by Jerry
He might not be seen.
If he were seen, he might not be recognized.
And if they did report him—
Well, he would face that when the time came. He had to go.
He turned in to the last street, an avenue broader than the others. He could hear chanting ahead of him spears and nursed their babies and told lengthy and intricate stories. Sometimes, they laughed. They were waiting for the winds to die.
There was a structure on that plain, a shining alien thing that did not belong. It had been there for half a century, but it was an intrusion. It stood apart and alone, a giant gleaming hemisphere of unyielding glassite.
Around that arching dome, the land was sterile. Nothing grew there and no animals ever came.
Sealed inside the great dome, faintly visible through the thick glassite, there was a small city.
People lived there: isolated, abandoned, forgotten.
There were soft shadows in the city now, indistinct patches of fugitive shade thrown by the lowering sunlight that filtered weakly through the treated glassite dome. Soon, the shadows would be gone and the illumination would be even again.
There was no wind, of course.
The winds never blew in the city.
Lee Melner ran through the pale Colony streets, his heart pounding. The evening shadows had dissolved under the steady thrust of the overhead lights. There was no cover. He simply had to run through the empty lanes, run as fast as he could, and trust to luck.
He might not be seen.
If he were seen, he might not be recognized.
And if they did report him—
Well, he would face that when the time came. He had to go.
He turned in to the last street, an avenue broader than the others. He could hear chanting ahead of him in the Square. He slowed his pace, catching his breath. He eased along the smooth wall that lined the inner-city street, hugging it. His throat was dry. He trembled with excitement.
Lee Melner had spent all of his seventeen years in the Colony. The dome-covered city was his world. It was a controlled world: gray, precise, safe, and stable. There were no surprises. There was no action. Even the seasons never changed. It was always the same temperature. There was no darkness. There were no storms.
(Sometimes, when the lighting was right, he could see great sheets of water washing over the dome. Twice in his lifetime, there had been tremendous crashes of thunder so loud that he could actually hear them. Once, he had thought he heard the far whining of the wind. That, he knew, was probably his imagination.)
There was nothing to do.
Most of the time, except with Ellen, Lee was bored stiff.
That was why he had to be in the Square tonight. It was not that he was particularly impressed by Edson Hewitt’s revelations. It was the color and motion and sound that drew him. It was the smells, the jostlings, the tang of the forbidden.
It was something different.
He pressed into the back of the crowd, losing himself. Nobody looked at him. Edson Hewitt was going full blast, and he held every eye.
He stood there on a platform, his tall, thin body shrouded in the black cape he always wore. Four flaming torches burned at the corners of the platform; Lee could smell the acrid chemical smoke. A woman in a shimmering white gown stood behind him. Her hands were clasped as though in prayer. Her head, framed by a cloud of long unfashionable blond hair that seemed to glow in the torchlight, was tilted back. She was staring intently up at the high underside of the dome.
Pretty corny, Lee thought. Just the same, it was effective.
“Citizens!” Edson Hewitt boomed in his deep, stentorian voice. “It is not too late for men of good will. You must have faith!”
“Faith,” chanted the crowd, right on cue.
“The ship will come!” Edson Hewitt lifted his skeletal arms in supplication. “The ship will come again, but it is not enough just to wait and hope. We have had enough of waiting! We must take action!”
“Action,” echoed the crowd.
“There is no limit to the power of the human mind. There is no barrier that can stand against its force. No, my friends, the light-years are as nothing! We must project the purity of our thought. We will be heard! There will be an answer!”
“Answer.”
“The ship will come again. It may be out there now, out in the great darkness, listening. We must put aside all evil things. We must cleanse ourselves. We must be worthy. We must project, project, project! And we must do it together!”
“Together!”
There was more, much more, in the same vein. The man’s presence was hypnotic; the people in the Square were like puppets, desperate to believe. The woman in the white gown never moved, staring up and out with blank and lovely eyes. The torches hissed at the platform corners; they were like the jets of a ship, pushing out orange columns of flame . . .
Lee wanted to let himself go, wanted to be caught up in it all, to be part of it. Something in him yearned to surrender, to float, to be absorbed. But he could not believe. There was a wall in him that would not break. Behind that wall, he knew that he needed something he had not yet found. He did not know what that something was, but he knew that Edson Hewitt wasn’t it.
“Join hands, citizens! Touch! The time has come!”
“Come!”
Lee was startled as hands sought his. He found himself clasped by an old man on his right; the hand was frail and dry like a wad of long-dead skin. A woman—no longer young, but not yet old—caught his left hand. Her palm was moist and strong. Her fingers contracted convulsively. There seemed to be an irregularity in her hand, a patch of different texture, a small object—
Lee kept looking straight ahead. His own palms began to sweat. He had lost his anonymity; he might be remembered. Of course, the meeting was not really illegal; free speech was still protected in the Colony. It would have been impossible to hold a large clandestine meeting anywhere in the Colony, especially not in the Square. There were no secrets in this world. Still, an activity can be forbidden whether it is illegal or not. Young people were supposed to stay in their homes during the night hours. His father had expressly warned him about attending this gathering. Old John Melner had strong opinions about Edson Hewitt . . .
