruiser, the date for the raid was set for a month in the future—when the rotation of the vault guard would increase the chance for success. The final act-escape—was within their grasp, and Lawson’s dream was nearly a reality.
That knowledge acted upon Lawson like a drug, intoxicating his senses and blurring the rigid self-discipline he had held upon his thinking for two years. Where once he had been outspoken against the gray dictatorship, he had forced himself to conform; he had made himself, in public, a bland imitation of the vacuous fools he observed around him.
But for the moment, when he knew escape was within his grasp, Lawson’s self-imposed restraint was gone. He wandered alone in the city, reveling in his hatred and drunk on his dreams. He wanted to see it all—that bumbling world he despised—and to sneer at its absurdities.
He walked through the factory district, where the first night shift was working in the blue-lit buildings. A five-hour work shift, Lawson thought. It was enough to give man freedom for all the creative impulses he had ever felt. That much the gray dictatorship had given them—that and economic security. Regardless of the work a man did, his income and his living conditions were much the same, within a very narrow range. Yet how had the fools frittered away their freedom?
There might have been a Renaissance of art, poetry, music, drama. Instead the people flocked during their free time to the great recreation blocks. They sat munching on insipid confections and watching the lush 3-D love dramas. Or they ate soporific banquets in the gilded halls, or drank endlessly at the mirrored bars. Sporting contests, too, were watched in 3-D restorations of the great games of the past; no one participated. There were gyms, pools, and game courts in all the recreation blocks; no one ever used them.
Man had made himself flabby-muscled and witless. For that, too, Lawson blamed the gray dictatorship. The government built and maintained the glittering recreation blo
cks and encouraged the people to use them. Amusement had been transformed into a drug to keep the world placid and easily managed.
From his early childhood Lawson had belligerently used the gyms and pools in the recreation block. He enjoyed the physical activity. He had a boundless energy that few others in his world seemed to possess. It disturbed his parents that he was so different from other people. They were desperately concerned at what the neighbors might think. But Lawson gloried in the difference. He was proud of his physique, vain in the knowledge that with one hand he could have crushed his scrawny, flaccid companions. His parents spoke so often of his embarrassing idiosyncracies that Lawson left home in his teens and took a job in a city factory. To do so meant that he had to sacrifice his right to attend the government university, but education under the dictatorship had no appeal for him.
On the night when the conspiracy voted to raid the chart vaults, Lawson walked slowly through the throbbing industrial sector and went to a recreation block on the edge of the suburb. For a time he wandered in the thronged bars and banquet halls, laughing in his soul at the dull-witted pleasures of his fellow men. From the back of the auditorium he watched a part of a 3-D love thriller until the ridiculous posturing of the heroine began to churn his viscera with nausea. Angrily, he went into the empty natatorium, stripped off his brown uniform, and plunged naked into the clean, cold water of the pool.
As he came up, refreshed by the long, gliding dive beneath the surface, he saw a pretty brunette watching him from the side of the pool. For a moment his nakedness embarrassed him. Disposable plastic trunks were always available in the dressing rooms, but Lawson seldom bothered to use any because he had always been alone in the pools. Then his embarrassment became boastful belligerence. What did he have to be ashamed of? Let her see a real man for a change.
Very deliberately he began to swim the length of the pool. He heard a splash in the water behind him, and the pretty brunette was in the water with him. She knifed past him, with a clean, powerful stroke, and turned at the end of the pool to smile into his face.
“I’ve always wanted to do it myself,” she laughed, “but I could never quite get up the nerve.”
And that was how he met Madge Brown. Their mutual affinity was immediate. She preferred to use the gyms and pools in the recreation blocks, as he did. That made her different in the same way that Lawson was different. Until he met Madge, he had never realized how lonely he had been, wedded to the abstraction of a dream and a hatred.
When they left the pool, they went to the lounge for a snack. He found himself telling her of his cherished hope of escape. It was a dangerous admission to make to a stranger, but he was certain it was safe. Lawson was sure he knew Madge Brown as well as he knew himself. Within an hour he had told her about the conspiracy, and the next day he asked the others to accept her as a recruit.
They found it impossible to investigate Madge as they did every other new member of the conspiracy. She told them that was to be expected, since she had just moved to the city from another some miles to the south.
“At home I was bored,” she said. “I lived with nothing but fools. I thought it might be different here.”
Adam Endicott was unwilling for her to know the details of the conspiracy until they had learned more of her background, but he was a minority of one. Lawson persuaded the others to accept her because he vouched for her. After all, it was fantastic to be cautious where Madge was concerned. Lawson knew her and that was enough. She was enthusiastic for his dream and surprisingly helpful; she was a government secretary, working for the security office, and she knew a way into the chart vault that would allow the conspirators to by-pass the outer ring of guards.
Yet one point of view, which she expressed repeatedly, puzzled Lawson. “It’s a wonderful thing to escape, Jimmy—but think how much more we could do if we stayed right here.”
“These fools had their chance. They turned it down when they elected Rennig.”
“Of course. First, you have to teach the people to want a revolution.”
“This is their world, just the way they have made it. Let them die with it.”
“That’s not the point, Jimmy. Don’t you see their problem is ours, too? We’re all human beings, with the same faults. If we could solve the problem here, we wouldn’t need to run away.”
“We’re not running away; we’re escaping from a graveyard to build a better world.”
“Then why couldn’t we do it here?”
To that one he never had an answer which satisfied even himself. The dream was to escape; anything else was a weakling’s compromise. Lawson couldn’t put that feeling in words, and he always countered her question with one of his own. “What makes you talk so much like a government propagandist, Madge?”
“But I don’t, Jimmy; I don’t!”
It amused him that the suggestion flustered her. He could never understand why. Madge was no spy; Madge would never betray the conspiracy; her thoughts and her reactions were too much like his own. He believed that; he believed it implicitly until the end—until he saw Madge with the gray-uniformed police officer outside her block-three apartment spire. “There’s one more,” she had said. “I’ll bring him in myself.”
Lawson lay on the grass at the edge of the parkland looking at the factory buildings of the city, gleaming bright against the night sky. The hatred burned out of his soul in the searing flush of guilt. It was his fault the dream had failed. He had destroyed the others by trusting Madge. How could he have misjudged her so grossly? Why hadn’t he seen that she was only acting a part?
That could not be true. Madge’s hatred for the gray dictatorship was as real as his, her wish for a finer world as genuine. No degree of acting could have conveyed such sincerity. Then why had she betrayed them?
At first Lawson thought of revenge. He would go back to her apartment and kill her with his own hands. It would be easy. She expected him and she didn’t know he knew the truth. Lawson actually got up from the grass and began to cut back across the park toward her apartment spire.
But gradually his footsteps slowed and stopped. Revenge was a personal emotion, entirely pointless. The dream deserved better than that. Whatever happened, Lawson could not save himself. In a matter of hours the gray-uniformed police would close in on him and, without a weapon, he was helpless. He accepted that as the hazard for opposing the accumulated weight of mediocrity. In the time that was left to him he wanted to make a gesture of some sort, something spectacular enough to encourage any other captives of regimentation who dreamed of escape.
He knew, suddenly, what he must do. The sky cruiser was on the abandoned space port, ready and waiting. Lawson would take it up alone and without the sky charts. He would be lost in the infinite emptiness, a mote forever riding the beams of cosmic energy. He had little chance of stumbling upon a world where he could survive or of finding one of the older colonies. The flight would be suicide. But no one would know that. In the city they would see the waterfall of fire as the ship arched upward through the stratosphere. The people would know that someone had broken free of the gray dictatorship. To those who dreamed, the trail of fire would been encouragement and a hope—perhaps enough to make them attempt escape.
From the park Lawson took the slide-walk to the fringe of the city, riding the fast-moving center lane. Beyond the circle of suburban apartments, the city decayed rapidly. There was a broad area of deserted homes, long unoccupied because the city population was much smaller than it had been generations before. Every city on the planet was bordered by a similar fringe of empty buildings and untended parks. Lawson took the decay for granted, since he had never lived with anything else, but he considered it a bitter symbol of the death of his world.
The slide-walk came to a turnaround in an empty station, where the windows were filmed by decades of accumulated grime and the ornamental gilt was flaking from the stone walls. Beyond the station was the two-level express highway winding across the rolling, green farmlan
d. Here and there on the white road Lawson saw the lights of produce vans moving toward the city.
There were no other vehicles on the road. Lawson would have been surprised if he had seen one. The people in the cities did not travel. They were uninterested in seeing the physical beauties of their world, although scores of pleasure cars were available for their use in the city storage yards. Early in their lives the people settled into their ruts: a five-hour work shift, with the rest of their day devoted to the sterile pleasures of mechanical amusements. They were content to live and die with that; they had no ambition to achieve anything else.
In a valley just outside the city lay the old space port. A bright, crescent moon, just rising above the horizon, revealed the high, wire walls and the round hulks of the abandoned sky ships. Far away, in the old, flat-roofed terminal building, there was a feeble light, burning for the convenience of the guards who patrolled the field. It was a small guard, merely a token reminder that space flight was forbidden. A stronger force was not necessary, for as long as the sky charts were locked in the government vaults not even a moronic fool would think of taking a ship into the trackless void of space.
Lawson slipped into the field through a gully beneath the electrified fence. It had been dug by the conspirators when they carried supplies to the sky cruiser. The cruiser was the largest hulk on the field, an enormous disk of rusting metal overgrown with weeds and vines. Although the interior had been cleansed and refinished, the conspirators could do nothing to the outer hull or their work would have been discovered by the guard. Yet they had tested the metal and found it entirely sound. The rust was an ugly blemish, but the long period of neglect had not seriously damaged the cruiser.