“Now! Project! The ship will come! Make it aware!”
“Aware!”
The torches flared higher. There was a scent like perfume, a sweetness that animated the still air. Moans came from the crowd.
A man quite close to Lee began to babble. The sounds that came from his mouth resembled words, but the language was unknown to Lee. In the dancing torchlight, Lee saw flecks of white foam on his lips. A woman fainted. She sank to her knees and was kept from falling by those who held her hands. Somewhere, there was a cry of anguish, then sobbing.
The torches brightened into a final blinding flash. With an abruptness that was shocking, they went out. There was only the steady pale light of the city. Edson Hewitt and the blond woman in the white gown were gone.
The ceremony was over.
Lee disengaged his right hand; the old man simply stood where he was, whimpering softly. The woman on his left had vanished.
Lee became conscious of something sticking to the palm of his left hand.
An irregularity, a small object—
He closed his fist around it.
He turned and ran.
Old John Melner glanced at his watch. He lifted his thin hand and stroked his thatch of fine white hair. He noticed that his hand was trembling slightly. He felt the weight of his years.
“Give him another thirty minutes to be on the safe side,” he said. His voice was steady, but it took an effort. “Then I’ll go home.”
“Are you sure it worked?” Dana Bigelow paced nervously back and forth across the sparsely furnished antiseptic room. His back was bent; Dana was in constant low-level pain.
John Melner shrugged and settled himself in his chair. Dana’s fretfulness always made him try to
relax; it was like an antidote. “I know my son. Lee knew about the meeting. I was carefully not at home. My wife was conspicuously asleep. So Lee went to hear Edson Hewitt pour out his garbage. He couldn’t possibly stay away—don’t you remember when you were seventeen years old?”
“No,” said Dana Bigelow.
“I do. I would have gone just to look at the blonde. Lee is no different; he’s a good boy. Okay. I know Paula, too. She found him, just as she was supposed to do. She found him if she had to crawl through that crowd. So Lee has got the note, and he got it under suitably dramatic circumstances. He’ll take it from there, or I have terribly misjudged my son.”
Dana Bigelow continued to pace. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing? We’re taking an awful chance. The computers can’t figure all the variables. I’m worried about Lee, even if it works. And I just don’t know about us—”
John Melner scowled. He looked formidable despite his age; the man had a will that had grown stronger with the years. “We don’t have a vast amount to lose, you and I. In any case, the threat to us—and to the Colony—is minimal. As for Lee, of course we can’t be sure we’re doing the right thing. That’s the trouble with us, anyway—we always have to be so sure. The only certainty, my friend, is death—and that’s about what we’ve got here. The time has come to take a chance or two. We can’t take it; we’re too old, too set in our ways, too secure. We value our security too highly, miserable as it is. That’s a penalty of age. Lee is different: he’s young, dammit, and full of juice and crazy romantic dreams. Lee suffers from the disease of youth—he thinks he’s immortal, that agony can never touch him, that the world can be changed. Okay; that’s what we need. You say you are worried about Lee. So am I—worried if he stays, worried if he goes. Lee is my son, remember? My only son, and a son that came late in life. That’s my answer to you, Dana. If he knew the whole story, do you doubt which choice he would make?”
Dana Bigelow stopped pacing. His eyes flashed from beneath his bushy brows. “I know what he would do. That’s not the point. By definition, the young lack experience. They have no basis on which to judge. It’s up to us to protect them.”
“Protect them from what? From life? What do all our experiences amount to? Have they been all that salutary? Dana, we’re a bunch of zombies living in a glass cage. What kind of record is that?”
“The Colony has survived. We’re alive.”
“Are we? It’s a matter of definition. Anyway, we’re two old men locked in a senile argument. The thing is done. The decision has been made. What we have to do now is get out of the way and let it happen.”
“You’re very confident.”
“No, not that. Call it by another name.”
Old John Melner sat quietly then, looking at nothing, waiting to go home.
Lee Melner ran back through the pale streets of the city. His face was flushed with excitement. He felt like a fugitive, although he could not believe that he had done anything really wrong. He did not look at the object clutched in his hand.
His home was a unit in a housing complex not far from the edge of the Colony; the great dome was closer to him now, starting its downward curve to meet the ground and form the seal of the city wall. The apartment was substantial, occupying three levels of the eight-story building, but from the street it was indistinguishable from the other units. There was, of course, no yard. The only grass and the only trees in the Colony grew in a tiny park not far from the Square. Sometimes—three times since Lee had been alive—flowers grew there.
He slipped the object into his pocket and pressed the combination of the door. The door hissed open. Lee moved inside, trying to control his harsh breathing. The house was silent; the lights were on as always in the lower level. He glanced at the familiar room. It was large and had a kind of warmth that came from long acquaintance. At the same time, there was almost nothing in it that was unusual or unique. There were no paintings, no books, no curious oddments of furniture. Everything had been made in the Colony, mass-produced by singularly unimaginative machines.
Everything but one item.
In the center of the room, on a stand protected by a plastic cover, there was an empty glass jar that had once held instant coffee. It had a faded red label on it with yellow lettering. It still had a lid.
It had come from earth.
It was more than an antique. It was something from a now unreachable world that seemed sometimes to be a dream.
It was priceless.
Lee activated the field lift that carried him silently to the third level. He did not pause at the second floor; he assumed that his mother was still asleep. If she had awakened, or if his father had returned and found him gone—
Well, he would soon know.
He stepped out into his room. He had no brothers or sisters; hardly anyone did. The third level was his alone.
Everything was exactly as he had left it. The bed was rumpled with pillows under the warmer to look—hopefully—like a sleeping body. His desk was neat and clean, the computer terminals off. The photograph of Ellen was on the stand by the bed, as always. The globe of earth glowed softly in the corner: deep blue and gentle green and rich brown. It was nothing like the world he knew.
Lee shrugged off his clothes and put on his sleeping tunic. He rearranged the pillows and switched off the overhead lights. He dug into the pocket of his discarded clothing and felt the small wadded object.
He carried it into the bed with him.
Carefully, trying to control the shaking of his hands, he unfolded the packet and smoothed it out. As he had suspected—indeed, known with a certainty that left no room for doubt—it was a message.
He examined it in the faint illumination of the bed-light.
The note read:
bee, you have been chosen. Your selection has involved years of study and analysis. We have chosen you because we know that you can be trusted and because your personality profile shows that you can succeed.
Much depends on you. Much has been kept from you. There has been no word from earth for thirty-five terrestrial years. Earth may no longer exist. The ships will never come.
You have your life before you. If you wish to live as others have lived, huddled in fear in this Colony prison and waiting for extinction, disregard this message.
If you want more than that—if you have the courage to follow your heart—you have only to act.
Lee, there is another world out there, beyond the Colony dome. It is waiting for us. The air is good, the white sun shines, the strong winds blow. There are people out there. Not people like us, but they are humanoid. They have not forgotten how to laugh and how to dream. We have much to offer them. They have more to offer us. One man can make the contact, if he is the right man.
There is a way out, contrary to what you have been taught. In addition to the main lock, there is a small emergency exit. It is simple to operate, from both the inside and the outside. The directions are engraved in a panel just to the left of the exit.
There is always danger in the unknown. You must be aware of this when you make your choice. If you choose not to go, you will live in comfort and security. You must decide whether that is all you want.
We will not contact you again if you stay in the Colony. If you do go Outside, and if you do not fail, you will be contacted by someone you know.
You will be the first. Remember that. Our trust in you is great.
Go to the house of Gilbert McAllister on the edge of the Colony not far from your home. The house is empty now. The door combination has been altered so that it is the same as your own. The lift in the main chamber on what appears to be the bottom floor will go DOWN if you press the control marked emergency. It will take you to the exit.
The rest is up to you, Lee.
Good luck from all of us.
The message was unsigned.
Lee got up, concealed the refolded packet in his desk, and returned to bed.
He switched off the bed light.
<
br /> Lee Melner never closed his eyes that night, but he dreamed many dreams.
Although it seemed an eternity, it actually took him two months to make up his mind.
He went many times to the house of Gilbert McAllister. Twice, he checked the combination on the door. It worked, and he found that he was not surprised. He did not go in.
He lived in a state of constant turmoil. Outwardly, he was calm enough; he sleepwalked through the set routines of his gray life. Inwardly, he was seething. He could not think and yet his mind was racing. He ached to tell someone, share what he knew. He came very close to taking Ellen into his confidence. Something made him hold back; he was afraid to involve her.
Not yet, not yet.
Long before he was aware that he had made a final decision, Lee caught himself making plans. This time would be safe; that time would not. What to wear, what to take. How to carry food and water. Whether or not to leave a message in case he did not return . . .
A night came. He could not sleep. That day there had been rain Outside; he had seen the sheets of water washing across the dome. That night, as he lay in his bed, he heard the distant roar of thunder. It was the third time in his life that he had heard it. He shivered and his heart pounded. He knew that he had to go.
A week later, he went.
Very early in the morning, while the Colony slept, Lee returned to the house of Gilbert McAllister. He pressed the combination and the familiar door whispered open.
He stepped inside, and the door closed behind him. The house was nothing special—a unit like all the others. It was neat and clean and had an empty smell about it.
He moved through the pale interior illumination and located the lift. There was a small switch on the bottom of the control panel. It was clearly marked: EMERGENCY. DO NOT TOUCH.
He threw the switch.
The lift went down. It went farther than he had expected, and then stopped.